Sashenka (45 page)

“There!” said Beria, smacking his loose, balloonlike lips. “Now eat while we talk. You’re going to need your energy.”

Sashenka hesitated, afraid that eating these delicious snacks would somehow obligate her to betray her husband or Mendel. She concentrated and thought of her children. Now was her chance.

“I don’t know what I’m accused of, respected Comrade Beria, but I’m innocent. I know you know that. You have no idea what joy it gives me to see you.”

“Oh, and me you. Eat up, my dear cream cake. They’re not poisoned, I promise.” She started to eat the sandwiches. “You know, you’re my type absolutely, Sashenka. The moment I saw you, I knew something about that overbite of yours suggests a capacity for pleasure. Yet you didn’t look too happy when I flirted with you at your place on May Day, hmmm? I think of women all day, you know. I’m a real Georgian man, aren’t I, eh?” Beria’s eyes grew cloudy, the eyelids drooping. “You know what I’d like to do, Sashenka, I’d like to drive you over to my Moscow house. Nina and my son live at Sosnovka, at the dacha. We’d have a Georgian
supra,
you and me in my
banya,
we’d drink the best wines in that cozy bathhouse, and then I’d lay you on the divan and lift your skirt and run my nose up until I can smell your strawberries…”

Beria was letting her know that he could do anything he wished. Yet she did not want to encourage him. His obscenity might be a trick, a lure. Or was it a sign that he really did desire her and if she wanted to get out, there was a simple price?

But this was Lavrenti Beria, People’s Commissar, a man she respected and liked, a Bolshevik trusted and chosen by Comrade Stalin himself. How could he talk like this to a comrade who had known Lenin and entertained Stalin in her house? She thought quickly, and decided right then and there that she would do anything, however vile and demeaning, to see her children again.

“You’re embarrassing me, Lavrenti Pavlovich,” she whispered huskily. “I’m not used to this sort of…”

“Aren’t you? Come on, Sashenka. I was surprised myself. You’re so respectable—such a decent Soviet woman teaching our housewives how to cook cakes and darn the skirts of Young Pioneers. But
we
know what a wanton creature you are. The things you cry out, the acts you demand when you’re really revved up. Just like your mother. She was notorious too, wasn’t she?”

A shard of ice froze her belly. Benya Golden must have betrayed their sexual secrets, and this was how her husband had known too.

Beria beamed a smile at her with lips too fat, too wide.

“We know everything, dearest cream cake,” he said lasciviously. “If you’d have that Jewish writer, you could have had me too. But don’t get your hopes up. You didn’t confess to my boy, Mogilchuk. Have you read his stories? They’re shit, you know. He writes detective yarns, whodunits—he aspires to create a Soviet Sherlock Holmes. But alas, my duty interferes with my pleasures. Your case is a serious one, Sashenka, and much as I’d love to taste you, the Instantzia is following this affair closely.”

“Comrade Stalin knows I’m innocent.”

“Careful, careful. Don’t mention that name to me, Prisoner ZeitlinPalitsyn. I want you to know that your only hope is to confess now. Disarm, reveal your treacherous antiSoviet activities. We’re working hard here. Are you going to make us force you?” He stood up and walked around the desk, enveloping her in his lime cologne. He stroked her hair, ran his hands over a breast. Sashenka cringed, tried not to cry out. He touched her lips, then forced a knuckle into her mouth. It tasted coppery.

He put on a silly voice: “I don’t want to be rough. Don’t do that to me! I love women! Oh, the taste of them! Don’t make me.” He sat down, businesslike again. “Think carefully.

There’s nothing I don’t know about you, your past, family, work, your cunt…Eh?” Beria drummed his fingers on the desk. “Are you going to help us? Stand up! Now! If you don’t we’ll grind you into dust and shoot you like a partridge! In a minute you’re going back to your cell and I’m going back to work. Hang on. Wait. Don’t turn around! Close your eyes.”

She heard him open a drawer in his desk. The single door at the other end of the office opened. She heard the breath of men and the creak of boots getting closer but passing behind her.

“Not on the Persian carpet, it’s a good one. Roll out that one. That’s it,” she heard Beria say.

A dull thud followed. Her eyes watered—there it was again, the pungent cologne of cloves

—she could taste it on her lips.

“Thank you, Comrade Bull!”

It was Kobylov again. What was this? Some sort of game? Fear clawed at her suddenly.

“Right! Now. Let’s take Comrade Snowfox back to her cell—and…onetwothree and…

turn
!”

Something bludgeoned into Sashenka’s right cheek so hard that it spun her round and tossed her off her feet onto the parquet in the sitting area. The world dissolved into a blizzard of red specks in a diamond kaleidoscope. She was on the parquet floor, looking back at the desk where Beria stood smiling with a black truncheon in his hands.

Holding the side of her face, which seemed to be twitching of its own accord, she peered through the shiny boots in front of her at a bundle of clothes spattered in dried mud. She realized it was alive, quivering, stirring. Her gaze was drawn to the mass of raw red and blue and yellow bruises on bare skin, to fingers that bled from the tips, to an unshaven face with redlidded eyes so swollen they could barely open. Her mouth gaped in shock.

“What do you think you’re doing bringing that in here?” asked Beria. “Didn’t you know I had Sashenka in here? You didn’t knock, Comrade Kobylov! Tut, tut, bad manners!”

“Sorry, Lavrenti Pavlovich, I didn’t know you were busy,” said the giant Kobylov. “We need to work a little on this old bag of shit, another stubborn case. But we don’t want her to see anything that might alarm her, do we?”

“Absolutely not,” said Beria. “Help her up and take her back to her cell.”

“Nasty bruise!” said Kobylov, touching her cheek and wrinkling his shiny nose. “You must have walked into something.” He helped her to her feet. Sashenka could not take her eyes off the body on the rough stained carpet. “Come on, we must protect you from this unsavory vision—it’s so hard to restrain Comrade Rodos when he gets the bit between his teeth.”

“Rodos?” she murmured.

On the other side of the room, a stocky man with a hairy mole on his cheek, a pointed face and a head like a chicken meatball was caressing a black truncheon.

Investigator Rodos, wearing dirty boots and a grey tunic girded with a wide army belt, shrugged modestly and, with a defiant glance at Sashenka, he started to land blows on the belly of the man on the carpet, raising the truncheon very slowly and deliberately over his shoulder as if he were lobbing a ball. The man on the floor groaned each time, like a cow that Sashenka had once seen giving birth at the Zeitlin estates in Ukraine.

“It’s rude to stare but it
is
fascinating, isn’t it?” said Beria as she left.

Kobylov took her arm and led her out into the corridor, where Investigator Mogilchuk’s toothy smile awaited her. “We’ll meet again, I hope,” said Kobylov, returning to Beria’s office in a waft of cloves.

Sashenka was shaking. Unable to control herself, she bent over and and vomited up the food she had eaten, which left a cheesy taste in her mouth. The thudding of the truncheons on the prone man was pulsating in her ears. She could not believe what she had seen. Who was it…? She knew—or was she seeing things? Was this how Beria treated Old Bolsheviks? Was that what Vanya did all night before coming home to the dacha and the children? Was this what had happened to the former owners of their dacha and their apartment?

She recited to herself Vanya’s instructions. “Confess nothing whatever happens until you know they have something so damning…I’ll never get out, but you, Sashenka, you can see the children again. Never forget them! Sign nothing whatever they do to you!” She still did not believe they had anything on her and it was clear that none of her associates had so far confessed. She could still get out if she kept her head. She had to hold on to this, whatever it cost her.

But where was Vanya? Where was Benya? She remembered their times together in the hotel, in the garden shed, kissing in the street like youngsters, singing “Black Eyes” by the river, exchanging pressed flowers as the most romantic days of her life. The seven thousand rubies of the Kremlin stars were theirs still! She loved them both now, Vanya and Benya, differently, insistently. They were her family now. They were all she had in this fathomless canyon of shadows.

They marched her back up the stairs, and down more stairs, out of the world of Karelian pine, palms and clove cologne and back through the pungency of cabbage, urine and detergent, into the Internal Prison. She had to lean on the wall a couple of times to keep herself from falling over. She touched her cheek; it was bleeding near the eye, swelling up.

Snowy, Carlo, Cushion, Bunny! Snowy, Carlo, Cushion, Bunny! she recited.

Were they safe? She calculated it had been six days since they left; three nights, three days since she was arrested. The knowledge that Satinov would keep the children safe formed a warm and untouchable locket of love deep inside her.

“Here we are, home again,” said Mogilchuk, shoving her into her cell. “Rest up. We’ll talk in the morning.” Sashenka sank heavily onto the bottom bunk in her cell. “Oh—and did you recognize your uncle Mendel? I think it was him—at least what was left of him.”

37

That night they moved her to a new cell with bright lights—but they refused to dim them.

The pipes in her cell shook, groaned and started to heat even though it was high summer.

In the cells, the air was already stifling.

Sashenka banged on her door.

“Sit on your bed, prisoner.” The locks rasped open. Two guards stood in the doorway.

“I wish to complain to Narkom Beria, to the Central Committee. The heating’s come on and it’s summer. And please turn my lights down. They are so bright they’re keeping me awake.”

The guards looked at each other. “We’ll report your complaints to our superiors.”

The doors slammed. The heat increased. Sashenka was sweating. She could hardly breathe, and she was tortured by thirst. She took off her dress and lay on the bunk in her underwear. The lights were so bright, so hot, she could not sleep, however tightly she closed her eyes. If she buried her face in the mattress, they shook her.

When she finally slept fitfully, the Judas port creaked open. “Wake up, prisoner!”

“I’m sleeping, it’s nighttime.”

She fell asleep again.

“Wake up, prisoner. Move your hands where we can see them.”

When these shouts were not enough to keep her awake, they dropped her on the floor, kicking her, slapping her face.

Now she understood. This was what her Party had come to. One night without sleep was fine but by the second night she felt she was beginning to disintegrate. She was nauseous all the time; sweat poured off her and she was not sure if she was ill or just worn to the bone. She fell asleep on her feet; the guards found her asleep on the lavatory but even there they woke her. Worst of all, her fears enveloped her, growing on her like fungus: what if Vanya was an Enemy all along? The children were lost and they were crying for her, or they were dead.

Hours and days crept by. No exercise. No washing. She was fed thrice daily via a tray passed through the hatch, but she was always hungry, always thirsty. Alone in the cell, woken every few minutes, she heard Snowy and Carlo’s voices. She must not break. For them. But their faces and smell overwhelmed her. They were lost already, she told herself.

Satinov’s plan would never work: they were in one of those orphanages, raped, tortured, beaten, abused, and when they were old enough, shot. She should confess to any lies, anything rather than this. Just to sleep in a cool cell. The children were dead already. Dead to her, dead in fact. They were no longer hers. They were lost forever.

She was no more in the land of the living.

38

Far to the south of Moscow, the Volga German woman in the floral scarf and the plain summer dress knocked again on the door of the stationmaster of RostovonDon. Again she dragged in her three suitcases and her two children, a small blond girl and a brownhaired boy, who clung to her arms, their sunken eyes already sad and hollow.

The stationmaster’s office was next to the furious chaos of the ticket office, where hundreds waited all day and where so many were disappointed. With its armchairs and portraits of Lenin and Stalin, the office was an oasis of calm and civilization. Even though the Volga German woman had come here every morning for four days and found no telegram, no signal, no friend, she still came in, appearing to enjoy her minute in this clean, quiet eye of the storm. The stationmaster and his assistant looked at each other and rolled their eyes. The nanny, with her three suitcases and two children, was just one of the desperate, grey multitudes who came in every morning hoping for some sign from above, some telegram from nonexistent relatives, some lost luggage that would never be found, some tickets for a train that would never leave.

“Comrade Stepanian,” she greeted the stationmaster on the fourth day, “good morning. I wondered if there was any news? A telegram perhaps?”

The stationmaster reached wearily into a wooden intray and, clicking his tongue like the clipclop of a horse, began to work his way through the thick yellow paper of Soviet officialdom, moving his lips as he read each telegram.

On the first day, Stepanian had checked the papers of this Volga German woman and these two welldressed children who were being transported to an orphanage near Tiflis.

Each day they returned, looking hungrier, filthier, more forlorn. The angular and wan nanny herself was haggard with exhaustion.

“I’d like to help. Are the young ones OK?” Stepanian smiled at the children. “Are you all right, you two? What’s that you’ve got there?”

“A cushion,” said the little girl, forlornly.

“Do you sleep on it?”