Sashenka (48 page)

Comrade Stepanian put his hand on the pile of telegrams and patted it.

“No, no, there’s no telegram…”

Carolina was overcome with despair. Satinov had failed them; it had all been for nothing.

“I’m leaving today,” she said, on the edge of tears. “I can’t wait any longer.”

She dragged herself and the children to the door and was struggling to open it when suddenly Stepanian shook himself and clicked his tongue like a woodpecker.

“Wait! There’s no telegram—but there’s someone waiting for you by the samovar in the canteen. A woman. She’s been here for some time.”

“Thank you, Comrade Stepanian. Thank you! I could embrace you…” and she rushed out.

“Is it Mama?” asked Carlo as they hurried to the café.

“Mama’s gone away,” said Snowy seriously. “Carolina’s told you already. We’re on an adventure.”

“Come on,” said Carolina. “Run quickly. Oh, please God she hasn’t left already.”

Inside the canteen, a little apart from the line for tea and hot water beside the steaming samovar and farther from the trays of greasy dumplings, pirozhki and
pelmeni
, a dignified older woman with a heartshaped face and grey curls around her ears sat stiffly. Wearing an oldfashioned lady’s cloche hat and a suit, Lala was sipping a cup of tea, scanning the crowds eagerly. When she saw the bedraggled nanny and the two children, she stood up and beckoned them over.

“Hello, I’ve come to meet you.” She smiled at them all and offered a hand to Carolina, who seemed beyond such courtesies. The two women eyed each other for a moment, then hugged like old friends.

“I’m sorry it’s taken so long. The train was delayed and I’m not practiced at all this. Come, let’s sit down at this table,” she said, speaking slowly, looking hard at the children, her darling Sashenka’s children. “I have a room in the Revolution Hotel in Rostov where we can go and wash and get some sleep. We can eat there too. I have papers stamped for the children and I was given some money.”

Carolina tottered and then sat and buried her face in her hands—and Lala knew what this moment must be costing the nanny. Carlo ran to Carolina and kissed her hair. “You’re my best friend in the whole wide world!” he said, stroking her cheek.

Lala placed her hand on Carolina’s shoulder. “We’re living in bad times and you’ve done so well to get here. Please, Carolina, stop crying! I never asked for this job. Like you, I’m risking a lot to do it. I too am out of my depth.”

“But you have a plan? You know what to do?”

“Yes, I have instructions. Carolina, I’ll do anything to carry them through.” She looked once more at the children and they stared at her.

“Who is she?” asked Snowy.

“Be polite, Snowy!” Lala saw Carolina return to her brisk self. “This lady is going to help you.”

“Where’s Mama?” asked Carlo, his face collapsing again.

“You must be Carlo,” said Lala. “I have something for you.” She reached into a canvas bag and pulled out a cookie tin illustrated with a picture of the Kremlin.

Carlo could not take his eyes off the tin. Lala opened it and Carlo gasped at the yellow magic of the cookies with their delicious cream and jam fillings but did not move.

“I heard you liked these,” she said, feeling Carolina smile at her.

“Look, Carlo,” said Snowy, “she knows they’re your favorite.” Snowy took one and gave it to Carlo, who ate it. He took hold of his sister’s hand.

“Hello, Snowy. Is that your friend Cushion?” asked Lala.

“You’ve heard of Cushion?”

“Of course, Cushion is famous. Hello, Miss Cushion! You’re much blonder than your mummy, Snowy, and your eyes are blue but you have her mouth—and you, Carlo, look just like your father.”

“You know Mama?” asked Snowy.

“You know Papa?” said Carlo.

“Oh yes,” said Lala, remembering the day she’d first met Sashenka and had loved her instantly like her own. She recalled the nights she spent with Sashenka in her bed at the mansion on Greater Maritime Street, the sleigh rides sweeping through the boulevards of St. Petersburg, the hilarity of ice skating, the exhilaration of riding ponies on the family estate. She had been Sashenka’s real mother and, although she had not seen her for almost ten years in the crazy, maneating world that Sashenka had embraced, she had thought of her every day and talked to that portrait of the Smolny schoolgirl in her pinafore, as if they were still together. She knew too that she was here, in this station, not just for herself or Sashenka—but for Samuil Zeitlin as well, whether he was alive or dead.

Now Sashenka had been swallowed up by the Party she’d served so assiduously—and the only way Lala could express her deep love was by undertaking this troubling mission for the Zeitlin family. “I know your mummy better than anyone alive,” she told Carlo and Snowy. “But we mustn’t think about Mummy now. We must make plans for the future, for your next adventure. Oh, and you must call me Lala.”

“So
you’re
Lala?” said Snowy. “Mama told me you gave her a bath every day. I like you.

You’re very cushiony.”

The two nannies smiled at each other, sharing their admiration of Snowy—then looked away, abruptly. It was too painful.

Turning their backs on the station, they walked into RostovonDon, each holding the hand of one of the children.

“Swing me!” piped Carlo, kicking up his legs, happy for the first time in days.

As Carolina took one arm and Lala the other, Lala could not help thinking that one stage of Snowy and Carlo’s lives was ending—and another was about to begin.

45

Sashenka crawled to her cell door. “Take me to Kobylov!”

The Judas port slid open, muddy, bored eyes blinked; it shut again. Sashenka lay back sweltering on her bunk, falling in and out of sleep. How many days since she had slept for longer than ten minutes? She had lost count. She had lost the sense of day and night. There was no window in her cell, just a brilliant light that penetrated and burned even the deepest and darkest and coolest chambers of her soul.

The confrontation with Captain Sagan had changed everything. She had thought about it all day and into the night, slipping in and out of delirium. Awake, she dreamed of the children, of Vanya, of Benya Golden, and debated absurd questions: could a woman love two men at the same time, one as a lover, one as a husband? Oh yes, it was possible. But each time, she passed into dreamless unconsciousness, she slipped under the surface of fathomless black water where she saw nothing.

Then she was shaken awake roughly. “No sleeping!”

She did not even know if Vanya was alive. She knew they would have been merciless. He was one of them, he knew where all the bodies lay buried, and now they were crushing him. She longed to see him.

She thought about asking to meet him to confirm that she should take the next step, but she feared that any suspicion that they had coordinated their plans would draw the investigators toward the children. They had had more than a week now, darling Cushion and Bunny, to go on their dread adventure.

What was their smell? Hay and vanilla. How did Snowy say, “Let’s do the Cushion dance”? Sashenka struggled to get the children’s intonation right, sketching their faces again and again, but sometimes the shape of a nose or the curve of a forehead (those delicious foreheads, her favorite places to kiss, just where the hair met the temple, oh, she could nuzzle them there forever!) confounded her and they sank beneath the remorseless black water. Perhaps this was Nature making it easier for her, allowing her to forget.

Her mind was barely functioning, she scarcely registered the life of the prison around her: she just existed on the conveyor. But if she went insane, she would be no use to Carlo and Snowy. She sensed it was time for the next step.

It was deep in the night when they came to get her. The whole Soviet government functioned throughout the night, from Stalin down. How naïve she had been about Vanya coming home at dawn, smelling like an old wolf, as if he had been in a barroom brawl. His secrecy had suited her too because she had never had to ask what he was doing all night.

Now she knew the compromise they had both made.

When they reached the interrogation rooms that existed, in Sashenka’s mind, in limbo, exactly halfway between the paneled offices at the front of the Lubianka complex and the dungeons of the Interior Prison, she was relieved, just as she had been oddly relieved when they had arrested her.

She walked into the room and was struck so hard on the back with a rubber truncheon that she fell over. She was kicked viciously, which made her curl up with a groan. The truncheons—there were two men in there—fell on her back, her breasts, her stomach, wherever she turned, but especially on her legs and feet. She screamed in pain, and blood ran down her face into her eyes. She tried to pretend that this was a very unpleasant medical procedure that was necessary and even therapeutic and would be over soon, but this did not work for long.

In the compacted odors of vodka sweat, cologne and pork sausage that oozed from her persecutors, in the agony of the blows that struck her breasts, in the virile grunts and heaves of these unfit men as they swung their truncheons, Sashenka recognized that her tormentors found berserk sport in beating her. Perhaps her request had interrupted a banquet in the NKVD Club—or even an orgy at a safe house somewhere.

The men halted briefly, breathing heavily. Wiping her eyes, shivering and gasping with agony, she squinted up at Kobylov and Rodos, in boots, white shirts and jodhpurs held up with suspenders. They stood together, such different men but with the same eyes: bloodshot, yellowed and wild, like wolves caught in the headlights.

“I want to confess,” she said as loudly as she could. “Everything. I beg you. Stop it now!”

46

“Hurrah! Hurrah!” shouted Kobylov, jumping up and down like a schoolboy at a soccer match. “Christ is risen!”

He remembered his own mother, the bigbreasted cheerful Georgian woman who so cherished him. The last time he was with her in her new apartment in Tiflis, she had warned him: “Careful of the unhappiness you cause, Bogdan! Remember God and Jesus Christ!”

He pulled on his tunic, wiping his forehead with a yellow silk kerchief. “Enough now! Get her cleaned up, Comrade Rodos, let her get some sleep, cool her cell down and give her some coffee when she wakes. Then give her a pen and paper and get Mogilchuk to charm her. I’m off back to the party where so many mares await me! Thank heaven we can stop before we ruin her looks altogether. This is hard work, Sashenka, for a man who loves women. It’s not easy, pure torture, not easy at all.” And with a fleshy wave of jeweled fingers and a gleaming boot kicking the door shut, he was gone.

Sashenka slept all the next day. The cell was deliciously cool and dark but her chest was agony—perhaps they had broken a rib? Some time in the night a doctor, a greybearded, whitecoated specialist, fallen from his fancy city practice into this world of the living dead, came to see her. She was half awake but she dreamed that he was the vanished Professor Israel Paltrovich who had delivered Snowy in the Kremlin Hospital. Something about his hush of surprise when he saw it was her, something about his aristocratic and softspoken bedside manner, even though he himself looked so broken, something about his gentle reassurance in the middle of the night, reminded her of him. She wanted to talk to him about Snowy.

“Professor, is it you…?”

He put his calm fingers on her hand and squeezed it.

“Just rest,” he said, and more quietly, “sleep, dear.” He gave her injections and rubbed some healing cream into her muscles.

When she woke up, she could not move. Her body was black and blue, and her urine was red. She ate and slept some more, then they let her wash and walk in the exercise yard, where, hobbling along, she stared at the gorgeous turquoise tent above her. The air was racy and fresh and warm. It was as if she had been born again today.

She had been lucky after a fashion, she told herself. What luck to be loved by Lala and raised by her; to marry Vanya and create those children; to have enjoyed the seventhousandruby caresses of Benya Golden, one wild, reckless love affair in her life of good sense and hard work. She had known Lenin and Stalin in person, the titans of human history.

Given that it was all about to end, thank God she had known such things. What riches, what times she had enjoyed!

They would draw it out of her, she knew, and she would deliver all they wanted—and more. The words she would utter, the confessions she would make, were a long form of suicide, but addictively indispensable to her one reader: the Instantzia, Comrade Stalin, who would find in her breathless reminiscences all he had ever wanted to believe about the world and the people he hated. Vanya had told her about Stalin’s lurid visions and she would pander to every one of them. Vanya, if he was still alive, would do the same, less flamboyantly. She did not know, probably would never know now, why she, Mendel, Benya and Vanya had been arrested in the first place. The workings of spiders and webs were now beyond her. All that mattered was that she was the center of it all, she had destroyed them all. She and Peter Sagan.

They might just keep her on ice for months but by the time they sentenced her (and this part, this snuffing out, this unspeakable ending, this violent conclusion of the mysterious, boundless, vibrant thing called Life, she still found unimaginable), the children would be settled somewhere with new names and destinies, safe and sound and in the world of the living—not in her world of the dead. She beamed her love to them, her thanks to Satinov, her love for those precious to her. She had to let them go. She had been a Communist since she was sixteen. It had been her religion, the rapture of absolutism, the science of history.

But now she saw, late in life, that
this,
her special fantastical confessional suicide, was her last mission. She had become a parent again, just as she ceased to be one. She was pregnant with purpose.

In the exercise yard, Sashenka saw wispy clouds in the dancing shapes of a train, a lion and a bearded rabbinical profile. Was that her grandfather, the Rabbi of Turbin? And could that be a rabbit and a pink cushion, lit by the rays of a sun just out of sight…Perhaps, after all, the mystics were right, life was just a chimera, a fire in the desert, a fevered trance, but the pain was real.