Sashenka (8 page)

She flopped into the chair. Sagan noted her exhaustion with satisfaction—and calibrated pity. She was really no more than a confused child. Still, it opened up interesting possibilities.

“You look hungry, mademoiselle. Fancy ordering some breakfast? Ivanov?” A gendarme NCO appeared in the doorway.

She nodded, avoiding his eyes.

“What can I get you, magamozelle?” Ivanov flourished an imaginary pen and paper, playing the French waiter.

“Let’s see!” Captain Sagan answered for her, remembering the reports in the surveillance files. “I’ll bet you have hot cocoa, white bread lightly toasted, saltless butter and caviar for breakfast?” Sashenka nodded mutely. “Well, we can’t do the caviar but we have cocoa, bread and I did find a little Cooper’s Fine Cut Marmalade from Yeliseyev’s on Nevsky Prospect. Any good to you?”

“Yes, please.”

“You’ve been bleeding.”

“Yes.”

“Someone attacked you?”

“Last night, it was nothing.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“I was read the charges. I’m innocent.”

He smiled at her but she still did not look at him. Her arms remained crossed and she was shivering.

“You’re guilty of course, the question is how guilty.”

She shook her head. Sagan decided this was going to be a very dull interrogation. Ivanov, wearing an apron stretched lumpily over his blue uniform, wheeled in the breakfast and offered bread, marmalade and some cocoa in a mug.

“Just as you ordered, magamozelle,” he said.

“Very good, Ivanov. Your French is exquisite.” Sagan turned to his prisoner. “Does Ivanov remind you of the waiters at the Donan, your papa’s favorite, or the Grand Hotel Pupp at Carlsbad?”

“I’ve never stayed there,” Sashenka whispered, running her fingertips over her wide lips, a gesture she made, he noticed, when she was thoughtful. “My mother stays there: she puts me and my governess in a dingy boardinghouse. But you knew that.” She was silent again.

They’re always the same. Unhappy at home, they get mixed up in bad company, he thought. She must be starving, but he would wait for her to ask him whether she could eat.

Instead she suddenly looked straight up at him as if the sight of the food had already restored her. Grey eyes, cool as slate, examined him. The speckled lightness of the irises—

grains of gold amid the grey—under the hooded eyebrows, projecting a mocking curiosity, took him aback.

“Are you going to sit there and watch me eat?” she asked, taking a piece of bread.

First point to her, thought Sagan. The gentleman in him, the descendant of generations of Baltic barons and Russian generals, wanted to applaud her. Instead he just grinned.

She picked up a knife, spread the bread with butter and marmalade and ate every piece, quickly and neatly. He noticed there were delicate freckles on either side of her nose, and now her arms were no longer crossed he could see that she had a most abundant bosom.

The more she tried to hide her breasts, the more conspicuous they became. We interrogators, concluded Sagan, must understand such things.

Ivanov removed the plates. Sagan held out a packet of cigarettes emblazoned with a crocodile.

“Egyptian goldtipped Crocodiles?” she said.

“Aren’t they your only luxury?” he replied. “I know that Smolny girls don’t smoke, but in prison, who’s watching?” She took one and he lit it for her. Then he took one himself and threw it spinning into the air, catching it in his mouth.

“A performing monkey as well as a torturer,” she said in her soft voice with its bumblebee huskiness, and blew out smoke in blue rings. “Thanks for breakfast. Am I going home now?”

Ah, decided Sagan, she does have some spirit after all. The light caught a rich tinge of auburn in her dark hair.

Sagan reached for a pile of handwritten reports.

“Are you reading someone’s diary?” she asked, cheekily.

He looked up at her witheringly. “Mademoiselle, your life as you knew it is over. You will probably be sentenced by the Commission to the maximum five years of exile in Yeniseisk, close to the Arctic Circle. Yes,
five
years. You may never come back. The harsh sentence reflects your treason during wartime and, as you are a Jew, next time it will be harsher still.”

“Five years!” Her breaths grew quick and shallow. “It’s
your
war, Captain Sagan, a slaughter of working men on the orders of emperors and kings, not
our
war.”

“OK, here’s the game. These are the surveillance reports of my agents. Let me read what my files say about a certain person I will call Madame X. You have to guess her real name.” He took a breath, his eyes twinkling, then lowered his voice theatrically.
“After following the erotic religion of Arzabyshev’s novel
Sanin
and taking part in sexual debauchery, she
embraced the ‘Eastern’ teachings of the socalled healer Madame Aspasia del Balzo, who revealed
through a process called spiritual retrogression that in a former life Mrs. X had been the handmaiden of Mary Magdalene and then the bodicedesigner of Joan of Arc.”

“That’s too easy! Madame X is my mother,” said Sashenka. Her nostrils flared and Sagan noticed her lips never quite seemed to close. He turned back to his file.

“In a tableturning session, Madame Aspasia introduced Baroness Zeitlin to Julius Caesar, who
told her not to allow her daughter Sashenka to mock their psychic sessions.”

“You’re making it up, Captain,” said Sashenka drily.

“In the lunatic asylum of Piter, we don’t need to make anything up. You appear quite often in this file, mademoiselle, or should I say Comrade Zeitlin. Here we are again.
Baroness
Zeitlin continues to pursue any road to happiness offered to her. Our investigations reveal that
Madame del Balzo was formerly Beryl Crump, illegitimate daughter of Fineas O’Hara Crump, an
Irish undertaker from Baltimore, whereabouts unknown. After embracing the teachings of the
French hierophant doctor Monsieur Philippe and then the Tibetan healer Dr. Badmaev, Baroness
Zeitlin is now a follower of the peasant known to his adepts as ‘Elder,’ whom she asked to exorcize
the evil spirits of her daughter Sashenka who she says despises her and has destroyed her spiritual
wellbeing.”

“You’ve made me laugh under interrogation,” Sashenka said, looking solemn. “But don’t think that you’ve got me that easily.”

Sagan spun the file onto his desk, sat back and held up his hands. “Apologies. I wouldn’t for a second underestimate you. I admired your article in the illegal
Rabochnii Put
—
Workers’ Path
—newspaper.” He drew out a grubby tabloid journal headed with a red star. “Title: ‘The Science of Dialectical Materialism, the Cannibalistic Imperialist Civil War, and Menshevik Betrayal of the Proletarian Vanguard.’”

“I never wrote that,” she protested.

“Of course not. But it’s very thorough and I understand from one of our agents in Zurich that your Lenin was quite impressed. I don’t imagine any other girls at the Smolny Institute could write such an essay, quoting from Plekhanov, Engels, Bebel, Jack London and Lenin—and that’s just the first page. I don’t mean to patronize.”

“I said I didn’t write it.”

“It’s signed ‘Tovarish Pesets.’ Comrade Snowfox. Your shadows tell me you always wear an Arctic fox fur, a gift from an indulgent father perhaps?”

“A frivolous
nom de révolution
. Not mine.”

“Come on, Sashenka—if I may call you that. No man would choose that name: we’ve got Comrade Stone, Kamenev, and Comrade Steel, Stalin, both of whom I have personally dispatched to Siberia. And Comrade Molotov, the Hammer. Do you know their real names?”

“No, I—”

“Our Special Section knows everything about your Party. It’s riddled with our informers.

So back to ‘Comrade Snowfox.’ Not many women in the Party could carry it off. Alexandra Kollontai perhaps, but we know her revolutionary code name. Anyway she’s in exile and you’re here. By the way, have you read her
Love of the Worker Bees
?”

“Of course I have,” Sashenka replied, sitting up straight. “Who hasn’t?”

“But I imagine all that free love is more your mother’s style?”

“What my mother does is her own business, and as to my private life, I don’t have one. I don’t want one. All
that
disgusts me. I despise such trivia.”

The ashgrey eyes looked through him again. There is no one as sanctimonious as a teenage idealist (especially one who is a rich banker’s precious daughter), reflected Sagan.

He was impressed with her game, yet was not quite sure what to do: should he release her or keep working on her? She might just be the minnow to hook some bigger fish.

“You know your parents and uncle Gideon Zeitlin all tried to get you released last night.”

“Mama? I’m surprised she’d bother…”

“Sergeant Ivanov! Have you got last night’s report from Rasputin’s place?” Ivanov clomped into the room with the file. Sagan leafed quickly through handwritten papers.

“Here we are.
Report of Agent Petrovsky: Dark One
—that’s our code name for Rasputin in case you hadn’t guessed—
talked to Ariadna Zeitlin, Jewess, wife of the industrialist, and acknowledged she had a special subject to discuss. But after a private session with the Dark One on
the subject of sin and an unruly scene on the arrival of Madame Lupkina, Zeitlin, accompanied by
the American Countess Loris, left the Dark One’s apartment at 3:33 a.m. and was driven to the
Aquarium nightclub and then the Astoria Hotel, Mariinsky Square, in the same RussoBalt landaulet motorcar. Both appeared intoxicated. They visited the suite of Guards Captain Dvinsky,
cardsharp and speculator, where…champagne ordered…
blah, blah
…they left at 5:30 a.m. The
Jewess Zeitlin’s stockings were torn and her clothes were in a disordered state. She was driven back
to the Zeitlin residence in Greater Maritime Street and the car then conveyed the American to her
husband’s apartment on Millionaya, Millionaires’ Row…”

“But…she never mentioned me?”

Sagan shook his head. “No—although her American friend did. Your father was more effective. But,” he raised a finger as her face lit up in expectation, “you’re staying right here.

Only as a favor to you, of course. It would ruin your credibility with your comrade revolutionaries if I released you too soon.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“If I do release you now, they may think you’ve become one of my double agents—and then they’d have to rub you out. Don’t think they’d be kinder because you’re a schoolgirl.

They’re ice cold. Or they’d assume your rich parents scurried to Rasputin or Andronnikov and bought you out. They’d think—quite rightly in my view—that you’re just a frivolous dilettante. So I’ll be doing you a favor when I make sure you get those five years in the Arctic.”

He watched the flush creep up her neck, flood her cheeks and burn her temples. She’s frightened, he thought, pleased with himself.

“That would be an honor.
I’m brave and fear neither knife nor fire
,” she said, quoting Zemfira in Pushkin’s “Gypsies.” “Besides, I’ll escape. Everyone does.”

“Not from there you won’t…Zemfira. It’s more likely you’ll die up there. You’ll be buried by strangers in a shallow unmarked grave on the taiga. You’ll never lead any revolutions, never marry, never have children—your very presence on this earth a waste of the time, money and care your family have expended on it.”

He saw a shudder pass right through her from shoulder to shoulder. He allowed the silence to develop.

“What do you want from me?” she asked, her voice shrill with nerves.

“To talk. That’s all,” he said. “I’m interested in your views, Comrade Snowfox. In what someone like you thinks of this regime. What you read. How you see the future. The world’s changing. You and I—whatever our beliefs—are the future.”

“But you and I couldn’t be more different,” she exclaimed. “You believe in the Tsars and landowners and exploiters. You’re the secret fist of this disgusting empire, while I believe it’s doomed and soon it’ll come crashing down. Then the people will rule!”

“Actually we’d probably agree on many things, Sashenka. I too know things must change.”

“History will change the world as surely as the sun rises,” she said. “The classes will vanish. Justice will rule. The Tsars, the princes, my parents and their depraved world, and nobility like you…” She stopped abruptly as if she had said too much.

“Isn’t life strange? I shouldn’t be saying this at all but we probably want the same things, Sashenka. We probably even read the same books. I adore Gorky and Leonid Andreyev.

And Mayakovsky.”

“But I love Mayakovsky!”

“I was in the Stray Dog cellar bar the night he declaimed his poems—and do you know, I wept. I wasn’t in uniform of course! But yes, I wept at the sheer courage and beauty of it.

You’ve been to the Stray Dog of course?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Oh!” Sagan feigned surprise with a fleck of disappointment. “I don’t suppose Mendel is too interested in poetry.”

“He and I don’t have time to visit smoky cabarets,” she said, sulkily.

“I wish I could take you,” he told her. “But you said you loved Mayakovsky? My real favorite is
Whorehouse after whorehouse

With sixstoryhigh fauns daring dances…

—and she took up the poem, enthusiastically:

Stage Manager! The hearse is ready

Put more widows in the crowds!

There aren’t enough there!

No one ever asked

That victory be

—and Sagan picked up the verse again:

Inscribed for our homeland

To an armless stump left from the bloody banquet.

What the hell good is it?

Sashenka marked the rhythm with both hands, flushed with the passion of the words. A vision, thought Sagan, of rebellious, defiant youth.

“Well, well, and I thought you were just a silly schoolgirl,” he said, slowly.

There was a knock on the door. Ivanov strode in and gave Sagan a note. He rose briskly and tossed his files onto his desk, sending the particles of dust, suspended in the sunlight, into little whirlwinds.