Sashenka

floor.”

The women walked up the stairs toward an open doorway lined in scarlet silk. A red-faced man in blue serge trousers and suspenders, clearly a policeman, pointed them inside brusquely. “Ladies, this way!”

A squat peasant woman in a floral dress took their coats and showed them into a room where a tall silver samovar bubbled and steamed. Beside it, and toying with handfuls of silks, chinchilla and sable furs, diamonds and egret feathers, sat the Elder Grigory, known as Rasputin, in a lilac silk shirt tucked into a crimson sash, striped trousers, and kid leather boots. His face was weathered, moley and wrinkled, his nose pockmarked, his hair center-parted into greasy bangs that formed arches on his forehead, and his beard was reddish brown. Yellow eyes gazed up at Ariadna without blinking, the glazed pupils flickering from side to side as if they saw nothing.

“Ah, my Little Bee,” he said. “Here!” He offered his hand to the women. Ariadna tipsily fell on one knee and kissed the hand, which moved on to Missy. “I know what you’ve come about. Go into my reception room. My little doves are all here, dear Bee. And you’re new.” He squeezed Missy’s waist, which tickled her, and she squealed. “Show her round, Little Bee.”

“Little Bee,” whispered Ariadna to Missy, “is his special name for me. We all have nicknames.”

“Don’t forget to mention Sashenka.”

“Sashenka, Sashenka. There, I’m remembering.”

The pair entered the main room, where ten or so guests, mostly women, sat round a table covered in their offerings—a heap of black Beluga caviar, half a sturgeon in aspic, piles of peppermint gingersnaps, boiled eggs, a coffee cake and a bottle of Cahors.

Rasputin was right behind them. He put his arm around Ariadna’s waist and swung her round, steering her to a seat at the table. He greeted them separately. “Wild Dove, meet Little Bee, Pretty Dandy, the Calm One…”

Among the women sat a plump moon-faced blonde in a drab, badly ironed and poorly made beige dress—and a treble string of the biggest pearls that Ariadna had ever seen. This shiny-cheeked creature was Anna Vyrubova, and the pretty, dark lady next to her, wearing a fashionable sailor-suit dress and a black and white bonnet, was Julia “Lili” von Dehn: these, Ariadna knew, were the Empress’s two best friends. The spirituality of the atmosphere was intensified by the exalted status of those present. Ariadna was keenly aware that, with the Emperor away at the front, the Empress ruled the Empire through the people in this room. She knew that Missy was not yet a devotee of the Elder—in fact she was there for the party. She was bored with sweet, banal Count Loris and adored anything that was fashionable or outre—and this was both. But for Ariadna it was different. Already drunk and high, she felt cleansed in this room. Whoever she was outside, however unhappy and insecure she felt at home, however desperate her love affairs and random her search for meaning in the universe, here things had a calm simplicity that she had never found before.

Rasputin walked around the table so that each guest might kiss his hand. When he found an empty chair, he sat down and took a handful of sturgeon in his bare fist and started to eat, smearing the food in his beard. The ladies watched in silence as he gobbled handfuls of cake, fish, caviar, without the slightest self-consciousness, his chomping loud and hearty. When he was finished, he gazed at them all and then placed his hands on Ariadna’s hands and squeezed them.

“You! Honeyed friend, you need me most tonight and I’m here.”

A blushing glow started on Ariadna’s chest and rose up her neck and throughout her body, as if she felt something between teenage bashfulness, religious awe and sensual excitement. Vyrubova’s bulging eyes, crafty yet credulous, glared jealously at her. What does our Friend see in this lowborn zhyd, the Jew banker’s sluttish wife? Ariadna knew she was thinking—even though Vyrubova herself, and the Empress too, had benefited from Zeitlin’s generosity.

Ariadna did not care even though the ugly flush was covering her neck and bare shoulders. Here she was no longer a Yiddeshe dochte born Finkel Barmakid in the court of the famous Rabbi of Turbin, or the troubled neurasthenic who could barely control her appetites. Here she was a woman worthy to be loved and cherished—even among the friends of the Tsars themselves. Rasputin talked to empresses and whores as though they were the same. This was the Elder’s genius—he made his bewildered doves into proud lionesses, his neurasthenic victims into beautiful champions. This sacred peasant would save Russia, the Tsars, the world. Ariadna’s breath hissed between her teeth; her tongue darted out to lick her dry lips. The room was quiet except for the murmur of the Elder and the humming of the samovar next door.

“Little Bee,” he said quietly in his simple country accent, raising her and leading her around the table to the sofa against the wall where he sat her down, pulling up his chair, squeezing her legs between his own. A tremor ran through her. “You have an emptiness inside you. You’re always balanced between despair and a void within. You’re a Hebrew? You’re a troublesome people but much wronged too. I will keep you all out of trouble. Just follow my holy way of love. Don’t listen to your priests or rabbis”—he took in her shiny eyes in a single glance—“they don’t know the whole mystery. Sin is given so that we may repent and repentance brings joy to the soul and strength to the body, understand?”

“We do, we do understand,” said Vyrubova in a loud, crude voice behind Rasputin.

“How is brutalized man with his beast’s habits to climb out of the pit of sin and live a life pleasing to God? Oh you are my darling, my Honey Bee.” His face was so close to hers that Ariadna could smell the sturgeon and the Madeira wine on his breath, the perfume on his beard and the alcohol in his sweat. “Sin should be understood. Without sin there is no life because there is no repentance and if there is no repentance there is no joy. How are you looking at me, Little Bee?”

“With holiness, Father. I have sinned,” she started. “I’d die without love. I need to be loved at every moment.”

“You’re thirsty, Honey Bee.” He kissed her lips very slowly. “For now, Honey Bee, come with me. Let us pray.” Leaving the other women behind, he took her hand and led her through the curtain into the sanctum.

13

Sashenka’s jailhouse dawn was a blinding light and the heady fumes of a long night’s distilled urine as every woman in the cell emptied her bladder in turn. Her Smolny pinafore was wet and bloodstained and she ached in every fiber of her body. Boots on stone, the turning of keys and screeching of locks. The cell door swung open.

A man stood in the doorway. “Ugh! It’s rank in here,” he muttered then pointed at Sashenka. “That’s the one. Bring her.”

Natasha squeezed her hand as two guards waded through the sprawled bodies and fished her out of the cell. They manhandled her through the grey corridors and deposited her in an interrogation room with a plain desk, a metal chair and walls peeling with damp. She could hear a man crying next door.

A gendarme, a lieutenant with a square head, shaved close, and a long square-cut beard, opened the door, stalked up to her and banged his fist on the table.

“You’re going to tell us every single name,” he said, “and you’re never going to fuck around like this again.” Sashenka flinched as he hoisted himself onto the table’s edge and pushed his livid face up close to hers. “You’ve every advantage in life,” he shouted. “True, you’re not a real Russian. You’re a zhyd, you’re not nobility. Your Jew father probably salutes the Kaiser every night…”

“My father’s a Russian patriot! The Tsar gave him a medal!”

“Don’t answer me like that. That title of his ain’t a Russian title. Jews can’t have titles here. Everyone knows that. He bought it with stolen rubles from some German princeling…”

“The King of Saxony made him a baron.” Whatever Sashenka’s views on her father’s class and the capitalist war, she was still his daughter. “He works hard for his country.”

“Shut up unless you want a slap. Once a zhyd always a zhyd. Profiteers, revolutionaries, tinkers. You Evrei—Hebrews —are all at it, aren’t you? But you’re such a looker. Yes, you’re real fresh strawberries!”

“How dare you!” she said quietly, always uneasy about her appearance. “Do not speak to me like that!”

Sashenka had not eaten or drunk since the night before. After her brave moments of defiance, her courage and energy were draining away. She needed food like the furnace of an engine needs coal, and she longed for a hot