Sashenka

“Is it you, Sashenka?” said the man, looking at her intensely. “Is it you? God, am I dreaming? You’re so very like her—down to her grey eyes, her mouth, even the way she stands. Is this a trick?”

“No, it’s not,” said Pasha, standing right behind him. “Katinka, you weren’t the only one doing some research. I found someone too.”

Katinka let her backpack drop onto the floor and stepped back. “Who are you?” she asked shakily. “Who the hell are you?”

The old man wiped his face with a big linen handkerchief. “Who’s asking the questions here? Me or this slip of a girl?” Katinka noticed his eyes were a dazzling blue. “My name’s Benya Golden. Who are you?” He took her hand and kissed it. “Tell me, for God’s sake.”

“Benya Golden?” exclaimed Katinka. “But I thought you were…”

“Well…,” Benya shrugged, “so did everyone else. Can I sit down? I’d like a cognac, please?” He looked round at the exquisitely restored mansion, the Old Master paintings, the fat sofas. “This place looks as if your bar will have everything. Get me a Courvoisier before I drop. It’s been a long journey. Look—my hands are trembling.”

They moved into the sitting room, where Pasha lit a cigar and poured them all brandies.

“So you’ve heard of me?” Benya said after a while.

“Of course, I’ve even read your Spanish Stories,” answered Katinka.

“I didn’t know I had such young fans. I didn’t know I had any fans.” He was silent. “You know, you really are the image of a woman called Sashenka whom I loved with all my heart a long time ago. Hasn’t anyone told you that?”

Katinka shook her head but she remembered Sashenka’s face in that prison photograph and how she’d felt. “She was my grandmother,” she said. “I’ve been finding out what happened to her.”

“Have you been in those vile archives?”

“Oh yes.”

“And have you found how they tortured us and broke us?”

Katinka nodded. “Everything.”

“And so can you tell me why it all happened, to us I mean, to me and Sashenka?”

“There was no why,” Katinka said slowly. “Just a chain of events. I’ve discovered so much…But tell me, how did you survive?”

“Uh, there’s not much to tell. Stalin’s thugs beat me and I told them everything they wanted. But at the trial, I said I’d been lying because I’d been tortured. I knew they’d shoot me and I couldn’t face the bullet knowing I’d betrayed Sashenka. But they gave me ten years in Kolyma instead. I was released in the war—and I had quite a war—but then I was rearrested afterward, and released again in the fifties. I was a husk of a man, but I met a woman in the camps, a nurse, an angel, and she put me back together again. She got me a job as editor of a journal in Birobizhan, the Jewish region, near the Chinese border, and that’s the godforsaken place where we’ve been living ever since.”

“Do you still write?”

“They’d beaten all that out of me.” He brushed that aside with a gesture. “I am happy just to breathe. Do you have any food in this palace? I’m always hungry.”

“Of course,” said Pasha. “We can make anything you like. Just name it!”

“I’ll have a steak, dear prince, and all the trimmings, and a bottle of red wine,” said Benya. “Do you have any French wine? Or is that pushing this dream too far? I once loved French Bordeaux…I drank it in Paris, you know—do you have it? Well then, will you all join me?” He went quiet again, and Katinka could see that his eyes had filled with tears.

Finally he took her hand and kissed it a second time. “Meeting you is like a last summer for me. Not a day passes when I don’t remember your grandmother. We were the world’s greatest lovers, yet we were together for just eleven days.” He sighed deeply. “I gave her a flower for every day…”

Katinka’s heart gave a little skip. She reached into her backpack and pulled out the little envelope of materials from Sashenka’s file that Kuzma had given her. “Does this mean anything to you?” She handed him a much-creased old envelope addressed to “B. Golden” at the Soviet Writers’ Union, in a feminine hand.

He took it from her, opened it, fingers shaking, and pulled out a pressed mimosa so flimsy that it almost came apart in his hands.

“She sent it to you,” Katinka told him, “but it arrived too late, and you’d been arrested. The Writers’ Union gave it to the NKVD and they filed it.”

Benya muttered something, shaking his head in disbelief. Then he raised the flower to his face, sniffed its old petals, kissed it and when he could finally speak, he sat up straight and proud, beaming at her through flooded eyes.

Suddenly he threw off his peaked cap and, with a dashing and triumphant smile, spun it across the room. “Even after fifty years,” he said, “I know what this means.”

30

It was a lazy sommerki in Moscow over a week later. A sleepy, orange-headed sun had lost the swagger of the day and struggled to remain in the sky. The light spread a tender pink veil over the cool waters while the shadows beneath the trees were dyed a dark blue. There was so much blossom on the warm breeze, it almost snowed gossamer as Katinka walked with Maxy around the Patriarchy Ponds. Katinka felt dizzy and joyful to be away from her family and the past. Here only the present mattered as she strolled around this sanctuary in the middle of the clamoring city.

She had not seen Maxy since that day out in the woods and she had things to tell him that only he would understand and that only they could share. Though they weren’t touching, she felt that they moved in sync, as if their limbs were linked with invisible threads.

“I’m so glad I’m living now,” she was saying to him, “because I don’t think I would have been as brave as Sashenka and Vanya if I’d lived then.”

“I think you might have been braver,” answered Maxy as, like one, they headed toward the outdoor cafe beside the water.

“Well, thank God that in our times we don’t need to be that brave,” she said. “We’re free in Russia. For the first time in history. We can do what we want, say whatever we want. No one’s watching us anymore—that’s all over now.”

“But for how long?” asked Maxy so seriously that Katinka thought he was being absurdly gloomy. The joy of being alive and young suddenly took hold of her—and she spun around and kissed him, quite recklessly.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is the story of the women and children of a fictional family across several generations and I hope it will be enjoyed as that: an intimate novel about a family. But it was inspired by the many stories, letters and cases that I found in archives and heard in interviews over ten years of researching Russian history. My own ancestors escaped from the Tsarist Empire in the early years of the last century and sparked my lifelong interest in Russia.

There are some historical characters in the book—Rasputin and Stalin being among the most obvious—and their portrayals are as accurate as I could make them. But as I wrote this book, Sashenka and her family began to seem more real than their factual contemporaries.

Historians generally write about extraordinary people who’ve shaped world events. But in this novel I wanted to write about how an ordinary family coped with the triumphs and tragedies of twentieth-century Russian history. I was fascinated by the courage and endurance of the many thousands of women who lost their husbands and