Sashenka

one, revolution isn’t possible. I’m not sure it’ll happen in our lifetimes. How can one jump the stages of Marxist development? It can’t happen, Sashenka. It’s impossible.”

“Of course. But surely—”

“Even Lenin isn’t sure we’ll live to see it.”

“You get his letters?”

Mendel nodded. “We’ve told him about the Smolny girl called Snowfox. How’s the family?”

She took a breath. Here it comes, he thought.

“Comrade Mendel,” she said, “I was arrested yesterday and spent the night at the Kresty.”

Mendel limped to the stove and, taking a greasy spoon, he leaned over the shchi soup and slurped a mouthful. The cigarette somehow remained hanging in the corner of his mouth.

“My first arrest, Uncle Mendel!”

He remembered his own first arrest twenty years ago, the appalled reaction of his father, the great Turbin rabbi, and his own pride on earning this badge of honor.

“Congratulations,” he told Sashenka. “You’re becoming a real revolutionary. Did the comrades of the cell committee take care of you?”

“Comrade Natasha looked after me. I didn’t know you were married.”

Sometimes Sashenka was a real Smolny schoolgirl. “I’m married to the Party. Comrades are arrested every day and very few are released the next morning.”

“There’s something else.”

“Go on,” he said, leaning on the stove, an old exile’s trick to ease the ache of Arctic winter. He chomped on a hunk of cold sausage, cigarette miraculously still in position.

“I was interrogated for several hours by Gendarme Captain Peter Sagan.”

“Sagan, eh?” Mendel knew that Sagan was the Okhrana case officer assigned to finish off the Party. He moved back to the little table, dragging his heavy boot. As he sat down, the table creaked. Now he was concentrating, watching her face. “I think I’ve heard the name. What of him?”

“He was trying to lead me on, but Uncle Mendel,” she said, joining him at the table and gripping his arm, the Smolny schoolgirl again, “he prides himself on his humanity. He’s something of a bourgeois liberal. I know I’m a neophyte but I just wanted to inform you—and the Petrograd Committee—that he seemed keen to be my friend. Naturally I gave him no encouragement. But at the end, he said he would like to meet me again and continue our conversation—”

“About what?”

“Poetry. Why are you smiling, Uncle Mendel?”

“You’ve done well, comrade,” Mendel said, thinking this new development through.

Sagan, a penniless nobleman, was a slick and ambitious policeman who specialized in turning female revolutionaries. But he might well be sympathetic to the Left, because the secret police knew how rotten the regime was better than anyone. It could be a signal, a trick, a seduction, a betrayal—or just an intellectually pretentious policeman. There were a hundred ways it could play out and Sashenka understood none of them, he thought.

“What if he does approach me?” she asked.

“What do you think?” answered Mendel.

“If he comes up to me in the street, I’ll tell him never to talk to me again and curse him for good measure. Is that what you want me to do?”

Silence except for the flutter of the kerosene lamp. Mendel peered at her as intensely as a priest at an exorcism. The child he had known since her birth was an unfinished but very striking creature, he reflected, guessing that Sagan wanted to turn her into a double agent to get to Mendel himself. But there were two ways of playing this, and he could not miss a chance to destroy Sagan, whatever the cost.

“You’re wrong,” he said slowly.

“If the committee wished it,” she said, “I would kill him with Papa’s Browning—it’s in his desk—or there’s the Mauser behind the bookcase at the safe house on Shirokaya. Let me do it!”

“In the end, we’ll put them all up against the wall,” said Mendel. “Now, listen to me. You might never hear from Sagan again. But if he turns up, talk to him, draw him out. He could be helpful to the Party and to me.”

“What if he tries to recruit me?”

“He will. Let him think that’s possible.”

“What if a comrade sees me with him?” she said anxiously.

“The Inner Bureau of the Committee will be informed of this operation. Three of us—a troika—just me and two others. Are you afraid?”

Sashenka shook her head. Her eyes were almost glowing in the dark. He could see she was scared and excited to have such a mission. “But I could be killed by my own comrades as a traitor?”

“We’re both in danger every minute,” he replied. “The very second you become a Bolshevik, your normal life is over. You walk forever on burning coals. It’s like leaping onto a sleigh galloping so fast you can never get off. Chop wood and chips fly. We’re in a secret war, the Superlative Game, you and I. The Party against the Okhrana. You do as I tell you, nothing more, and you report every word to me. You know the codes and the drops? Be vigilant. Vigilance is a Bolshevik virtue. You’ve become an asset to the Party quicker than I could have predicted. Understand?”

Mendel took care to moderate his voice and hoped he sounded convincing. He offered his hand and they shook. Her hand felt as silky, delicate and nervy as a little bird whose bones could be crushed with ease. “Good night, comrade.”

Sashenka stood up and pulled on her coat, stole, boots and shapka and wrapped her head in the scarf. At the door she turned back, pale and serious.

“I’d hate you to protect me because I was family.”

“I never would, comrade.”

18

“See the filly over there?” said the old coachman in the sheepskin, his cheeks as red as rare beef.

“Her again. Is she nursing a broken heart?”

“Is she a working girl or planning a bank robbery?”

“Perhaps she’s booked a room at the hotel?”

“Is she slumming it for a lover who knows how to clean a horse’s arse? Me, for example!”

“Hey, girl, have a vodka on us!”

In the middle of St. Isaac’s Square, not far from Greater Maritime Street, somewhere between the Mariinsky Palace and the cathedral, stood a flimsy wooden hut, painted black, with a tarpaulin roof so it looked like a giant one-horse cab with the hood up. Here in the bleary realm of overboiled cabbage and winter sweat, the coachmen of the one-horse cabs—the izvoshtikis—came to drink and eat in the early hours in a world beyond exhaustion.

Sashenka, a rough karakul coat and leather cap beside her, sat on her own and put some kopeks into the noisy automatic barrel organ. It started to play “Yankee Doodle” and then some Strauss waltzes and presently “Yankee Doodle” again. Lighting a cigarette, she stared through the window at the Rolls-Royces outside the Astoria Hotel, the falling snow, and the horses tapping their hooves on the ice outside, waiting patiently, their breaths and whinnies all visible in the cold.

Two days had passed since her meeting with Mendel. At eleven that night, Lala had looked in on her in her bedroom.

“Turn your lights out now, darling,” she said. “You look tired.” Lala sat on her bed and kissed her forehead as always. “You’ll hurt your eyes with all that reading. What are you reading about?”

“Oh Lala…one day I’ll tell you,” Sashenka said, curling up to sleep, anxious that her governess should not discover that under the bedclothes she was dressed ready to go out.