Sashenka

Once she knew Lala was asleep, she crept outside, taking a streetcar and then an izvoshtik over to the factories on the Petrograd Side. She spent an hour at the workers’ circle at the Putilov and, together with another young intellectual, a boy from the Gymnasium, and a couple of lathe turners, they delivered the spare parts for a printing press to a new hideout in Vyborg.

Afterward she had an hour to kill so she walked along the Embankment and then along the Moika over her favorite little bridge, the Bridge of Kisses, past the ocher Yusupov Palace that more than any other building represented the iniquitous wealth of the few. She came here to the coachmen’s hut because it was close to home —and yet in another dimension.

She ordered spicy ukha fish soup, goat’s cheese, black Borodinsky bread and some tea—and sat listening to the men’s gossip. When they talked about her as a dish, a looker, she did not quite understand what they meant. She could see her reflection in the little window and felt dissatisfied as always. She preferred to picture herself out in the freeze, buried in her high-necked coat, stole and shapka.

Cut out the vanity, Sashenka told herself. Her looks did not interest her. Like her uncle Mendel, she lived for the Revolution. Wherever she looked in the streets, she saw only those who would benefit from the beautiful march of the dialectic.

She dipped the bread and cheese into some mustard, and spluttered as the burn raced up her nose into her sinuses. Afterward, she nibbled at a shapeless sugar lump and reflected that she was happier now than she had ever been in her entire life.

As a child, her parents had taken her to Turbin to visit the rabbinical court of her grandfather, Abram Barmakid, the saintly rabbi, with his beadles, disciples, students and hangers-on. She was very young and her father was not yet such a swell, and they lived in Warsaw, which was full of Hasidic Jews. But nothing had prepared Sashenka for the medieval realm of Abram Barmakid. The honest fanaticism, the rigid joy, even the guttural Yiddish language, the men with ringlets, fringed shawls and gabardine coats, the bewigged women—all of it scared her. Even then, she had feared their medieval spells and superstitions.

Yet she now reflected that her grandparents’ world of golems and evil eyes was no worse than the secular money worship of her father’s marketplace. Since childhood, she had been shocked by the injustices she had seen at Zemblishino and the manor house on his vast estates on the Dnieper. The luxury and debauchery of her parents’ wretched marriage seemed to her to epitomize the rottenness of Russia and the capitalist world.

Mendel had rescued her from all this wickedness, and had changed her life. If you love then love with verve; if you threaten mean it well, the poet Alexei Tolstoy had written. That was her: “All or nothing!” She reveled in the delicious, almost amorous feeling of being part of a secret, a giant conspiracy. There was something seductive about sacrificing the old morality of the middle classes for the new morality of the Revolution. It was like sitting in this cafe: the very unromance of it was what made it so romantic.

She glanced at her watch: 4:45 a.m. Time to go. She pulled on the coat and hat again, tossed down some coins. The coachmen watched, nodding at her. On the street, the draymen were delivering the milk crates, the patisserie van loading up with freshly baked bread. Carters dragged in sacks of coal. Janitors cleaned the steps. Piter was awakening.

The freezing air was so refreshing after the musk of the little hut that she inhaled it until it burned her lungs. How she loved Piter with its peculiar climate, almost arctic in its gummy winter blackness, but in summer, when it never grew dark, as bright as Paradise before the Fall. Its gorgeous facades in eggshell blue and ocher were magnificently imperial. But behind them were the factories, the electric streetcars, the yellow smoke and the crowded workers’ dormitories. The beauty that surrounded her was a lie. The truth might seem ugly but it had its beauty too. Here was the future!

She crossed St. Isaac’s Square. Even in winter, you could spot the approach of dawn because the golden dome began to shine darkly long before there was as much as a glow on the horizon. The Astoria was still feasting—she could hear the band, glimpse in the gloom the diamonds of women, the orange tips of men’s cigars. The Yacht Club was still open, troikas and limousines waiting outside for the courtiers and financiers.

She headed down Greater Maritime. She heard the rumble of a car and sank back into a doorway, like the ghost she had described to Mendel.

The Delaunay stopped outside her home. Pantameilion, in his long shining boots, opened the door of the car. Her mother climbed out. First one gorgeously clad foot in the softest kid boot appeared. Then a glimpse of silk stockings, then the satin dress, the sequins glittering.

A white hand studded with rings held the car’s doorframe. Sashenka was disgusted. Here she was, coming from serving the working class; here, with perfect symmetry, came her mother, fresh from servicing the desires of some corrupt man who was not her father.

Sashenka did not know what exactly it was that lovers did, though she knew it was like the dogs on her father’s estate—and she was repulsed, yet rapt. She watched her mother pull herself out of the car and stand swaying. Pantameilion rushed to catch her hand.

Sashenka wanted to scratch her mother’s face and throw her to the ground where she belonged, but she stepped out of the shadows to find Pantameilion crouched on the snow, pulling at a writhing sequined form on the pavement. It was her mother struggling to get back on her feet.

Sashenka ran up to them. Ariadna was on all fours, her stockings torn and naked knees bleeding. She fell forward again, one gloved hand clawing at the snow, the other trying to fight off Pantameilion’s proffered arm.

“Thanks, Pantameilion,” said Sashenka. “Just check to see that the doors are open. And send the watchman back to bed.”

“But miss, the baroness…”

“Please, Pantameilion, I’ll look after her.”

Pantameilion’s face bore the double anguish of servants faced with the collapse of their employers—they hated the topsy-turviness of a humiliated mistress just as they feared the insecurity of a fallen master. He bowed, shuffled into the house and emerged a moment later, climbing back into the growling Delaunay and jerking it into gear.

Mother and daughter were alone in the street under the mansion’s lantern.

Sashenka knelt beside her mother, who was weeping. Her tears ran in black streams from black eyes on dirty white skin, like muddy footprints on old snow.

Sashenka pulled her to her feet, threw her arm over her shoulder and dragged her up the two steps into the lobby of the house. Inside, the great hall was almost dark, just an electric light burning on the first-floor landing. The giant white squares shone bright, while the black ones were like holes dropping to the middle of the earth. Somehow, she got her mother up to her room. The electric light would be too bright so she lit the oil lamps instead.

By now, Ariadna was sobbing quietly to herself. Sashenka raised her mother’s hands to her lips and kissed them, her anger of a few moments earlier forgotten.

“Mama, Mama, you’re home now. It’s me, Sashenka! I’m going to undress you and put you to bed.” Ariadna calmed down a little, though she continued to speak slivers of nonsense as Sashenka undressed her.

“Sing it again…loneliness…your lips are like stars, houses…the wine is only mediocre, a bad year…hold me again…feel so sick…pay it, I’ll pay, I can afford it…Love is God…am I home…you sound like my daughter…my vicious daughter…another glass please…kiss me properly.”

Sashenka pulled off her mother’s boots, threw off the sable and the hat with ostrich feathers, unhooked the satin dress embroidered with sequins and misty with faded tuberose, untied the bodice, unrolled the shredded stockings, unclipped the brooches, the three ropes of pearls and the diamond earrings. As she pulled off the underdress and the lingerie that was inside out, she was enveloped in the animal smells and sweated alcohol of a woman of the town, aromas that repelled her. She vowed she would never let herself descend into such a state. Finally she heated water and washed her mother’s face.

Amazed at herself, she realized that she had become the mother, and the mother the child. She folded and hung her mother’s clothes, laid her jewels in the velvet box, threw her lingerie into the laundry basket. Then she helped her mother onto the bed, under the covers and kissed her cheek. She stroked her forehead and sat with her.

“You and me…,” said Ariadna, as she fell asleep, rolling and tossing in her sad dreams.