“Yes.”
“Children?”
“Not yet.”
“Happy?” Sashenka rubbed her eyes, now weary.
“Are any marriages happy?” he answered.
“I pity you,” she said. “I’ll never marry. Good night.”
“One thing, Zemfira: do you think there’s anywhere I’d rather be than here?”
Sashenka frowned. “That’s no compliment. I suspect most men don’t want to go home. Particularly when they’re vampires like you and me.” We are both armed, she thought almost deliriously. We could both die tonight.
Outside again, Sashenka walked through the streets with a light sleet caressing her face and eyelashes. Sagan was certainly an odd sort of gendarme, she reflected. She was playing along with him, drawing him out. He was older than her, much older, and he had recruited many double agents but his smug confidence in the his gamesmanship was his Achilles heel. Somehow, she’d break him down and deliver him to the Party, like John the Baptist’s head on a platter.
Far away, a train rushed whistling through the night. The black smoke of the factories encircled a silver moon. It was almost dawn: the sky was tinged with pink; the snow a deep purple. The muffled trot of a sleigh approached, and she hailed it.
The bulldog was so cold in her pocket, it burned her fingers.
“The price of oats is up again,” said the coachman, pulling on his tangled beard as they trotted toward the Zeitlin house on Greater Maritime Street.
21
Zeitlin knocked on the door of Ariadna’s boudoir and entered without waiting for an answer. It was midday but she was still in bed, wearing a silk nightgown with blue bows that revealed the bruised white skin of her shoulders. The room smelled of coffee and tuberose. Leonid had brought her breakfast earlier, and the painted wooden tray with its dirty plates and empty glasses now stood on a stand beside the bed. Luda the maid was laying out the dresses for that day—one for a luncheon, one for calling on friends, one for drinks, then one for a dinner. Four outfits, Zeitlin noted. Were so many dresses really necessary?
“Will this do for tea, Baroness?” Luda appeared from the boudoir holding up a crepe-de-chine dress. “Oh Baron! Good morning.” She bowed.
“Leave us alone, Luda.”
“Yes, Baron.”
“Sit down, Samuil,” said Ariadna, stretching. She was enjoying letting him see her flesh, he could tell. “What is it? Has the Bourse crashed? That’s all you care about, isn’t it?”
“I’ll stand.” He was conscious that he was clenching his cigar between his teeth.
She stiffened. “What’s happened? You always sit down. Shall I send for coffee?” She reached for the bell but was distracted by the smoothness of her upper arm, which she nuzzled against her lips.
“No, thank you.”
“Please yourself. I had such fun last night. I saw the Elder again. He told me such fascinating things, Samuil. Everyone was talking about the new Premier. Samuil?”
“I want a divorce, Ariadna.” There—he’d said it.
There was a long silence, then Zeitlin saw the words register. She shook her head and raised a hand as if trying to speak.
“You? But why? We’ve lived like this for years. You’re not a jealous man. You’re too…too confident for that. You’re joking surely, Samuil. We’ve been married for eighteen years. Why now?”
Zeitlin took a puff of his cigar, trying to appear calm and rational.
“It’s just…weariness.”
“Weariness? You’re divorcing me out of weariness?”
“You’ll have a generous allowance. Nothing will change. You’ll just be living in a different house. Is it such a shock?”
“You can’t!” He had turned to leave but she jumped out of bed and threw herself to the floor at his feet, knocking the cigar out of his hand. He bent to catch it and she gripped him so hard that he lost his balance and fell beside her. She’d begun to weep, her eyes wild, the whites rolling. He tried to release himself but, in the process, tore her nightgown, exposing her breasts. Yet still she held on to him so hard that the diamond studs on his stiff shirtfront popped out onto the floor.
They lay side by side, breathing heavily. He looked down and noticed her long dark-brown nipples peering through her thick tresses. She looked like a gypsy dancer. This is how her lovers must see her, he thought, marveling at her uninhibited wantonness. How strange are we humans, he reflected. The light is dark, the night is bright.
Over the years, while they were strangers by day, they had still shared a passion by night. In daylight she either worried or disgusted him, but then she would come to him in the early hours, her breath stale with old champagne, fresh brandy and yesterday’s perfume, other men’s cigars, and whisper to him of adventures of startling depravity. She hissed an argot of peasant Polish and gutter Yiddish, the language they had spoken when they first met at the court of her father, the Turbin rabbi, in that Jewish village near Lublin.
What things she told him, what delicious visions! Desires and exploits almost incredible for a respectable lady! One night a lover had taken her to the Summer Gardens, a place of dogs and prostitutes…she spared him no detail. Roused to a fever, he performed erotic feats worthy of an athlete, he the most moderate of men who regarded passion as a dangerous thing. But in the morning he awoke feeling filthy and remorseful, as if he had met a whore in a seedy room and made a fool of himself. And this was his own wife!
“Aren’t I still beautiful?” she asked him, smelling of tuberose and almonds. “How can you leave
Samuil had meant it differently—he had wondered even then if she was too unpredictable to marry.
He stood up, not without difficulty, adjusting his clothes. “Ariadna, we’ve become ridiculous.”
The servants had talked: Pantameilion had told Leonid, who had agonized how to tell the master that Sashenka had rescued her mother, drunk in the street. The butler had dispatched Shifra, Zeitlin’s own ancient governess, to tell him this unpalatable news. Zeitlin had not reacted, simply thanking Shifra politely, kissing her blue-veined hand and showing her to the door again. Historians, thought Zeitlin, try to find a single explanation for events but really things happen for many reasons, not one. Lighting up his Montecristo cigar, he reflected on Sashenka’s arrest, on Mrs. Lewis’s belief that he barely knew his own daughter—and on the unwelcome arrival of Rasputin in his life (which was somehow worse than Ariadna’s lovers). While his irrepressible brother Gideon sought his pleasures recklessly because “I might croak at any minute and go straight to hell,” Zeitlin had believed that calm discipline would ensure a long life.
Then last night he had been visited by dreams of sudden death, train crashes, gunshots, smashed automobiles, the house on fire, overturned sleighs, revolution, blood on the snow, himself on a deathbed dying of consumption of the intestines and angina pectoris, with Sashenka weeping beside him—and at the very gates of heaven, he had realized he was carrying nothing. He’d invested in treasure, not love. He was naked and he had wasted his life.
At dawn, he had gone to Shifra in the pantry—but the old witch, crouched in the chair like a translucent spider, already knew his dreams. “You need love in your life too,” she’d told him. “Don’t always live for the future.
