Sashenka

There might not be a future. Who knows what’s written for you in the Book of Life?”

Zeitlin hated change and feared shaking the foundations of his world. But something in the Chain of Being was shifting and he could not help himself. Against his better judgement, in a trance that he believed might be the presence of Fate, he’d gone to Ariadna’s room.

Now he looked down at his wife, still lying in a tangle of easy limbs on the floor.

“Is there someone else?” she asked. “Are you in love with some ballerina from the Mariinsky? A gypsy bitch from the Bear? If there is, I don’t care. You see, you selfish, cold fool, I just don’t care! I’m going to be as good as a nun. The Elder is showing me the rosy path to redemption. We have another appointment next week, on December sixteenth. Just Rasputin and me. ‘I will teach you, Honey Bee,’ he says. ‘You’ve sinned so much, you ooze Satan’s darkness. Now I’ll teach you love and redemption.’ That was what he told his Honey Bee. He’s kind to me. He listens to me for hours on end even when his antechamber is filled with petitioners, generals, countesses…”

Zeitlin clicked his studs onto his shirt and retied his cravat.

“I just want to live a normal life,” he said quietly. “I’m not so young and I might drop dead at any minute. Is that so strange? Flek will arrange everything.” And feeling a quiet sorrow and fear of the future, he left, closing the door behind him.

22

On the broad glowing screen of the Piccadilly Cinema on Nevsky, the matinee that afternoon was entitled Her Heart Is a Toy in His Hands. Sashenka was late and missed the beginning but as she raised her face to the screen and lit up a cigarette, she soon gathered that the gentleman in question was a supposedly handsome dandy (who actually looked like a stuffed dummy) wearing tails and white tie on a beach while the lady in a red-tinted ball dress stared out at a sea of blue-tinted waves.

Onstage a quartet of students from the Conservatoire were playing music chosen to represent the sea breeze. The lady’s heart had been toyed with enough, and she’d begun to wade into the ocean. A fat man in a tailcoat ran onto the stage and started to turn a wheel on a brass machine. The quartet ceased playing and the machine produced a sound that resembled the crunch and swish of the surf.

In the darkness of the half-full Piccadilly, the air was dry with electricity, and silvery cigarette smoke curled through the beam of light that projected the images. A peasant soldier sitting with his sweetheart commented loudly: “She’s in the water! She’s stepping into the sea.” A couple in the back were kissing passionately, both probably married and too poor to afford a hotel. A drunk snored. But most stared at the images in rapt amazement. Sashenka had just delivered a message from Mendel to Satinov, the Georgian comrade who wore the hood, and she had an hour to kill before meeting Comrade Vanya over in Vyborg. Then it was home for supper as usual. The End declared the ornate letters on a black background before a new picture show was announced: The Skin of Her Throat Was Alabaster.

Sashenka sighed loudly.

“You think it’s nonsense?” said a voice beside her. “Where’s your sense of romance?”

“Romance? You’re the smiling cynic,” she said. It was Sagan. “You realize that we’ll conquer Russia with the silver screen? We will paint the world red. I thought you slept during the day?”

Since Sashenka’s arrest, they had been meeting every two or three days, sometimes in the middle of the night. She reported to Mendel on every detail. “Be patient,” he said. “Keep playing. One day, he’ll offer something.”

“He thinks he can flatter me as a fellow intellectual.”

“Let him. Even the Okhrana are human and will make human mistakes. Make him like you.”

She never knew when she would see the secret policeman. In between discussions about poetry, novels and ideology, he had asked questions about the Party—was Mendel still in the city? Who was the new Caucasian comrade? Where did Molotov live? And she responded by asking, as specified by Mendel, what raids were planned, what arrests, was there a double agent in the committee?

On the screen the new moving picture had started. The quartet played a sweeping melody on their strings.

“I’m not here for the film,” said Captain Sagan, suddenly serious. “I’ve got a troika waiting outside. You need to come with me.”

“Why should I? Are you arresting me again?”

“No, your mother’s in trouble. I’m doing you and your family a favor. I’ll explain on the way.”

They climbed into the troika, pulled the bear rug over their laps and sat swathed in furs as the sleigh skated over the ice with that effervescent swish that felt like flight. The streets were already dark but the electric lights were shining. Low Finnish sledges decorated with ribbons and jingling bells and screaming students rushed through the streets, their silhouettes forming cutouts against the snow. The food shortages were spreading, prices rising, and Sashenka spotted a massive line of working women jostling outside a bakery. The worse, the better, she thought gleefully. The sirens of the Vyborg factories whistled. The snow, so rarely white, glowed a gritty orange.

“Are you taking me home?”

Sagan shook his head. “To Rasputin’s place. He’s disappeared. Dead, I think.”

“So? That’s a shame for us: he’s won us more recruits than the Communist Manifesto.”

“On that, Zemfira, we differ. For us, it’s a blessing from heaven. The body’s under the ice somewhere—we’ll find him. The Empress is distraught. He never came home from a party at the Yusupov Palace. Young Felix, the transvestite Prince Yusupov, is up to his neck in it but he’s married to a Grand Duchess.”

“And my mother?”

“Your mother was waiting for Rasputin at his apartment. I thought, after the other night, you’d be the one to help…”

Police in grey uniforms with lambskin collars guarded the doorway of 64 Gorokhovaya Street. Shabby young men in student overcoats with notebooks and unwieldy cameras tried to talk their way past the barriers but Sashenka and Captain Sagan were let straight through.

In the courtyard, gendarmes in their handsome dark blue uniforms with silver buttons sheltered from the cold. Sashenka noticed that even though Sagan was in plain clothes, they saluted him.

At the top of the stairs, the stiff shirts, well-cut suits and smart two-tone shoes marked out the urbane Okhrana officers from the grizzled beards, red noses and grubby shoes of the police detectives handling the murder investigation. The Okhrana officers greeted Sagan and updated him in coded jargon that reminded Sashenka of the Bolsheviks. Perhaps all secret organizations are the same, she thought.

“Come to collect her mother,” Sagan told his colleagues, taking her wrist. She decided not to withdraw it.

“Go on up—but hurry,” his Okhrana colleague told him. “The Director’s on his way over. The Minister’s been reporting to Her Imperial Majesty at Tsarskoe Selo but he’ll be here soon.”

As they neared the apartment, Sashenka could hear the sound of howling. It was raucously uninhibited in the way that peasants grieved. She thought of the air-raid sirens and then a dog she once saw, its legs sliced off by a car. She entered a lobby; to the left, the steamy kitchen with the samovar; a table spread with silks and furs; and then right, into the main sitting room, in the middle of which was a table with a half-drunk glass of the Elder’s Madeira. The place reminded Sashenka of the huts of the peasants on the Zeitlin estates in Ukraine but, among the soupy cabbagey smells, there was a hint of Parisian perfume. Nothing in the place quite fit, she thought: it was a peasant izba crossed with a government office and a bourgeois family home. It was like the hideout of a gypsy gang of robbers.

There was a sudden flurry of activity behind them and a general of the gendarmes, surrounded by an entourage, entered the main room.

Sagan hurried out, saluted, conferred and returned. “They’ve found the body. In the Neva. It’s him.” He crossed himself, then raised his voice. “All right. We’ve got to get her home now. She’s been here since last night.”