Sashenka

She sat up in bed, cold, sober. She thought she saw the Elder: yes, there was his beard and his glittering eyes at the end of the bed. “Is it you, Grigory?” she asked aloud. But then she realized that it was a combination of the curtain pelmet and a dress on a stand that somehow suggested a tall, thin man with a beard. She was alone and clearheaded suddenly.

Rasputin, who offered me a new road to happiness, is dead, she thought. Samuil, whose love and wealth were the pillars of my rickety palace, is divorcing me. Sashenka hates me—and who can blame her? My Hasidic parents shame me and I am ashamed of my shame. My whole life, every step of the way, has been a fiasco. My happiness has been tottering on a tightrope, only to tumble through the air. Even my pleasures are like the moment that high-wire artiste starts to tremble and loses her footing…

I mocked my father’s world of holiness and superstition. Perhaps my mother was right: was I cursed since birth? I mocked Fate because I had everything. Does the Evil Eye possess me?

Ariadna lay back on the pillow, alone and adrift on the oceans like a ship without a crew.

27

Sashenka left an emergency message for Mendel at Lordkipadze, the Georgian pharmacy on Alexandrovsky Prospect, and then walked home down Nevsky. The clouds billowed into creamy cauliflowers that hung low over the city. The ice that curled from the drainpipes and the roofs was stiffening. The thermometer was sinking to minus twenty. In the workers’ districts, the sirens and whistles blared. Strikes had started to spread from factory to factory.

On Nevsky, right in the center, clerks, workers, even bourgeois housewives lined up outside the bakeries for bread. Two women rolled around in the sludge fighting for the last loaves: a working woman repeatedly hit the other in the face, and Sashenka heard the crack as her nose broke.

At Yeliseyev’s Grocery Store, where the Zeitlins ordered their food, Sashenka watched as workers burst in and grabbed cakes and fruit. The shop assistant was bludgeoned.

That night, she could not even pretend to sleep. Her head was buzzing. The anger of the streets replayed in her mind. Outside, the sirens of the Vyborg echoed across the Neva, like the calling of whales.

She rose from her bed, and in the early hours Comrade Molotov met her at the coachmen’s cafe outside the Finland Station.

“Comrade Mendel is busy now. He sent me.” Molotov was humorless and stern but also meticulous and he listened carefully to Sashenka’s tip-off.

“Your s-s-source is r-reliable?” Molotov stammered, his forehead bulging.

“I think so.”

“Thank you, c-c-comrade. I’ll get to work.”

At dawn, Comrades Vanya and Satinov were already dismantling the printing press. Sashenka and other comrades removed the parts in beer barrels, milk churns, coal sacks. The bulky press itself was placed in a coffin, collected by a stolen undertaker’s hearse and accompanied by a carriage of weeping (Bolshevik) relatives in black to the new site in Vyborg.

At dusk the following afternoon, Mendel and Sashenka climbed the stairs of an office building down the street from the printing press. For Mendel, every step was an effort as he dragged his reinforced boot behind him.

They came out on the roof and Sashenka gave Mendel one of her Crocodile cigarettes, its gold tip incongruous beside his worker’s cap and rough leather coat. Together, they watched as three carriages of grey-clad police and two carloads of gendarmes pulled up outside the cellar and broke down the door.

“Good work, Comrade Snowfox,” said Mendel. “You were right.”

She flushed with pride. She really was an asset to the Party, not the spoiled child of the degenerate classes.

“Do I continue to meet Sagan?”

Mendel’s eyes, magnified by his bottle-glass lenses, pivoted toward her. “I suppose he’s in love with you.”

She laughed and shook her head simultaneously. “With me? You must be joking. No one looks at me like that. Sagan talks mostly about poetry. He really knows his stuff. He was helpful about Mama but he’s very proper. And I’m a Bolshevik, comrade, I don’t flirt.”

“Fucking poetry! Don’t be naive, girl. So he lusts after you!”

“No! Certainly not!” She blushed with confusion. “But he sympathizes with us. That’s why he tipped us off.”

“They always say that. Sometimes it’s even true. But don’t trust any of his shtik.” Mendel often used the Yiddish of his childhood. While Ariadna had completely lost the accent, Sashenka noticed that Mendel still spoke Russian with a strong Polish-Jewish intonation.

“If you’re right about his immorality, comrade, I don’t think I should meet Sagan again. He sent me a note this morning, inviting me to take a sleigh ride with him in the countryside. I said no of course and now I certainly shan’t meet him.”

“Don’t be such a schlamazel, Sashenka,” he replied. “You don’t know what’s best here, girl. Beware bourgeois morality. We’ll decide what’s immoral and what isn’t. If the Party asks you to cover yourself in shit, you do it! If he desires you, so much the better.”

Sashenka felt even more flustered. “You mean…”

“Go on the sleigh ride,” he boomed, exasperated. “Meet the scum as often as it takes.”

“But he needs something to show for it too.”

“We’ll give him a morsel or two. But in return, we want a gold nugget. Get me the name of the traitor who betrayed the press in the first place. Without that name, this operation is a failure. The Party will be disappointed. Be vigilant. Tak! That’s it.” Mendel’s face was livid with the cold. “Let’s go down before we freeze. How’s your mother coping with the divorce?”

“I never see her. Dr. Gemp says she’s hysterical and melancholic. She’s on chloral, bromine, opium. Father wants her to try hypnotism.”

“Is he going to marry Mrs. Lewis?”

“What?” Sashenka felt this like a punch in the belly. Her father and Lala? What was he talking about? But Mendel was already on his way downstairs.

The factory whistles started up again across the city, yet the black slate of the rooftops revealed none of the seething furies beneath. The world really was going mad, she thought.

28

The next day was warmer. The sun and the moon watched each other suspiciously across a milky sky. The sparse clouds resembled two sheep and a ram, horns and all, on a snowy field. The factories were on strike.

As she took the streetcar to the Finland Station, Sashenka saw crowds crossing the bridges from the factories, demonstrating for bread for the third day running. The demonstration had started on Thursday, International Women’s Day, and grown since then.

“Arise, you starvelings, from your slumbers!” the crowds chanted, waving their red banners. “Down with autocracy! Give us bread and peace!”

The Cossacks tried to turn them back at the Alexander Bridge but tens of thousands marched anyway. Sashenka saw women in peasant shawls smash the windows of the English Shop and help themselves to food: “Our men are dying at the front! Give us bread! Our children are starving!” There were urchins on the streets now, creatures with the bodies of children but with swollen bellies and the faces of old monkeys. One sat on the street corner singing and playing his concertina:

Here I am abandoned, an orphan, with no one to look after me,