the room and threw off his cape like a Spanish bullfighter. She felt her forehead being dabbed; her dressing changed; morphine injected; her lips wetted with warm, sugary tea. Her belly ached; bowels groaned; the congested fist in her chest throbbed around a single bullet that she herself had placed there. This thing on the bed—the body she recognized as hers—was no more important than a laddered pair of stockings, a good pair, but an object that could be thrown away without a thought.
Her father was praying aloud, reading from the Psalms, singing in a deep chant that filled her with disinterested joy. It was the voice of a nightingale outside in the garden. But when she looked at his face, he was young, his beard a reddish brown, eyes strong and bright. Her mother was there too, full of life, even younger. She did not wear a wig but her own long blond hair in braids, and a girl’s dress. And her grandparents too, all much younger than she. There was her husband as a teenager. Sashenka as a little girl. They could now be her sisters and brothers.
The rabbi’s chanting carried her to Turbin three decades earlier. Her father and the beadle were walking out of the studyhouse; her mother was cooking dumplings and noodles laced with saffron, cinnamon and cloves. Ariadna was in trouble even then: she had refused to marry the son of the Mogilevsky rabbi, had been seen talking to one of the Litvak lads who did not even wear ringlets—and she had met a Russian officer in the woods near the barracks. She adored that uniform, the gold buttons, the boots, the shoulder boards. No one knew she had kissed not only the Litvak boy but also the young Russian, sipping cognac that made her glow, their hands all over her, her skin fluttering under their caresses. How that officer must have boasted and laughed to his friends in the officers’ mess: “You’ll never guess what I found in the woods today. A lovely Jewess fresh as the dew…”
I was too beautiful for the rabbi’s court in Turbin, she told herself. I was a peacock in a stable. And now she was happily going back to Turbin. Or at least passing through there, on the way to somewhere else. What was written for her in the Book of Life?
But when Ariadna flew back to that familiar bedroom filled with family and re-entered her body, she realized that it was no longer her bedroom, Sashenka was no longer her daughter, Miriam no longer her mother—and she herself was no longer Ariadna Finkel Barmakid, Baroness Zeitlin. She became something else, and she was filled with joy.
Sashenka was the first to notice. “Papa,” she said, “look! Mama’s smiling.”
38
“She’s gone,” said Miriam, taking her daughter’s hand.
“Woe is to outlive your own child,” said the rabbi quietly and then he started to pray for his daughter. Sashenka felt that she had made some peace with her mother, but her father, who had been napping on the divan, awoke and threw himself onto the body, weeping.
Uncle Gideon, now writing for Gorky’s
The doctor sent them all out. He closed Ariadna’s mouth and her eyes and then called them back. “Come and see her now,” he instructed.
“She’s become…beautiful again,” Sashenka whispered. “Yet there’s no one there.” Sure enough, Ariadna was no longer the quivering ruin but as beautiful as she had been as a girl. She was serene, her skin white, her pretty nose upturned, and those lush lips slightly opened as if expecting to be kissed by some dashing young officer.
This is how I’ll remember her, thought Sashenka. What a beauty. Yet she felt a gnawing dissatisfaction and uneasiness: she had never known her. Her mother had been a stranger.
And who was she herself in this play? She no longer belonged there. While her mother was dying, she had become her daughter again. Her father, who had been unfazed by revolutions, wars, strikes and abdications, by his daughter’s arrest, his brother’s mischief, his wife’s affairs, who had defied Petrograd workers, Baku assassins and aristocratic anti-Semites, had crumpled under this, a domestic suicide. He had abandoned his business, left his contracts unsigned, his contacts neglected and, in a few weeks, he had lost almost all interest in money. The businesses in Baku, Odessa and Tiflis were already unraveling because the Azeri Turks, Ukrainians and Georgians were liberating themselves from the Russian Empire. But the details were in his mind, and it seemed that this unshaven, grief-stricken man was beset by doubts about everything. She could hear him jabbering and crying.
It seemed to Sashenka that she might be losing both parents in one day.
She did not cry anymore—she had cried often enough in recent nights—but still she longed to know why her mother had used her daughter’s gun. Was Ariadna punishing Sashenka? Or was it simply the first weapon that had come to hand?
Sashenka stood beside the bed for a long time as people came and went to pay their respects. Gideon staggered into the room and kissed Ariadna’s forehead. He ordered the doctor to sedate her father. The old Jews prayed. She watched as Turbin reclaimed the wicked she-devil of St. Petersburg.
Ariadna’s smile remained, but gradually her face started to subside. Her cheeks sank, and her gentile nose, the perfect little button that had allowed her to romance Guards officers and English noblemen, became Semitic and hooked. Sashenka’s grandfather covered the body with a white shroud and lit two candles in silver candlesticks at the head of the bed. Miriam covered the mirrors with cloths and opened the windows. Since Zeitlin himself seemed paralyzed, the rabbi took control. Orthodox Jews, liberated by the Revolution and allowed to visit the capital, appeared in this most secular of houses, as if by magic. Low stools were provided for the women to sit shiva.
There was a debate among the rabbis about what to do with the body. A suicide was beyond God’s law and should have consigned her to an unholy burial, another tragedy for Ariadna’s father. But two other rabbis had arrived and they asked what had actually killed Ariadna. An infection, Dr. Gemp replied, not a bullet. By this pragmatic and merciful device, the Rabbi of Turbin was allowed to bury his daughter Finkel, known as Ariadna, in the Jewish cemetery.
Finally, the servants, shocked and confused by the presence of these gabardine-coated Jews with ringlets and black hats, filed past the bed.
Sashenka knew she had to get back to her job at the Bolshevik newspaper. As if on cue, the door opened and Mendel, who had appeared only once for ten minutes a few days after the shooting, limped into the room between two young comrades, the powerful, thickset Vanya Palitsyn, now clad in a leather coat and boots with a pistol in his holster, and the slim, virile Georgian, Satinov, who wore a sailor’s jacket and boots. They brought the welcome breath of a new age into the chamber of decay.
Mendel was wearing a long lambskin coat and a worker’s cap. He approached the bed, looked coldly at his sister’s face for a moment, shook his head and then nodded at his sobbing parents.
“Mama, Papa!” he said, in his deep voice. “I’m sorry.”
“Is that all you have to say to us?” asked Miriam through a curtain of tears. “Mendel?”
“You’ve wasted enough time here, Comrade Zeitlin,” Mendel said brusquely to Sashenka. “Comrade Lenin arrived last night at the Finland Station. I’ve got a job for you. Get your things. Let’s go.”
“Wait, Comrade Mendel,” said Vanya Palitsyn quietly. “She’s lost a mother. Let her take her time.”
Mendel stopped. “We’ve work to do and Bolsheviks can’t and shouldn’t have families. But if you say so…” He hesitated, looking back at his parents and the deathbed. “I lost a sister too.”
“I’ll bring Comrade Snowfox,” said Vanya Palitsyn. “You two go ahead.”
Satinov kissed Sashenka thrice and hugged her—he was a Georgian after all, she remembered. “You mourn all you need,” said Satinov, following Mendel as he limped out.
Vanya Palitsyn, brawny in his leathers and holster, looked out of place in the exquisite boudoir, yet Sashenka appreciated his support. She saw his brown eyes scan the room and imagined what the peasant-worker would make of the decadent trappings of capitalism: of all those dresses and jewels, Zeitlin the prostrate, sobbing industrialist, the society doctor in his cape, the half-soused bon viveur Gideon, the tearful servants and the rabbi. Vanya could not take his eyes off those wailing Jews from Poland!
Sashenka was pleased to be able to smile at something.
“I’ve read about deathbeds in Chekhov stories,” she said quietly to him, “but I never realized they’re so
