discuss soccer. She sighed. She and Vanya were opposites—he a worker of peasant origins, she an intellectual of bourgeois upbringing. But everyone knew that opposites make good marriages, and she had a kind, successful husband, two beautiful children, the drivers, the cars, this idyllic dacha—and now an American fridge.
Carolina started to set the big table on the veranda for an early May Day supper. Sashenka, who always held a party on May Day, thought about the evening ahead—and their guests. Uncle Gideon would bring his raffish friends and proposition somebody inappropriate, she supposed. There was a squeal. Carlo had grabbed Snowy’s beloved cushion and she was chasing him into the sitting room and out again, careering round the Red Corner, both laughing their heads off.
Sashenka walked onto the veranda, humming a tune, one of Liubov Orlova’s songs.
She stopped, jolted by a terrifying attack of happiness. She was on the right side of history; Soviet power, with its colossal steel plants and thousands of tanks and planes, was strong; Comrade Stalin was loved and admired. How much the Party had achieved! What joyous times she lived in! What would her grandfather, the Turbin rabbi, probably still alive in New York, have said about her dizzy happiness? “Don’t tempt the Fates.” That would have been his warning—all that nonsense about the Evil Eye and those dybbuks and golems. But this was just medieval superstition! There was much to celebrate.
“Have we got vodka?” she called out to Vanya.
“Yes, and a crate of Georgian wine in the trunk of the car.”
“Well, pour me a glass! Put Utesov’s jazz-tango on the gramophone.”
The children and her husband joined her on the veranda. Vanya lifted up Snowy and pretended to slow-dance with her as if she were a grown-up. Sashenka held Carlo and danced with him, singing along to the music. She and Vanya turned the children upside down at the same moment and then swooped them up again. The children squealed with joy. How many comrades dance with their children like we do? thought Sashenka. Most of them are much too dull.
3
The sun was going down, suffusing the garden with the lilac light that always made Muscovites think of bygone summers in their dachas. At seven the party began and, as Sashenka had predicted, Uncle Gideon arrived first, bringing some friends—the famous jazz singers Utesov and Tseferman, as well as Masha, a pouty young actress from the Maly Theater who was his latest conquest.
Gideon, no longer young but still strong and irrepressible, was as shameless as he had been twenty years earlier. He wore a peasant blouse and blue beret from Paris, a gift, he said, from his friend Picasso, or was it Hemingway? Gideon claimed to know everyone—ballerinas, pilots, actors and writers. Sashenka depended on her uncle to bring these glamorous artists to her house on May Day night.
Uncle Mendel, roasting in a winter suit and tie, and his wife Natasha, the plump Yakut lady whom Sashenka remembered from the days before the Revolution, arrived right on the invited hour with their pretty daughter Lena, a student, who had inherited her mother’s slanting eyes and amber skin.
Mendel immediately started in on foreign policy with Vanya. “The Japanese are spoiling for a fight,” he said.
“Please don’t talk politics,” said Lena, stamping her foot.
“I don’t know what else to talk about, sweet one,” protested her father in his resonant baritone.
“Exactly!” cried his daughter.
Soon the driveway was jammed with drivers in ZiSes, Buicks and Lincolns trying to park along the grass shoulder, and Sashenka begged Razum to impose some order. Razum, who was blind drunk, shouted, pointed and banged the roofs of cars but ended up handing out vodka to the other drivers and having a party at the gates. The traffic jam got worse and the chauffeurs sang saucy ditties, to Sashenka’s amusement. A soused Razum was a feature of her parties.
Inside, Sashenka invited guests to eat at the buffet. They piled their plates with the
“So this is your niece, Gideon?” said Len Utesov, the jazz singer from Odessa, who would not let go of her hand. “What a beauty! I’m spellbound. Will you run away from your husband and come on tour with me to the Far East? No? She says no, Gideon. What must I do?”
“We love your songs,” said Sashenka, basking in the attention and pleased she had worn such a pretty summer dress. “Vanya, let’s play Len’s record on the gramophone.”
“Why play his records,” cried Gideon, “when you can play him?”
“Behave yourself, Uncle, or you’ll be doing the dishes,” teased Sashenka, sweeping her thick brown bob with its streaks of auburn behind her ears.
“With Carolina?” he roared. “Why not? I love all shapes and sizes!”
Vanya called for quiet and toasted May Day—“and our dear Comrade Stalin.”
As the light faded, Utesov started to tinkle on the piano, then Tseferman joined him. Soon they were singing the Odessa prison songs together. Uncle Gideon accompanied them on the bayan, a sort of accordion. The pianist from the Art Theater played on the upright piano while the writer Isaac Babel, sturdy but with laughing eyes behind round spectacles and mischief curling his full, playful mouth, leaned on the piano and watched. There was always a party, said Gideon, when Babel was around.
Sashenka had loved his
As the thieves’ songs of the Black Sea wafted over the dacha, Sashenka’s guests—writers in baggy cream suits, mustachioed Party men in matching white tunics, peaked caps and wide trousers, a pilot in uniform (one of “Stalin’s Eagles”), actresses in Coty perfume and low-cut silk dresses a la Schiaparelli—talked and sang, smoked and flirted. May Days started with the parade in Red Square and ended with a Soviet bacchanalia, from the top down. Somewhere, even Comrade Stalin and his comrades were toasting the Revolution. Vanya had told Sashenka there was a little room for drinks and
Slightly drunk on the champagne and still strung up with an uneasy elation, Sashenka strolled into the garden and lay down in the hammock between two gnarled apple trees. She could hear herself singing those songs, watching her children, and swinging back and forth as the tipsy world spun a little.
“Sashenka.” It was Carolina, the nanny. Carolina appeared dry, serious and formal—but underneath she was very affectionate and loving to the children. Sashenka had chosen her carefully. “Shouldn’t we put the children to bed? Carlo’s exhausted. He’s still so young.”
Sashenka could see Carlo, in blue pajamas embroidered with Soviet airplanes, sitting in a chair watching the musicians in a dreamy way. Uncle Gideon was playing his bayan for Snowy, shouting, “Bravo, little Cushion! Hurrah!”
“My cushion, cushion, cushion is dancing with Uncle Gideon,” sang the little girl, in her own world. “Giddy- gush, giddy-gush, giddy, giddy-up!”
“Thank you, Carolina,” said Sashenka. “Let’s put Carlo to bed in a minute. They’re having such fun.” It was way past their bedtime but when they were older they would be able to boast, “We saw Utesov and Tseferman play thieves’ songs together! Yes, in 1939 during the Second Five Year Plan in the joyous period after the Great Turn, after collectivization and after the times of struggle, at our dacha!”
She congratulated herself on the success of her soiree. Why did they all come to her house? Was it because she was an editor? She was a “Soviet woman of culture” well known for her
