romances and gypsy songs:
When he finished singing, her hand remained in his, first by accident, then tensely, and when she became aware of it she did not try to remove it.
He was flirting with her in an audacious and dangerous way, Sashenka told herself. Didn’t he know who she was? Didn’t he understand what her husband did? I’m a Communist, a believer, she thought, and I’m a married woman with two children. Yet now, in that hot Muscovite night, after twenty years of survival and discipline, and three years of terror and tragedy while thousands upon thousands of Enemies were unmasked and liquidated, she suddenly experienced a flutter of madness in the company of this slight, balding Galician Jew who had ambushed her with his frivolous dance steps, blue eyes and raffish songs.
Benya handed her down a small set of stone steps that led directly to the river’s brim, a secret quay. “No one can see us!” he told her again, and they sat on the steps, their feet just over the water. It should have been muddy and scummy but tonight the Moskva was coated with diamonds that reflected light onto their faces, etching them in purple and bronze, making them both feel younger. A flush spread throughout her body, the sensation of wings beating. She had been powerfully bedded by her husband and had children by him—yet she had never experienced anything like this.
“Did you ever do this as a teenager?” he asked her. He kept reading her mind uncannily.
“Never. I was a solemn child and a very serious Bolshevik…”
“Didn’t you ever wonder what the popular songs were about?”
“I thought they were nonsense.”
“Well then,” he said, “you deserve just an hour in the world of popular song.”
“What do you mean?” she said, noticing his lips, his sunburnt neck, his eyes burning into her. He offered her his last Egyptian cigarette, a Star of Egypt with a gold tip—and it took her back twenty years. He lit it for her with a silver kerosene lighter, then offered her a swig from a flask. She expected vodka; instead, sweetness flooded her senses.
“What on earth is it?”
“It’s a new American cocktail,” he said. “A Manhattan.”
It went straight to her head—and yet she was more sober than she had ever been.
A hulking barge, piled high with coal or ore like a floating mountain, rumbled past them, lying low and rusty in the water. The sailors sat around, drinking and smoking. One was playing a guitar, another an accordion. But when they saw Sashenka, in her white wide-brimmed hat and her beaded dress tight across the hips, her gleaming white stockings reflected on the dappled waters, they started to call out and point at her.
“Hey, look over there! A real vision!”
Sashenka waved back.
“Fuck her, man! Kiss her for us! Bend her over, comrade! You lucky bastard!” one of the sailors called.
Benya jumped to his feet, raising his hat like a dancer. “Who! Me?” he called.
“Kiss her, man!”
He shrugged apologetically. “I can’t disappoint my audience,” and, before she could protest, he kissed her on the lips. She fought it for a second but then, to her own astonishment, she surrendered.
“Hurrah! Kiss her for us!” The sailors cheered. She laughed into his mouth. He pushed his tongue between her lips, delving as deep as he could reach, and she groaned. Her eyes closed. Surely no one in the world had ever kissed like
She had never understood before. In the Civil War she’d been young, but she had been with Vanya then and men like Vanya did not kiss like this. And she had never wanted him to kiss her this way: they’d been comrades first; he had cared for her after her mother’s suicide; they worked closely together during the Revolution of October 1917; and then she’d traveled through Russia on the Agitprop trains and he with the Red Army as a commissar. Afterward, they had met again in Moscow. There was no time for romance in those days: they had moved into an apartment with other young couples, all of them working days and nights, living on carrot tea and crackers. Sashenka was still the straitlaced Bolshevik and that was how she liked it. She’d always recalled her oversexed mother with horror and regret. Yet this insolent Galitzianer, this Benya Golden, had no such inhibitions. He licked her lips, nuzzled her forehead, inhaled the smell of her skin as if it were myrrh—and the pleasure of these simple things amazed her!
She opened her eyes as if she had been asleep for an age. The sailors and the barge were gone but Benya kept on kissing her. The secret places of her body purred. She shifted her position, embarrassed, but every time she moved, her loins felt liquid and heavy. She was nearly forty years old—and she was lost.
“You know, I just don’t do this sort of thing,” she said at last, a little breathlessly.
“Why the hell not? You’re very good at it.”
She must have been a little mad because now she leaned over again and took his head in her hands and started to kiss him back in a way she had never done before.
“I want you to know, Benya, I love your stories. When I read them, I wept…”
“And I love these freckles on either side of your nose…And these lips, my God, they never quite close as if you’re always hungry,” Benya said, kissing her again.
“So why have you stopped writing?”
“My ink is frozen.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She pushed his face away roughly, holding his chin in her hand. “I don’t believe you’re not writing. I think you’re writing secretly.”
He stared out at the river, where the lights of the British Embassy in its stately mansion right opposite glowed in the water.
“I’m a writer. Every writer has to write or he’ll die. If I didn’t I’d shrivel up and rot away. So I translate articles from socialist papers, and get commissions to work on film scripts. But they’ve almost dried up too. I’m nearly penniless now, even though I still have my apartment in the writers’ building.”
“Why didn’t you stay in Paris?”
“I’m a Russian. Without the Motherland, I’d be nothing.”
“So what are you working on?”
“You.”
“You’re writing about the secret police and the top of the Party, aren’t you? You write it by hand at night, and hide it in your mattress. Or maybe at the home of some girl in the suburbs? Am I just material for your secret work? Are you using me to see into our world?”
He sighed and scratched his head. “We writers all have something secret that keeps us alive and gives us hope, although we know we can never publish it. Isaac Babel’s working on something secret, Misha Bulgakov’s writing a novel about the devil in Moscow. But no one will ever read them. No one will ever read me.”
“I will. Can I read what you’re working on?”
He shook his head.
“You don’t trust me, do you?”
“I long to trust you, Sashenka. I’d love to show you the novel because no one knows of it, not even my wife, and if I showed it to you, then I would have one reader, one beautiful reader, instead of none and I’d feel an artist again instead of a washed-up scribbler in these days when we’ve all become cannibals.”
Benya looked away from her and she sensed, even if she did not see, that there were tears in his eyes.
“Let’s make a pact,” she said, taking both his hands. “You can trust me with anything, even the novel. I’ll be your reader. And in return, if you swear never to hurt me, never to break this confidence, you can kiss me again
