As she reached Room 403, she heard a step behind her. It was Benya. She opened the door with the key that she held as editor of the magazine, and they almost fell into the little room that, if she analyzed it (and she would never forget these smells as long as she lived), was like a sealed capsule of mothballs and disinfectant. Inside, the room was dark, lit only by the lurid scarlet of the electric stars atop each of the eight spires of the Kremlin outside the window. They backed onto a bed that sagged in the middle, the sheets rancid with what she later identified as old sperm and alcohol in a cocktail specially mixed for Soviet hotels. She wanted to struggle, to reprimand, to complain, but he grabbed her face and kissed her so forcefully that a lick of flame burned her to the core.
His hands pulled her dress off her shoulders and he buried his face in her neck, then her hair, scooping up between her legs. He pulled down her brassiere, cupping her breasts, sighing in bliss. “The blue veins are divine,” he whispered. And in that moment, a lifetime of unease about this ugly feature of her body was replaced with satisfaction. He licked them, circling her nipples hungrily. Then he disappeared up her skirt.
She pushed him away from there, once, then twice. But he kept returning. She slapped his mouth, quite hard, but he didn’t care.
“No, no, not there, come on, no thank you, no…” She cringed, closing her eyes bashfully.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
Could that be true? Yes, he insisted and he swiped her with his tongue. No one had ever done this to her before. She shivered, barely able to control herself.
“Lovely!” he said.
She was so ashamed she actually hid her face in her hands. “Just don’t!”
“See if you can pretend it isn’t happening!” was his suggestion as he buried his face in her. When she finally looked down, he peered back at her, laughing. I’ve got a lover, she thought, incredulous. His irrepressible carnality enthralled her. It was like the first time with her husband, her only other lover—but then it was not like that at all. In fact, she reflected,
He’s a madman, she thought as he made love to her again. Oh my God, after twenty years of being the most rational Bolshevik woman in Moscow, this goblin has driven me crazy!
He eased out of her again, showing himself.
“Look!” he whispered and she did. Was this really her? There he was between her legs again, doing the most absurd, lovely things to places behind her knees, the muscle at the very top of her thighs, her ears, the middle of her back. But the kissing, just the kissing, was heavenly.
She lost all sense of time and place and decorum. He made her forget she was a Communist, he made her forget herself for the first time in twenty years—and at last she began to live in the luscious, invincible present.
13
All was silent. Lying on creased sheets, she opened her eyes like one who has been in a deep sleep, awakening after a flood or an earthquake. Were those Kremlin stars still outside the window or had they been swept away by their lovemaking? Reality returned to her slowly.
“Oh my God,” she said. “What have I done?”
“You loved that, didn’t you?” he said.
She shook her head, eyes closing again.
“Look at me,” he said. “Tell me how much you love it. Or I’ll never kiss you again.”
“I can’t say it.”
“Just nod.”
She nodded and felt her bruised face. She could hardly believe the intoxication of her pulsating body in that dark little room at the top of the Metropole on a night in May 1939 after the Terror was over.
Her dress and her underwear were on the floor but her bra was still on her stomach; one stocking was still in place but the other draped the lamp, casting a brassy sepia light on their limbs. Their mouths were salty and the taint of pleasure and sweat made her giddy with sheer delight.
Benya was kissing her again on the lips, then between her legs—it was so sensitive there now that she winced. He gave her a kiss on the mouth and then delicately there again. She shivered, blisters of perspiration on her rounded belly. Then she pulled Benya up and turned him over so she was on top and he was inside her again. Somehow they just slotted together. Why did she feel so at home in his arms? Why did it seem so natural?
The enormity of what had happened struck her like a blow. She had betrayed kind hearty Vanya, her husband and friend of all these years, the father of her children. She loved him still but this earth-tilting fever was another love, utterly foreign, and contradictory to that cozy habitual love of home and children. Women aren’t supposed to be able to love two men at once but now I see that’s absurd, Sashenka thought. Yet a tremor of guilt slipped down her throat to her uneasy heart.
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” she whispered. “I bet everyone says that to you…”
“Well, funny you should ask but according to ‘The Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery,’ it is the traditional female comment at this very moment of the first encounter.”
“And according to this…‘Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery,’ what is the correct male answer?”
“I’m meant to say, ‘Oh, I know!’ as if I believe you.”
“Which you don’t.”
“Actually, I do believe you.”
“And who is the author of this famous book of wisdom?”
“A certain B. Z. Golden,” answered Benya Golden.
“Does it say what happens next?”
He was silent, and she saw a shadow pass over his face.
“Are you afraid, Sashenka?”
She shivered. “Slightly.”
“We need never meet again,” he said.
“You don’t mean that, do you?” she asked, suddenly terrified that he might indeed mean it.
He shook his head, his eyes very close to hers. “Sashenka, I think this is the most joyful thing that has ever happened to me. I’ve had lots of girls, I sleep with lots of women…”
“Don’t boast, you filthy Galitzianer!” she scolded.
“Perhaps it’s the times. Perhaps we live everything so intensely now. But we deserve a little selfishness, don’t we?” He took her face in his hands and she was surprised how serious he became. “Do you feel anything for me?”
Sashenka pushed him away and stumbled to the window, sweat drying on her back, a pulse still beating between her legs. They were in the eaves of the old building. In the moon-blanched night, she looked down at the Moskva River, the bridges, the gaudy onion domes of St. Basil’s, and into the Kremlin, sixty-nine acres of ocher palaces, emerald rooftops, blood-red battlements, golden cupolas and cobbled courtyards, and saw where Comrade Stalin worked, in the triangular Sovnarkom Building with the domed green roof. She could even see the light on in his office. Was he there now? The people thought so but she knew he was probably at Kuntsevo. He was her friend, Josef Vissarionovich…well, not quite. Comrade Stalin was beyond friendship, but the Father of Peoples—yes, her new acquaintance and sometime guest who had promoted her husband and admired her magazine—was the greatest statesman in the history of the working class. She did not doubt it, and she remained a Bolshevik to her fingertips. What had happened in this room had not changed that.
But something
