interest. Yet this vain, impertinent and flashy Galitzianer with his dimpled chin, his low-set brows over dancing blue eyes, his forlorn last tuft of blond hair on his balding forehead, and yes, his sex, had made her savagely happy.
He got up and stood behind her. “What is it?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her.
“I’ve done something worse than be unfaithful—something I thought I would never do. I’ve become my mother.”
But he wasn’t listening. “You don’t even know how erotic you are,” he said, running his hands up her thighs from behind. And they started again, another shuddering tournament. When it was over, they had become creatures of the sea, their bodies as sleek and wet and lithe as leaping dolphins.
Later, she rested her elbows on the windowsill so she was looking at the Kremlin again and he touched her, from behind, with such delicate tracery, such gleeful tenderness, that she barely recognized the geography of her own body. “What a glutton you turn out to be!” he teased her. He seemed to live with joyfulness, a gaiety that dyed her monochrome world all the wild colors of the rainbow.
So
14
Her body still tingling and burning, Sashenka walked home past the Kremlin, higher and brighter than ever in the searchlights that sent strange white columns boring into the sky, across the Manege and alongside the National Hotel. When she looked back at the Kremlin, its eight red stars made her think of Benya. They were, she’d read in the newspaper, made of crystal, alexandrite, amethyst, aquamarine, topaz—and seven thousand rubies! Yes, seven thousand rubies to celebrate her and Benya Golden. What had happened to her? she wondered. She could not believe Benya’s uninhibited carnality or the fog of sweat that had blurred that little room. Passing the old university on her right, she turned down little Granovsky Street. Her pink turn-of-the-century wedding-cake home, the Fifth House of Soviets, was on the left with guards outside. The guards nodded at her. The janitor was hosing down the yard.
She let herself into the apartment on the first floor. She did not turn on the lights but she relished the shining parquet floors that smelled of polish and caught the meager light; she enjoyed the high ceilings, molded so beautifully; and the woody aroma of the Karelian pine furniture, issued by the government. Her parents-in-law were asleep round the corner of the L-shaped corridor but she turned on the lamp by her bedside, its base a muscular golden bicep holding a bulb surrounded by a green shade. She sat on her bed for a second and caught her breath. Was she betraying everyone she loved? Could she lose it all? Yet she could not regret what she had done.
She opened the door to the children’s rooms and looked in on them. Would they smell the reek of sin on her? But they slept on angelically. She had not betrayed them, she told herself firmly. She had just found a part of herself.
Sashenka stood looking down on them, then kissed Snowy’s forehead and Carlo’s nose. Carlo held one of his many bunnies in his arms. She suddenly longed to wake them up and cuddle them. I am still their mother, I am still Sashenka, she told herself.
Just then Snowy, holding her cushion, sat up. “Mama, is it you?”
“Yes, darling, I’m back. Did Babushka put you to bed?”
“Did you go dancing?”
“How did you know?”
“You’re still singing a song, Mama. What song are you singing? A silly song?”
Sashenka closed her eyes and sang softly just for her and Snowy:
What a song she had sung with Benya Golden, she thought. Was he still singing it?
Snowy grabbed her mother’s hand, folded it into her floppy cushion, put them both under her golden head and went back to sleep.
Sitting on the bed, her hand trapped under Snowy’s alabaster cheek, Sashenka’s uneasiness evaporated. She was not Ariadna; she could not remember Ariadna ever kissing her good night. Her mother had become a wanton creature, a lunatic animal. But sitting there on Snowy’s bed, she remembered her mother’s death. She wished they had talked. Why had Ariadna killed herself with her Mauser? Sashenka would never forget sitting beside her wheezing mother, waiting for her to die.
Listening now to the soft breathing of the children, she thought of her father again. How proud she had been that he had not fled abroad but had renounced capitalism and joined the new regime. But she had not seen him since 1930, when he fell from being a “non-Party specialist” to a “former person” and “saboteur” and was sent into a lenient exile in Tiflis, where he’d lived in a single room. During the Terror, Sashenka might have been vulnerable as a “capitalist’s daughter” but she was an Old Bolshevik, an enthusiast even for the Terror, and she had “reforged” herself as one of Stalin’s New Soviet Women. Vanya’s working-class credentials and success protected her, but she’d accepted that she could not appeal for her father, help him or even send him packages.
“Let him go,” Vanya had told her. “It’ll be best for him and us.” She had almost appealed to Comrade Stalin, but Snowy had stopped her just in time.
She had last heard Samuil Zeitlin’s gentle, urbane voice—its tone and mannerisms so redolent of their old mansion and life before the Revolution—on the telephone just before his arrest in 1937. Her children had never met him: they believed that her parents had died long before. Sashenka never criticized the Party for the way it treated her father, not even in her own mind, but that did not stop her wondering now: are you out there, Papa? Are you chopping logs in Vorkuta, in the wastes of Kolyma? Or did they give you the seven grams of lead—the Highest Measure of Punishment—years ago?
Slowly she went back to her room, showered, then, collecting Carlo in her arms, she got into bed with him. Carlo awoke and kissed her on the nose. “You’ve found a baby bunny in the woods,” he whispered, and with his mouth still close to her ear, they slept.
The next morning, she had just sat down at her T-shaped desk in the office when the phone rang.
A low humorous voice with that Jewish Galician intonation that immediately, embarrassingly, resonated between her legs, said: “It’s your new writer, Comrade Editor. I wasn’t sure—did you commission that article or not?”
15
Ten days later, Benya Golden lunched as usual at the Writers’ Club with Uncle Gideon. Later they visited the Sandunovsky Baths and Benya continued on to Stas, the Armenian barber, in his little shop right next door. There was a portrait of Stalin on the wall, an array of metal clippers and naked razors stuck on a magnetic strip, and a plastic plant in the window. The radiogram, always playing at Stas’s place, reported clashes with the Japanese in Mongolia. War was coming. Benya sat in the soft leather chair as Stas bathed his face in foam and warm water.
“You seem happy enough,” said Stas, an old Caucasian with thick oily hair dyed an unnatural jet black and a small raffish mustache. “You’ve got a commission? Or you’re in love?”
“Both, Stas, both, simultaneously! Everything in my life has changed since I last saw you.”
As he luxuriated in the warm towels wrapped around his face and neck, Benya’s spirits soared. He didn’t give a fig for his commission. All he could think about was Sashenka. Her meltingly husky voice, how she would stroke her short upper lip when concentrating; how they danced, made love, sang, talked, and understood each other “as if we were born under the same star,” he said aloud, shaking his head slowly.
Not a day, not an hour, not a minute passed when he wasn’t consumed by his need to see her, talk to her, touch her. He wanted to feast his eyes on her and fill up his stores of memories, so that even if she was not with
