him he could almost reach out and feel her. Now he viewed even the most familiar places with reverence, if they were associated with her. That day he had wandered down Gorky Street. The stars and towers celebrated not the Tsars or Stalin, but her, Sashenka. When he ambled past Granovsky, where she lived, a diaphanous halo illuminated that very street. The NKVD guards were not guarding marshals or commissars, they were guarding his heart, which dwelled there.
Yet with love, there was always suffering: she was married. So was he. And they had met in cruel times. He had once loved his wife, but the struggle of everyday life had ground their passion into routine; they had become brother and sister—or, worse, lodgers in the same apartment that they shared with their little daughter. And Sashenka was—highfalutin romantic phrases failed him—simply the loveliest woman he had ever met. He felt he was sitting atop a dizzying peak, peering down on the glowing earth, crowned with stars. Could it last? We mustn’t waste a second, he thought.
“What time is it? I’m late. Hurry up, Stas!” He felt impatient suddenly as if he had to tell someone about his ardent secret. “I’m in love, Stas. No, more than love, I’m crazy about her!”
Across town in the Kitaigorod, Moscow’s Chinatown, Sashenka, in the smart scarlet suit she wore sometimes for work, was climbing up a small staircase to the atelier of Monsieur Abram Lerner, the last old- fashioned tailor in Moscow. He worked for the special services section of the NKVD, and it was he who had designed the new marshals’ uniforms when Stalin had restored the old ranks of the army. It was said that he made Stalin’s own tunics but the Master hated new clothes and it was probably just a rumor.
Lerner had taken on Cleopatra Fishman to serve the leaders’ wives. Sashenka knew that Polina Molotov and the other wives all came to her (and that some insisted on paying, while some did not pay at all). Now, at the end of a busy day, she had arrived to collect another new outfit. She waited impatiently in the reception area, where there were piles of
Cleopatra Fishman, a stocky little woman with grey, curly hair who smelled of chicory, escorted Sashenka into the dressing room, where she unveiled the blue silk dress with the pleated flounces on the skirt.
“Do you want to try it now or just take it?”
Sashenka looked at her watch.
“I’ll put it on.” She quickly threw off her clothes—in a way, she reflected, that she would never have thrown them off before—and folded them away into a bag and pulled on her new outfit. She shivered as the silk settled onto her new-cast body.
“You’ve had a new hairdo too, Sashenka.”
“The permanent wave. Do you approve?”
The older woman looked her up and down. “You’re glowing, Comrade Sashenka. Are you pregnant? Anything you want to tell old Cleopatra?”
Fifteen minutes later, at 7:00 p.m., in that eyrie at the top of the Metropole, Sashenka, in her new dress and hairdo, her new brassiere, her new perfume and silk stockings, was kissing Benya Golden, who, while his white suit got dirtier and shabbier, was also primped, barbered and bathed.
They made love, they talked, they laughed—and then she brought a package out of her bag and tossed it on the bed.
He jumped up and opened it, weighing it in his hands.
“A little present.”
“Paper!” He sighed. The Literary Fund Shop had refused him any more paper so she had ordered it for him. “Paper’s the way to a writer’s heart.”
They had met at the Metropole every day for ten days, and their relationship had moved beyond mere sexual infatuation. Sashenka had told him the story of her family; he had told her of his upbringing in Lemberg, of his adventures in the civil war, and the many outrageous erotic shenanigans in which he had become embroiled. After twenty years in the grip of Bolshevik officialdom, Sashenka was bowled over by the exuberance of Golden’s life: every disaster became a ridiculous comedy in which he starred as chief clown. His clashes with officialdom—dreary and heartbreaking in anyone else—became hilarious sketches peopled by grotesques. His views on the Socialist Realists, writers and filmmakers, were riotously scabrous, yet he spoke of poetry with tears in his eyes. He lent her books and took her to movies in the middle of the day; they relished Moscow in bloom—the lilacs and the magnolias—and he even bought her garlands of mimosa and bunches of violets, which came, the shopkeeper assured them, all the way from the Crimea.
“You’ve brought me back to life,” Benya told her.
“What am I doing with you?” she answered. “I feel as if I’m in delicious freefall. When a woman lives a disciplined life for twenty years and then the discipline snaps, she may lose her mind.”
“So you do like me a bit?” he persisted.
“You’re always fishing for more praise, my darling.” She smiled at him, taking in his blue eyes with the yellow speckles that bored into her so intensely, the dimpled chin, the mouth that was always on the verge of laughter. Sashenka realized that though she laughed so much with the children, she had not laughed enough in her life since those early days with Lala. There was precious little laughter with Mendel and Vanya, and now she discovered how many joyless people there were in the world (and especially in the Bolshevik Party). When she was not making love with Benya, they were laughing, their mouths wide open, their eyes shining.
“You need more and more praise, don’t you? I can tell your mother loved you as a boy.”
“She did. Is it that obvious? I was so spoiled.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell you what I think of you, you silly Galitzianer. Your head’s quite swollen enough. Anyway, isn’t the proof of the pudding in the eating?”
“This pudding always wants to be nibbled,” he said.
She sighed. “I want you all the time.”
She was at the window, letting the breeze cool her sweat, wearing just her stockings. He was lying naked and spread-eagled on the bed, smoking a Belomor and wearing nothing but his white peaked cap. She went to him and lay on his limbs, resting her head on her hand, taking his cigarette for a puff and then blowing blue circles into his mouth. But for once, he did not start making love to her.
“I’ve written your article,” he said, not looking at her.
“The Felix Dzerzhinsky Communal Orphanage…”
“…for the Re-education of Children of Traitors to the Motherland.”
“Well, it must be quite an uplifting institution,” she mused. “The front line in the creation of the new Soviet child.”
“I can’t write it like that, Sashenka. Even if I turned myself into the most cold-hearted, cowardly, murderous scum, I couldn’t write it…”
“What do you mean? It’s a story of redemption.” She was shocked by his sudden vehemence.
“Redemption? More like perdition, Dante’s inner circle of hell!” He was shouting suddenly, and she ran a finger over her lips, surprised by his anger. “I don’t know where to start. At a distance it looked very sweet—an old noble house in the woods, probably somewhat like the Zemblishino of your upbringing. Children parading at morning assembly in their white uniforms to discuss the new
“But it’s run by the NKVD…for the Party, and they care about reforging the children. Comrade Stalin said —”
“No! You don’t understand!” He was shouting again and she was a little afraid. She had never seen him angry before. He shook her off him, jumped up to get a piece of paper from his jacket and began to read:
