“That was Mouche,” cried Gideon.
“With her lover, Rovinsky,” said Mogilchuk. “Do you know where Rovinsky is now?”
Gideon shook his head. He had not known about Mouche’s love affair—but she was so like him. He must protect his darling daughter.
Mogilchuk just opened his hands as if sand were running through them.
“You want all Mendel’s stories?” said Gideon. “That might take all night!”
“Our State can place eternity at your disposal if you wish. Are you dreaming of Masha, that little honey of yours? She’s much too young for you and so demanding! She’ll give you a heart attack. No—much safer for you to think about your daughter as you tell us those Mendel stories.”
20
Two days had passed and it was dusk on the Patriarchy Ponds. In the sweltering half light, couples walked like pink shadows around the cool ponds, holding hands under the trees. Their feet crunched on the gravel, their laughter tinkled and someone was playing the accordion. Two old men stared at a chessboard, neither moving.
Sashenka, in her white hat and hip-hugging white beaded dress, bought two ice creams and handed one to Benya Golden. They walked slightly apart but an observer would have known they were lovers, for they kept a constant symmetry between their bodies as if linked by invisible threads.
“Are you busy?” she asked him.
“No, I’ve virtually nothing to do and no money to do it with. But”—here he whispered—“I am writing brilliantly all day on your delicious paper! Can I have some more? I’m so happy to set eyes on you. I just long to kiss you again, to savor you.”
She sighed, half closing her eyes.
“Shall I go on?”
“I can’t believe I want to hear your talk—but I do.”
“I want to tell you something crazy. I want to run away with you to the Black Sea. I want to walk with you along the seafront at Batum. On the boardwalk there’s a barrel organ that plays all our favorite love songs and I could sing along, and then when the tropical sun goes down we could sit at Mustapha’s cafe and kiss. No one would stop us, but at midnight some old Tatars I know would take us in their boat to Turkey—”
“What about my children? I could never leave them.”
“I know, I know. That’s one of your attractions.”
“You’re shamefully perverse, Benya. What
“You’re a wonderful mother. I’ve behaved badly all my life—but not you. You’re a real woman of milk and blood, a Party matron, an editor, a mother. Tell me, how’s the magazine?”
“Wildly busy. The Women’s Committee is planning a gala for Comrade Stalin’s sixtieth in December; we’re doing a special issue for the Revolution Holidays; I’ve managed to get Snowy into her first Pioneers’ Camp at Artek—she’s already dreaming of wearing her famous red scarf. But best of all, Gideon is back home.”
“But he could still be doomed, you know. They could just be playing him like a fish on a hook.”
“No, Vanya says he might be all right. Comrade Stalin said at the Congress—”
“No more Party claptrap, Sashenka,” Benya said urgently. “We haven’t time to talk about congresses. There’s only now! Only us.”
They turned a corner, away from the ponds, and suddenly they were on their own. Sashenka took his hand. “Do you look forward to seeing me?”
“All day. Every minute.”
“Then why are you looking so mischievous and crafty? Why have you lured me here?”
They were approaching an archway that led into a courtyard. Checking to see that no one was watching them, Golden pulled her into the archway, through the courtyard and into a garden where there was a rickety garden shed, the sort favored by pensioners to store their geranium seeds. He flashed a key. “This is our new dacha.”
“A shed?”
He laughed at her.
“You’re displaying bourgeois morality.”
“I am a Communist, Benya, but when it comes to lovemaking I couldn’t be more aristocratic if I tried!”
“Imagine it’s the secret pavilion of Prince Yusupov or Count Sheremetev!” He unlocked the wooden door. “See! Imagine!”
“How can you even think for a moment that I would…” Sashenka realized that the days of living with Vanya in the spartan bunk beds of their tiny room in the Sixth House of the Soviets were long ago. She was a Bolshevik— but she’d earned her luxuries. “It’s rotten and it stinks of manure.”
“No, that is Madame Chanel’s new perfume.”
“That looks like a garden fork to me!”
“No, Baroness Sashenka, that’s a diamond-encrusted fork made for the Empress herself by the celebrated craftsmen of Dresden.”
“And what’s that disgusting old rag?”
“That blanket? That is a pelt of silk and chinchilla fur for the baroness’s comfort.”
“I’m not going in there,” said Sashenka firmly.
Golden’s face fell but he persisted. “What if I just told you, with no bullshit at all, that this door leads us into a secret world where no one can see us or touch us and where I will love you more than life itself? It’s not a mansion, I know. It may be just a pathetic garden shed, but it is also the shed where I want to adore you and cherish you without wasting another second during my short lifetime in this menacing world. It may sound silly but you’ve arrived in the summer of my life. I’m not old, but I’m no longer young, and I know myself. You are the only woman of my life, the woman I will remember as I die.” He looked very serious suddenly, as he handed her a book he’d drawn out of his jacket—a volume of Pushkin. “I prepared this so we would never forget this moment.”
She opened it and on the page of her favorite poem, “The Talisman,” was a single, rare dried orchid.
He began to recite:
“You never stop surprising me,” she whispered. Sashenka felt so moved and desperate to kiss him that her hands shook. She stepped into the shed and kicked the door shut. Everything in there—tools and seeds and some old boots—seemed as alive and full of love as she was.
Benya took her in his arms, and somehow she could tell by the look in his eyes, and the cast of his lips, that he meant what he’d said, that he did love her, and that this moment, in their private world, was one of those sacred occasions that occur once or twice in a lifetime, and sometimes never at all. She wanted to bottle it, store it, keep it forever in a locket at the very front of her memory so she could always reach for it and live it all over again, but she was so entranced that she couldn’t even hold that thought. She just reached for him and kissed him again and again until they had to go home. But even as they parted, she repeated to herself,
21
