Sashenka

Tears flooded her eyes and she put down the phone.

“Who was that?” asked Snowy. “Lenochka? Aunt Lenochka’s a fat cushion. What’s wrong, Mama?”

“My God,” sighed Sashenka, sinking into a chair, her hand at her forehead. What did this mean? First Gideon, then Mendel. She felt sick.

“Mamochka,” said Carlo in his piping voice, climbing onto her knee like a tame bear cub. He wore blue pajamas. “Are you feeling poorly? I’m going to give you a cuddle and stroke your face and kiss you like this! I love you, Mamochka, you’re my best friend!”

Carlo kissed her on the nose with such pliant gentleness that Sashenka shivered with love.

22

The following Saturday, Sashenka was waiting for Vanya to come home. The dacha was quiet, its stillness suffocating. The children were baking a cake with Carolina.

Doves cooed in the dovecote and crows cawed in the birch trees. The horses in Marshal Budyonny’s stables whinnied and the children’s pony answered. Bees buzzed; the jasmine was sickly sweet. The important neighbor next door was singing a song from the movie Jolly Fellows. But the phone did not ring. Satinov had not called for his game of tennis.

Everything had slowed down. Sashenka sat on the veranda, pretending to read the newspapers and her magazine proofs. There was no clue in the newspapers, no hint of the spy mania and show trials of a year earlier. People were being freed; cases were being reviewed. Perhaps she was being paranoid. She had rung Benya and told him about the uncles in code. “The geraniums are budding,” he’d answered calmly and she remembered the garden shed and their talisman.

She thought about Benya all the time. They could meet next week. He would soothe her; he would make her laugh in that fatalistic Jewish way of his. How had she survived so long without the one and only Benya? She yearned to call him, but not from the dacha. There was a public phone down the lane. Benya kept teasing her, trying to make her say that she loved him. “Don’t you feel something special for me?” he’d ask. After ten days? She, Party member, mother, editor and Old Bolshevik, fall in love with an idle writer? Was he mad? No, it was she who was crazy. Oh, Benya! What would he make of all this?

The signs were confusing. Gideon had not been arrested, and Mouche had called to report that “they” had just wanted to discuss movies with him, “movies and the history of the Greeks and the Romans.” Was that a hint for Sashenka or a random throwaway phrase? Was Gideon warning them about Mendel’s arrest? “The Greeks and the Romans.” Mendel knew ancient history. He was ancient history. His arrest must stem from something in the distant Bolshevik past. Stalin’s old Georgian friend, “Uncle” Abel Yenukidze, had written a history of the Bolshevik printing press in Baku—yet fatally downplayed the Master’s role in it. Sashenka remembered Comrade Abel well, a sandy-haired playboy with blue eyes, wandering hands and a harem of ballerinas. He had been shot in 1937.

Yet Mendel was no Abel. Uncle Mendel had never joined an opposition and had fought for Stalin ferociously. He was the Conscience of the Party and no chatterer. Why Mendel and why now, when the Terror was really over? They could have arrested Mendel at any time since 1936. It did not make sense.

Or had Gideon meant ancient family history? But everyone knew about the Zeitlins and that she had typed for Lenin, she the millionaire’s Bolshevik daughter, Comrade Snowfox! Were the Organs circling her and her family? Her antecedents might be bourgeois—but she was protected by her marriage to Vanya Palitsyn, by his loyal service and proletarian pedigree, and by their joint Party orthodoxy.

Or perhaps the problem lay with her husband? Was this some rivalry inside the Organs, Beria’s new Georgians versus the old Muscovites? But Vanya had never been a vassal of the previous boss, Yezhov, and anyway Beria had sacked all Yezhov’s homicidal lags months earlier. Those maniacs were gone. Dust.

Family arrests did not necessarily reflect on her, Sashenka told herself. They happened all the time. Even Stalin’s in-laws, the Svanidzes, had been arrested. Even the brothers of Stalin’s dear Comrade Sergo had been executed. Her own father had vanished. Stalin had said the sons were not to blame for the sins of the fathers but at a secret dinner at the Kremlin, attended by Vanya himself, he had also threatened to destroy Enemies of the People “and their entire clans! Yes, their clans!”

Stalin, history and the Party worked in mysterious ways, she knew this. We Party members are devotees of a military-religious order in a time of intensifying class struggle and coming war, thought Sashenka. The greater the successes of our Party, the more our enemies will struggle against us: that was Comrade Stalin’s formula. We owe our loyalty to the Party and the holy grail of the Idea, not bourgeois sentimentality. Mendel is a politician and in our progressive but imperfect system, this is politics. It would be fine, she told herself. Mendel would return just like Gideon. This was a new, less carnivorous era. The bad times were over.

The doves in the dovecote flew up like a fan as a car drew up. Sashenka came down in her bare feet to help the chauffeur open the gates.

Her husband stepped out wearily but Sashenka felt reassured at the sight of him. Vanya was Assistant Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs and, since the March Congress, candidate member of the Central Committee—and here he was, right as rain. Just a little washed out and with more grey in his thick coarse hair—but he always came home tired.

She had been a fool for worrying. Snowy and Carlo rushed outside. Carlo was naked and Snowy wore her pink summer dress: she was growing fast. Their father hugged them, squeezed them, greeted their bunnies and cushions, heard about their cakes and candies in the kitchen—and sent them back inside. Then he was looking at Sashenka, looking at her as he had never looked at her before, his raging eyes crow black. He was about to say something when Carolina announced lunch from the veranda.

He turned his back on her and walked inside.

23

The meal at the veranda table seemed longer than usual. The scent of the lilacs was heavenly but then Snowy threw some bread at her brother. Vanya snapped, jumping up and wrenching her chair away from the table.

“Stop that!” he shouted.

Snowy was shocked and started to sob. Carlo looked terrified, then his wide face melted into tears. “I didn’t do anything!” he cried. He ran to his mother but Sashenka said nothing. All her senses were centered on her husband.

Vanya avoided her eyes and ate hardly anything. Instead of feeling guilty, as she expected to, she felt resentful. She longed for Benya and his irrepressible sense of fun, his Rabelaisian bawdiness and his sensitivity.

“Vanya, you need to sleep,” she said finally.

“Do I? What good will that do?”

Sashenka rose. “I’m going to take the children to swim in the river.” It was 2:30 p.m.

Vanya shut himself in his study.

In her bare feet, carrying the towels, Sashenka led the children by the hand down the dirt lane through the silver birches toward the banks of the Moskva. Vanya always returned grouchy from his nocturnal work, she told herself. Even walking, she felt how Benya had changed her life.

Her legs were bare, and the sun seemed to lick her cheekbones, shoulders and knees as if they were covered in syrup. Her thighs grazed each other, sticking a little, sweaty. Even the grit between her toes seemed sensual. The young Sashenka of the civil war and the twenties would never have noticed such things; the Party matron of the thirties was too serious, too full of the Party’s campaigns and slogans. Then she had dressed with deliberate dreariness, in the plainest, brownest stockings, in shapeless shift dresses, her hair in the tightest bun and always tied with the same kerchief. Now everything played with her senses in a way that amazed her. The