Sashenka

“They were true. You said they were true, in spirit, in essence.”

“Oh yes, they were true all right. They were all bastards. They were enemies in spirit. They lost faith, and faith is everything. But…” He shook his head.

“You beat people to say these things, didn’t you, Vanya?”

“For the Party, I’d do anything. I’ve done anything. Yes, I know what it is to break a man. Some break like a matchstick, some die rather than say a word. But better to shoot a hundred innocent men than let one spy escape, better a thousand.”

“Oh my God, Vanya.” Benya’s words, and Benya’s expression as he had said them, returned to her. He had known what Vanya did all night while she, she…

“What did you think I was doing? It was top secret but it suited you not to know.”

“But the Party’s right to destroy the spies. I knew there were mistakes but we all said the mistakes were worth it. Now, what if we become such a mistake? I believe in the Party and Stalin, it’s my life’s work. Vanya, do you still believe?”

“After what I’ve done for the Party, I have to believe. If I were shot tonight, I’d die a Communist. And you?”

“Die? I can’t die. I can’t vanish! I want to live. I love life. I’ll do anything to live.”

“Keep your voice down, dear Comrade Snowfox.” His new air of brisk conspiracy took her back to when he was an ardent young Bolshevik activist in Petrograd in 1916—it was one of the things that had attracted her to him. “Be calm! We’re not going to die but we need to plan ahead. If they take us, don’t confess a thing. That’s the key. If you don’t confess, they can’t touch you. Whatever they do to us, confess nothing!”

“I’m not sure I could take it. The pain,” Sashenka said shakily. “Vanya, you have your revolver here, don’t you?”

Vanya lifted the peaked cap that lay before them on the table. Underneath lay a Nagant pistol. Sashenka put her hand on the cold steel and remembered the “bulldogs” in Petrograd that she’d carried for the Party. How passionately and proudly she had borne those pistols for the Revolution. How she had admired Vanya, the strapping worker with those hands more like paws, his bold face, his brown eyes! What had he become? What had they both become?

“We could kill ourselves tonight, Vanya. I could kill myself and you’d be free of me. You’d be clean. I’ll do it if you just ask…”

“That’s our first choice. We have the gun and we have tonight. But suppose they don’t have anything on you? They’ll beat you and humiliate you. But if you don’t confess, they’ll ask: ‘Did she sign anything? No? Well, perhaps she wasn’t a bastard after all.’ They’ll free you in the end. For us, for life, for the children.”

The children! They’d almost forgotten the children. Death, the violence and finality of vanishing from the earth and ceasing to exist, was so horrifying, so immediate, that it bred the purest form of egotism. How could she have been so selfish?

Sashenka turned and ran into the house, Vanya behind her, and they burst into Snowy’s room. Holding hands, they stared in anguish at Snowy, her white skin and fair hair spread out on her pillow, breathing so softly, her long arms curled beside her, her silly pink cushion resting against her cheek. And there was Carlo lying naked on his front, hair tousled, arms and legs still creased like a baby, head burrowed into his favorite velveteen rabbit.

Sashenka was barely able to breathe, her throat parched, in the warm, dark room that smelled of the peculiar freshness of young children in summertime, of hay and vanilla. It was as if they were the first and last parents in the world. But they were the only ones to know what they were up against. Sashenka’s stomach churned. They were on the verge of losing their treasures forever.

“Snowy, Carlo, oh darlings!” She fell to her knees between the two beds, Vanya beside her, and suddenly they were sobbing silently in each other’s arms.

“Don’t wake them,” said Vanya.

“We mustn’t,” agreed Sashenka, brokenly. But she could not help herself. With trembling hands, she reached into Carlo’s bed and lifted him out, folded him against her, raining kisses on his satiny forehead until he stirred. Vanya was holding Snowy, his face buried in her hair, which cleaved like gold thread to his wet cheeks. Both children were drowsily sensual as they clung to their parents, gloriously unaware of the rising storm, roused from the deep slumber of that sweltering night. The four of them crouched together in the comforting darkness, the parents gasping with tears, the children stretching and sighing, settling back into their loving arms, only half awake.

Finally Vanya pulled Sashenka by the hand. “Put them back to bed!” he said. They tucked the children in again then crept outside to sit on the edge of the sofa by the open French windows. A car door slammed loudly in the night air.

“Vanya! Is this it? Is it them?” She threw herself into his arms.

He calmed her with his clumsy hands, their coarseness now so welcome, familiar.

“No, it’s not them. Not yet,” he whispered. “But we’ve got to think calmly. Stop crying, girl! Gather yourself. For the children…”

Then he too started to shudder—and she let out an involuntary moan until he put his hand over her mouth. Finally she left the room and washed her face with cold water. A dread soberness descended on both of them.

“Vanya, we can’t kill ourselves because—”

“Stalin calls suicide ‘spitting in the eye of the Party.’ We save ourselves pain, but not the children. The Party will take it out on the children.”

“I’ve got it. We kill ourselves and the children. Tonight, Vanya, now. We die together and we’ll be together. Forever!” How strange—yet she did believe in a sort of afterlife. In eternity. That was what her rabbinical grandparents believed, and she the Communist had always eschewed it. Now those old words from Turbin came back to her—Zohar, the Book of Splendor and heart of the Kabala, Heaven and Gehenna, the golems and dybbuks that haunted those cursed with the Evil Eye, the spiritual world so foreign to scientific Marxism and dialectical materialism. And yet now she imagined her soul, and its love, living on beyond the shell of her body. There she would see her mother and father, all young again. They would all be together! She pulled out the Nagant from under Vanya’s NKVD cap. She still knew how to use it.

“Do you believe that?” he asked. “I do. We’d all be together in Heaven. Maybe you’re right. If they come for us, we kill them and then ourselves.”

“So that’s decided.” But as Sashenka turned toward the bedroom, he caught her, taking the pistol from her and slipping it into his holster.

He hugged her tightly, whispering, “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Could you?”

She shook her head. It was now past midnight and Sashenka’s mind was working more systematically.

“We don’t have time for more crying, do we, darling Vanya?”

“They’ve something on us. I don’t know what.”

“Gideon mentioned ‘the Greeks and the Romans’ and then Mendel was arrested. Benya Golden knows nothing about us.”

“But is he a provocateur? A spy? Is he filth?”

“He could be…” She was now so afraid that she was blaming her own lover. Was this what had happened? Had Benya destroyed her family? Then another meteor shower of possibilities bombarded her: “Could it be a Chekist intrigue at the Lubianka? There has to be some reason for this, Vanya, doesn’t there?”

He opened his hands wide.

“There has to be a cause,” he told her. “But there doesn’t need to be any reason.”

Just then they heard the back gate creak.

“It’s them, Vanya. I love you, Vanya, Snowy, Carlo. If either of us live, oh Vanya… Shall we end it all? Where’s the bulldog?”

They clung together. He had the gun in his hand and they pressed its cool steel between their palms as if it were their love token. There were no other sounds. The night turned with grinding slowness.

A whistle split the stillness, and a figure in a white hood stepped out of the shadows of the orchard.

Vanya raised the Nagant pistol.

“Who’s there? I’ll shoot. I’ll take you all with me, you bastards!”