An officer opened Kobylov’s door. Breathing heavily, he raised his clumsy boots and leaned out until his weight landed him on the ground. The officer helped him out.
Sashenka’s door was opened and a Chekist gripped her arm and guided her into a large basement with chipped arches and battered wooden walls, where yet more bewildered people stood in lines. The room stank of cabbage soup, urine and despair. Sashenka—a special case, she noted ruefully—was led to the front.
“I am a Soviet woman and a member of the Party,” she told a bored Chekist. She had helped build this Soviet system; she believed this oppressive machine was necessary to create the new world according to the Marxist- Leninist-Stalinist science of dialectical materialism; she wanted the Chekists to know she still believed in it even though it was about to consume her. But the Chekist just shook his head and told her to empty her pockets, handbag, suitcase. He waved a yellow hand to hurry her and filled in a form. Full name, patronymic, year of birth. He peered at her. Color of hair? Color of eyes? Distinguishing marks? He pressed her fingers on a blue inkpad and took her prints. She received a prisoner number.
“Watch? Rings? Any money?” He noted her belongings and cash, gave her the form to sign and tore off a receipt. Behind her, other bodies pushed against her. “Women that way!” pointed the Chekist. Sashenka remembered her arrest in St. Petersburg and the identical questions—but now she was much more afraid. The Tsarist Empire was soft; she had helped create this man-eating USSR.
She entered a small room where a woman in a white coat sat on a desk smoking an acrid
“Clothes off!” the woman barked.
Sashenka removed her dress and shoes. She stood in her underwear and stockings, shivering slightly in the night chill of the cold concrete. She remembered that her underwear was silk. The woman’s beady eyes noticed too.
“Everything off! Don’t waste my time, and don’t be stuck up!” The woman rammed the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and pulled up her sleeves to reveal powerful hairy forearms.
Sashenka removed her brassiere and stood with her hands over her breasts. Not bad breasts after two children, she told herself stoically.
“And the rest!”
She took off her teddy, standing shyly, a hand over her pubis.
“No one’s interested in you and your clipped little tail. Move it! Mouth open!”
The woman stuck her fingers into Sashenka’s mouth. They tasted of stale cheese.
“Hands on desk now. Legs open.”
She pushed Sashenka’s head down. A finger scooped painfully into her vagina and then plunged into her rectum. Sashenka gasped at the invasion.
“Toughen up, princess. It wasn’t torture! Get dressed.” She took Sashenka’s shoes. “Take out the laces. Give me that belt. No pens allowed.” The woman measured her prisoner’s height and wrote it down. “Sit!”
Sashenka fell back into a chair, relieved to be dressed again.
“Vlad!” called the woman.
A skinny old photographer with slicked-back hair, a tiny head and a worn blue suit appeared in the room: clearly an alcoholic, he was shaking and could hardly hold his heavy camera. A round flashlight blossomed out of it like a chrome sunflower.
“Look at me,” he said.
Sashenka looked into the camera, wearily at first, but then she tried to primp herself up, touching her hair. Suppose one day her children saw that picture? She fixed her eyes on the lens trying to transmit a message: Snowy and Carlo—I love you, I love you! This is your mother! Remember me! Dream of me!
“Keep still! Done.” The bulb flashed with a sizzling pop. Sashenka saw silver stars melting across a black sky.
A guard led her by the arm through a locked door that clicked behind them. Her shoes were loose without the laces and her dress no longer fitted without the belt. There were three guards now, one in front, one holding her, one behind. She passed metal cages, climbed up steel staircases and down stone ones, waited in concrete assembly areas, marched along rows of cells with steel doors and sliding eyeholes. She heard the percussion of prisons—coughing and swearing, the clank of locks, slam of doors and scrape of feet, the clack of bunches of keys swinging. Floors of worn parquet glistened with burning detergent.
The smell of prisons—urine, sweat, feces, disinfectant, cabbage soup, the oil of guns and locks—reminded her of Piter in 1916. Back again—but this time Papa won’t be getting me out! she thought sadly. She felt that Vanya and Benya and Uncle Mendel were all nearby, and somehow it comforted her. In one corridor, another prisoner approached with a guard—she glimpsed a pretty young woman, younger than her, with a black eye.
“Avert your eyes, Prisoner seven hundred seventy-eight,” barked her guard, the first words he had spoken. He pushed Sashenka toward a corner where what appeared to be a metal coffin stood upright. He opened its door and pushed her inside, locking it. The coffin door pressed on her back. Was this a torture? She fought for breath in the airless space. The other guards and prisoner were passing. When they were gone, the coffin was unlocked and they continued until they reached a line of cells where a guard held a door open. There,
The cell was small and cool with two bunk beds, no window whatsoever, a bucket of slops in the corner, brick walls and a damp floor. The door shut; the locks scraped; she stood there alone; the peephole opened; eyes stared at her. Then the Judas port shut. She closed her eyes and listened to the life around her. Prisoners sang, spat, coughed and spluttered, and tapped to one another using prisoners’ code that had not changed since the days of the Tsar. The giant building throbbed like a secret city. Pipes gurgled and shook. A metal pail was dragged along and then a wet mop swished outside. A cart clanked. There was the murmur of voices, the echo of metal cups and spoons. The eyehole opened and closed. The door rasped open again.
“Supper!” Two prisoners, one bearded, old and frail, the other grey but probably her own age, were serving soup out of a swinging pan in the cart. The old one gave her a tin cup while the other poured from a ladle, filling up the cup with steaming water from a kettle. Two guards, hands on their pistols, watched closely. There must be no contact between prisoners.
“Thank you!” she said.
“No talking!” said the guard. “Never look at other prisoners!”
The younger prisoner gave her a sugar lump and a small square of black bread and looked at her for a moment, with a spark of feeling on a sensitive, rather mischievous face. Before Benya she would not have recognized it but now she spoke that particular language. My God, she thought, it was lust! Sashenka was pleased: the people in here still feel desire! Perhaps lust lasts beyond many other things. When the door slammed, she drank her watery buckwheat porridge. She used the slop bucket and lay down.
Vanya, wherever you are, she thought, I know what to do. All was not yet lost: the children had gone but there might be no case against her. Vanya knew that. She could still return. She
The lights remained on. Sashenka tried to sleep. She talked aloud to the children but already they belonged to another world. Could she still smell their smells? The texture of their skin, the sound of their voices, everything was still utterly fresh and vivid for her. She started to cry, gently and with resignation.
The peephole slipped open.
“Silence, prisoner! Show your face and hands at all times!”
She slept and she was a child again, on the Zeitlin estate at Zemblishino: her father, in a white suit and yachting shoes, was holding a pony by the bridle—and Lala, darling Lala, was helping her climb up into the saddle…
35
Sashenka was woken by the grating of carts, swishing of mops, screeching of locks. The peephole opened and shut, the door rasped open.
“Slopping out! Bring your slop bucket!” A guard marched her to the washroom, where the chlorine stung her
