Sashenka

eyes. She poured out her slops and washed her face with water. Then it was back to her cell.

“Breakfast!” The same prisoner whose glance had been so slyly sensuous now wore a plywood tray like an usherette selling cigarettes. The other prisoner, a bearded old man covered in tattoos—a real criminal, Sashenka guessed—poured out the tea and handed over a small piece of bread, a lump of sugar, and eight cigarettes with a strip of phosphorus from a matchbox. Once again the long thin face of the server revealed nothing, but again his eyes roved over her body and neck and glinted with the rudest lust before the door slammed again. Already, the tea and bread tasted divine. She knew from Vanya that prisoners sometimes waited weeks even to be interrogated so it might be ages before she was able to make her stand, to defend herself as a Communist—and find out what had brought her here.

Then she lay again on the bed. Where are the children now? she wondered. And she said aloud the word that was becoming her talisman, her code to transmit her love across the vast steppes and powerful rivers of Russia to her distant children. “Cushion!”

“Prisoner seven hundred seventy-eight?” The door had opened.

“Yes.”

“Come!” Three guards marched her along the corridors, up metallic steps, down concrete staircases with metal grilles to prevent suicides, over rickety wooden bridges suspended above granite canyons, across corridors, until they passed two security doors with manned barriers and entered a wide passageway with offices instead of cells. Sashenka hummed to herself—she found to her surprise it was that gypsy romance so beloved of Benya Golden, their love song:

Black eyes, passionate eyes, lovely burning eyes,
how I love you, how I fear you.
I first laid eyes on you in an unkind hour…

What an unkind hour for love it had turned out to be, but that tune fueled a sudden surge of optimism. She was certain now there would be no need for Vanya’s terrible plan. She would easily disprove the Chekists’ accusations. Then they would release her. She would wait a little then recall the children. Oh, the joy of that!

“In here!” The guard pushed her into a small clean office with a linoleum floor, an empty desk, a grey telephone and a light turned toward her. The brightness of the bulb blinded her for a second. Golden beads sparkled before her eyes and she smelled the sweetness of coconut pomade.

A young man in NKVD uniform with round spectacles, a ginger mustache and a preposterous pompadour opened a papka file, licking his finger as he turned the pages. He took his time and when he had finished he sat back, his boots creaking. He stroked, almost massaged, the piece of paper in front of him.

“Prisoner, my name is Investigator Mogilchuk. Are you ready to help us?” He did not call her “comrade” but he seemed gentle and reasonable. His voice was husky like that of a boyish student; the accent was southern, from around the Black Sea, Mariupol perhaps; and she guessed that he was a teacher’s son, provincial intelligentsia, probably qualified in the law, summoned to Moscow to fill the boots of the old Chekists, now deceased.

“Yes, Investigator, I am but I would like to save you from wasting your time. I’ve been a Party member since 1916; I worked in Lenin’s apparat and I’d like to ask—”

“Silence, prisoner! I ask the questions here. As the armed sword of the Party, we Chekists will decide your case. That’s our mission. Now will you help us?”

“Absolutely. I want to clear this up.”

Investigator Mogilchuk stretched his neck and raised his chin. “Clear up what?” he said.

“Well, whatever it is that I’m accused of.”

“You know what it is.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Oh, come now, prisoner. I’m going to ask you: why are you here?”

“I don’t know. I am innocent. Genuinely.”

Mogilchuk carefully checked the crusty surface of his pompadour and knitted his eyebrows. “That’s not being helpful. Are you sincere in your wish to serve the Party? I wonder. If you were sincere, you would know why you are here.”

“I am a sincere Communist, Comrade Investigator, but I’ve done nothing wrong! Nothing! I joined no oppositions. Never! I supported every policy of the Lenin-Stalin Party line. I would never tolerate any anti-Soviet conversations. Not even anti-Soviet thoughts. My life’s been devoted to the Party…”

“Shut up!” said the investigator and banged the table, an action so absurd that Sashenka struggled to conceal her disdain. She had a misplaced urge to laugh.

“Don’t waste our time!” he snapped at her. “You think we bring you here for fun? I’m up to here in cases and I need you to confess now to what you have done. We know how to handle people like you.”

“People like me?”

“Spoiled Party princesses who think the State owes them their fancy clothes, cars, dachas. We specialize in grinding your type down to size. So I repeat: look into your life, your Communist conscience, your past! Why are you here? A confession will make things much easier for you.”

“But I can’t… I’m innocent!”

“How do you reconcile the fact of your arrest with your claim of innocence? Begin your confession! Do not wait until we force you!”

Sashenka was rattled. What was he demanding? If she admitted something trivial would that satisfy him? She thought back over Vanya’s careful instructions as they sat on the swinging hammock in the dark hot garden that desperate night: “Confess nothing. Without a confession, they can’t touch you! Believe me, darling, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve broken legions of men and perhaps this’ll be their revenge on me. But don’t invent some little crime. It won’t ease the pressure! If they have something specific, they’ll confront you. If they want something specific, they’ll sweat it out of you.”

Mogilchuk leaned forward. The sickliness of his coconut pomade was overpowering. “You come from a bourgeois family, real bloodsuckers. Did you genuinely embrace the Party—or did you remain a member of your filthy class, an enemy of working people?”

“I worked for Lenin.”

“Do you think I care about that now? If you deceived Comrade Lenin, you’ll be doubly damned.”

“He called me Comrade Snowfox. He himself knew my background and he told me he came from nobility—it didn’t matter because I was a real Bolshevik believer.”

“How dare you soil Comrade Lenin! Don’t you realize where you are? Don’t you realize what you are now? You’re as good as dust! You are sitting before the Tribunal of the Revolution: the Cheka. Just answer my questions.” He looked down at the file, massaging the paper, round and round. “How long have you known Mendel Barmakid?”

“He’s my uncle. All my life.”

“Do you believe he’s a good Communist?”

“I have always thought so.”

“You sound like you have doubts?”

“I know he’s been arrested.”

“So you know we don’t arrest people for nothing?”

“Comrade Mogilchuk, I believe in the armed wing of the Party. I believe you Chekists are, as Dzerzhinsky said, the knights of the Revolution. My own husband—”

“Accused Palitsyn. Do you think he’s such a paragon of Party-mindedness? Really? Search your memories, your conversations: was he ever really an honest Chekist?”

“Yes, he was.” Suddenly she questioned even that: what if Vanya was a Fascist spy?

“And Mendel? He was never a real Communist, was he…Comrade Snowfox”—he added with a sneer—“if I may call you that?”

“An honest Bolshevik who served five exiles, imprisonment in the Trubetskoy Bastion, ruined his health in