Sashenka

you’re a writer, are you? No wonder Mogilchuk wanted to interrogate you. I thought you were just a filthy traitor and a piece of shit. A writer, eh?”

Benya could not contain his surprise. “I wrote a book called Spanish Stories that was a success two years ago and then—”

“What the fuck do I care, you vain little prick?” spat Rodos. “I just see a smug Jew who I could break in half like a stick. I could grind you to dust.”

Benya did not doubt it. Rodos, with his squashed bald head, overdeveloped shoulders and short legs, reminded him of a hyena. Benya was scared of losing the things he loved, his child and, above all, his darling, his Sashenka. They were all that mattered now.

“Again, why did we arrest you?”

“I honestly don’t know. I lived in Paris, I was associated with French and American writers. I knew some of the generals arrested for being Trotskyites.”

“So? Don’t make me open the drawer on my desk where I keep my sticks and smash your Yid hook nose into pulp. I like French wrestling—that’s what we call it here. Confess your criminal and amoral activities and I won’t even have to raise a sweat. Tell me the full story of your sexual depravity in the Metropole Hotel, room four hundred and three.”

“That?” exclaimed Benya. So had he been arrested because of his affair with Sashenka? Gideon had warned him about meddling with a secret policeman’s wife. Even in such puritanical times that couldn’t be so serious, could it? Perhaps this meant that he would be sent into provincial exile, far from Moscow, but at least he’d live. He had to protect Sashenka.

“Yes, that,” answered Rodos, holding up a thick file. “We know every disgusting detail.”

“I get it. Her husband’s behind this. But she’s innocent, I promise. She’s done nothing wrong. She’s a loyal Communist.” Benya scanned Rodos’s face but it was like trying to read a slab of meat.

“Who said she wasn’t?”

“So she’s not in any trouble then?”

“That’s secret information, Accused Golden. Just confess how it all started…”

Benya prayed that Sashenka knew none of this. Perhaps she would return to being the good wife she had always been. She would assume that Benya had been arrested as a Trotskyite spy and she would despise him and forget about him and continue her life of Party-minded duty and luxury. He loved her so much he wanted to suffer for her, to save her pain.

When they arrived to arrest him, he had not been surprised. He had been so happy in those two weeks of loving Sashenka that he could not believe it would last—even though he knew that she was truly the love of his life. It was a love that comes just once, if ever.

As he sat inside the car on the way to prison, he watched the city streets pass by, the lights fluid through his tears. It was dawn, the time when cities renew themselves before the day breaks: trucks collected garbage, janitors sprayed steps, old ladies swept up paper, a man in overalls carried a pail of milk. But the red stars of the Kremlin that had lit up their room in the Metropole belonged to them both together. Now he would suffer on the rack: they would tear him to pieces, and his blood ran cold.

Sashenka would live on outside, that adorable woman whom he loved. No one would ever know what was in their hearts, no matter how much they beat him. Her existence outside the prison, like that of his own young child, meant that he would live on too as long as she lived. She had never told him that she loved him but he hoped that she did…Why couldn’t she tell him when so much suffering stretched out ahead of him? She was making him wait for it, and probably he would have to wait to hear it in another world.

Now he asked himself—what was the right thing to say? How to protect Sashenka? Or was she beyond protecting? Such was his writer’s curiosity that, even as he mocked death, he speculated on this latest twist in his own liquidation. What would his “Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery” recommend? he wondered, recalling how he and Sashenka had laughed about it together.

“Disarm and make your confession!” Rodos shouted.

Suddenly he pulled open the drawer of the desk and smashed Benya once, twice and again across the face with a black rubber truncheon.

Benya fell to the floor, his cheek scouring on concrete. Rodos followed him, his boots smashing into Benya’s nose, blood fountaining out, and the truncheon thudding into his face, his kidneys, his groin, his face again. He vomited in agony, bringing up bile and blood and teeth.

“Sashenka!” he moaned, realizing with each blow that she was not free, sensing that she was somewhere here, near and in pain—and that broke him utterly. “I love you! Where are you?”

43

“Peter Sagan, Captain of Gendarmes,” the old Zek said in the most urbane and aristocratic of tones. “There, that’s given her a shock.”

Sashenka gasped. Hadn’t he died in the streets of Petrograd? Her heart drummed, claws tweaked her insides.

“How do you know her?” asked Mogilchuk.

“I loved her once,” said the husk in his Corps de Pages, Yacht Club accent.

“You had a sexual relationship with her?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a lie!” cried Sashenka, thinking back to that romantic but chaste sleigh ride and then the miserable night when Sagan had tried to rape her.

“Quiet or you’ll be removed,” said Mogilchuk. “You’ll get your chance in a minute. She was a virgin?”

“Yes. She became my mistress and I corrupted her with unspeakable perversions. I also gave her cocaine, which I pretended to take as a medicine.”

“Never!” shouted Sashenka. “This is not Peter Sagan. I don’t recognize this man. He’s an impostor!”

“Ignore her, prisoner. Let’s carry on. You had a professional relationship?”

“I used her…I hated the revolutionaries as scum…but I came to love her.”

“We don’t want your romantic reminiscences, prisoner. Your professional relationship?”

“She was my double agent.”

“When did you recruit her for the Okhrana?”

“Winter 1916. We arrested her as a Bolshevik. I recruited her at Kresty Prison. Thereafter we met in safe houses and hotel rooms where she betrayed her comrades.”

“This is not true. You know it’s not true! Whoever you are, you’re telling lies!” Sashenka stood up. Kobylov’s bejeweled hands fell heavily on her shoulders, jolting her back into her seat. A chill rose up her body, and she started to shiver.

“Did she recruit other agents for you, higher up the Bolshevik high command?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us who.”

“First, Mendel Barmakid.”

Sashenka shook her head. She felt she was drowning, the waters closing above her head.

“Was Mendel a valuable agent, Prisoner Sagan?”

“Oh yes. The other leaders were in prison, Siberia or abroad. He was a member of the Central Committee in contact with Lenin.”

“How long did he remain a double agent?”

“Mendel’s still a double agent.”

“Lies! You bastard!” she shouted again, energy draining from her. “You’ll rot in hell for this! If you knew what you were doing! If you only knew…” She started to weep.

“Get a grip on yourself, accused,” said Mogilchuk, “or Rodos will tear you apart.” There was a moment of silence. “After the Revolution, Sagan, what happened to your Okhrana agents?”