She recalled the nights she spent with Sashenka in her bed at the mansion on Greater Maritime Street, the sleigh rides sweeping through the boulevards of St. Petersburg, the hilarity of ice skating, the exhilaration of riding ponies on the family estate. She had been Sashenka’s real mother and, although she had not seen her for almost ten years in the crazy, man-eating world that Sashenka had embraced, she had thought of her every day and talked to that portrait of the Smolny schoolgirl in her pinafore, as if they were still together. She knew too that she was here, in this station, not just for herself or Sashenka—but for Samuil Zeitlin as well, whether he was alive or dead.
Now Sashenka had been swallowed up by the Party she’d served so assiduously—and the only way Lala could express her deep love was by undertaking this troubling mission for the Zeitlin family. “I know your mummy better than anyone alive,” she told Carlo and Snowy. “But we mustn’t think about Mummy now. We must make plans for the future, for your next adventure. Oh, and you must call me Lala.”
“So
The two nannies smiled at each other, sharing their admiration of Snowy—then looked away, abruptly. It was too painful.
Turning their backs on the station, they walked into Rostov-on-Don, each holding the hand of one of the children.
“Swing me!” piped Carlo, kicking up his legs, happy for the first time in days.
As Carolina took one arm and Lala the other, Lala could not help thinking that one stage of Snowy and Carlo’s lives was ending—and another was about to begin.
45
Sashenka crawled to her cell door. “Take me to Kobylov!”
The Judas port slid open, muddy, bored eyes blinked; it shut again. Sashenka lay back sweltering on her bunk, falling in and out of sleep. How many days since she had slept for longer than ten minutes? She had lost count. She had lost the sense of day and night. There was no window in her cell, just a brilliant light that penetrated and burned even the deepest and darkest and coolest chambers of her soul.
The confrontation with Captain Sagan had changed everything. She had thought about it all day and into the night, slipping in and out of delirium. Awake, she dreamed of the children, of Vanya, of Benya Golden, and debated absurd questions: could a woman love two men at the same time, one as a lover, one as a husband? Oh yes, it was possible. But each time, she passed into dreamless unconsciousness, she slipped under the surface of fathomless black water where she saw nothing.
Then she was shaken awake roughly. “No sleeping!”
She did not even know if Vanya was alive. She knew they would have been merciless. He was one of them, he knew where all the bodies lay buried, and now they were crushing him. She longed to see him.
She thought about asking to meet him to confirm that she should take the next step, but she feared that any suspicion that they had coordinated their plans would draw the investigators toward the children. They had had more than a week now, darling Cushion and Bunny, to go on their dread adventure.
What was their smell? Hay and vanilla. How did Snowy say, “Let’s do the Cushion dance”? Sashenka struggled to get the children’s intonation right, sketching their faces again and again, but sometimes the shape of a nose or the curve of a forehead (those delicious foreheads, her favorite places to kiss, just where the hair met the temple, oh, she could nuzzle them there forever!) confounded her and they sank beneath the remorseless black water. Perhaps this was Nature making it easier for her, allowing her to forget.
Her mind was barely functioning, she scarcely registered the life of the prison around her: she just existed on the conveyor. But if she went insane, she would be no use to Carlo and Snowy. She sensed it was time for the next step.
It was deep in the night when they came to get her. The whole Soviet government functioned throughout the night, from Stalin down. How naive she had been about Vanya coming home at dawn, smelling like an old wolf, as if he had been in a barroom brawl. His secrecy had suited her too because she had never had to ask what he was doing all night. Now she knew the compromise they had both made.
When they reached the interrogation rooms that existed, in Sashenka’s mind, in limbo, exactly halfway between the paneled offices at the front of the Lubianka complex and the dungeons of the Interior Prison, she was relieved, just as she had been oddly relieved when they had arrested her.
She walked into the room and was struck so hard on the back with a rubber truncheon that she fell over. She was kicked viciously, which made her curl up with a groan. The truncheons—there were two men in there—fell on her back, her breasts, her stomach, wherever she turned, but especially on her legs and feet. She screamed in pain, and blood ran down her face into her eyes. She tried to pretend that this was a very unpleasant medical procedure that was necessary and even therapeutic and would be over soon, but this did not work for long.
In the compacted odors of vodka sweat, cologne and pork sausage that oozed from her persecutors, in the agony of the blows that struck her breasts, in the virile grunts and heaves of these unfit men as they swung their truncheons, Sashenka recognized that her tormentors found berserk sport in beating her. Perhaps her request had interrupted a banquet in the NKVD Club—or even an orgy at a safe house somewhere.
The men halted briefly, breathing heavily. Wiping her eyes, shivering and gasping with agony, she squinted up at Kobylov and Rodos, in boots, white shirts and jodhpurs held up with suspenders. They stood together, such different men but with the same eyes: bloodshot, yellowed and wild, like wolves caught in the headlights.
“I want to confess,” she said as loudly as she could. “Everything. I beg you. Stop it now!”
46
“Hurrah! Hurrah!” shouted Kobylov, jumping up and down like a schoolboy at a soccer match. “Christ is risen!”
He remembered his own mother, the big-breasted cheerful Georgian woman who so cherished him. The last time he was with her in her new apartment in Tiflis, she had warned him: “Careful of the unhappiness you cause, Bogdan! Remember God and Jesus Christ!”
He pulled on his tunic, wiping his forehead with a yellow silk kerchief. “Enough now! Get her cleaned up, Comrade Rodos, let her get some sleep, cool her cell down and give her some coffee when she wakes. Then give her a pen and paper and get Mogilchuk to charm her. I’m off back to the party where so many mares await me! Thank heaven we can stop before we ruin her looks altogether. This is hard work, Sashenka, for a man who loves women. It’s not easy, pure torture, not easy at all.” And with a fleshy wave of jeweled fingers and a gleaming boot kicking the door shut, he was gone.
Sashenka slept all the next day. The cell was deliciously cool and dark but her chest was agony—perhaps they had broken a rib? Some time in the night a doctor, a grey-bearded, white-coated specialist, fallen from his fancy city practice into this world of the living dead, came to see her. She was half awake but she dreamed that he was the vanished Professor Israel Paltrovich who had delivered Snowy in the Kremlin Hospital. Something about his hush of surprise when he saw it was her, something about his aristocratic and soft-spoken bedside manner, even though he himself looked so broken, something about his gentle reassurance in the middle of the night, reminded her of him. She wanted to talk to him about Snowy.
“Professor, is it you…?”
He put his calm fingers on her hand and squeezed it.
“Just rest,” he said, and more quietly, “sleep, dear.” He gave her injections and rubbed some healing cream into her muscles.
When she woke up, she could not move. Her body was black and blue, and her urine was red. She ate and slept some more, then they let her wash and walk in the exercise yard, where, hobbling along, she stared at the gorgeous turquoise tent above her. The air was racy and fresh and warm. It was as if she had been born again today.
