She had been lucky after a fashion, she told herself. What luck to be loved by Lala and raised by her; to marry Vanya and create those children; to have enjoyed the seven-thousand-ruby caresses of Benya Golden, one wild, reckless love affair in her life of good sense and hard work. She had known Lenin and Stalin in person, the titans of human history. Given that it was all about to end, thank God she had known such things. What riches, what times she had enjoyed!
They would draw it out of her, she knew, and she would deliver all they wanted—and more. The words she would utter, the confessions she would make, were a long form of suicide, but addictively indispensable to her one reader: the Instantzia, Comrade Stalin, who would find in her breathless reminiscences all he had ever wanted to believe about the world and the people he hated. Vanya had told her about Stalin’s lurid visions and she would pander to every one of them. Vanya, if he was still alive, would do the same, less flamboyantly. She did not know, probably would never know now, why she, Mendel, Benya and Vanya had been arrested in the first place. The workings of spiders and webs were now beyond her. All that mattered was that she was the center of it all, she had destroyed them all. She and Peter Sagan.
They might just keep her on ice for months but by the time they sentenced her (and this part, this snuffing out, this unspeakable ending, this violent conclusion of the mysterious, boundless, vibrant thing called Life, she still found unimaginable), the children would be settled somewhere with new names and destinies, safe and sound and in the world of the living—not in her world of the dead. She beamed her love to them, her thanks to Satinov, her love for those precious to her. She had to let them go. She had been a Communist since she was sixteen. It had been her religion, the rapture of absolutism, the science of history. But now she saw, late in life, that
In the exercise yard, Sashenka saw wispy clouds in the dancing shapes of a train, a lion and a bearded rabbinical profile. Was that her grandfather, the Rabbi of Turbin? And could that be a rabbit and a pink cushion, lit by the rays of a sun just out of sight…Perhaps, after all, the mystics were right, life was just a chimera, a fire in the desert, a fevered trance, but the pain was real.
When the time comes for the Highest Measure, she promised herself, I’ll welcome the seven grams of lead and I’ll leave an expression of love for Snowy and Carlo out there on the gates of eternity. It was time for the final act.
47
“Here’s your prize,” said Kobylov, welcoming her into the interrogation room. The secret policeman watched as the beautiful prisoner caught first a whiff and then the strong aroma of the burnt, slightly sour coffee beans.
“You must confess your criminal and treacherous activities,” said Mogilchuk, pouring her coffee out of a brass flask.
She sat in the chair, snow-white between the welts and bruises, and thin, but something about those lips that never quite closed, the little islands of freckles on either side of her nose, and that bosom distracted Kobylov, who sat on the windowsill, swinging a new pair of coffee-colored calf-leather boots. He liked this stage in a case. There was an end-of-semester chumminess in the air and he did not have to beat her anymore, even though a bout of French wrestling with a real bastard was bracing sport. He felt her grey eyes rest on him, bright again and bold and vigilant.
Kobylov winked at her and wrinkled his nose. He took out a packet of cigarettes emblazoned with a crocodile. “Your favorite Egyptians,” he said, taking one and tossing her the packet.
“I couldn’t have imagined when I became a Bolshevik that I would end here,” she told him.
“When you chose the revolutionary life, even at sixteen, you entered a game of life and death and put the quest for the holy grail above everything else,” said Kobylov, lighting her cigarette and then his own. “Comrade Stalin told me that himself.”
“But I changed,” said Sashenka, blowing out lacy ringlets of smoke.
Kobylov raised his eyes to heaven. “It’s irreversible,” he said.
“Like a sleigh ride that you can never get off…”
“Time to work,” said Kobylov.
Mogilchuk lifted his pen and smoothed the pristine sheet of paper. “Begin your confession.”
Sashenka brushed her hair back off her forehead. There was a cut on her cheek and one whole side of her face was still swollen, surrounded by a rainbow of deep blue, mustard yellow and poppy red.
Kobylov felt like the hunter who corners the noble stag and even as he aims his rifle at its heart he cannot help but admire it. He marveled at her self-possession and her courage.
Sashenka ran her fingers over her lips and met Kobylov’s gaze. “I want to start on the day I was arrested by the Okhrana outside the Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1916. That was how I came to be recruited by the Tsarist secret police and thence by British, German and Japanese intelligence and their hireling, Trotsky. May I start on the day it all began?”
48
Carolina heard the door of her hotel room close quietly. The room seethed with insects: the ceiling, even the bedspread, was covered in a blanket of glistening black bodies like living caviar. The children had been fascinated by them. In one twin bed, Carolina had slept with Carlo curled around her to form a single sculpture. After the station, it had seemed the most luxurious room on earth. But now, as she sprang awake from a sleep fathoms deep, she knew that click of the lock could mean only one thing.
She jumped up and ran to the window and, placing her hands on the glass, she stared, wild eyed, down at the street below. Among the horse-drawn carts, trucks and Pobeda cars, she saw women in floral dresses and red headscarves, and the pea-green uniforms of a provincial Soviet town. Then she spotted the children far across the square, walking toward the station.
They were holding Mrs. Lewis’s hands, two tiny far-off figures. But she knew every mannerism of their gaits, the way Carlo stomped along and Snowy’s long-legged, bouncing grace, so like her mother’s. For a moment, Carolina longed to run after them and catch them and hug them over and over again…But already she knew this leave-taking was for the best.
The train would be shunting forward, the momentum shifting too. Soon Snowy and Carlo would be leaving another beloved figure behind and moving into a new existence.
She cried loudly and openly and for a long time in the room.
She cursed this gentle nanny, this Lala, who now had the children. Perhaps Lala would keep them, and even though she could never care for them as lovingly as she herself (no one alive could do that!), they would be better with her than with strangers. But Carolina knew too that Lala could not keep them forever; that she had some dangerous connections, and connections had to be avoided, Comrade Satinov had explained. So Lala was taking them somewhere else. She had mentioned an orphanage in Tiflis, but that was for the paperwork. There the children’s identities would be laundered and their adoptions made official.
The night before, it had been hard to get the children to sleep even though they were exhausted and so grateful for the beds. They cried out for their mummy and daddy. The two nannies stroked them, hugged them and fed them their favorite cookies until in the end the children had hugged them back and surrendered to sleep.
Then the two nannies had sat in the bathroom and Carolina had talked with a frowning intensity, passing on everything she knew about the children: what they loved, what they hated, what foods, what hobbies, what books. At the end, in a sort of agony, she had whispered, “Tell the new parents about the Cushion, tell them about the bunnies. It’s all they have left of their lives!”
And Lala had understood. “I know what sensitive children they are, Carolina. I cared for Sashenka for so long…”
“What was she like?” asked Carolina. “Was she like…?” and she looked toward the bedroom—but then she
