Sashenka

Orlov-Chesmensky, a former owner of the manor, the fifteen crystal peacocks on the shelf, and the English grandfather clock, and into the deliciously cool hall with its black and white flagstone floor. She saw the library lights were still on and smelled the coffee and smoke blending in the warm, rosy night.

Mendel opened the library door and Sashenka stepped aside into the cloakroom, from where she watched her uncle limp out with a gleam in his bloodshot eyes, a sheaf of valuable papers gripped in his claw-like hands.

The trapped miasma of an entire night’s chain-smoking poured out like a ghostly tidal wave. Sashenka waited until he had gone and then darted into the library to look at the books that so gripped him that he was happy to go to prison for them. The table was empty.

“Curious, Sashenka?” It was Mendel at the door, his voice in congruously deep and rich, his clothes defiantly moth-eaten.

She jumped. “I was just interested,” she said.

“In my books?”

“Yes.”

“I hide them when I’ve finished. I don’t like people knowing my business or even my thoughts.” He hesitated. “But you’re a serious person. The only intellectual in this family.”

“How do you know that, Uncle, since you’ve never bothered to speak to me?” Sashenka was delighted and surprised.

“The others are just capitalist decadents and our family rabbi belongs in the Middle Ages. I judge you by what you read. Mayakovsky. Nekrasov. Blok. Jack London.”

“So you’ve been watching me?”

Mendel’s pince-nez were so greasy the lenses were barely transparent. He limped over to the English collection, the full set of Dickens bound in kid with the gold Zeitlin crest, and pulling out one, he reached behind and handed her a well-thumbed old book: What Is to Be Done? by Chernyshevsky.

“Read it now. When you finish, you’ll find the next book here behind David Copperfield. Understood? We’ll take it from there.”

“Take what? From where?”

But Mendel was gone and she was alone in the library.

That was how it started. The next night, she could hardly wait until everyone was asleep before she crept down, savoring the smells of coffee and acrid makhorka tobacco as she drew closer to the set of Dickens.

“Ready for the next? Your analysis of the book?” Mendel had said without looking up.

“Rakhmetov is the most compelling hero I have ever known,” she told him, returning his book. “He is selfless, dedicated. Nothing stands in the way of his cause. The ‘special man’ touched by history. I want to be like him.”

“We all do,” he replied. “I know many Rakhmetovs. It was the first book I read too. And not just me but Lenin as well.”

“Tell me about Lenin. And what is a Bolshevik? Are you Bolshevik, Menshevik, Socialist Revolutionary, Anarchist?”

Mendel observed her as if she were a zoological specimen, narrowing his eyes, inhaling the badly rolled makhorka that caught in his throat. He coughed productively.

“What’s it to you? What do you think of Russia today, the workers, the peasants, the war?”

“I don’t know. It seems as if…” She stopped, aware of his scathing stare.

“Go on. Speak up.”

“It’s all wrong. It’s so unjust. The workers are like slaves. We’re losing the war. Everything’s rotten. Am I a revolutionary? A Bolshevik?”

Mendel rolled a new cigarette, not hurriedly and with surprising delicacy, licked the paper and lit it. An orange flame flared up and died down.

“You don’t know enough to be anything yet,” he told her. “We must take our time. You are now the sole student on my summer course. Here’s the next book.” He gave her Victor Hugo’s novel of the French Revolution, 1793.

The next night she was even more excited.

“Ready for more? Your analysis?”

“Cimourdain had never been seen to weep,” she quoted Hugo’s description of his hero. “He had an inaccessible and frigid virtue. A just but awful man. There are no half measures for a revolutionary priest who must be infamous and sublime. Cimourdain was sublime, rugged, inhospitably repellent, gloomy but above all pure.”

“Good. If Cimourdain were alive today, he’d be a Bolshevik. You have the sentiment; now you need the science. Marxism is a science. Now read this.” He held up a novel called Lady Cynthia de Fortescue and the Love of the Cruel Colonel. On its cover stood a lady with vermilion lipstick and cheeks like a puff adder, while a devilishly handsome officer with waxed mustaches and narrowed eyes lurked behind.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Just read what I give you.” Mendel was back at his desk, scratching with his pen.

In her bedroom, when she opened the book, she found Marx’s Communist Manifesto hidden inside. This was soon followed by Plekhanov, Engels, Lassalle, more Marx, Lenin.

No one had ever spoken to Sashenka like Mendel. Her mother wanted her to be a foolish child preparing for a life of overheated balls, unhappy marriages and seedy adulteries. She adored her father but he barely noticed his “little fox,” regarding her as no more than a fluffy mascot. And darling Lala had long since submitted to her place in life, reading only novels like Lady Cynthia de Fortescue and the Love of the Cruel Colonel. As for Uncle Gideon, he was a degenerate sensualist who had tried to flirt with her, and once even patted her behind.

At meals and parties she barely spoke, so rapt was she by her short course in Marxism, so keen was she to ask Mendel more questions. Her mind was with him in his smoky library, far from her mother and father. Lala, who sometimes found her asleep with the lamp shining and some vulgar novel beside her, worried that she was reading too late. It was Mendel who exposed Sashenka to the grotesque injustice of capitalist society, to the oppression of workers and peasants, and showed her how Zeitlin—yes, her own father—was an exploiter of the working man.

But there was a solution, she learned: a class struggle that would progress through set stages to a workers’ paradise of equality and decency. The Marxist theory was universal and utopian and all human existence fitted into its beautiful symmetry of history and justice. She could not understand why the workers of the industrial world, especially in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the peasants in the villages of Russia and Ukraine, the footmen and maids in her father’s houses, did not rise up and slay their masters at once. She had fallen in love with the ideas of dialectical materialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Mendel treated Sashenka as an adult; more than a woman, as an adult man, a co-conspirator in the worthiest, most exclusive secret movement in the world. Before long they were meeting almost like lovers, in the twilight, at dawn and in the glowing night, in the stables, in the birch woods and blackberry thickets, on expeditions to collect mushrooms, even whispering by night in the dining hall, sealed within its yellow silk walls that were fragrant with carnations and lilac.

Yes, Sashenka thought now, the road to this stinking prison in the black St. Petersburg winter had started on her father’s fairy-tale estate on those summer nights when nightingales sang and the dusk was a hazy pink. But was she really such a threat to the throne of the Emperor that she should be arrested at the gates of the Smolny and tossed into this hell?

A woman behind Sashenka got up and staggered toward the slop bucket. Somehow she tripped over Sashenka and fell, cursing her. This time Sashenka grabbed the woman’s soft throat, ready to fight, but the woman apologized and Sashenka found she suddenly didn’t mind. Now she was tasting the real misery of Russia. Now she could tell them she did not just know big houses and limousines. Now she was a woman, a responsible adult, independent of her family. She tried to sleep but she could not.

In the sewers of the Empire, she felt alive for the first time.