Sashenka Read online

  Mendel felt an odd sensation, and realized he was happy to see her. She was sparkling with life. Yet he did not give her the hug he wanted to give her. The child was spoilt enough already.

  ‘Don’t get overconfident,’ he said gruffly. ‘Comrade Snowfox, did you deliver the message to the safehouse?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you collect the pamphlets from the printing press?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘In the apartment on the Petrograd Side. Shirokaya Street.’

  ‘Tomorrow they need to reach the comrades at the Putilov Works.’

  ‘I’ll do it. Usual arrangements?’

  Mendel nodded. ‘You’re doing well, comrade.’

  She looked so young when she smiled, and by the dim lantern of the mean little room Mendel noticed the little shower of freckles on either side of her nose. He knew from her quick replies that she wanted to tell him something. He decided to make her wait.

  Her intensity made him feel like an old man suddenly, conscious of his skin like porridge speckled with broken veins, of the strands of grey in his greasy hair, of the aches of his arthritis. That was what exile and prison did for you.

  ‘Dear comrade,’ she said, ‘I can’t thank you enough for your teaching. Now everything fits. I never thought the words “comrade” and “committee” would excite me so much, but they do. They really do!’

  ‘Don’t chatter too much,’ he told her sternly. ‘And watch yourself with comrades. They know your background and they look for signs of bourgeois philistinism. Change the sable. Get a karakul.’

  ‘Right. I feel that I’m a cog in a secret world, in the universal movement of history.’

  ‘We all are, but in Piter at the moment you’re more important than you realize. We’ve so few comrades,’ said Mendel, inhaling his cigarette, his red-rimmed eyes half closed. ‘Keep reading, girl. You can’t read enough. Self-improvement is the Bolshevik way.’

  ‘The food shortages are getting worse. You’ve seen the queues? Everyone is grumbling – from the capitalists who come for lunch with Papa to comrades in the factories. Surely something will happen now?’

  Mendel shook his head. ‘One day, yes, but not now. Russia still lacks a real proletarian class and without one, revolution isn’t possible. I’m not sure it’ll happen in our lifetimes. How can one jump the stages of Marxist development? It can’t happen, Sashenka. It’s impossible.’

  ‘Of course. But surely—’

  ‘Even Lenin isn’t sure we’ll live to see it.’

  ‘You get his letters?’

  Mendel nodded. ‘We’ve told him about the Smolny girl called Snowfox. How’s the family?’

  She took a breath. Here it comes, he thought.

  ‘Comrade Mendel,’ she said, ‘I was arrested yesterday and spent the night at the Kresty.’

  Mendel limped to the stove and, taking a greasy spoon, he leaned over the shchi soup and slurped a mouthful. The cigarette somehow remained hanging in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘My first arrest, Uncle Mendel!’

  He remembered his own first arrest twenty years ago, the appalled reaction of his father, the great Turbin rabbi, and his own pride on earning this badge of honour.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he told Sashenka. ‘You’re becoming a real revolutionary. Did the comrades of the cell committee take care of you?’

  ‘Comrade Natasha looked after me. I didn’t know you were married.’

  Sometimes Sashenka was a real Smolny schoolgirl. ‘I’m married to the Party. Comrades are arrested every day and very few are released the next morning.’

  ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said, leaning on the stove, an old exile’s trick to ease the ache of Arctic winter. He chomped on a hunk of cold sausage, cigarette miraculously still in position.

  ‘I was interrogated for several hours by Gendarme Captain Peter Sagan.’

  ‘Sagan, eh?’ Mendel knew that Sagan was the Okhrana case officer tasked with finishing off the Party. He moved back to the little table, dragging his heavy boot. As he sat down, the table creaked. Now he was concentrating, watching her face. ‘I think I’ve heard the name. What of him?’

  ‘He was trying to lead me on, but Uncle Mendel,’ she said, joining him at the table and gripping his arm, the Smolny schoolgirl again, ‘he prides himself on his humanity. He’s something of a bourgeois liberal. I know I’m a neophyte but I just wanted to inform you – and the Petrograd Committee – that he seemed keen to be my friend. Naturally I gave him no encouragement. But at the end, he said he would like to meet me again and continue our conversation—’

  ‘—about what?’

  ‘Poetry. Why are you smiling, Uncle Mendel?’

  ‘You’ve done well, comrade,’ Mendel said, thinking this new development through.

  Sagan, a penniless nobleman, was a slick and ambitious policeman who specialized in turning female revolutionaries. But he might well be sympathetic to the Left, because the secret police knew how rotten the regime was better than anyone. It could be a signal, a trick, a seduction, a betrayal – or just an intellectually pretentious policeman. There were a hundred ways it could play out and Sashenka understood none of them, he thought.

  ‘What if he does approach me?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you think?’ answered Mendel.

  ‘If he comes up to me in the street, I’ll tell him never to talk to me again and curse him for good measure. Is that what you want me to do?’

  Silence except for the flutter of the kerosene lamp. Mendel peered at her as intensely as a priest at an exorcism. The child he had known since her birth was an unfinished but very striking creature, he reflected, guessing that Sagan wanted to turn her into a double agent to get to Mendel himself. But there were two ways of playing this, and he could not miss a chance to destroy Sagan, whatever the cost.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said slowly.

  ‘If the committee wished it,’ she said, ‘I would kill him with Papa’s Browning – it’s in his desk – or there’s the Mauser behind the bookcase at the safehouse on Shirokaya. Let me do it!’

  ‘In the end, we’ll put them all up against the wall,’ said Mendel. ‘Now, listen to me. You might never hear from Sagan again. But if he turns up, talk to him, draw him out. He could be helpful to the Party and to me.’

  ‘What if he tries to recruit me?’

  ‘He will. Let him think that’s possible.’

  ‘What if a comrade sees me with him?’ she said anxiously.

  ‘The Inner Bureau of the Committee will be informed of this operation. Three of us – a troika – just me and two others. Are you afraid?’

  Sashenka shook her head. Her eyes were almost glowing in the dark. He could see she was scared and excited to have such a mission. ‘But I could be killed by my own comrades as a traitor?’

  ‘We’re both in danger every minute,’ he replied. ‘The very second you become a Bolshevik, your normal life is over. You walk for ever on burning coals. It’s like leaping on to a sleigh galloping so fast you can never get off. Chop wood and chips fly. We’re in a secret war, the Superlative Game, you and I. The Party against the Okhrana. You do as I tell you, nothing more, and you report every word to me. You know the codes and the drops? Be vigilant. Vigilance is a Bolshevik virtue. You’ve become an asset to the Party quicker than I could have predicted. Understand?’

  Mendel took care to moderate his voice and hoped he sounded convincing. He offered his hand and they shook. Her hand felt as silky, delicate and nervy as a little bird whose bones could be crushed with ease. ‘Goodnight, comrade.’

  Sashenka stood up and pulled on her coat, stole, boots and shapka and wrapped her head in the scarf. At the door she turned back, pale and serious.

  ‘I’d hate you to protect me because I was family.’

  ‘I never would, comrade.’

  18

  ‘See the filly over there?’ said the old
coachman in the sheepskin, his cheeks as red as rare beef.

  ‘Her again. Is she nursing a broken heart?’

  ‘Is she a working girl or planning a bank robbery?’

  ‘Perhaps she’s booked a room at the hotel?’

  ‘Is she slumming it for a lover who knows how to clean a horse’s arse? Me, for example!’

  ‘Hey, girl, have a vodka on us!’

  In the middle of St Isaac’s Square, not far from Greater Maritime Street, somewhere between the Mariinsky Palace and the cathedral, stood a flimsy wooden hut, painted black, with a tarpaulin roof so it looked like a giant one-horse cab with the hood up. Here in the bleary realm of overboiled cabbage and winter sweat, the coachmen of the one-horse cabs – the izvoshtikis – came to drink and eat in the early hours in a world beyond exhaustion.

  Sashenka, a rough karakul coat and leather cap beside her, sat on her own, and put some kopeks into the noisy automatic barrel organ. It started to play ‘Yankee Doodle’ and then some Strauss waltzes and presently ‘Yankee Doodle’ again. Lighting a cigarette, she stared through the window at the Rolls-Royces outside the Astoria Hotel, the falling snow, and the horses tapping their hooves on the ice outside, waiting patiently, their breaths and whinnies all visible in the cold.

  Two days had passed since her meeting with Mendel. At eleven that night, Lala had looked in on her in her bedroom.

  ‘Turn your lights out now, darling,’ she said. ‘You look tired.’ Lala sat on her bed and kissed her forehead as always. ‘You’ll hurt your eyes with all that reading. What are you reading about?’

  ‘Oh Lala … one day I’ll tell you,’ Sashenka said, curling up to sleep, anxious that her governess should not discover that under the bedclothes she was dressed ready to go out.

  Once she knew Lala was asleep, she crept outside, taking a tram and then an izvoshtik over to the factories on the Petrograd Side. She spent an hour at the workers’ circle at the Putilov and, together with another young intellectual, a boy from the Gymnasium, and a couple of lathe-turners, they delivered the spare parts for a printing press to a new hideout in Vyborg.

  Afterwards she had an hour to kill so she walked along the Embankment and then along the Moika over her favourite little bridge, the Bridge of Kisses, past the ochre Yusupov Palace that more than any other building represented the iniquitous wealth of the few. She came here to the coachmen’s hut because it was close to home – and yet in another dimension.

  She ordered spicy ukha fish soup, goat’s cheese, black Borodinsky bread and some tea – and sat listening to the men’s gossip. When they talked about her as a dish, a looker, she did not quite understand what they meant. She could see her reflection in the little window and felt dissatisfied as always. She preferred to picture herself out in the freeze, buried in her high-necked coat, stole and shapka.

  Cut out the vanity, Sashenka told herself. Her looks did not interest her. Like her uncle Mendel, she lived for the Revolution. Wherever she looked in the streets, she saw only those who would benefit from the beautiful march of the dialectic.

  She dipped the bread and cheese into some mustard, and spluttered as the burn raced up her nose into her sinuses. Afterwards, she nibbled at a shapeless sugarlump and reflected that she was happier now than she had ever been in her entire life.

  As a child, her parents had taken her to Turbin to visit the rabbinical court of her grandfather, Abram Barmakid, the saintly rabbi, with his beadles, disciples, students and hangers-on. She was very young and her father was not yet such a swell, and they lived in Warsaw, which was full of Hasidic Jews. But nothing had prepared Sashenka for the medieval realm of Abram Barmakid. The honest fanaticism, the rigid joy, even the guttural Yiddish language, the men with ringlets, fringed shawls and gaberdine coats, the bewigged women – all of it scared her. Even then, she had feared their medieval spells and superstitions.

  Yet she now reflected that her grandparents’ world of golems and evil eyes was no worse than the secular money-worship of her father’s marketplace. Since childhood, she had been shocked by the injustices she had seen at Zemblishino and the manor house on his vast estates on the Dnieper. The luxury and debauchery of her parents’ wretched marriage seemed to her to epitomize the rottenness of Russia and the capitalist world.

  Mendel had rescued her from all this wickedness, and had changed her life. If you love then love with verve; if you threaten mean it well, the poet Alexei Tolstoy had written. That was her: ‘All or nothing!’ She revelled in the delicious, almost amorous feeling of being part of a secret, a giant conspiracy. There was something seductive about sacrificing the old morality of the middle classes for the new morality of the Revolution. It was like sitting in this café: the very unromance of it was what made it so romantic.

  She glanced at her watch. 4.45 a.m. Time to go. She pulled on the coat and hat again, tossed down some coins. The coachmen watched, nodding at her. On the street, the draymen were delivering the milk crates, the patisserie van was loading up with freshly baked bread. Carters dragged in sacks of coal. Janitors cleaned the steps. Piter was awakening.

  The freezing air was so refreshing after the musk of the little hut that she inhaled it until it burned her lungs. How she loved Piter with its peculiar climate, almost arctic in its gummy winter blackness, but in summer, when it never grew dark, as bright as Paradise before the Fall. Its gorgeous façades in eggshell blue and ochre were magnificently imperial. But behind them were the factories, the electric trams, the yellow smoke and the crowded workers’ dormitories. The beauty that surrounded her was a lie. The truth might seem ugly but it had its beauty too. Here was the future!

  She crossed St Isaac’s Square. Even in winter, you could spot the approach of dawn because the golden dome began to shine darkly long before there was as much as a glow on the horizon. The Astoria was still feasting – she could hear the band, glimpse in the gloom the diamonds of women, the orange tips of men’s cigars. The Yacht Club was still open, troikas and limousines waiting outside for the courtiers and financiers.

  She headed down Greater Maritime. She heard the rumble of a car and sank back into a doorway, like the ghost she had described to Mendel.

  The Delaunay stopped outside her home. Pantameilion, in his long shining boots, opened the door of the car. Her mother climbed out. First one gorgeously clad foot in the softest kid boot appeared. Then a glimpse of silk stockings, then the satin dress, the sequins glittering.

  A white hand studded with rings held the car’s doorframe. Sashenka was disgusted. Here she was, coming from serving the working class; here, with perfect symmetry, came her mother, fresh from servicing the desires of some corrupt man who was not her father.

  Sashenka did not know what exactly it was that lovers did, though she knew it was like the dogs on her father’s estate – and she was repulsed – yet rapt. She watched her mother pull herself out of the car and stand swaying. Pantameilion rushed to catch her hand.

  Sashenka wanted to scratch her mother’s face and throw her to the ground where she belonged, but she stepped out of the shadows to find Pantameilion crouched on the snow, pulling at a writhing sequinned form on the pavement. It was her mother struggling to get back on her feet.

  Sashenka ran up to them. Ariadna was on all fours, her stockings torn and naked knees bleeding. She fell forward again, one gloved hand clawing at the snow, the other trying to fight off Pantameilion’s proffered arm.

  ‘Thanks, Pantameilion,’ said Sashenka. ‘Just check the doors are open. And send the watchman back to bed.’

  ‘But miss, the baroness …’

  ‘Please, Pantameilion, I’ll look after her.’

  Pantameilion’s face bore the double anguish of servants faced with the collapse of their employers – they hated the topsy-turviness of a humiliated mistress just as they feared the insecurity of a fallen master. He bowed, shuffled into the house and emerged a moment later, climbing back into the growling Delaunay and jerking it into gear.

  Mother and dau
ghter were alone in the street under the mansion’s lantern.

  Sashenka knelt beside her mother, who was weeping. Her tears ran in black streams from black eyes on dirty white skin, like muddy footprints on old snow.

  Sashenka pulled her to her feet, threw her arm over her shoulder and dragged her up the two steps into the lobby of the house. Inside, the great hall was almost dark, just an electric light burning on the first-floor landing. The giant white squares shone bright, while the black ones were like holes dropping to the middle of the earth. Somehow, she got her mother up to her room. The electric light would be too bright so she lit the oil lamps instead.

  By now, Ariadna was sobbing quietly to herself. Sashenka raised her mother’s hands to her lips and kissed them, her anger of a few moments earlier forgotten.

  ‘Mama, Mama, you’re home now. It’s me, Sashenka! I’m going to undress you and put you to bed.’ Ariadna calmed down a little, though she continued to speak slivers of nonsense as Sashenka undressed her.

  ‘Sing it again … loneliness … your lips are like stars, houses … the wine is only mediocre, a bad year … hold me again … feel so sick … pay it, I’ll pay, I can afford it … Love is God … am I home … you sound like my daughter … my vicious daughter … another glass please … kiss me properly.’

  Sashenka pulled off her mother’s boots, threw off the sable and the hat with ostrich feathers, unhooked the satin dress embroidered with sequins and misty with faded tuberose scent, untied the bodice, unrolled the shredded stockings, unclipped the brooches, the three ropes of pearls and the diamond earrings. As she pulled off the underdress and the lingerie that was inside out, she was enveloped in the animal smells and sweated alcohol of a woman of the town, aromas that repelled her. She vowed she would never let herself descend into such a state. Finally she heated water and washed her mother’s face.