Sashenka (12 page)

Mother and daughter 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 firstfloor 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, 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.

Amazed at herself, she realized that she had become the mother, and the mother the child.

She folded and hung her mother’s clothes, laid her jewels in the velvet box, threw her lingerie into the laundry basket. Then she helped her mother onto the bed, under the covers and kissed her cheek. She stroked her forehead and sat with her.

“You and me…,” said Ariadna, as she fell asleep, rolling and tossing in her sad dreams.

“Sleep, Mama. There, there. It’s over.”

“Darling Sashenka, you and me…”

When Ariadna finally slept, Sashenka wept. I don’t want children, she told herself. Never!

19

Sashenka was still asleep in the chair in Ariadna’s boudoir when she heard her mother calling her: “Sashenka! I’ll take you shopping today, just as your father wanted. Chernyshev’s for your day dresses! You might even be lucky enough to have a gown from Madame Brissac like the little Grand Duchesses!”

“But I’ve got to study,” said Sashenka, stretching, and going into her mother’s bedroom.

“Don’t be foolish, my dear,” said her mother cheerfully, as if nothing shocking had happened. “Look at how you dress. Like a schoolteacher!”

Ariadna was having breakfast off a tray on her bed, and the room smelled of coffee, toast, caviar and poached eggs. “We’ve become firm friends, haven’t we,
sladkaya
—my sweetie?”

As Leonid finished serving and left the room, Ariadna winked at Sashenka, who asked herself how her mother could possibly have recovered so absolutely, so shamelessly, from the night’s indulgences. The dissipated require constitutions of steel, she thought.

“I’m not sure I can come.”

“We leave at eleven. Lala’s drawing you a bath.” Sashenka decided to acquiesce. Her days were interminably boring anyway. She lived for the dark hours.

An hour later, the twotone coffeehued Benz, the third family car, piloted by Pantameilion sporting what Sashenka privately called his “bandmaster’s garb,” delivered them before the famous windows of mannequins in hats, toques and ball dresses: the Chernyshev couture atelier on the corner of Greater Maritime and Nevsky.

The doors of the fashion emporium were opened by flunkeys in green frock coats. Inside, women wearing white gloves, hats like fruit bowls and tightwaisted dresses, pleated and whaleboned, tried on racks of dresses. The air was dense with perfume and the scent of warm bodies.

Ariadna commandeered the entire right side of the shop, much to Sashenka’s embarrassment. A smiling fever of submissive enthusiasm attended Ariadna’s every whim. At first Sashenka thought the staff were cringing like her at her mother’s brashness but then she realized that the atmosphere reflected the jubilation felt in all luxury shops at the arrival of a very rich client with little taste and less restraint.

A stick insect in a red gown speaking poor French presided over this jamboree, barking orders. The assistants were almost too assiduous: weren’t they smirking a little? Models (who, Sashenka thought, wore far too much foundation) walked up and down in dresses that did not interest her. Her mother pointed at this one or that one, in brocade or lace, with flounces or sequins, and even made her try on a couple. Lala, who accompanied mother and daughter, helped Sashenka into the dresses.

Sashenka had decided to enjoy the trip in order to avoid a quarrel with her mother. But the dressing and undressing, the pulling and pushing, the staring and poking by the skinny nonFrenchwoman, who whipped pins in and out of the fabric with invisible speed, began to rile her. She hated the way she looked in every dress and found herself becoming angry and upset.

“I’m so ugly, Lala, in this. I refuse to wear it! I’d burn it!” Her mother, in her velvet skirt and furcollar bolero jacket, was a gorgeous swan while Sashenka felt lumpier and fatter than a warthog. She could not bear to look in the mirrors again.

“But Mademoiselle Zeitlin has such a perfect figure for the latest fashions,” said the couturier.

“I want to go home!”

“Poor Sashenka’s tired, aren’t you, darling?” Another wink. “You don’t have to have everything but there were some you liked, weren’t there, sweetie?”

Feeling somewhat sheepish at this, Sashenka nodded.

A wave of relief now passed over the staff. Glasses of Tokai were brought for Baroness Zeitlin, who threw her head back and laughed too loudly, paying in big green notes, and then the satisfied assistants helped the ladies rearrange their furs. Pantameilion followed them out of Chernyshev’s, carrying their purchases in bulging bags, which he quickly stowed in the trunk.

“There!” said Ariadna, settling herself in the car. “Now you have some grownup dresses at last.”

“But Mama,” replied Sashenka, sickened by the expense and surprised such shops were still open in wartime, “I don’t lead that life. I just wanted something simple. I don’t need ball dresses and tea dresses and day dresses.”

“Oh yes you do,” answered Lala.

“I sometimes change six times in a day,” declared Ariadna. “I wear a day dress in the morning. Then a tea dress and then today I’m going to call on the Lorises in my new chiffon dress with brocade, and then tonight…”

Sashenka could hardly bear to think of her mother at night.

“We women have got to make an effort to find husbands,” explained Ariadna.

“Where to, Baroness?” asked Pantameilion through the speaking tube.

“To the English Shop, Sashenka’s favorite,” answered Ariadna.

Inside the shop, behind the windows that displayed Penhaligon’s bath oils and perfumes, Pears soaps and Fortnum’s Gentleman’s Relish and Cooper’s jams, the women bought a ginger cake and cookies while still lecturing Sashenka about the need for dresses.

“Hello, Sashenka! Is it you? Yes, it is!” Some young students in uniformed greatcoats and caps were lingering outside Chernyshev’s, smirking and pushing against one another.

“Naughty Sashenka! We heard about your scrape with the gendarmes!” they called.

Sashenka noticed that the “aesthetes” wore berets, the “dandies” peaked caps. One of the aesthetes, who was heir to some magnate or other, had written her love poems. Sashenka smiled thinly and walked on ahead of her mother and Lala.

“Mademoiselle, what a pleasure to meet again!”

For a moment Sashenka froze, but then her senses returned as Captain Sagan walked briskly through the lurking students. He wore a tweed coat, a tartan tie and a derby hat, all probably bought at the English Shop. He bowed, with a slight smile, raised the derby and kissed her hand.

“I was buying some cufflinks,” he said. “Why is everyone so keen on English style? Why not Scottish or Welsh or even Indian? They’re our allies too.”

Sashenka shook her head and tried to remember what Mendel had ordered her to do. Her heart was thumping in the rhythm of a speeding train. This is it, Comrade Mendel! she told herself.

“I’m sure you never want to see me again, but there’s Mayakovsky to discuss, and remember we never got to Akhmatova? I must rush. I hope I haven’t…embarrassed you.”

“You’ve a hell of a nerve!” she exclaimed.

He raised his derby, and she could not help but notice that he wore his hair long, more like an actor than a policeman.

Sagan waved at a waiting sleigh that slid forward with its bells ringing and carried him off down Nevsky.

Ariadna and Lala caught up with her.

“Sashenka!” said her mother. “Who was that? You could have been a little more friendly.”

But Sashenka now felt invincible, however many silly dresses they had made her try on.

She adored the secret nocturnal work of a Bolshevik activist. Now, she thought, I’ll be a real asset to the Party. The house was watched. Sagan must have guessed that they would visit the English Shop, where he would stand out less than at Chernyshev’s. He had spoken to her out of earshot of her mother and governess because he wanted her to know that he had his eye on her. She could not wait to tell Mendel.

On the way home, Ariadna squeezed her daughter’s cheek.

“Sashenka and I are going to be firm friends, firm friends, aren’t we, darling?” her mother kept saying.

Sitting on the tan leather between Ariadna and Lala, Sashenka remembered that in the past, whenever she had run to her mother for a cuddle, Ariadna had withdrawn from her, saying, “Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Lewis, this is a new dress from Madame Brissac and the child’s got a dirty mouth…”

Last night she had finally got her hug but now she no longer wanted it.

When they reached home, Ariadna took Sashenka’s hand and coaxed her upstairs into her boudoir.

“Come out with me tonight in a new dress that shows off your figure!” she whispered huskily, sniffing the tuberose on her wrist. “After last night, when I saw you coming home late, I know about your secret lover! I won’t tell Papa but we can go out together. I thought you were such a prig, dear Sashenka, never smiling—no wonder you had no suitors—but I was wrong, wasn’t I? Creeping home in the early hours like a pussycat! Who was the tomcat? That tweed suit and derby we saw just now? We’ll wear our gorgeous new gowns and people will think we’re sisters. You and me, we’re just the same…”

But Sashenka had to deliver a Party rubber stamp and the receipt book for contributions.

At the safe house, she would meet the comrades and boil the gelatin used to print the leaflets on the hectograph.

Before all those duties, she had to contact Mendel and tell him about her meeting with Sagan.

She longed for the mysteries of the night like the embrace of a lover.

20

Sashenka left the house at 1:00 a.m. Noting the two spooks on the street, she walked up to Nevsky Prospect and into the Europa Hotel. From the lobby she took the service elevator down to the basement, walked through the kitchens, where bloodyaproned porters with shaggy beards were delivering eggs, cabbages and the pink carcasses of pigs and lambs, and out into the street again, where she hailed a troika and left a coded note for Mendel at the Georgian pharmacy on Alexandrovsky Prospect.

At the coachmen’s café outside the Finland Station, she was eating a lukewarm pirozhki and listening to “Yankee Doodle” on the barrel organ for the third time when a young man slipped into the seat opposite her. He was older, but they shared the grey fatigue of the night dweller and the radiant conviction of the revolutionary.

“Cccollect the bbbulldog from the comrade at the Horse Guards,” stuttered the student, who had little hazel eyes, thick steelrimmed spectacles and a leather worker’s cap on a peculiarly square head. This was Comrade Molotov, Sashenka realized, and he was twentysix years old. He, Comrade Mendel and Comrade Shlyapnikov were the last Bolshevik leaders at liberty in the whole Empire. When he took off his leather coat, he wore a short jacket and stiff collar like a clerk. Without his cap, his forehead bulged unnaturally.

“Ask for Cccomrade Palitsyn. Anything to report?”

She shook her head.

“Gggood luck, comrade.” Comrade Molotov was gone. Sashenka felt a thrill run down her spine.

At the Horse Guards, the concierge Verezin let her in again.

“What happened to the sable? And the Arctic fox?” he asked.

“Attracted too much attention,” she said. “Is someone here for me?”

Comrade Ivan Palitsyn sat waiting beside some bottles at the round table by the stove. He stood up when she entered.

“I’m Comrade Vanya,” he said. “I know you. I saw you talk to the workers’ circle at the Putilov Works.” He offered a big red hand.

“I remember you,” she said. “You were the only one who asked a question. I was very nervous.”

“No wonder,” said Vanya, “a girl and an intellectual among us lot. You spoke passionately and we appreciated a girl like you coming to help us.”

Sashenka knew what he meant by “a girl like you” and it touched a nerve. He must have noticed because he added gently, “We come from such different worlds, but you tell me what you know, and I’ll share what I know.”

She was grateful. Shaggy haired and six feet tall with the cheekbones and slanting eyes of his Tatar forefathers, Vanya Palitsyn personified the pure Russian brawn of peasant stock and the plainspoken, practical fervor of the worker. She knew that, unlike Mendel or Molotov, he was the real thing, one who had toiled in the Putilov Works since he was eight, and he talked in the argot of a proletarian. This, thought Sashenka, is the hero for whom Marx had created his vision and for whom she had joined the movement.