Sashenka (17 page)

“Oh Lala, thank God you’re here. Help us to the bedroom. Then—let me think—call the maids and Dr. Gemp.” Sashenka paused, then looked at Lala. “Where’s my father?”

25

Captain Sagan stood wearily at the window of the safe house on Gogol Street, lighting a thin cigar. It was a new year but the Russian defeats were worsening. He took a pinch of cocaine from his snuffbox and rubbed it into his gums. Instantly the blood fountained through his veins and his fatigue was transformed into a roaring optimism that galloped through his temples.

In the early hours of a January night, lanterns blinked across the Neva from the ramparts of the Peter and Paul Fortress. To his right, along the Embankment, the lights burned in the Winter Palace too, although the Tsars had not lived there since 1905. The Empress lived outside the city at Tsarskoe Selo and the Emperor at headquarters near the front. But the fortress represented the power of the autocracy: in its church lay buried Peter the Great, Catherine and their successors all the way down to the present Emperor’s father.

But it was a prison too: the freezing cells of the Trubetskoy Bastion held the anarchists, nihilists and socialists he himself had trapped.

He heard the door click. Footsteps behind him. Perhaps it was her? Or was it one of their assassins? One day, that click and this view might be the last thing his senses recorded before the shot that blew off the back of his head. It might even be her foolish finger on the trigger. But this was the Superlative Game, the risk of the life he led, the crusading work he did, his service to the Motherland. He believed in God, believed that he would go to Heaven: remove God and his son Jesus Christ and there was nothing, just chaos and sin. If he died now, he would never see his wife again. Yet it was meetings like this in the fathomless night that made his life worth living.

He did not turn round. Thrilling to the sight of the red Menshikov Palace, the fortress, the frozen river, Peter’s city, he waited. He knew it was her coming into the room behind him, sitting on the sofa. He could almost taste her.

Plainly dressed in a grey skirt and white blouse, like a virginal teacher, Sashenka was looking at a book. Sagan marveled at how she had changed since her arrest. Although her hair was pulled back into a severe bun and her drawn face bereft of any makeup, this only made those dovegrey eyes more intense, those little islands of freckles all the more exquisite. The less flirtatious she was, the more she concealed her figure, the more he looked at her when she was looking away. She seemed to him even more compelling…yes, even beautiful.

“So, Comrade Petro”—that was what she now called him—“have you got something for us or not? Is the samovar boiling? Can I have some tea?”

Sagan made the
chai
. They had met often and become quite informal. He could not know whether she was meeting him because she was beginning to like him or because the Party had ordered her to do so. We men are absurd, he thought, even as he hoped it was the former. It was fine to be attracted to her, even if she was barely a woman. But he did not need to remind himself that to become attached in any way, even fond, let alone in love, could risk not just his career but his sacred mission in life. He knew the rules. If Mendel was pulling the strings, the Bolshevik cripple would want Sagan to lust after her. This must never happen. It never would. Sagan was always in control.

“Happy New Year, Zemfira,” he said and he kissed her cheeks three times. “How was the coming of 1917 in your house?”

“Joyful. Our house was more like a sanatorium this year.”

“How’s your mother?”

“Ask your spies if you really want to know.” Accustomed to conspiracy, she seemed more confident than ever. Yet he was sure that, since Rasputin’s death, she had started to trust him, in spite of her Bolshevik vigilance. When they met the night after Rasputin’s death, she had thanked him. For a moment he even thought she might hug him in her prim comradely way, but she did not. Yet they kept meeting.

“Is the baroness’s opium working? Is she trying hypnosis? I understand it works.”

“I don’t care,” she replied. “She’s better, I think. She’s getting another dress made and grumbling about Uncle Gideon’s outrages.”

“And the divorce?”

“Papa should divorce her but I don’t think he’ll dare. She’s a lost soul. She believes in nothing but pleasure. I’m hardly at home now.” There was a pause. “The Party’s growing.

Have you noticed? Have you seen the bread lines? There are fights every day for the last loaves.”

He sighed, suddenly craving more cocaine, fighting an urge to tell her more about himself, more of what he knew. He was surprised by a wave of hopelessness that seemed to blow in from the streets of the city and sweep over him. Were Tsar, Empire and Orthodoxy already lost?

“You know the truth from your reports,” she said, leaning forward, “and I know you sympathize with us. Come on, Petro. Show me a little of yourself—or I might get bored and never meet you again. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me what your reports say.”

The perceptive grey eyes studied him unforgivingly, he thought.

He said nothing.

She raised her eyebrows and gestured with her hands. Then, jumping up, she gathered her karakul coat and
shapka
and headed for the door. She opened it.

“Wait,” he said, his head tightening like a vise. He did not want her to go. “I’ve got a headache. Let me have a toke of my tonic.”

“Go right ahead.” She watched him open his crested silver box, an heirloom set with diamonds, and, wetting his finger, take a thick layer of white power and rub it into his gums.

His arteries distended, the blood gushed once more to his temples, and he wondered if she could see the seething swell of his lips.

“Our reports,” he started to tell her, “warn the Tsar of revolution. I’ve just written one that reads:
If food supplies are not improved, it will be hard to enforce law and order on the streets of
Petrograd. The garrison remains loyal but
…Why do we bother? The new government’s a joke.

Sturmer, Trepov, now this antique Prince Golitsyn, are pygmies and crooks. Rasputin’s murder hasn’t solved anything. We need a new start. I don’t agree with everything you believe in, but some of it makes sense…”

“Interesting.” She stood right in front of him so that he thought he could smell her—was it Pears lavender soap? Her finger stroked her lips. He understood that she had grown up faster than he had realized. “We’ve been back and forth, haven’t we, Comrade Petro? But now we’re getting impatient! If you think I like meeting you, you might just be right. We might almost be friends…but are we? Some of my comrades don’t think I should see you anymore. If you really sympathize with us, there are things we need to know. ‘It’s a waste of time,’ my comrades say. ‘Sagan wouldn’t give us ice in winter.’ In any case, you know your work’s all for nothing. Your world’s about to end. You need to give us something to persuade us to spare you.”

“You’re too optimistic, Sashenka, deluded. I don’t think much of the standard of your newspapers but, between ourselves, they tell the truth about the situation in the factories and at the front. I’ve agonized about this. But I might have something for you.”

“You do?” Sashenka’s smile as she said this made it worthwhile. She tossed off her coat and sat again, still in her
shapka
.

Not for the first time, Sagan wrestled with the infinite possibilities of who was playing whom. Sashenka’s new confidence informed him that she was still telling Mendel about their meetings. Sagan was disappointed that she was not coming just out of affection—

maybe he was losing his touch—but she was surely a little fond of him? “Almost friends,”

she had said. In spite of himself, the secret policeman felt a tinge of hurt. But they talked about their families, poetry, even health.

So how much did she tell Mendel? He hoped she was keeping back their closeness, because this was how it worked: the holding back of small things led to small lies and then the holding back of larger things led to big lies—this was how he recruited his double agents. He wanted to destroy Mendel, and Sashenka was the tool to do it. Duplicity, not honesty, was his métier—but if he was honest for once, she was not only a tool. She was his delight.

“Listen carefully,” he said. “They’re planning a raid tomorrow night on your printing press down the road. You need to move it. I don’t need to know where.”

She tried to conceal her excitement from him, but the way she knitted her eyebrows to assume a military briskness made him want to laugh.

“Are you leading this raid?” she asked.

“No, it’s a Gendarmerie operation. To find out the details, I had to promise to trade some information in return.”

“That’s presumptuous, Comrade Petro.”

He flicked his wrist impatiently. “All intelligence work is a marketplace, Sashenka. This has kept me up night after night. I can’t sleep. I live on Dr. Gemp’s powder. I want to help your Party, the people, Russia, but everything inside me rebels against giving you anything. You know I’m risking all by telling you this?”

Sashenka turned to leave. “If it’s a lie, this is over and they’ll want your head. If your spooks follow me from here, we’ll never meet again. Do we understand each other?”

“And if it’s true?” he called after her.

“Then we’ll meet again very soon.”

26

A gentle sepia light shone through the clouds, reflected off the snow, and burst brighter through the curtains: the opium sailed through Ariadna’s veins. Dr. Gemp had called to give her the injection. Her head dropped onto the pillow and she drifted in and out of dreams: Rasputin and she were together in Heaven, he was kissing her forehead; the Empress was inspecting them, dressed in her grey nursing outfit. Rasputin held her hand and, for the first time in her life, she was truly happy and secure.

In her bedroom, she could hear soft voices speaking in Yiddish. Her parents were sitting with her. “Poor child,” murmured her mother. “Is she possessed by a dybbuk?”

“Everything is God’s will, even this,” replied her father. “That’s the point of free will. We can only ask for his mercy…” Ariadna could hear the creak of the leather strap as the rabbi tied his phylactery onto his arm and he switched to Hebrew. He was reciting the Eighteen Benedictions and this familiar, reassuring chant bore her like a magic carpet back in time…

A young and handsome Samuil Zeitlin was standing in the muddy lane outside the Talmudic studyhouse, near the workshop of Lazar the cobbler in the little JewishPolish town of Turbin, not far from Lublin. He was asking for her hand in marriage. She shrugged at first: he was not a Prince Dolgoruky or even a Baron Rothschild, not good enough for her

—but then who would be? Her father shouted, “The Zeitlin boy’s a heathen! He doesn’t eat or dress like one of us: does he keep kosher? Does he know the Eighteen Benedictions?

That father of his with his bow ties and holidays in Bad Ems: they’re apostates!”

Then she was circling the Jewish wedding canopy—the chuppah—seven times; Samuil was smashing a wineglass with a decisive stamp of his boot. Her new husband was borne aloft by the singing Hasids, with an expression on his face that said: I just pray I never have to see these primitive fanatics ever again—but I’ve got her! I’ve got her! Tonight I make love to the most beautiful girl in the Pale! Tomorrow, Warsaw! The day after, Odessa. And she would escape Turbin, at last, forever.

Then it was years later and she was caressing Captain Dvinsky in a suite at the Bristol in Paris, where she amazed even that connoisseur of flesh with her depravities. In a torn camisole, she was on all fours, pressing her loins down onto his face, smearing his face, revolving like a stripper, delighted by the wantonness of it, hissing swear words in Polish, obscenities in Yiddish. Even now, waves of lust, the stroking of naked men, the kisses of women, washed over her.

She sat up in bed, cold, sober. She thought she saw the Elder: yes, there was his beard and his glittering eyes at the end of the bed. “Is it you, Grigory?” she asked aloud. But then she realized that it was a combination of the curtain pelmet and a dress on a stand that somehow suggested a tall, thin man with a beard. She was alone and clearheaded suddenly.

Rasputin, who offered me a new road to happiness, is dead, she thought. Samuil, whose love and wealth were the pillars of my rickety palace, is divorcing me. Sashenka hates me

—and who can blame her? My Hasidic parents shame me and I am ashamed of my shame.

My whole life, every step of the way, has been a fiasco. My happiness has been tottering on a tightrope, only to tumble through the air. Even my pleasures are like the moment that highwire artiste starts to tremble and loses her footing…

I mocked my father’s world of holiness and superstition. Perhaps my mother was right: was I cursed since birth? I mocked Fate because I had everything. Does the Evil Eye possess me?

Ariadna lay back on the pillow, alone and adrift on the oceans like a ship without a crew.

27

Sashenka left an emergency message for Mendel at Lordkipadze, the Georgian pharmacy on Alexandrovsky Prospect, and then walked home down Nevsky. The clouds billowed into creamy cauliflowers that hung low over the city. The ice that curled from the drainpipes and the roofs was stiffening. The thermometer was sinking to minus twenty. In the workers’ districts, the sirens and whistles blared. Strikes had started to spread from factory to factory.

On Nevsky, right in the center, clerks, workers, even bourgeois housewives lined up outside the bakeries for bread. Two women rolled around in the sludge fighting for the last loaves: a working woman repeatedly hit the other in the face, and Sashenka heard the crack as her nose broke.

At Yeliseyev’s Grocery Store, where the Zeitlins ordered their food, Sashenka watched as workers burst in and grabbed cakes and fruit. The shop assistant was bludgeoned.

That night, she could not even pretend to sleep. Her head was buzzing. The anger of the streets replayed in her mind. Outside, the sirens of the Vyborg echoed across the Neva, like the calling of whales.