Sashenka (18 page)

She rose from her bed, and in the early hours Comrade Molotov met her at the coachmen’s café outside the Finland Station.

“Comrade Mendel is busy now. He sent me.” Molotov was humorless and stern but also meticulous and he listened carefully to Sashenka’s tipoff.

“Your sssource is rreliable?” Molotov stammered, his forehead bulging.

“I think so.”

“Thank you, cccomrade. I’ll get to work.”

At dawn, Comrades Vanya and Satinov were already dismantling the printing press.

Sashenka and other comrades removed the parts in beer barrels, milk churns, coal sacks.

The bulky press itself was placed in a coffin, collected by a stolen undertaker’s hearse and accompanied by a carriage of weeping (Bolshevik) relatives in black to the new site in Vyborg.

At dusk the following afternoon, Mendel and Sashenka climbed the stairs of an office building down the street from the printing press. For Mendel, every step was an effort as he dragged his reinforced boot behind him.

They came out on the roof and Sashenka gave Mendel one of her Crocodile cigarettes, its gold tip incongruous beside his worker’s cap and rough leather coat. Together, they watched as three carriages of greyclad police and two carloads of gendarmes pulled up outside the cellar and broke down the door.

“Good work, Comrade Snowfox,” said Mendel. “You were right.”

She flushed with pride. She really was an asset to the Party, not the spoiled child of the degenerate classes.

“Do I continue to meet Sagan?”

Mendel’s eyes, magnified by his bottleglass lenses, pivoted toward her. “I suppose he’s in love with you.”

She laughed and shook her head simultaneously. “With me? You must be joking. No one looks at
me
like that. Sagan talks mostly about poetry. He really knows his stuff. He was helpful about Mama but he’s very proper. And I’m a Bolshevik, comrade, I don’t flirt.”

“Fucking poetry! Don’t be naïve, girl. So he
lusts
after you!”

“No! Certainly not!” She blushed with confusion. “But he sympathizes with us. That’s why he tipped us off.”

“They always say that. Sometimes it’s even true. But don’t trust any of his
shtik
.” Mendel often used the Yiddish of his childhood. While Ariadna had completely lost the accent, Sashenka noticed that Mendel still spoke Russian with a strong PolishJewish intonation.

“If you’re right about his immorality, comrade, I don’t think I should meet Sagan again.

He sent me a note this morning, inviting me to take a sleigh ride with him in the countryside. I said no of course and now I certainly shan’t meet him.”

“Don’t be such a
schlamazel
, Sashenka,” he replied. “You don’t know what’s best here, girl.

Beware bourgeois morality. We’ll decide what’s immoral and what isn’t. If the Party asks you to cover yourself in shit, you do it! If he desires you, so much the better.”

Sashenka felt even more flustered. “You mean…”

“Go on the sleigh ride,” he boomed, exasperated. “Meet the scum as often as it takes.”

“But he needs something to show for it too.”

“We’ll give him a morsel or two. But in return, we want a gold nugget. Get me the name of the traitor who betrayed the press in the first place. Without that name, this operation is a failure. The Party will be disappointed. Be vigilant.
Tak!
That’s it.” Mendel’s face was livid with the cold. “Let’s go down before we freeze. How’s your mother coping with the divorce?”

“I never see her. Dr. Gemp says she’s hysterical
and
melancholic. She’s on chloral, bromine, opium. Father wants her to try hypnotism.”

“Is he going to marry Mrs. Lewis?”

“What?” Sashenka felt this like a punch in the belly. Her father and Lala? What was he talking about? But Mendel was already on his way downstairs.

The factory whistles started up again across the city, yet the black slate of the rooftops revealed none of the seething furies beneath. The world really was going mad, she thought.

28

The next day was warmer. The sun and the moon watched each other suspiciously across a milky sky. The sparse clouds resembled two sheep and a ram, horns and all, on a snowy field. The factories were on strike.

As she took the streetcar to the Finland Station, Sashenka saw crowds crossing the bridges from the factories, demonstrating for bread for the third day running. The demonstration had started on Thursday, International Women’s Day, and grown since then.

“Arise, you starvelings, from your slumbers!” the crowds chanted, waving their red banners. “Down with autocracy! Give us bread and peace!”

The Cossacks tried to turn them back at the Alexander Bridge but tens of thousands marched anyway. Sashenka saw women in peasant shawls smash the windows of the English Shop and help themselves to food: “Our men are dying at the front! Give us bread!

Our children are starving!” There were urchins on the streets now, creatures with the bodies of children but with swollen bellies and the faces of old monkeys. One sat on the street corner singing and playing his concertina:

Here I am abandoned, an orphan, with no one to look after me,
And I will die before long and there’ll be no one to pray at my grave,
Only the nightingale will sing sometimes on the nearest tree.

Sashenka gave the boy some money and a Red pamphlet: “After the Revolution,” she told him, “you’ll have bread; you’ll be the masters; read Marx and you’ll understand. Start with
Das Kapital
and then—” But the boy had scampered off.

Sashenka had no special orders from the Party. At first light, she’d checked with Shlyapnikov at the Shirokaya safe house. “The demonstrations are a waste of time, comrade,” he insisted. “Don’t squander any of our leaflets. This’ll lead to naught like all the other riots.”

On Friday, a police officer had been killed by the workers on the bridge—and a mob had broken into Filippov’s, the patisserie where Delphine the cook bought Baron Zeitlin’s millefeuille.

Now the authorities were striking back. The city was filled with Cossacks and soldiers, and it seemed to Sashenka like an armed camp. Every side street, every bridge was guarded by machinegun nests and armored cars; squadrons of horsemen massed on the squares; horse manure steamed on the snow.

The theaters were still playing and Ariadna was so improved that she and Zeitlin were off to the Alexandrinsky to see Lermontov’s
Masquerade
, a most avantgarde production. The Donan and the Contant were still crowded, and the orchestras played waltzes and tangos at the Europa and Astoria hotels.

Sashenka was meeting Sagan. She hurried first to the safe house at 153 Nevsky but Mendel, who was with Shlyapnikov and Molotov, ordered her to calm down. “Give these workers a few shots over their heads and a loaf of bread and the movement will be gone.”

The others agreed. Perhaps they were right, Sashenka thought uncertainly.

At the Finland Station, Sashenka checked her police tails out of habit. There was one spook who fitted the bill but she lost him easily before she caught the train, traveling third class.

In the cold, the steam seemed to wheeze out of the train, whirling around it like a wizard’s spell.

She had arranged to meet Sagan at Beloostrov, the small town nearest the Finnish border.

When she arrived—the only passenger to leave the carriage—Sagan was waiting in a troika, a sleigh with three horses, smoking a cigar, shrouded in furs. She climbed in and he covered their laps with the fur blanket. The coachman spat out a spinning green gobbet of phlegm, cracked his whip and they were off. Sashenka remembered such trips with Lala in the family sleigh with its ivory fittings, the family crest on the doors, the sable rug. Now this flimsy sleigh, creaking and clattering, flew over the fields, the coachman in his sheepskin and fur hood leaning to one side, drunkenly flicking his whip over the mangy rumps of the skinny piebalds. Every now and then he talked to the horses or his passengers but it was hard to hear him over the swish of the sleigh and the thud of the hooves.

“Giddyup…Oats…prices rising…Oats…”

“Shouldn’t you be in Piter fighting the wicked pharaohs?” Sagan asked her.

“The workers are just hungry, not rebels at all. Aren’t you worried though?”

He shook his head. “There’ll be riots but nothing more.”

“The Party agrees with you.” She peered up into Sagan’s face. He looked exhausted and anxious—the strain of his double life and miserable marriage, the headaches and insomnia, the rising turbulence in the city, all seemed to be catching up with him. She shook her head at Mendel’s accusations. How could he know what Sagan felt when he had never met him and certainly never seen them together? No, Sagan had become a sort of friend—

he alone understood the pain of having a mother like Ariadna. She felt that he liked her too, for her own sake, but
not
like
that!
Not at all! Sagan was not even suited to police work. He was much more like a vague poet than a frightening policeman with his feathery blond hair that he wore much too long—and yet it suited him. They were enemies in many ways, she knew that, but their understanding was based on mutual respect and shared ideas and tastes. She had a serious mission and when it was over they might never see each other again. But she was glad Mendel had ordered her to see Sagan again. Very glad.

She had family news to tell him and who else could she confide in?

“Something has happened at home,” she began. There was no harm in recounting harmless gossip. “Mrs. Lewis! My Lala! Mendel has a spy in the Donan. That’s how I discovered. When I confronted Papa, he blushed and denied it and looked away and then finally admitted that he had considered marrying her for
me,
to make me a happier home. As if that would make the slightest difference to my life! But now he says he’s not going to divorce Mama. She’s too fragile. I asked Lala and she hugged me and told me she refused him on the spot. They’re all such children, Comrade Petro. Their world’s about to end, the inevitable dialectic’s about to crush them and they’re still playing like that orchestra on the
Titanic
.”

“Are you hurt?” he asked, leaning toward her. She noticed his blond mustache was cut just like her father’s.

“Of course not,” she answered huskily, “but I never thought of Lala like that!”

“Governesses are prone to it. I had my first love affair with my sister’s governess,” said Sagan.

“Did you?” She was suddenly disappointed in him. “And how’s your wife?”

He shook his head. “I’m spiritually absent from my home. I come and go like a ghost. I find myself doubting everything I once believed in.”

“Lala was my confidante. Who do you talk to?”

“No one. Not my wife. Sometimes I think, well, maybe
you’re
the only person I can be myself with because we’re half strangers, half friends, don’t you see?”

Sashenka smiled. “What a pair we are!” She closed her eyes and let the wind with its refreshing droplets of snow sprinkle her face.

“There!” shouted Sagan. He pointed at an inn just ahead.

“Right, master,” cried the sleigh driver and whipped the horses.

“We’re almost there,” Sagan said, touching her arm.

A tiny wooden cottage, with colorful wooden carvings hanging from its roof, stood all alone in the middle of the snowfields with only a few birches on either side like bodyguards. Sashenka thought the place belonged in a Snow Queen fairy tale.

The sleigh swished to a stop, the horses’ nostrils flared and steaming in the cold. The wooden door opened, and a fat peasant with a jetblack beard came out in a bearskin caftan and soft boots to hand her down from the sleigh.

Inside, the “inn” was more like a peasant
izba
. The “restaurant” was a single room with a traditional Russian stove, on top of which a very old man with a shaggy white beard lay full length, snoring noisily in his socks. Inside the halfopen stove, Sashenka saw game sizzling on a spit. The blackbearded peasant showed them to a rough wooden table and thrust a generous shot of
chacha
into their hands.

“To a strange pair!” said Sagan and they drank. She had never been out for a meal with a man before. The
chacha
burned in Sashenka’s belly like a redhot bullet, and this unlikely idyll—the open fire, the sleeping old man and the aromatic game in the stove—softened her concentration. She imagined that they were the only people alive in the whole of the frozen north. Then she mentally shook herself, to keep her wits about her. Joking with Sagan, whom he seemed to know, the peasant served them roast goose in a pipinghot casserole, so well done that the fat and flesh almost dripped off the bones to flavor a mouthwatering beet, garlic and potato broth. They so enjoyed the food that they almost forgot the Revolution, and just made small talk. There was no dessert, and the old man never awoke. Eventually they left, very satisfied, after another
chacha
.

“Your tip checked out, Petro,” said Sashenka as the sleigh sped over the featureless snowfields.

“It was hard to give you that.”

“But it wasn’t enough. We want the name of the man who betrayed us.”

“I might get it for you. But if we’re going to keep meeting, I need to show my superiors something…”

She let the silence develop as she prepared herself, excited by the danger of their game.

“All right,” she said. “There is something. Gurstein escaped from exile.”

“We know that.”

“He’s in Piter.”

“That we guessed.”

“Well, do you want to find him?”

He nodded.

“Try the Kiev boardinghouse, room twelve.” This was the response she’d rehearsed with Mendel, who had warned her that she would have to trade some information of her own.

Gurstein was apparently expendable.

Sagan did not seem impressed. “He’s a Menshevik, Sashenka. I want a Bolshevik.”

“Gurstein escaped with Senka Shashian from Baku.”

“The insane brigand who robbed banks for Stalin?”

“He’s in room thirteen. You owe
me,
Comrade Petro. If this was known, the Party’d kill me by morning. Now give me the name of the traitor who betrayed the printing press.”