Sashenka (23 page)

Sashenka, I want to tell you something that will surprise you. My world—everything I cherished—has vanished in a night.”

“That’s not what you told me would happen.”

“I’m in your hands. You can turn me in. I was a believer in the Empire. And yet I told you the truth about myself.”

He took a bottle of Armenian brandy, cheap
chacha
, and poured out two shots, handing one to Sashenka. He downed his. She took off her coat and hat.

“Why are you here?” he asked. “I’d have thought you’d be celebrating.”

“I was. And then something terrible happened. I was going to the Taurida Palace but when I passed the guardhouse at the barracks I knocked on the door. It was open. The doorman—remember the doorman, Verezin?—was lying dead on the floor, shot in the head. And then I went into the Soviet and met my comrades.”

“You’d told them he was a traitor?”

She nodded.

“And you were surprised that he was dead?”

“No, I wasn’t surprised. A bit shocked, I suppose. But that’s revolution for you. When you chop wood, chips fly.”

“But you said something terrible had happened?”

“My mother shot herself.”

Sagan was aghast. “I’m so sorry, Sashenka. Is she dead?”

“No, she is just about alive. She shot herself in the chest. Apparently, beautiful women tend to avoid their faces. She found my Mauser, the Party’s Mauser, under my mattress.

How did she know it was there? How could she have found it? The doctors are there now.” Sashenka paused, struggling to control her breathing. “I should have gone to the newspaper but instead I found myself here. Because it was here…with you…that we talked so much about her. I hated her. I never told her how much…”

She started to cry and Sagan put his arms around her. His hair smelled of smoke, his neck almost tasted of cognac, yet she found that just telling Sagan about her mother had calmed her. His hug restored her and, ironically, gave her the strength to pull away.

“Sashenka,” he said, his hands squeezing her shoulders, “I have something to tell you. I was doing my job but I never told you how much I came to…be fond of you. I have no one else. I…”

She went cold suddenly.

“You’re so much younger than me but I think I love you.”

Sashenka stepped backward. She knew she had needed him, but not as the man who had kissed her in the snowfields, more as a confidant. Now his need for her, his stench of desperation, repelled her, and this specter of the fallen regime was frightening her. She wanted to be away from him.

“You can’t just leave me like that,” he cried, “after what I just told you.”

“I never asked for this, never.”

“You can’t leave…”

“I’ve got to go,” she said and, sensing a change in him, rushed for the door. He was right behind her.

He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back to the sofa, where she had sat so many nights talking of poetry and parents.

She punched his jaw. “Let me go!” she screamed. “What are you doing?”

But he seized her hands and pushed her down, his long thin face terrifyingly close, pouring sweat and dribbling saliva as he struggled with her. He thrust his other hand up her skirt, tearing her stockings, driving up between her thighs. Then he turned to her chest, ripping the buttons off her blouse, rending her undergarments and clawing at her breasts.

She twisted sharply, freed her hands and smacked him in the nose. His blood burst all over her face but his weight held her down. Then she pulled the Walther out of his holster and slammed it sideways into his face. She felt the steel connect with teeth, bone and flesh, and more blood oozed over her fingers.

He rolled off her, and she was on her feet and racing for the door. As she wrenched it open, she glimpsed him curled like a child on the sofa, sobbing.

Sashenka did not stop until she was downstairs and out of the building. She hurtled into a cellar bar full of drunken soldiers but they were shocked by the sight of her and, seizing their bayoneted rifles, offered their help in killing anyone who had laid a finger on her. In the bathroom she washed the blood off her face and buttoned her blouse. The metallic taste of Sagan’s blood was in her mouth, nose, everywhere, and she tried to wash it away but the smell made her gag, and she vomited. When she came out, she took a vodka from one of the soldiers and drank it down. It cleansed her a little, and gradually she felt calmer.

Outside, the streets were still heaving. She heard a burst of shooting on Nevsky. They were lynching pickpockets, and there were drunken gangs of deserters and bandits on the loose. She sensed that Sagan would want to get away from the apartment, so she hid in a doorway and watched the exit from the building. Her head was throbbing, and the lingering taste of his blood made her retch again. Her body was shaking. This had all been for the Party, and now it was over. She told herself that she should feel a sense of triumph—

for she had won the Superlative Game, Sagan and his masters were finished, and his attack on her reflected his humiliation. Yet all she could feel was a corrosive shame and a savage fury. She imagined returning with her Party pistol and shooting him as a police spy, but instead, fumbling, she lit up a Crocodile.

About half an hour later, Sagan came out into the street and, in the queer purple light of night, she saw his swollen, bleeding face, his broken gait, how diminished he was. He was just a crooked, lanky figure hunched beneath a high astrakhan hat, his uniform covered by a khaki greatcoat. The streets were seething with huddled men, armed with Berdanas and Mausers, staggering in padded coats. The night was balanced on that thin spine between chanting jubilation and growing ugliness. Sagan headed down Gogol, through the small streets, and across Nevsky. She followed and saw the workers surround him outside the Kazan Cathedral. Perhaps they’d give him a good beating and punish him for hurting her, she thought, but they let him through. Then he tripped on a paving stone and they saw his uniform.

“A gendarme! A pharaoh! Let’s arrest him! Scum! Bastard! We’ll take him to the Soviet!

We’ll throw him in the bastion! Here, take this on the smiler, you weasel!” They surrounded him, but he must have drawn his pistol. He got off a shot—there it was, that popping sound again. Then they were kicking at a bundle on the ground, jeering, shouting and raising their rifle butts and bayonets. Breathing raggedly, Sashenka watched it all happen too fast for her really to understand.

Somewhere inside the cacophony of blows and cries, she heard his voice and then the squealing of an animal in pain. The moist thudding of the rifle butts told the rest. Through the workers’ boots and the skirts of their greatcoats, she could see blood glistening on the dark uniform.

She did not see the metamorphosis of a man into a smeared heap on the street—and when it was over, there was a hush after the frenzy, as the crowd cleared their throats, straightened their clothes and then shuffled away. She did not wait any longer. She had seen the power of the people in action—the judgment of history.

Yet she no longer felt as if she had won. A wave of sadness and guilt overwhelmed her, as if her curse had visited this horror upon him. The dead body of Verezin, and now this. Yet
this
was what she had craved and she must welcome it: the Revolution was a noble master. Many would die in the struggle, she thought—and yet the destruction of a man was a terrible thing.

She found herself leaning on a statue outside the Kazan as tears ran down her face. It was an end but not the one she had wanted. She wished she had never known Sagan and she wished too that he had walked on down that street to a safe exile, far away.

36

A husky drawl broke the sepulchral hush of the sickroom.

“What’s in the newspaper?” Ariadna asked.

The familiar voice shocked Sashenka. Her mother had not spoken for days. She had just slept, her breathing labored, the infection flourishing in her chest so that it seemed she would never wake again. Sashenka had been reading
Pravda
, the Party newspaper, when Ariadna stirred. She spoke so clearly that Sashenka dropped the paper, scattering its pages onto the carpet.

“Mama, you gave me a shock!”

“I’m not dead yet, darling…or am I? It stinks in here. I can hardly breathe. What does that newspaper say?”

Sashenka picked up the pages. “Uncle Mendel’s on the Party’s Central Committee. Lenin’s returning any day.” Sashenka looked up to find her mother’s velvety eyes resting on her with an astonishing warmth. It surprised and then embarrassed her.

“When I finally went to your room…,” Ariadna began, and Sashenka strained to understand.

“Mama, you look better.” It was a lie but who tells the truth to the dying? Sashenka wanted to soothe her mother. “You’re getting better. Mama, how do you feel?”

“I feel…” She squeezed her daughter’s hand. Sashenka squeezed back. The eyes dimmed again.

“I long to ask you one question, Mama. Why did you…? Mama?”

At that moment Dr. Gemp, a plump, worldly man with a shiny pink pate and the theatrical air often associated with society doctors, entered the room.

“Did your mother wake up then? What did she say?” he asked. “Ariadna, are you in pain?”

Sashenka watched him lean over her mother, bathing her forehead and neck with a cold compress. He unraveled the dressing on her chest and inspected, cleaned and dabbed the wound, which looked like a congealed fist of blood.

Her father appeared beside her, also leaning over the sickbed. He looked terrible, his collar filthy and the beginnings of a prickly grey beard on his cheeks. He reminded Sashenka of an old Jew from the Pale.

“Is she coming round? Ariadna? Speak to me! I love you, Ariadna!” said Zeitlin. Ariadna opened her eyes. “Ariadna! Why did you harm yourself? Why?”

Behind him stood Ariadna’s parents, Miriam, her small, dry face pointed like that of a field mouse, and the Rabbi of Turbin, with gabardine coat and skullcap, his face framed by his prophetic beard and whimsical ringlets.

“Darling Silberkind,” said Miriam in her strong PolishYiddish accent, taking Sashenka’s hands and kissing her shoulder tenderly. But Sashenka sensed how out of place the old couple felt in Ariadna’s room. They had been in there before, yet they peered, like paupers, at the pearls, gowns, tarot cards and potions. For them this was the Temple of the Golden Calf and the very ruin of their dreams as parents.

Dr. Gemp, who specialized in the secret tragedies—abortions, suicides and addictions—of Grand Dukes and counts, stared at the old Jews as if they were lepers, but managed to finish dressing Ariadna’s wound.

Ariadna pointed at her parents. “Are you from Turbin?” she asked them. “I was born in Turbin. Samuil, you must shave…”

Hours, nights, days passed. Sashenka lost track of time as she sat by the bed. Ariadna’s breathing was hoarse and labored, like an old pair of bellows. Her face was grey and sallow and sunken. She had become old, tiny and collapsed. Her jaw hung open, and her chest creaked up and down, catching on clots of phlegm in her lungs so that her breath rattled and crackled. There was no beauty or vivacity left, just this shivering, quivering animal that had once been a vibrant woman, a mother, Sashenka’s mother.

Sometimes Ariadna struggled to breathe and began to panic. Sweat poured off her, soaking the sheets, and she clawed the bed. Then Sashenka would stand up and take her hand.

All of a sudden, there was so much she wanted to say to her mother: she wanted to love her, wanted to be loved by her. Was it too late?

“Mama, I’m here with you, it’s me, Sashenka! I love you, Mama!” Did she love her? She was not sure, but her voice was saying these things.

Dr. Gemp came again. He pulled Zeitlin and Sashenka aside.

“Don’t raise your hopes, Samuil,” said the doctor.

“But she wakes up sometimes! She talks…,” said Zeitlin.

“The wound’s infected and the infection has spread.”

“She could recover, she could…,” insisted Sashenka.

“Perhaps, mademoiselle,” replied Dr. Gemp smoothly, as a maid handed him his black cape and fedora. “Perhaps in the land of miracles.”

37

“Would you like me to read something to you?” Ariadna heard her daughter ask the next morning.

“No need,” she replied, “because I can come and read it myself.” Another Ariadna rose up from the Ariadna on the bed and hovered over Sashenka’s shoulder. She looked down and barely recognized the waxy creature with a dressing on her chest, breathing fast like a sick dog. Her hair was lank and greasy but she did not demand that Luda bring the curling tongs—so she
must
be dying. Ariadna wondered if she had always been cursed by the Evil Eye or infested by a dybbuk, or whether she had brought all her troubles upon herself.

She spun away from reality into wondrous dreams. She flew gracefully around the room.

What visions she had! She and Samuil were together in a garden with tinkling fountains and luscious peaches. Were they in the Garden of Eden? No, the forests were slim silver birches: these were Zeitlin’s forests, soon to be the butts of rifles in the dead hands of Russian solders. The trees became ballerinas in tutus, then stark naked.

She opened her eyes. She was in her room again. Sashenka was sleeping on the divan. It was night. The room was softly lit by a lamp, not electric light. Samuil and two old Jews, a man and a woman, were talking quietly.

“I’ve lost myself, Rabbi,” said Samuil in Yiddish. “I no longer know who I am. I’m not a Jew, not a Russian. I have long ago ceased to be a good husband or a good father. What should I do? Should I wear phylacteries and pray as a religious Jew, or should I become a socialist? I thought I had my life in order and now…”

“You’re just a man, Samuil,” answered the bearded sage.

Ariadna knew that voice: it was her father. What a fine voice, so deep and kind. Would he curse Samuil and call him a heathen? she wondered.

“You’ve done bad things and good things. Like all of us,” her father said.

“So what should I do?”

“Do good. Do nothing bad.”

“It sounds simple.”

“It’s very hard but it is a great thing. Don’t harm yourself or others. Love your family. Ask for God’s mercy.”