Sashenka (32 page)

He thought she seemed cool and calm again, the “Soviet woman of culture” in her white dress, but then her lips, which stayed just open enough for him to catch the glint of her teeth, twitched a little as she dragged on the cigarette. Her eyes closed for a second so that her dark eyelashes fanned against her skin and those rare archipelagos of freckles. The lights caught the chestnut in her thick dark hair, and he saw that beneath all the composure she was a little breathless. He was breathless himself. Tonight it seemed the world was turning a little faster and tilting a little bit more.

The show was about to start. The lights spun and then shone onto the fountain in the middle of the room. The drums rolled. It was not Utesov’s band tonight but another jazz group with three trumpeters, a saxophonist and two doublebassists, all in black suits with white collars. New Orleans met Odessa in the strut of a louche, smoky rhythm.

Benya ordered wine and vodka and
zakuski
—caviar, herring,
pelmeni
—and then realized he had barely a kopek in his pocket. “I order, you pay,” he told her. “I’m as broke as a cockroach on Millionaya Street!”

She drank the Georgian wine, and he watched her relish its taste and then swallow it and sigh as it quenched her thirst—and even that commonplace act seemed precious. At last, he pulled her up to dance.

“Just once,” she said.

Benya knew he was good at the foxtrot and the tango, and they danced for more than one song. His body was slim and slight but he spun her around, making the steps as if he were walking on air. He suddenly felt that time was short. The circumstances that had allowed this freedom might never coincide again and he must push things as far as they could go.

So he held her against him, knowing just from her breath how exhilarated she was too.

She broke away quickly and sat down again.

“I’ve got to go now,” she said as he joined her.

“This is a night that doesn’t exist in our lives,” he whispered. “Nothing that happens tonight ever happened. Suppose we took a room?”

“Never! You’re insane!”

“But imagine what a joy it would be.”

“And how would we even book it?” she answered. “Good night, Benya.” She grabbed her bag.

“Wait.” He held her hand under the table and then, in a crazy gamble that would either ruin the night or make it, he put her hand right on his zipper.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, snatching it away.

“No,” he answered. “Look what you’re doing to me. I’m suffering.”

“I must go at once.” But she didn’t and he could see the effects of his brashness in her wide grey eyes. She was drunk, but not on the wine.

“Don’t you have a room here already, Sashenka? For your magazine?”

She blushed. “Room four hundred and three belongs to Litfond but, yes, the editors of
Soviet Wife
can use it for outoftown writers, but that would be completely out of…”

“Anyone using it now?”

Cold anger flashed in her eyes and she stood up. “You must think I’m some sort of…
bummekeh
!” She stopped and he realized she was surprised by her use of the Yiddish for a disreputable woman, a relic from her childhood.

“Not a
bummekeh
,” he answered quick as a flash, “just the most gorgeous
bubeleh
in Moscow!”

She started to laugh—no one had ever called her a babe, a little doll, before and Benya understood that they shared an oddly reassuring past in the old Jewish world of the Pale of Settlement.

“Room four hundred and three,” he said, almost to himself.

“
Bonsoir,
Benya. You’ve made me surprise even myself but enough is enough. File your article by next Monday,” and she turned and walked out of the dining room, the chrome and glass double doors swinging behind her.

12

Sashenka laughed at her own stupidity. She had pushed through the wrong doors, but after such an exit she could not go back into the dining room. Now, she sat on the scarlet stairs leading to the rear elevators of the hotel and lit up one of her own Herzegovina Flors. Her presence in this hidden space right in the heart of the hotel seemed quite appropriate. No one knew she was there.

Without really thinking, she walked into the service elevator and rode it up to the fourth floor. Like a somnambulist, she crept along the musty, humid corridors, smelling the stale whiff of chlorine, cabbage and rotting carpet even in Moscow’s smartest hotel. She was lost. She must go home. She feared there might be the usual old lady (and NKVD informant) at the desk on the fourth floor, but then she realized that by entering the back way she had missed the crone altogether.

As she reached Room 403, she heard a step behind her. It was Benya. She opened the door with the key that she held as editor of the magazine, and they almost fell into the little room that, if she analyzed it (and she would never forget these smells as long as she lived), was like a sealed capsule of mothballs and disinfectant. Inside, the room was dark, lit only by the lurid scarlet of the electric stars atop each of the eight spires of the Kremlin outside the window. They backed onto a bed that sagged in the middle, the sheets rancid with what she later identified as old sperm and alcohol in a cocktail specially mixed for Soviet hotels. She wanted to struggle, to reprimand, to complain, but he grabbed her face and kissed her so forcefully that a lick of flame burned her to the core.

His hands pulled her dress off her shoulders and he buried his face in her neck, then her hair, scooping up between her legs. He pulled down her brassiere, cupping her breasts, sighing in bliss. “The blue veins are divine,” he whispered. And in that moment, a lifetime of unease about this ugly feature of her body was replaced with satisfaction. He licked them, circling her nipples hungrily. Then he disappeared up her skirt.

She pushed him away from there, once, then twice. But he kept returning. She slapped his mouth, quite hard, but he didn’t care.

“No, no, not there, come on, no thank you, no…” She cringed, closing her eyes bashfully.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

Could that be true? Yes, he insisted and he swiped her with his tongue. No one had ever done this to her before. She shivered, barely able to control herself.

“Lovely!” he said.

She was so ashamed she actually hid her face in her hands. “Just don’t!”

“See if you can pretend it isn’t happening!” was his suggestion as he buried his face in her.

When she finally looked down, he peered back at her, laughing. I’ve got a lover, she thought, incredulous. His irrepressible carnality enthralled her. It was like the first time with her husband, her only other lover—but then it was not like that at all. In fact, she reflected,
this
is me losing my real virginity at the hands of this infernal, lovable Jewish clown who is so unlike any of the macho Bolsheviks in my life.

He’s a madman, she thought as he made love to her again. Oh my God, after twenty years of being the most rational Bolshevik woman in Moscow, this goblin has driven me crazy!

He eased out of her again, showing himself.

“Look!” he whispered and she did. Was this really her? There he was between her legs again, doing the most absurd, lovely things to places behind her knees, the muscle at the very top of her thighs, her ears, the middle of her back. But the kissing, just the kissing, was heavenly.

She lost all sense of time and place and decorum. He made her forget she was a Communist, he made her forget herself for the first time in twenty years—and at last she began to live in the luscious, invincible present.

13

All was silent. Lying on creased sheets, she opened her eyes like one who has been in a deep sleep, awakening after a flood or an earthquake. Were those Kremlin stars still outside the window or had they been swept away by their lovemaking? Reality returned to her slowly.

“Oh my God,” she said. “What have I done?”

“You loved that, didn’t you?” he said.

She shook her head, eyes closing again.

“Look at me,” he said. “Tell me how much you love it. Or I’ll never kiss you again.”

“I can’t say it.”

“Just nod.”

She nodded and felt her bruised face. She could hardly believe the intoxication of her pulsating body in that dark little room at the top of the Metropole on a night in May 1939 after the Terror was over.

Her dress and her underwear were on the floor but her bra was still on her stomach; one stocking was still in place but the other draped the lamp, casting a brassy sepia light on their limbs. Their mouths were salty and the taint of pleasure and sweat made her giddy with sheer delight.

Benya was kissing her again on the lips, then between her legs—it was so sensitive there now that she winced. He gave her a kiss on the mouth and then delicately there again. She shivered, blisters of perspiration on her rounded belly. Then she pulled Benya up and turned him over so she was on top and he was inside her again. Somehow they just slotted together. Why did she feel so at home in his arms? Why did it seem so natural?

The enormity of what had happened struck her like a blow. She had betrayed kind hearty Vanya, her husband and friend of all these years, the father of her children. She loved him still but this earthtilting fever was another love, utterly foreign, and contradictory to that cozy habitual love of home and children. Women aren’t supposed to be able to love two men at once but now I see that’s absurd, Sashenka thought. Yet a tremor of guilt slipped down her throat to her uneasy heart.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” she whispered. “I bet everyone says that to you…”

“Well, funny you should ask but according to ‘The Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery,’ it is the traditional female comment at this very moment of the first encounter.”

“And according to this…‘Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery,’ what is the correct male answer?”

“I’m meant to say, ‘Oh, I know!’ as if I believe you.”

“Which you don’t.”

“Actually, I do believe you.”

“And who is the author of this famous book of wisdom?”

“A certain B. Z. Golden,” answered Benya Golden.

“Does it say what happens next?”

He was silent, and she saw a shadow pass over his face.

“Are you afraid, Sashenka?”

She shivered. “Slightly.”

“We need never meet again,” he said.

“You don’t mean that, do you?” she asked, suddenly terrified that he might indeed mean it.

He shook his head, his eyes very close to hers. “Sashenka, I think this is the most joyful thing that has ever happened to me. I’ve had lots of girls, I sleep with lots of women…”

“Don’t boast, you filthy Galitzianer!” she scolded.

“Perhaps it’s the times. Perhaps we live everything so intensely now. But we deserve a little selfishness, don’t we?” He took her face in his hands and she was surprised how serious he became. “Do you feel anything for me?”

Sashenka pushed him away and stumbled to the window, sweat drying on her back, a pulse still beating between her legs. They were in the eaves of the old building. In the moonblanched night, she looked down at the Moskva River, the bridges, the gaudy onion domes of St. Basil’s, and into the Kremlin, sixtynine acres of ocher palaces, emerald rooftops, bloodred battlements, golden cupolas and cobbled courtyards, and saw where Comrade Stalin worked, in the triangular Sovnarkom Building with the domed green roof.

She could even see the light on in his office. Was he there now? The people thought so but she knew he was probably at Kuntsevo. He was her friend, Josef Vissarionovich…well, not quite. Comrade Stalin was beyond friendship, but the Father of Peoples—yes, her new acquaintance and sometime guest who had promoted her husband and admired her magazine—was the greatest statesman in the history of the working class. She did not doubt it, and she remained a Bolshevik to her fingertips. What had happened in this room had not changed that.

But something
had
changed. Benya was lighting a cigarette, lying stretched out on the bed.

He was watching her silently, barely breathing. The band might still have been playing downstairs, but in the room it was quiet and calm. She had everything but this in her life.

She was a Communist woman and a mother, while Benya was a blocked writer out of tune with the boldest ideals of his time, alienated from the great dialectic of history, a piece of faithless flotsam who regarded Comrade Stalin and the workers’ state with sneering zoological interest. Yet this vain, impertinent and flashy Galitzianer with his dimpled chin, his lowset brows over dancing blue eyes, his forlorn last tuft of blond hair on his balding forehead, and yes, his sex, had made her savagely happy.

He got up and stood behind her. “What is it?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her.

“I’ve done something worse than be unfaithful—something I thought I would never do.

I’ve become my mother.”

But he wasn’t listening. “You don’t even know how erotic you are,” he said, running his hands up her thighs from behind. And they started again, another shuddering tournament. When it was over, they had become creatures of the sea, their bodies as sleek and wet and lithe as leaping dolphins.

Later, she rested her elbows on the windowsill so she was looking at the Kremlin again and he touched her, from behind, with such delicate tracery, such gleeful tenderness, that she barely recognized the geography of her own body. “What a glutton you turn out to be!” he teased her. He seemed to live with joyfulness, a gaiety that dyed her monochrome world all the wild colors of the rainbow.

So
this,
she mused to herself,
this
is what all the fuss is about.

14

Her body still tingling and burning, Sashenka walked home past the Kremlin, higher and brighter than ever in the searchlights that sent strange white columns boring into the sky, across the Manege and alongside the National Hotel. When she looked back at the Kremlin, its eight red stars made her think of Benya. They were, she’d read in the newspaper, made of crystal, alexandrite, amethyst, aquamarine, topaz—and seven thousand rubies!