Sashenka (34 page)

The doctors said he had also been beaten every day by Khanchuk. The teachers are savage degenerates who sexually abuse the children and treat them as slaves. The little ones are terrorized by gangs of damaged older children. It is one of the most horrifying places I’ve ever seen.”

“But it’s run by the NKVD…for the Party, and they care about reforging the children.

Comrade Stalin said—”

“No! You don’t understand!” He was shouting again and she was a little afraid. She had never seen him angry before. He shook her off him, jumped up to get a piece of paper from his jacket and began to read:

The Felix Dzerzhinsky Communal Orphanage for the Reeducation of Children of Traitors to the
Motherland is one of the most delightful examples of redemption in our Soviet paradise. Here, in a
charming rustic glade, these innocent children, tainted only by the cruelties of chance in their relationships to their wicked parents, the bloodsucking terrorists, wrecking spies, snakes, rats and Trotskyite murderers, are given a wonderful new introduction to the generosity of Soviet education. No
wonder at 6:00 a.m. at morning assembly, they happily sing the “Internationale,” chant “Thank
you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood” and then start to study the
Short Course.
Meanwhile, in the Little Red Corner, a gang of hungry, dirty and brutalized teenagers have started to
torture a little girl of four with a switchblade and a cigarette lighter under the negligent gaze of the
corrupt and depraved Director Khanchuk. Before the end of the day, she will probably be raped
again by these feral children stripped of all the kindness and innocence of childhood. No wonder, because this very morning two children celebrating their twelfth birthdays were arrested as Trotskyite
and Japanese spies and marched off to be sentenced to execution or hard labor in the camps…

Sashenka gasped. “We can’t publish that! If I handed that to Klavdia, my deputy, she would immediately take you to the Party Committee and they would denounce you to the Organs.”

Benya was silent.

“You don’t want me to hand it in, do you?” she said.

“I don’t want to die, if that’s what you mean—but I don’t want to be a Russian toady either. I didn’t sleep last night. I saw my own child in that Dantean hell and I woke up sobbing. I want you to mention that place to your husband.” Her husband. Following Benya’s imaginary book, “The Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery,” they had agreed never to mention Vanya or Benya’s wife, Katya.

“I’m not sure I should mention you to my husband at all.”

“I don’t suppose he’d be all that interested, especially if he’s still working boisterously on those diplomats…” There was an edge to his voice that she did not like.

“Boisterously? He works too hard.”

“Well, we’ve all heard about his hard work.”

Sashenka looked at him a long time, her belly churning at the sting in his words, which she did not quite understand. Their lovemaking had been so frenzied and it was hot under the eaves of the Metropole. She was horrified by Benya’s article, which brought back that song from her Petersburg youth:

Here I am abandoned, an orphan, with no one to look after me…

Only the nightingale…

Benya lay down beside her again and stroked her gleaming white back, his fingers exploring between her thighs, but she flicked his hand away and lit the article with her lighter, holding it as it flamed and fell.

“Do you despise me?” Her bumblebee voice was breaking up.

He sighed, again. “‘The Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery’ reveals that this is the adulteress’s most commonly asked question. No, actually I think all the better of you…”

Craving him, she rolled him on top of her, dreaming of spending a night with him, of singing with him at the piano, and of waking up together.

16

Lavrenti Beria knew he did not suit the full blue and red uniform of CommissarGeneral, first degree, of State Security. His legs were too short for the pleated trousers and boots, his shoulders too broad, his neck too thick, but he had to wear the ridiculous rig sometimes. His black Buick with the darkened windows drove him through the Spassky Gates into the Kremlin, turned into Trinity Square, and halted with a skid at the Sovnarkom Building. Security in the Little Corner, as Stalin’s office was known, was very tight. The Guards Section answered only to Stalin himself, so that even the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs needed to show his pass and surrender his sidearm.

Beria had been in Moscow for only ten months, so he was still new enough to enjoy his position—but keenly aware that he had to fight to keep it. He was confident that he could handle any degree of responsibility—he was indefatigable, he could work without sleep.

Holding his leather satchel, Beria passed through the first security barrier into the office of Alexander Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s chief of staff. Here he surrendered his Mauser. A bald dwarf with the face of a baboon and livid, almost burned skin, Poskrebyshev recorded his arrival in the Master’s appointment book. He greeted Beria respectfully, a sign of Stalin’s favor.

“Go right in! The Master’s ready—and in a thoughtful mood.” Poskrebyshev offered this service to important visitors: a forecast of Stalin’s state of mind.

The first door opened and a group of military commanders and intellectual types came out, holding drawing boards. Beria thought he saw tanks and guns on these. The soldiers and designers glanced at him and Beria saw them blanch: yes, he was the pitiless sword of the Revolution. They had to fear him. If they didn’t, he was not doing his job.

When they were gone, Beria passed through the last security checkpoint. The young men in blue saluted.

The room was empty. Beria knew that the Master was now thinking about the European situation. Madrid, the capital of the Spanish Republic, had just fallen—and that removed any obstacle to dialogue with the Hitlerite Germans. Britain and France had caved in to Hitler at Munich, and momentous changes were now on the Master’s mind. That was the reason for the case against the former diplomats at the Foreign Commissariat—it was a signal to Berlin that Soviet policy was changing.

Poskrebyshev shut the door behind him.

Beria waited by the door of a large, high rectangular office with many windows. A huge table covered in green baize stood in the center. Portraits of Lenin and Marx hung on one side, and (an addition that anticipated the coming war) those of Field Marshals Kutuzov and Suvorov on the other. Lenin’s death mask was illuminated by a greenshaded lamp to remind visitors that this was the holy of holies.

At the far end, behind a large empty desk, a small door, almost invisible in the wood paneling, opened and Stalin came in, carrying a steaming glass in a silver holder. Beria was always impressed with the Master’s mixture of animal grace, peasant swagger and thoughtful intellect. A great statesman required all three.

“Lavrenti,
gamajoba
!” said Stalin in Georgian. Alone, they could talk Georgian. When Russians were present, Stalin did not like to talk in his native tongue because he was a Russian leader and Georgia was a minor province of the Russian Empire; “a parochial marsh,” he had once called it. But when they were alone together, it was fine.

Stalin gave Beria his tigerish smile. “Ah, the new uniform. Not bad, not bad at all. Sit down. How’s Nina?”

“Very well, thank you, Comrade Stalin. She sends her regards.” Beria knew that Stalin liked his blond wife, Nina.

“And your son, little Sergo?”

“Settling into school. He still remembers when you tucked him up in bed when he was very small.”

“I read him his bedtime story too. Svetlana’s very happy he’s now in Moscow. Does Nina like that nobleman’s house I chose for you? Did she get the Georgian jams I sent over?

You’re a specially trusted responsible worker, you need some space. You need special conditions.”

“Thank you and the Central Committee for your trust, the house and the dacha. Nina’s delighted!”

“But she can thank me for the jam herself!” They laughed.

“Believe me, Josef Vissarionovich,” Beria respectfully used Stalin’s name and patronymic,

“she’s writing you a letter.”

“No need. Sit down.”

Beria sat at the green baize table and unzipped his case, pulling out papers. Stalin sat at the head of the table, stirring his tea. He squeezed a slice of lemon into it.

“Right, what have you got for me?”

“We’ve a lot to get through, Comrade Stalin. The case at the Foreign Commissariat is progressing well and there are German, Polish, French and Japanese spies among the old diplomats.”

“Who’s working it?”

“Kobylov and Palitsyn.”

“We know Kobylov. He’s a bull in a china shop but a good operative. He takes his silk gloves off. Palitsyn’s a good worker?”

“Very,” replied Beria, though he had inherited Palitsyn, not chosen him. “Here are some of the confessions already signed by the prisoners. Comrade Stalin, you asked about the former person Baron Zeitlin, father of Palitsyn’s wife and brother of the journalist Gideon Zeitlin.”

“Sashenka ZeitlinPalitsyn is a decent Soviet woman,” said Stalin.

Beria noted the Master was not in the mood for jokes about sex, a subject never absent from his own mind for long. Today he could see that Stalin’s mind was in the fraught borderlands of Mitteleuropa. He watched the Master sip his tea and pull a new pack of Herzegovina Flor cigarettes from his shabby yellow tunic. Opening it, he lit one and started to fiddle with the pencils on his desk.

“Did she and Palitsyn ever contact him?” Stalin asked.

“No.”

“They put the Party first,” said Stalin, sharp eyes on Beria. “You see? A decent Soviet girl who has ‘reforged’ herself—despite her class and connections. I remember seeing her typing in Lenin’s office. Don’t forget Lenin himself was a nobleman and grew up on a country estate, eating strawberries and rolling in the hay with peasant girls.”

Beria knew this trick of the Master: only Stalin could criticize Lenin in the way that one god may mock another. Beria delivered the required look of shock and the old tiger’s eyes gleamed. Stalin was the Lenin of today.

Beria laid out some papers. “You asked about Zeitlin’s whereabouts. It took a bit of time to find out his fate. On March twentyfifth, 1937, he was arrested on my orders in Tiflis, where, since his dismissal in 1930, he had been living quietly in exile with his English wife.

He was interrogated…”

“Silk gloves, or gloves off?” Beria saw that Stalin was sketching a wolf’s head with a green crayon on the pad of writing paper headed
J. V. Stalin
. He scrawled the words
Zeitlin
and then
glove
.

“Roughly enough. We weren’t running a hotel! But he confessed nothing.”

“What? That broken reed survived Kobylov’s workout?”

“If I hadn’t supervised, Kobylov would have ground him into dust. The Bull can go too far.”

“The Revolution requires we all do some dirty work.”

“My boys and I don’t wear silk gloves. Zeitlin was sentenced under Article Fiftyeight to the Vishka”—this was the nickname among the leaders for execution, the Highest Measure of Punishment—“as a Trotskyite terrorist who had conspired to assassinate Comrades Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and myself.”

“Even you? You are modest!” said Stalin with a slight smirk but then he sighed a little sadly. “We make mistakes sometimes. We have too many yesmen in this country.”

Beria was used to these inquiries. Stalin’s memory was extraordinarily detailed but even he could not remember all the names on the death lists. After all, he had personally signed death lists accompanied by “albums”—brief biographies and photographs of those listed

—for 38,000 Enemies. Around a million had been executed since 1937 and more had died en route to, or in, the Gulag camps. Beria was curious why the Master was interested in a forgotten antique like Zeitlin—unless Stalin was attracted to Sashenka, and in that he couldn’t fault his taste. The Master was deeply secretive about his private life but Beria had learned that he had had many affairs in the past. Another possibility occurred to Beria. Zeitlin had once had interests in Baku and Tiflis. Did Stalin know Zeitlin personally?

No matter; sometimes Stalin expressed regret for such executions. “So Zeitlin’s gone?” he asked, shading in his wolf’s head.

“No, he was in the album of seven hundred and fortythree names prepared for you and the Politburo by the Narkom NKVD on April fifteenth, 1937. You confirmed all the Vishka sentences but placed a dash next to the name of Zeitlin.”

“One of my dashes?” murmured Stalin.

Beria knew that a tiny signal from the Master—a mere stroke of punctuation on a piece of paper, or a tone of voice, or a raised eyebrow—could change a fate.

“Yes. Zeitlin was not executed but was sent to Vorkuta, where he’s now in the camp hospital with pneumonia, angina and dysentery. He got a job as an accountant in the camp store.”

“Those bourgeois are still pulling their tricks, I see,” said Stalin.

“He’s been constantly ill.”

“A creaky gate’s often strongest.”

“He may not survive.”

Stalin shrugged and exhaled smoke.

“Lavrenti Pavlovich, do we really think former person Zeitlin poses much of a threat anymore? Come to Kuntsevo for dinner tonight. Chareuli the film director and some disreputable Georgian actors are coming. I know you’re busy—only if you have time.”

Stalin pushed the file across the desk and Beria knew it was a sign that he should take his leave. The meeting was over.

17

When Sashenka’s uncle, Gideon Zeitlin, finished his usual lunch—borscht soup, salted herring and veal cutlets—at his usual table at the Writers’ Club in Moscow, he donned his fedora and walked out into the balmy streets. He had eaten with his cronies: the “Red Count,” the supple, worldly and fat Alexei Tolstoy, one of Stalin’s favorite writers; Fadeyev, the drunken secretary of the Writers’ Union; Ilya Ehrenburg, the raffish novelist; and Gideon’s own comely daughter Mouche, now an actress who was starting to earn big parts in the movies. These literary lions enjoyed their privileges—the food, the wine, the dachas in Peredelkino, the holidays in Sochi—because they had survived the terrible years of ’37 and ’38.