Sashenka (37 page)

Lena followed her father into his bedroom. She opened his wardrobe and took out his threepiece black suit, his black fedora, his walking boots with the builtup sole, a leather tie, his Order of Lenin. Then, struggling to show no emotion and aware that she must not add to his troubles, she helped him dress, as her mother often did. He said nothing until he was ready. “Thank you, Lenochka.”

“What’s it about, Papa? Do you know?” she asked, then wished she hadn’t bothered him.

He just shook his head. “Probably nothing.”

Mendel entered the sitting room and kissed his wife’s forehead. “I love you, Natasha,” he said in his deep voice. “Long live the Party!” Then he turned to his daughter.

“I’ll see you down,” said Lena, feeling numb. In the hall, she helped her lame father step over a heap of family photographs, papers, letters and proofs of his famous book,
Bolshevik
Morality
. The floor looked like a shattered collage of their entire lives.

They rode down in the ornate but creaking elevator. Outside, the night was warm. The Great Palace of the Kremlin glowed majestically. Even though it was so late, there were two lovers on Stone Bridge; tango music escaped from an open window somewhere in the huge building. There was no traffic, just a Packard touring car and a Black Crow van that bore the words
Eggs, Bread, Vegetables,
both with engines idling.

In the humid street, the glossy, oversized Commissar of Security Kobylov somehow reminded Lena of a shiny papiermâché statue on a May Day carnival float.

“Your carriage awaits, Mendel,” he said, inclining his kinkyhaired head toward the Crow.

Lena watched her father, limping in his oldfashioned suit, his metallic boots clicking on the asphalt, as he approached the open door of the black van. He paused and Lena gasped, her heart in her mouth, but Mendel just looked up at the supermodern apartment building they were so proud to inhabit and said nothing, though a nervous tic fluttered on his cheek. Her severe, laconic and very oldfashioned father was not a demonstrative man but Lena knew from a million little things that he absolutely loved her, his only child. Now Lena did something she had never done before. She took his hand and, placing it between both of hers, she squeezed it. He looked away, and she could hear him wheezing. He was sixty but he looked much older.

Then he turned to Lena and, to her surprise and deep emotion, he bowed formally and then kissed her thrice, the old way,
à la russe
. “Be a good Communist. Goodbye, Lena Mendelovna.”

“Goodbye, Papa,” she answered.

She wanted to inhale his smell of coffee and cigarettes and soap, his presence, his love; she fought an urge to hold on to his suit, to fall to the pavement and grip his legs so they couldn’t take him—but it was over too fast.

Mendel didn’t look at her again—and she understood why. The step was too high. Two Chekists took Mendel and lifted him into the van. Inside, there were metal cages so Mendel could not sit. They closed him into one such compartment and as they slammed the van door, Lena saw not only her father’s liquid eyes catching the light—but others’

too.

Kobylov banged the top of his limousine as he swung into the passenger seat. Lena stood in the street and watched the two vehicles speed across the bridge past the Kremlin and out of sight.

The janitor, so friendly, always doing chores for the family, stood on the steps staring, but he said nothing and averted his eyes. Then Lena went upstairs to tend to Natasha.

Her mother was sobbing so hard she could not speak. Lena sat down wearily and wondered what to do. She remembered that her mother had cared for Sashenka during her night in prison in 1916.

At dawn, Lena called Sashenka from a phone on the street. She could hear Snowy singing in the background, the clack of cutlery. Sashenka was serving the children breakfast over at Granovsky.

“It’s Lenochka,” she said.

“Lenochka—what is it?”

“Papa’s fallen ill unexpectedly and they’ve…he’s gone for treatment.” Lena was overcome with foreboding. Tears flooded her eyes and she put down the phone.

“Who was that?” asked Snowy. “Lenochka? Aunt Lenochka’s a fat cushion. What’s wrong, Mama?”

“My God,” sighed Sashenka, sinking into a chair, her hand at her forehead. What did this mean? First Gideon, then Mendel. She felt sick.

“Mamochka,” said Carlo in his piping voice, climbing onto her knee like a tame bear cub.

He wore blue pajamas. “Are you feeling poorly? I’m going to give you a cuddle and stroke your face and kiss you like this! I love you, Mamochka, you’re my best friend!”

Carlo kissed her on the nose with such pliant gentleness that Sashenka shivered with love.

22

The following Saturday, Sashenka was waiting for Vanya to come home. The dacha was quiet, its stillness suffocating. The children were baking a cake with Carolina.

Doves cooed in the dovecote and crows cawed in the birch trees. The horses in Marshal Budyonny’s stables whinnied and the children’s pony answered. Bees buzzed; the jasmine was sickly sweet. The important neighbor next door was singing a song from the movie
Jolly Fellows
. But the phone did not ring. Satinov had not called for his game of tennis.

Everything had slowed down. Sashenka sat on the veranda, pretending to read the newspapers and her magazine proofs. There was no clue in the newspapers, no hint of the spy mania and show trials of a year earlier. People were being freed; cases were being reviewed. Perhaps she was being paranoid. She had rung Benya and told him about the uncles in code. “The geraniums are budding,” he’d answered calmly and she remembered the garden shed and their talisman.

She thought about Benya all the time. They could meet next week. He would soothe her; he would make her laugh in that fatalistic Jewish way of his. How had she survived so long without the one and only Benya? She yearned to call him, but not from the dacha.

There was a public phone down the lane. Benya kept teasing her, trying to make her say that she loved him. “Don’t you feel something special for me?” he’d ask. After ten days?

She, Party member, mother, editor and Old Bolshevik, fall in love with an idle writer? Was he mad? No, it was
she
who was crazy. Oh, Benya! What would he make of all this?

The signs were confusing. Gideon had not been arrested, and Mouche had called to report that “they” had just wanted to discuss movies with him, “movies and the history of the Greeks and the Romans.” Was that a hint for Sashenka or a random throwaway phrase?

Was Gideon warning them about Mendel’s arrest? “The Greeks and the Romans.” Mendel knew ancient history. He
was
ancient history. His arrest must stem from something in the distant Bolshevik past. Stalin’s old Georgian friend, “Uncle” Abel Yenukidze, had written a history of the Bolshevik printing press in Baku—yet fatally downplayed the Master’s role in it. Sashenka remembered Comrade Abel well, a sandyhaired playboy with blue eyes, wandering hands and a harem of ballerinas. He had been shot in 1937.

Yet Mendel was no Abel. Uncle Mendel had never joined an opposition and had fought for Stalin ferociously. He was the Conscience of the Party and no chatterer. Why Mendel and why now, when the Terror was really over? They could have arrested Mendel at any time since 1936. It did not make sense.

Or had Gideon meant ancient
family
history? But everyone knew about the Zeitlins and that she had typed for Lenin, she the millionaire’s Bolshevik daughter, Comrade Snowfox!

Were the Organs circling her and her family? Her antecedents might be bourgeois—but she was protected by her marriage to Vanya Palitsyn, by his loyal service and proletarian pedigree, and by their joint Party orthodoxy.

Or perhaps the problem lay with her husband? Was this some rivalry inside the Organs, Beria’s new Georgians versus the old Muscovites? But Vanya had never been a vassal of the previous boss, Yezhov, and anyway Beria had sacked all Yezhov’s homicidal lags months earlier. Those maniacs were gone. Dust.

Family arrests did not necessarily reflect on her, Sashenka told herself. They happened all the time. Even Stalin’s inlaws, the Svanidzes, had been arrested. Even the brothers of Stalin’s dear Comrade Sergo had been executed. Her own father had vanished. Stalin had said the sons were not to blame for the sins of the fathers but at a secret dinner at the Kremlin, attended by Vanya himself, he had also threatened to destroy Enemies of the People “and their entire clans! Yes, their clans!”

Stalin, history and the Party worked in mysterious ways, she knew this. We Party members are devotees of a militaryreligious order in a time of intensifying class struggle and coming war, thought Sashenka. The greater the successes of our Party, the more our enemies will struggle against us: that was Comrade Stalin’s formula. We owe our loyalty to the Party and the holy grail of the Idea, not bourgeois sentimentality. Mendel is a politician and in our progressive but imperfect system,
this
is politics. It would be fine, she told herself. Mendel would return just like Gideon. This was a new, less carnivorous era. The bad times were over.

The doves in the dovecote flew up like a fan as a car drew up. Sashenka came down in her bare feet to help the chauffeur open the gates.

Her husband stepped out wearily but Sashenka felt reassured at the sight of him. Vanya was Assistant Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs and, since the March Congress, candidate member of the Central Committee—and here he was, right as rain. Just a little washed out and with more grey in his thick coarse hair—but he always came home tired.

She had been a fool for worrying. Snowy and Carlo rushed outside. Carlo was naked and Snowy wore her pink summer dress: she was growing fast. Their father hugged them, squeezed them, greeted their bunnies and cushions, heard about their cakes and candies in the kitchen—and sent them back inside. Then he was looking at Sashenka, looking at her as he had never looked at her before, his raging eyes crow black. He was about to say something when Carolina announced lunch from the veranda.

He turned his back on her and walked inside.

23

The meal at the veranda table seemed longer than usual. The scent of the lilacs was heavenly but then Snowy threw some bread at her brother. Vanya snapped, jumping up and wrenching her chair away from the table.

“Stop that!” he shouted.

Snowy was shocked and started to sob. Carlo looked terrified, then his wide face melted into tears. “I didn’t do anything!” he cried. He ran to his mother but Sashenka said nothing. All her senses were centered on her husband.

Vanya avoided her eyes and ate hardly anything. Instead of feeling guilty, as she expected to, she felt resentful. She longed for Benya and his irrepressible sense of fun, his Rabelaisian bawdiness and his sensitivity.

“Vanya, you need to sleep,” she said finally.

“Do I? What good will that do?”

Sashenka rose. “I’m going to take the children to swim in the river.” It was 2:30 p.m.

Vanya shut himself in his study.

In her bare feet, carrying the towels, Sashenka led the children by the hand down the dirt lane through the silver birches toward the banks of the Moskva. Vanya always returned grouchy from his nocturnal work, she told herself. Even walking, she felt how Benya had changed her life.

Her legs were bare, and the sun seemed to lick her cheekbones, shoulders and knees as if they were covered in syrup. Her thighs grazed each other, sticking a little, sweaty. Even the grit between her toes seemed sensual. The young Sashenka of the civil war and the twenties would never have noticed such things; the Party matron of the thirties was too serious, too full of the Party’s campaigns and slogans. Then she had dressed with deliberate dreariness, in the plainest, brownest stockings, in shapeless shift dresses, her hair in the tightest bun and always tied with the same kerchief. Now everything played with her senses in a way that amazed her. The buttoned cotton dress seemed to caress her on the thighs and neck. She longed to tell Benya about the delicious smell of pine resin and every detail of what she was doing and feeling. A cool breeze lifted the unbuttoned hem and showed her legs.

She grinned at the thought of Benya and his hands all over her, of him dancing and that way he laughed, with his mouth wide open. They discussed books and movies, paintings and plays but oh, how they laughed. And the laughter led back to her thighs and her breasts and her lips: all belonged to him.

They reached the golden banks of the mudbrown river, lined with cherry trees laden with pink blossom. Snowy picked her a spray. Other children were swimming, and she recognized some of the Party families. She waved and blew kisses, clapping for the children as they sprinted and dived. “Are you watching me, Mama?” called Carlo every time he jumped in and each time she answered, “When aren’t we watching you two?” She dried and dressed them when they began to feel chilled.

They returned by the woods. An army of bluebells lay under the trees awaiting them.

Snowy and Carlo started to build a camp for the Wood Cushions, immersed in a world of mossy sofas and treetrunk palaces.

She sat on the bench by the lane and watched them. She knew why she had brought them this way. Her eyes flickered between the camp and the nearby public telephone. Should she, shouldn’t she? No, she would not call.

“Darlings, we’ve got to go home now,” she said.

“No!” shouted Snowy. “We want to play.”

She knew she had to phone, that she was always going to use that phone. She closed her eyes. Benya had said he would be at his ramshackle dacha in Peredelkino, the writers’ village. She had the number and longed to suggest that they meet somehow. At some garden shed—clinging together among the spades and geraniums! But she must wait until the Mendel business was settled. Besides, he was with his family.

She would call him anyway. If Benya’s wife answered, she would introduce herself as his editor. She really was commissioning him to write a piece for the magazine: “How to celebrate at a real Soviet people’s masked ball! How to prepare your dresses, your masks and your feast!”