Sashenka (38 page)

As her children danced along the sandy path, she dialed Benya’s number. The phone rang and rang. No answer. She found herself leaning on the aluminum shield of the telephone box, pressing herself against it, dreamily contemplating the electrical miracle that would carry his voice through the wires to her ear. She stopped herself, shaking her head at her own foolishness.

You’ll have to wait, Benya Golden. I’ll find a way to let you know, she said to herself. I was going to tell you I loved you.

24

At 4:00 p.m., Sashenka was back at the dacha. The white pillars of its façade, the wooden table, the swinging hammocks reminded her of summers at Zemblishino before the Revolution. The children were drowsy and Carolina took them to rest in their rooms.

Vanya sat in the garden in his scarletembroidered peasant shirt, boots and baggy trousers. Always the boots.

“Are you all right, Vanya?” she asked. “Any news of Mendel?”

He did not move. Then he stood up slowly, turned toward her and hit her right in the face, knocking her over. The punch was so powerful that she did not quite feel it, although as she lay stunned on the grass she could taste the blood on her tongue.

His impassive face twitching, Vanya stood over her, clenching and wringing, clenching and wringing those puffy hands of his. Sashenka got to her feet and dashed at her husband, her mouth open to scream at him, but he caught her by the wrist and flung her back onto the ground.

“Where have you just been, you disgusting slut?” He was bending right over her. Even in this fight, both were aware of the voices over the fence, the staff in the house, the guards: everyone was listening and reporting. After he had hit her, they were still whispering at each other, not shouting, beneath the buzz of a late spring day.

“We went to swim in the river.”

“To the telephone.”

“Well, I passed the telephone…”

“And you called, did you not?”

“Don’t speak to me like I’m one of your cases. What if I did? I’m not allowed to make a phone call?”

“Who did you call?”

He knew already, she could tell, and it terrified her.

“You called that Jewish writer, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Do you think I haven’t had my chances? Have I been faithful to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, let me tell you, I’ve never touched another woman once in all these years, Sashenka. I worshipped you. I did everything for you. Didn’t I provide for you?” Then he hissed at her: “You met him in our house, you whore! You took my children down the lane and you called that bastard writer!”

What did he know? Sashenka frantically shuffled the facts like a pack of cards: if he knew that she phoned him, what did that prove? If he knew she had commissioned an article, well, why not? If he knew about the hotel, then she was lost!

Vanya stood over her and she thought he would hit her again or kick her with his boots, right there in the garden of their dacha with their children sleeping in the house.

“Have you fucked him?”

“Vanya!”

“It doesn’t matter, Alexandra Samuilovna. Now it doesn’t matter. Now it’s beyond that.

You can’t talk to him because he’s not there.”

She was still touching her bleeding lip as the meaning of what her husband said swept over her.

“What are you saying?”

His face was close to hers. He was sweating. “He’s not there, Sashenka! He’s gone now.

That’s
his prize!”

Sashenka was furious, whitelipped with a wild anger that took her by surprise. “So this is your revenge? This is how Chekists make their wives faithful, is it? You should be ashamed of yourself! I thought you served the Party. And what will you do to him? Beat him up in some cellar with a bludgeon? Is that what
you
do every day, Vanya?”

“You don’t understand.” Vanya sat down suddenly. He rubbed his face in his hands, rubbed his hair, eyes closed. Then he got up and walked slowly back into the house.

Sashenka stood up shakily. Benya had been arrested! It could not be true. What would happen to him? She could hardly bear to contemplate him suffering. Where was he?

25

“Mamochka!” Carlo was crying. He always woke up in a bad mood.

“Why are you and Papochka talking like that?” said Snowy, dancing into the garden.

“Mama, why is your lip bleeding?”

“Oh,” said Sashenka, feeling ashamed for the first time. “I banged it on the door.”

“I want to cure you, Mama. Can I put a bandage on your cut?” said Carlo, touching her lip and kissing her hands, while Snowy, refreshed and exuberant, trotted round the garden like a fresh pony. Sashenka looked down the corridor toward Vanya’s study, the possibilities ricocheting around her brain. She was almost glad Vanya had hit her and that he had not taken it out on the children. She would rather he beat her black and blue if it meant Benya would not suffer. But what if Benya wasn’t who he seemed to be? Suppose he’d been arrested not out of a cuckold’s vengeance but because he was an “unclean element,”

some sort of Trotskyite spy? Or suppose Vanya had invented the arrest just to torment her? Or suppose Mendel was in real trouble and had somehow embroiled her and her friends? As each plausible scheme ripened in her imagination, she felt another lurch of fear until one of the children called her.

“Mamochka, are you watching me?” First Snowy, then Carlo. Sashenka almost sleepwalked through the exasperatingly slow afternoon, a perfect example of the delights of spring in the silver woods of the Moscow plain.

What have I done, she thought, what have I done?

At last, it was 8:00 p.m. and bedtime.

“Will you stroke me to sleep?” Carlo mumbled, brown eyes on hers.

“Eleven strokes on your forehead,” she said.

“Yes, Mamochka, eleven strokes.”

Usually, Sashenka was completely engrossed in Carlo but today her mind was somewhere else. Where was she? With Benya in the cellars of the Lubianka? With Mendel in the dungeons of hell? And where did this leave her and her family? She prayed for a release from the suspense, and yet she feared it.

“Mamochka? Can I tell you something? Mama?”

“Yes, Carlo.”

“I love you in my heart, Mama.” This was a new expression and it hit Sashenka hard. She seized his sturdy cub’s body and hugged him tightly.

“What a lovely thing to say, darling. Mama loves you in her heart too.”

She laid her hands on his satiny forehead and they counted aloud: she stroked his face eleven times until his eyes were closed. Mercifully, Snowy was exhausted and went straight to sleep without a fuss.

It was a lush, sweltering night. The house was patrolled by fat fluttering moths, sleepy obese bluebottles and swarming greenflies. The ceiling fans whirred. Carolina was in her room.

No one had phoned.

Vanya went to sit on the rocking chair on the veranda, smoking and drinking. Jews, Sashenka thought, don’t drink when they’re in crisis, they get rashes and palpitations. She remembered her father. Vanya’s chair creaked back and forth and she heard the clanking of her father’s Trotting Chair all those years ago.

It was time. Crows cawed in the linden tree. Sashenka approached her husband nervously.

“Vanya?” she said. She needed to know how he had found out about Benya, what he knew. Until then, confess to nothing.

“Vanya, I did nothing,” she lied. “I flirted. I’m so sorry…” She expected more severity from him but when he turned his face to her, it was clammy and swollen with tears. Vanya never cried except when he was very drunk, during sad movies, at regimental reunions or when he saw Snowy in the school play.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Do you hate me?”

He shook his head.

“Please just tell me what you know.”

Vanya tried to speak but his generous mouth, swaggering jaw and teddybear eyes lost their definition, as he cried silently in that warm dusk.

“I know I’ve done something very wrong. Vanya, I am so sorry!”

“I know everything,” he said.

“Everything? What is there to know?”

He groaned with an awesome, weary pain. “Don’t bother, Sashenka. We’re beyond husbands and wives now.”

“You’re scaring me, Vanya.”

Tears flowed down his cheeks as the blood of the sunset spread across the sky.

26

Sashenka stood beside the rocking chair, breathing in the scent of the jasmine. She thought of Mendel. She thought of Benya. And the children asleep in their rooms.

Finally Vanya got up from his chair. He was drunk, his eyes hot and gritty—but drunk in the way that hard drinkers ride the alcohol—and he pulled her to him, lifting her feet off the ground. For the first time in a long while, she was grateful for his touch. She noticed the rabbits in the hutch and the pony gazing peacefully over the fence—but she and Vanya were as alone as they had ever been.

“I can separate from you,” she said. “No one needs to know. Let me separate and you’ll be rid of me. Divorce me!” (Just hours ago, this might have been a fantasy escape with Benya

—now it seemed a measure of desperation.) “I did something terrible! I’m sorry, so sorry…”

“Don’t say that,” whispered Vanya, squeezing her tighter. “I’m angry with you, of course, you fool. But we don’t have time to be hurt.”

“For God’s sake, tell me what you mean? Who knows?”

“
They
know everything—and it’s all my fault,” he said.

“Please! Just tell me what’s happened?”

He hugged her suddenly, kissing her neck, her eyes, her hair. “I’ve been moved off the Foreign Commissariat case. I’m being sent down to check out our comrades in Stalinabad in Turkestan.”

“Well, I’ll go with you. We can all go and live in Stalinabad.”

“Pull yourself together, Sashenka. They could arrest me at the station. They could come tonight.”

“But why? It’s me who’s done something…I beg for forgiveness but how can this be political?”

“Gideon, Mendel, now Benya Golden—there’s something out there, Sashenka, and I don’t know what it is. Perhaps they have something on your writer? Perhaps he’s a bastard connected to foreign spies. But they also have something on you and me. I don’t know what it is but I do know that it could destroy us altogether.” His feverish face was pale in the shrinking light. “We might not have any time. What are we going to do?”

The enormity of their predicament crushed Sashenka.

Two weeks earlier, Comrade Stalin had been in her house with Comrade Beria, Narkom of the NKVD. Stars of screen and stage had sung in their home; Vanya was newly promoted and trusted; Comrade Stalin admired her magazine, admired her and tweaked Snowy’s cheeks. No, Vanya was wrong. It was lies. Her heart fluttered, red sparks rose before her eyes and her guts spasmed.

“Vanya, I’m terrified.”

They sat at the table on the veranda, very close, cheek to cheek, hand in hand, closer now than on their honeymoon when they were young and in love, bound together now in more ways than any husband and wife would ever want to be.

Vanya gathered himself. “Sashenka, I’m frightened too. We’ve got to make a plan now.”

“Do you really believe they’re coming for us?”

“It’s possible.”

“Can’t we ask someone? Have you called Lavrenti Pavlovich? He likes you. He’s pleased with you. You even play on his basketball team. What about Hercules? He knows everything; Stalin loves him; he’ll help us.”

“I’ve called them both,” answered Vanya. “‘Comrade Beria is unavailable,’ said his apparat. Hercules hasn’t called back.”

“But that doesn’t mean anything. Beria’s probably tomcatting. And Hercules’ll call us.”

“We need to decide what to do tonight. They may arrest me, or you, or both of us. Who knows what they’re beating out of Mendel right now—or your fucking writer.”

“But surely they can’t make them invent things?”

“Christ save us!” Vanya exclaimed. “You’re joking, aren’t you? We have a saying in the Organs: ‘Give me a man tonight and I’ll have him confessing he’s the King of England by morning!’ You believed every confession at the trials? Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, the terrorists, killers, wreckers, spies?”

“They were true. You said they were true, in spirit, in essence.”

“Oh yes, they were true all right. They were all bastards. They were enemies in spirit.

They lost faith, and
faith
is everything. But…” He shook his head.

“You beat people to say these things, didn’t you, Vanya?”

“For the Party, I’d do anything. I’ve done anything. Yes, I know what it is to break a man.

Some break like a matchstick, some die rather than say a word. But better to shoot a hundred innocent men than let one spy escape, better a thousand.”

“Oh my God, Vanya.” Benya’s words, and Benya’s expression as he had said them, returned to her. He had known what Vanya did all night while she, she…

“What did you think I was doing? It was top secret but it suited you not to know.”

“But the Party’s right to destroy the spies. I knew there were mistakes but we all said the mistakes were worth it. Now, what if we become such a mistake? I believe in the Party and Stalin, it’s my life’s work. Vanya, do you still believe?”

“After what I’ve done for the Party, I have to believe. If I were shot tonight, I’d die a Communist. And you?”

“Die? I can’t die. I can’t vanish! I want to live. I love life.
I’ll do anything to live
.”

“Keep your voice down, dear Comrade Snowfox.” His new air of brisk conspiracy took her back to when he was an ardent young Bolshevik activist in Petrograd in 1916—it was one of the things that had attracted her to him. “Be calm! We’re not going to die but we need to plan ahead. If they take us, don’t confess a thing. That’s the key. If you don’t confess, they can’t touch you. Whatever they do to us, confess nothing!”

“I’m not sure I could take it. The pain,” Sashenka said shakily. “Vanya, you have your revolver here, don’t you?”

Vanya lifted the peaked cap that lay before them on the table. Underneath lay a Nagant pistol. Sashenka put her hand on the cold steel and remembered the “bulldogs” in Petrograd that she’d carried for the Party. How passionately and proudly she had borne those pistols for the Revolution. How she had admired Vanya, the strapping worker with those hands more like paws, his bold face, his brown eyes! What had he become? What had they both become?