Sashenka

1

Dust rose around the limousine as Sashenka watched her husband jump out like a showman from a puff of smoke. The sunlight caught the flash of polished boots, the gleam of an ivory-handled pistol and the scarlet tabs that trimmed the well-pressed blue tunic.

“I’m home,” Vanya Palitsyn called up to her on the veranda, waving at the driver to open the trunk. “Sashenka, bring out the children. Tell them their daddy’s here! I’ve got something for them. And you, darling!”

Sashenka had been lying on a divan on the wooden veranda of their country house, trying to read the proofs of her magazine. The one-story villa with white pillars had been built near Moscow by a Baku oil nabob at the turn of the century. A wave of feathery blossom sailed over her head on the hot wind. The apple and peach trees in the orchard were thick with creamy petals and the veranda smelled of jasmine, hyacinth and honeysuckle. A crackly gramophone recording of Kozlovsky the tenor sang Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin over the fence from the neighboring dacha—and a male voice joined in heartily.

She had been out there for a while and found herself humming the aria too. Her son, Carlo, aged three and a half, was on her lap and he did not allow her to read anything because he was so demanding and playful. He was actually named Karlmarx but as he was a toddler during the Spanish Civil War, when Sashenka wore a Spanish beret every day, his name was given a Latin turn. “Carlo, I’ve got to read this. Go and find Snowy and play with her or ask Carolina to cook you something!”

“No,” answered Carlo in his high voice. He was a sturdy, brown-haired boy with a broad dimpled face, already handsome, and was kissing her cheeks. He was built like a bear cub but insisted he was a rabbit. “I want to be with my mama. Look, Mamochka, I’m stroking you!” Sashenka looked down at her son, at his beautiful brown eyes, and kissed him back.

“You’re going to break hearts, Carlo my little bear!” she said.

“I’m not a bear cub, Mama, I’m a bunny rabbit!”

“All right, Tovarish Zayka,” she said. “You’re my favorite Comrade Bunny-Rabbit in the—”

“—whole wide world!” he finished for her. “And you’re my best friend!”

Then she’d heard the car bouncing up the drive.

“Papa’s home!” Sashenka said, sitting up.

“Open the gates!” yelled the driver.

“All right, coming,” she heard a man answer. She recognized his voice. It was one of the service staff, the old Cossack in charge of the horses.

The gates swung open. Through them, she could see the little guardhouse at the end of the communal drive with its figures in blue uniforms. They were not really guarding her house—Vanya was quite important now but some big names, Molotov and Zhdanov, both Politburo members, and Marshal Budyonny and Uncle Mendel, lived down the same lane.

The car, a green ZiS, based on the American Lincoln with a long hood and a sleek body, swung through the gates, its creaky suspension gasping. It threw up clouds of dust as it came, weaving between the chickens, ducks and barking dogs. The children’s pony, tied at the gate, watched impassively.

“Look, Comrade Bunny-Rabbit, it’s Daddy!”

“I only want to kiss Mummy!” insisted Carlo, but he jumped down anyway and rushed to hug his father.

Sashenka followed him down the wooden steps. “Vanya, what a nice surprise! You must be boiling in those boots!” But the wearing of boots at one’s desk, even in high summer—and the Moscow plain was hot that May—was more about the military machismo of the Bolsheviks than comfort or utility. Comrade Stalin wore boots at all times.

Carlo flung himself into Vanya’s arms. His father gathered him up and whirled him round and round. Carlo squeaked with glee.

“How was the parade?” asked Sashenka, watching son and father, who were so alike.

“We missed you on the VIP stand,” replied her husband. “The new planes were beautiful. I saw Mendel—and my new boss with his Georgians. Satinov said he would come by later…”

“Next year I’ll try to organize things better,” she promised. She had given Carolina the morning off to see the parade but the nanny was already back. At first, Sashenka had regretted missing the show in Red Square that demonstrated Soviet power, with its ranks of shock workers, soldiers and athletes in gorgeous uniforms, and its display of planes and tanks. The might of the army filled her with pride at what they had achieved since 1917, and she enjoyed greeting the leaders beside her in the VIP seats. But this year she’d wanted to be home with her children at the dacha.

“Is Uncle Hercules coming for the party?” asked Carlo. “I want to play with him!”

“Papochka says he’s coming but you’ll probably be asleep, Bunny.”

Vanya squeezed Sashenka’s narrow waist and took her face between his huge hands and kissed her.

“You’re so lovely, darling,” he said. “How are you?”

She slipped out of his grasp. “I’m exhausted, Vanya, after the women’s group and the plans for the school and orphanage. There was a problem at the printer’s, some idiotic typographical error—”

“Nothing serious?” Sashenka saw his eyes narrow and hastened to reassure him. The Terror was over but even a proofing mistake could be dangerous. Vanya and Sashenka had not forgotten the fate of the typesetter who had put “Solin” (Man of Salt) instead of “Stalin” (Man of Steel).

“No, no, nothing like that, and then Carolina burned the pirozhki and Carlo sobbed…What’s all that?” she asked, pointing at the boxes in the car.

“Is it a present for me?” asked Carlo.

“Wait and see,” answered Vanya, laughing. He unhooked the leather strap across his barrel chest that was linked to his belt and gun holster, tossing everything to his driver, Razum. Throwing off his blue tunic, he whirled it round his head to reveal a white shirt and suspenders holding up blue trousers with red stripes tucked into boots. Returning to the car, he helped Razum, who wore the same uniform, to pull out three large parcels wrapped up in blue paper.

Razum was an old boxer with a broken nose. He was a real veteran with a scar on his right cheek that he claimed to have received from General Skuro himself in the Civil War (though Vanya joked that he actually got it by falling drunkenly through a pane of glass).

Placing the two smaller parcels by the car, Vanya and Razum slowly carried the third toward the house.

“Papochka!” Their five-year-old daughter, Snowy, holding a pink cushion, ran out of the house, in nothing but shorts, to hug her father. Vanya lifted her up in his arms and kissed her forehead.

“Look at me! Watch this, Daddy!” she said, waving her favorite cushion “friend” in the air.

“We’re always watching you,” replied Sashenka. “Show Daddy your cushion dance.”

Snowy was tall for her age, slim and very pale, hence her nickname, with blue eyes and rosy lips. Sashenka could not quite believe that such a beautiful creature had come from her and Vanya, although she looked a little like Sashenka’s father, the “former person” Samuil Zeitlin, ex-baron, ex-bloodsucker. Sashenka felt a sudden pang of sadness and could not help wondering where he was now. No one knew if he was among the living—and a Bolshevik did not ask.

Snowy kicked her legs high, waving the cushion and skipping like a colt. “Look, Papochka, do you like my new cushion dance?” She performed her crazy jig that always ended with “Giddy-gush, giddy-gush, giddy, giddy-up, giddy-gush!” Sashenka clapped. Vanya laughed. She could do no wrong in his eyes.

“Look!” Snowy pointed to a scarlet butterfly and pretended to fly after it, waving her hands as wings.

“You’ll be in the Bolshoi yet!” said Vanya. “An Artist of the People!”

Snowy ran back to her father, jumping up and down with much-treasured exuberance, and he picked her up again. He was so tall that her feet were far from the ground. “What have you been doing today, Snowy?”

“I’m not Snowy. Show us the presents, Papochka!”

“Volya then.”

Volya was her real name—it meant “Freedom” but also “Will,” a tribute to the People’s Will, an early revolutionary group—another good revolutionary name, reflected Sashenka, watching them indulgently.

She knew she was fortunate that Vanya was such a gentle father in this steely time of struggle when tenderness was not fashionable among the leaders, though Satinov had whispered to her that even Comrade Stalin did homework every night with his daughter Svetlana. Sashenka and Vanya were a real Soviet team, sharing the load when possible because both worked very hard, and they were both unusually affectionate parents. But then, as Comrade Kaganovich, Stalin’s trusted ally, had told her delegation of the Committee of Wives of Commanders, “Bringing up Soviet children is as important as liquidating spies or fighting Fascists, and a Soviet wife should care for her husband and children!”

An angular, beaky woman in sensible shoes and with her grey hair in a bun bustled after the little girl.

“You must put a hat on, Snowy,” scolded Carolina, the nanny, a Volga German who also cooked for the family, “or you’ll get sunburned like Carlo!”

Vanya put Snowy back on the ground. “Right, time to open the presents,” he said. “But first, this big one is for your lovely mother.” He and Razum heaved the bulky package onto the veranda. “There! Open it!”

“Can I open it?” said Snowy, jumping up and down.

“Can I open it?” cried Carlo, struggling out of his mother’s arms.

“Ask Mama!” said Vanya, smiling at Sashenka. “It’s her May Day present!”

“Of course you can,” said Sashenka.

“Come on then, Comrades Cushion and Bunny-Rabbit!” said their father. They tore at the paper until there in the blazing sun stood a voluptuous, cream-colored refrigerator with stainless steel trimmings and the words General Electric in chrome across its front. “Pleased, darling?”

Sashenka was delighted. An American fridge would make such a difference to their lives at the dacha, especially in this heat. She hugged Vanya, who tried to kiss her on the lips but she swerved slightly and he got her cheek instead. “Thank you, Vanya. But where on earth did you get it?”

“Well, it’s from the Narkom—the People’s Commissar—for our good work but he said that Comrade Stalin himself had approved the list.” Behind them the service staff—Razum the driver, Golavaty the Cossack groom with bow legs and a waxed mustache, Carolina the nanny and Artyom the old gardener—admired the American fridge.

But Snowy and Carlo were already tearing at the other parcels, to reveal a metal frame, wheels, handlebars…

“A bicycle!” cried Snowy.

“Oh, Snowy, just what you were hoping for on May Day!” said Sashenka, catching Vanya’s eye. “You really are a lovely daddy, thank you for all of this!” She took Snowy’s hand. “Snowy, say thank you to your wonderful papochka!”

“Not Snowy. My name is CUSHION! Thank you, Papochka!” Snowy scampered up to her father and leaned into his arms.

“You’ve got to thank the Party too and Comrade Stalin!” said Sashenka. But the children were already trying to balance on the bikes.

“Thank you, Comrade St…” Snowy lost interest and chased another butterfly while Carlo tried to cycle and fell off, which led to tears, cuddles and consoling ice cream indoors.

By midafternoon it was too hot to be outside and an oriole was singing. The silver pine forest that surrounded them buzzed with spring, voices murmured nearby, glasses tinkled, horses neighed.

Sashenka swung in the hammock, watching as Vanya, still in his boots and breeches but now bare chested, broad shouldered and muscular, worked with his tools to add training wheels to Carlo’s bike, cannibalizing parts from an old stroller. Sashenka marveled at his ingenuity—but of course he was a former lathe turner, a real worker since his childhood, and she remembered meeting him that first time at the safe house in Leningrad, when she was sixteen and he a little older. There had been no sentimental courtship or soppy proposal, Sashenka thought proudly, no bourgeois philistinism or rotten liberalism; they were too busy making a revolution. They had just agreed to get married, and had not even registered at the marriage office until the government had moved to Moscow. Then there’d been the civil war. She’d worked for the Party and taken evening classes at the Industrial College. She and Vanya had set off together into the countryside to squeeze the grain out of the obstinate peasants and collectivize their smallholdings. They shared digs at the House of the Soviets with other couples and owned nothing. I can’t believe, she thought now, that I’m almost forty already. The Smolny Institute for Noble Imbeciles seemed as distant as the Middle Ages.

Over the fence, the neighbor changed his gramophone record and started to sing along to one of Dunaevsky’s catchy songs from his jazz movie, The Jolly Fellows.

“Dunaevsky might come by for some zakuski later, Vanya,” she said. “Along with Utesov and some new writers too. Uncle Gideon’s bringing them. He might even persuade Benya Golden to come.”

“Who?” he said, his forehead crumpled as he tightened the bolts attaching a wheel to the bicycle.

“The writer whose stories on the Spanish Civil War I read recently,” she replied.

Vanya shrugged his bunched shoulders. Sashenka wished he was more interested in singers, writers and film stars. She was—and why shouldn’t she be? Vanya had once called them “a rackety bunch of unreliable elements—and your uncle Gideon is the worst.” She knew that Vanya preferred Party and military people but they could be so rigid and dry, and they were worse since the Terror. Besides, she was an editor, and her magazine was read by the wives of all the “responsible workers”—as the leaders were called. It was her job to know glamorous stars.

“Well, Satinov’s coming and so is Uncle Mendel if you want to talk politics,” she answered.

“How many have you asked?” he said, trying out the balance of the bike.

“I don’t know,” she answered dreamily. “It’s a big house…”

The dacha was a recent acquisition—and sometimes, in spite of herself, the sounds and smells reminded Sashenka of Zemblishino, the Zeitlin family estate where Mendel had converted her to Marxism.

Sashenka and Vanya had been assigned the dacha a year previously, in the summer of 1938, when they had also been granted the apartment on Granovsky and their driver. The cleansing of the Party had been a brutal and bloody process. Many had failed the test and fallen by the wayside, sentenced to death, the Highest Measure of Punishment in the official terminology. Some of Sashenka’s oldest friends and acquaintances had turned out to be traitors, spies and Trotskyites. She had never realized so many of them wore masks, pretending to be good Communists while actually being Fascists, saboteurs and traitors. With so many comrades vanishing into the “meat grinder,” as it was known, Sashenka had, like all her friends, culled their photos from the family photograph albums, scratching out their faces. Even she and Vanya had been worried, although they were completely committed to the rapture of the Revolution. Their marriage was a Communist marriage too. Sashenka and Vanya shared faith in the Party; for them, the faith was everything. They shared so much even if, she suddenly thought, the differences in their interests had become more marked as they grew older.

But the Terror was over now; they could breathe easy again. The country was ready and united for the coming war against the Hitlerite Fascists.

Vanya stood up and called Snowy, who came scampering around the corner with little Carlo trying to keep up.

“The bikes are ready.” He lifted her onto the seat. “Now take it slowly, Comrade Cushion, easy now, not too fast, feet on the pedals, now start to pedal…”

“Me too,” piped Carlo.

“Hang on, Carlo, oh Carlo…Don’t worry, bear cub, I’ve got you!”

“I’m a bunny, Papochka!” shouted the little boy furiously. His parents laughed. “Don’t laugh, silly Mummy!”

Sashenka smiled, her heart full of love for her small son. It didn’t matter if he was rude to her providing he was not rude to his father, who had a furious temper.

“Careful, Bunny,” she called. But it was too late. Desperate to catch up with his sister, he went too fast, swerved to avoid a chicken and fell off his bicycle.

“I want my mummy!” he sobbed.

Sashenka scooped him up again, at which he instantly stopped crying and demanded to go back on the bike.

“Look at me, look at me, Papochka and Mamochka!” He was off again.

“When aren’t we looking at you?” retorted Sashenka, tenderly. Turning round she could see that Snowy had mastered the bicycle. Triumphant, the little girl jumped off and danced away, waving her cushion.

“Right, it’s too hot and I’m hungry,” announced Vanya. “Brightness burns. I want you all out of the sun right now.”

2

An hour later, Sashenka, sitting cross-legged on the floor, was playing with the children in the nursery next to the Red Corner, with its posters of Lenin and Stalin, and the family radio mounted in a varnished oak casing. She could hear Razum and Vanya in the kitchen arguing about the soccer match between Dynamo Moscow and Spartak. Dynamo Moscow had played appallingly. Spartak had fouled the Moscow striker, who had been borne off the field, but the referee had not sent off the Spartak player.

“Perhaps he’s a saboteur!” Razum joked.

“Or maybe he needs new spectacles!”

No one would have laughed about a saboteur six months earlier, Sashenka reflected, even a soccer saboteur. People had been arrested and shot for lesser things. She recalled how the director of the Moscow Zoo had been detained for poisoning a Soviet giraffe, and how a schoolboy at School 118 near their Moscow apartment had been arrested for throwing a dart that accidentally hit a poster of Stalin. Whenever one of their friends was arrested, Vanya would close the kitchen door (so the children could not hear) and whisper the name. If it was someone famous like Bukharin, he would just shrug: “Enemies are everywhere.” If it was a good friend with whom they had holidayed in Sochi, for example, she would be mystified and concerned. “The Organs must know something but…”

“There’s always a reason,” he’d say. “It means it’s necessary.”

“The masks that people wear! The evil of our enemies beggars belief. Snowy was going to play with their children—”

“Cancel Snowy’s visit,” Vanya would say sharply, “and don’t call Elena! Careful!” He would kiss her forehead and no more would be said.

“You can’t make a revolution with silk gloves,” said Comrade Stalin, and Sashenka had repeated it to herself every day. But now Comrade Stalin had told the Eighteenth Congress that the Enemies of the People had been destroyed. Yezhov, the crazy secret-police boss, had been fired and arrested for his excesses, while the new Narkom of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, had brought back justice and moderation.

The men, their voices increasingly sticky from the succession of beers and the heat, were guffawing about a goal Vanya had scored in their amateur soccer team. Sashenka could not imagine why anyone would want to discuss soccer. She sighed. She and Vanya were opposites—he a worker of peasant origins, she an intellectual of bourgeois upbringing. But everyone knew that opposites make good marriages, and she had a kind, successful husband, two beautiful children, the drivers, the cars, this idyllic dacha—and now an American fridge.

Carolina started to set the big table on the veranda for an early May Day supper. Sashenka, who always held a party on May Day, thought about the evening ahead—and their guests. Uncle Gideon would bring his raffish friends and proposition somebody inappropriate, she supposed. There was a squeal. Carlo had grabbed Snowy’s beloved cushion and she was chasing him into the sitting room and out again, careering round the Red Corner, both laughing their heads off.

Sashenka walked onto the veranda, humming a tune, one of Liubov Orlova’s songs.

She stopped, jolted by a terrifying attack of happiness. She was on the right side of history; Soviet power, with its colossal steel plants and thousands of tanks and planes, was strong; Comrade Stalin was loved and admired. How much the Party had achieved! What joyous times she lived in! What would her grandfather, the Turbin rabbi, probably still alive in New York, have said about her dizzy happiness? “Don’t tempt the Fates.” That would have been his warning—all that nonsense about the Evil Eye and those dybbuks and golems. But this was just medieval superstition! There was much to celebrate.

“Have we got vodka?” she called out to Vanya.

“Yes, and a crate of Georgian wine in the trunk of the car.”

“Well, pour me a glass! Put Utesov’s jazz-tango on the gramophone.”

The children and her husband joined her on the veranda. Vanya lifted up Snowy and pretended to slow-dance with her as if she were a grown-up. Sashenka held Carlo and danced with him, singing along to the music. She and Vanya turned the children upside down at the same moment and then swooped them up again. The children squealed with joy. How many comrades dance with their children like we do? thought Sashenka. Most of them are much too dull.

3

The sun was going down, suffusing the garden with the lilac light that always made Muscovites think of bygone summers in their dachas. At seven the party began and, as Sashenka had predicted, Uncle Gideon arrived first, bringing some friends—the famous jazz singers Utesov and Tseferman, as well as Masha, a pouty young actress from the Maly Theater who was his latest conquest.

Gideon, no longer young but still strong and irrepressible, was as shameless as he had been twenty years earlier. He wore a peasant blouse and blue beret from Paris, a gift, he said, from his friend Picasso, or was it Hemingway? Gideon claimed to know everyone—ballerinas, pilots, actors and writers. Sashenka depended on her uncle to bring these glamorous artists to her house on May Day night.

Uncle Mendel, roasting in a winter suit and tie, and his wife Natasha, the plump Yakut lady whom Sashenka remembered from the days before the Revolution, arrived right on the invited hour with their pretty daughter Lena, a student, who had inherited her mother’s slanting eyes and amber skin.

Mendel immediately started in on foreign policy with Vanya. “The Japanese are spoiling for a fight,” he said.

“Please don’t talk politics,” said Lena, stamping her foot.

“I don’t know what else to talk about, sweet one,” protested her father in his resonant baritone.

“Exactly!” cried his daughter.

Soon the driveway was jammed with drivers in ZiSes, Buicks and Lincolns trying to park along the grass shoulder, and Sashenka begged Razum to impose some order. Razum, who was blind drunk, shouted, pointed and banged the roofs of cars but ended up handing out vodka to the other drivers and having a party at the gates. The traffic jam got worse and the chauffeurs sang saucy ditties, to Sashenka’s amusement. A soused Razum was a feature of her parties.

Inside, Sashenka invited guests to eat at the buffet. They piled their plates with the zakuski snacks laid out on the table: pirozhki, blinis, smoked herring and sturgeon, veal cutlets. They drank vodka, cognac, wine and Crimean champagne. It was hard work but she enjoyed it, especially meeting Gideon’s new arty friends.

“So this is your niece, Gideon?” said Len Utesov, the jazz singer from Odessa, who would not let go of her hand. “What a beauty! I’m spellbound. Will you run away from your husband and come on tour with me to the Far East? No? She says no, Gideon. What must I do?”

“We love your songs,” said Sashenka, basking in the attention and pleased she had worn such a pretty summer dress. “Vanya, let’s play Len’s record on the gramophone.”

“Why play his records,” cried Gideon, “when you can play him?”

“Behave yourself, Uncle, or you’ll be doing the dishes,” teased Sashenka, sweeping her thick brown bob with its streaks of auburn behind her ears.

“With Carolina?” he roared. “Why not? I love all shapes and sizes!”

Vanya called for quiet and toasted May Day—“and our dear Comrade Stalin.”

As the light faded, Utesov started to tinkle on the piano, then Tseferman joined him. Soon they were singing the Odessa prison songs together. Uncle Gideon accompanied them on the bayan, a sort of accordion. The pianist from the Art Theater played on the upright piano while the writer Isaac Babel, sturdy but with laughing eyes behind round spectacles and mischief curling his full, playful mouth, leaned on the piano and watched. There was always a party, said Gideon, when Babel was around.

Sashenka had loved his Red Cavalry stories, and admired the way he saw things. “Babel is our Maupassant,” she told Vanya when he came to watch but he shrugged his shoulders and returned to the study. She stood with the musicians, holding Carlo, who was staying up late, and sang along while the men pretended to sing to her, and Snowy danced around the room in a pink party dress, all long limbs like a new foal, waving her inevitable companion.

As the thieves’ songs of the Black Sea wafted over the dacha, Sashenka’s guests—writers in baggy cream suits, mustachioed Party men in matching white tunics, peaked caps and wide trousers, a pilot in uniform (one of “Stalin’s Eagles”), actresses in Coty perfume and low-cut silk dresses à la Schiaparelli—talked and sang, smoked and flirted. May Days started with the parade in Red Square and ended with a Soviet bacchanalia, from the top down. Somewhere, even Comrade Stalin and his comrades were toasting the Revolution. Vanya had told Sashenka there was a little room for drinks and zakuski behind the Mausoleum on Red Square, after which the leaders lunched all afternoon at Marshal Voroshilov’s place and then caroused at some dacha in the suburbs until the early hours.

Slightly drunk on the champagne and still strung up with an uneasy elation, Sashenka strolled into the garden and lay down in the hammock between two gnarled apple trees. She could hear herself singing those songs, watching her children, and swinging back and forth as the tipsy world spun a little.

“Sashenka.” It was Carolina, the nanny. Carolina appeared dry, serious and formal—but underneath she was very affectionate and loving to the children. Sashenka had chosen her carefully. “Shouldn’t we put the children to bed? Carlo’s exhausted. He’s still so young.”

Sashenka could see Carlo, in blue pajamas embroidered with Soviet airplanes, sitting in a chair watching the musicians in a dreamy way. Uncle Gideon was playing his bayan for Snowy, shouting, “Bravo, little Cushion! Hurrah!”

“My cushion, cushion, cushion is dancing with Uncle Gideon,” sang the little girl, in her own world. “Giddy-gush, giddy-gush, giddy, giddy-up!”

“Thank you, Carolina,” said Sashenka. “Let’s put Carlo to bed in a minute. They’re having such fun.” It was way past their bedtime but when they were older they would be able to boast, “We saw Utesov and Tseferman play thieves’ songs together! Yes, in 1939 during the Second Five Year Plan in the joyous period after the Great Turn, after collectivization and after the times of struggle, at our dacha!”

She congratulated herself on the success of her soirée. Why did they all come to her house? Was it because she was an editor? She was a “Soviet woman of culture” well known for her partiinost, her strict Party-mindedness. Was it because men found her attractive? I’ve never had so much fuss made of me, she thought, and was glad she had worn her white linen summer dress that showed off her tanned shoulders. And then of course there was the attraction of her husband’s power. All writers were fascinated by that!

Just then the hammock lurched so violently that she almost fell off.

“So here’s the comrade editor of Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine,” a mocking voice crooned from behind her.

“You gave me a shock creeping up on me like that,” she said, laughing as she swiveled in the hammock to see who had ambushed her. “You should treat the comrade editor with some Soviet respect! Who are you anyway?” she asked, sitting up, pleasurably dizzy from the champagne.

“You didn’t invite me,” said the man, “but I came anyway. I’ve heard about your parties. Everyone comes. Or almost everyone.”

“You mean I’ve always forgotten to invite you.”

“Precisely, but then I’m very hard to get.”

“You don’t seem too shy to me. Or too hard to get.” She was glad she had worn the Coty perfume. “Then why did you come?”

“I’ll give you three guesses who I am.”

“You’re a mining engineer from Yuzovka?”

“No.”

“You’re a hero-pilot, one of Stalin’s Eagles?”

“No. Last chance.”

“You’re an important apparatchik from Tomsk?”

“You’re tormenting me,” he whispered.

“All right then,” Sashenka said. “You’re Benya Golden, writer. My naughty uncle Gideon said he’d asked you. And I love your Spanish stories.”

“Gee, thanks,” he said in English with an American accent. “I’ve always really wanted to write for Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping. It’s one of my life’s ambitions.”

“Now you’re mocking me.” She sighed, aware of how much she was enjoying talking to this strange man. “But we do need a piece for the autumn on ‘How to prepare Happy Childhood chocolate cakes and Soviet Union candies—tasty and nutritious food for the Soviet family.’ Or if that doesn’t take your fancy, how about a thousand words on the new Red Square perfume produced by Comrade Polina Molotov’s Cosmetics Trust? Don’t laugh—I’m being serious.”

“I wouldn’t dare. No one laughs these days without thinking first, especially not at Comrade Polina’s perfume, which, as every Soviet woman knows, is a revolution in the struggle of perfumery.”

“But you usually handle wars,” Sashenka pointed out. “Do you think Benya Golden could handle a really serious subject for a change?”

“Yours are truly challenging subjects, Comrade Editor,” replied Benya Golden, “and I know you wouldn’t tease a poor scribbler.”

“Poor scribbler indeed. Your stories sell really well.”

There was a silence.

“Must I stand here in holy audience,” Benya asked, changing the subject, “or may I sit beside you?”

“Of course.” She made space in the hammock. Benya was wearing a white suit with very wide sailor trousers and was looking at her intensely from beneath eyebrows set low over blue eyes with yellow speckles. His fair hair was balding. In the dimming pink light, she could see he had long eyelashes like a girl. She knew he was originally a Jew from Habsburg Galicia, and she remembered her mother saying that Galitzianers were jackanapes and rogues, worse than Litvaks—and Ariadna had probably had personal experience of both. I’m not sure I like him, she decided suddenly; there is something brash about him.

She found herself aware of her movements as she rearranged herself in the hammock, and felt irritated by the way he had crept up on her. He was invading her privacy, and his proximity made her feel shivery inside.

“I have an idea for our article,” said Benya. “What about ‘The disturbing effect of Red Square ladies’ perfume and Moscow Tailoring Factory stockings on those promiscuous shock workers and Stakhanovites in the Magnitogorsk steelworks’? That will really get their furnaces stoked.”

He started to laugh and Sashenka thought he must be drunk to say something so clumsy and dangerous.

“I don’t much like that idea,” she said soberly. She stood up, sending the hammock rocking.

“Now you’re behaving like a solemn Bolshevik matron.” He lit a cigarette.

“I’ll be who I like in my own house. That was an un-Soviet philistine joke. I think you should leave.”

She stormed toward the dacha, so furious that she was shaking. She had relaxed for a moment, her head turned by his fame, his presence in her house, but her Party-mindedness now righted her tipsy mind. Was this sneering vulgarian here by coincidence or had he been sent to provoke her into a philistine joke that could ruin her and her family? Why was she so infuriated by his boozy arrogance and pushy flirtatiousness? Wasn’t he wary of her husband’s position? Her anxiety about her fragile happiness made it all the more unsettling.

Then, stepping from the fuzzy darkness into the light of the house, she saw Carlo asleep in the big chair by the piano. He looked adorable, his upturned nose and closed eyes so innocent. Snowy was sitting on Uncle Gideon’s knee, trying to poke the corners of her pink cushion into his mouth while he talked to Utesov about Eisenstein’s new movie, Alexander Nevsky. Gideon’s actress girlfriend, almost a child herself, sat next to them on the sofa, wide-eyed as she listened to Gideon’s loud reflections on famous writers, beautiful women and faraway cities.

“Uncle Gideon?” said Sashenka.

“Am I in trouble?” he replied with mock fear.

“I don’t much like your friend Golden. I want him to leave.” Sashenka scooped up Carlo, kissing him, careful not to wake him.

“Come on, Snowy. Bedtime.” Carolina appeared magically at the door and was beckoning to her.

“I don’t want to go to bed! I won’t go to bed,” shouted Snowy. “I’m playing with Uncle Gideon.”

Gideon slapped his thigh. “Even I had to go to bed when I was little!”

Sashenka felt suddenly weary of her party and her guests.

“Don’t act spoiled, Snowy,” she said. “You’ve had a lovely present today. We’ve let you stay up and now you’re tired.”

“I’m NOT tired, you silly—and I want a cuddle with Uncle Hercules!” Snowy stamped her foot and pretended to be very angry indeed—which made Sashenka want to laugh.

The sitting room was at right angles to Vanya’s study. As she headed toward the door, Sashenka could make out her husband’s curly greying head and barrel chest. He was still in his blue trousers although now sporting his favorite embroidered shirt.

Vanya sat at a desk on which were placed three Bakelite phones, one of them his new orange vertushka, the hotline to the Kremlin. He was arguing with Uncle Mendel, one of the few Old Bolsheviks elected to the Central Committee at the 1934 Congress of Victors and re-elected at the Eighteenth Congress. The others had overwhelmingly vanished into the meat grinder and Sashenka knew that most of them had been shot. But Mendel had survived. They were discussing jazz: Soviet versus American. Mendel liked Utesov and Tseferman’s Soviet version while Vanya preferred Glenn Miller.

“Vanya,” boomed Mendel’s trumpet of a voice out of his tiny twisted body, “Soviet jazz reflects the struggle of the Russian worker.”

“And American jazz,” replied Vanya, “is the music of the Negro struggle against the white capitalists of—”

“I won’t go to bed,” cried Snowy, throwing herself onto the ground.

Vanya leaped up, effortlessly gathered Snowy into his arms and kissed her. “Bed before I box your ears!” Vanya put Snowy down and gave her a little push. “Now!”

“Yes, Comrade Papa,” said Snowy, chastened. “Night, Papochka, night, Uncle Mendel.” She skipped out.

“Thank you, Vanya,” said Sashenka as she followed with Carlo in her arms.

A car door slammed outside, a light step sounded on the veranda, and the family favorite, Hercules Satinov, smart in a white summer Stalinka tunic, soft cream boots and a white peaked cap, peeped round the corner.

“Where’s my Snowy?” he called. “Don’t tell Cushion I’m here!”

“Uncle Hercules!” cried Snowy, scampering back into the room, opening her arms to him and kissing him.

Sashenka kissed their friend thrice, bumping into her daughter in the process. “Hercules, welcome. Snowy was longing to see you! But now you’ve seen him, Snowy, you’re going to bed! Say good night to Comrade Satinov!”

“But Mama, Cushion and I want to play with Hercules,” Snowy wailed.

“Bed! Now!” Vanya shouted and Snowy darted back down the corridor toward her room.

If anything, Sashenka reflected, Hercules Satinov had become better looking with time. His black hair still gleamed with barely a strand of grey. She remembered how he and Vanya had come to collect her when her mother died, how kind they’d been to her. Now she watched as Satinov embraced his best friend, before noticing Mendel and shaking his hand formally.

“Happy May Day, comrades!” he said in his strong Georgian accent. “Sorry I’m late, I had papers to get through at Old Square.” Satinov, who had helped run the Caucasus, now worked in the Party Secretariat at the grey granite headquarters on Old Square, up the hill from the Kremlin.

“What a party, Sashenka! The jazz men singing together? Even at receptions for the leaders in St. George’s Hall, I’ve never seen that before. I hope you don’t mind, Vanya, some Georgian friends have invited themselves, and they’ll be here shortly.”

4

“Aren’t you leaving?” Uncle Gideon loomed up over Benya Golden, smoking a cigarette on the veranda. “You ideeeot!”

“Gideon, shush. Did you hear what Satinov said? Some Georgians are coming! Which ones? Someone big?” Benya whispered.

“How would I know, you schmendrik! They’re probably some Georgian singers or cooks or dancers!”

Gideon gripped Benya’s hand and pulled him outside into the dark orchard. Benya peered around nervously.

“No one can hear us here,” said Gideon, checking that Razum and the drivers were still singing dirty songs at the gates.

“If they’re just cooks or singers, why have you dragged me down here and why are you speaking, Gideon, in that bellow of a whisper?”

The sky glowed rosily and warmly, an owl hooted, and the sweet scent of flowers seeped out of the orchard. Gideon liked Benya Golden enormously and admired him as a writer. They both loved women, though as Gideon liked to put it, “I’m an animal while Benya’s a romantic.” He put his arm around his friend.

“If these Georgians are big bosses,” he said, “the less people like them know about people like us, the better.” He remembered his brother Samuil, Sashenka’s father, who he assumed was long dead now, and suddenly his chest hurt and he wanted to cry. “Ugh, time to go! Cure your curiosity, Benya! But I’m whispering, you big schmendrik, because you’ve offended my niece. Well?”

“I put my foot in it with the comrade editor. She’s no Dushenka,” Benya said, “no featherbrain. I had no idea she was so extraordinary. Is she happily married?”

“You ideeeot! Firstly she’s Vanya Palitsyn’s wife, my dear Benya, and secondly she’s never even looked at another man! First love and they’ve been together ever since. What did you do, pinch her ass, or suggest that Marshal Voroshilov is a blockhead?”

Benya was silent for a minute. “Both,” he admitted.

“You Galitzianer schlemiel, you tinker!”

“Gideon, what’s the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel?”

“The schlemiel always spills his drink onto the schlimazel.”

“So which am I?”

“Both!” Gideon told him and they roared with laughter.

“But the trouble is—I’m short of work,” Benya said. “I haven’t written for ages. They’ve noticed of course. I really do need a commission from her magazine.”

“What? About how to organize a masked jazz ball for workers celebrating production targets? Have you no shame?” asked Gideon.

“Why did I tease her?” groaned Golden. “Why can I never resist saying things? Now you’ve got me worried, Gideon. She won’t denounce me, will she?”

“I have no idea, Benya. The Organs and the Party are all around us here. You have to behave differently in such houses. Here the softness is only skin-deep.”

“That’s why I had to come. I want to understand what makes them tick—the men of power and violence. And that Venus with her mysterious, scornful grey eyes is at the center of everything.”

“Ahhh, I see. You want to understand the essence of our times and write a Comédie Humaine or a War and Peace on our Revolution, starring our princess Sashenka from the mansion on Greater Maritime Street? We writers are all the same. My niece’s life’s a spectator sport, eh?”

“Well, it’s quite a story, you must admit. I’ve met them all—marshals, Politburo members, secret policemen. Some of the killers were as delicate as mimosa; some of those who were crushed by them were as coarse as tar. At Gorky’s house, I met the sinister Yagoda, you know, and I once played the guitar with that insane killer Yezhov, at the seaside.” Benya was no longer smiling. He looked anxiously at Gideon. “But the meat grinder is over, isn’t it?”

“Comrade Stalin says the Terror’s over and who am I to disbelieve him?” answered Gideon, who really was whispering now. “Do you think I’ve survived this long by asking stupid questions? Me? Of all people? With my family background? I do what I have to—I’m the licensed maverick—and I console myself in holy communion with drink and flesh. I’ve spent the last three years waiting for the knock on the door—but so far they’ve let me be.”

“They? Surely Comrade Stalin didn’t know what was happening, did he? Surely it was Yezhov and the Chekists out of control? Now Yezhov’s gone; that good fellow Beria has stopped the meat grinder; and, thank God, Comrade Stalin is back in control.”

Gideon felt a lurch of fear. Although he regarded himself as a mere journalist, he had, like all the famous writers—Benya himself, Sholokhov, Pasternak, Babel, even Mandelstam before he disappeared—praised Stalin and voted for the Highest Measure of Punishment for Enemies of the People. At meetings of the Writers’ Union, he’d raised his hand and voted for the death of Zinoviev, Bukharin, Marshal Tukhachevsky: “Shoot them like mad dogs!” he had said, just like everyone else, just like Benya Golden. Even now he was aware of his rashness in discussing such sensitive questions with the overexcitable Benya. He pulled Benya close, so close his beard tickled his ear.

“It was never only Yezhov!” he murmured. “The orders came from higher…”

“Higher? What are you saying…?”

“Don’t write that book on the Organs and don’t tease my niece about Komsomol cakes and the ‘furnaces’ of female steelworkers! And Benya, you need to write something, something that pleases. We’re off to Peredelkino—Fadeyev’s having a party and he hands out the writing jobs so you’d better be polite to him this time, and don’t hang around here anymore if you ever want to work again!”

“You’re right. Shall I say good-bye to Sashenka?”

“Do you want a kick in the balls? I’ll get the car and you go and get my girl and tell the frisky little minx we’re leaving.”

As they left, two black Buick town cars purred into the drive.

“Was that the Georgians?” hissed Benya from the back of Gideon’s car. Masha sat silently in the front, lighting a cigarette.

“Don’t look back,” bellowed Gideon, “or we’ll turn into pillars of salt!” He put his foot down and sped away with a screech of tires.

5

The party was over. The half moon poured a milky light into the well of warm darkness outside. Mendel, chain-smoking and coughing up phlegm in guttural thunderclaps, and Satinov, who both worked at Old Square, were talking about rebuilding cadres at the Machine Tractor Stations. Sashenka and Vanya started to tidy up.

Apart from the uneasiness with Benya Golden, it had been a successful evening, Sashenka reflected. In the half darkness a figurine of alabaster nakedness appeared. “Mamochka, I can’t sleep,” said Snowy, waving her cushion so winningly that Satinov cheered.

Sashenka felt a surge of love. She could not help but indulge her daughter, perhaps remembering her own mother’s coldness, but the truth was that she was always happy to see her. “Come and have a quick cuddle! Then back to bed. Don’t overexcite her—especially you, Hercules!”

Snowy vaulted into Sashenka’s arms.

“Doesn’t that cherub ever go to bed?” growled Vanya.

“Mama, I’ve got to tell you something.”

“What, my darling?”

“Cushion woke me up to give Hercules a message!”

“Whisper it to me quickly and then back to bed—or Papochka will get cross.”

“Very cross!” said Vanya, who caught them both in a hug and kissed Sashenka’s face while Sashenka nuzzled Snowy’s silky cheek.

“Mamochka, what are those ghosts doing in the garden?” Snowy asked, pointing over her mother’s shoulder.

Sashenka turned and peered through the window.

The “ghosts,” four crop-haired young men in white suits, were stepping up onto the veranda.

“Communist greetings, Comrade Palitsyn,” said one, as the phone rang in Vanya’s office—the one connected to the Kremlin, its tone high-pitched and distinctive.

A few minutes later Vanya returned, his rumpled forehead a little puzzled. He called over to Satinov. “Hercules, that was your friend Comrade Egnatashvili.” Sashenka knew that Egnatashvili was a senior secret policeman in charge of Politburo dachas and food. “He says he’s coming with some people. We might need some Georgian food…”

Satinov looked up from the sofa. “Well, he said he might come. Who’s he bringing?”

“He just said Georgian friends.”

“Some Georgian food?” asked Sashenka, thinking fast. “It’s only midnight. Razum!” The driver appeared, swaying a little, his uniform crooked. “Can you drive?”

Razum had entered that stage of embalmed drunkenness known only to the Russian species of alcoholic: he was so soused he was almost sober again.

“Absolutely, Comrade Sashenka”—and he burped loudly.

“I’ll call the Aragvi Restaurant,” said Satinov, heading for the phone in the study. The restaurant was in town off Gorky Street.

“Comrade Razum, speed into Moscow to the Aragvi and bring back some Georgian food. Scram!”

Razum leaped off the veranda, lost his footing, nearly fell over, righted himself and made it to the car.

“Wait!” Satinov shouted. “Egnatashvili will bring something. He’s got all the best food in Moscow.” There was a pause as he and Vanya looked again at the young men in white suits guarding the gates, the suits glowing as if the moon had painted them silver.

“Who’s coming, Mamochka?” asked Snowy in the silence.

“Silence, Volya! Bed now!” said Snowy’s father, his eyes flashing. He did not use her real name unless he was deadly earnest. “Sashenka, we’ve got to give that child some discipline…”

“Who’s coming, do you think?” Sashenka asked Vanya, with a twinge of concern.

“Maybe Lavrenti Pavlovich…”

“I think I’ll be going. It’s been a nice evening,” said Mendel, whose wife and daughter had left hours ago. Sashenka noticed he was one of the few leaders who still sported an ill-fitting bourgeois suit and tie, never having embraced the Stalin Party tunic. Mendel pulled out his pillbox and placed a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue. “Let me call my driver,” he muttered to himself. “Can’t take those flashy Georgians and all those toasts! Ugh. Too late!”

A convoy of cars drew up at the gate, their powerful beams illuminating the greens and reds of the lush garden. A pall of dust darkened the starry sky, reaching for the moon. The ghosts in the white suits opened the gates to reveal several black Lincolns and a new ZiS.

The piano tinkled from inside, there was laughter from a nearby dacha, and Sashenka saw a blond athletic figure in the familiar blue and red-striped uniform jump out of the front car.

Satinov called out in Georgian: “Gagimajos!” And in Russian: “‘It’s Egnatashvili and he’s brought some food!” Sashenka could see that Egnatashvili was carrying a crate of wine. Guards in blue uniforms materialized, as if from nowhere, at the gates.

“Come on in, comrades,” said Sashenka. “Satinov said you might join us.”

Comrade Egnatashvili’s eyes gleamed up at her in the dark, eyes narrowed in warning, as she moved forward to welcome the new guests, hand outstretched—and then froze.

6

Lavrenti Beria, round faced and olive skinned, in baggy white trousers and an embroidered Georgian blouse, was carrying a box full of plates. He was, as Sashenka knew well, the new People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, boss of the secret police, the NKVD.

“Lavrenti Pavlovich! Welcome!” Vanya stepped down from the veranda. “Let me help you with that…”

“I’ll take it in, don’t you worry,” Beria said, with a glance behind him.

Sashenka saw Vanya stiffen to attention—and then the night went quiet and next door the singing and the clink of glasses hushed.

A statue seemed to be standing right there in her garden.

Comrade Stalin, his feline, almost oriental face smiling and flushed and still singing a Georgian song, appeared at the foot of the steps in a white summer tunic, wide trousers and light brown boots embroidered in red thread. The moon seemed to throw him his own spotlight.

“We heard Comrade Satinov was going to a party given by Comrade Palitsyn,” said Stalin in a soft Georgian accent, chuckling like a mischievous satyr. “Then we heard he had invited Comrade Egnatashvili. Comrade Beria said he was invited too. This meant only Comrade Stalin was left out and Comrade Stalin wanted to chat to Comrade Satinov. So I appealed to my comrades, admitting I didn’t know Comrade Palitsyn well enough to crash his party. ‘Let’s put it to a vote,’ I said. The vote went my way, and my comrades decided they would invite me. But I come at my own risk. I won’t hold it against you, comrade hosts, if you send me home again. But we do bring some wine and Georgian delicacies. Comrades, where’s the table?”

Satinov stepped forward.

“Comrade Stalin, you already know Comrade Palitsyn a little,” said Satinov, “and this is his wife, Sashenka, whom you may remember…”

“Please come in, Comrade Stalin, what an honor,” said Sashenka, finally finding her voice. She had a terrifying and un-Bolshevik urge to curtsy as she used to at the Smolny before the portrait of the Dowager Empress. She was not quite sure how she managed the steps down to the garden, yet somehow she approached Stalin—smaller, older, sallower and much wearier than she remembered, his left arm held in stiffly. He had, she noticed, a slight potbelly, and his tunic’s pockets were roughly darned. But then she supposed giants did not care about such things.

Stalin seemed amazed at the effect he had—and yet he reveled in it. He took her hand and kissed it in the old Georgian way, looking up at her with eyes of honey and gold.

“Comrade Snowfox, you’re beautifully dressed.”

He remembers my old Party alias from St. Petersburg! What a memory! How embarrassing! How flattering! she thought in confusion.

“It is lucky that you and your magazine are teaching Soviet women the art of dressing. Your dress is very pretty,” he continued, climbing the steps.

“Thank you, Comrade Stalin.” She reminded herself not to mention that her dress had been made abroad.

“For once, comrades, the Party has appointed the right person to the right job…” Stalin laughed and the others laughed too, even Mendel. “Come and join us, Comrades Satinov and Palitsyn. And you, Comrade Mendel.” Sashenka noticed that Stalin did not show much enthusiasm for the austere Mendel.

Beria affably poked Palitsyn in the stomach as he passed. “Good to see you, Vanya.” He clicked his tongue. “All quiet? Everything running smoothly?”

“Absolutely. Welcome to my home, Lavrenti Pavlovich!”

“What did you think of the soccer? Spartak need to be taught a lesson, and if our strikers don’t play better next time I’ll bust their guts!” Beria clapped his hands cheerfully. “Will you come and play basketball on my team tomorrow? We’re playing Voroshilov’s guards.”

“I’ll be there, Lavrenti Pavlovlich.”

Sashenka knew that her husband admired Beria, who worked like a horse. He was young, his round face smooth and unlined.

“May I sit down here?” asked Stalin modestly, pointing at the table.

“Of course, Comrade Stalin, wherever you wish,” she said.

Comrade Egnatashvili laid out the food on the table and Sashenka leaned across for the wine bottle.

“Let me open it,” said Stalin. He poured glasses of the earthy red wine for everyone. Then he put some lobio beans, with their rich Georgian broth, into a bowl, tossed in some bread and added a plate on top to let the bread soak. He helped himself to shashlik lamb and Georgian spicy chicken, satsivi, and carried this assortment back to his place. Egnatashvili, blond and handsome in his well-cut uniform, with bulging wrestler’s shoulders, stood towering over Stalin, helping himself to the same dishes. Both of them sat down and started to eat, Egnatashvili tasting his lobio a moment earlier than Stalin. He really was Stalin’s food taster, Sashenka thought.

“Comrade Satinov,” Stalin said quietly, gesturing for Satinov to sit beside him, with Beria on the other side. Egnatashvili, Vanya and Mendel were farther down the table.

“Lavrenti Pavlovich, who shall be tamada?” Stalin asked Beria.

“Comrade Satinov should be toastmaster!” suggested Beria.

Satinov rose, holding up a Georgian wineglass in the curved shape of an ox’s horn, and made his first toast. “To Comrade Stalin, who has led us through such difficult times to shining triumphs!”

“Surely you can think of something more interesting than that!” joked Stalin, but everyone in the house stood up and drank to him.

“To Comrade Stalin!”

“Not him again,” protested Stalin. His voice was surprisingly soft and high. “Let me make a toast: to Lenin!”

Other toasts followed: to the Red Army, to their hosts, to Sashenka and Soviet women. Sashenka observed everything, topping up the glasses then rejoining the table. She wanted to remember every moment of this scene. Stalin bantered with Satinov in Georgian but Sashenka sensed the Leader was watching him, evaluating him. She knew that Stalin liked simple, decent young people who were ruthless and vigorous but easygoing and cheerful. Satinov was hardworking and competent but he was always singing opera to himself.

Mendel started coughing.

“How’s your lungs, Mendel?” Stalin asked, listening patiently as Mendel answered with an excess of medical detail. “Mendel and I shared a cell at the Bailovka Prison in Baku in 1908,” Stalin informed the table.

“Right,” said Mendel, stroking his modest goatee.

“And Mendel had a food hamper from his indulgent family and he shared it with me.”

“Right, I shared with all the comrades in the cell,” said Mendel in his starchy, pettifogging way, making clear there was no favoritism in his comradeship. But only one cellmate mattered, thought Sashenka.

“That’s Mendel! Incorruptible author of that best-selling tome Bolshevik Morality! You haven’t changed in the slightest, Mendel,” said Stalin teasingly but with a straight face. “You were old then and you’re old now!” He chuckled and the others joined in. “But we’ve all aged…”

“Not at all, Comrade Stalin,” insisted Egnatashvili, Vanya and Beria simultaneously. “You look great, Comrade Stalin.”

“That’s enough of that,” said Stalin. “Mendel once told me off for drinking too much at a meeting when we exiles shared that old stable in Siberia, and he’s still giving everyone a hard time!”

Sashenka remembered how Mendel had backed Stalin in the Control Commission ever since Lenin’s death, never wavering during the famine of ’32, nor hesitating to smash the “bastards” to smithereens at the Plenums of ’37.

“In fact,” Stalin teased Mendel, “I often have to hold him back or he’ll froth at the mouth and have a seizure!” Everyone laughed at Mendel because his pedantic fanaticism was notorious. But it was also the reason that Mendel was still alive.

Stalin sipped his wine, his half-slit eyes flicking from person to person.

“Would you like some music, Comrade Stalin?” suggested Satinov.

Stalin smiled like a cat. When he started to sing “Suliko,” all the Georgians joined in. Then Satinov called out, “Black Swallow.” Stalin grinned and, without missing a beat, took the lead in a beautiful, high tenor, backed by Egnatashvili in a baritone, and Beria and Satinov in polyphonic harmonies. Sashenka listened entranced.

They sang more songs: hymns, and the Odessan thieves’ songs “Murka” and “From Odessa Jail.” They crooned Stalin’s favorite gangster tunes: “They’ve buried the gold, the gold, the gold…” Sashenka wondered if Stalin was choosing the songs to put everyone at their ease: the Orthodox hymns for the Russians, the harmonies for the Georgians, Odessan numbers for the Jews—yes, that was Mendel’s deep voice enriching “From Odessa Jail.”

“We need some hot women here!” said Beria. “But I’ve drunk too much. I don’t think I could even…”

“Comrade Beria, observe the proprieties! There are ladies present,” said Stalin, with mock gravity and a slight smirk. “Shall we play the gramophone? Do you have records? Some dances?”

Sashenka brought out their collection. Thank God, Satinov always gave them a Georgian gramophone record for May Day and November 8, so Stalin found exactly what he wanted. He stood at the gramophone and played the records; sometimes he raised his hands and made Caucasian dance steps but mostly he directed the festivities.

The Georgians pushed back the sofa. Sashenka rolled up the carpet and when she got up she found Satinov and Egnatashvili dancing the lezginka to her. She preferred the tango, the foxtrot and the rumba but she knew the Caucasian moves too, so she made the dainty steps while first Satinov, then Beria and Egnatashvili set to her.

“Comrade Hercules, you can really dance,” said Stalin approvingly. “I haven’t seen anyone dance so well since I was a boy…Where’s your family from?”

“Borzhomi,” answered Hercules Satinov.

“Not far from my hometown,” said Stalin, restarting the record. This was Georgian talk but Sashenka agreed with Stalin: Satinov danced gracefully. His dark eyes shone, his steps were lithe and agile, and his hands were elegant and expressive. He held her firmly, while Beria’s hand squeezed her and he put his face too close. His lips were so fat it seemed as if there was too much blood in them. Presently, she felt tired and stood back to watch. She found herself next to the gramophone where Stalin was laying out the records.

Sashenka felt happy suddenly, and at ease, almost too relaxed. She’d been terrified when first she saw Stalin, right there in her garden. But he had relaxed them all and now she was fighting against her instinct to flirt and chatter. She was overexcited and probably drunk on that heavy Georgian red. Several times, crazy things were on the tip of her tongue. Be careful, Sashenka, she ordered herself, this is Stalin! Remember the last few years—the meat grinder! Beware!

Waves of devotion rolled over her for this tough yet modest man, so decent yet so pitiless toward his enemies. But she sensed her cloying devotion would irritate him, make him uneasy. She wanted to ask him to dance. What if he was longing to dance with her? But what if such an offer was insolent or made him uncomfortable? Yet she wanted to dance with him and he must have seen it on her lips.

“I don’t dance, Sashenka, because I can’t hold a woman with my arm.” His left arm was a little shorter than his right—it was why he held it stiffly. They stood beside the piano and she was aware of the tense silence, of the danger that surrounded this extraordinary man.

“I adore this music, Comrade Stalin.”

“Music relaxes the beast in a man,” said Stalin. He looked about him. “Are you and Comrade Palitsyn happy with this dacha?”

“Oh yes, Comrade Stalin,” she answered. “So happy.”

“I hope so. May I look around?”

Beria and the others watched but did not follow them, and Sashenka was immensely proud and stirred that Stalin was talking only to her.

“We’re so grateful for it—and today we received the refrigerator. Thank you for the Party’s trust!”

“We have to reward the Party’s responsible workers.” Stalin looked into Vanya’s study. “Is it warm enough in winter? I like the study, very airy. Are there enough bedrooms? Do you like the kitchen?”

Oh yes, Sashenka loved everything about it. She fought her giddiness, her feelings of joy and freedom as an unspeakable but powerful thought crossed her mind. She was thinking of her father, Samuil Zeitlin. Couldn’t she ask Comrade Stalin now? She was so intimate with him at that moment: how could he refuse her anything? She could tell he admired her as a new Soviet woman.

“Comrade Stalin…,” she began.

Her father had lost his mind after Ariadna’s suicide and his fortune after the October Revolution. He had stayed behind in St. Petersburg, put his financial knowledge at the service of the Bolsheviks, and during the twenties he had served as a “non-Party specialist” in the People’s Commissariats of Finance and Foreign Trade, then the State Bank, before he was purged in 1930 as a “wrecker with Trotskyite tendencies.” Yet they let him retire to Georgia. Beria had arrested him there in 1937—and he had vanished. Of course, they were right to “check” this class enemy, thought Sashenka. On paper, Zeitlin was among the worst of the bloodsucking oppressors. But he had “disarmed” and had served Soviet power sincerely, without a mask. Surely Stalin would see he was no longer a threat?

Stalin smiled indulgently at Sashenka. He looked, she thought, like a friendly old tiger, creases forming on either side of his mouth—and she hesitated for a second. The honey in his eyes sharpened to yellow and a shadow of embarrassment crossed his face. She suddenly grasped that Stalin must recognize her expression. He, who could divine everything, could tell she was about to ask about the arrest or execution of a relative and there was nothing he hated so much as that request.

“Comrade Stalin, may I ask a…” The words were forming again on Sashenka’s lips and she could not stop them. She had excised her father from her memory in 1937 but now, at this most unsuitable, most fatal and yet opportune moment, she longed to say his name. What was happening to her? A Bolshevik didn’t need a family, just the Party, but she loved her papa! She wanted to know—was he felling logs somewhere? Were his bones in some shallow grave out in the Siberian taiga? Had he long since faced the Highest Measure? Please, Comrade Stalin, she prayed, say he’s alive! Free him! “Comrade Stalin…”

“Cushions!” Stalin and Sashenka turned to the doorway, and Vanya’s mouth fell open. “Mamochka, I can’t sleep!” cried Snowy. “There’s so much noise. You woke me up. I want a cuddle!”

Snowy was wearing a nightie printed with butterflies, her long golden hair curling around her rosy cheeks, her smile revealing evenly spaced milk teeth and pink gums. She fell into her mother’s arms.

7

“Snowy!” Vanya, who had been cheerfully drunk a minute earlier, stood up, his face darkening. Sashenka too sensed real peril. She had tried to teach her children to say nothing, repeat nothing, hear nothing, but Snowy was capable of anything! With Stalin in the house? One foolish word, a single stupid game could at best make a fool of her and Vanya in front of Stalin, at worst dispatch them all to the firing squad. What would Stalin say? What would Snowy say to Stalin?

“Who’s this?” asked Stalin quietly, apparently enjoying Vanya’s expression of panic.

“Comrade Stalin,” said Sashenka, “may I introduce you to my daughter, Volya.”

Stalin beamed at her daughter. Didn’t all Georgians love children? thought Sashenka, as he bent down and tickled her nose. “Hello, Volya,” he said. “That’s a good Communist name.”

“That noise woke me up,” Snowy grumbled.

Stalin pinched her cheek.

“Stop!” she cried. “You’re pinching me!”

“Yes, so you’ll remember me,” said Stalin. “I confess my guilt before you, Comrade Volya. It was me playing the music, not your mama, so be angry with me.”

“She’s not angry at all. I apologize, Comrade Stalin,” Sashenka said quickly. “Now, Snowy, off to bed!”

“I hate sleeping.”

“Me too…Snowy,” said Stalin playfully.

“Here’s my cushion!” Snowy pushed her cushion toward Stalin’s face but Sashenka caught it just in time.

“Well, what’s that?” asked Stalin, bemused, half smiling.

“It’s my best friend, Miss Cushion,” said Snowy. “She’s in charge of production of cushions for the Second Five Year Plan and she wants to join the Young cushiony Pioneers so she can wear the red scarf!”

“That’s enough, child,” Sashenka said. “Comrade Stalin doesn’t want to hear such nonsense! Off to bed!” She was aware that, on the other side of the room, her husband had raised a hand to his face.

“Yes, bed!” he said too loudly.

“Easy, Comrade Palitsyn,” said Stalin, ruffling Snowy’s hair. “Couldn’t she stay up a little? As a treat?”

“Well…of course, Comrade Stalin.”

Snowy performed a quick cushion dance and blew a kiss to her father.

“So you’re a Cushionist?” said Stalin solemnly.

“I’m in the Cushion Politburo,” said Snowy with that gummy smile. Sashenka saw she was thrilled to find herself the focus of all eyes. “Long Live Cushionism!”

Sashenka felt as though she were drowning, as she waited miserably for Stalin’s reaction. There was a long silence. Beria sneered. Mendel scowled. Stalin frowned, glancing gravely round the room with his yellow eyes.

“I think, since I woke her up,” said Stalin slowly, “we should let this little beauty stay up and join our singing, but if your parents think you should go to bed…” Sashenka shook her glossy head, and Stalin raised a finger: “I resolve: one, the Party recognizes that Cushionism is not a deviation. Two, if you stay up, you should sit on my knee and tell me about Cushionism! Three: you will go to bed when your mother says so. How is that, young Comrade Snowy Cushion?”

Snowy nodded then peered at Stalin with her very blue discerning gaze. She raised her arm.

“I know you,” she said, pointing. Sashenka flinched again.

Stalin said nothing, watching.

“You’re the poster in the Red Corner,” said Snowy. “The poster’s come for dinner.” Everyone laughed, Sashenka and Vanya with relief.

Stalin sat back at the table and opened his arms. Terrified that her daughter would reject Stalin, Sashenka put Snowy onto the Leader’s knee, but she was much more interested in waving the cushion to the music. They sang another round of songs. After the first song, Stalin put Snowy down, kissed her forehead and she sped round to her mother.

“Say good night and thanks to Comrade Stalin,” said Sashenka, holding Snowy tightly.

“Night, night, Comrade Cushion,” said Snowy, waving her pink cushion.

“I’m sorry, Comrade Stalin…”

“No, no. That’s a first!” Stalin laughed. “Good-bye, Comrade Cushion.”

Sashenka carried Snowy from the room. “Comrade Stalin, you are so good with children. She’ll remember this all her life. I can’t thank you enough for your kindness and tolerance to Snowy.” Sighing with relief, she tucked Snowy into bed and the child was asleep a moment later.

When she returned to the sitting room, she was holding something. Stalin’s eyes flicked toward her hands. “Comrade Stalin, as a small thank you for the honor of having you as our guest, but really to thank you for your patience with our daughter, may I give you a gift of a sweater for your daughter Svetlana?” She held up a cashmere sweater that would fit the thirteen-year-old Svetlana Stalin and handed it to him.

“Where’s it from?” Stalin asked coldly.

Sashenka swallowed. It was from Paris. What should she say?

“It’s from abroad, Comrade Stalin. I am very proud of our Soviet products, which are better than any foreign luxuries, but this is just a simple sweater.”

“I wouldn’t accept it for myself,” said Stalin, puffing on a cigarette, “but since Svetlana is really the one who runs the country, I shall accept it for her.” Everyone laughed and Stalin stood up. “Right! Who’s up for a movie? I want to see Volga, Volga again.”

Almost everyone except Sashenka, who had to listen for the children, and Comrade Mendel, who said he was too tired and ill, was up for a movie. They piled into the cars to drive back to the movie theater in the Great Kremlin Palace. Stalin kissed Sashenka’s hand and complimented her dress again. Outside, he inspected the buds on the bushes.

“You grow roses here. And jasmine. I love roses.” Then, surrounded by the swaggering Georgians and the young men in white suits, he lumbered away in that heavy, slightly crooked gait, toward the waiting cars. Egnatashvili opened the door for him.

As he climbed into one of the cars, Vanya waved at Sashenka, exhilarated to be in the entourage for the first time. “Back soon, darling!” he called.

Beria kissed her on the mouth with his sausagey, blood-swollen lips. “He likes you,” he said in his thick Mingrelian accent. “Well done. He’s got good taste, the Master. You’re my type too!”

Satinov was last to leave, peering round to make sure the bosses were in their cars. Doors slamming, wheels screeching, the clouds of exhaust and dust rising over the moon-kissed orchards, the Buicks and ZiSes revved up and skidded out of the drive.

“Phew, Sashenka!” he said. “Long live Cushionism! Kiss my goddaughter for me, the little charmer!” Feeling weak, Sashenka kissed Satinov good-bye. Then he jumped into the last car, which sped away.

The young men in white suits had disappeared.

Alone on the veranda, Sashenka looked up at the sky. Dawn had begun to break. Wondering if she had been dreaming, she went inside and looked into the children’s rooms.

Carlo had slept through it all but he had thrown off his pajamas and now lay naked with his head at the wrong end of the bed. His body was still wrapped in the pink fleshy curves of a baby and he held on to a soft rabbit. Sashenka shook her head with pleasure and kissed his satiny forehead.

Snowy slept like an angel in her pink room, her hands resting open on her pillow, on either side of her head. That damn cushion lay on her bare chest. Sashenka smiled. Even Comrade Stalin loved Cushion. What a strange night it had been.

8

Stalin sat in the middle pullout seat between the front and back seats of his new ZiS limousine, Beria in the back with Egnatashvili, and his chief bodyguard, Vlasik, in the front beside the driver. The rest were in other cars.

“To the Kremlin please, Comrade Salkov,” he told the driver gently. He knew the names and circumstances of all his bodyguards and drivers, was always kind to them and they were devoted to him. “Take the Arbat.”

“Right, Comrade Stalin,” said the driver. Stalin lit his pipe.

They sped down avenues of birch and spruce, the blossoms bright in the moonbeams. They came out on the Mozhaisk Highway, and took Dorogomilov Street.

“She’s a good Soviet woman, Sashenka,” said Stalin after a while to Beria, “don’t you think so, Lavrenti? And Vanya Palitsyn’s a good worker.”

“Agreed,” said Beria.

The convoy was on the Borodino Bridge with its stone bulls, its colonnades and obelisks, and about to cross Smolensk Square.

“That Sashenka can dance all right,” mused Egnatashvili, who was no politician but lived for sports, food, horses and girls.

“And she can edit too,” joked Stalin, “though that magazine’s hardly an academic journal. But that sort of housekeeping shit is important. Soviet women need to know these things.” They sped down the Arbat. “But what a family! She still has hints of her alien bourgeois origins—did you know she was at the Smolny? But she doesn’t bore us with stupid lectures like Molotov’s wife. Keeps home, makes cakes, raises children, works for the Party. She’s ‘reforged’ herself into a decent Soviet woman.”

“Agreed, Comrade Stalin,” said Beria.

“This’ll be about the tenth time I’ve seen Volga, Volga,” said Stalin. “It’s always like a holiday every time I see it! I think I know it by heart!”

“Me too,” said Beria.

They were approaching the Kremlin along wide empty roads, the security cars in front, alongside and behind. The blood-red towers of the medieval fortress appeared up ahead of them, gates opening slowly, preparing to swallow them up. Guards saluted. The wheels gave rubber gulps over the cobbles. “Ivan the Terrible walked here,” said Stalin quietly. It had been his home for more than twenty years, longer than he had spent in his mother’s house, longer than the Seminary.

Stalin looked round at Beria, whose eyes were closed.

“Tell me, Lavrenti,” he said loudly, pointing his pipe, and Beria awoke with a start. “Where’s Sashenka’s father, Zeitlin the capitalist? I remember we checked him out. Is he still with you at one of your places or was he shot? Can we find out?”

9

“I like the article ‘How to Do the Foxtrot,’” said Sashenka, inspecting the proofs at her T-shaped desk. “Are you happy with it, comrades?”

Two days had passed, and she was in the offices of Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping on Petrovka. There were portraits of Stalin, Pushkin and Maxim Gorky on the walls; photographs of Vanya Palitsyn in uniform last May Day parade with Snowy and Carlo stood on her desk; and one grey Bakelite telephone and a very small grey safe sat on a table in the corner. The size of the safe, the number of phones and the quality of the Stalin portraits were signs of power. This was not a powerful office.

“We must entertain our readers, of course, Comrade Editor,” said Klavdia Klimov, the pointy-faced, bug-eyed deputy editor who dressed in the hideous shrouds of the Moscow Tailoring Factory. “But shouldn’t we also look at the class implications of foxtrot?”

Sashenka was a master at playing this game: she was herself a believer and took the journal’s mission seriously. She might still be a little dizzy from the excitements of the May Day holiday, but she knew the rules: never talk about the bosses and especially not the Master. Nonetheless, she hoped somehow the story would leak out. She wanted Klavdia and the three other editors in her office to know who had come to visit the Palitsyns on May Day night! After all, Comrade Stalin had endorsed the journal and her work, so shouldn’t she share this with her comrades? Several times it was on the tip of her tongue but even she balked at the scale of this name-dropping and she swallowed it…Back to the foxtrot and jazz dancing.

“Do we agree with Comrade Deputy Editor? A vote?” All five of them raised their hands. “Can we resolve to commission a further piece on jazz dancing as an expression of the American capitalist’s oppression of the Negroes? Klavdia, would you write it yourself or do you have a writer in mind? And photographs? Should we pose a shot with professional dancers or send someone down to the Metropole one night?”

The editors agreed to pose a shot: there were sometimes alien elements at the Metropole. Finally they dispersed. The meeting was over. Sashenka took out a Herzegovina Flor cigarette and lit it with her lighter. She offered them round. The other four lit up too.

“You know, Utesov and Tseferman played at our house on the holiday,” Sashenka said, unable to prevent herself from a little harmless boasting.

There was an awkward silence and immediately Sashenka regretted it. “Would they give an interview to the magazine?” asked Klavdia.

“Well, I couldn’t ask them then and there,” said Sashenka, blowing out blue smoke. “But I’ll give it some thought.”

Just then there was a knock on the door. Sashenka’s secretary, Galya, stood in the doorway.

“There’s a writer waiting to see you.”

“Does he have an appointment?”

“No, but he’s very arrogant. He says you’ll know who he is and he wants to apologize.”

There was a leap in Sashenka’s belly as if she had driven over a hill too fast. “That must be Benya Golden,” she said dismissively. “What impudence! A very rude man. Tell him I haven’t got time, Galya.”

“Benya Golden?” said their one male editor, Misha Kalman. He had gotten up to leave but now he put his briefcase down again. “Will he write for the journal?”

“How do you know him?” asked Klavdia almost accusingly, eyes bulging. She remained in her seat, and when she inhaled she made a wet sucking sound.

“I don’t know him. But he came to the dacha on the weekend.”

“It must have been quite a party,” said the deputy editor in her shapeless brown shift dress. “Utesov, Tseferman—and now Golden too.” Sashenka wished she had not boasted about the guest list. She turned to Galya.

“I don’t wish to see him. He should make an appointment. Besides, I hear he’s washed up. He hasn’t written a thing for two years. Tell him to go, Galya.”

“Right, comrade,” said Galya.

“No, wait,” said Misha Kalman, whose voice was high and quizzical.

Galya turned as if to leave the room.

“Tell him, Galya,” Sashenka insisted, and Galya moved toward the door.

“Hang on!” said Kalman. “I’m a fan of his work. We so rarely get writers of his quality in the journal. Carpe diem!”

Klavdia’s protuberant eyes, like those of a big red crab, swiveled at Sashenka. “Are you allowing individualism to penalize the collective?” she asked.

Sashenka sensed danger in overplaying her dislike. Bathing in the majesty of Stalin himself, she felt suddenly generous. Besides, maybe she had overreacted at her party? Had Benya been that bad?

“Wait a minute, Galya,” she said at last, and Galya, giggling this time, stopped.

“Comrades, we need to decide if we really want him to write for Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping.”

Klavdia pointed out that Golden had been a member of the delegation to the Writers’ Congress in Paris in 1936 with Ehrenburg, Babel and others, and that he had been involved in the Pushkin Centenary of 1937.

“His stories are unforgettable,” said Kalman, ruffling his grey corkscrew curls as he praised Benya’s writing on the Spanish Civil War. Sashenka recalled that some of the generals Benya knew had been unmasked as Enemies of the People and executed in 1937/8. His patron, Gorky, was dead and many other writers had been liquidated.

“But why hasn’t Golden written anything lately?” she inquired. “Is this a protest against the Party or is it on ‘guidance’ from the Culture Section at Old Square?”

“I’ll call Fadeyev at the union,” said Klavdia, “and Zhdanov’s cultural apparat at the Central Committee. I’ll take soundings.”

“Proposal accepted. What would you like him to write, Klavdia?”

“Could he write about how the Bolshevik Cake Factory has made the largest chocolate cake in the world in the shape of a tank for Comrade Voroshilov’s birthday? Golden could interview the workers and reveal how they used Bolshevik ingenuity to create the tank’s gun barrel out of cookies and wafers…”

The Bolshevik Cake Factory loomed large in the magazine’s features but Sashenka frowned as she imagined Benya’s reaction to a cake story, however grand and military in design.

“Or how about the dancing piece?” suggested Klavdia. “Under my close supervision.”

“Comrade, you yourself had a better idea,” said Sashenka. “Remember the work of our Women’s Committee. You suggested a piece on the orphanage for children of Enemies of the People!”

“It’s a heartwarming story of class redemption and the reforging of identity,” said Klavdia.

“Surely that’s the piece for a serious writer in our pages? We’ll run it big, a cover story, five thousand words. I heard the place is delightful and many children are adopted into warm Soviet homes. So, comrades, shall I ask him to do the piece on the Felix Dzerzhinsky Communal Orphanage for Children of Traitors to the Motherland?”

Sashenka felt tired. It was already 7:00 p.m. and Carlo had woken at six that morning and climbed into her bed. Outside, Moscow basked in the vermilion light of a May evening. Despite the Five Year Plan and the signs of building work everywhere, there was still something primitive about Moscow. The streets were half empty and there were not many cars. A horse and carriage clipped along Petrovka, delivering vegetables.

“Thank you, comrades!” said Sashenka. “Resolution carried.” Her comrades filed out of the room. “Galya?”

“Final decision, comrades?” Galya joked, popping her head round the corner.

“Send him in, and you can go home.”

A moment later, Benya Golden stood in her office.

“I can’t talk in this ink-shitting bureaucratic morgue,” he exclaimed in his gravelly voice. “The breeze outside is so balmy, it’ll make you want to sing. Follow me!”

Afterward, long afterward, when she had too much time to replay these moments, Sashenka knew this was where it had all started. Her blood pounding in her ears, she walked with him to the elevators, then stopped.

“I’ve left something on my desk, Benya. I must grab it. Excuse me!”

She left him in the foyer and ran back to her office. Her fingers touching her lips, she looked at her desk, her photographs of Vanya and the children, her phone, her proofs, at everyone and everything that was important to her. She told herself this preening man was bad news. He was rude, arrogant, insincere and lacking Party-mindedness (he was not even a Party member)—and not as afraid of life as he should be. She should not go walking with him.

Then, aware of what she was doing yet curiously unable to stop herself, she turned around and walked back to where Benya Golden was waiting for her.

10

“This is one of those rare moments when no one knows where we are,” said Benya Golden as they walked in the Alexander Gardens beside the red crenellated fortress towers of the Kremlin, which reached up to pierce the pink sky.

“You know, sometimes you strike me as very naïve for a writer,” replied Sashenka briskly, remembering his foolish comments at the dacha. “We’re both well known and we’re walking in the most famous park in the city.”

“That’s true but no one’s watching us.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I told no one I was coming to your office, and you told no one we were going for a walk around Moscow. I was on my way home to my wife, and you were on your way to your husband at the Granovsky. So there was no reason to follow either of us. Your comrades imagine we’re earnestly discussing commissions in your office. If they cared, the Organs would assume that we were going home as we always do.”

“Except we didn’t.”

“Precisely, Sashenka, if I may call you that. Anyway no one would recognize me in my hat.” Benya doffed his white peaked cap and bowed low.

“Well, they’d certainly recognize you now,” she said, looking at the fair spiky strands of his receding hair.

“Look around you. The whole of Moscow is promenading tonight. Don’t you ever want to be rid of your responsibilities? Just for an hour.”

Sashenka sighed. “Just for an hour.” The soothing balmy air caressed her skin and reached into her white dress, inflating and rippling the cool cotton so she felt as light and gay as a sail on the wind. Golden was walking faster, talking as quickly, and she struggled to keep up, almost running in her high heels.

She thought about her responsibilities. There was her husband, conventional, industrious and successful, and their two mercurial, spirited cherubs in the bloom of health and happiness. They had two residences, the new dacha and the huge new apartment in the pink Granovsky building known as the Fifth House of Soviets in that little street near the Kremlin. There were the service workers: Carolina the nanny and cook, Razum the driver, the gardeners, the groom. Then there were Vanya’s parents, who lived with them at the apartment—they were a full-time job in themselves, especially Vanya’s mother, who sat in the yard all day gossiping in a dangerously loud voice. She considered Vanya’s stressful, prestigious position, and her own duties on the Women’s Committee and the Party Committee. They both had hectic lives; war was coming; they had to build their socialist world; they were emerging from deep sorrow and tragedy; many had vanished beneath the waves of revolution. That night, like most nights, Vanya would work until dawn—everyone did, following the Master’s nocturnal hours. Vanya told her how the leaders sat at their desks waiting until the words came down the vertushka: “The Master’s just left the Little Corner for the Nearby Dacha.”

Now, there was something big going on. After Munich, Stalin was changing his foreign policies—and his ministers. This was significant for the future of Europe—but it also meant that Vanya was busy working on the changes at the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.

As usual when he had secrets to share, he had pulled Sashenka into the garden at the dacha. “Litvinov’s out; Molotov’s in. I’ll be busy for a few days,” he had told her.

Sashenka knew that meant she would not see Vanya at night either and she must not mention this to anyone. Meanwhile Vanya’s parents were babysitting Snowy and Carlo at the Granovsky apartment.

Feeling lighthearted suddenly in Benya’s company, Sashenka stopped and twirled around like a girl. “Just for an hour. I can be lost for an hour. What a delicious idea!”

Her words sounded indulgently extravagant somehow—not like her at all, and she wanted to take them back.

“You were a Party member before the Revolution, weren’t you, Comrade Snowfox?” said Benya. “You must have been adept at dodging the Okhrana spooks. So are we being followed?”

She shook her head. “No. Our Organs have never been as good at surveillance as the Okhrana was.”

“Careful, Comrade Editor! Rash talk!”

She could see that he was teasing her. “And yet I feel I can trust you.”

“You can, I promise you that,” said Benya. “Isn’t it wonderful sometimes to be able to escape one’s duties and be completely selfish for a while?”

“We Communists can never do that,” she objected. “We mothers can never do it either…”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, just shut up and try it for a bit. Time is so short.”

Sashenka said nothing, but she was shocked and her head spun with a sort of vertigo.

They walked around the Kremlin. The Great Palace shimmered glass and gold beneath the evening sky. They passed the brooding dark modernist labyrinth of Government House on the Embankment, where Satinov, Mendel and many other bosses lived, where so many had been arrested in the dark times, where the elevators had groaned all night, as the NKVD drove people away in their Black Crows. There was no traffic on the streets now, just a couple of horses and carts—and an old lady selling greasy pirozhki from a kiosk.

Moscow, thought Sashenka, once called the city of a thousand cupolas because there were so many churches, is a grim place. Comrade Stalin will beautify it and make it a worthier capital for the workers of the world, but now it’s still partly palatial, partly a collection of villages—and the rest is just a building site. She had one of her periodic pangs of nostalgia for her home city: St. Petersburg—or Leningrad, as it was now called, the cradle of revolution.

I love you, Peter’s creation, she thought, quoting Pushkin.

“You’re missing Piter, aren’t you?” said Benya, out of the blue.

“How did you know?”

“I can read you, can’t you tell?”

She could, and it made her very uneasy.

They stood on the Stone Bridge, looking down on the Great Palace and the Moskva River, the whole of the city reflected and amplified in tiny detail as if it were resting on a mirror.

“Will you dance with me?” he asked, taking her hand.

“Here?” Goosebumps covered her arms and legs.

“Just here.”

“You really are the most foolish man.” She felt dizzy again, and recklessly young, and her skin scintillated where he touched her as he took her in his arms, confidently, and turned her left and left, back and forth in the foxtrot, all the time singing a Glenn Miller song in an American accent, in perfect tune.

When they parted, his body seemed to leave a burning imprint on her belly where he had pressed her against him. She saw there was another couple on the bridge. They did not react as Sashenka and Golden approached. They were youngsters, he in a Red Army uniform and she in a white coat over a dress with a slit up the side. She was probably one of the girls from the food shops on Gorky Street. They were openly kissing each other with an intense hunger, their mouths wide open, their tongues licking like cats at a dish of milk, faces shining, eyes closed, her curtain of thick flaxen hair getting caught in his teeth, his hands up her skirt, her fingertips on his zipper.

Sashenka felt disgusted: she remembered the couple necking on her street during the Revolution, and Gideon and Countess Loris outside the Astoria—yet she could not take her eyes off the couple and suddenly felt a starburst of the wildest wantonness in her body, and such urgency that she did not recognize herself, so foreign was it to her, so alien. This gulping spasm was so insistently physical that she feared it was her period arriving early to cramp her insides.

Benya towed her along the Embankment with insouciant arrogance, not talking anymore, just singing old romances and gypsy songs:

When he finished singing, her hand remained in his, first by accident, then tensely, and when she became aware of it she did not try to remove it.

He was flirting with her in an audacious and dangerous way, Sashenka told herself. Didn’t he know who she was? Didn’t he understand what her husband did? I’m a Communist, a believer, she thought, and I’m a married woman with two children. Yet now, in that hot Muscovite night, after twenty years of survival and discipline, and three years of terror and tragedy while thousands upon thousands of Enemies were unmasked and liquidated, she suddenly experienced a flutter of madness in the company of this slight, balding Galician Jew who had ambushed her with his frivolous dance steps, blue eyes and raffish songs.

Benya handed her down a small set of stone steps that led directly to the river’s brim, a secret quay. “No one can see us!” he told her again, and they sat on the steps, their feet just over the water. It should have been muddy and scummy but tonight the Moskva was coated with diamonds that reflected light onto their faces, etching them in purple and bronze, making them both feel younger. A flush spread throughout her body, the sensation of wings beating. She had been powerfully bedded by her husband and had children by him—yet she had never experienced anything like this.

“Did you ever do this as a teenager?” he asked her. He kept reading her mind uncannily.

“Never. I was a solemn child and a very serious Bolshevik…”

“Didn’t you ever wonder what the popular songs were about?”

“I thought they were nonsense.”

“Well then,” he said, “you deserve just an hour in the world of popular song.”

“What do you mean?” she said, noticing his lips, his sunburnt neck, his eyes burning into her. He offered her his last Egyptian cigarette, a Star of Egypt with a gold tip—and it took her back twenty years. He lit it for her with a silver kerosene lighter, then offered her a swig from a flask. She expected vodka; instead, sweetness flooded her senses.

“What on earth is it?”

“It’s a new American cocktail,” he said. “A Manhattan.”

It went straight to her head—and yet she was more sober than she had ever been.

A hulking barge, piled high with coal or ore like a floating mountain, rumbled past them, lying low and rusty in the water. The sailors sat around, drinking and smoking. One was playing a guitar, another an accordion. But when they saw Sashenka, in her white wide-brimmed hat and her beaded dress tight across the hips, her gleaming white stockings reflected on the dappled waters, they started to call out and point at her.

“Hey, look over there! A real vision!”

Sashenka waved back.

“Fuck her, man! Kiss her for us! Bend her over, comrade! You lucky bastard!” one of the sailors called.

Benya jumped to his feet, raising his hat like a dancer. “Who! Me?” he called.

“Kiss her, man!”

He shrugged apologetically. “I can’t disappoint my audience,” and, before she could protest, he kissed her on the lips. She fought it for a second but then, to her own astonishment, she surrendered.

“Hurrah! Kiss her for us!” The sailors cheered. She laughed into his mouth. He pushed his tongue between her lips, delving as deep as he could reach, and she groaned. Her eyes closed. Surely no one in the world had ever kissed like this.

She had never understood before. In the Civil War she’d been young, but she had been with Vanya then and men like Vanya did not kiss like this. And she had never wanted him to kiss her this way: they’d been comrades first; he had cared for her after her mother’s suicide; they worked closely together during the Revolution of October 1917; and then she’d traveled through Russia on the Agitprop trains and he with the Red Army as a commissar. Afterward, they had met again in Moscow. There was no time for romance in those days: they had moved into an apartment with other young couples, all of them working days and nights, living on carrot tea and crackers. Sashenka was still the straitlaced Bolshevik and that was how she liked it. She’d always recalled her oversexed mother with horror and regret. Yet this insolent Galitzianer, this Benya Golden, had no such inhibitions. He licked her lips, nuzzled her forehead, inhaled the smell of her skin as if it were myrrh—and the pleasure of these simple things amazed her!

She opened her eyes as if she had been asleep for an age. The sailors and the barge were gone but Benya kept on kissing her. The secret places of her body purred. She shifted her position, embarrassed, but every time she moved, her loins felt liquid and heavy. She was nearly forty years old—and she was lost.

“You know, I just don’t do this sort of thing,” she said at last, a little breathlessly.

“Why the hell not? You’re very good at it.”

She must have been a little mad because now she leaned over again and took his head in her hands and started to kiss him back in a way she had never done before.

“I want you to know, Benya, I love your stories. When I read them, I wept…”

“And I love these freckles on either side of your nose…And these lips, my God, they never quite close as if you’re always hungry,” Benya said, kissing her again.

“So why have you stopped writing?”

“My ink is frozen.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She pushed his face away roughly, holding his chin in her hand. “I don’t believe you’re not writing. I think you’re writing secretly.”

He stared out at the river, where the lights of the British Embassy in its stately mansion right opposite glowed in the water.

“I’m a writer. Every writer has to write or he’ll die. If I didn’t I’d shrivel up and rot away. So I translate articles from socialist papers, and get commissions to work on film scripts. But they’ve almost dried up too. I’m nearly penniless now, even though I still have my apartment in the writers’ building.”

“Why didn’t you stay in Paris?”

“I’m a Russian. Without the Motherland, I’d be nothing.”

“So what are you working on?”

“You.”

“You’re writing about the secret police and the top of the Party, aren’t you? You write it by hand at night, and hide it in your mattress. Or maybe at the home of some girl in the suburbs? Am I just material for your secret work? Are you using me to see into our world?”

He sighed and scratched his head. “We writers all have something secret that keeps us alive and gives us hope, although we know we can never publish it. Isaac Babel’s working on something secret, Misha Bulgakov’s writing a novel about the devil in Moscow. But no one will ever read them. No one will ever read me.”

“I will. Can I read what you’re working on?”

He shook his head.

“You don’t trust me, do you?”

“I long to trust you, Sashenka. I’d love to show you the novel because no one knows of it, not even my wife, and if I showed it to you, then I would have one reader, one beautiful reader, instead of none and I’d feel an artist again instead of a washed-up scribbler in these days when we’ve all become cannibals.”

Benya looked away from her and she sensed, even if she did not see, that there were tears in his eyes.

“Let’s make a pact,” she said, taking both his hands. “You can trust me with anything, even the novel. I’ll be your reader. And in return, if you swear never to hurt me, never to break this confidence, you can kiss me again after sundown by the Moskva.”

He nodded and they held hands, their faces luminous in the summer night like the burnished death masks of pharaohs. Behind her, she heard the call and then the haunting creak of wings as two swans landed with a clean foamy swish on the rippling surface of the river.

She was happier at that moment, in herself and for herself, than she could ever remember.

11

Benya led Sashenka by the hand up the steps from the Embankment and toward the Metropole Hotel. She hung back as the doorman in the top hat and braided tails opened the door, but Benya could tell that she wanted to dance as much as he did.

Benya loved the atmosphere at the Metropole. Even during the Terror, the jazz band went on playing there and he would dance away his troubles to the blare of the trumpets and saxophones. Before 1937, the hotel had been full of foreigners with their Russian girls in French gowns, but now the businessmen, diplomats, journalists and social delegations from abroad sat apart. Before the killing started, Gideon had sometimes brought him here for dinners with important foreign writers. He had met H. G. Wells, Gide and Feuchtwanger. He had heard his patron Gorky give a speech here to the Party writers and theater bureaucrats such as Averbakh and Kirshon. One by one, they had all vanished. Alien elements liquidated! But he had survived, and Sashenka had survived the Terror by some miracle, and it seemed to Benya all of a sudden that tonight they should celebrate being alive.

As they walked together through the doors, they were so close and so in step, momentarily, that he could see the dark wood and polished chrome of the front desk reflected in her grey eyes. But as soon as they were in the lobby, Benya noticed how Sashenka kept apart from him. He realized she was worried that she might be recognized—but she sometimes entertained her writers for the journal here and he was her new writer.

“Relax,” he whispered to her.

The waiters in black coats showed them to a black art-deco table. How different the dining room seemed. The brilliant mirrors, the curling blue smoke rising to the molded ceiling like mist on a mountain, the lights on the stage, the silhouettes of men with their hair en brosse and their tidy mustaches, the gleam of boots, the curve of jodhpur breeches on the Red Army officers, the permanent-wave hairdos of the girls—all were infinitely more glamorous tonight.

A girl in a white blouse with a flashlight and a tray of cigarettes and chocolates appeared before them. Never taking his eyes off Sashenka, Benya bought a pack of cigarettes, offering her one. He lit hers, then his own. They said nothing, but when she looked at him, her gaze seemed like the beam of a lighthouse shining out from a friendly shore. The smoke whirled around her in broken circles as if it too wanted to be close to her. Everything in the nightclub revolved around her.

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 double-bassists, 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 out-of-town 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 earth-tilting 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 moon-blanched night, she looked down at the Moskva River, the bridges, the gaudy onion domes of St. Basil’s, and into the Kremlin, sixty-nine acres of ocher palaces, emerald rooftops, blood-red 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 low-set 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! Yes, seven thousand rubies to celebrate her and Benya Golden. What had happened to her? she wondered. She could not believe Benya’s uninhibited carnality or the fog of sweat that had blurred that little room. Passing the old university on her right, she turned down little Granovsky Street. Her pink turn-of-the-century wedding-cake home, the Fifth House of Soviets, was on the left with guards outside. The guards nodded at her. The janitor was hosing down the yard.

She let herself into the apartment on the first floor. She did not turn on the lights but she relished the shining parquet floors that smelled of polish and caught the meager light; she enjoyed the high ceilings, molded so beautifully; and the woody aroma of the Karelian pine furniture, issued by the government. Her parents-in-law were asleep round the corner of the L-shaped corridor but she turned on the lamp by her bedside, its base a muscular golden bicep holding a bulb surrounded by a green shade. She sat on her bed for a second and caught her breath. Was she betraying everyone she loved? Could she lose it all? Yet she could not regret what she had done.

She opened the door to the children’s rooms and looked in on them. Would they smell the reek of sin on her? But they slept on angelically. She had not betrayed them, she told herself firmly. She had just found a part of herself.

Sashenka stood looking down on them, then kissed Snowy’s forehead and Carlo’s nose. Carlo held one of his many bunnies in his arms. She suddenly longed to wake them up and cuddle them. I am still their mother, I am still Sashenka, she told herself.

Just then Snowy, holding her cushion, sat up. “Mama, is it you?”

“Yes, darling, I’m back. Did Babushka put you to bed?”

“Did you go dancing?”

“How did you know?”

“You’re still singing a song, Mama. What song are you singing? A silly song?”

Sashenka closed her eyes and sang softly just for her and Snowy:

Black eyes, passionate eyes, lovely burning eyes,

how I love you, how I fear you.

I first laid eyes on you in an unkind hour…

What a song she had sung with Benya Golden, she thought. Was he still singing it?

Snowy grabbed her mother’s hand, folded it into her floppy cushion, put them both under her golden head and went back to sleep.

Sitting on the bed, her hand trapped under Snowy’s alabaster cheek, Sashenka’s uneasiness evaporated. She was not Ariadna; she could not remember Ariadna ever kissing her good night. Her mother had become a wanton creature, a lunatic animal. But sitting there on Snowy’s bed, she remembered her mother’s death. She wished they had talked. Why had Ariadna killed herself with her Mauser? Sashenka would never forget sitting beside her wheezing mother, waiting for her to die.

Listening now to the soft breathing of the children, she thought of her father again. How proud she had been that he had not fled abroad but had renounced capitalism and joined the new regime. But she had not seen him since 1930, when he fell from being a “non-Party specialist” to a “former person” and “saboteur” and was sent into a lenient exile in Tiflis, where he’d lived in a single room. During the Terror, Sashenka might have been vulnerable as a “capitalist’s daughter” but she was an Old Bolshevik, an enthusiast even for the Terror, and she had “reforged” herself as one of Stalin’s New Soviet Women. Vanya’s working-class credentials and success protected her, but she’d accepted that she could not appeal for her father, help him or even send him packages.

“Let him go,” Vanya had told her. “It’ll be best for him and us.” She had almost appealed to Comrade Stalin, but Snowy had stopped her just in time.

She had last heard Samuil Zeitlin’s gentle, urbane voice—its tone and mannerisms so redolent of their old mansion and life before the Revolution—on the telephone just before his arrest in 1937. Her children had never met him: they believed that her parents had died long before. Sashenka never criticized the Party for the way it treated her father, not even in her own mind, but that did not stop her wondering now: are you out there, Papa? Are you chopping logs in Vorkuta, in the wastes of Kolyma? Or did they give you the seven grams of lead—the Highest Measure of Punishment—years ago?

Slowly she went back to her room, showered, then, collecting Carlo in her arms, she got into bed with him. Carlo awoke and kissed her on the nose. “You’ve found a baby bunny in the woods,” he whispered, and with his mouth still close to her ear, they slept.

The next morning, she had just sat down at her T-shaped desk in the office when the phone rang.

A low humorous voice with that Jewish Galician intonation that immediately, embarrassingly, resonated between her legs, said: “It’s your new writer, Comrade Editor. I wasn’t sure—did you commission that article or not?”

15

Ten days later, Benya Golden lunched as usual at the Writers’ Club with Uncle Gideon. Later they visited the Sandunovsky Baths and Benya continued on to Stas, the Armenian barber, in his little shop right next door. There was a portrait of Stalin on the wall, an array of metal clippers and naked razors stuck on a magnetic strip, and a plastic plant in the window. The radiogram, always playing at Stas’s place, reported clashes with the Japanese in Mongolia. War was coming. Benya sat in the soft leather chair as Stas bathed his face in foam and warm water.

“You seem happy enough,” said Stas, an old Caucasian with thick oily hair dyed an unnatural jet black and a small raffish mustache. “You’ve got a commission? Or you’re in love?”

“Both, Stas, both, simultaneously! Everything in my life has changed since I last saw you.”

As he luxuriated in the warm towels wrapped around his face and neck, Benya’s spirits soared. He didn’t give a fig for his commission. All he could think about was Sashenka. Her meltingly husky voice, how she would stroke her short upper lip when concentrating; how they danced, made love, sang, talked, and understood each other “as if we were born under the same star,” he said aloud, shaking his head slowly.

Not a day, not an hour, not a minute passed when he wasn’t consumed by his need to see her, talk to her, touch her. He wanted to feast his eyes on her and fill up his stores of memories, so that even if she was not with him he could almost reach out and feel her. Now he viewed even the most familiar places with reverence, if they were associated with her. That day he had wandered down Gorky Street. The stars and towers celebrated not the Tsars or Stalin, but her, Sashenka. When he ambled past Granovsky, where she lived, a diaphanous halo illuminated that very street. The NKVD guards were not guarding marshals or commissars, they were guarding his heart, which dwelled there.

Yet with love, there was always suffering: she was married. So was he. And they had met in cruel times. He had once loved his wife, but the struggle of everyday life had ground their passion into routine; they had become brother and sister—or, worse, lodgers in the same apartment that they shared with their little daughter. And Sashenka was—highfalutin romantic phrases failed him—simply the loveliest woman he had ever met. He felt he was sitting atop a dizzying peak, peering down on the glowing earth, crowned with stars. Could it last? We mustn’t waste a second, he thought.

“What time is it? I’m late. Hurry up, Stas!” He felt impatient suddenly as if he had to tell someone about his ardent secret. “I’m in love, Stas. No, more than love, I’m crazy about her!”

Across town in the Kitaigorod, Moscow’s Chinatown, Sashenka, in the smart scarlet suit she wore sometimes for work, was climbing up a small staircase to the atelier of Monsieur Abram Lerner, the last old-fashioned tailor in Moscow. He worked for the special services section of the NKVD, and it was he who had designed the new marshals’ uniforms when Stalin had restored the old ranks of the army. It was said that he made Stalin’s own tunics but the Master hated new clothes and it was probably just a rumor.

Lerner had taken on Cleopatra Fishman to serve the leaders’ wives. Sashenka knew that Polina Molotov and the other wives all came to her (and that some insisted on paying, while some did not pay at all). Now, at the end of a busy day, she had arrived to collect another new outfit. She waited impatiently in the reception area, where there were piles of Bazaar and Vogue magazines from America. If a client liked a certain design, she pointed to it in Vogue and Cleo and her team of seamstresses would work it up for her. Lerner and Cleopatra, who were not related but had worked together for decades, existed in an island of old-world courtesy: their atelier was probably the only institution in the entire Soviet Union where no one had been denounced or shot over the last decade.

Cleopatra Fishman, a stocky little woman with grey, curly hair who smelled of chicory, escorted Sashenka into the dressing room, where she unveiled the blue silk dress with the pleated flounces on the skirt.

“Do you want to try it now or just take it?”

Sashenka looked at her watch.

“I’ll put it on.” She quickly threw off her clothes—in a way, she reflected, that she would never have thrown them off before—and folded them away into a bag and pulled on her new outfit. She shivered as the silk settled onto her new-cast body.

“You’ve had a new hairdo too, Sashenka.”

“The permanent wave. Do you approve?”

The older woman looked her up and down. “You’re glowing, Comrade Sashenka. Are you pregnant? Anything you want to tell old Cleopatra?”

Fifteen minutes later, at 7:00 p.m., in that eyrie at the top of the Metropole, Sashenka, in her new dress and hairdo, her new brassiere, her new perfume and silk stockings, was kissing Benya Golden, who, while his white suit got dirtier and shabbier, was also primped, barbered and bathed.

They made love, they talked, they laughed—and then she brought a package out of her bag and tossed it on the bed.

He jumped up and opened it, weighing it in his hands.

“A little present.”

“Paper!” He sighed. The Literary Fund Shop had refused him any more paper so she had ordered it for him. “Paper’s the way to a writer’s heart.”

They had met at the Metropole every day for ten days, and their relationship had moved beyond mere sexual infatuation. Sashenka had told him the story of her family; he had told her of his upbringing in Lemberg, of his adventures in the civil war, and the many outrageous erotic shenanigans in which he had become embroiled. After twenty years in the grip of Bolshevik officialdom, Sashenka was bowled over by the exuberance of Golden’s life: every disaster became a ridiculous comedy in which he starred as chief clown. His clashes with officialdom—dreary and heartbreaking in anyone else—became hilarious sketches peopled by grotesques. His views on the Socialist Realists, writers and filmmakers, were riotously scabrous, yet he spoke of poetry with tears in his eyes. He lent her books and took her to movies in the middle of the day; they relished Moscow in bloom—the lilacs and the magnolias—and he even bought her garlands of mimosa and bunches of violets, which came, the shopkeeper assured them, all the way from the Crimea.

“You’ve brought me back to life,” Benya told her.

“What am I doing with you?” she answered. “I feel as if I’m in delicious freefall. When a woman lives a disciplined life for twenty years and then the discipline snaps, she may lose her mind.”

“So you do like me a bit?” he persisted.

“You’re always fishing for more praise, my darling.” She smiled at him, taking in his blue eyes with the yellow speckles that bored into her so intensely, the dimpled chin, the mouth that was always on the verge of laughter. Sashenka realized that though she laughed so much with the children, she had not laughed enough in her life since those early days with Lala. There was precious little laughter with Mendel and Vanya, and now she discovered how many joyless people there were in the world (and especially in the Bolshevik Party). When she was not making love with Benya, they were laughing, their mouths wide open, their eyes shining.

“You need more and more praise, don’t you? I can tell your mother loved you as a boy.”

“She did. Is it that obvious? I was so spoiled.”

“Well, I’m not going to tell you what I think of you, you silly Galitzianer. Your head’s quite swollen enough. Anyway, isn’t the proof of the pudding in the eating?”

“This pudding always wants to be nibbled,” he said.

She sighed. “I want you all the time.”

She was at the window, letting the breeze cool her sweat, wearing just her stockings. He was lying naked and spread-eagled on the bed, smoking a Belomor and wearing nothing but his white peaked cap. She went to him and lay on his limbs, resting her head on her hand, taking his cigarette for a puff and then blowing blue circles into his mouth. But for once, he did not start making love to her.

“I’ve written your article,” he said, not looking at her.

“The Felix Dzerzhinsky Communal Orphanage…”

“…for the Re-education of Children of Traitors to the Motherland.”

“Well, it must be quite an uplifting institution,” she mused. “The front line in the creation of the new Soviet child.”

“I can’t write it like that, Sashenka. Even if I turned myself into the most cold-hearted, cowardly, murderous scum, I couldn’t write it…”

“What do you mean? It’s a story of redemption.” She was shocked by his sudden vehemence.

“Redemption? More like perdition, Dante’s inner circle of hell!” He was shouting suddenly, and she ran a finger over her lips, surprised by his anger. “I don’t know where to start. At a distance it looked very sweet—an old noble house in the woods, probably somewhat like the Zemblishino of your upbringing. Children parading at morning assembly in their white uniforms to discuss the new History of the Bolshevik Party—Short Course. But when I wanted to come inside and observe, the director, a brutish Ukrainian named Khanchuk, made a fuss, although he surrendered when he learned the name of the editor’s husband. Inside, away from public scrutiny, the children are starving, dirty and ill educated. One six-year-old died yesterday—there were cuts and burns all over his little body. 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:

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 bumble-bee 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 Commissar-General, 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 green-shaded 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 Zeitlin-Palitsyn 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 twenty-fifth, 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 Fifty-eight 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 yes-men 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 forty-three 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.

Afterward, Gideon, a giant with his prickly beard, ox-like jaw and playful black eyes, walked in the streets with Mouche. It was early summer. Girls were promenading.

“Mouche, did you notice that, until recently, everyone dressed like prissy nuns?” announced Gideon. “Thank God that’s over! Skirts are getting shorter, slits getting higher. I adore summertime!”

“Stop looking, Papa momzer,” Mouche scolded him, calling him a rogue in Yiddish, like in the old days. “You’re too old.”

“You’re right. I am too old, but I’m slightly soused and I can still look. And I can still do!”

“You’re a disgrace.”

“But you love me, don’t you, Mouche?” Gideon held Mouche’s hand. His daughter was now in her thirties, married with children, and dramatically good-looking, with black eyes, thick black hair, strong cheekbones—and almost famous in her own right. Gideon was a grandfather but damn that! The girls were out in force in Moscow that May, and the old connoisseur relished the legs, the bare shoulders, the new look of permed hair—oh, he could taste their skin, their thighs. He decided to call on his new mistress, Masha, the girl he’d brought along to Sashenka’s party. Masha, he mused, was one of those placid, easygoing girls who would be boring were it not for their almost insane appetite for sex in all its varieties. He was just playing the scene in his mind when he realized Mouche was pulling on his arm.

“Papa! Papa!”

A white Emka car had stopped right next to them. The driver was waving at Gideon, and his passenger, a young man in a baggy brown suit, round intellectual’s spectacles and a pompadour hairstyle, jumped out and opened the car’s back door.

“Gideon Moiseievich, any chance of a chat? It won’t take long.”

Mouche had gone quite pale. The pretty girls in the streets drifted out of Gideon’s vision, and he put his hand on his chest.

“If you’re not feeling well, we can talk another time,” said the young man, who sported a thin ginger mustache.

“Papa, will you be OK?” asked Mouche.

Gideon puffed up his barrel chest and nodded.

“It’s probably just a chat, darling. I’ll see you later.”

It was routine, he told himself. Nothing to worry about. He’d be back with Mouche in a couple of hours.

As Mouche watched her father get into the car, she had a terrible feeling that she might never see him again. Where was her uncle Samuil? Vanished. Half of her father’s friends had disappeared. First their works were mocked in the newspapers, then their apartments were searched and sealed. When she saw those friends again, she could barely say hello. They carried the plague of death. Finally they too were arrested, and vanished. But Gideon had strode over their bodies, and Mouche saw that he was a master of survival. He did what he had to do, although his family background was utterly damning. He survived only because it was said that Comrade Stalin liked his work and his connections with the European intelligentsia.

Now swaying in the summer wind, Mouche watched the car drive off with an ostentatious skid of the wheels up the hill toward the Lubianka. As it left, she had seen her father turn and blow her a kiss.

Mouche hurried to the public telephone and rang her cousin.

“Sashenka? Papa’s fallen ill unexpectedly.” She knew this was all she needed to say.

“Which hospital is he at?”

“The one at the top of the hill.”

18

At her apartment in the Granovsky, Sashenka was playing with the children in the playroom. Carolina, the nanny, had made them toast and peach jam for tea and was now frying calf’s livers for supper. Vanya was meant to be home by seven but he was late, and Satinov and his heavily pregnant wife, Tamara, had already arrived for dinner.

“What is it?” Satinov had asked, as soon as he saw her anxious face.

“Hercules, may I show you our new car downstairs?”

Sashenka knew that Satinov understood this code perfectly. Leaving the doll-like Tamara with the children, they took the elevator down to the courtyard where an array of the most dazzling limousines were parked under the watchful eye of the janitor and an NKVD guard. Granovsky was now such a bosses’ residence that it had its own wooden guardhouse.

A gaggle of elderly men and women sat in a half circle of canvas chairs in the evening light, warmed by the hot asphalt—the mottled men in fedoras, white vests and shorts, displaying creased old bellies and white-furred chests, the swollen women in cheap sandals and sundresses with floppy hats, broad in hip, white skin burning raw. The men were reading the newspapers or playing chess, while the women talked, pointed, laughed, whispered and talked more.

At their center was Marfa, Vanya’s fishwife of a mother, a cheerful walrus in a straw hat.

“Hey, there’s my daughter-in-law,” Marfa cried out raucously. “Sashenka, I’m telling them about the May Day party and who turned up at the dacha. They can’t believe it.”

Her father-in-law, Nikolai Palitsyn, an old peasant, pointed proudly at Sashenka. “She talked to HIM!” said Nikolai. “HIM!” He raised his eyes to heaven.

“But HE mentioned how much he admired Vanya!” added Vanya’s mother.

Sashenka tried to smile but Vanya’s parents were a source of danger. The courtyard was in its way quite select: these were all the parents of bosses but any gossiping was reckless, and could prove fatal.

“Hello, Comrade Satinov,” called out the old Palitsyns.

Satinov waved, impeccably smart in tunic and boots.

“I’m showing Hercules the new car,” Sashenka said. “Can you believe them?” she whispered. “How can we shut them up?”

“Don’t worry, Vanya will keep them quiet. Now tell me what’s happened,” he said.

“Mouche called. They’ve arrested Gideon. I thought it was all over except for a few special cases. I thought…”

“Mostly it’s over but it’s our system now. It’ll never be over. It’s the way we make our USSR safe, and we’re living in such dangerous times. Probably it’s nothing, Sashenka. Gideon’s always been a law unto himself. He’s probably got drunk, told a stupid joke or groped Molotov’s sourpuss wife. Remember: do and say nothing.”

A Buick drew up and the driver opened the door.

“It’s Vanya.”

Sashenka was not surprised to see her husband looking bleary, unshaven and exhausted—it was the hours he worked, and the stress.

“What is it?” he asked, before he even kissed Sashenka or greeted Satinov.

“I’m going upstairs to play with the children,” said Satinov.

“Did you know about Gideon’s arrest?” Sashenka asked her husband, while, for the benefit of the geriatrics and the guards, she pretended to look at the car.

Vanya took her smooth hands in his big ones. “Rest assured, they’re very pleased with me at the moment. I don’t know any details but they mentioned it to me and I just said, ‘Let our comrades check him out.’ Understand? I promise you this doesn’t touch us in any way.”

Sashenka looked into Vanya’s reassuringly proletarian face, taking in his lined forehead, greying temples and crumpled uniform. She was so relieved that they were safe. Gideon was a special case, she told herself, a European writer who knew foreigners, who visited whorehouses in Paris, who gave interviews to English newspapers. Once again, she was grateful for her husband’s rock-like stability. Then she remembered Benya’s sarcasm about his “boisterous” hard work, which, in turn, was obscured by a delicious memory of Benya’s lips on her body earlier that day. A trickle of unease ran down her spine.

Upstairs, Snowy and Carlo were chasing Satinov round the apartment. Sashenka came in as they caught Satinov and tickled him.

“Tell me, Uncle Hercules,” said Snowy, sitting astride her godfather, “where do cushions live?”

“Cushonia, of course.” Satinov had helped Snowy develop her fantasy world. “Are they Wood Cushions, Sky Cushions or Sea Cushions?”

“Hercules, you’re such a sport,” said Sashenka. “You’ll be marvelous when you have your own!”

“I love these children,” said Satinov as he surrendered to them, allowing Carlo to pull off his boots.

Carolina came in to announce that dinner was ready.

19

Gideon was numb with fear as the car crossed Red and Revolution squares, then climbed the hill toward Lubianka Square. His vision crumpled as five mountainous storeys of grey granite and three of yellow brick overshadowed the car, which turned through a side gate into Lubianka Prison.

His mind kept working. He thought remorsefully of his brother, whom he had not seen for almost ten years and whom he had not telephoned since 1935. Surely Samuil had understood that it was risky for them to be in contact? But where was he now?

Gideon remembered his brother at the mansion on Greater Maritime Street, in that study crammed with Edwardian bric-a-brac, clanking on his Trotting Chair. How could it be that he had ceased to exist?

Without even thinking, Gideon bowed his head and whispered the Kaddish for his brother, amazed he could even recall that old Jewish prayer for the dead…Facing death, one returns to childhood, to family. Gideon realized that he loved his daughter Mouche more than anyone in the world. Will Mouche understand me, remember me, after I get the seven grams in the back of the neck? he wondered. The pain in his chest was unbearable. He was almost weeping with fear.

“Here we are!” The young man smiled at Gideon. He did not treat Gideon like a prisoner. On the contrary, a uniformed Chekist—as all secret policemen were known, in honor of Lenin’s “knights of the Revolution,” the Cheka—opened the door and helped him out of the car. Well, I am a literary celebrity, Gideon thought, reviving a little. There was no tonic like fame.

He noticed the many Buicks and ZiSes parked there. This was not the courtyard where they brought new prisoners.

Gideon was guided through double wooden doors into a marble hall and then a wood-paneled corridor with a blue carpet runner along the middle. Officers in NKVD uniform, and secretaries, bustled about. It was like any other state office. Gideon was relieved they were not taking him to the Internal Prison but he kept searching his mind for the meaning of this summons. What had he written recently? What had he said? What was happening in Europe that could involve him? He was a Jew and they had just sacked Litvinov, the Foreign Commissar, and also a Jew. Were Jews going out of favor? Was the USSR moving closer to Hitler?

If I am going to die, have I fucked enough women? Gideon thought suddenly. Never enough! Heartburn pierced his chest and he gasped.

“This is my office,” said the young man, his pompadoured hair rising in a perfectly formed wave over his pink forehead. “I’m Investigator Mogilchuk of the Serious Cases Section, State Security. Are you all right? Here!” He offered Gideon a pillbox. “Nitroglycerin? You see, I was expecting you.”

Gideon swallowed two pills, and the pain in his chest diminished.

A busty freckled redhead with a slit up the side of her dress sat typing in the anteroom. Even here his mind wandered up her skirt for that delicious first touch of the new…There were flowers on her desk. She took Gideon’s hat.

“Come on in, Gideon Moiseievich,” said Investigator Mogilchuk, clean-cut and young. When they were sitting down, the freckled girl brought tea for both of them and shut the door.

“Thanks for coming in, Citizen Zeitlin,” Mogilchuk started, pulling out a pad of paper and a pen. Gideon could smell the coconut sweetness of that damned pomade in the youth’s red hair. “I shall take notes. By the way, have you seen Romm’s new movie, Lenin in 1918? As a young fan of your writing, I just wondered what you thought of it?”

Gideon virtually spat out his tea: had these ideeeots terrified him in order to bring him here just for a chat on movies? No, of course they had not. Ever since the twenties, the Cheka had used sophisticated faux intellectuals to manage the real ones. This freckly youth was merely the latest in a long line.

“Lenin in 1918 is a wonderful film, and Stalin is beautifully portrayed in contrast to the murderous terrorist Bukharin,” he replied.

“You know Romm of course. And how about Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky?”

“Eisenstein is a sublime artist and a friend. The movie shows us how Bolshevism is utterly compatible with the Russian nation and its stand against our national enemies.”

“Interesting,” said the interrogator sincerely, stroking his ginger mustache. “I must tell you I’m a writer myself. You may have read my collection of detective stories published under the name M. Sluzhba? One of them will soon be performed as a play at the Art Theater.”

“Ah yes,” said Gideon, who vaguely remembered a review of a volume of clichéd detective yarns by a certain Sluzhba in some thick journal. “I thought those tales had the tang of reality about them.”

Mogilchuk smiled toothily. “You flatter me! Thank you, Gideon Moiseievich, from you that’s a compliment. I would welcome any comments.” He passed his hand over the papers before him but did not change his tone. “Now let me start by showing you these.” He pushed a bound wad of papers toward Gideon.

“What are these?” Gideon’s confidence sank again.

“Just some of the confessions of your intimate friends in the last couple of years.”

Gideon surveyed the typed-up pages on special headed NKVD letterhead, each one signed in the corner.

“You’re a big name and you appear frequently in these confessions,” explained the youngster keenly, almost admiringly. “They all mention you. Look here in these Protocols of Interrogation, and see there!”

Could the wild-eyed hag in this photograph really be that lissom creature of pleasure Larissa, whose throaty laughter and delicious breasts he remembered from that summer at the Mukhalachka Sanatorium in the Crimea just four years ago? Had she really denounced him for planning to kill Comrade Stalin? But then he remembered that he had himself denounced Larissa at meetings of the Writers’ Union as a traitor, snake and spy who should be shot along with Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. And no one had had to torture him to make him do it.

Where were these friends of his? Were they all dead?

Gideon’s breath was shallow with fear; red specks rose before his eyes.

Outside that comfortable sunny office with this unctuous Soviet New Man with his pomaded hair were scores of corridors and offices where baby tyrants grew into big tyrants, where ambitious bullies became systematic torturers. And somewhere in this nest of misery was the Interior Prison with its cellars where his friends had died, where he might die yet. Gideon was amazed by the evil in the world.

“This is all totally false,” said Gideon. “I deny this nonsense.”

The quiff smiled affably. “We’re not here to discuss that now. We just want a chat. About your relative Mendel Barmakid.”

“Mendel? What about Mendel? He’s an important man.”

“You know him well?”

“He is the brother of my brother’s late wife. I’ve known him since they married.”

“And you admire Comrade Mendel?”

“We’re not friends. We’ve never been friends. In my view, he’s an ideeeot!” Gideon felt a guilty relief. He had always disliked Mendel, who had banned two of his plays at the Little Theater—but no, he wished this fate on no man. On the other hand, Gideon was in his fifties and never hungrier to embrace life, to gobble it up. Who loves life as much as me, he wondered, who deserves to live more? He thanked God they wanted Mendel, not him!

“Where did you last see Comrade Mendel?”

“At the Palitsyns’ house on May Day night.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No.”

“Who was he talking to?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t pay attention to him. He doesn’t approve of me. Never did.”

Gideon noted that the interrogator still called Mendel “comrade,” which meant that this was merely a fishing expedition. These torturers always tried to rope in other big names to add to their invented conspiracies. That was why all his old friends had denounced Gideon himself: the NKVD was just letting him know that he was living on ice. OK, he surrendered. They owned him and that was fine!

“Comrade Mendel appears in many of the confessions we have here too. Does Comrade Mendel reminisce about his early revolutionary career in the underground? His role in 1905? In exile? In Baku? In Petersburg? The early days of 1917? Does he boast of his exploits?”

“All the time. Ad nauseam.” Gideon, hands resting on his fat prosperous belly, laughed so heartily and unexpectedly that the young investigator laughed too, in a high and reedy squeak. “I know all his stories by heart. He doesn’t so much boast as drone on interminably.”

“Do you have enough tea, Citizen Zeitlin? Want some cakes? Fruit? We so value these friendly chats. So, tell me the stories.”

The youngster opened his hands. Gideon felt braver.

“I’m happy to tell old stories but if you want an informant, I’m not right for such work…”

“I quite understand,” said Mogilchuk mildly, collecting the files. A photograph half fell out of them. Gideon’s chest constricted sharply. It was Mouche, his beloved daughter, walking with Rovinsky, the film director, who’d vanished in 1937. So Mouche was the reason they asked him about movies. Mogilchuk quickly gathered up the photograph again and it disappeared into his papki.

“That was Mouche,” cried Gideon.

“With her lover, Rovinsky,” said Mogilchuk. “Do you know where Rovinsky is now?”

Gideon shook his head. He had not known about Mouche’s love affair—but she was so like him. He must protect his darling daughter.

Mogilchuk just opened his hands as if sand were running through them.

“You want all Mendel’s stories?” said Gideon. “That might take all night!”

“Our State can place eternity at your disposal if you wish. Are you dreaming of Masha, that little honey of yours? She’s much too young for you and so demanding! She’ll give you a heart attack. No—much safer for you to think about your daughter as you tell us those Mendel stories.”

20

Two days had passed and it was dusk on the Patriarchy Ponds. In the sweltering half light, couples walked like pink shadows around the cool ponds, holding hands under the trees. Their feet crunched on the gravel, their laughter tinkled and someone was playing the accordion. Two old men stared at a chessboard, neither moving.

Sashenka, in her white hat and hip-hugging white beaded dress, bought two ice creams and handed one to Benya Golden. They walked slightly apart but an observer would have known they were lovers, for they kept a constant symmetry between their bodies as if linked by invisible threads.

“Are you busy?” she asked him.

“No, I’ve virtually nothing to do and no money to do it with. But”—here he whispered—“I am writing brilliantly all day on your delicious paper! Can I have some more? I’m so happy to set eyes on you. I just long to kiss you again, to savor you.”

She sighed, half closing her eyes.

“Shall I go on?”

“I can’t believe I want to hear your talk—but I do.”

“I want to tell you something crazy. I want to run away with you to the Black Sea. I want to walk with you along the seafront at Batum. On the boardwalk there’s a barrel organ that plays all our favorite love songs and I could sing along, and then when the tropical sun goes down we could sit at Mustapha’s café and kiss. No one would stop us, but at midnight some old Tatars I know would take us in their boat to Turkey—”

“What about my children? I could never leave them.”

“I know, I know. That’s one of your attractions.”

“You’re shamefully perverse, Benya. What am I doing with you?”

“You’re a wonderful mother. I’ve behaved badly all my life—but not you. You’re a real woman of milk and blood, a Party matron, an editor, a mother. Tell me, how’s the magazine?”

“Wildly busy. The Women’s Committee is planning a gala for Comrade Stalin’s sixtieth in December; we’re doing a special issue for the Revolution Holidays; I’ve managed to get Snowy into her first Pioneers’ Camp at Artek—she’s already dreaming of wearing her famous red scarf. But best of all, Gideon is back home.”

“But he could still be doomed, you know. They could just be playing him like a fish on a hook.”

“No, Vanya says he might be all right. Comrade Stalin said at the Congress—”

“No more Party claptrap, Sashenka,” Benya said urgently. “We haven’t time to talk about congresses. There’s only now! Only us.”

They turned a corner, away from the ponds, and suddenly they were on their own. Sashenka took his hand. “Do you look forward to seeing me?”

“All day. Every minute.”

“Then why are you looking so mischievous and crafty? Why have you lured me here?”

They were approaching an archway that led into a courtyard. Checking to see that no one was watching them, Golden pulled her into the archway, through the courtyard and into a garden where there was a rickety garden shed, the sort favored by pensioners to store their geranium seeds. He flashed a key. “This is our new dacha.”

“A shed?”

He laughed at her.

“You’re displaying bourgeois morality.”

“I am a Communist, Benya, but when it comes to lovemaking I couldn’t be more aristocratic if I tried!”

“Imagine it’s the secret pavilion of Prince Yusupov or Count Sheremetev!” He unlocked the wooden door. “See! Imagine!”

“How can you even think for a moment that I would…” Sashenka realized that the days of living with Vanya in the spartan bunk beds of their tiny room in the Sixth House of the Soviets were long ago. She was a Bolshevik—but she’d earned her luxuries. “It’s rotten and it stinks of manure.”

“No, that is Madame Chanel’s new perfume.”

“That looks like a garden fork to me!”

“No, Baroness Sashenka, that’s a diamond-encrusted fork made for the Empress herself by the celebrated craftsmen of Dresden.”

“And what’s that disgusting old rag?”

“That blanket? That is a pelt of silk and chinchilla fur for the baroness’s comfort.”

“I’m not going in there,” said Sashenka firmly.

Golden’s face fell but he persisted. “What if I just told you, with no bullshit at all, that this door leads us into a secret world where no one can see us or touch us and where I will love you more than life itself? It’s not a mansion, I know. It may be just a pathetic garden shed, but it is also the shed where I want to adore you and cherish you without wasting another second during my short lifetime in this menacing world. It may sound silly but you’ve arrived in the summer of my life. I’m not old, but I’m no longer young, and I know myself. You are the only woman of my life, the woman I will remember as I die.” He looked very serious suddenly, as he handed her a book he’d drawn out of his jacket—a volume of Pushkin. “I prepared this so we would never forget this moment.”

She opened it and on the page of her favorite poem, “The Talisman,” was a single, rare dried orchid.

He began to recite:

“You never stop surprising me,” she whispered. Sashenka felt so moved and desperate to kiss him that her hands shook. She stepped into the shed and kicked the door shut. Everything in there—tools and seeds and some old boots—seemed as alive and full of love as she was.

Benya took her in his arms, and somehow she could tell by the look in his eyes, and the cast of his lips, that he meant what he’d said, that he did love her, and that this moment, in their private world, was one of those sacred occasions that occur once or twice in a lifetime, and sometimes never at all. She wanted to bottle it, store it, keep it forever in a locket at the very front of her memory so she could always reach for it and live it all over again, but she was so entranced that she couldn’t even hold that thought. She just reached for him and kissed him again and again until they had to go home. But even as they parted, she repeated to herself, You must not lose it, its power is infallible, love gave it to you. And she could scarcely believe her own joy and luck that someone had actually said those words to her.

21

“What now? I’ll complain to the Housing Committee. Stop that rumpus! It’s three a.m.!” shouted Mendel Barmakid, Central Committee member, Orgburo member, Deputy Chairman of the Central Control Commission, Supreme Soviet deputy. His daughter Lena was also awakened by the banging on the door and for a moment she lay there, smiling at her father’s absurdly operatic fury, imagining him in his ancient corded dressing gown, moth-eaten and stained. She heard him open the door of the family apartment in the Government House on the Embankment.

“What is it, Mendel?” called out Mendel’s wife, Natasha.

Now my mother’s up too, thought Lena, and she could almost see the plump Yakut woman with the Eskimo features in her sweeping blue caftan. Her parents were talking to someone. Who could it be?

Lena jumped out of bed, put on a scarlet kimono and her glasses, and came round the corner from her room toward the front door.

She saw her father rubbing his red-rimmed eyes and squinting up at a bulging giant in NKVD uniform. In shining boots, immaculate in his blue and scarlet uniform, holding a riding crop in a hand covered in gaudy rings and a jewel-handled Mauser in the other, Bogdan Kobylov stared down at the three Barmakids. He was not alone.

“Who is it? What do they want, Papa?”

Before Mendel could answer, Kobylov swaggered into the hall, almost blinding Lena with his eye-watering Turkish cologne. “Evening, Mendel. On the orders of the Central Committee, you’re coming with us,” he said in a barely intelligible rustic Georgian accent. “We’ve got to search the apartment and seal your study.”

“You’re not taking him,” said Lena, blocking the way.

“All right! Step back,” said Kobylov in a surprisingly soft voice. “If you waste my time and fuck around, I’ll grind you all to dust, the little mare included. If we keep things polite, it’ll be better for you. As you can imagine, there are other things I’d far rather be doing at this time of night.” He flexed his muscles.

Lena glared up at their tormentor’s jewels and kinky hair but her father laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and pulled her out of Kobylov’s way.

“Thank you, Vladlena,” sneered the interloper with a flashy smile. Lena’s full, revolutionary name, Vlad-Lena, was short for Vladimir Lenin.

“Good evening, comrades,” said Mendel in that Polish-Yiddish Lublin accent that he had never lost. “As a Bolshevik since 1900, I obey any summons from the Central Committee.”

“Good!” Kobylov beamed mockingly.

Lena, who was twenty and studying, sensed how this uneducated secret policeman from some village in Georgia hated the Old Bolsheviks, Soviet nobility, with their libraries, fancy airs and intellectual pretensions.

“May I get dressed, Comrade Kobylov?” asked Mendel.

“Your women will help you. One of my boys will keep an eye on you. Where are the weapons?”

Lena knew from her father how Comrade Stalin hated suicides.

“There’s a Nagant in the bedside table, a Walther in the study,” boomed Mendel, limping back to the bedroom.

“I’ve got to sit down,” murmured Natasha. She collapsed onto the sofa in the sitting room.

“Mama,” cried Lena.

“Are you all right, Natasha?” called Mendel.

“I’m fine. Lena, help Papa dress, please.” Natasha lay down, breathing heavily.

Lena brought a glass of water to her mother, then watched the Chekists opening drawers and making piles of manuscripts in Mendel’s study. During ’37 and ’38, there had been arrests and raids in their building every night—she’d hear the elevators working in the early hours and see the NKVD Black Crows parked outside. The next morning, she’d noticed how the doors on the apartments had been sealed by the NKVD. “The Cheka’s defending the Revolution,” her father told her. “Never speak of this.” But that was all over. The arrests had stopped a year ago. This must be a mistake, she thought.

“Mendel,” called Kobylov. “Any letters to or from the Central Committee? Old things?” He meant letters from Comrade Stalin. “Your memoirs?”

“In the safe, it’s open,” retorted Mendel from the bedroom. To Lena’s surprise, there were a few postcards from Stalin in exile; some notes from the twenties; and typed memoirs on yellowing sheets of foolscap, marked by Mendel’s spidery notes. Her father was so modest. He told stories of his adventures but never dropped names. “Lena!”

Lena followed her father into his bedroom. She opened his wardrobe and took out his three-piece black suit, his black fedora, his walking boots with the built-up 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 papier-mâché statue on a May Day carnival float.

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

Lena watched her father, limping in his old-fashioned 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 super-modern apartment building they were so proud to inhabit and said nothing, though a nervous tic fluttered on his cheek. Her severe, laconic and very old-fashioned 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. Good-bye, Lena Mendelovna.”

“Good-bye, 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 sandy-haired 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 in-laws, 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 military-religious 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 mud-brown 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 tree-trunk 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!”

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 scarlet-embroidered 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, white-lipped 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 teddy-bear 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?

“We could kill ourselves tonight, Vanya. I could kill myself and you’d be free of me. You’d be clean. I’ll do it if you just ask…”

“That’s our first choice. We have the gun and we have tonight. But suppose they don’t have anything on you? They’ll beat you and humiliate you. But if you don’t confess, they’ll ask: ‘Did she sign anything? No? Well, perhaps she wasn’t a bastard after all.’ They’ll free you in the end. For us, for life, for the children.”

The children! They’d almost forgotten the children. Death, the violence and finality of vanishing from the earth and ceasing to exist, was so horrifying, so immediate, that it bred the purest form of egotism. How could she have been so selfish?

Sashenka turned and ran into the house, Vanya behind her, and they burst into Snowy’s room. Holding hands, they stared in anguish at Snowy, her white skin and fair hair spread out on her pillow, breathing so softly, her long arms curled beside her, her silly pink cushion resting against her cheek. And there was Carlo lying naked on his front, hair tousled, arms and legs still creased like a baby, head burrowed into his favorite velveteen rabbit.

Sashenka was barely able to breathe, her throat parched, in the warm, dark room that smelled of the peculiar freshness of young children in summertime, of hay and vanilla. It was as if they were the first and last parents in the world. But they were the only ones to know what they were up against. Sashenka’s stomach churned. They were on the verge of losing their treasures forever.

“Snowy, Carlo, oh darlings!” She fell to her knees between the two beds, Vanya beside her, and suddenly they were sobbing silently in each other’s arms.

“Don’t wake them,” said Vanya.

“We mustn’t,” agreed Sashenka, brokenly. But she could not help herself. With trembling hands, she reached into Carlo’s bed and lifted him out, folded him against her, raining kisses on his satiny forehead until he stirred. Vanya was holding Snowy, his face buried in her hair, which cleaved like gold thread to his wet cheeks. Both children were drowsily sensual as they clung to their parents, gloriously unaware of the rising storm, roused from the deep slumber of that sweltering night. The four of them crouched together in the comforting darkness, the parents gasping with tears, the children stretching and sighing, settling back into their loving arms, only half awake.

Finally Vanya pulled Sashenka by the hand. “Put them back to bed!” he said. They tucked the children in again then crept outside to sit on the edge of the sofa by the open French windows. A car door slammed loudly in the night air.

“Vanya! Is this it? Is it them?” She threw herself into his arms.

He calmed her with his clumsy hands, their coarseness now so welcome, familiar.

“No, it’s not them. Not yet,” he whispered. “But we’ve got to think calmly. Stop crying, girl! Gather yourself. For the children…”

Then he too started to shudder—and she let out an involuntary moan until he put his hand over her mouth. Finally she left the room and washed her face with cold water. A dread soberness descended on both of them.

“Vanya, we can’t kill ourselves because—”

“Stalin calls suicide ‘spitting in the eye of the Party.’ We save ourselves pain, but not the children. The Party will take it out on the children.”

“I’ve got it. We kill ourselves and the children. Tonight, Vanya, now. We die together and we’ll be together. Forever!” How strange—yet she did believe in a sort of afterlife. In eternity. That was what her rabbinical grandparents believed, and she the Communist had always eschewed it. Now those old words from Turbin came back to her—Zohar, the Book of Splendor and heart of the Kabala, Heaven and Gehenna, the golems and dybbuks that haunted those cursed with the Evil Eye, the spiritual world so foreign to scientific Marxism and dialectical materialism. And yet now she imagined her soul, and its love, living on beyond the shell of her body. There she would see her mother and father, all young again. They would all be together! She pulled out the Nagant from under Vanya’s NKVD cap. She still knew how to use it.

“Do you believe that?” he asked. “I do. We’d all be together in Heaven. Maybe you’re right. If they come for us, we kill them and then ourselves.”

“So that’s decided.” But as Sashenka turned toward the bedroom, he caught her, taking the pistol from her and slipping it into his holster.

He hugged her tightly, whispering, “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Could you?”

She shook her head. It was now past midnight and Sashenka’s mind was working more systematically.

“We don’t have time for more crying, do we, darling Vanya?”

“They’ve something on us. I don’t know what.”

“Gideon mentioned ‘the Greeks and the Romans’ and then Mendel was arrested. Benya Golden knows nothing about us.”

“But is he a provocateur? A spy? Is he filth?”

“He could be…” She was now so afraid that she was blaming her own lover. Was this what had happened? Had Benya destroyed her family? Then another meteor shower of possibilities bombarded her: “Could it be a Chekist intrigue at the Lubianka? There has to be some reason for this, Vanya, doesn’t there?”

He opened his hands wide.

“There has to be a cause,” he told her. “But there doesn’t need to be any reason.”

Just then they heard the back gate creak.

“It’s them, Vanya. I love you, Vanya, Snowy, Carlo. If either of us live, oh Vanya…Shall we end it all? Where’s the bulldog?”

They clung together. He had the gun in his hand and they pressed its cool steel between their palms as if it were their love token. There were no other sounds. The night turned with grinding slowness.

A whistle split the stillness, and a figure in a white hood stepped out of the shadows of the orchard.

Vanya raised the Nagant pistol.

“Who’s there? I’ll shoot. I’ll take you all with me, you bastards!”

27

“I can only stay for a few minutes,” said the visitor, removing the Caucasian hood that he had always worn in that Petrograd winter, in the early days.

“Oh Hercules, thank God you came!” Sashenka kissed him repeatedly, holding on to him. “We’re going to be all right, aren’t we? You’ve come to tell us how to fix it. Who do we need to talk to? Please tell us!”

They turned off the lights on the veranda, and Hercules Satinov sat at the table with Vanya and Sashenka. She poured the three of them shots of Armenian brandy.

“It’s going to be fine, isn’t it?” she said again. “We’re imagining this, aren’t we? Oh Hercules, what are we going to do?”

“Hush, Sashenka,” said Vanya. “Just let him speak.”

Satinov nodded, his eyes slits of quicksilver in the darkness.

“Listen carefully,” he began. “I don’t know everything but I know that something has changed. They’re working on Mendel and they’ve found something on you.”

“On me?” cried Sashenka. “Vanya, divorce me! I’ll shoot myself.”

“Just listen to him, Sashenka,” said Vanya.

“It’s beyond that now,” said Satinov tersely. “I thought…about the children.”

Sashenka’s blood started to pound.

“Can’t I go and see Beria? I’d do anything. Anything! I could persuade Lavrenti Pavlovich…”

Satinov shook his head and Sashenka sensed the tension running through him. He did not even have time to discuss them. Just the children.

“I could write to Comrade Stalin. He knows me, he’s known me since March 1917 when I typed for Lenin…He knows me.”

Satinov’s eyes flashed, and Sashenka understood that somehow this came from the Instance, the top, the Instantzia.

“You must think only of the children now,” he said simply.

“Oh my God,” Sashenka whispered, red spots whirring before her eyes. “They’ll be sent to one of those orphanages. They’ll be tortured, murdered, abused. Trotsky’s children are dead. All Kamenev’s. All Zinoviev’s. I know what happens in those places…”

“Quiet, Sashenka. What can we do, Hercules?” Vanya asked.

“Can they stay with any of your family?” asked Satinov but Sashenka knew Gideon and Mouche were on the edge of the precipice; his other daughter, Viktoria, was a Party fanatic who would never help tainted children; Mendel was already in the coils of the Lubianka; and Vanya’s parents would probably be arrested soon after them.

“Then Snowy and Carlo must be sent away,” said Satinov. “Immediately. Maybe even tomorrow. To the south. I have friends there who owe me favors. Remember, I was on the ZaKavCom for a long time. Outside the towns, there are ordinary people, unpolitical people. I was tough at times when I worked down there, I broke the backs of our enemies—but when I could, I helped people.”

“Who are these people? What will happen to Snowy and Carlo?” Sashenka was drowning in hysteria: she fought for breath, her mouth gasping, yet she could not take in enough oxygen.

“Sashenka, you have to trust me. I’m Snowy’s godfather. Do you trust me?”

She nodded. No choice: Satinov was all they had.

“Right, they must travel south in secret. I have to go to the Caucasus myself tonight but I can’t travel with them. Someone absolutely trustworthy must take them ‘on holiday’—nothing suspicious about that. Somewhere, that person will hand them over to another person I have in mind.”

“What about Vanya’s parents?”

“Yes, my mother loves the children…,” said Vanya eagerly.

“No,” interrupted Satinov. “They’re at the Granovsky. They’re being watched at all times. They would not be a wise choice; forgive me, Vanya, but their Party-mindedness is both fervent and simpleminded, a dangerous combination.”

“Do you know… someone who would look after the children in the south, someone really kind, kind enough for such beloved…such angels?” Sashenka asked.

Satinov took Sashenka’s hands in his and squeezed them. “Don’t torture yourself. Yes, oh yes, I promise you, Sashenka, I have in mind someone of whom you would approve. But even that person cannot know where they are finally settled.”

“Will they be settled together? Please say they will. They love each other, need each other—and without us…”

Hercules shook his head. “No. If they were in an NKVD orphanage for children of traitors, they’d be split up, their names changed. Besides, there might be an all-Union search for a brother and sister together and they’d find them. They’ll be safer separated. There are thousands of lost children now, millions even, the stations are full of them.”

“But that would mean they’d lose a brother and a sister as well as their parents. They’d cease to be part of the same family. Vanya, I can’t bear it. I can’t go through with it.”

“Yes,” Vanya replied, “you will.”

“They’ll be settled in separate families,” continued Satinov. “I have the families in mind. They’re couples without children, not involved in politics in any way—but decent, kind people. If you come back, if all this is nothing, if you’re just exiled, you won’t be able to live in Moscow for a long time but the children’ll be ready for you, I promise. And they’ll come and join you wherever you are. But if not, and things look bad…”

“Tell me who they are, please, these families. Who are they?” beseeched Sashenka, her voice cracking.

“No one except me can know where they settle. Helping children of Enemies of the People would cost all of us our heads. But I can do it, Sashenka. The paperwork’ll be lost, and they’ll disappear safely. You’re not alone. Many sent their children to the countryside in thirty-seven. So this is my offer. If you accept this, I swear that I’ll watch over your children as long as I have breath in my body. It will be my life’s mission. But you have to decide right now.”

Vanya looked at Sashenka and she looked at him. Finally she turned to Satinov.

“Oh Hercules,” she croaked—but she nodded.

She tried to hug Satinov but he shrank from her and she understood how he felt because she’d felt it herself. When doomed friends were put on ice in ’37, waiting for arrest, she avoided them as if they were infectious, as if they carried the plague, because in those times such connections could be fatal. Now she was the leper and this dear friend was helping her.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “You’re a decent man, an honest Communist.”

“Believe me, I’m not so great,” Satinov said.

“All right,” he said then. “First, I have telegrams to send. Get the children ready tonight. You can send them anytime from tomorrow. Or you can wait until one of you is taken and you know more. You depart tomorrow for Stalinabad, don’t you, Vanya? But if they take you, will you be able to get a message out? I’m leaving tonight on a special Central Committee train so I’ll be in Tiflis tomorrow. I’m heading a new mission and I’ll be in the south for a month. It’s a blessing because it means I can help you. I’ll give you my telegram details. And this is important: if you’re arrested, I need time to settle the children before the Organs come looking. Vanya, you know what I’m saying. Don’t even think about harming yourselves. Give me the cover, whatever it costs you. I’ll use it well, understand? Now, stage one. Would Carolina take them on the first part of the journey?”

Sashenka thought of the stick-thin Volga German woman. For a moment she hesitated. In her flux of fear, Sashenka wondered if the nanny would betray them. Truly they could trust no one. Then, “Yes,” she said, “I believe she’d go to the ends of the earth for those children.”

“Get her,” said Vanya but Sashenka was already knocking on Carolina’s door. When she saw Carolina’s anxious face, she realized that the nanny knew something was wrong—she hardly needed to explain. A few words sufficed.

Sashenka fought back tears and understood from the grim determination on Carolina’s face and her set jaw that she had observed their suffering of the past hours.

“Come and join us,” said Sashenka. The distinctions of mistress and servant vanished in a second, their power to save (or destroy) each other making them equals.

“Right,” said Satinov when Sashenka and the nanny returned. “You understand that whatever happens, I was never here. Vanya, Sashenka, the last time we ever met was at the Granovsky at dinner with my wife. We didn’t talk politics. I know nothing of your fate. You must book Carolina’s tickets and passes as soon as possible. Call the station, work out times, right now, tonight even.” He placed two identity cards on the table. “These are the papers for two orphans from the Dzerzhinsky Orphanage. Carolina must travel on her own papers but the children’s tickets will be in false names. There are constant inspections on the stations and trains these days. Sashenka, destroy the children’s passports—don’t leave them in the dacha!”

“Where should Carolina go?” asked Sashenka. “Could she take them home with her to her village?”

“They might find her even there,” said Satinov. “There’ve been a lot of arrests of Volga Germans out of Rostov. Carolina, you should take the Moscow-Baku-Tiflis train from Saratovsky Station. When you leave the train at Rostov there’ll be a message for you at the stationmaster’s office under your own name—it’s Gunther, isn’t it? Carolina Gunther? Either a person or a message. Afterward you must return to your village. All clear?”

Sashenka noticed that Satinov did not look his old friends in the eye as he departed, but he kissed her hand just as he had when they first met more than twenty years before and he hugged Vanya.

Pulling on his Georgian hood, he left through the garden just as he had come, and the gate creaked as it closed. Sashenka had known him since the winter of 1916, when they were all young. He had seen her at Ariadna’s deathbed, had been their best friend in the world. Now their relationship was ending—or perhaps it was metamorphosing. From being a friend, he might become the only family her children had on earth. Among this Russian nation of toadies and cowards, timeservers and snitches, he alone had shown the courage to remain a human being.

“Come on. We’ve got work to do,” said Carolina briskly, placing her hands on Sashenka’s upper arms and pressing. “But first we must eat. A clear mind needs a full stomach.” She brought out a tray of goat’s cheese, tomatoes and black Borodinsky bread with Narzan mineral water.

They did not turn on the veranda light but they fell on the food as if they had never eaten before. Time ground on slowly. Sashenka felt better now: she had a mission. She had to trust Hercules Satinov. He said her children would be settled with “kind people” but oh, how her heart was breaking! She remembered Snowy and Carlo’s births at the Kremlevka, the Kremlin Hospital, on Granovsky. Snowy, the first, had been easy: she had emerged with a head of blond hair and slept her first night on Sashenka’s chest…Now she talked endlessly about cushions and butterflies (she knew the names of Brazilian Blues and Red Admirals) and she hated eggs. Carlo needed his eleven strokes before he would sleep, and he woke up in the night and needed a cuddle. He hated yogurt and he had a collection of rabbits, and when his blood sugar ran low between meals he needed his favorite Pechene cookies, the ones with the Kremlin on the tin; and he always wanted to visit the new Metro stations with their marble halls and glass cupolas and ride on the trains…

Should she write these things down for these “kind people”? Could she tell someone? Who would know all this—except a mother? How could her children be happy without their mother? Sashenka began to shake again.

“Discipline yourself! We must be practical!” Vanya’s voice cut into her terror.

Sashenka contracted into herself as if she had been touched by a block of ice.

She could not write anything down and the children could take little with them—above all, nothing that linked them to their parents. There was no time now for sentiment, tears, guilt. Sashenka was a mother now, nothing more, just a mother protecting her cubs. She had to save them from the orphanages that Benya had described. When everything had been prepared, if there was time, then she could savor the presence of those living treasures, and talk to them a little. Then she could sob all she liked.

Sashenka found her food tasted of nothing. The garden might have been made of cardboard; the jasmine and the lilac and the honeysuckle smelled of decay; the pony, the rabbits, the squirrels, the rest of existence could rot for all she cared, if only she could be spared to bring up her children, if only they could be free to return to her…

Here I am abandoned, an orphan, with no one to look after me… Never had that old song been so pertinent and so unbearable.

“Vanya, we must talk carefully. This may be our last night together. But what do we tell them?” she asked, choking over her words.

“The less, the better,” said Vanya. “They must forget we ever existed. Snowy will remember more but Carlo’s only three. He won’t even…” He could not speak anymore. Sashenka took Carolina’s hand.

“Carolina, let’s pack their cases. We must find them warm things to wear so they are never cold.”

They went back into Snowy’s room and Sashenka started to hand the child’s clothes to Carolina. Each time, when she raised a little skirt or sweater to her nose, she inhaled the scent of hay and vanilla.

I gave the children life, Sashenka told herself, but I never owned them. Now they must live on without me, as if I never existed.

28

Old Razum the driver, last night’s booze oozing out of cratered pores, arrived at dawn to take Vanya to the Moscow station. He honked beyond the gate, and Sashenka came out in her mauve nightie. It was a cool, bright, bracing May morning. The dew on the grass sparkled like a shower of diamonds, and the roses were budding. The children were already up and Carlo was jumping on their bed.

“Mama, can I tell you something…”

Vanya had been drinking all night and was sweating vodka. Sashenka watched as he went into the playroom to kiss the children. She knew he had many things he wished to say to them: bits of advice, sayings, mistakes to be warned against, gems all fathers wish to impart to their children before going on a journey. But the children were overexcited and would not even sit on his knee.

“I don’t want to kiss Papochka, do you, Snowy?” Carlo pointed at his father, who stood there in his full NKVD uniform, boots, cap, three tabs on his red collar, leather strap and holster.

“We only want to kiss Mama and Carolina. Daddy’s a scary monster! Daddy will eat us up and spit us out!” shouted Snowy, skipping like a frisky lamb. They jumped around him, and Sashenka watched—tears in her eyes—as Vanya caught them each in turn and pressed his face, his lips, his nose against them, just for a moment.

“Ouch, Daddy, you’re all prickly!” cried Carlo. “You hurt me!”

“I don’t want to kiss your prickly face,” said Snowy. “Kiss my lovely cushion instead. Take it with you!”

“You want me to take your favorite?” asked Vanya, almost overcome.

“Yes, so you remember me, but promise to send it back, Papochka!”

Vanya’s lips trembled as he took the little pink cushion and put it in his pocket, then he grabbed Snowy and held her for a moment. “Let me go, Papochka! You smell all funny!” And she scampered off, jumping over the two neat little canvas cases that stood by the door.

Vanya marched out, tears streaming down his unshaven cheeks.

Carlo ran after him. “Papa! I love you here,” he said, “in my heart. Let me stroke you because you’re crying.” Vanya stopped and picked up his son, and Carlo mopped up the tears with his bunny rabbit.

“Why are you sad, Papa?” asked Snowy on the veranda.

“I don’t like going away from you,” said Vanya, putting Carlo down gently. “I’ll be back soon but when I’m away, if you ever wonder where I am, look up at the stars in the sky like I’ve shown you. Wherever the Big Bear is, that’s where I’ll be.”

Sashenka came with him to the door. He took her in his arms, lifted her up and squeezed her so tight that her slippers fell off.

“Marrying you…,” he could barely articulate the words, “…best decision…ever. Don’t worry, this’ll blow over, but if not we have our plan.” He turned to Carolina and bowed low.

Carolina looked down and pushed her strong jaw forward, then she offered her hand and he shook it, standing straight as if he were on parade. “Thank you, Carolina!” Then he grabbed her too and hugged her spare, scrawny body.

Razum had turned the car round. Vanya climbed in and they drove away. Sashenka watched it go and ran back inside and threw herself onto her bed. How could all this be coming to an end? She still could not quite believe it.

She tried to imagine where Benya Golden was, and Mendel, but she could not do so. A ruthlessness had entered her spirit: there was no one but her and Vanya and the children now. No one. She should feel pity for Benya who loved her, and Mendel too—but she didn’t. Let them perish so that she and her children could be together.

She felt weight on the bed.

“What’s wrong? Mamochka’s crying. Are you sad Papochka’s gone away?” asked Snowy.

“Mama, Mama, can I tell you something? I’m going to kiss you and stroke you, Mama,” said Carlo. His brown eyes turned cloudy, like a seducer in a movie, and he kissed her hard right on the lips.

“Darlings?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“You might be going on a journey, a great adventure.”

“With you and Daddy?”

“No, I don’t think so, Snowy. But you love Carolina, don’t you? You might be going with her and you know never to talk about your family or anything you’ve heard at home.”

“We know that already,” said Snowy very seriously. “Papa always says: ‘No chatter!’”

“What about you and Daddy?” Carlo asked, his eyes anxious.

“Well, Carlo, we might come along later. If or when we can…But we’ll always be around you, always…”

“Of course you will, silly!” said Snowy. “We’re going to be together for ever and ever.”

29

Sashenka drove them back into the city on Sunday afternoon. And then it started.

The guards at Granovsky were as friendly as ever—but there was a new guy. What expression was that in his eyes? Did he know that Vanya was in Stalinabad? Did he know why? Was there a why? Marfa and Nikolai, Vanya’s parents, and the other geriatrics sat in their chairs downstairs: why didn’t Vanya’s father stop reading his newspaper and speak to her? What was that sly look from Andreyev’s old father—had his son, a top Politburo member, mentioned something? Had he told him to be careful of those Palitsyns, not to let the children play with them for a while? The janitor waved but why didn’t he say hello and help with the cases? He always helped. Did he know something?

A young man in the street in a gabardine coat and a fedora watched them drive in. A Chekist? The guards in the guardhouse made a note: they were watching her. They knew something. Outside the apartment, Marshal Budyonny’s maid lingered, dusting the stairs. An informer. It was agony. It was absurd. The circle of confidence and despair turned rhythmically inside her like a creaking old carousel at a circus.

It was Sunday night, and she lay in bed. A hole gaped in her belly. Wormwood coated her tongue. The fear hit her again, the terror of losing the children, and of death. Yet she was not afraid of the final cut: young people who became revolutionaries were always a step away from the gallows. When she traveled on the Agitprop trains during the civil war, she had been ready at any time to face death if she was captured by the Whites. That was what it meant to be a Bolshevik. But since she had had Snowy and Carlo, she had sensed death creeping up on her, a thief in the night, the highwayman who would steal her children. She felt her breasts for cancerous lumps; she feared the influenza and TB—what was that cough? Please, please, she begged Fate, give me the time to love them and cherish them. Grant me those years to see them happy and married with children of their own.

When the Terror came, she saw other parents disappear and their children vanish after them, no longer playing in the courtyard at the house on the Embankment or here on Granovsky. But those parents had deviated from the Party line and acted rashly, insincerely, impurely. They had seemed honest Communists yet in reality they wore masks. The Party came first and they had erred. She had always promised she would never do that. Yet somehow, she had done exactly that.

It grew dark and Sashenka tried to sleep, only to be divebombed by phantasms of horror, of tortures, arrests, sobbing childish faces. She shook and her pulse raced: was she going to have a heart attack? Vanya had not called. She dropped into sleep fitfully, just touching it, never sinking into it, before skimming off it like a pebble on a pond. She saw her mother dead, her mother alive, her mother young, her father being shot in the back of the head in front of her children.

“Who is that man?” asked Snowy.

“Don’t you know your own dedushka, your grandfather?”

“What will happen to him when he’s dead?” Carlo was asking. “Will he become a ghost?”

Sashenka woke up sweating and trembling, went into the children’s room and lay down with Carlo, barely able to believe that this adorable boy could exist in such a world. She put her face on his shoulder. His skin was soft and rich. She stroked his bare back and fell asleep again.

When she awoke, Carlo was stroking her, his sweet breath on her face. What joy!

“Mamochka, can I tell you something? Someone’s knocking on the door.”

She sat up. It all came back to her. Nausea and vertigo assailed her. The knocking was so loud, so angry.

She kissed both children and then approached the door.

“Open up!”

“Who is it?” cried Snowy.

“It’s Razum!” said the driver. “Telegram.”

Sashenka hesitated. Took a deep breath. Opened the door.

“Good morning, comrade,” smiled Razum. “A beautiful day! And a message from the boss.”

IN STALINABAD.

FEELING WELL.

GREETINGS TO CHILDREN.

HOME WEDNESDAY. VP

Sashenka felt jubilant, certain suddenly that nothing bad would happen. She had imagined it all. Why shouldn’t an assistant deputy commissar like Vanya be sent on some temporary assignment to Stalinabad? It happened all the time; not everyone sent on missions into the regions was arrested. Satinov too had been dispatched to Georgia for a few weeks and no one suggested he was in any trouble.

She got ready for work at the magazine. She thought coldly of enemies and traitors, as she had so often before, when the Organs had “checked” those friends who never returned. Was she dangerously linked to Benya Golden via the magazine? Klavdia had called Andrei Zhdanov’s cultural apparat at Old Square and Fadeyev at the Writers’ Union. They had both passed him so her back was covered. She and he had met to discuss the commission. There was no personal connection between them. She was suddenly overtaken by self-disgust. She loved only her children, husband, herself—and no one else.

Perhaps Satinov had been wrong? Perhaps the only link between Mendel and Benya was that both were prominent, and it was this that put them in danger. Before he left, Vanya had told her that other writers and artists had recently been arrested: Babel for one, Koltsov the journalist, Meyerhold the theatrical director. Perhaps they were connected? Vanya had whispered that they were planning a fourth show trial, starring the fallen “Iron Commissar” Yezhov, and were considering tossing some diplomats and intellectuals into the cauldron. Perhaps that was what this nightmare was about?

She kissed the children; she hugged Carolina; she dressed in her favorite cream suit with white buttons and the blouse with the big white collar; she touched behind her ears with some Red Moskva perfume. Greeting the janitor and the guards, she walked to work. Granovsky was an elegant street, the apartment building pink and ornate, a wonderful place to live. Down the road, behind, stood the Kremlevka where the best specialists had delivered her babies.

She came out of Granovsky near Moscow University, where Snowy and Carlo would study one day.

The zestful breeze danced around her and she smiled as she passed the Kremlin, beaming waves of affection at the charming little window of the exquisite Amusements Palace, right by the wall of the Alexander Gardens where Stalin had lived until the suicide of his wife Nadya. As she crossed the Manege and passed the National Hotel, she caught sight of the domed and triangular splendor of the Sovnarkom Building where Stalin worked and where he lived, where the light was on all night. Thank you, Comrade Stalin, you always know the right thing to do, she telegraphed to him mentally through the amber air of a sunny Moscow day. You met Snowy, you understand everything. Health and long life to you, Josef Vissarionovich!

Walking with her slightly bouncing step, she turned left up Gorky Street. On the right stood the building where Uncle Gideon lived in a roomy apartment, near other famous writers like Ilya Ehrenburg. Trucks growled down the street, carrying cement for the new Moskva Hotel that was rising like a noble stone temple; Lincolns and ZiS limousines swept down the avenue toward the Kremlin; a dappled horse and cart was stationed outside the Mayor’s office, a former palace. Moscow was still unformed, still that collection of villages, but she belonged here. Up the hill and over the top, Sashenka passed men and women working on the new buildings, militiamen on duty spinning their truncheons, children on their way to school, Young Pioneers with their red scarves. Before she reached the Belorussian Station, she saw the fine statue of Pushkin—and turned right down to Petrovka with its shabby stalls offering fried pirozhki.

At the office, she called the editors to sit at the T-shaped table. “Come in, comrades. Do sit! Let me hear your ideas for Comrade Stalin’s birthday issue in December.”

The days passed lightly and gracefully like new skates on glazed ice.

30

“Papa’s back!” cried Snowy.

“What are you doing out of bed?” Sashenka was in her nightie and housecoat. “Back to bed! It’s almost midnight.”

“Razum’s at the door with Daddy!”

“Daddy’s back?” Carlo, in blue pajamas, emerged all tousled from bed and stomped down the parquet corridor of the apartment.

“He’s at the door!” Snowy was jumping up and down. “Can we stay up? Please, Mama!”

“Of course!” She opened the door.

“Hello, Razum, you picked him up? He’s late as usual…”

“Stand back, no crap,” said Razum in an exaggerated voice with a blast of vodka and garlic. He stood, boots wide apart, pistol in his hand, in his usual shabby NKVD uniform. “Come on, boys, this is the place! See how they lived, see what the Party gave him, the fat boss—and see how he repaid it!”

Razum was not alone: four Chekists stood behind him, and behind them stood the janitor, sweaty and embarrassed, fiddling with his baroque bunch of a hundred keys. The Chekists filed past her into the apartment.

“Oh God, it’s started.” Sashenka’s legs almost gave way, and she leaned against the wall.

A senior officer, a narrow-faced commissar with two tabs, who was too thin for his overlarge uniform, stood in front of her. “Orders to search this apartment, orders signed by L. P. Beria, Narkom, NKVD.”

Razum elbowed this stick insect aside, so keen was he to be part of the operation. “We’ve arrested Palitsyn right at the Saratovsky Station at first light. He punched one of them, did Vanya Palitsyn.”

“That’s enough, comrade,” said the stick insect in charge.

“Where is he?” asked Sashenka eagerly. So Vanya’s train had been on time. Razum (probably excluded from the secret in case he warned his boss) had been at the station to meet him, and Vanya had been arrested then and there. Razum’s grotesque pantomiming was his desperate attempt to prove his loyalty and save his skin. Sashenka knew enough to realize Vanya would have been taken straight to the Internal Prison at what they called “the Center”: Lubianka.

“Not another word, Comrade Razum,” said the stick insect. “This is our affair.”

“I always had my suspicions about these barins.” Razum was still chattering. “There wasn’t much I didn’t see. Now we’re going to search the place, find out what papers that snake’s been hiding. This way, boys!”

The stick insect and his Chekists were already in the study. Carolina watched from her bedroom door. Had they come to arrest her? Sashenka wondered. Frantic longings and selfish thoughts filled her again: perhaps she was safe? Perhaps they only wanted Vanya? Let Vanya be arrested. Let her stay with the children.

Sashenka and Carolina looked at each other silently. Were they too late? Would the children be tortured in that orphanage? How would they know what to do? Vanya had sent no signal. Should Carolina leave right now with the children? Tonight? Or would that bring further torment?

“What’s happening, Mama?” asked Snowy, arms curling round her mother’s waist. Carlo sensed the turmoil in the boots and the loud voices, the casual way the Chekists were opening drawers and slamming cupboards in the study, tossing papers and photographs into a heap on the floor. His pliant face collapsed in three stages: a slight downturn of the eyes and the lips; welling tears and crumpling features; the spread of a deep red blush as he started to howl.

“Stay in your bedroom,” cried Sashenka, hiding them behind her body. “Go to Carolina.”

Carolina opened her arms but the children froze around Sashenka, their hands clutching her hips and thighs, sheltering under her like travelers during a storm.

Vanya’s mother burst out of her room in a purple nightdress, followed by her husband.

“What’s going on?” she shouted. “What’s happening?” She ran into the study and started pushing the Chekists away from Vanya’s desk. “Vanya’s a hero! There’s been some mistake! What’s he been arrested for?”

“Article Fifty-eight, I believe!” answered the stick insect. “Now, out of the way. They’re removing the safe.”

Sashenka saw the secret policemen fixing a seal onto the door of the study. Four of the boys were straining to get Vanya’s safe to the elevator. Finally the janitor brought up a metal cart and they wheeled it out.

“Good night, Comrade Zeitlin-Palitsyn,” said the uniformed stick insect to Sashenka. “Don’t tinker with the seal on the study. We’ll return for more material tomorrow.”

“Wait! Does Vanya need some clothes?”

“The spy had a suitcase, thank you very much,” sneered Razum, hands on hips, striking a pose. “I’ll be right with you, lads!” he shouted over his shoulder to the stick insect and the others who were loading piles of papers into the elevator.

“Why do you hate us?” Sashenka asked him quietly.

“He’ll sing! He’ll confess, the hyena!” Razum said to her. “You bosses live like nobility! Think you’re better than the likes of us? You’ve gotten fat and soft. Now you’re getting your comeuppance.”

“Silence, Comrade Razum, or you’ll be in the soup yourself!” piped the stick insect, holding the elevator door open. Old Razum turned abruptly but as he did so, something fell out of his pocket. Shouting drunken insults, he trotted after his fellows. The elevator door closed.

Sashenka shut the door, leaned back against it and sank to the floor, Carlo and Snowy collapsing with her, tangled in her legs. She was thinking coldly, trying to plan with the icy dedication of a mother in crisis—though her hands were shaking, the red sparks rising in her eyes were blinding her, and her belly was squirming.

“Cushion!” Snowy reached out to pick up the little pink cushion with a bow. “Silly Razum dropped my lovely cushion”—and she showed the wrinkled pink object to Sashenka.

Sashenka grabbed it from Snowy, examining it, turning it over, smelling it.

“No, Snowy. Wait,” she snapped as her daughter tried to retrieve it.

“I want my little cushion!” cried Snowy pitifully.

“Carolina!” The nanny was there already.

Vanya’s parents emerged from their room again and stood staring at the scene.

“Where’s Vanya?” asked Vanya’s mother. She pointed savagely at Sashenka. “I always told him you were a class enemy, born and bred. This is your doing, isn’t it?”

“Be quiet for once!” Sashenka retorted. “I’ll explain everything later. Tomorrow you two should go to the dacha or to the village—but for now please go to your rooms. I need to think!”

The old peasants muttered at her rudeness but retreated again.

“That bastard Razum,” spat Carolina.

“From now on, everyone’s a bastard. We’ve just crossed from one species to another,” said Sashenka, holding the little pink cushion. “Carolina, this was at the dacha?”

“Yes.”

“We didn’t bring it back, did we?”

“No, we didn’t. It lives in the playroom there.”

Sashenka turned to her daughter. “Where did this come from, darling?”

“Razum dropped it. That silly old man! He smells!”

“But who took it from the dacha? Did you see someone take it?”

“Yes, silly. Papa took it. I gave it to him to look after and he put it in his pocket.”

“So your papochka remembered us,” murmured Sashenka. “Dear Vanya.” Snowy’s cushion: what signal could be more appropriate? “Good old Razum,” she added.

“Can I have it, Mamochka?”

“Yes, darling heart, you can have it.”

Sashenka looked up at Carolina and the nanny looked back at her: it was an exchange of absolute maternal love, a look of gravity that tolled so poignantly that both women were stunned by it.

In that instant, Sashenka tried to touch, taste, see and feel all the treasured impressions and precious moments of her children’s lives. But she could not hold them and they slipped through her fingers, carried away on the wind.

31

The next morning, Sashenka went to the office. Some would have stayed in bed, claiming illness, but that in itself might arouse suspicions. The arrest of a husband did not always lead to the arrest of the wife. No, she would edit her magazine as she always did and take what came.

As she departed, she kissed the children, inhaled their skin, their hair. She looked into each of their faces in turn. She kissed Carlo’s brown eyes and pressed her lips onto Snowy’s silky forehead.

“I love you. I will always love you. Never forget it. Ever,” she said to each of them, firmly. No tears. Discipline.

“Mama, Mama, can I tell you something?” said Carlo. “You are a silly old pooh!” and he roared with laughter at his wicked joke.

Snowy laughed too but took her mama’s side. “No, she’s not. Mama’s a darling cushion.” High praise indeed.

Carolina stood behind them. Vanya’s parents pulled their coats on. Sashenka hesitated then nodded at them. They nodded too. There was nothing else to say now.

Sashenka shook herself. She craved to kiss Carlo and Snowy again, so craved it that she could wear away their very skin with kisses—but she shuddered and pulled on her coat and opened the door.

“Mama, I love you in my heart,” cried out Carlo. He blew a raspberry at her and then grabbed Snowy’s cushion and trotted off with it.

“Give me that back, you pooh!” Snowy pursued him, away from the adults.

Sashenka seized the moment and was gone, taking a little canvas bag and her handbag. Just like that. The children did not even notice. One moment she was a mother with her children; the next she was gone. It was like jumping out of an airplane: a second that changed everything in life.

As she walked down the elegant wooden staircase, Sashenka could not see for the salty tears swimming across her vision.

But her senses sharpened as she came into the lobby. The guards went quiet as she approached them, and the janitor swept the parking lot with astonishing enthusiasm. When she passed Comrade Andreyev, Party Secretary, and his wife, Deputy People’s Commissar Dora Khazan, coming down to their ZiS, they met her eyes but looked right through her. They were probably going to see Comrade Stalin and Comrade Molotov and Comrade Voroshilov that very day in the corridors of the Kremlin, in the land of the living. They might never cross paths again.

She waved gaily at the guards. One waved back but the other told him off.

She set out for work. The light, the flowers of the Alexander Gardens, the carts and horses, the dust and rumble of all those new building projects, the crocodile of red-scarfed Young Pioneers singing gaily, none of this registered with her.

The pavement did not seem hard. She floated on the air because her shoes, feet, bones were no longer solid. Adrenaline rushed through her, along with the fine coffee she had made during the night.

She suddenly felt the urge to run back and kiss the children again. It was so strong that her muscles actually bunched and started to move but she held them back. Stick to the plan! For them. Any folly, any stupid sentimentality could ruin it.

Her heart drummed, her vision sharpened. She reveled in her heightened senses. On the street, she noticed the janitors watching her as they cleaned their courtyards. The militiamen at the Granovsky corner whispered to one another.

She stopped at the corner and glanced back. Yes: her parents-in-law had come out into the street. On time. Vanya’s mother swung her usual canvas handbag but this time none of the other gossiping peasants in the courtyard greeted her. Vanya’s father looked toward Sashenka but gave no sign of recognition.

Helped by her husband, Vanya’s mother hobbled on her swollen legs down the street in the opposite direction, smoking a cigarette.

Sashenka turned the corner and headed past the Kremlin on her right, the National Hotel on her left, and then up Gorky Street. Just about now, she knew that Carolina would be coming downstairs with the children, taking them for a walk.

She would lead them in the same direction as the grandmother and grandfather, left out of the door.

The guards in the Granovsky guardpost would watch them impassively: who cared? The NKVD was interested in the parents. Besides, they had no orders. Yet.

Sashenka lingered outside the National. She hoped Carolina and the children had caught up with their Palitsyn babushka and dedushka, who would hand over a tiny canvas suitcase. It belonged to Snowy. The plan was to get the children’s suitcases out of the house without the guards noticing.

The children remained with the grandparents. Carolina took the next right and came into Gorky Street just as Sashenka was about to cross. They greeted each other.

“Time for a coffee, Comrade?”

“Of course.” They entered the National Hotel and ordered a coffee in the café. Sashenka tried to remain caught up in the cloak-and-dagger moment—but she felt so sick, so desperate, that her gorge rose, and her belly lurched as it had the day that Lala first left her at boarding school and she wanted to chase after her. Frantic, she had broken away from her teacher and sprinted down the Smolny corridors, pushing aside other girls and running outside to the gates, where Lala saw her and cuddled her again. Now that frenzy returned. But Carolina, bony and expressionless, sipped the coffee, kissed Sashenka briskly, and then hurried off with barely a glance, carrying Carlo’s little case, which contained winter clothes, underwear, soap, toothbrush and three bunny rabbits. Sashenka ran through the items: had they remembered everything? What about Carlo’s cookies?

At the door of the café, Carolina turned back one more time. She and Sashenka exchanged a last beseeching gaze of the most terrible emotions—love, gratitude, sorrow. Then Carolina set her jaw and was gone. The plan was in motion. Vanya had sent the signal with Razum that Sashenka had to act now. Just as Satinov had suggested, so Sashenka and Carolina had arranged.

Sashenka watched the nanny’s thin back with a desperate wild envy. As an amputee feels his absent leg walking, so she felt her own ghostly body running after them, while she still sat in the café. Then her body bunched and twitched and she was on her feet. She started to run after Carolina. She found herself tossing coins for the coffee onto the table. She was running, sweating, her heart thrashing in her chest as if she were having a heart attack, flying almost, tears splashing in her wake like rain on a car windshield. She was on the street. She looked left and right. Carolina was already gone. God, she had to see them again! The sob in her throat became a wild groan, a sound that she had never heard in her life. She sprinted frantically down the side street.

And then she saw them. A streetcar had stopped in the distance, casting sparks in its wake. Snowy was on the first step, waving her pink cushion and laughing, so that Sashenka could distinctly see her wide white forehead and fair curls. Carolina, holding both bags in her left hand, handed up Carlo, who was playing the fool, pretending to march, singing a song.

He was tugging at her sleeve. “Carolina, Carolina, can I tell you something?” Sashenka knew he was saying this but Carolina was up the steps now too. Two soldiers climbed on behind them, both smoking.

“Stop! Carolina! Carlo! Snowy!” Sashenka was actually screaming.

Carolina paid at the little window. Sashenka could see only the tops of their heads, Carlo’s tousled brown hair and Snowy’s butter-colored tresses, catching a speck of sunlight like spun gold. She was ruining everything by running. The NKVD would see her and know she was spiriting them away; they’d arrest her as a spy; they’d throw the children into the Dzerzhinsky Orphanage, shoot them. But Sashenka was out of control, careering forward now, colliding with an old lady whose shopping bag was torn, potatoes rolling on the pavement; still Sashenka ran, tears cascading down her face. But the streetcar, in a shower of sparks, jolted. The doors shut. It gathered speed. Sashenka was catching up and she saw them again: Carolina was helping them into a seat by the window. Just a blurred impression of blue eyes and a milky forehead, and brown eyes and hair—and they were gone.

A man pushed Sashenka out of his path, and she fell into a doorway and sat on the step. She heard herself howling as her mother had howled when Rasputin was killed. People hurried by, slightly disgusted at her. Slowly she gathered herself.

The grandparents would return to the apartment and tell the guards they were going back to the dacha for the summer. The guards understood because Vanya Palitsyn had been arrested, and they would shrug: who cared?

Sashenka stood up and straightened her clothes. Everyone was safe. Hoping no NKVD informant had noticed her hysteria, she tidied her face, got to her feet and crossed Gorky Street, glancing down to the Kremlin and up at Uncle Gideon’s window. There was no point in calling him though she longed to do so. Her phones might be bugged and he would find out soon enough. She beamed him her love: would he ever know it? Now she thought about her father again: where was he? Would she join him in some forgotten grave? She could not, just could not conceive of her own vanishing from the surface of the turning world.

She chose a different route to Petrovka, not via Pushkin Square but taking the Stoleshnikov Alley. She tried to absorb everything—the little bars there, the Aragvi Georgian restaurant, the shoeshine stall, the kiosk selling newspapers, Zviad the Mingrelian’s barbershop—but nothing stayed with her. Like the night. There was too much to take in.

Where would Snowy and Carlo be now? Don’t even glance at your watch, she told herself. Suppose you are being observed: they might ask why you are checking the time constantly. But the train to the south was leaving at 10:00 a.m. and now it was 9:43. Her children were on their way.

32

The doorman straightened as Sashenka arrived at work; her secretary, Galya, blushed at the sight of her; Klavdia did not even look up as she passed. Everyone knew that Sashenka was no longer a real person. She was a Former Person; worse, they all knew somehow that she was the wife of an Enemy and Vanya was in the cellars of the Internal Prison of the Lubianka—and so was Benya Golden, her new writer whom she had met at her dacha on May Day night, with whom she had left the office, with whom she had been seen walking…

Sashenka sat at her desk. No one came in. She spent the entire day there, except for a brief visit to the cafeteria, where she ate some borscht alone. She tried to read the proofs of the magazine but could not concentrate. She had known many friends and comrades who had endured shadows and clouds over them but who had continued as if nothing had happened—and they had survived. Like Uncle Gideon. Keep your nerve and you might just keep your children, she promised herself.

She returned home in the evening.

The high ceilings, the shiny parquet floor, the ornate moldings on the walls, the dappled glossy brown of the Karelian pine furniture, the green lamps with the muscular bronze figures belonged to her life with the children. She hated the apartment now. It was echoingly quiet. She longed to look into the children’s rooms. Don’t do that to yourself. It will break you up, send you mad, she told herself. But just a glance?

Dropping her handbag and coat, she rushed down the corridor, throwing herself onto their beds and smelling their pillows, first Snowy’s then Carlo’s. There, at last, she could cry. She imitated their voices and she talked to their photographs. Then she burned their photographs, all of them, and their passports too. Snowy had left most of her cushions and Carlo had left most of his army of rabbits. Sashenka took them to bed with her, company for the sleepless night that lay ahead.

Presently she packed herself a suitcase with her toothbrush, warm clothes, underwear. She chose her best. Why not?

The next day she went to work again, taking her suitcase. And the next day. And the day after that. The stress was making her ill. She had a sore throat, her face was drawn and she could barely eat. At night she dreamed of Vanya and the children. Where were they now? Three nights on the road: were they with a family? Or in some railway station, lonely, hungry, lost? She talked to the children all the time, aloud, like a crazy woman.

Benya Golden came to her in the night. She awoke filled with regret, guilt, disgust—and, horribly, a feverish excitement. She hated him suddenly. She would like to kill him with her bare hands, gouge his eyes out: was it him, with his smug defiance, his refusal to write, his curiosity about the Organs, his famous friends in Paris and Madrid—was it his connections that would kill her and steal her children? Yes, she had loved him, yes, he had given her the wildest happiness, but now, compared to her love for her children—it was dust!

On the third day, she saw something different in the eyes of the guards. When she greeted the janitor, he looked up toward her apartment and she knew it was about to happen. She stopped on the stairs, almost relieved that this limbo was over.

When she let herself back into the apartment, the study was unsealed and she smelled cloves. She walked past the Red Corner into the sitting room and saw plates of half-eaten food on the dining-room table. A very large man in a specially tailored NKVD uniform lay with his patent leather boots on the sofa. High boots creaking, he got to his feet and gave Sashenka a gleaming white smile. His skin was brown and glossy, his hair kinky, and he had colorful rings on every fat brown finger. His clove-scented cologne was so pungent that Sashenka could taste it on her tongue. He was not alone. A couple of other Chekists tottered to their feet, perhaps a little drunk, sniggering.

Sashenka was wearing a pink cotton summer dress. She had had her hair styled recently, slightly curled at the front, arranged the new way in a permanent wave, and her face was made up. She drew herself up to her proudest.

“Comrades, sorry to have kept you. Have you been waiting long? I am Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn, whom Lenin called Comrade Snowfox.”

“Well, comrade, what a nice welcome,” said Commissar-General of State Security (Second Degree) and Deputy People’s Commissar NKVD Bogdan “the Bull” Kobylov. “You know Comrade Beria is an admirer of yours?”

Sashenka took a deep breath, nostrils flaring, grey eyes narrowed.

“I’ve been expecting you any minute. I’m almost pleased…”

“Now I see why Comrade Beria speaks so highly of you,” he said.

Like many oversized men, his voice was mellifluous, almost effete. Sashenka despised him. She thought of her children far away—they had been gone for three nights now. She knew that within minutes she would be stepping off the edge of the world but she remembered what she had to do. She coolly took out a cigarette and held it out like a film star. Kobylov, fluttering his rings on amber-skinned fingers, leaned over and lit it for her. She could smell his oily flesh—and those cloves.

“Thank you, comrade.” She inhaled, closing her eyes and blowing out the blue smoke. Someone was playing the piano in a nearby apartment and a child was singing, a family in a normal world. “What do you want?”

“When it’s a pretty woman,” said Kobylov, wrinkling his nose at her, “I like to come and get her myself.”

33

A thousand miles to the south in the small city of Tiflis, a grey-haired woman was packing an overnight bag. She lived alone in a single room, close to the city center, down a dark, overgrown lane just below the sulphur baths, the old town and the Orthodox church with the round Georgian tower.

Her tiny room, which contained a bed, a lamp, a wardrobe and old photographs of a rich family, all waxed mustaches, bowler hats, sailor suits and shiny limousines, was in an elegant mansion, once the property of a line of Georgian princes, the last of whom had been an eccentric antiquarian, book collector and owner of the sulphur baths. (He was now a taxi driver in Paris.) At the time of the 1905 revolution, he had sold the palace to a Jewish oil magnate based in St. Petersburg. Now the mansion was divided up into small apartments and the princely library on the ground floor was a café, a flamboyant venue of a kind that no longer existed in Moscow or anywhere in Russia proper. But here in Georgia, despite the recent killings that had decimated the intelligentsia, this curiosity shop of a café, with its damp old books, candlesticks overflowing with wax and dense, curling vines covering its steamed-up windows, still prospered, serving Turkish coffee and Georgian dishes.

The grey-haired lady worked in the café all day as a waitress. It was not well paid but it was a decent job for those times; she had the correct papers; it was all legal. She kept herself to herself, never chatted with customers or even with the other waitresses, who had given up gossiping about her. It was clear that she was a bourgeois and that she did not belong there, but provincial cities in those days were full of such flotsam and Georgia was more tolerant than anywhere else. It was said that Communism did not extend much beyond the limits of the capital. She had once lived with an older man but he had gone and she showed no interest in discussing her private life.

The waitress’s Russian was excellent, her Georgian more than adequate, but she spoke both with an accent. She was polite to everyone but they noticed she reserved her real solicitude for the library itself. The kitchen and bar had been jerry-built between two bookcases at the end of the dark old room. The humidity of the kettles and cauldrons had rotted the woodwork; the books were peeling and warping; the old pictures were mildewed and yellowing—but she did what she could, dusting the books, sometimes drying them out in her own room upstairs.

On the previous day, the woman had asked for a week off, something that had never happened before. But she had years of unused vacation, so Tengiz, the manager, gave her two weeks instead.

Today, she rose very early and walked across Beria Square to the Armenian Market, where she bought provisions. Returning to her room, she filled her suitcase not only with clothes but also with a bag of flat Georgian lavashi loaves, cured meats and candies. Taking a photograph of an awkward schoolgirl in the uniform of a Tsarist boarding school off the wall, she removed its back and took out some notes. She hid two hundred rubles in her girdle, kissed the photograph and replaced it on the wall.

She checked herself in the mirror and tutted: those apple cheeks in that heart-shaped face were now weathered and coarsened; there were bags under her eyes; and her clothes were dignified but frayed at the edges. She looked fifty but she was younger. How on earth, she asked herself, did you end up here? She shook her head and smiled.

A few hours later she caught the streetcar to the station, where she bought a ticket to Baku and from there to Rostov-on-Don. She changed at Baku Station, a place teeming with Muslims, Turks and Tartars in Soviet uniforms, skullcaps and robes, carrying chickens and sheep and children. One family offered her some Turkish plov, cold lamb stew, and she was grateful. She waited for her train. When it was called, it seemed that the entire station charged at it but her Turkish friends helped her and pulled her up into their carriage. She sat close to them and was again grateful for their protection. On the train, she tried to sleep but could not stop reflecting on the strange events of the previous week.

Four days earlier, a sweaty official in a Party tunic had arrived to inspect the residence and work permits of the employees at the café. All were asked to go to the Party Headquarters, the old Viceroy’s Palace, on Beria Boulevard to have their papers checked. Tengiz told her she was to go first. This was odd but one did not ask questions: checks, cleansings and purges were part of everyday life. Her husband was already gone, certainly dead; and she had been expecting them to come for her. Surely she would be arrested and vanish in her turn. Well, did it matter anymore?

The woman tramped up the hill to the splendid white Viceroy’s Palace, from where the First Secretary ruled Georgia. The wait made her very anxious. There were many questions she longed to ask. But like everyone else, she was helpless before the clumsy and colossal state. Questions from you could lead to questions about you—it was better to keep your head down. She waited like the other coughing, scratching, grunting, depressed people, old and young, in the filthy anteroom with its battered wooden window.

When it was her turn, she passed her papers through the hole. She was then called through into a grubby, unpainted office. She braced herself for the rude tyranny of some minor Georgian bureaucrat. But the official who awaited her was not that type at all. A slim and handsome man, clearly a Party boss, stood up when she came in, drew out a chair for her and then took his place behind the desk. His Stalinka tunic fitted his broad shoulders and slim waist perfectly. He radiated the energy of the Stalin generation and appeared much too sophisticated to belong in this chipped office. He must be a Muscovite, a potentate, she thought. Yet his blue eyes were bright, questioning.

“Audrey Lewis?”

She nodded.

“Don’t be nervous. I’ve always known you were here in Tiflis. Do you remember me?” he asked. “I saw you long ago in St. Petersburg. The house on Greater Maritime Street, the day Sashenka’s mother died. Three comrades came to collect her that day. One was her uncle Mendel. The second was Vanya. I was the third. Now, Lala, there is something I want you to do.”

34

The smell of sweat and clove cologne rose from Commissar Kobylov’s expansive neck and thighs during the ride through the summer night in Moscow. Sashenka was squeezed next to him and he was enjoying their proximity, shifting his elephantine bottom and wrinkling his nose at her like an oversized tabby cat.

The car drove up the hill to the brooding granite of the Lubianka, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, and then swerved into a side street, through the opening gates of a courtyard, driving Kobylov’s spicy breath onto her neck. But already Sashenka did not care. She was trying to pace herself, to conserve her energy, as all prisoners try to do.

The lights over the courtyard—invisible from the exterior—illuminated a scene that resembled a railway station where people arrived but never left. Sashenka guessed that this hidden nine-story building was the dreaded Internal Prison. Black Crow vans and Stolypin trucks, back doors open to reveal barred cages, unloaded bleary-eyed men in nightshirts with bleeding lips, shrieking women in cocktail dresses and smeared eye shadow, piles of badly bound papers and battered leather suitcases. Each of the arrivals had the white face of a once-settled person falling into an abyss of fear.

An officer opened Kobylov’s door. Breathing heavily, he raised his clumsy boots and leaned out until his weight landed him on the ground. The officer helped him out.

Sashenka’s door was opened and a Chekist gripped her arm and guided her into a large basement with chipped arches and battered wooden walls, where yet more bewildered people stood in lines. The room stank of cabbage soup, urine and despair. Sashenka—a special case, she noted ruefully—was led to the front.

“I am a Soviet woman and a member of the Party,” she told a bored Chekist. She had helped build this Soviet system; she believed this oppressive machine was necessary to create the new world according to the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist science of dialectical materialism; she wanted the Chekists to know she still believed in it even though it was about to consume her. But the Chekist just shook his head and told her to empty her pockets, handbag, suitcase. He waved a yellow hand to hurry her and filled in a form. Full name, patronymic, year of birth. He peered at her. Color of hair? Color of eyes? Distinguishing marks? He pressed her fingers on a blue inkpad and took her prints. She received a prisoner number.

“Watch? Rings? Any money?” He noted her belongings and cash, gave her the form to sign and tore off a receipt. Behind her, other bodies pushed against her. “Women that way!” pointed the Chekist. Sashenka remembered her arrest in St. Petersburg and the identical questions—but now she was much more afraid. The Tsarist Empire was soft; she had helped create this man-eating USSR.

She entered a small room where a woman in a white coat sat on a desk smoking an acrid makhorka cigarette.

“Clothes off!” the woman barked.

Sashenka removed her dress and shoes. She stood in her underwear and stockings, shivering slightly in the night chill of the cold concrete. She remembered that her underwear was silk. The woman’s beady eyes noticed too.

“Everything off! Don’t waste my time, and don’t be stuck up!” The woman rammed the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and pulled up her sleeves to reveal powerful hairy forearms.

Sashenka removed her brassiere and stood with her hands over her breasts. Not bad breasts after two children, she told herself stoically.

“And the rest!”

She took off her teddy, standing shyly, a hand over her pubis.

“No one’s interested in you and your clipped little tail. Move it! Mouth open!”

The woman stuck her fingers into Sashenka’s mouth. They tasted of stale cheese.

“Hands on desk now. Legs open.”

She pushed Sashenka’s head down. A finger scooped painfully into her vagina and then plunged into her rectum. Sashenka gasped at the invasion.

“Toughen up, princess. It wasn’t torture! Get dressed.” She took Sashenka’s shoes. “Take out the laces. Give me that belt. No pens allowed.” The woman measured her prisoner’s height and wrote it down. “Sit!”

Sashenka fell back into a chair, relieved to be dressed again.

“Vlad!” called the woman.

A skinny old photographer with slicked-back hair, a tiny head and a worn blue suit appeared in the room: clearly an alcoholic, he was shaking and could hardly hold his heavy camera. A round flashlight blossomed out of it like a chrome sunflower.

“Look at me,” he said.

Sashenka looked into the camera, wearily at first, but then she tried to primp herself up, touching her hair. Suppose one day her children saw that picture? She fixed her eyes on the lens trying to transmit a message: Snowy and Carlo—I love you, I love you! This is your mother! Remember me! Dream of me!

“Keep still! Done.” The bulb flashed with a sizzling pop. Sashenka saw silver stars melting across a black sky.

A guard led her by the arm through a locked door that clicked behind them. Her shoes were loose without the laces and her dress no longer fitted without the belt. There were three guards now, one in front, one holding her, one behind. She passed metal cages, climbed up steel staircases and down stone ones, waited in concrete assembly areas, marched along rows of cells with steel doors and sliding eyeholes. She heard the percussion of prisons—coughing and swearing, the clank of locks, slam of doors and scrape of feet, the clack of bunches of keys swinging. Floors of worn parquet glistened with burning detergent.

The smell of prisons—urine, sweat, feces, disinfectant, cabbage soup, the oil of guns and locks—reminded her of Piter in 1916. Back again—but this time Papa won’t be getting me out! she thought sadly. She felt that Vanya and Benya and Uncle Mendel were all nearby, and somehow it comforted her. In one corridor, another prisoner approached with a guard—she glimpsed a pretty young woman, younger than her, with a black eye.

“Avert your eyes, Prisoner seven hundred seventy-eight,” barked her guard, the first words he had spoken. He pushed Sashenka toward a corner where what appeared to be a metal coffin stood upright. He opened its door and pushed her inside, locking it. The coffin door pressed on her back. Was this a torture? She fought for breath in the airless space. The other guards and prisoner were passing. When they were gone, the coffin was unlocked and they continued until they reached a line of cells where a guard held a door open. There, 778 was scrawled on an oily card.

The cell was small and cool with two bunk beds, no window whatsoever, a bucket of slops in the corner, brick walls and a damp floor. The door shut; the locks scraped; she stood there alone; the peephole opened; eyes stared at her. Then the Judas port shut. She closed her eyes and listened to the life around her. Prisoners sang, spat, coughed and spluttered, and tapped to one another using prisoners’ code that had not changed since the days of the Tsar. The giant building throbbed like a secret city. Pipes gurgled and shook. A metal pail was dragged along and then a wet mop swished outside. A cart clanked. There was the murmur of voices, the echo of metal cups and spoons. The eyehole opened and closed. The door rasped open again.

“Supper!” Two prisoners, one bearded, old and frail, the other grey but probably her own age, were serving soup out of a swinging pan in the cart. The old one gave her a tin cup while the other poured from a ladle, filling up the cup with steaming water from a kettle. Two guards, hands on their pistols, watched closely. There must be no contact between prisoners.

“Thank you!” she said.

“No talking!” said the guard. “Never look at other prisoners!”

The younger prisoner gave her a sugar lump and a small square of black bread and looked at her for a moment, with a spark of feeling on a sensitive, rather mischievous face. Before Benya she would not have recognized it but now she spoke that particular language. My God, she thought, it was lust! Sashenka was pleased: the people in here still feel desire! Perhaps lust lasts beyond many other things. When the door slammed, she drank her watery buckwheat porridge. She used the slop bucket and lay down.

Vanya, wherever you are, she thought, I know what to do. All was not yet lost: the children had gone but there might be no case against her. Vanya knew that. She could still return. She would return. What could they have on her, the loyalest Communist? Then aloud she said one word: “Cushion!”

The lights remained on. Sashenka tried to sleep. She talked aloud to the children but already they belonged to another world. Could she still smell their smells? The texture of their skin, the sound of their voices, everything was still utterly fresh and vivid for her. She started to cry, gently and with resignation.

The peephole slipped open.

“Silence, prisoner! Show your face and hands at all times!”

She slept and she was a child again, on the Zeitlin estate at Zemblishino: her father, in a white suit and yachting shoes, was holding a pony by the bridle—and Lala, darling Lala, was helping her climb up into the saddle…

35

Sashenka was woken by the grating of carts, swishing of mops, screeching of locks. The peephole opened and shut, the door rasped open.

“Slopping out! Bring your slop bucket!” A guard marched her to the washroom, where the chlorine stung her eyes. She poured out her slops and washed her face with water. Then it was back to her cell.

“Breakfast!” The same prisoner whose glance had been so slyly sensuous now wore a plywood tray like an usherette selling cigarettes. The other prisoner, a bearded old man covered in tattoos—a real criminal, Sashenka guessed—poured out the tea and handed over a small piece of bread, a lump of sugar, and eight cigarettes with a strip of phosphorus from a matchbox. Once again the long thin face of the server revealed nothing, but again his eyes roved over her body and neck and glinted with the rudest lust before the door slammed again. Already, the tea and bread tasted divine. She knew from Vanya that prisoners sometimes waited weeks even to be interrogated so it might be ages before she was able to make her stand, to defend herself as a Communist—and find out what had brought her here.

Then she lay again on the bed. Where are the children now? she wondered. And she said aloud the word that was becoming her talisman, her code to transmit her love across the vast steppes and powerful rivers of Russia to her distant children. “Cushion!”

“Prisoner seven hundred seventy-eight?” The door had opened.

“Yes.”

“Come!” Three guards marched her along the corridors, up metallic steps, down concrete staircases with metal grilles to prevent suicides, over rickety wooden bridges suspended above granite canyons, across corridors, until they passed two security doors with manned barriers and entered a wide passageway with offices instead of cells. Sashenka hummed to herself—she found to her surprise it was that gypsy romance so beloved of Benya Golden, their love song:

What an unkind hour for love it had turned out to be, but that tune fueled a sudden surge of optimism. She was certain now there would be no need for Vanya’s terrible plan. She would easily disprove the Chekists’ accusations. Then they would release her. She would wait a little then recall the children. Oh, the joy of that!

“In here!” The guard pushed her into a small clean office with a linoleum floor, an empty desk, a grey telephone and a light turned toward her. The brightness of the bulb blinded her for a second. Golden beads sparkled before her eyes and she smelled the sweetness of coconut pomade.

A young man in NKVD uniform with round spectacles, a ginger mustache and a preposterous pompadour opened a papka file, licking his finger as he turned the pages. He took his time and when he had finished he sat back, his boots creaking. He stroked, almost massaged, the piece of paper in front of him.

“Prisoner, my name is Investigator Mogilchuk. Are you ready to help us?” He did not call her “comrade” but he seemed gentle and reasonable. His voice was husky like that of a boyish student; the accent was southern, from around the Black Sea, Mariupol perhaps; and she guessed that he was a teacher’s son, provincial intelligentsia, probably qualified in the law, summoned to Moscow to fill the boots of the old Chekists, now deceased.

“Yes, Investigator, I am but I would like to save you from wasting your time. I’ve been a Party member since 1916; I worked in Lenin’s apparat and I’d like to ask—”

“Silence, prisoner! I ask the questions here. As the armed sword of the Party, we Chekists will decide your case. That’s our mission. Now will you help us?”

“Absolutely. I want to clear this up.”

Investigator Mogilchuk stretched his neck and raised his chin. “Clear up what?” he said.

“Well, whatever it is that I’m accused of.”

“You know what it is.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Oh, come now, prisoner. I’m going to ask you: why are you here?”

“I don’t know. I am innocent. Genuinely.”

Mogilchuk carefully checked the crusty surface of his pompadour and knitted his eyebrows. “That’s not being helpful. Are you sincere in your wish to serve the Party? I wonder. If you were sincere, you would know why you are here.”

“I am a sincere Communist, Comrade Investigator, but I’ve done nothing wrong! Nothing! I joined no oppositions. Never! I supported every policy of the Lenin-Stalin Party line. I would never tolerate any anti-Soviet conversations. Not even anti-Soviet thoughts. My life’s been devoted to the Party…”

“Shut up!” said the investigator and banged the table, an action so absurd that Sashenka struggled to conceal her disdain. She had a misplaced urge to laugh.

“Don’t waste our time!” he snapped at her. “You think we bring you here for fun? I’m up to here in cases and I need you to confess now to what you have done. We know how to handle people like you.”

“People like me?”

“Spoiled Party princesses who think the State owes them their fancy clothes, cars, dachas. We specialize in grinding your type down to size. So I repeat: look into your life, your Communist conscience, your past! Why are you here? A confession will make things much easier for you.”

“But I can’t… I’m innocent!”

“How do you reconcile the fact of your arrest with your claim of innocence? Begin your confession! Do not wait until we force you!”

Sashenka was rattled. What was he demanding? If she admitted something trivial would that satisfy him? She thought back over Vanya’s careful instructions as they sat on the swinging hammock in the dark hot garden that desperate night: “Confess nothing. Without a confession, they can’t touch you! Believe me, darling, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve broken legions of men and perhaps this’ll be their revenge on me. But don’t invent some little crime. It won’t ease the pressure! If they have something specific, they’ll confront you. If they want something specific, they’ll sweat it out of you.”

Mogilchuk leaned forward. The sickliness of his coconut pomade was overpowering. “You come from a bourgeois family, real bloodsuckers. Did you genuinely embrace the Party—or did you remain a member of your filthy class, an enemy of working people?”

“I worked for Lenin.”

“Do you think I care about that now? If you deceived Comrade Lenin, you’ll be doubly damned.”

“He called me Comrade Snowfox. He himself knew my background and he told me he came from nobility—it didn’t matter because I was a real Bolshevik believer.”

“How dare you soil Comrade Lenin! Don’t you realize where you are? Don’t you realize what you are now? You’re as good as dust! You are sitting before the Tribunal of the Revolution: the Cheka. Just answer my questions.” He looked down at the file, massaging the paper, round and round. “How long have you known Mendel Barmakid?”

“He’s my uncle. All my life.”

“Do you believe he’s a good Communist?”

“I have always thought so.”

“You sound like you have doubts?”

“I know he’s been arrested.”

“So you know we don’t arrest people for nothing?”

“Comrade Mogilchuk, I believe in the armed wing of the Party. I believe you Chekists are, as Dzerzhinsky said, the knights of the Revolution. My own husband—”

“Accused Palitsyn. Do you think he’s such a paragon of Party-mindedness? Really? Search your memories, your conversations: was he ever really an honest Chekist?”

“Yes, he was.” Suddenly she questioned even that: what if Vanya was a Fascist spy?

“And Mendel? He was never a real Communist, was he…Comrade Snowfox”—he added with a sneer—“if I may call you that?”

“An honest Bolshevik who served five exiles, imprisonment in the Trubetskoy Bastion, ruined his health in hard labor and never joined a single deviation or opposition…”

Mogilchuk removed his glasses. Without them, he was blearily myopic. He rubbed his face and ran his hands over his red hair. She sensed how eager he was to deliver her confession to his superior. Maybe he’d impress Beria. Perhaps even the Instantzia—Comrade Stalin himself—would hear of this ardent young investigator? He replaced his glasses. “Lift Mendel’s mask, show us this jackal and disarm him for us!”

“I don’t know anything,” she said. “Mendel! I’m trying to think…”

“Think and tell me!” Mogilchuk raised his pen. “You speak and I’ll write. Did Mendel ever mention the Japanese diplomat he met in Paris?”

“No.”

“The English lord who visited the embassy in London?”

“No.”

“What foreigners did he know? Did he ever ask you to meet them? Think—scour your mind!”

So it was Uncle Mendel they wanted! Sashenka knew it was not her. They’d invited Gideon to the Lubianka to talk about Mendel. Then Vanya had been pulled into this: perhaps someone had overheard Mendel and Vanya arguing about jazz? And, through Vanya: her. Benya was clearly unconnected to Mendel. Except via her—but that was much too tenuous. No, Benya was part of something else, the case against the intellectuals—and Mogilchuk hadn’t mentioned him at all. What was clear, though, was that they needed her to denounce Mendel.

So it was Mendel who had brought this disaster upon her: it was he who had taken her children away. The mother in her was happy to sacrifice Mendel in a moment: she would do anything to see her children again. But if she invented the fact that Mendel was a Japanese spy, would they see that she was innocent and had loyally served the Party?

She went back to Vanya’s instructions: “If they’re creating a case against Mendel, they’ll want your testimony, but remember he converted you and me to Marxism, introduced us both to the Party—and each other! That confession will destroy us all! Wait until we know what they have against us.”

The investigator checked his hairdo again. “Well?”

“No, Mendel’s a decent comrade.”

“And you yourself have nothing to tell me?”

She shook her head, feeling exhausted and weak. But there was hope, she told herself. Like someone buried in a landslide, she thought there was a way through to a chink of light. Vanya would not confess either; and even if her darling Vanya was destined for the meat grinder, there was no case against her. Vanya, like any father, would die easier if he knew his wife was safe with their children! Be strong, confess nothing—and you will see Snowy and Carlo again, she told herself. After all, this had been polite enough. Perhaps they were just fishing…

“All right, you want to play games with us?” said Mogilchuk quite calmly. “You must realize, Comrade Snowfox, that I’m an intellectual like you are, like your uncle Gideon. You may have seen my stories published under the name M. Sluzhba? Well, I just like to talk to people. That’s my way. I’ve given you every chance but you’re going to get a nasty surprise if you don’t start to talk.” He picked up the Bakelite phone and dialed a number. “It’s Mogilchuk…No, she won’t…Right!” He replaced the phone. “Come with me.”

36

Accompanied by a guard, Investigator Mogilchuk led Sashenka down a long passageway that she had never seen before, up some steps, across the covered bridge, down some steps, and they emerged onto a wide corridor with a parquet floor. It was lined with gleaming panels of Karelian pine, portraits and busts of early Chekist heroes, and silken banners. A blue carpet ran down the center, held in place with chunky gold tacks. Guards in ceremonial NKVD uniform stood beside a Soviet flag and a life-sized statue of Dzerzhinsky. The corridor ended in imposing double doors of oak. A guard opened them.

They entered an anteroom where two NKVD officers, probably from the regions, sat with their briefcases. Mogilchuk walked straight through a further set of double doors, which were opened by another guard. Inside, Sashenka recognized instantly the bustling apparat of a Soviet potentate: many secretaries in white blouses and grey skirts, eager young men in Party tunics, lines of Bakelite phones, piles of papki files, and green palms. A young officer jumped up and led them to a third closed door. He knocked and opened it.

“Investigator Mogilchuk?”

They entered an airy and bright office of monumental proportions, gleaming parquet and Karelian pine, smelling of polish and cool forests. To the left, some sofas and soft chairs were set on Persian carpets. Over the mantelpiece hung a huge oil painting by Gerasimov of Comrade Stalin, and in the corner sat a steel safe taller than a man. Marble busts of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky stood on each side of the room and, so far away that Sashenka could barely see it, another Gerasimov loomed, this time of Dzerzhinsky, Iron Felix, the founder of the Cheka, with his insane eyes and goatee.

In the middle of the room, a polished oak desk was attached to a conference table to form the T shape common to every office in the USSR. It was in pristine order, with a silver desk set, inkwells of turquoise ink, and only one or two pieces of paper on the blotter. The table behind the desk boasted eight telephones—and the vertushka Kremlin line. And presiding over it all, on a high-backed velvet burgundy chair, sat Comrade Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, Narkom of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.

Beria was eating from a plate of what appeared to be spinach or salad leaves. He beckoned her into the room with an open palm, masticating energetically.

Mogilchuk saluted and left the room.

“Oh Lavrenti Pavlovich,” Sashenka said, “I’m so pleased to see you! Now we can clear this up.”

Beria swallowed his mouthful then stood up courteously, walked round the desk and kissed her hand. “Welcome, Alexandra Samuilovna,” he said formally in his rich Mingrelian accent, still holding her hand between his silky fingers. “You’re wondering what I’m eating?”

“Yes,” she said, though she did not give a damn what he was eating.

“Well, I don’t eat meat, you see. I hate killing anything. Those poor calves or lambs! No, I can’t bear it, and besides, Nina says I mustn’t put on weight! I’m a vegetarian so I eat only this—even at Josef Vissarionovich’s place. ‘Beria’s grass!’ says Comrade Stalin. ‘Look, Lavrenti Pavlovich is having his grass again!’ Now, let me look at you.” He kept her hand and turned her around as if they were dancing. ‘Ah, you’re so pale. But so beau-ti-ful still. That figure’s enough to drive a man like me to folly! To risk everything for just one caress. You’re like a cream cake. What a shame to meet like this, eh?’”

His colorless eyes ran over Sashenka with such gobbling greed that she flinched. The stocky and bald People’s Commissar with the pince-nez circled her noiselessly on his soft suede shoes. He was not in uniform, just baggy yellow slacks and a collarless, embroidered blouse, like a Georgian at the seaside. Sashenka had not forgotten that her husband used to play on Beria’s basketball team at his Sosnovka dacha. When she watched the games, she had noticed that Beria was incredibly quick on his feet.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she repeated. She meant it. Beria was ruthless but competent. Vanya had admired his diligence, industry and fairness after the drunken frenzy of Yezhov. “You can sort this out, Lavrenti Pavlovich! Bless you!”

“I could look at your hips and breasts all day, my cream cake, but you’re tired, I can see. Will you eat something?” He picked up a phone and said, “Bring in some sandwiches.”

At Beria’s invitation, she took one of the leather-seated chairs at the conference table adjoining Beria’s desk. He sat down too. The double doors opened and a woman in a white apron wheeled in a tea cart. Placing a white napkin over her arm (just like one of the waitresses at the Metropole Hotel), she served tea and set out some sandwiches and fish zakuski, then left.

“There!” said Beria, smacking his loose, balloon-like lips. “Now eat while we talk. You’re going to need your energy.”

Sashenka hesitated, afraid that eating these delicious snacks would somehow obligate her to betray her husband or Mendel. She concentrated and thought of her children. Now was her chance.

“I don’t know what I’m accused of, respected Comrade Beria, but I’m innocent. I know you know that. You have no idea what joy it gives me to see you.”

“Oh, and me you. Eat up, my dear cream cake. They’re not poisoned, I promise.” She started to eat the sandwiches. “You know, you’re my type absolutely, Sashenka. The moment I saw you, I knew something about that overbite of yours suggests a capacity for pleasure. Yet you didn’t look too happy when I flirted with you at your place on May Day, hmmm? I think of women all day, you know. I’m a real Georgian man, aren’t I, eh?” Beria’s eyes grew cloudy, the eyelids drooping. “You know what I’d like to do, Sashenka, I’d like to drive you over to my Moscow house. Nina and my son live at Sosnovka, at the dacha. We’d have a Georgian supra, you and me in my banya, we’d drink the best wines in that cozy bathhouse, and then I’d lay you on the divan and lift your skirt and run my nose up until I can smell your strawberries…”

Beria was letting her know that he could do anything he wished. Yet she did not want to encourage him. His obscenity might be a trick, a lure. Or was it a sign that he really did desire her and if she wanted to get out, there was a simple price?

But this was Lavrenti Beria, People’s Commissar, a man she respected and liked, a Bolshevik trusted and chosen by Comrade Stalin himself. How could he talk like this to a comrade who had known Lenin and entertained Stalin in her house? She thought quickly, and decided right then and there that she would do anything, however vile and demeaning, to see her children again.

“You’re embarrassing me, Lavrenti Pavlovich,” she whispered huskily. “I’m not used to this sort of…”

“Aren’t you? Come on, Sashenka. I was surprised myself. You’re so respectable—such a decent Soviet woman teaching our housewives how to cook cakes and darn the skirts of Young Pioneers. But we know what a wanton creature you are. The things you cry out, the acts you demand when you’re really revved up. Just like your mother. She was notorious too, wasn’t she?”

A shard of ice froze her belly. Benya Golden must have betrayed their sexual secrets, and this was how her husband had known too.

Beria beamed a smile at her with lips too fat, too wide.

“We know everything, dearest cream cake,” he said lasciviously. “If you’d have that Jewish writer, you could have had me too. But don’t get your hopes up. You didn’t confess to my boy, Mogilchuk. Have you read his stories? They’re shit, you know. He writes detective yarns, whodunits—he aspires to create a Soviet Sherlock Holmes. But alas, my duty interferes with my pleasures. Your case is a serious one, Sashenka, and much as I’d love to taste you, the Instantzia is following this affair closely.”

“Comrade Stalin knows I’m innocent.”

“Careful, careful. Don’t mention that name to me, Prisoner Zeitlin-Palitsyn. I want you to know that your only hope is to confess now. Disarm, reveal your treacherous anti-Soviet activities. We’re working hard here. Are you going to make us force you?” He stood up and walked around the desk, enveloping her in his lime cologne. He stroked her hair, ran his hands over a breast. Sashenka cringed, tried not to cry out. He touched her lips, then forced a knuckle into her mouth. It tasted coppery.

He put on a silly voice: “I don’t want to be rough. Don’t do that to me! I love women! Oh, the taste of them! Don’t make me.” He sat down, businesslike again. “Think carefully. There’s nothing I don’t know about you, your past, family, work, your cunt…Eh?” Beria drummed his fingers on the desk. “Are you going to help us? Stand up! Now! If you don’t we’ll grind you into dust and shoot you like a partridge! In a minute you’re going back to your cell and I’m going back to work. Hang on. Wait. Don’t turn around! Close your eyes.”

She heard him open a drawer in his desk. The single door at the other end of the office opened. She heard the breath of men and the creak of boots getting closer but passing behind her.

“Not on the Persian carpet, it’s a good one. Roll out that one. That’s it,” she heard Beria say.

A dull thud followed. Her eyes watered—there it was again, the pungent cologne of cloves—she could taste it on her lips.

“Thank you, Comrade Bull!”

It was Kobylov again. What was this? Some sort of game? Fear clawed at her suddenly.

“Right! Now. Let’s take Comrade Snowfox back to her cell—and…one-two-three and…turn!”

Something bludgeoned into Sashenka’s right cheek so hard that it spun her round and tossed her off her feet onto the parquet in the sitting area. The world dissolved into a blizzard of red specks in a diamond kaleidoscope. She was on the parquet floor, looking back at the desk where Beria stood smiling with a black truncheon in his hands.

Holding the side of her face, which seemed to be twitching of its own accord, she peered through the shiny boots in front of her at a bundle of clothes spattered in dried mud. She realized it was alive, quivering, stirring. Her gaze was drawn to the mass of raw red and blue and yellow bruises on bare skin, to fingers that bled from the tips, to an unshaven face with red-lidded eyes so swollen they could barely open. Her mouth gaped in shock.

“What do you think you’re doing bringing that in here?” asked Beria. “Didn’t you know I had Sashenka in here? You didn’t knock, Comrade Kobylov! Tut, tut, bad manners!”

“Sorry, Lavrenti Pavlovich, I didn’t know you were busy,” said the giant Kobylov. “We need to work a little on this old bag of shit, another stubborn case. But we don’t want her to see anything that might alarm her, do we?”

“Absolutely not,” said Beria. “Help her up and take her back to her cell.”

“Nasty bruise!” said Kobylov, touching her cheek and wrinkling his shiny nose. “You must have walked into something.” He helped her to her feet. Sashenka could not take her eyes off the body on the rough stained carpet. “Come on, we must protect you from this unsavory vision—it’s so hard to restrain Comrade Rodos when he gets the bit between his teeth.”

“Rodos?” she murmured.

On the other side of the room, a stocky man with a hairy mole on his cheek, a pointed face and a head like a chicken meatball was caressing a black truncheon.

Investigator Rodos, wearing dirty boots and a grey tunic girded with a wide army belt, shrugged modestly and, with a defiant glance at Sashenka, he started to land blows on the belly of the man on the carpet, raising the truncheon very slowly and deliberately over his shoulder as if he were lobbing a ball. The man on the floor groaned each time, like a cow that Sashenka had once seen giving birth at the Zeitlin estates in Ukraine.

“It’s rude to stare but it is fascinating, isn’t it?” said Beria as she left.

Kobylov took her arm and led her out into the corridor, where Investigator Mogilchuk’s toothy smile awaited her. “We’ll meet again, I hope,” said Kobylov, returning to Beria’s office in a waft of cloves.

Sashenka was shaking. Unable to control herself, she bent over and and vomited up the food she had eaten, which left a cheesy taste in her mouth. The thudding of the truncheons on the prone man was pulsating in her ears. She could not believe what she had seen. Who was it…? She knew—or was she seeing things? Was this how Beria treated Old Bolsheviks? Was that what Vanya did all night before coming home to the dacha and the children? Was this what had happened to the former owners of their dacha and their apartment?

She recited to herself Vanya’s instructions. “Confess nothing whatever happens until you know they have something so damning…I’ll never get out, but you, Sashenka, you can see the children again. Never forget them! Sign nothing whatever they do to you!” She still did not believe they had anything on her and it was clear that none of her associates had so far confessed. She could still get out if she kept her head. She had to hold on to this, whatever it cost her.

But where was Vanya? Where was Benya? She remembered their times together in the hotel, in the garden shed, kissing in the street like youngsters, singing “Black Eyes” by the river, exchanging pressed flowers as the most romantic days of her life. The seven thousand rubies of the Kremlin stars were theirs still! She loved them both now, Vanya and Benya, differently, insistently. They were her family now. They were all she had in this fathomless canyon of shadows.

They marched her back up the stairs, and down more stairs, out of the world of Karelian pine, palms and clove cologne and back through the pungency of cabbage, urine and detergent, into the Internal Prison. She had to lean on the wall a couple of times to keep herself from falling over. She touched her cheek; it was bleeding near the eye, swelling up.

Snowy, Carlo, Cushion, Bunny! Snowy, Carlo, Cushion, Bunny! she recited.

Were they safe? She calculated it had been six days since they left; three nights, three days since she was arrested. The knowledge that Satinov would keep the children safe formed a warm and untouchable locket of love deep inside her.

“Here we are, home again,” said Mogilchuk, shoving her into her cell. “Rest up. We’ll talk in the morning.” Sashenka sank heavily onto the bottom bunk in her cell. “Oh—and did you recognize your uncle Mendel? I think it was him—at least what was left of him.”

37

That night they moved her to a new cell with bright lights—but they refused to dim them. The pipes in her cell shook, groaned and started to heat even though it was high summer. In the cells, the air was already stifling.

Sashenka banged on her door.

“Sit on your bed, prisoner.” The locks rasped open. Two guards stood in the doorway.

“I wish to complain to Narkom Beria, to the Central Committee. The heating’s come on and it’s summer. And please turn my lights down. They are so bright they’re keeping me awake.”

The guards looked at each other. “We’ll report your complaints to our superiors.”

The doors slammed. The heat increased. Sashenka was sweating. She could hardly breathe, and she was tortured by thirst. She took off her dress and lay on the bunk in her underwear. The lights were so bright, so hot, she could not sleep, however tightly she closed her eyes. If she buried her face in the mattress, they shook her.

When she finally slept fitfully, the Judas port creaked open. “Wake up, prisoner!”

“I’m sleeping, it’s nighttime.”

She fell asleep again.

“Wake up, prisoner. Move your hands where we can see them.”

When these shouts were not enough to keep her awake, they dropped her on the floor, kicking her, slapping her face.

Now she understood. This was what her Party had come to. One night without sleep was fine but by the second night she felt she was beginning to disintegrate. She was nauseous all the time; sweat poured off her and she was not sure if she was ill or just worn to the bone. She fell asleep on her feet; the guards found her asleep on the lavatory but even there they woke her. Worst of all, her fears enveloped her, growing on her like fungus: what if Vanya was an Enemy all along? The children were lost and they were crying for her, or they were dead.

Hours and days crept by. No exercise. No washing. She was fed thrice daily via a tray passed through the hatch, but she was always hungry, always thirsty. Alone in the cell, woken every few minutes, she heard Snowy and Carlo’s voices. She must not break. For them. But their faces and smell overwhelmed her. They were lost already, she told herself. Satinov’s plan would never work: they were in one of those orphanages, raped, tortured, beaten, abused, and when they were old enough, shot. She should confess to any lies, anything rather than this. Just to sleep in a cool cell. The children were dead already. Dead to her, dead in fact. They were no longer hers. They were lost forever.

She was no more in the land of the living.

38

Far to the south of Moscow, the Volga German woman in the floral scarf and the plain summer dress knocked again on the door of the stationmaster of Rostov-on-Don. Again she dragged in her three suitcases and her two children, a small blond girl and a brown-haired boy, who clung to her arms, their sunken eyes already sad and hollow.

The stationmaster’s office was next to the furious chaos of the ticket office, where hundreds waited all day and where so many were disappointed. With its armchairs and portraits of Lenin and Stalin, the office was an oasis of calm and civilization. Even though the Volga German woman had come here every morning for four days and found no telegram, no signal, no friend, she still came in, appearing to enjoy her minute in this clean, quiet eye of the storm. The stationmaster and his assistant looked at each other and rolled their eyes. The nanny, with her three suitcases and two children, was just one of the desperate, grey multitudes who came in every morning hoping for some sign from above, some telegram from nonexistent relatives, some lost luggage that would never be found, some tickets for a train that would never leave.

“Comrade Stepanian,” she greeted the stationmaster on the fourth day, “good morning. I wondered if there was any news? A telegram perhaps?”

The stationmaster reached wearily into a wooden in-tray and, clicking his tongue like the clipclop of a horse, began to work his way through the thick yellow paper of Soviet officialdom, moving his lips as he read each telegram.

On the first day, Stepanian had checked the papers of this Volga German woman and these two well-dressed children who were being transported to an orphanage near Tiflis. Each day they returned, looking hungrier, filthier, more forlorn. The angular and wan nanny herself was haggard with exhaustion.

“I’d like to help. Are the young ones OK?” Stepanian smiled at the children. “Are you all right, you two? What’s that you’ve got there?”

“A cushion,” said the little girl, forlornly.

“Do you sleep on it?”

“We can’t sleep well here. We’re beside the canteen but we want to go home. The cushion is my friend.”

“We want our mummy,” said the little boy, who already had the anxious eyes of a station child.

The words seemed to upset the Volga German woman. Stepanian glanced at her and she shook her head, immediately beginning to collect the bags in order to return to the platform where an Azeri family was keeping their place under the shelter just outside the canteen. She was trying to hide her anxiety but the stationmaster was a connoisseur of misery and uncertainty.

“Thank you, comrade,” the woman said very politely. “I’ll check in again tomorrow.”

Stepanian got up and held open the door for them. “Sorry, I can’t help,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.”

“Is she a fantasist? Maybe there’s no telegram?” his assistant asked when they’d left.

“Who knows?” Stepanian shrugged, dismissing them, and returned to his desk with a click of his tongue. He had an important job to do.

Outside the office, the bedraggled threesome walked slowly back to the platforms. Rostov-on-Don station boomed with the thunder of shunting carriages while the air sang with the whistle and puffing of locomotives. Even though the turmoil of collectivization and the Terror was over, the regional stations were still mangy bedlams of confused humanity. Families camped around their suitcases, some well-to-do, some in rags, some in city clothes, some in peasant boots and smocks. Trains were overbooked and never left on time; tickets were hard to buy; the militia checked and rechecked passes and passport stamps, removing those who lacked the correct papers or the energy to dodge their sudden descents.

It was lucky it was a warm summer because the platforms resembled an encampment, crowded with soldiers, workers, peasants and children, hungry ragged children, well-fed lost children, children sitting on handsome leather suitcases, urchins with the faces of old men, little girls with painted lips and short skirts smoking cigarettes and looking for customers.

The canteen in the station offered snacks for those with rubles. An old Tatar ran a kiosk selling newspapers and candies, and behind the Moscow platform was a rusty spigot where the station’s inhabitants lined up all day for water. The lavatories, down the steps under the station, were awash with a foamy stinking waste yet there were constant lines; children sobbed and wet themselves and adults fought to get to the front faster.

Carolina was more than worried now. She did not know what had happened to Sashenka and presumed the worst. She was a deeply practical woman but the stress of caring for two children in the station was eating at her. She prided herself on her cleanliness, but by now all three of them were dirty, the children’s clothes stained with food, grease and piss. She had a plentiful supply of rubles for food, but Snowy and Carlo, delicate eaters, were used to fine cooking and hated the watery vegetable soup, black bread and dumplings in thin tomato sauce that were the only things available in the canteen. They were already losing weight. During the day they played with other children but Carolina could never relax because some of these urchins had become feral tricksters who were capable of anything. She had to watch the suitcases too. At night they slept together, hugging one another, on their rolled-up mattress under a blanket and some coats. Snowy and Carlo cried in her arms and asked about Mummy and Daddy. When would they see them again? Where were they going?

The actual departure from Moscow had been easy enough: Vanya’s parents had reserved seats for Carolina and the children. The train had left on time; and although the journey had taken a day longer than scheduled, a kind Red Army soldier and his young wife, on their way to a new posting on the Turkish border, had taken pity on them and brought them ice creams and snacks from the stations where the train stopped. But the children knew something was terribly wrong. They wanted their mother. Carolina longed to comfort them but did not want to lie, or to encourage them to say dangerous things that might draw attention. It was agony. As they traveled away from their former life, from their parents, from Moscow, Snowy and Carlo clung to her.

“Will you be with us, Carolina? You’re staying with us, aren’t you? I miss Mama!”

After their visit to Comrade Stepanian, they went for their daily snack in the canteen. They sat at one of the greasy Formica tables. Carolina found that she was shaking. Weary and dispirited, she tried to fight off an attack of naked panic. The Palitsyns were gone. Perhaps Comrade Satinov had forgotten his plan? Perhaps he too had been destroyed? She counted her money in her mind: she had twenty-five rubles in her hand and the large sum of four hundred rubles in her brassiere, for emergencies. If there was no message soon, she would have to make a difficult decision. She had already decided there was no question of leaving Snowy and Carlo at an orphanage of any sort, especially not an NKVD one, but she had few connections in officialdom, and none that was independent of the Palitsyns. She would have to take the children home with her, to her German village not far from Rostov. This filled her with joy, for she loved Snowy and Carlo. They loved her too and she knew that in time she could heal the wounds of loss with her loving care. But she was too old to be their mother and how long would it be before the NKVD came to arrest the Palitsyns’ nanny—and where else would they search than in her own village?

That night, she could not sleep. She listened to the chug of locomotives and hiss of steam, the never-quiet rumble of people and machines in the station. Carolina looked down at the pale faces of the children, at Snowy pressing her pink cushion against her lips for comfort, and, for the first time since she left Moscow, she started to cry.

39

“Prisoner seven hundred seventy-eight, sit down. Now, did you sleep well?”

Sashenka, disheveled, pale, dehydrated and barely strong enough to speak, shook her head.

“Is your cell comfortable? How is the air circulating in this hot summer?”

Sashenka said nothing.

Investigator Mogilchuk swept a hand over his thick pompadour and stroked the papers in front of him. It was the same as yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Sashenka had spent three days on the so-called conveyor. No sleep in an overheated cell had broken stronger prisoners than her. After breakfast and slopping out, they brought her back to this interrogation room.

“Your cheek has come up with quite a bruise. It’s black and blue.”

Sashenka touched it gingerly. It was very painful. Perhaps her cheekbone was fractured, she thought.

“Let’s start again. Remember your uncle Mendel. Do not wait until we force you! Begin your confession! Then we’ll let you sleep and solve that heating problem in your cell. Would you like a night’s sleep?”

“I have nothing to confess. I am innocent.”

“Then how do you reconcile the fact of your arrest with that declaration of innocence? Do you think I’m a clown and Comrade Beria’s just passing the time of day?”

“I don’t understand it myself. I can only think it’s a mistake or the result of a misunderstanding caused by some coincidences.”

“The Party doesn’t recognize coincidences,” said Mogilchuk. “You saw Comrade Investigator Rodos in Comrade Beria’s office? He’s quite a man, a legend in the Organs, more like a dangerous beast: we have to stop him killing prisoners all the time. In fact, he’s damaged quite a few people close to you this very week. He says he gets a red mist before his eyes and forgets himself. He hates our sort, Sashenka. He hates intellectuals! You might have to meet him soon if you don’t disarm. But you’re in luck. I’m going to give you one more chance: I am going to introduce someone who might jog your memory.”

He picked up the telephone on his desk. “Deliver the package!” he said genially.

He smiled at Sashenka, removed and replaced his spectacles, and checked his pompadour. They waited in silence. The phone rang.

“Yes, yes, comrade, we’ll wait for you.”

Mogilchuk left the room for a moment and then returned. “Just making sure everything is just so.”

“Can I have a glass of water?” Sashenka repeated Vanya’s instructions to herself and then, under her breath but still moving her lips, she chanted, “Snowy, Carlo, Cushion, Bunny.”

Mogilchuk was pouring her out a glass when the door burst open and Kobylov pretended to creep in, raising his huge shiny hands with the many glistening rings.

“Pretend I’m not here, Comrade Investigator. I’ll hide over here in the corner!” Just like a headmaster sitting at the back to observe a teacher’s class, the fragrant giant leaned against the wall and crossed his boots.

There was a knock on the door.

“Your show!” Kobylov whispered and wrinkled his nose at Sashenka. She looked away. “Tired?” he hissed.

“Enter!” piped up Mogilchuk. “The confrontation starts now.” The door opened. The torturer from Beria’s office entered. “Welcome, Comrade Rodos,” Mogilchuk said.

Butterflies of physical fear fluttered in Sashenka’s belly. Rodos moved slowly as if made of rusty steel. He nodded at his comrades and then looked Sashenka straight in the eye. He sat down in the chair next to Mogilchuk and started to play with the long red hairs of the mole on his chin. This was the Sashenka team: Kobylov was in charge, with Mogilchuk and Rodos as the soft and hard men. Just to break her? No, they must be working on some bigger case, she thought; one that involved poor Mendel. Her natural optimism, barely still beating in her breast, told her she would survive this. No one had yet broken, that was clear.

So who were they bringing to surprise her? She had already seen Mendel—a heartbreaking, dreadful sight.

If it was Vanya, and he had told lies against her, she would understand that, under the ministerings of Rodos, he had crossed into the other world: she would still beam her love at him. She would not confess: she could still survive.

If it was Benya, darling Benya of the eight stars, of the seven thousand rubies, he was beyond blame now. She had rung him that day to say “I love you.” Now she loved him once more, convinced he was as innocent as she. If she never got out of the Lubianka, she would always be grateful that she had known such a love.

But she would not confess, whatever anyone said, because she was still innocent. And if she did not confess, she would one day be freed. And she would reclaim Snowy and Carlo. It was all for them now.

The door opened.

Sashenka looked down at her fingers with terrible foreboding. This was it.

She sensed, through her peripheral vision, a wizened figure hesitating in the doorway.

“Sit down, prisoner,” said Rodos, pointing at the chair facing Sashenka on the T-shaped conference table. “There!”

A skinny old man in blue prison overalls hesitated again, pointing at himself. “Yes, you! Sit there, prisoner. Hurry!”

A bolt of expectation hit her. Was it her father? She gulped. Was he alive? Had he testified against her? It did not matter: if he was alive, she would be jubilant.

Love welled up in her for her father, her mother, her grandparents, all of them.

Papa! Whatever they’d done to him, whatever he’d done to her, she just wanted to hug him. Would they let her kiss him?

“Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn!” barked Rodos. “Face the prisoner.”

40

41

A cadaverous old man with yellow translucent skin and tufts of pale hair on a peeling, scabby scalp sat opposite her in blue prison uniform. He sucked his gums, jerkily glanced around him, and scratched himself in bursts, rolling his eyes, followed by long minutes of comatose stillness.

Sashenka had never met a Zek, but everything about this broken-down ruin shouted Zek, a veteran of the Gulags. She sensed that he had spent years in Vorkuta or Kolyma, breaking rocks, cutting down trees. He no longer even smelled of prisons or possessed the shifty, artful craving for survival that she herself now displayed. This meager husk existed without hope or spirit. Now she saw the true meaning of that expression favored by Beria and even her Vanya: “ground into camp dust.” She had never understood it before.

At last she dared to peer into the face, tears welling: was it Baron Samuil Zeitlin, arrested in 1937? No, it could not be her father. This man did not look anything like her father.

Kobylov smacked his lips with a sportsman’s glee, and Sashenka observed how the investigators noted his impatience.

“Do you recognize each other?” asked Mogilchuk keenly.

“Speak up, prisoner,” said Rodos with surprising warmth. “You recognize her?”

Sashenka searched her memory. Who was he? He must be in his eighties or more.

He swallowed loudly and opened his mouth. He had no teeth, and his gums were pale with ulcerated streaks. She noticed a mark on his neck and realized it was blue-black bruising.

“It’s her! It’s her!” the creature said in a strikingly educated, level and delicate voice. “Of course I recognize her.”

“What’s her name?” demanded Rodos briskly.

“She looks exactly the same. But better.”

“Speak up! Who is she?”

The husk smirked at Rodos. “You think I’ve forgotten?”

“Do you want me to remind you?” said Rodos, still playing with the coarse hairs that grew out of his mole.

“What will you do with me after this? Put me out of my misery?”

Rodos ran a hand over his bumpy scalp. “If you don’t want any more French wrestling…” and then he stood up and shrieked in a voice of maniacal violence: “What is her name?”

The prisoner stiffened. Sashenka jumped, breaking into a sweat.

“Are you going to beat me again? You don’t have to. That’s Baroness Alexandra Zeitlin—Sashsh-enk-ka, whom I once loved.”

Rodos walked to the door. “I have another appointment,” he said to Kobylov.

“Enjoy it,” said Kobylov. “Carry on, Investigator Mogilchuk.”

“Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn,” said Mogilchuk, “do you recognize the prisoner?”

Sashenka shook her head, fascinated and horrified.

“Prisoner, your name?”

“Peter Ivanovich Pavlov.” It was another man’s voice, from another city in another vanished time.

“That’s not your real name, is it?” coaxed Mogilchuk gently. “That’s the false name under which you masqueraded as a teacher in Irkutsk for more than ten years when you were really a White Guardist spy. Now look at the accused and tell her your real name.”

42

In another interrogation room, Benya Golden sat in a chair in front of Investigator Boris Rodos.

“You’ve been arrested for treacherous anti-Soviet activities,” Rodos said. “Do you acknowledge your guilt?”

“No.”

“Why do you think you’ve been arrested?”

“A chain of coincidences and my inability to write.”

Rodos grunted and peered at his papers, with a sneer that further flattened his broad boxer’s nose. “So you’re a writer, are you? No wonder Mogilchuk wanted to interrogate you. I thought you were just a filthy traitor and a piece of shit. A writer, eh?”

Benya could not contain his surprise. “I wrote a book called Spanish Stories that was a success two years ago and then—”

“What the fuck do I care, you vain little prick?” spat Rodos. “I just see a smug Jew who I could break in half like a stick. I could grind you to dust.”

Benya did not doubt it. Rodos, with his squashed bald head, overdeveloped shoulders and short legs, reminded him of a hyena. Benya was scared of losing the things he loved, his child and, above all, his darling, his Sashenka. They were all that mattered now.

“Again, why did we arrest you?”

“I honestly don’t know. I lived in Paris, I was associated with French and American writers. I knew some of the generals arrested for being Trotskyites.”

“So? Don’t make me open the drawer on my desk where I keep my sticks and smash your Yid hook nose into pulp. I like French wrestling—that’s what we call it here. Confess your criminal and amoral activities and I won’t even have to raise a sweat. Tell me the full story of your sexual depravity in the Metropole Hotel, room four hundred and three.”

“That?” exclaimed Benya. So had he been arrested because of his affair with Sashenka? Gideon had warned him about meddling with a secret policeman’s wife. Even in such puritanical times that couldn’t be so serious, could it? Perhaps this meant that he would be sent into provincial exile, far from Moscow, but at least he’d live. He had to protect Sashenka.

“Yes, that,” answered Rodos, holding up a thick file. “We know every disgusting detail.”

“I get it. Her husband’s behind this. But she’s innocent, I promise. She’s done nothing wrong. She’s a loyal Communist.” Benya scanned Rodos’s face but it was like trying to read a slab of meat.

“Who said she wasn’t?”

“So she’s not in any trouble then?”

“That’s secret information, Accused Golden. Just confess how it all started…”

Benya prayed that Sashenka knew none of this. Perhaps she would return to being the good wife she had always been. She would assume that Benya had been arrested as a Trotskyite spy and she would despise him and forget about him and continue her life of Party-minded duty and luxury. He loved her so much he wanted to suffer for her, to save her pain.

When they arrived to arrest him, he had not been surprised. He had been so happy in those two weeks of loving Sashenka that he could not believe it would last—even though he knew that she was truly the love of his life. It was a love that comes just once, if ever.

As he sat inside the car on the way to prison, he watched the city streets pass by, the lights fluid through his tears. It was dawn, the time when cities renew themselves before the day breaks: trucks collected garbage, janitors sprayed steps, old ladies swept up paper, a man in overalls carried a pail of milk. But the red stars of the Kremlin that had lit up their room in the Metropole belonged to them both together. Now he would suffer on the rack: they would tear him to pieces, and his blood ran cold.

Sashenka would live on outside, that adorable woman whom he loved. No one would ever know what was in their hearts, no matter how much they beat him. Her existence outside the prison, like that of his own young child, meant that he would live on too as long as she lived. She had never told him that she loved him but he hoped that she did…Why couldn’t she tell him when so much suffering stretched out ahead of him? She was making him wait for it, and probably he would have to wait to hear it in another world.

Now he asked himself—what was the right thing to say? How to protect Sashenka? Or was she beyond protecting? Such was his writer’s curiosity that, even as he mocked death, he speculated on this latest twist in his own liquidation. What would his “Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery” recommend? he wondered, recalling how he and Sashenka had laughed about it together.

“Disarm and make your confession!” Rodos shouted.

Suddenly he pulled open the drawer of the desk and smashed Benya once, twice and again across the face with a black rubber truncheon.

Benya fell to the floor, his cheek scouring on concrete. Rodos followed him, his boots smashing into Benya’s nose, blood fountaining out, and the truncheon thudding into his face, his kidneys, his groin, his face again. He vomited in agony, bringing up bile and blood and teeth.

“Sashenka!” he moaned, realizing with each blow that she was not free, sensing that she was somewhere here, near and in pain—and that broke him utterly. “I love you! Where are you?”

43

“Peter Sagan, Captain of Gendarmes,” the old Zek said in the most urbane and aristocratic of tones. “There, that’s given her a shock.”

Sashenka gasped. Hadn’t he died in the streets of Petrograd? Her heart drummed, claws tweaked her insides.

“How do you know her?” asked Mogilchuk.

“I loved her once,” said the husk in his Corps de Pages, Yacht Club accent.

“You had a sexual relationship with her?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a lie!” cried Sashenka, thinking back to that romantic but chaste sleigh ride and then the miserable night when Sagan had tried to rape her.

“Quiet or you’ll be removed,” said Mogilchuk. “You’ll get your chance in a minute. She was a virgin?”

“Yes. She became my mistress and I corrupted her with unspeakable perversions. I also gave her cocaine, which I pretended to take as a medicine.”

“Never!” shouted Sashenka. “This is not Peter Sagan. I don’t recognize this man. He’s an impostor!”

“Ignore her, prisoner. Let’s carry on. You had a professional relationship?”

“I used her…I hated the revolutionaries as scum…but I came to love her.”

“We don’t want your romantic reminiscences, prisoner. Your professional relationship?”

“She was my double agent.”

“When did you recruit her for the Okhrana?”

“Winter 1916. We arrested her as a Bolshevik. I recruited her at Kresty Prison. Thereafter we met in safe houses and hotel rooms where she betrayed her comrades.”

“This is not true. You know it’s not true! Whoever you are, you’re telling lies!” Sashenka stood up. Kobylov’s bejeweled hands fell heavily on her shoulders, jolting her back into her seat. A chill rose up her body, and she started to shiver.

“Did she recruit other agents for you, higher up the Bolshevik high command?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us who.”

“First, Mendel Barmakid.”

Sashenka shook her head. She felt she was drowning, the waters closing above her head.

“Was Mendel a valuable agent, Prisoner Sagan?”

“Oh yes. The other leaders were in prison, Siberia or abroad. He was a member of the Central Committee in contact with Lenin.”

“How long did he remain a double agent?”

“Mendel’s still a double agent.”

“Lies! You bastard!” she shouted again, energy draining from her. “You’ll rot in hell for this! If you knew what you were doing! If you only knew…” She started to weep.

“Get a grip on yourself, accused,” said Mogilchuk, “or Rodos will tear you apart.” There was a moment of silence. “After the Revolution, Sagan, what happened to your Okhrana agents?”

“They went underground as I did myself.”

“Under whose control?”

“Initially the White Guards but later we became the servants of…an unholy alliance of snakes and running dogs.” At this, Sagan again smirked, and Sashenka sensed within him a mixture of shame and mockery. Behind his shifting, restless blue irises he seemed to be weeping, begging her to forgive him. Had they drugged him?

“Under whose command, Sagan?”

“Ultimately under the command of Japanese and British intelligence but taking orders from the United Opposition of Trotsky and Bukharin.”

“So all these years you were still in contact with the accused?”

“I was the contact between her and the enemies of the Soviet working people.”

“You met regularly?”

“Yes, we did.”

“This is laughable,” Sashenka shouted. “I’ve never heard of this man. The policeman Sagan was killed on Nevsky Prospect in 1917. This man is an actor!”

“What other agents did she recruit?”

“Her husband, Vanya Palitsyn. And more recently the writer Benya Golden—using the same degenerate sexual techniques I taught her as a girl.”

“So Japanese and British intelligence, along with Trotsky and Bukharin, were running traitor Mendel in the Central Committee, traitor Palitsyn in the NKVD, and traitor Golden the writer for years on end?”

“Yes!”

“You bastard!” Sashenka threw herself across the table but when her fingers came into contact with her accuser, it was like grabbing handfuls of sand. There was nothing to hold. The old man was so weak that he fell off his chair, grazing his head on the side of the table and lying on the floor in a heap.

Kobylov lifted her up from behind like a rag doll and dropped her hard onto her chair.

“Careful, girl, we’ve got to look after him, haven’t we, boys?” said Mogilchuk as he helped Sagan off the floor. He was still floppy and could barely sit up, legs and hands a blur of spasms.

Sashenka experienced the despair of the damned. This scarecrow was tolling the bells on her entire life. She thought of her children. The unthinkable had happened. Nothing was as she had imagined.

She was not irrelevant to this case, she realized. She was its pivot—the center of the spider’s web—and she would never get out, never see Snowy and Carlo again. “Give me time to settle the children,” Satinov had demanded. She prayed he had succeeded.

Was it now time to put Vanya’s plan into action? “Only confess when you realize you have no choice,” he’d instructed. Had he held out this long?

“Good work, boys!” Kobylov clapped his hands together and left, kicking the door shut behind him with a gleaming boot.

Mogilchuk held up a file entitled Protocol of Interrogation and opened it.

“Here’s your confession. You’ve signed every page and at the end, have you not?”

Sagan nodded, jiggling his knees and scratching.

The Chekist tossed it over to Sashenka. “There, Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn! Read it! You couldn’t remember all this? How could you have forgotten?”

44

“Comrade Stepanian, any sign of a telegram?”

Carolina staggered into the stationmaster’s office. It was the next morning, a fan whirred overhead, and the hot office was crowded that day. An old peasant in blouse and clogs, two little eyes peering over a long white beard, sat in front of the desk; a young man in a Party tunic with a Kalinin beard waited with passport and tickets; an NKVD officer read a sports magazine with his feet up on the radiator.

Comrade Stepanian put his hand on the pile of telegrams and patted it.

“No, no, there’s no telegram…”

Carolina was overcome with despair. Satinov had failed them; it had all been for nothing. “I’m leaving today,” she said, on the edge of tears. “I can’t wait any longer.”

She dragged herself and the children to the door and was struggling to open it when suddenly Stepanian shook himself and clicked his tongue like a woodpecker.

“Wait! There’s no telegram—but there’s someone waiting for you by the samovar in the canteen. A woman. She’s been here for some time.”

“Thank you, Comrade Stepanian. Thank you! I could embrace you…” and she rushed out.

“Is it Mama?” asked Carlo as they hurried to the café.

“Mama’s gone away,” said Snowy seriously. “Carolina’s told you already. We’re on an adventure.”

“Come on,” said Carolina. “Run quickly. Oh, please God she hasn’t left already.”

Inside the canteen, a little apart from the line for tea and hot water beside the steaming samovar and farther from the trays of greasy dumplings, pirozhki and pelmeni, a dignified older woman with a heart-shaped face and grey curls around her ears sat stiffly. Wearing an old-fashioned lady’s cloche hat and a suit, Lala was sipping a cup of tea, scanning the crowds eagerly. When she saw the bedraggled nanny and the two children, she stood up and beckoned them over.

“Hello, I’ve come to meet you.” She smiled at them all and offered a hand to Carolina, who seemed beyond such courtesies. The two women eyed each other for a moment, then hugged like old friends.

“I’m sorry it’s taken so long. The train was delayed and I’m not practiced at all this. Come, let’s sit down at this table,” she said, speaking slowly, looking hard at the children, her darling Sashenka’s children. “I have a room in the Revolution Hotel in Rostov where we can go and wash and get some sleep. We can eat there too. I have papers stamped for the children and I was given some money.”

Carolina tottered and then sat and buried her face in her hands—and Lala knew what this moment must be costing the nanny. Carlo ran to Carolina and kissed her hair. “You’re my best friend in the whole wide world!” he said, stroking her cheek.

Lala placed her hand on Carolina’s shoulder. “We’re living in bad times and you’ve done so well to get here. Please, Carolina, stop crying! I never asked for this job. Like you, I’m risking a lot to do it. I too am out of my depth.”

“But you have a plan? You know what to do?”

“Yes, I have instructions. Carolina, I’ll do anything to carry them through.” She looked once more at the children and they stared at her.

“Who is she?” asked Snowy.

“Be polite, Snowy!” Lala saw Carolina return to her brisk self. “This lady is going to help you.”

“Where’s Mama?” asked Carlo, his face collapsing again.

“You must be Carlo,” said Lala. “I have something for you.” She reached into a canvas bag and pulled out a cookie tin illustrated with a picture of the Kremlin.

Carlo could not take his eyes off the tin. Lala opened it and Carlo gasped at the yellow magic of the cookies with their delicious cream and jam fillings but did not move.

“I heard you liked these,” she said, feeling Carolina smile at her.

“Look, Carlo,” said Snowy, “she knows they’re your favorite.” Snowy took one and gave it to Carlo, who ate it. He took hold of his sister’s hand.

“Hello, Snowy. Is that your friend Cushion?” asked Lala.

“You’ve heard of Cushion?”

“Of course, Cushion is famous. Hello, Miss Cushion! You’re much blonder than your mummy, Snowy, and your eyes are blue but you have her mouth—and you, Carlo, look just like your father.”

“You know Mama?” asked Snowy.

“You know Papa?” said Carlo.

“Oh yes,” said Lala, remembering the day she’d first met Sashenka and had loved her instantly like her own. She recalled the nights she spent with Sashenka in her bed at the mansion on Greater Maritime Street, the sleigh rides sweeping through the boulevards of St. Petersburg, the hilarity of ice skating, the exhilaration of riding ponies on the family estate. She had been Sashenka’s real mother and, although she had not seen her for almost ten years in the crazy, man-eating world that Sashenka had embraced, she had thought of her every day and talked to that portrait of the Smolny schoolgirl in her pinafore, as if they were still together. She knew too that she was here, in this station, not just for herself or Sashenka—but for Samuil Zeitlin as well, whether he was alive or dead.

Now Sashenka had been swallowed up by the Party she’d served so assiduously—and the only way Lala could express her deep love was by undertaking this troubling mission for the Zeitlin family. “I know your mummy better than anyone alive,” she told Carlo and Snowy. “But we mustn’t think about Mummy now. We must make plans for the future, for your next adventure. Oh, and you must call me Lala.”

“So you’re Lala?” said Snowy. “Mama told me you gave her a bath every day. I like you. You’re very cushiony.”

The two nannies smiled at each other, sharing their admiration of Snowy—then looked away, abruptly. It was too painful.

Turning their backs on the station, they walked into Rostov-on-Don, each holding the hand of one of the children.

“Swing me!” piped Carlo, kicking up his legs, happy for the first time in days.

As Carolina took one arm and Lala the other, Lala could not help thinking that one stage of Snowy and Carlo’s lives was ending—and another was about to begin.

45

Sashenka crawled to her cell door. “Take me to Kobylov!”

The Judas port slid open, muddy, bored eyes blinked; it shut again. Sashenka lay back sweltering on her bunk, falling in and out of sleep. How many days since she had slept for longer than ten minutes? She had lost count. She had lost the sense of day and night. There was no window in her cell, just a brilliant light that penetrated and burned even the deepest and darkest and coolest chambers of her soul.

The confrontation with Captain Sagan had changed everything. She had thought about it all day and into the night, slipping in and out of delirium. Awake, she dreamed of the children, of Vanya, of Benya Golden, and debated absurd questions: could a woman love two men at the same time, one as a lover, one as a husband? Oh yes, it was possible. But each time, she passed into dreamless unconsciousness, she slipped under the surface of fathomless black water where she saw nothing.

Then she was shaken awake roughly. “No sleeping!”

She did not even know if Vanya was alive. She knew they would have been merciless. He was one of them, he knew where all the bodies lay buried, and now they were crushing him. She longed to see him.

She thought about asking to meet him to confirm that she should take the next step, but she feared that any suspicion that they had coordinated their plans would draw the investigators toward the children. They had had more than a week now, darling Cushion and Bunny, to go on their dread adventure.

What was their smell? Hay and vanilla. How did Snowy say, “Let’s do the Cushion dance”? Sashenka struggled to get the children’s intonation right, sketching their faces again and again, but sometimes the shape of a nose or the curve of a forehead (those delicious foreheads, her favorite places to kiss, just where the hair met the temple, oh, she could nuzzle them there forever!) confounded her and they sank beneath the remorseless black water. Perhaps this was Nature making it easier for her, allowing her to forget.

Her mind was barely functioning, she scarcely registered the life of the prison around her: she just existed on the conveyor. But if she went insane, she would be no use to Carlo and Snowy. She sensed it was time for the next step.

It was deep in the night when they came to get her. The whole Soviet government functioned throughout the night, from Stalin down. How naïve she had been about Vanya coming home at dawn, smelling like an old wolf, as if he had been in a barroom brawl. His secrecy had suited her too because she had never had to ask what he was doing all night. Now she knew the compromise they had both made.

When they reached the interrogation rooms that existed, in Sashenka’s mind, in limbo, exactly halfway between the paneled offices at the front of the Lubianka complex and the dungeons of the Interior Prison, she was relieved, just as she had been oddly relieved when they had arrested her.

She walked into the room and was struck so hard on the back with a rubber truncheon that she fell over. She was kicked viciously, which made her curl up with a groan. The truncheons—there were two men in there—fell on her back, her breasts, her stomach, wherever she turned, but especially on her legs and feet. She screamed in pain, and blood ran down her face into her eyes. She tried to pretend that this was a very unpleasant medical procedure that was necessary and even therapeutic and would be over soon, but this did not work for long.

In the compacted odors of vodka sweat, cologne and pork sausage that oozed from her persecutors, in the agony of the blows that struck her breasts, in the virile grunts and heaves of these unfit men as they swung their truncheons, Sashenka recognized that her tormentors found berserk sport in beating her. Perhaps her request had interrupted a banquet in the NKVD Club—or even an orgy at a safe house somewhere.

The men halted briefly, breathing heavily. Wiping her eyes, shivering and gasping with agony, she squinted up at Kobylov and Rodos, in boots, white shirts and jodhpurs held up with suspenders. They stood together, such different men but with the same eyes: bloodshot, yellowed and wild, like wolves caught in the headlights.

“I want to confess,” she said as loudly as she could. “Everything. I beg you. Stop it now!”

46

“Hurrah! Hurrah!” shouted Kobylov, jumping up and down like a schoolboy at a soccer match. “Christ is risen!”

He remembered his own mother, the big-breasted cheerful Georgian woman who so cherished him. The last time he was with her in her new apartment in Tiflis, she had warned him: “Careful of the unhappiness you cause, Bogdan! Remember God and Jesus Christ!”

He pulled on his tunic, wiping his forehead with a yellow silk kerchief. “Enough now! Get her cleaned up, Comrade Rodos, let her get some sleep, cool her cell down and give her some coffee when she wakes. Then give her a pen and paper and get Mogilchuk to charm her. I’m off back to the party where so many mares await me! Thank heaven we can stop before we ruin her looks altogether. This is hard work, Sashenka, for a man who loves women. It’s not easy, pure torture, not easy at all.” And with a fleshy wave of jeweled fingers and a gleaming boot kicking the door shut, he was gone.

Sashenka slept all the next day. The cell was deliciously cool and dark but her chest was agony—perhaps they had broken a rib? Some time in the night a doctor, a grey-bearded, white-coated specialist, fallen from his fancy city practice into this world of the living dead, came to see her. She was half awake but she dreamed that he was the vanished Professor Israel Paltrovich who had delivered Snowy in the Kremlin Hospital. Something about his hush of surprise when he saw it was her, something about his aristocratic and soft-spoken bedside manner, even though he himself looked so broken, something about his gentle reassurance in the middle of the night, reminded her of him. She wanted to talk to him about Snowy.

“Professor, is it you…?”

He put his calm fingers on her hand and squeezed it.

“Just rest,” he said, and more quietly, “sleep, dear.” He gave her injections and rubbed some healing cream into her muscles.

When she woke up, she could not move. Her body was black and blue, and her urine was red. She ate and slept some more, then they let her wash and walk in the exercise yard, where, hobbling along, she stared at the gorgeous turquoise tent above her. The air was racy and fresh and warm. It was as if she had been born again today.

She had been lucky after a fashion, she told herself. What luck to be loved by Lala and raised by her; to marry Vanya and create those children; to have enjoyed the seven-thousand-ruby caresses of Benya Golden, one wild, reckless love affair in her life of good sense and hard work. She had known Lenin and Stalin in person, the titans of human history. Given that it was all about to end, thank God she had known such things. What riches, what times she had enjoyed!

They would draw it out of her, she knew, and she would deliver all they wanted—and more. The words she would utter, the confessions she would make, were a long form of suicide, but addictively indispensable to her one reader: the Instantzia, Comrade Stalin, who would find in her breathless reminiscences all he had ever wanted to believe about the world and the people he hated. Vanya had told her about Stalin’s lurid visions and she would pander to every one of them. Vanya, if he was still alive, would do the same, less flamboyantly. She did not know, probably would never know now, why she, Mendel, Benya and Vanya had been arrested in the first place. The workings of spiders and webs were now beyond her. All that mattered was that she was the center of it all, she had destroyed them all. She and Peter Sagan.

They might just keep her on ice for months but by the time they sentenced her (and this part, this snuffing out, this unspeakable ending, this violent conclusion of the mysterious, boundless, vibrant thing called Life, she still found unimaginable), the children would be settled somewhere with new names and destinies, safe and sound and in the world of the living—not in her world of the dead. She beamed her love to them, her thanks to Satinov, her love for those precious to her. She had to let them go. She had been a Communist since she was sixteen. It had been her religion, the rapture of absolutism, the science of history. But now she saw, late in life, that this, her special fantastical confessional suicide, was her last mission. She had become a parent again, just as she ceased to be one. She was pregnant with purpose.

In the exercise yard, Sashenka saw wispy clouds in the dancing shapes of a train, a lion and a bearded rabbinical profile. Was that her grandfather, the Rabbi of Turbin? And could that be a rabbit and a pink cushion, lit by the rays of a sun just out of sight…Perhaps, after all, the mystics were right, life was just a chimera, a fire in the desert, a fevered trance, but the pain was real.

When the time comes for the Highest Measure, she promised herself, I’ll welcome the seven grams of lead and I’ll leave an expression of love for Snowy and Carlo out there on the gates of eternity. It was time for the final act.

47

“Here’s your prize,” said Kobylov, welcoming her into the interrogation room. The secret policeman watched as the beautiful prisoner caught first a whiff and then the strong aroma of the burnt, slightly sour coffee beans.

“You must confess your criminal and treacherous activities,” said Mogilchuk, pouring her coffee out of a brass flask.

She sat in the chair, snow-white between the welts and bruises, and thin, but something about those lips that never quite closed, the little islands of freckles on either side of her nose, and that bosom distracted Kobylov, who sat on the windowsill, swinging a new pair of coffee-colored calf-leather boots. He liked this stage in a case. There was an end-of-semester chumminess in the air and he did not have to beat her anymore, even though a bout of French wrestling with a real bastard was bracing sport. He felt her grey eyes rest on him, bright again and bold and vigilant.

Kobylov winked at her and wrinkled his nose. He took out a packet of cigarettes emblazoned with a crocodile. “Your favorite Egyptians,” he said, taking one and tossing her the packet.

“I couldn’t have imagined when I became a Bolshevik that I would end here,” she told him.

“When you chose the revolutionary life, even at sixteen, you entered a game of life and death and put the quest for the holy grail above everything else,” said Kobylov, lighting her cigarette and then his own. “Comrade Stalin told me that himself.”

“But I changed,” said Sashenka, blowing out lacy ringlets of smoke.

Kobylov raised his eyes to heaven. “It’s irreversible,” he said.

“Like a sleigh ride that you can never get off…”

“Time to work,” said Kobylov.

Mogilchuk lifted his pen and smoothed the pristine sheet of paper. “Begin your confession.”

Sashenka brushed her hair back off her forehead. There was a cut on her cheek and one whole side of her face was still swollen, surrounded by a rainbow of deep blue, mustard yellow and poppy red.

Kobylov felt like the hunter who corners the noble stag and even as he aims his rifle at its heart he cannot help but admire it. He marveled at her self-possession and her courage.

Sashenka ran her fingers over her lips and met Kobylov’s gaze. “I want to start on the day I was arrested by the Okhrana outside the Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1916. That was how I came to be recruited by the Tsarist secret police and thence by British, German and Japanese intelligence and their hireling, Trotsky. May I start on the day it all began?”

48

Carolina heard the door of her hotel room close quietly. The room seethed with insects: the ceiling, even the bedspread, was covered in a blanket of glistening black bodies like living caviar. The children had been fascinated by them. In one twin bed, Carolina had slept with Carlo curled around her to form a single sculpture. After the station, it had seemed the most luxurious room on earth. But now, as she sprang awake from a sleep fathoms deep, she knew that click of the lock could mean only one thing.

She jumped up and ran to the window and, placing her hands on the glass, she stared, wild eyed, down at the street below. Among the horse-drawn carts, trucks and Pobeda cars, she saw women in floral dresses and red headscarves, and the pea-green uniforms of a provincial Soviet town. Then she spotted the children far across the square, walking toward the station.

They were holding Mrs. Lewis’s hands, two tiny far-off figures. But she knew every mannerism of their gaits, the way Carlo stomped along and Snowy’s long-legged, bouncing grace, so like her mother’s. For a moment, Carolina longed to run after them and catch them and hug them over and over again…But already she knew this leave-taking was for the best.

The train would be shunting forward, the momentum shifting too. Soon Snowy and Carlo would be leaving another beloved figure behind and moving into a new existence.

She cried loudly and openly and for a long time in the room.

She cursed this gentle nanny, this Lala, who now had the children. Perhaps Lala would keep them, and even though she could never care for them as lovingly as she herself (no one alive could do that!), they would be better with her than with strangers. But Carolina knew too that Lala could not keep them forever; that she had some dangerous connections, and connections had to be avoided, Comrade Satinov had explained. So Lala was taking them somewhere else. She had mentioned an orphanage in Tiflis, but that was for the paperwork. There the children’s identities would be laundered and their adoptions made official.

The night before, it had been hard to get the children to sleep even though they were exhausted and so grateful for the beds. They cried out for their mummy and daddy. The two nannies stroked them, hugged them and fed them their favorite cookies until in the end the children had hugged them back and surrendered to sleep.

Then the two nannies had sat in the bathroom and Carolina had talked with a frowning intensity, passing on everything she knew about the children: what they loved, what they hated, what foods, what hobbies, what books. At the end, in a sort of agony, she had whispered, “Tell the new parents about the Cushion, tell them about the bunnies. It’s all they have left of their lives!”

And Lala had understood. “I know what sensitive children they are, Carolina. I cared for Sashenka for so long…”

“What was she like?” asked Carolina. “Was she like…?” and she looked toward the bedroom—but then she could speak no longer. No more details. It would be more than either of them could bear.

The two women, the Englishwoman and the Volga German, embraced in tears. In the end, lying each with one of the children, they managed to fall asleep too in the warm hotel room looking out over the Don, where Peter the Great had once sailed.

As she packed her bag and caught the bus to return to her little village, Carolina remembered how the three figures had wound their way toward the station. They were pulling the tottering Lala in different directions, laughing, she thought, from the way Carlo was tossing his head back and Snowy was skipping. She realized that she was seeing Snowy and Carlo Palitsyn for the last time. Very soon, they would be different children with new names, belonging to other families.

“Good-bye, my absolute darlings!” she said aloud. “God bless you. May my love travel with you wherever you go and whomsoever you become.”

To what awaited her, she gave not a thought.

There were such kind women as Carolina, in the agony of Russia, when even the most decent people became cruel or turned their eyes away. Such paragons were rare. But they existed. They alone kept the candles of love alight.

49

It was high summer, the time of year when Tiflis becomes a balmy, baking city of outdoor cafés and strolling boulevardiers. In the Café Biblioteka, Lala Lewis was pouring red wine for one of her regulars when the doors opened.

An ancient waxy-skinned man entered in a battered, dusty sepia-colored suit with a little leather suitcase. He sported a neat grey mustache, and walked painfully in pigeon steps toward the cashier’s desk. Tengiz the manager was not sure if he recognized this ghostly wraith: could it be a miracle? One of the “lucky stiffs” back from the dead?

The Englishwoman watched his staggering progress silently for a moment, her eyes opening wider and wider, her mouth breaking into a scream before any sound came out.

Then she gave the most girlish yelp, as if she were sixteen years old, and almost skipped across the wooden floor to meet her husband. She had recognized the “former person” Samuil Zeitlin, who had been arrested in 1937, sentenced to death but reprieved by a centimeter of ink from the pen of Comrade Stalin and dispatched to the Kolyma Gulags in northeastern Siberia. Then, a few short months ago, against all the odds of Fate, Zeitlin, the ultimate class enemy, had been reprieved again.

“Good God!” said Lala in English. “Samuil! You’re alive! You’re ALIVE!” She threw herself into his weak embrace, nearly knocking him over. It had never occurred to her that he might still live. She quickly poured him a thimble of brandy and he swallowed it and sighed.

“Thank God you’re still here, darling Lala,” he said, falling to his knees, right there in the café, and kissing her hands and even her feet.

“Let’s get you up,” she said, pulling him to his feet, anxious not to make any more of a scene. “You really are a miracle. Since the Terror ended, a few have come back—lucky stiffs is what they call them.”

“If you only knew, but you’d never believe it, the things I saw on the way to Kolyma, the things I saw men do to other men…”

Lala sat him down at a table and brought him a glass of brandy, a plate of lobio beans and a hot slice of khachapuri. He told how a strange thing had happened to him. An NKVD guard had come to the office, where he worked as camp accountant in the faraway hell of Kolyma, and summoned him to the commandant’s apparat, where he was asked to sign for his belongings. He was given his old suit and shoes then invited to lunch by the commandant, who served veal cutlets, by coincidence almost the same dish cooked daily by Delphine at the mansion on Greater Maritime Street. He was taken to the barber’s shop (the barber was a former nobleman). Then, with a small allowance, he was freed to set off on the long, slow journey back to Tiflis.

When he was a little restored, she and Tengiz helped him upstairs to her room. Tengiz brought them hot water. When the manager was gone, she undressed Zeitlin and washed his frail body with a warm sponge.

Samuil sat on the edge of the bed, looking at her, asking questions with his eyes. She knew he wanted to know about Sashenka—but he could not bring himself to ask.

He lay down with a sigh, closed his eyes and went to sleep immediately.

Lala lay beside him with her head on his shoulder. At that moment, she loved him so much that she regretted nothing. She felt that she had imagined her birth and childhood in England. It seemed her entire life had taken place in Russia with the Zeitlins. Her family in Hertfordshire had not received a letter from her for many years. They probably thought she was dead. And the English girl Audrey Lewis was dead.

She had loved Samuil for nearly thirty years and they had been together for more than twenty: his family was her family. She had mourned him and grieved in the stoical silence of the times.

She never blamed Samuil for keeping her in Russia—they had been happy together. And it had been such a blessing that she had not been arrested but was still working in the café, healthy and prepared, waiting for him to return. Here he was, her Samuil, alive and back from the camps, returned from the dead.

She kissed his face and his hands, smelled his male smoky biscuit smell. He was almost as she remembered.

He opened his eyes as if he couldn’t quite believe where he was, smiled, and went back to sleep.

Lala stroked his skin, the parchment of the Gulags, and wondered how, and when, to tell him about the heroism of his daughter, what had happened in the railway station just a few weeks ago, and how together she and Sashenka had saved Snowy and Carlo.