Sashenka

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘Me!’ Sashenka was already up, holding her engraved calf-leather case and her canvas bag of books. She was so keen to leave that she gave the lowest and most aristocratic curtsy she had ever managed, lower even than the one she had given to the Dowager Empress on St Catherine’s Day. ‘Merci, maman!’ she said. Behind her she heard the girls whisper in surprise, for she was usually the rebel of the class. But she did not care any more. Not since the summer. The secrets of those hazy summer nights had shattered and recast everything.

  The bell was ringing and Sashenka was already in the corridor. She looked around at its high moulded ceilings, shining parquet and the electric glare of the chandeliers. She was quite alone.

  Her satchel – engraved in gold with her full name, Baroness Alexandra Zeitlin – was over her shoulder but her most treasured possession was in her hands: an ugly canvas book bag that she hugged to her breast. In it were precious volumes of Zola’s realist novels, Nekrasov’s bleak poetry and the passionate defiance of Mayakovsky.

  She started to run down the corridor towards Grand-maman, who was silhouetted against the lamps of limousines and the press of governesses and coachmen, all waiting to collect the Noble Young Ladies of the Smolny. But it was too late. The doors along the corridor burst open and suddenly it was flooded with laughing girls in white dresses with white lacy pinafores, white stockings and soft white shoes. Like an avalanche of powdery snow, they flowed down the corridor towards the cloakrooms. Coming the other way, the herd of heavy-hoofed coachmen, their long beards white with hoarfrost and bearing the freezing northern night in their cloaks, trudged forward to collect the girls’ trunks. Resplendent in his flashy uniform with its peaked cap, Pantameilion stood among them, staring at Sashenka as if in a trance.

  ‘Pantameilion!’

  ‘Oh, Mademoiselle Zeitlin!’ He shook himself and reddened.

  What could have embarrassed the ladykiller of the servants’ quarters? she wondered, smiling at him. ‘Yes, it’s me. My trunk and valise are in Dormitory 12, by the window. Wait a minute – is that a new uniform?’

  ‘Yes, mademoiselle.’

  ‘Who designed it?’

  ‘Your mother, Baroness Zeitlin,’ he called after her as he lumbered up the stairs to the dormitories.

  What had he been staring at, Sashenka asked herself: was it her horrible bosom or her over-wide mouth? She turned uneasily towards the cloakroom. After all, what was appearance? The shallow realm of schoolgirls! Appearance was nothing compared to history, art, progress and fate. She smiled to herself, mocking her mother’s scarlet and gold taste: Pantameilion’s garish uniform made it obvious that the Zeitlins were nouveaux riches.

  Sashenka was first into the cloakroom. Filled with the silky furs of animals, brown, golden and white, coats, shapkas and stoles with the faces of snowfoxes and mink, the room seemed to be breathing like the forests of Siberia. She pulled on her fur coat, wrapped her white fox stole around her neck and the white Orenburg shawl around her head and was already heading for the door when the other girls poured in, home-bound, their faces flushed and smiling. They threw down shoes, slipped on little boots and galoshes, unclipped leather satchels and bundled themselves into fur coats, all the time chattering, chattering.

  ‘Captain de Pahlen’s back from the front. He’s paying a visit to Mama and Papa but I know he’s coming to see me,’ said little Countess Elena to her wide-eyed companions. ‘He’s written me a letter.’

  Sashenka was almost out of the room when she heard several girls calling to her. Where was she going, why was she in such a hurry, couldn’t she wait for them, what was she doing later? If you’re reading, can we read poetry with you? Please, Sashenka!

  The end-of-term crowd was already pushing, shoving through the door. A schoolgirl cursed a sweating old coachman who, carrying a trunk, had trodden on her foot. Freezing outside, it was feverishly hot in the hall. Yet even here Sashenka felt herself quite separate, surrounded by an invisible barrier that no one could cross, as she heaved her canvas bag, coarse against the lushness of her furs, over her shoulder. She thought she could feel the different books inside – the anthologies of Blok and Balmont, the novels of Anatole France and Victor Hugo.

  ‘Mademoiselle Zeitlin! Enjoy your holidays!’ Grand-maman, half blocking the doorway, declared fruitily. Sashenka managed a merci and a curtsy (not low enough to impress Maman Sokolov). Finally, she was outside.

  The stinging air refreshed and cleansed her, burning her lungs deliciously as the oblique snow nipped her cheeks. The lamps of the cars and carriages created a theatre of light twenty feet high but no more. Above her, the savage, boundless sky was Petrograd black, tempered with specks of white.

  ‘The landaulet is over there!’ Pantameilion, bearing an Asprey travelling trunk over his shoulder and a crocodile-skin valise in his hand, gestured across the drive. Sashenka pushed through the crowd towards the car. She knew that, whatever happened – war, revolution or apocalypse – her Lala would be waiting with her Huntley & Palmers biscuits, and maybe even an English ginger cake. And soon she would see her papa too.

  When a valet dropped his bags, she leaped over them. When the way was blocked by a hulking Rolls with a grand-ducal crest on its glossy flank, Sashenka simply opened the door, jumped in and climbed out the other side.

  Engines chortled and groaned, horns hooted, horses whinnied and stamped their hooves, servants tottered under pyramids of trunks and cases, and cursing coachmen and chauffeurs tried to find a route through the traffic, pedestrians and grimy ice. It was as though an army was breaking camp, but it was an army commanded by generals in white pinafores, chinchilla stoles and mink coats.

  ‘Sashenka! Over here!’ Lala was standing on the car’s running-board, waving frantically.

  ‘Lala! I’m coming home! I’m free!’ For a moment, Sashenka forgot that she was a serious woman with a mission in life and no time for fripperies or sentimentality. She threw herself into Lala’s arms and then into the car, inhaling its reassuring aroma of treated leather and the Englishwoman’s floral perfume. ‘Where are the biscuits?’

  ‘On the seat, darling! You’ve survived the term!’ said Lala, hugging her tightly. ‘You’ve grown so much! I can’t wait to get you home. Everything’s ready in the little salon: scones, ginger cake and tea. Now you can have the Huntley & Palmers.’

  But just as she opened her arms to release Sashenka, a shadow fell across her face.

  ‘Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin?’ A gendarme stood on either side of the car door.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sashenka. She felt a little dizzy suddenly.

  ‘Come with us,’ said one of the gendarmes. He was standing so close that she could see the pores of his pockmarked skin and the hairs of his ginger moustache. ‘Now!’

  3

  ‘Are you arresting me?’ asked Sashenka slowly, looking round.

  ‘We ask the questions, miss,’ snapped the other gendarme, who had sour milky breath and a forked Poincaré beard.

  ‘Wait!’ pleaded Lala. ‘She’s a schoolgirl. What can you want with her? You must be mistaken, surely?’ But they were already leading Sashenka towards a plain sleigh parked to one side.

  ‘Ask her if you want to know,’ the gendarme called over his shoulder, gripping Sashenka tightly. ‘Go on, you tell her, you silly little bitch. You know why.’

  ‘I don’t know, Lala! I’m so sorry! Tell Papa!’ Sashenka cried before they pushed her into the back of the sleigh.

  The coachman, also in uniform, cracked his whip. The gendarmes climbed in after her.

  Out of sight of her governess, she turned to the officer with the beard. ‘What took you so long?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been expecting you for some time.’ She had been preparing these lines for the inevitable moment of her arrest, but annoyingly the policeman did not seem to have heard her as the horses lurched forward.

  Sashenka’s heart was pounding in her ears as the sleigh flew across the snow, right past the Taurida Palace and towards the centre of the
city. The winter streets were quiet, swaddled by the snow. Squeezed between the padded shoulders of the two gendarmes, she sat back, enveloped in the warmth of these servants of the Autocrat. Before her, Nevsky Prospect was jammed with sleighs and horses, a few cars, and trams that clattered and sparked down the middle of the street. The gas streetlamps, lit day and night in winter, glowed like pink halos in the falling snow. She looked past the officers: she wanted to be seen by someone she knew! Surely some of her mother’s friends would spot her as they came out of the shops in the arcades of Gostiny Dvor, the Merchant’s Row bazaar with its folksy Russian clutter – icons, stuffed bears and samovars.

  Flickering lanterns and electric bulbs in the vast façades of the ministries, ochre palaces and glittering shops of Tsar Peter’s city rushed past her. There was the Passazh with her mother’s favourite shops: the English Shop with its Pears soap and tweed jackets, Druce’s with its English furniture, Brocard’s with its French colognes. Playful snowflakes twisted in a little whirlwind, and she hugged herself. She was nervous, she decided, not frightened. She had been put on earth to live this adventure: it was her vocation.

  Where are they taking me? she wondered. The Department of Police on Fontanka? But then the sleigh turned fast on Garden Street, past the forbidding Mikhailovsky Castle where the nobles had murdered the mad Tsar Paul. Now the towers of the Peter and Paul Fortress rose through the gloom. Was she to be buried alive in the Trubetskoy Bastion? But then they were heading over the Liteiny Bridge.

  The river was dark except for the lights hung across the bridges and the lamps of the Embankment. As they crossed, she leaned to her left so she could look at her beloved St Petersburg just as Peter the Great had built it: the Winter Palace, the Admiralty, Prince Menshikov’s Palace and, somewhere in the gloom, the Bronze Horseman.

  I love you, Piter, she thought. The Tsar had just changed the city’s name to Petrograd because St Petersburg was too German – but to the natives it was always St Petersburg, or just Piter. Piter, I may never, ever see you again! Adieu, native city, adieu Papa, adieu Lala!

  She quoted one of Ibsen’s heroes: All or nothing! This was her motto – and always would be.

  And then there it was: the drear dark-red brick of the Kresty Prison, looming up until its shadows swallowed her. For a moment the great walls towered over the little sleigh as the gates swung open and then clanged shut behind her.

  Not so much a building, more of a tomb.

  4

  The Delaunay-Belleville careered down Suvorovsky and Nevsky Prospects with Pantameilion at the wheel, and pulled up outside the Zeitlin family house, a Gothic façade of Finnish granite and ochre, on Bolshaya Morskaya or Greater Maritime Street. Weeping, Lala opened the front door into a hall with a chequered floor, almost falling on to three girls who, with cloths tied to their hands and knees, were polishing the stone on all fours.

  ‘Hey, your boots are filthy!’ howled Luda the parlourmaid.

  Lala’s shoes left melted slush on the gleaming floors but she did not care. ‘Is the baron at home?’ she asked. One of the girls nodded sulkily. ‘And the baroness?’

  The girl glanced upstairs and rolled her eyes – and Lala, trying not to slip on the damp stone, ran to the study door. It was open.

  A mechanical sound like the shunt of a locomotive came from inside.

  Delphine, the surly and ancient French cook, was getting her menu approved. A wife would normally take care of such matters – but not in this uneasy house, as Lala was well aware. The colour of a wax candle, as thin as a broomstick, Delphine always had a drip on the end of her long nose, which hung perilously over the dishes. Lala remembered Sashenka’s fascination with it. What happens if it falls into the borscht? she’d ask, her grey eyes sparkling.

  ‘They don’t help you, mon baron,’ the cook was saying, haggard in her creased brown uniform. ‘I’ll talk to them if you like, sort them out.’

  ‘Thank you, Delphine,’ said Baron Zeitlin. ‘Come in, Mrs Lewis!’ The cook stood up straight like a birch tree, stiffened proudly and passed the nanny without a glance.

  Inside the baron’s study, Lala could savour the leather and cigars even in her tears. Dark and lined with walnut, the room was crammed with expensive clutter and lit by electric lights in flounced green shades. Palms seemed to sprout up every wall. Portraits suspended on chains from the ceiling looked down on sculpted heads, small figurines in frock coats and top hats, and signed sepia photographs of the Emperor and various Grand Dukes. Ivory fans, camels and elephants mingled with oval cameos lined up on a baize card table.

  Baron Samuil Zeitlin was sitting in a strange contraption that shook rhythmically like a trotting horse as he manipulated its polished steel arms, his hands on the wooden handles, his cheeks slightly red, a cigar stub between his teeth. The Trotting Chair was designed to move the baronial bowels after meals.

  ‘What is it, Mrs Lewis? What’s happened?’

  Trying not to sob, she told him, and he jumped straight off the Trotting Chair. Lala noticed that his hands were shaking slightly as he relit the cigar that never left his mouth. He questioned her closely, all business. Zeitlin alone decided when their conversations would be warm and when they would be cold. Not for the first time, Lala pitied the children of people of quality who could not love like more middling people.

  Then, taking a deep breath, she looked at her employer, at the intense gaze of this slim, handsome man with the fair moustache and Edward VII beard, and realized that if anyone could be trusted to bring her Sashenka home, the baron could.

  * * *

  ‘Please stop crying, Mrs Lewis,’ said Baron Zeitlin, proprietor of the Anglo-Russian Naphtha-Oil Bank of Baku and St Petersburg, handing her a silk handkerchief from his frock coat. Calmness in moments of crisis was not just a requirement of life and a mark of civilization but an art, almost a religion. ‘Crying won’t get her out. Now sit down. Gather yourself.’

  Zeitlin saw Lala take a breath, touch her hair and smooth down her dress. She sat, hands together, bracing herself, trying to be calm.

  ‘Have you mentioned this to anyone else in the house?’

  ‘No,’ replied Lala, whose heart-shaped face seemed to Zeitlin unbearably appealing when decorated with her crystal tears. Only her high voice failed to fit the picture. ‘But Pantameilion knows.’

  Zeitlin walked back round his desk and pulled a velvet bellrope. The parlourmaid appeared, a light-footed peasant girl with the snub nose that marked her as a child of the family estates in Ukraine.

  ‘Luda, ask Pantameilion to decarbonize the Pierce-Arrow in the garage,’ said Zeitlin.

  ‘Yes, master,’ she said, bowing slightly from the waist: peasants from the real countryside still bowed to their masters, Zeitlin reflected, but nowadays those from the cities just sneered.

  As Luda closed the study door, Zeitlin sank down in his high-backed chair, pulled out his green leather cigar box with the gold monogram and absent-mindedly drew out a cigar. Stroking the rolled leaves, he eased off the band and smelt it, drawing the length of it under his nose and against his moustache so that it touched his lips. Then with a flash of his chunky cufflinks, he took the silver cutter and snipped off the tip. Moving slowly and sensuously, he flipped the cigar between finger and thumb, spinning it round his hand like the baton of the leader of a marching band. Then he placed it in his mouth and raised the jewelled silver lighter in the shape of a rifle (a gift of the War Minister, for whom he manufactured the wooden stocks of rifles for Russian infantrymen). The smell of kerosene rose.

  ‘Calme-toi, Mrs Lewis,’ he told Lala. ‘Everything’s possible. Just a few phone calls and she’ll be home.’

  But beneath this show of confidence, Zeitlin’s heart was palpitating: his only child, his Sashenka, was in a cell somewhere. The thought of a policeman or, worse, a criminal, even a murderer, touching her gave him a burning pain in his chest, compounded by shame, a whiff of embarrassment, and a sliver of guilt – but he soon dismissed that. The ar
rest was either a mistake or the fruit of intrigue by some jealous war contractor – but calm good sense, peerless connections and the generous application of gelt would correct it. He had fixed greater challenges than releasing an innocent teenager: his rise from the provinces to his current status in St Petersburg, his place on the Table of Ranks, his blossoming fortune, even Sashenka’s presence at the Smolny Institute, all these were testament to his steely calculation of the odds and meticulous preparation, easy luck, and uninhibited embrace of his rightful prizes.

  ‘Mrs Lewis, do you know anything about the arrest?’ he asked a little sheepishly. Powerful in so many ways, he was vulnerable in his own household. ‘If you know something, anything that could help Sashenka …’

  Lala’s eyes met and held his through the grey smoke. ‘Perhaps you should ask her uncle?’

  ‘Mendel? But he’s in exile, isn’t he?’

  ‘Quite possibly.’

  He caught the edge in a voice that always sounded as if it was singing a lullaby to a child, his child, and recognized the glance that told him he hardly knew his own daughter.

  ‘But before his last arrest,’ she continued, ‘he told me this house wasn’t safe for him any more.’

  ‘Not safe any more …’ murmured Zeitlin. She meant that the secret police were watching his house. ‘So Mendel has escaped from Siberia? And Sashenka’s in contact with him? That bastard Mendel! Why doesn’t anyone tell me anything?’

  Mendel, his wife’s brother, Sashenka’s uncle, had recently been arrested and sentenced to five years of administrative exile for revolutionary conspiracy. But now he had escaped, and maybe somehow he had entangled Sashenka in his grubby machinations.

  Lala stood up, shaking her head.

  ‘Well, Baron, I know it’s not my place …’ She smoothed her floral dress, which served only to accentuate her curves. Zeitlin watched her, fiddling with a string of jade worry beads, the only un-Russian hint in the entire stalwartly Russian study.