Sashenka

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘Just read what I give you.’ Mendel was back at his desk, scratching with his pen.

  In her bedroom, when she opened the book, she found Marx’s Communist Manifesto hidden inside. This was soon followed by Plekhanov, Engels, Lassalle, more Marx, Lenin.

  No one had ever spoken to Sashenka like Mendel. Her mother wanted her to be a foolish child preparing for a life of overheated balls, unhappy marriages and seedy adulteries. She adored her father but he barely noticed his ‘little fox’, regarding her as no more than a fluffy mascot. And darling Lala had long since submitted to her place in life, reading only novels like Lady Cynthia de Fortescue and the Love of the Cruel Colonel. As for Uncle Gideon, he was a degenerate sensualist who had tried to flirt with her, and once even patted her behind.

  At meals and parties she barely spoke, so rapt was she by her short course in Marxism, so keen was she to ask Mendel more questions. Her mind was with him in his smoky library, far from her mother and father. Lala, who sometimes found her asleep with the lamp shining and some vulgar novel beside her, worried that she was reading too late. It was Mendel who exposed Sashenka to the grotesque injustice of capitalist society, to the oppression of workers and peasants, and showed her how Zeitlin – yes, her own father – was an exploiter of the working man.

  But there was a solution, she learned: a class struggle that would progress through set stages to a workers’ paradise of equality and decency. The Marxist theory was universal and utopian and all human existence fitted into its beautiful symmetry of history and justice. She could not understand why the workers of the industrial world, especially in St Petersburg and Moscow, the peasants in the villages of Russia and Ukraine, the footmen and maids in her father’s houses, did not rise up and slay their masters at once. She had fallen in love with the ideas of dialectical materialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  Mendel treated Sashenka as an adult; more than a woman, as an adult man, a co-conspirator in the worthiest, most exclusive secret movement in the world. Before long they were meeting almost like lovers, in the twilight, at dawn and in the glowing night, in the stables, in the birch woods and blackberry thickets, on expeditions to collect mushrooms, even whispering by night in the dining hall, sealed within its yellow silk walls that were fragrant with carnations and lilac.

  Yes, Sashenka thought now, the road to this stinking prison in the black St Petersburg winter had started on her father’s fairytale estate on those summer nights when nightingales sang and the dusk was a hazy pink. But was she really such a threat to the throne of the Emperor that she should be arrested at the gates of the Smolny and tossed into this hell?

  A woman behind Sashenka got up and staggered towards the slop bucket. Somehow she tripped over Sashenka and fell, cursing her. This time Sashenka grabbed the woman’s soft throat, ready to fight, but the woman apologized and Sashenka found she suddenly didn’t mind. Now she was tasting the real misery of Russia. Now she could tell them she did not just know big houses and limousines. Now she was a woman, a responsible adult, independent of her family. She tried to sleep but she could not.

  In the sewers of the Empire, she felt alive for the first time.

  9

  For his foray into the St Petersburg night, Zeitlin dressed in a new stiff collar and frock coat to which he attached his star of the Order of St Vladimir, second class, an honour enjoyed by only a very few Jewish industrialists.

  At the bottom of the stairs, pausing for a moment with a hand against the exquisite turquoise tiles of the Dutch stove in the hall, he decided he had better tell his parents-in-law about Sashenka. He knew his wife would not bother. He passed through the empty drawing room and dining room, walled in canary and damask silk, then opened the baize door that led to the so-called Black Way, the dark underbelly of the house. The smell was quite different here, where the air was thick with butter, fat, boiling cabbage and sweat. It gave, thought Zeitlin, a hint of the other, older Russia.

  Downstairs lived the cook and the chauffeur, but that was not where he was headed. Instead, Zeitlin started to climb the Black Way. Halfway up he leaned on a doorpost, exhausted and dizzy. Was it his heart, his indigestion, a touch of neurasthenia? Am I about to drop dead? he asked himself. Gideon was right, he had better call Dr Gemp again.

  A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped. It was his old nanny, Shifra, a bone-white spectre in an orange housecoat and fluffy slippers who had cared for Sashenka before Lala’s arrival.

  ‘Would you approve the menu today?’ she croaked. The household kept up the pretence that old Shifra was still in charge though Delphine now ran the kitchens. Shifra had been retired in tactful stages, without anyone telling her. ‘I’ve consulted the powers, dear boy,’ she added softly. ‘I’ve glanced into the Book of Life. She’ll be all right. Would you like a hot cocoa, Samoilo? Like the old days?’

  Zeitlin nodded at the menu that Delphine had already shown him but refused the cocoa. The old woman floated away like a cobweb on the wind, as silently as she had emerged.

  Alone again, he found to his surprise that there were tears in his eyes: it was that sensuous pull of childhood starting in the belly. His house felt suddenly alien to him, too big, too full of strangers. Where was his darling Sashenka? In a blinding flash of panic, he knew that his child was all that mattered.

  But then the thousand threads of worldliness and wealth weaved around him again. How could he, Zeitlin, fail to fix anything? No one would dare to treat the girl roughly: surely everyone knew his connection to Their Imperial Majesties? His lawyer Flek was on his way; the Interior Minister was calling the Director of Police, who was calling the Commander of the Separate Corps of Gendarmes, who in turn would be calling the chief of the Okhrana Security Section. He could not bear to think of Sashenka spending the night in a police station, let alone a prison cell. But what had she done? She seemed so demure, so correct, almost too serious for her age.

  Parlourmaids and footmen lived further up the Black Way but he stopped on the second floor and opened the metal-lined door that led to the apartment over the garage. Here the smells became more foreign, and yet familiar to Samuil: chicken fat, gefilte fish, frying babke potatoes and the bite of vishniak. Noticing the mezuzah newly nailed to the doorpost, Zeitlin opened the door into what he called ‘the travelling circus’.

  In a large room, filled with precarious piles of books, candelabra, canvas cases and half-opened boxes, a tall old man with a white beard and ringlets, wearing a black kaftan and yarmulke, stood erect at a stand facing towards Jerusalem, reciting the Eighteen Benedictions. A silver pointer with an outstretched finger showed his place in the open Talmud. The book was draped with silk, for the holy word could not be left uncovered. This man, Rabbi Abram Barmakid, was not Zeitlin’s father but he was another link to the world of his childhood: this, Zeitlin thought wistfully, is where I came from.

  Rabbi Barmakid, once the famous sage of Turbin with his own court and disciples, was now surrounded by sad vestiges of the silver paraphernalia that had previously beautified his prayerhouse and studyhouses. There stood the Ark with its scrolls in velvet covers and silver chains: golden lions with red-beaded eyes and blue-stoned manes kept watch. It was said the rabbi could work miracles. His lips moved quickly, his face seizing the joy and beauty of holy words in a time of disorder and downfall. He had just celebrated Yom Kippur and the Days of Awe camping in this godless house, and the only happy man in it was the one who had lost everything but kept his faith.

  In 1915, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, the Commander-in-Chief, had declared all Jews potential German spies and driven them out of their villages. They were given a few hours to load centuries of life on to carts. Zeitlin had rescued the rabbi and his wife, putting them up in St Petersburg illegally because they had no permits. But while they denounced their godless daughter Ariadna, they were still proud, in spite of themselves, that she had married Zeitlin, a man with oilfields in Baku, ships
in Odessa, forests in Ukraine …

  ‘Is that you, Samuil?’ a hoarse voice called out to him. In the cupboard-sized kitchen next door he found the rabbi’s wife, Miriam, bewigged and wearing a silk housecoat, stirring a cauldron of soup at an old gas stove with two sideboards, the separation of milk from meat roughly enforced on a sprawl of half-washed kitchenware.

  ‘Sashenka’s been arrested,’ said Samuil.

  ‘Woe is me!’ cried Miriam in her deep voice. ‘Before the light, a deeper darkness! This is our punishment, our own Gehenna on earth, for children who all turned away from God, apostates each one. We died long ago and thanks to God, you can only die once. My son Mendel’s a godless anarchist; Ariadna’s lost to God: a daughter who, God protect her, goes out half-naked every night! My youngest boy, Avigdor, whose very name is dead to me, abandoned us altogether, long ago – where is he, still in London? And now our darling Silberkind’s in trouble too.’ In her childhood Sashenka had been blonde, and her grandparents still called her the Silberkind – the silver child. ‘Well, we mustn’t waste time.’ The old woman started to pour honey into an empty plate.

  ‘What are you cooking?’

  ‘Honeycakes and chicken soup for Sashenka. In prison.’

  They already knew, via the household grapevine. Zeitlin almost wept – while he called ministers, the old rabbi’s wife was cooking honeycakes for her grandchild. He could hardly believe that these were the parents of Ariadna. How had they produced that hothouse flower in their Yiddish courtyard?

  He stood watching Miriam as he had once watched his own mother in their family kitchen in a wooden-hutted village in the Pale of Settlement.

  ‘I don’t even know what she’s been arrested for,’ Zeitlin whispered.

  Zeitlin was proud that he had never actually converted to Orthodoxy. He had not needed to do so. As a Merchant of the First Guild, he had the right to stay in St Petersburg even as a Jew – and just before the war he had been elevated to the rank of the Emperor’s Secret Councillor, the equivalent of a lieutenant-general on the Table of Ranks. But despite all this, he was still a Jew, a discreet Jew but a Jew nonetheless. He still remembered the tune of Kol Nidre – and the excitement of asking the Four Questions at Passover.

  ‘You’re as white as a sheet, Samuil,’ Miriam told him. ‘Sit! Here, drink this!’ She handed him a glass of vishniak and he downed it in one. Shaking his head slightly, he raised the empty glass to his mother-in-law and then, wordlessly kissing her blue-veined hand, he hurried downstairs, taking his beaver-skin coat and hat from Pantameilion at the front door. He was ready to begin.

  10

  The surface of the frozen canal shone grittily in the moonlight as Captain Sagan’s sleigh drew up outside the headquarters of the Department of Police, 16 Fontanka.

  Taking the lift to the top floor, Sagan passed the two checkpoints, each with two gendarmes on duty, to enter the heart of the Empire’s secret war against terrorists and traitors: the Tsar’s Security Department, the Okhrana. Even late at night, the cream of the security service was at work up here – young clerks in pince-nez and blue uniforms sorting the card indexes (blue for Bolsheviks, red for Socialist Revolutionaries) and adding names to labyrinthine charts of revolutionary sects and cells.

  Sagan was one of the organization’s rising stars. He could have drawn the Bolshevik chart, with Lenin at its centre, in his sleep, even with its latest names and arrows. He hesitated before the chart for a moment just to relish his success. Here it was: all the Central Committee arrested, except Lenin and Zinoviev, plus six Duma members – the whole lot in Siberian exile, too broken ever to launch a revolution. Similarly, the Mensheviks: castrated as a group. The SR Battle Organization: broken. There were only a few more Bolshevik cells left to smash.

  In the offices further along the corridor, the code-breakers with their greasy hair and flaky skin were poring over columns of hieroglyphics, and old-fashioned provincial officers in boots and whiskers leaned over maps of the Vyborg Side, planning raids. The security service needed all sorts, Sagan told himself, spotting a colleague who had been a revolutionary but had recently changed sides. Across the room he noticed the ex-burglar who was now the Okhrana’s specialist housebreaker, and he greeted the homosexual Italian aristocrat, really a Jewish milkman’s son from Mariupol, who specialized in sensitive interrogations … As for me, Sagan thought, I have my speciality too: turning revolutionaries into double agents. I could turn the Pope against God.

  He ordered a clerk to bring the files on that night’s raids and the reports of his fileri agents on the movements of the Jew Mendel Barmakid, and his niece, the Zeitlin girl.

  11

  The scent of rosewater and perfumed candles at Prince Andronnikov’s salon was so powerful that Zeitlin’s head spun and his chest ached. He took a glass of champagne and downed it in one: he needed courage. He started to search the crowd, but knew that he mustn’t seem too desperate. Does everyone know why I am here? Has the news about Sashenka spread? he asked himself. He hoped not.

  The room was crowded with petitioners in winged collars, frock coats and medals, florid men of business puffing on cigars, but they were outnumbered by the bare shoulders of women, and shiny-cheeked, rose-lipped youths wearing velvet and rouge, smoking scented Egyptians through golden holders.

  He was pulled aside by the obese ex-minister Khvostov, who began: ‘It’s only a matter of time now until the Emperor appoints a representative ministry – this can’t go on, can it, Samuil?’

  ‘Why not? It’s gone on for three hundred years. It may not be perfect but the system is stronger than we think.’ In Zeitlin’s lifetime, however much the cards were shuffled, they had always ended in a configuration not entirely disadvantageous to his interests. It was his future, his luck sealed in the Book of Life. Things would go well – for him and for Sashenka, he reassured himself.

  ‘Have you heard anything?’ persisted Khvostov, gripping Zeitlin’s arm. ‘Who’s he going to summon? We can’t go on like this, can we, Samuil? I know you agree.’

  Zeitlin tugged his arm free. ‘Where is Andronnikov?’

  ‘Right at the back … you’ll never get there! It’s too crowded. And another thing …’ Zeitlin fled into the crowd. The heat and the perfumes were unbearable. Wet with sweat, the men’s hands slipped and skidded on the soft, pale backs of the ladies. The cigar smoke was so dense that an acrid mist had formed, half feral, half exquisite. The Governor-General, old Prince Obolensky, real high nobility, and a couple of Golitsyns were there: knee-deep in the shit, thought Zeitlin. A pretty girl, who was kept in profitable three-way concubinage by the Deputy Interior Minister, the new War Minister and Grand Duke Sergei, was kissing Simnavich, Rasputin’s secretary, with an open mouth, in front of everyone. Zeitlin took no satisfaction in this: he just thought of the rabbi and Miriam, back at home. They would not have believed that the court of the Russian Empire had somehow come to this.

  In a clear tunnel through the tangled limbs and necks of the crowd, Zeitlin saw a tiny bulging eye with such dense eyelashes that they were almost glued together. He was sure that the other eye and the rest of the body belonged to Manuilov-Manesevich, the dangerous huckster, police snitch, and now, disgracefully, the chief of staff of Premier Sturmer himself.

  Zeitlin elbowed his way through but little Manuilov-Manesevich was always ahead of him and he never caught up. Instead he found himself at the doorway of Prince Andronnikov’s holy of holies, newly redecorated like a Turkish harem – all swirling silks, with a fountain bursting out of a gold tap that formed the penis of a gilded boy Pan and, even more out of place, a large gold Buddha. A crystal chandelier with hundreds of candles dripping their wax only intensified the heat.

  I probably paid for some of this tat, Zeitlin thought as he entered the tiny room packed with petitioners jostling for position. There, puffing on a hubble-bubble pipe and kissing the rosy neck of a boy in a page’s uniform, was Andronnikov himself, with the Interior Minister perched next to him. Zeitli
n had never abased himself before anyone: it was one of the many advantages of being rich. But there was no time for pride now.

  ‘Hey, you spilt my drink! Where’s your manners?’ cried one petitioner.

  ‘In a hurry to get somewhere, Baron Zeitlin?’ sneered another. But Zeitlin, thinking only of his daughter, pushed through.

  He found himself squatting next to Andronnikov and the minister.

  ‘Ah, Zeitlin, sweetheart!’ said Prince Andronnikov, who was wearing full face make-up and resembled a plump Chinese eunuch. ‘Kisskiss, my peach!’

  Zeitlin closed his eyes and kissed Andronnikov on the rouged lips. Anything for Sashenka, he thought. ‘Lovely party, My Prince.’

  ‘Too hot, too hot,’ said the Prince gravely – adding ‘too hot for clothes, eh?’ to the youth next to him, who chortled. The red silk walls were crammed with signed photographs of ministers and generals and grand dukes: was there anyone who did not owe Andronnikov something? Entrepreneur of influence, gutter journalist, friend of the powerful and poisonous gossip, Andronnikov helped set the prices in the Bourse of influence, and had just brought down the War Minister.

  ‘My Prince, it’s about my daughter …’ Zeitlin began – but a more aggressive petitioner, a skinny ginger-haired woman with freckles and an ostrich feather rising out of a peacock brooch on a silk turban, interrupted him. Her son needed a job at the Justice Ministry but was already on a train out to the Galician Front. Protopopov, the Interior Minister, could see the price for this favour dangling before him and rose, taking the lady’s hand. Zeitlin saw his chance and moved into the vacated seat next to Andronnikov, who inclined his head and put his hand on his famous white briefcase, a mannerism that meant: let us deal.

  ‘Dear Prince, my daughter Sashenka …’

  Andronnikov waved a spongy jewelled hand. ‘I know … your daughter at Smolny … arrested this afternoon – and guilty by all accounts. Well, I don’t know. What do you suggest?’