Sashenka

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘Are you taking me home?’

  Sagan shook his head. ‘To Rasputin’s place. He’s disappeared. Dead, I think.’

  ‘So? That’s a shame for us: he’s won us more recruits than the Communist Manifesto.’

  ‘On that, Zemfira, we differ. For us, it’s a blessing from heaven. The body’s under the ice somewhere – we’ll find him. The Empress is distraught. He never came home from a party at the Yusupov Palace. Young Felix, the transvestite Prince Yusupov, is up to his neck in it but he’s married to a Grand Duchess.’

  ‘And my mother?’

  ‘Your mother was waiting for Rasputin at his apartment. I thought, after the other night, you’d be the one to help …’

  Police in grey uniforms with lambskin collars guarded the doorway of 64 Gorokhovaya Street. Shabby young men in student overcoats with notebooks and unwieldy cameras tried to talk their way past the barriers but Sashenka and Captain Sagan were let straight through.

  In the courtyard, gendarmes in their handsome dark blue uniforms with silver buttons sheltered from the cold. Sashenka noticed that even though Sagan was in plain clothes, they saluted him.

  At the top of the stairs, the stiff shirts, well-cut suits and smart two-tone shoes marked out the urbane Okhrana officers from the grizzled beards, red noses and grubby shoes of the police detectives handling the murder investigation. The Okhrana officers greeted Sagan and updated him in coded jargon that reminded Sashenka of the Bolsheviks. Perhaps all secret organizations are the same, she thought.

  ‘Come to collect her mother,’ Sagan told his colleagues, taking her wrist. She decided not to withdraw it.

  ‘Go on up – but hurry,’ his Okhrana colleague told him. ‘The director’s on his way over. The minister’s been reporting to Her Imperial Majesty at Tsarskoe Selo but he’ll be here soon.’

  As they neared the apartment, Sashenka could hear the sound of howling. It was raucously uninhibited in the way that peasants grieved. She thought of the air-raid sirens and then a dog she once saw, its legs sliced off by a car. She entered a lobby; to the left, the steamy kitchen with the samovar; a table spread with silks and furs; and then right, into the main sitting room, in the middle of which was a table with a half-drunk glass of the Elder’s Madeira. The place reminded Sashenka of the huts of the peasants on the Zeitlin estates in Ukraine but, among the soupy cabbagey smells, there was just a hint of Parisian scent. Nothing in the place quite fitted, she thought: it was a peasant izba crossed with a government office and a bourgeois family home. It was like the hideout of a gypsy gang of robbers.

  There was a sudden flurry of activity behind them and a general of the gendarmes, surrounded by an entourage, entered the main room.

  Sagan hurried out, saluted, conferred and returned. ‘They’ve found the body. In the Neva. It’s him.’ He crossed himself, then raised his voice. ‘All right. We’ve got to get her home now. She’s been here since last night.’

  The howling grew louder and more shrill. Sagan opened the double doors into a small dark room with scarlet rugs and pillows and a large divan.

  The shrieking was so animalistic, the shapes within the room so hard to identify that Sashenka stepped back, but Sagan caught her around the waist and again took her hand. She was grateful but most of all shocked. Bloody spots danced before her as her eyes adjusted to the gloom and she was able to see.

  ‘She’s in there. I have a car waiting for you downstairs but she should go before the press get in here. Go on. Don’t be afraid,’ Sagan said gently. ‘It’s just noise.’

  She stepped inside.

  It was hard at first to see how the bodies and limbs fitted together. Some women, arms around one another, crouched on the floor, rocking together, sobbing hysterically and ululating like Asiatics. Among them Sashenka saw her mother, her head shaking convulsively, her features hollow, her mouth a gash of scarlet screaming.

  ‘Where am I?’ cried her mother, her voice high and rough from wailing. ‘Who are you?’

  The air inside was a broth of raw sweat and expensive soaps. Sashenka knelt down and tried to reach Ariadna but her mother rolled away.

  ‘No! No! Where’s Grigory? He’s coming, I know it.’

  Sashenka, now on both knees, tried to get a hold of her mother but this time Ariadna slipped through her fingers, with a manic laugh. A fat woman on all fours began to bellow. Sashenka had a sudden urge to get up and run away, yet this was her own mother and she now realized, if she had never grasped it before, that Ariadna was not just a bad mother, she was sick, almost demented. A tall, black-haired ox of a young peasant, with black hair on her upper lip and eyebrows that grew together, seized Sashenka, shouting curses. Sashenka fought back but her attacker, whose mouth was edged with a white paste, sank her teeth into her arm. Sashenka shouted in pain, tossing aside this peasant woman, who Sagan later told her was Rasputin’s daughter, and reached for her mother in earnest. She took her arm and then her leg and dragged her out of the fray. The other women tried to stop her but Sagan and an ordinary policeman pushed them back.

  The creature who had been her mother lay at her feet, shivering and sobbing, under the cool eyes of Sagan and the policemen, who were discussing the post mortem on Rasputin’s body and who might have murdered him. There was a pain in her forearm: Sashenka could see the individual toothmarks of her assailant. She noticed that Ariadna wore a simple floral dress quite unlike anything she had seen her wear before, and understood that she had intended to come before the Elder Grigory as a poor supplicant.

  Sashenka fell to her knees, her hands clasped. She wanted to cry too. Sagan’s hand came to rest on her shoulder.

  ‘Pull yourself together, Mademoiselle Zeitlin. You’ve got to get her out of here now,’ said Sagan, donning his Derby hat. ‘I’ll help you.’

  Sashenka and Sagan took Ariadna by the arms and dragged her to the door.

  On the landing, Ariadna started screaming again. ‘Grigory, Grigory, where are you? We need you to soothe our souls and forgive our sins! Grigory! I’ve got to wait for him! He’ll come back for me …’ She struggled out of their hands, scratching and kicking, and tried to bolt back into the apartment but, moving fast, Sagan caught her.

  ‘Gentlemen, we could do with a hand!’ he called to the two city policemen guarding the door. One of them took Sashenka’s place on Ariadna’s left arm; Sagan took the right. The other policeman pulled down his hat, and in a fluid motion swept up Ariadna’s two feet in his arms. The three of them carried Ariadna down the stairs, her dress riding up to reveal the shreds of her stockings and her bare legs.

  Sashenka averted her gaze and walked ahead of them, horrified and helpless yet grateful for their assistance. She crossed the courtyard, feeling the eyes of the policemen on her, hoping they would not know that this mess was her mother. Pity and shame engulfed her.

  A car with a gendarme sergeant at the wheel was backing through the archway into the courtyard.

  ‘Get her inside,’ said Sagan breathlessly. Another gendarme opened the back door and helped guide Ariadna into the compartment. ‘Take her home, Sashenka.’ Sagan slammed the door. ‘Good luck.’ He leaned in towards the driver. ‘Thank you, Sergeant. Greater Maritime Street and fast!’ Sagan banged the roof of the car.

  Sashenka was alone in the compartment with her mother – and it took her back in time to the years after the revolution of 1905. She could just remember the Cossack horsemen and the furious shabby crowds and how Zeitlin had sent them out of Russia, to the west. They had travelled through Europe in a private railway carriage. Ariadna, always soused even then, wore scarlet brocade and held court at the Grand Hotel Pupp in Carlsbad, the Carlton in Nice, Claridge’s in London, always accompanied by some new ‘uncle’. There was the pink-cheeked Englishman, a Guards officer with a gold breastplate and a bearskin hat; a nimble Spanish diplomat in a frock coat; and Baron Mandro (known to Sashenka as ‘the Lizard’), an ageing Galician Jew with an eyepatch, rouged cheeks and hairy hands like cockroaches, who had onc
e patted her bottom. When she bit him – she could still taste his coppery blood on her tongue – Ariadna had slapped her. ‘Get her out of here, vicious child!’ and Sashenka was carried out of the room, struggling and screaming. And now, a decade later, Ariadna was being carried out, kicking and howling.

  Sashenka peered out of the window. She longed to be in the streets, factories and safehouses with her comrades, away from this domestic farrago. The restaurants and nightclubs were filled with people. Whores trooped past St Isaac’s towards the Astoria dressed in so much scarlet, gold and shining leather that through the snow and darkness Sashenka thought they resembled a regiment of Chevalier Guards. St Petersburg was in a fever. Never had the stakes in the poker games been so high, never had there been so many revellers, so many limousines outside the Astoria … Was it the last mazurka?

  As Ariadna’s head fell on to her daughter’s shoulder, Sashenka told herself she was a Marxist and a Bolshevik, and she had nothing to do with her parents any more.

  23

  ‘Your guest is already here, mon baron.’

  Zeitlin had asked a woman to meet him at the Donan at 24 Moika. At night the restaurant was crowded with ministers, nabobs, courtesans, profiteers and probably spies but during the day they held court in the foyer and café of the Europa Hotel. In the afternoon the Donan was deserted, which was why Zeitlin often used its private rooms to hold discreet meetings: it was here in his usual private dining room, known as the baron’s kabinet, that he had met the War Minister in August 1914 to clinch the deal to supply the army with rifle butts.

  That morning he had called Jean-Antoine, the maître d’. Born in Marseilles, Jean-Antoine was celebrated for his discretion, his ability to recall everyone he had ever met, and his tact in resolving the most outrageous scenes.

  ‘Mais d’accord, mon baron,’ Jean-Antoine replied. ‘Your kabinet’s ready. Champagne on ice? Your favourite crayfish? Or just English tea, English cakes and Scotch whisky?’

  ‘Just the tea.’

  ‘I’ll send over to the English Shop right away.’

  Zeitlin usually took the automobile but that afternoon he had donned his shapka hat with earmuffs, his black coat with the beaver collar and his valenki galoshes over his patent-leather grey shoes (from Lobb’s of London) and picked up his cane with the silver wolf’s head – and he had let himself out of his house without ringing the bell.

  Zeitlin relished the anonymity of moving through the dark streets without chauffeur or footman. It was not snowing but the ice was grinding into an adamantine freeze all over again. He could almost hear the grey glaze of the Neva River fusing together its fractures and fissures. In the streets, the gas lamps were being lit, the trams clattering over their rails. Behind him, bells and laughter pealed. A sleigh bearing students crammed together and holding on for dear life slid past him and was gone. These days, youngsters did what the hell they liked, Zeitlin thought. They had no values, no discipline.

  Was he happier now that he was rich? Look at his crazy wife! And there was his darling Sashenka, a riddle to her own father. He loved her and longed to protect her. Yet she no longer seemed interested in her own family. She was almost a stranger, and sometimes he thought she despised him.

  He wished he could weep as freely as a child. Like an old man singing his school song, he found himself humming the Kol Nidre tune from his childhood, which told of a vanishing world. He had hated it then but now he wondered: what if it was the right way?

  He popped into Yegorov’s, the bathhouse with its Gothic mahogany walls and stained-glass windows, and a page in white tunic and black breeches showed him to a cubicle. Stripping naked, he entered the icy bath and slipped under the iron bridge, draped in lush foliage, that arched over the water. Then he steamed for a while on a granite table. Several naked men, their bald heads and buttocks oddly alike in their pinkness and shininess, were being beaten with birch twigs. Zeitlin lay there ignoring everyone and thinking.

  I’d pray to God if I was sure there was one, he told himself, but if he exists, we are just worms in the dust to him. Success is my religion. I make my own history.

  Yet in his heart Zeitlin believed there was something out there greater than mankind. Behind his cigar smoke, studded shirt, frock coat, striped English trousers and spats, he was still a Jew, a believer in God in spite of himself. He had studied at the cheder, learning the Shulhan Aruk, the rules of living, the Pentateuch, the five books of the Bible that formed the Torah, the Jewish law, and the pedantic, wise, archaic poetry of the Talmud and the Mishnah.

  After about an hour he dressed, splashing on his cologne, and walked back to Nevsky. The tall, glassy effulgence of the Fabergé shop glinted out of the darkness.

  ‘Good evening, barin! Jump in, I’ll give you a ride!’ called out a Finnish sledge-driver, flicking his whip and slowing his stumpy-legged ponies, their jingling bells ringing festively.

  Zeitlin waved the sledge-driver away and walked on with a spring in his step. I have been safe but captive for decades, he thought. I’m returning to life after a long hibernation. I am going to reclaim my daughter, show her how I love her, interest myself in her tutoring and her further studies. It is never too late, never too late, is it?

  At the Donan, Jean-Antoine greeted him. Zeitlin threw off his coat and hat and kicked off his galoshes. He was looking forward to greeting his guest.

  Inside the scarlet womb of his private kabinet, Lala awaited him in a prim shantung tea dress decorated with mauve flowers. She stood up when he came in, her gentle heart-shaped face quizzical.

  ‘Baron! What’s so urgent?’

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ he said, taking her hands in his. ‘Let’s sit down.’

  ‘Why here?’

  ‘I’ll explain.’

  There was a knock on the door, and waiters brought in the tea: fruitcake, muffins with strawberry jam, fresh cream and two thimble glasses of amber. Lala stood up to serve, but he stopped her and waited until the waiters had poured the tea and closed the door.

  ‘A brandy,’ he said. ‘For both of us.’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘You’re worrying me. You don’t seem yourself. And why the cognac?’

  ‘It’s the best. Courvoisier. Try it.’

  They eyed one another anxiously. Zeitlin knew he looked old, that his face was lined, that there were new fingers of grey at his temples. He was exhausted by relentless meetings and his own bonhomie, desiccated by columns of figures. Everyone expected so much of him, his obligations seemed unending. Even the profits of his own companies ground him down.

  Lala seemed older too, he thought suddenly. Her cheeks were plumper, the skin weathered by the winters. Fear of the future and of solitude, secret disappointments, had made her a little older than her years.

  Ashamed of these thoughts, he hesitated as the little wood fire surged up, dyeing their faces orange. She sipped the cognac. Slowly the fire warmed them.

  She stood up. ‘I don’t like the cognac. It burns my throat. I think I should go. I don’t like the feel of this place. It’s not respectable …’

  ‘This is the Donan!’

  ‘Quite,’ she said. ‘I’ve read about it in the newspapers …’

  It was no good. He could restrain himself no longer. He threw himself at her feet and buried his face in her lap, his tears wetting her shantung dress.

  ‘What’s wrong? For heaven’s sake, what is it?’

  He took her hands. She tried to push him away but somehow the kindness that was so much a part of her overcame her habit of prudence. Gently, she stroked his hair, and he could feel her hands soft and warm like a girl’s.

  He stood up and took her in his arms.

  What am I doing? he thought. Have I gone mad? My God, the lips have their own rules. Just as magnesium burns on contact with oxygen, so skin on skin unleashes some sort of chemical reaction. He kissed her.

  She sighed quietly under her breath. He knew she was an inveterate giver of affection – but didn’t she
want some for herself too?

  Then something magical happened. He kissed her again and suddenly she kissed him back, eyes closed. His hands ran over her body. The very plainness of her dress, the cheapness of her stockings, the ordinariness of her rose-water scent delighted him. When he touched higher, he could barely conceive of the silkiness of her thigh. The smell of soap on skin, the smoke from the fire, the steaming tang of the Indian tea, entranced them both.

  I am doing something utterly reckless, out of character and foolish, Zeitlin told himself. I who have control over everything I do. Stop right now, you fool. Don’t be like your absurd brother! I’ll be a laughing stock! I’ll shatter my perfect world.

  But it was already shattered, and Zeitlin found he did not care.

  24

  At fourteen, Audrey Lewis had left the village school in Pegsdon, Hertfordshire, to take a job as junior nanny with the family of Lord Stisted in Eaton Square, London.

  Her story, as she herself said later, was as sadly predictable as one of the cheap novels she enjoyed reading. Seduction and impregnation by the feckless son of the house (who specialized in servant girls), and her subsequent arranged marriage to Mr Lewis, the fifty-year-old chauffeur, ‘so as not to frighten the horses’. Her abortion was humiliating, painful and she almost died from a haemorrhage; the marriage did not prosper, and she left her position with the bribe of a glowing reference. Her adoring parents begged her to come home to their pub – The Live and Let Live in Pegsdon, which they had named to reflect their philosophy of life. But then she saw the advertisement in the Lady. One word was enough for her: Russia!