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 verandah.
He turned his back on her and walked inside.
23
The meal at the verandah 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 centred 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 towards 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 treacle. 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 gamed 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 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 dialled Benya’s number. The phone rang and rang. No answer. She found herself leaning on to the aluminium 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 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 towards 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 on to the ground.
‘Where have you just been, you disgusting slut?’ He was bending right over her. Even in this row, 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 whi
spering at each other, not shouting, beneath the buzz of a summer’s 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 plaster 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 towards 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 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 verandah, 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 verandah, 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.’
Sashenka Page 30
