Sashenka

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  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 grammes 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-coloured calf-leather boots. He liked this stage in a case. There was an end-of-term chumminess in the air and he did not have to beat her any more, 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 favourite 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 marvelled 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 counterpane, 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 towards 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 for ever; 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 favourite biscuits 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 Rabbit. 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 towards 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 towards 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.

  ‘Goodbye, 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 summe
r, 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-coloured suit with a little leather suitcase. He sported a neat grey moustache, and walked painfully in pigeon steps towards 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 was 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 centimetre of ink from the pen of Comrade Stalin and despatched to the Kolyma Gulags in north-eastern 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 over 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, smelt 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.

  Part Three

  The Caucasus, London, Moscow, 1994

  1

  ‘Three hours, twelve minutes and eighteen seconds until the train for London!’ Katinka Vinsky cried out, running to her window in her pink nightgown, almost slipping over on the wrinkled yellow carpet, throwing open the brown, damp-stained curtains. She caught a glimpse of herself smiling in the mirror and behind her a chaotic bedroom with clothes everywhere, and a half-filled carpet bag. It was dawn in the bungalow cottage on the main street of Beznadezhnaya, a village on the Russian borderlands of the north Caucasus, remote enough for locals to say that it was ‘lost in deafness’.

  ‘Mamochka! Papochka! Where are you?’ she called, opening her door.

  Then she saw the doctor and his wife, already dressed, in the kitchen-cum-sitting room. She knew her father would be reassuring her mother that their daughter’s trip would be all right, that they would be at the station early enough, that the seat on the train was booked (facing the right way, because their darling felt sick if she had her back to the direction of the train), that the train would arrive in time for her to catch the bus to Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow to check in for the Aeroflot flight to Heathrow. Her mother was reassuring her father that Katinka would have enough food for the journey and that she had the right clothes for London, where, it was said, the rain never stopped and the fog never cleared. They were, Katinka decided, much more nervous than she was.

  Katinka knew her parents were in two minds about her accepting the mysterious job in London. They had been so proud when she received the top grades in history at Moscow University, but when her professor, Academician Beliakov, showed her the advertisement in the Humanities Department Gazette, her father had begged her not to go. What sort of people lived in London and were rich enough to hire a historian? he asked. But Katinka could not resist it. Researching a family history, tracing the vanished past … She imagined a cultured young Count Vorontsov or Prince Golitsyn living in a dilapidated London town house full of ancient samovars, icons and family portraits, keen to find out what had become of his family, their palaces and works of art dating from the eighteenth century, her period, her speciality. She wished she’d been born in those more elegant times …

  She had never been abroad before, although she had spent three years at the university residence in faraway Moscow. No, the offer was too good to miss: young historians specializing in eighteenth-century history do not often get the chance to earn much-needed US dollars and travel to London.

  Katinka’s father, Dr Valentin Vinsky, was smoking a cigarette and pacing the floor while her mother Tatiana, a soft, feathery creature with bright red-dyed hair, busied herself in the kitchen with her mother-in-law, Babushka – or Baba for short. Through the fog of cooking, Baba, a low-slung, broad-shouldered peasant in a floral dress, scarlet kerchief and some old surgical socks held up with elastic, moved slowly like a dinosaur in the mist.

  Steam rose so densely, so aromatically, from the bubbling pots of vegetable broth that it was hard to see the two women. It was as if the nourishing humidity had warped the entire house. Like a million Soviet homes, everything inside, carpets, curtains and clothes, was yellowed with steam and damp and grease.

  ‘There you are!’ said Katinka, bounding into the room. ‘How long have you been up?’

  ‘I didn’t sleep a wink!’ her father replied. He was tall and dark-skinned with brown eyes. Though his grey hair was thinning and he was always exhausted, Katinka thought he looked like one of those handsome forties film stars. ‘Everything packed?’

  ‘Not so fast, Papochka!’

  ‘Well, you must hurry …’
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  ‘Oh Papochka!’ Father and daughter hugged, both with tears in their eyes. The family were always quick to cry and Katinka, the youngest of three children and a beloved afterthought, was its soft-hearted and much-indulged core. Her father was a thoughtful man. He did not laugh much; in fact, he did not say much at all and when he did he was tortuously inarticulate – yet he was worshipped virtually as a god in the neighbourhood, where he had delivered the babies of babies he had delivered and even their babies. ‘I can’t imagine how I’ve brought up such a confident, loquacious child as you, Katinka,’ he once told her. ‘But you’re the light of my life. Unlike me, you can do anything!’ He was right – she knew she possessed all the assurance of a child utterly cherished in the happiest of families.

  ‘Your food’ll be ready, don’t you worry, girl,’ said Baba, her gums almost bare of teeth. ‘Go and wake up Bedbug or he’ll miss your departure!’ ‘Klop’, or Bedbug, was Sergei Vinsky, Katinka’s grandfather.

  Katinka trotted down the corridor towards the bathroom, passing her little bedroom with its single unit of bed, light and bedside table (standard Soviet issue), and its curling posters of Michael Jackson.

  She heard the taps running in the bath as she called out to her grandfather. The bathroom door opened and she met the rich, sweet distillation of Bedbug’s bowels and the familiar stale damp of old towels that was another ingredient of the provincial fug of home. Bedbug, a small weathered countryman in a string vest and pouchy grey Y-fronts, emerged from a bathroom that was so overshadowed by hanging laundry that it resembled a gypsy tent. Resting his hands on his hips and chewing his gums, he let rip an ungodly fart of orchestral proportions.