Simon Montefiore: Sashenka

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.

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 elevator 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 center, 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 farther 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.

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. Zeitlin 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 spilled 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 makeup and resembled a plump Chinese eunuch. “Kiss-kiss, 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.