Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

“I’m so ugly, Lala, in this. I refuse to wear it! I’d burn it!” Her mother, in her velvet skirt and fur-collar bolero jacket, was a gorgeous swan while Sashenka felt lumpier and fatter than a warthog. She could not bear to look in the mirrors again.

“But Mademoiselle Zeitlin has such a perfect figure for the latest fashions,” said the couturier.

“I want to go home!”

“Poor Sashenka’s tired, aren’t you, darling?” Another wink. “You don’t have to have everything but there were some you liked, weren’t there, sweetie?”

Feeling somewhat sheepish at this, Sashenka nodded.

A wave of relief now passed over the staff. Glasses of Tokai were brought for Baroness Zeitlin, who threw her head back and laughed too loudly, paying in big green notes, and then the satisfied assistants helped the ladies rearrange their furs. Pantameilion followed them out of Chernyshev’s, carrying their purchases in bulging bags, which he quickly stowed in the trunk.

“There!” said Ariadna, settling herself in the car. “Now you have some grown-up dresses at last.”

“But Mama,” replied Sashenka, sickened by the expense and surprised such shops were still open in wartime, “I don’t lead that life. I just wanted something simple. I don’t need ball dresses and tea dresses and day dresses.”

“Oh yes you do,” answered Lala.

“I sometimes change six times in a day,” declared Ariadna. “I wear a day dress in the morning. Then a tea dress and then today I’m going to call on the Lorises in my new chiffon dress with brocade, and then tonight…”

Sashenka could hardly bear to think of her mother at night.

“We women have got to make an effort to find husbands,” explained Ariadna.

“Where to, Baroness?” asked Pantameilion through the speaking tube.

“To the English Shop, Sashenka’s favorite,” answered Ariadna.

Inside the shop, behind the windows that displayed Penhaligon’s bath oils and perfumes, Pears soaps and Fortnum’s Gentleman’s Relish and Cooper’s jams, the women bought a ginger cake and cookies while still lecturing Sashenka about the need for dresses.

“Hello, Sashenka! Is it you? Yes, it is!” Some young students in uniformed greatcoats and caps were lingering outside Chernyshev’s, smirking and pushing against one another. “Naughty Sashenka! We heard about your scrape with the gendarmes!” they called.

Sashenka noticed that the “aesthetes” wore berets, the “dandies” peaked caps. One of the aesthetes, who was heir to some magnate or other, had written her love poems. Sashenka smiled thinly and walked on ahead of her mother and Lala.

“Mademoiselle, what a pleasure to meet again!”

For a moment Sashenka froze, but then her senses returned as Captain Sagan walked briskly through the lurking students. He wore a tweed coat, a tartan tie and a derby hat, all probably bought at the English Shop. He bowed, with a slight smile, raised the derby and kissed her hand.

“I was buying some cufflinks,” he said. “Why is everyone so keen on English style? Why not Scottish or Welsh or even Indian? They’re our allies too.”

Sashenka shook her head and tried to remember what Mendel had ordered her to do. Her heart was thumping in the rhythm of a speeding train. This is it, Comrade Mendel! she told herself.

“I’m sure you never want to see me again, but there’s Mayakovsky to discuss, and remember we never got to Akhmatova? I must rush. I hope I haven’t…embarrassed you.”

“You’ve a hell of a nerve!” she exclaimed.

He raised his derby, and she could not help but notice that he wore his hair long, more like an actor than a policeman.

Sagan waved at a waiting sleigh that slid forward with its bells ringing and carried him off down Nevsky.

Ariadna and Lala caught up with her.

“Sashenka!” said her mother. “Who was that? You could have been a little more friendly.”

But Sashenka now felt invincible, however many silly dresses they had made her try on. She adored the secret nocturnal work of a Bolshevik activist. Now, she thought, I’ll be a real asset to the Party. The house was watched. Sagan must have guessed that they would visit the English Shop, where he would stand out less than at Chernyshev’s. He had spoken to her out of earshot of her mother and governess because he wanted her to know that he had his eye on her. She could not wait to tell Mendel.

On the way home, Ariadna squeezed her daughter’s cheek.

“Sashenka and I are going to be firm friends, firm friends, aren’t we, darling?” her mother kept saying.

Sitting on the tan leather between Ariadna and Lala, Sashenka remembered that in the past, whenever she had run to her mother for a cuddle, Ariadna had withdrawn from her, saying, “Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Lewis, this is a new dress from Madame Brissac and the child’s got a dirty mouth…”

Last night she had finally got her hug but now she no longer wanted it.

When they reached home, Ariadna took Sashenka’s hand and coaxed her upstairs into her boudoir.

“Come out with me tonight in a new dress that shows off your figure!” she whispered huskily, sniffing the tuberose on her wrist. “After last night, when I saw you coming home late, I know about your secret lover! I won’t tell Papa but we can go out together. I thought you were such a prig, dear Sashenka, never smiling—no wonder you had no suitors—but I was wrong, wasn’t I? Creeping home in the early hours like a pussycat! Who was the tomcat? That tweed suit and derby we saw just now? We’ll wear our gorgeous new gowns and people will think we’re sisters. You and me, we’re just the same…”

But Sashenka had to deliver a Party rubber stamp and the receipt book for contributions. At the safe house, she would meet the comrades and boil the gelatin used to print the leaflets on the hectograph.

Before all those duties, she had to contact Mendel and tell him about her meeting with Sagan.

She longed for the mysteries of the night like the embrace of a lover.

Sashenka left the house at 1:00 a.m. Noting the two spooks on the street, she walked up to Nevsky Prospect and into the Europa Hotel. From the lobby she took the service elevator down to the basement, walked through the kitchens, where bloody-aproned porters with shaggy beards were delivering eggs, cabbages and the pink carcasses of pigs and lambs, and out into the street again, where she hailed a troika and left a coded note for Mendel at the Georgian pharmacy on Alexandrovsky Prospect.

At the coachmen’s café outside the Finland Station, she was eating a lukewarm pirozhki and listening to “Yankee Doodle” on the barrel organ for the third time when a young man slipped into the seat opposite her. He was older, but they shared the grey fatigue of the night dweller and the radiant conviction of the revolutionary.

“C-c-collect the b-b-bulldog from the comrade at the Horse Guards,” stuttered the student, who had little hazel eyes, thick steel-rimmed spectacles and a leather worker’s cap on a peculiarly square head. This was Comrade Molotov, Sashenka realized, and he was twenty-six years old. He, Comrade Mendel and Comrade Shlyapnikov were the last Bolshevik leaders at liberty in the whole Empire. When he took off his leather coat, he wore a short jacket and stiff collar like a clerk. Without his cap, his forehead bulged unnaturally. “Ask for C-c-comrade Palitsyn. Anything to report?”

She shook her head.

“G-g-good luck, comrade.” Comrade Molotov was gone. Sashenka felt a thrill run down her spine.

At the Horse Guards, the concierge Verezin let her in again.

“What happened to the sable? And the Arctic fox?” he asked.

“Attracted too much attention,” she said. “Is someone here for me?”