Simon Montefiore: Sashenka

“Who designed it?”

“Your mother, Baroness Zeitlin,” he called after her as he lumbered up the stairs to the dormitories.

What had he been staring at, Sashenka asked herself: was it her horrible bosom or her overwide mouth? She turned uneasily toward the cloakroom. After all, what was appearance? The shallow realm of schoolgirls! Appearance was nothing compared to history, art, progress and fate. She smiled to herself, mocking her mother’s scarlet and gold taste: Pantameilion’s garish uniform made it obvious that the Zeitlins were nouveaux riches.

Sashenka was first into the cloakroom. Filled with the silky furs of animals, brown, golden and white, coats, shapkas and stoles with the faces of snow foxes and mink, the room seemed to be breathing like the forests of Siberia. She pulled on her fur coat, wrapped her white fox stole around her neck and the white Orenburg shawl around her head and was already heading for the door when the other girls poured in, homebound, their faces flushed and smiling. They threw down shoes, slipped on little boots and galoshes, unclipped leather satchels and bundled themselves into fur coats, all the time chattering, chattering.

“Captain de Pahlen’s back from the front. He’s paying a visit to Mama and Papa but I know he’s coming to see me,” said little Countess Elena to her wide-eyed companions. “He’s written me a letter.”

Sashenka was almost out of the room when she heard several girls calling to her. Where was she going, why was she in such a hurry, couldn’t she wait for them, what was she doing later? If you’re reading, can we read poetry with you? Please, Sashenka!

The end-of-term crowd was already pushing, shoving through the door. A schoolgirl cursed a sweating old coachman who, carrying a trunk, had trodden on her foot. Freezing outside, it was feverishly hot in the hall. Yet even here Sashenka felt herself quite separate, surrounded by an invisible barrier that no one could cross, as she heaved her canvas bag, coarse against the lushness of her furs, over her shoulder. She thought she could feel the different books inside—the anthologies of Blok and Balmont, the novels of Anatole France and Victor Hugo.

“Mademoiselle Zeitlin! Enjoy your holidays!” Grand-maman, half blocking the doorway, declared fruitily. Sashenka managed a merci and a curtsy (not low enough to impress Maman Sokolov). Finally, she was outside.

The stinging air refreshed and cleansed her, burning her lungs deliciously as the oblique snow nipped her cheeks. The lamps of the cars and carriages created a theater of light twenty feet high but no more. Above her, the savage, boundless sky was Petrograd black, tempered with specks of white.

“The landaulet is over there!” Pantameilion, bearing an Asprey traveling trunk over his shoulder and a crocodile-skin valise in his hand, gestured across the drive. Sashenka pushed through the crowd toward the car. She knew that, whatever happened—war, revolution or apocalypse—her Lala would be waiting with her Huntley & Palmers cookies, and maybe even an English ginger cake. And soon she would see her papa too.

When a valet dropped his bags, she leaped over them. When the way was blocked by a hulking Rolls with a grand-ducal crest on its glossy flank, Sashenka simply opened the door, jumped in and climbed out the other side.

Engines chortled and groaned, horns hooted, horses whinnied and stamped their hooves, servants tottered under pyramids of trunks and cases, and cursing coachmen and chauffeurs tried to find a route through the traffic, pedestrians and grimy ice. It was as though an army were breaking camp, but it was an army commanded by generals in white pinafores, chinchilla stoles and mink coats.

“Sashenka! Over here!” Lala was standing on the car’s running-board, waving frantically.

“Lala! I’m coming home! I’m free!” For a moment, Sashenka forgot that she was a serious woman with a mission in life and no time for fripperies or sentimentality. She threw herself into Lala’s arms and then into the car, inhaling its reassuring aroma of treated leather and the Englishwoman’s floral perfume. “Where are the cookies?”

“On the seat, darling! You’ve survived the term!” said Lala, hugging her tightly. “You’ve grown so much! I can’t wait to get you home. Everything’s ready in the little salon: scones, ginger cake and tea. Now you can have the Huntley & Palmers.”

But just as she opened her arms to release Sashenka, a shadow fell across her face.

“Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin?” A gendarme stood on either side of the car door.

“Yes,” said Sashenka. She felt a little dizzy suddenly.

“Come with us,” said one of the gendarmes. He was standing so close that she could see the pores of his pockmarked skin and the hairs of his ginger mustache. “Now!”

“Are you arresting me?” asked Sashenka slowly, looking round.

“We ask the questions, miss,” snapped the other gendarme, who had sour milky breath and a forked Poincaré beard.

“Wait!” pleaded Lala. “She’s a schoolgirl. What can you want with her? You must be mistaken, surely?” But they were already leading Sashenka toward a plain sleigh parked to one side.

“Ask her if you want to know,” the gendarme called over his shoulder, gripping Sashenka tightly. “Go on, you tell her, you silly little bitch. You know why.”

“I don’t know, Lala! I’m so sorry! Tell Papa!” Sashenka cried before they pushed her into the back of the sleigh.

The coachman, also in uniform, cracked his whip. The gendarmes climbed in after her.

Out of sight of her governess, she turned to the officer with the beard. “What took you so long?” she asked. “I’ve been expecting you for some time.” She had been preparing these lines for the inevitable moment of her arrest, but annoyingly the policeman did not seem to have heard her as the horses lurched forward.

Sashenka’s heart was pounding in her ears as the sleigh flew across the snow, right past the Taurida Palace and toward the center of the city. The winter streets were quiet, swaddled by the snow. Squeezed between the padded shoulders of the two gendarmes, she sat back, enveloped in the warmth of these servants of the Autocrat. Before her, Nevsky Prospect was jammed with sleighs and horses, a few cars, and streetcars that clattered and sparked down the middle of the street. The gas streetlamps, lit day and night in winter, glowed like pink halos in the falling snow. She looked past the officers: she wanted to be seen by someone she knew! Surely some of her mother’s friends would spot her as they came out of the shops in the arcades of Gostiny Dvor, the Merchant’s Row bazaar with its folksy Russian clutter—icons, stuffed bears and samovars.

Flickering lanterns and electric bulbs in the vast façades of the ministries, ocher palaces and glittering shops of Tsar Peter’s city rushed past her. There was the Passazh with her mother’s favorite shops: the English Shop with its Pears soap and tweed jackets, Druce’s with its English furniture, Brocard’s with its French colognes. Playful snowflakes twisted in a little whirlwind, and she hugged herself. She was nervous, she decided, not frightened. She had been put on earth to live this adventure: it was her vocation.

Where are they taking me? she wondered. The Department of Police on Fontanka? But then the sleigh turned fast on Garden Street, past the forbidding Mikhailovsky Castle where the nobles had murdered the mad Tsar Paul. Now the towers of the Peter and Paul Fortress rose through the gloom. Was she to be buried alive in the Trubetskoy Bastion? But then they were heading over the Liteiny Bridge.

The river was dark except for the lights hung across the bridges and the lamps of the Embankment. As they crossed, she leaned to her left so she could look at her beloved St. Petersburg just as Peter the Great had built it: the Winter Palace, the Admiralty, Prince Menshikov’s Palace and, somewhere in the gloom, the Bronze Horseman.