Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

“Happy New Year, Zemfira,” he said and he kissed her cheeks three times. “How was the coming of 1917 in your house?”

“Joyful. Our house was more like a sanatorium this year.”

“How’s your mother?”

“Ask your spies if you really want to know.” Accustomed to conspiracy, she seemed more confident than ever. Yet he was sure that, since Rasputin’s death, she had started to trust him, in spite of her Bolshevik vigilance. When they met the night after Rasputin’s death, she had thanked him. For a moment he even thought she might hug him in her prim comradely way, but she did not. Yet they kept meeting.

“Is the baroness’s opium working? Is she trying hypnosis? I understand it works.”

“I don’t care,” she replied. “She’s better, I think. She’s getting another dress made and grumbling about Uncle Gideon’s outrages.”

“And the divorce?”

“Papa should divorce her but I don’t think he’ll dare. She’s a lost soul. She believes in nothing but pleasure. I’m hardly at home now.” There was a pause. “The Party’s growing. Have you noticed? Have you seen the bread lines? There are fights every day for the last loaves.”

He sighed, suddenly craving more cocaine, fighting an urge to tell her more about himself, more of what he knew. He was surprised by a wave of hopelessness that seemed to blow in from the streets of the city and sweep over him. Were Tsar, Empire and Orthodoxy already lost?

“You know the truth from your reports,” she said, leaning forward, “and I know you sympathize with us. Come on, Petro. Show me a little of yourself—or I might get bored and never meet you again. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me what your reports say.”

The perceptive grey eyes studied him unforgivingly, he thought.

He said nothing.

She raised her eyebrows and gestured with her hands. Then, jumping up, she gathered her karakul coat and shapka and headed for the door. She opened it.

“Wait,” he said, his head tightening like a vise. He did not want her to go. “I’ve got a headache. Let me have a toke of my tonic.”

“Go right ahead.” She watched him open his crested silver box, an heirloom set with diamonds, and, wetting his finger, take a thick layer of white power and rub it into his gums. His arteries distended, the blood gushed once more to his temples, and he wondered if she could see the seething swell of his lips.

“Our reports,” he started to tell her, “warn the Tsar of revolution. I’ve just written one that reads: If food supplies are not improved, it will be hard to enforce law and order on the streets of Petrograd. The garrison remains loyal but …Why do we bother? The new government’s a joke. Sturmer, Trepov, now this antique Prince Golitsyn, are pygmies and crooks. Rasputin’s murder hasn’t solved anything. We need a new start. I don’t agree with everything you believe in, but some of it makes sense…”

“Interesting.” She stood right in front of him so that he thought he could smell her—was it Pears lavender soap? Her finger stroked her lips. He understood that she had grown up faster than he had realized. “We’ve been back and forth, haven’t we, Comrade Petro? But now we’re getting impatient! If you think I like meeting you, you might just be right. We might almost be friends…but are we? Some of my comrades don’t think I should see you anymore. If you really sympathize with us, there are things we need to know. ‘It’s a waste of time,’ my comrades say. ‘Sagan wouldn’t give us ice in winter.’ In any case, you know your work’s all for nothing. Your world’s about to end. You need to give us something to persuade us to spare you.”

“You’re too optimistic, Sashenka, deluded. I don’t think much of the standard of your newspapers but, between ourselves, they tell the truth about the situation in the factories and at the front. I’ve agonized about this. But I might have something for you.”

“You do?” Sashenka’s smile as she said this made it worthwhile. She tossed off her coat and sat again, still in her shapka .

Not for the first time, Sagan wrestled with the infinite possibilities of who was playing whom. Sashenka’s new confidence informed him that she was still telling Mendel about their meetings. Sagan was disappointed that she was not coming just out of affection—maybe he was losing his touch—but she was surely a little fond of him? “Almost friends,” she had said. In spite of himself, the secret policeman felt a tinge of hurt. But they talked about their families, poetry, even health.

So how much did she tell Mendel? He hoped she was keeping back their closeness, because this was how it worked: the holding back of small things led to small lies and then the holding back of larger things led to big lies—this was how he recruited his double agents. He wanted to destroy Mendel, and Sashenka was the tool to do it. Duplicity, not honesty, was his métier—but if he was honest for once, she was not only a tool. She was his delight.

“Listen carefully,” he said. “They’re planning a raid tomorrow night on your printing press down the road. You need to move it. I don’t need to know where.”

She tried to conceal her excitement from him, but the way she knitted her eyebrows to assume a military briskness made him want to laugh.

“Are you leading this raid?” she asked.

“No, it’s a Gendarmerie operation. To find out the details, I had to promise to trade some information in return.”

“That’s presumptuous, Comrade Petro.”

He flicked his wrist impatiently. “All intelligence work is a marketplace, Sashenka. This has kept me up night after night. I can’t sleep. I live on Dr. Gemp’s powder. I want to help your Party, the people, Russia, but everything inside me rebels against giving you anything. You know I’m risking all by telling you this?”

Sashenka turned to leave. “If it’s a lie, this is over and they’ll want your head. If your spooks follow me from here, we’ll never meet again. Do we understand each other?”

“And if it’s true?” he called after her.

“Then we’ll meet again very soon.”

A gentle sepia light shone through the clouds, reflected off the snow, and burst brighter through the curtains: the opium sailed through Ariadna’s veins. Dr. Gemp had called to give her the injection. Her head dropped onto the pillow and she drifted in and out of dreams: Rasputin and she were together in Heaven, he was kissing her forehead; the Empress was inspecting them, dressed in her grey nursing outfit. Rasputin held her hand and, for the first time in her life, she was truly happy and secure.

In her bedroom, she could hear soft voices speaking in Yiddish. Her parents were sitting with her. “Poor child,” murmured her mother. “Is she possessed by a dybbuk?”

“Everything is God’s will, even this,” replied her father. “That’s the point of free will. We can only ask for his mercy…” Ariadna could hear the creak of the leather strap as the rabbi tied his phylactery onto his arm and he switched to Hebrew. He was reciting the Eighteen Benedictions and this familiar, reassuring chant bore her like a magic carpet back in time…

A young and handsome Samuil Zeitlin was standing in the muddy lane outside the Talmudic studyhouse, near the workshop of Lazar the cobbler in the little Jewish-Polish town of Turbin, not far from Lublin. He was asking for her hand in marriage. She shrugged at first: he was not a Prince Dolgoruky or even a Baron Rothschild, not good enough for her—but then who would be? Her father shouted, “The Zeitlin boy’s a heathen! He doesn’t eat or dress like one of us: does he keep kosher? Does he know the Eighteen Benedictions? That father of his with his bow ties and holidays in Bad Ems: they’re apostates!”