Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

“Arise, you starvelings, from your slumbers!” the crowds chanted, waving their red banners. “Down with autocracy! Give us bread and peace!”

The Cossacks tried to turn them back at the Alexander Bridge but tens of thousands marched anyway. Sashenka saw women in peasant shawls smash the windows of the English Shop and help themselves to food: “Our men are dying at the front! Give us bread! Our children are starving!” There were urchins on the streets now, creatures with the bodies of children but with swollen bellies and the faces of old monkeys. One sat on the street corner singing and playing his concertina:

Here I am abandoned, an orphan, with no one to look after me,

And I will die before long and there’ll be no one to pray at my grave,

Only the nightingale will sing sometimes on the nearest tree.

Sashenka gave the boy some money and a Red pamphlet: “After the Revolution,” she told him, “you’ll have bread; you’ll be the masters; read Marx and you’ll understand. Start with Das Kapital and then—” But the boy had scampered off.

Sashenka had no special orders from the Party. At first light, she’d checked with Shlyapnikov at the Shirokaya safe house. “The demonstrations are a waste of time, comrade,” he insisted. “Don’t squander any of our leaflets. This’ll lead to naught like all the other riots.” On Friday, a police officer had been killed by the workers on the bridge—and a mob had broken into Filippov’s, the patisserie where Delphine the cook bought Baron Zeitlin’s millefeuille.

Now the authorities were striking back. The city was filled with Cossacks and soldiers, and it seemed to Sashenka like an armed camp. Every side street, every bridge was guarded by machine-gun nests and armored cars; squadrons of horsemen massed on the squares; horse manure steamed on the snow.

The theaters were still playing and Ariadna was so improved that she and Zeitlin were off to the Alexandrinsky to see Lermontov’s Masquerade , a most avant-garde production. The Donan and the Contant were still crowded, and the orchestras played waltzes and tangos at the Europa and Astoria hotels.

Sashenka was meeting Sagan. She hurried first to the safe house at 153 Nevsky but Mendel, who was with Shlyapnikov and Molotov, ordered her to calm down. “Give these workers a few shots over their heads and a loaf of bread and the movement will be gone.” The others agreed. Perhaps they were right, Sashenka thought uncertainly.

At the Finland Station, Sashenka checked her police tails out of habit. There was one spook who fitted the bill but she lost him easily before she caught the train, traveling third class. In the cold, the steam seemed to wheeze out of the train, whirling around it like a wizard’s spell.

She had arranged to meet Sagan at Beloostrov, the small town nearest the Finnish border. When she arrived—the only passenger to leave the carriage—Sagan was waiting in a troika, a sleigh with three horses, smoking a cigar, shrouded in furs. She climbed in and he covered their laps with the fur blanket. The coachman spat out a spinning green gobbet of phlegm, cracked his whip and they were off. Sashenka remembered such trips with Lala in the family sleigh with its ivory fittings, the family crest on the doors, the sable rug. Now this flimsy sleigh, creaking and clattering, flew over the fields, the coachman in his sheepskin and fur hood leaning to one side, drunkenly flicking his whip over the mangy rumps of the skinny piebalds. Every now and then he talked to the horses or his passengers but it was hard to hear him over the swish of the sleigh and the thud of the hooves.

“Giddy-up… Oats… prices rising… Oats…”

“Shouldn’t you be in Piter fighting the wicked pharaohs?” Sagan asked her.

“The workers are just hungry, not rebels at all. Aren’t you worried though?”

He shook his head. “There’ll be riots but nothing more.”

“The Party agrees with you.” She peered up into Sagan’s face. He looked exhausted and anxious—the strain of his double life and miserable marriage, the headaches and insomnia, the rising turbulence in the city, all seemed to be catching up with him. She shook her head at Mendel’s accusations. How could he know what Sagan felt when he had never met him and certainly never seen them together? No, Sagan had become a sort of friend—he alone understood the pain of having a mother like Ariadna. She felt that he liked her too, for her own sake, but not like that! Not at all! Sagan was not even suited to police work. He was much more like a vague poet than a frightening policeman with his feathery blond hair that he wore much too long—and yet it suited him. They were enemies in many ways, she knew that, but their understanding was based on mutual respect and shared ideas and tastes. She had a serious mission and when it was over they might never see each other again. But she was glad Mendel had ordered her to see Sagan again. Very glad. She had family news to tell him and who else could she confide in?

“Something has happened at home,” she began. There was no harm in recounting harmless gossip. “Mrs. Lewis! My Lala! Mendel has a spy in the Donan. That’s how I discovered. When I confronted Papa, he blushed and denied it and looked away and then finally admitted that he had considered marrying her for me, to make me a happier home. As if that would make the slightest difference to my life! But now he says he’s not going to divorce Mama. She’s too fragile. I asked Lala and she hugged me and told me she refused him on the spot. They’re all such children, Comrade Petro. Their world’s about to end, the inevitable dialectic’s about to crush them and they’re still playing like that orchestra on the Titanic .”

“Are you hurt?” he asked, leaning toward her. She noticed his blond mustache was cut just like her father’s.

“Of course not,” she answered huskily, “but I never thought of Lala like that!”

“Governesses are prone to it. I had my first love affair with my sister’s governess,” said Sagan.

“Did you?” She was suddenly disappointed in him. “And how’s your wife?”

He shook his head. “I’m spiritually absent from my home. I come and go like a ghost. I find myself doubting everything I once believed in.”

“Lala was my confidante. Who do you talk to?”

“No one. Not my wife. Sometimes I think, well, maybe you’re the only person I can be myself with because we’re half strangers, half friends, don’t you see?”

Sashenka smiled. “What a pair we are!” She closed her eyes and let the wind with its refreshing droplets of snow sprinkle her face.

“There!” shouted Sagan. He pointed at an inn just ahead.

“Right, master,” cried the sleigh driver and whipped the horses.

“We’re almost there,” Sagan said, touching her arm.

A tiny wooden cottage, with colorful wooden carvings hanging from its roof, stood all alone in the middle of the snowfields with only a few birches on either side like bodyguards. Sashenka thought the place belonged in a Snow Queen fairy tale.

The sleigh swished to a stop, the horses’ nostrils flared and steaming in the cold. The wooden door opened, and a fat peasant with a jet-black beard came out in a bearskin caftan and soft boots to hand her down from the sleigh.

Inside, the “inn” was more like a peasant izba . The “restaurant” was a single room with a traditional Russian stove, on top of which a very old man with a shaggy white beard lay full length, snoring noisily in his socks. Inside the half-open stove, Sashenka saw game sizzling on a spit. The black-bearded peasant showed them to a rough wooden table and thrust a generous shot of cha-cha into their hands.