Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

“Have we got vodka?” she called out to Vanya.

“Yes, and a crate of Georgian wine in the trunk of the car.”

“Well, pour me a glass! Put Utesov’s jazz-tango on the gramophone.”

The children and her husband joined her on the veranda. Vanya lifted up Snowy and pretended to slow-dance with her as if she were a grown-up. Sashenka held Carlo and danced with him, singing along to the music. She and Vanya turned the children upside down at the same moment and then swooped them up again. The children squealed with joy. How many comrades dance with their children like we do? thought Sashenka. Most of them are much too dull.

The sun was going down, suffusing the garden with the lilac light that always made Muscovites think of bygone summers in their dachas. At seven the party began and, as Sashenka had predicted, Uncle Gideon arrived first, bringing some friends—the famous jazz singers Utesov and Tseferman, as well as Masha, a pouty young actress from the Maly Theater who was his latest conquest.

Gideon, no longer young but still strong and irrepressible, was as shameless as he had been twenty years earlier. He wore a peasant blouse and blue beret from Paris, a gift, he said, from his friend Picasso, or was it Hemingway? Gideon claimed to know everyone—ballerinas, pilots, actors and writers. Sashenka depended on her uncle to bring these glamorous artists to her house on May Day night.

Uncle Mendel, roasting in a winter suit and tie, and his wife Natasha, the plump Yakut lady whom Sashenka remembered from the days before the Revolution, arrived right on the invited hour with their pretty daughter Lena, a student, who had inherited her mother’s slanting eyes and amber skin.

Mendel immediately started in on foreign policy with Vanya. “The Japanese are spoiling for a fight,” he said.

“Please don’t talk politics,” said Lena, stamping her foot.

“I don’t know what else to talk about, sweet one,” protested her father in his resonant baritone.

“Exactly!” cried his daughter.

Soon the driveway was jammed with drivers in ZiSes, Buicks and Lincolns trying to park along the grass shoulder, and Sashenka begged Razum to impose some order. Razum, who was blind drunk, shouted, pointed and banged the roofs of cars but ended up handing out vodka to the other drivers and having a party at the gates. The traffic jam got worse and the chauffeurs sang saucy ditties, to Sashenka’s amusement. A soused Razum was a feature of her parties.

Inside, Sashenka invited guests to eat at the buffet. They piled their plates with the zakuski snacks laid out on the table: pirozhki, blinis, smoked herring and sturgeon, veal cutlets. They drank vodka, cognac, wine and Crimean champagne. It was hard work but she enjoyed it, especially meeting Gideon’s new arty friends.

“So this is your niece, Gideon?” said Len Utesov, the jazz singer from Odessa, who would not let go of her hand. “What a beauty! I’m spellbound. Will you run away from your husband and come on tour with me to the Far East? No? She says no, Gideon. What must I do?”

“We love your songs,” said Sashenka, basking in the attention and pleased she had worn such a pretty summer dress. “Vanya, let’s play Len’s record on the gramophone.”

“Why play his records,” cried Gideon, “when you can play him?”

“Behave yourself, Uncle, or you’ll be doing the dishes,” teased Sashenka, sweeping her thick brown bob with its streaks of auburn behind her ears.

“With Carolina?” he roared. “Why not? I love all shapes and sizes!”

Vanya called for quiet and toasted May Day—“and our dear Comrade Stalin.”

As the light faded, Utesov started to tinkle on the piano, then Tseferman joined him. Soon they were singing the Odessa prison songs together. Uncle Gideon accompanied them on the bayan, a sort of accordion. The pianist from the Art Theater played on the upright piano while the writer Isaac Babel, sturdy but with laughing eyes behind round spectacles and mischief curling his full, playful mouth, leaned on the piano and watched. There was always a party, said Gideon, when Babel was around.

Sashenka had loved his Red Cavalry stories, and admired the way he saw things. “Babel is our Maupassant,” she told Vanya when he came to watch but he shrugged his shoulders and returned to the study. She stood with the musicians, holding Carlo, who was staying up late, and sang along while the men pretended to sing to her, and Snowy danced around the room in a pink party dress, all long limbs like a new foal, waving her inevitable companion.

As the thieves’ songs of the Black Sea wafted over the dacha, Sashenka’s guests—writers in baggy cream suits, mustachioed Party men in matching white tunics, peaked caps and wide trousers, a pilot in uniform (one of “Stalin’s Eagles”), actresses in Coty perfume and low-cut silk dresses à la Schiaparelli—talked and sang, smoked and flirted. May Days started with the parade in Red Square and ended with a Soviet bacchanalia, from the top down. Somewhere, even Comrade Stalin and his comrades were toasting the Revolution. Vanya had told Sashenka there was a little room for drinks and zakuski behind the Mausoleum on Red Square, after which the leaders lunched all afternoon at Marshal Voroshilov’s place and then caroused at some dacha in the suburbs until the early hours.

Slightly drunk on the champagne and still strung up with an uneasy elation, Sashenka strolled into the garden and lay down in the hammock between two gnarled apple trees. She could hear herself singing those songs, watching her children, and swinging back and forth as the tipsy world spun a little.

“Sashenka.” It was Carolina, the nanny. Carolina appeared dry, serious and formal—but underneath she was very affectionate and loving to the children. Sashenka had chosen her carefully. “Shouldn’t we put the children to bed? Carlo’s exhausted. He’s still so young.”

Sashenka could see Carlo, in blue pajamas embroidered with Soviet airplanes, sitting in a chair watching the musicians in a dreamy way. Uncle Gideon was playing his bayan for Snowy, shouting, “Bravo, little Cushion! Hurrah!”

“My cushion, cushion, cushion is dancing with Uncle Gideon,” sang the little girl, in her own world. “Giddy-gush, giddy-gush, giddy, giddy-up!”

“Thank you, Carolina,” said Sashenka. “Let’s put Carlo to bed in a minute. They’re having such fun.” It was way past their bedtime but when they were older they would be able to boast, “We saw Utesov and Tseferman play thieves’ songs together! Yes, in 1939 during the Second Five Year Plan in the joyous period after the Great Turn, after collectivization and after the times of struggle, at our dacha!”

She congratulated herself on the success of her soirée. Why did they all come to her house? Was it because she was an editor? She was a “Soviet woman of culture” well known for her partiinost , her strict Party-mindedness. Was it because men found her attractive? I’ve never had so much fuss made of me, she thought, and was glad she had worn her white linen summer dress that showed off her tanned shoulders. And then of course there was the attraction of her husband’s power. All writers were fascinated by that!

Just then the hammock lurched so violently that she almost fell off.

“So here’s the comrade editor of Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine,” a mocking voice crooned from behind her.

“You gave me a shock creeping up on me like that,” she said, laughing as she swiveled in the hammock to see who had ambushed her. “You should treat the comrade editor with some Soviet respect! Who are you anyway?” she asked, sitting up, pleasurably dizzy from the champagne.