Simon Montefiore: Sashenka

Mendel, his wife’s brother, Sashenka’s uncle, had recently been arrested and sentenced to five years of administrative exile for revolutionary conspiracy. But now he had escaped, and maybe somehow he had entangled Sashenka in his grubby machinations.

Lala stood up, shaking her head.

“Well, Baron, I know it’s not my place…” She smoothed her floral dress, which served only to accentuate her curves. Zeitlin watched her, fiddling with a string of jade worry beads, the only un-Russian hint in the entire stalwartly Russian study.

There was a sudden movement behind them.

“Shalom aleichem!” boomed a broad-shouldered, bearded man in a sable greatcoat, astrakhan hat and high boots like a hussar. “Don’t ask me about last night! I lost every kopek in my pocket—but who’s counting?”

The door to the baron’s sanctuary had been shoved open and Gideon Zeitlin’s aura of cologne, vodka and animal sweat swept into the study. The baron winced, knowing that his brother tended to call on the house only when he needed his funds replenished.

“Last night’s girl cost me a pretty fortune,” said Gideon. “First the cards. Then dinner at the Donan. Cognac at the Europa. Gypsies at the Bear. But it was worth it. That’s paradise on earth, eh? Apologies to you, Mrs. Lewis!” He made a theatrical bow, big black eyes glinting beneath bushy black brows. “But what else is there in life except fresh lips and skin? Tomorrow be damned! I feel marvelous!”

Gideon Zeitlin touched Mrs. Lewis’s neck, making her jump, as he sniffed her carefully pinned hair. “Lovely!” he murmured as he strode round the desk to kiss his elder brother wetly, twice on the cheeks and once on the lips.

He tossed his wet fur coat into the corner, where it settled like a living animal, and arranged himself on the sofa.

“Gideon, Sashenka’s in trouble…,” Zeitlin started wearily.

“I heard, Samoilo. Those ideeeots!” bellowed Gideon, who blamed all the mistakes of mankind on a conspiracy of imbeciles that included everyone except himself. “I was at the newspaper and I got a call from a source. I haven’t slept from last night yet. But I’m glad Mama’s not alive to see this one. Are you feeling OK, Samoilo? Your ticker? How’s your indigestion? Lungs? Show me your tongue?”

“I’m bearing up,” replied Zeitlin. “Let me see yours.”

Although the brothers were opposites in appearance and character, the younger impecunious journalist and the older fastidious nabob shared the very Jewish conviction that they were on the verge of death at all times from angina pectoris, weak lungs (with a tendency toward consumption), unstable digestion and stomach ulcers, exacerbated by neuralgia, constipation and hemorrhoids. St. Petersburg’s finest doctors competed with the specialists of Berlin, London and the resorts of Biarritz, Bad Ems and Carlsbad for the right to treat these invalids, whose bodies were living mines of gold for the medical profession.

“I’ll die at any moment, probably making love to the general’s girl again—but what the devil! Gehenna—Hell—the Book of Life and all that Jewish claptrap be damned! Everything in life is here and now. There’s nothing after! The commander-in-chief and the general staff”—Gideon’s long-suffering wife Vera and their two daughters—“are cursing me. Me? Of all people! Well, I just can’t resist it. I won’t ask again for a long time, for years even! My gambling debts are…” He whispered into his brother’s ear. “Now hand over my bar mitzvah present, Samoilo: gimme the mazuma and I’m off on my quest!”

“Where to?” Zeitlin unlocked a wooden box on his desk, using a key that hung on his gold watch chain. He handed over two hundred rubles, quite a sum.

Zeitlin spoke Russian like a court chamberlain, without a Jewish accent, and he thought that Gideon scattered his speech with Yiddish and Hebrew phrases just to tease him about his rise, to remind him of whence they came. In his view, his younger brother still carried the smell of their father’s courtyard in the Pale of Settlement, where the Jews of the Tsarist Empire had to live.

He watched as Gideon seized the cash and spread it into a fan. “That’s for me. Now I need the same again to grease the palms of some ideeeots.”

Zeitlin, who rarely refused Gideon’s requests because he felt guilty about his brother’s fecklessness, opened his little box again.

“I’ll pick up some London fruitcake from the English Shop; find where Sashenka is; toss some of your vile mazuma to policemen and ink-shitters and get her out if I can. Call the newspaper if you want me. Mrs. Lewis!” Another insolent bow—and Gideon was gone, slamming the door behind him.

A second later, it opened again. “You know Mendel’s skulking around? He’s out of the clink! If I see that schmendrik , I’ll punch him so hard his fortified boot will land in Lenin’s lap. Those Bolsheviks are ideeeots!” The door slammed a second time.

Zeitlin raised his hands to his face for a few seconds, forgetting Lala was still there. Then, sighing deeply, he reached for the recently installed telephone, a leather box with a listening device hooked on to the side. He tapped it three times on the top and spoke into the mouthpiece: “Hello, exchange? Put me through to the Interior Minister, Protopopov! Petrograd two three four. Yes, now please!”

Zeitlin relit his cigar as he waited for the exchange to connect him to the latest Interior Minister.

“The baroness is in the house?” he asked. Lala nodded. “And the old people, the traveling circus?” This was his nickname for his parents-in-law, who lived over the garage. Lala nodded again. “Leave the baroness to me. Thanks, Mrs. Lewis.”

As Lala shut the door, he asked no one in particular: “What on earth has Sashenka done?” and then his voice changed:

“Ah, hello, Minister, it’s Zeitlin. Recovered from your poker losses, eh? I’m calling about a sensitive family matter. Remember my daughter? Yes, her. Well…”

At the Gendarmerie’s Temporary House of Detention within the red walls of the Kresty Prison, Sashenka was waiting, still in her sable coat and Arctic snow fox stole. Her Smolny dress and pinafore were already smeared with greasy fingermarks and black dust. She had been left in a holding area with concrete floors and chipped wooden walls.

A pathway had been worn smooth from the door to benches and thence to the counter, which had slight hollows where the prisoners had leaned their elbows as they were booked. Everything had been marked by the thousands who had passed through. Hookers, safecrackers, murderers, revolutionaries waited with Sashenka. She was fascinated by the women: the nearest, a bloated walrus of a woman with rough bronze-pink skin and an army coat covering what appeared to be a ballerina’s tutu, stank of spirits.

“What do you want, you motherfucker?” she snarled. “What are you staring at?” Sashenka, mortified, was suddenly afraid this monster would strike her. Instead the woman leaned over, horribly close. “I’m an educated woman, not some streetwalker like I seem. It was that bastard that did this to me, he beat me and…” Her name was called but she kept talking until the gendarme opened the counter and dragged her away. As the metal door slammed behind her, she was still shouting, “You motherfuckers, I’m an educated woman, it was that bastard who broke me…”

Sashenka was relieved when the woman was gone, and then ashamed until she reminded herself that the old hooker was not a proletarian, merely a degenerate bourgeoise.

The corridors of the House of Detention were busy: men and women were being delivered to their cells, taken to interrogations, dispatched on the long road to Siberian exile. Some sobbed, some slept; all of life was there. The gendarme behind the counter kept looking at her as if she were a peacock in a pigsty.