Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

“But Mama, Cushion and I want to play with Hercules,” Snowy wailed.

“Bed! Now!” Vanya shouted and Snowy darted back down the corridor toward her room.

If anything, Sashenka reflected, Hercules Satinov had become better looking with time. His black hair still gleamed with barely a strand of grey. She remembered how he and Vanya had come to collect her when her mother died, how kind they’d been to her. Now she watched as Satinov embraced his best friend, before noticing Mendel and shaking his hand formally.

“Happy May Day, comrades!” he said in his strong Georgian accent. “Sorry I’m late, I had papers to get through at Old Square.” Satinov, who had helped run the Caucasus, now worked in the Party Secretariat at the grey granite headquarters on Old Square, up the hill from the Kremlin.

“What a party, Sashenka! The jazz men singing together? Even at receptions for the leaders in St. George’s Hall, I’ve never seen that before. I hope you don’t mind, Vanya, some Georgian friends have invited themselves, and they’ll be here shortly.”

“Aren’t you leaving?” Uncle Gideon loomed up over Benya Golden, smoking a cigarette on the veranda. “You ideeeot!”

“Gideon, shush. Did you hear what Satinov said? Some Georgians are coming! Which ones? Someone big?” Benya whispered.

“How would I know, you schmendrik ! They’re probably some Georgian singers or cooks or dancers!”

Gideon gripped Benya’s hand and pulled him outside into the dark orchard. Benya peered around nervously.

“No one can hear us here,” said Gideon, checking that Razum and the drivers were still singing dirty songs at the gates.

“If they’re just cooks or singers, why have you dragged me down here and why are you speaking, Gideon, in that bellow of a whisper?”

The sky glowed rosily and warmly, an owl hooted, and the sweet scent of flowers seeped out of the orchard. Gideon liked Benya Golden enormously and admired him as a writer. They both loved women, though as Gideon liked to put it, “I’m an animal while Benya’s a romantic.” He put his arm around his friend.

“If these Georgians are big bosses,” he said, “the less people like them know about people like us , the better.” He remembered his brother Samuil, Sashenka’s father, who he assumed was long dead now, and suddenly his chest hurt and he wanted to cry. “Ugh, time to go! Cure your curiosity, Benya! But I’m whispering, you big schmendrik, because you’ve offended my niece. Well?”

“I put my foot in it with the comrade editor. She’s no Dushenka,” Benya said, “no featherbrain. I had no idea she was so extraordinary. Is she happily married?”

“You ideeeot! Firstly she’s Vanya Palitsyn’s wife, my dear Benya, and secondly she’s never even looked at another man! First love and they’ve been together ever since. What did you do, pinch her ass, or suggest that Marshal Voroshilov is a blockhead?”

Benya was silent for a minute. “Both,” he admitted.

“You Galitzianer schlemiel , you tinker!”

“Gideon, what’s the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel ?”

“The schlemiel always spills his drink onto the schlimazel .”

“So which am I?”

“Both!” Gideon told him and they roared with laughter.

“But the trouble is—I’m short of work,” Benya said. “I haven’t written for ages. They’ve noticed of course. I really do need a commission from her magazine.”

“What? About how to organize a masked jazz ball for workers celebrating production targets? Have you no shame?” asked Gideon.

“Why did I tease her?” groaned Golden. “Why can I never resist saying things? Now you’ve got me worried, Gideon. She won’t denounce me, will she?”

“I have no idea, Benya. The Organs and the Party are all around us here. You have to behave differently in such houses. Here the softness is only skin-deep.”

“That’s why I had to come. I want to understand what makes them tick—the men of power and violence. And that Venus with her mysterious, scornful grey eyes is at the center of everything.”

“Ahhh, I see. You want to understand the essence of our times and write a Comédie Humaine or a War and Peace on our Revolution, starring our princess Sashenka from the mansion on Greater Maritime Street? We writers are all the same. My niece’s life’s a spectator sport, eh?”

“Well, it’s quite a story, you must admit. I’ve met them all—marshals, Politburo members, secret policemen. Some of the killers were as delicate as mimosa; some of those who were crushed by them were as coarse as tar. At Gorky’s house, I met the sinister Yagoda, you know, and I once played the guitar with that insane killer Yezhov, at the seaside.” Benya was no longer smiling. He looked anxiously at Gideon. “But the meat grinder is over, isn’t it?”

“Comrade Stalin says the Terror’s over and who am I to disbelieve him?” answered Gideon, who really was whispering now. “Do you think I’ve survived this long by asking stupid questions? Me? Of all people? With my family background? I do what I have to—I’m the licensed maverick—and I console myself in holy communion with drink and flesh. I’ve spent the last three years waiting for the knock on the door—but so far they’ve let me be.”

“ They? Surely Comrade Stalin didn’t know what was happening, did he? Surely it was Yezhov and the Chekists out of control? Now Yezhov’s gone; that good fellow Beria has stopped the meat grinder; and, thank God, Comrade Stalin is back in control.”

Gideon felt a lurch of fear. Although he regarded himself as a mere journalist, he had, like all the famous writers—Benya himself, Sholokhov, Pasternak, Babel, even Mandelstam before he disappeared—praised Stalin and voted for the Highest Measure of Punishment for Enemies of the People. At meetings of the Writers’ Union, he’d raised his hand and voted for the death of Zinoviev, Bukharin, Marshal Tukhachevsky: “Shoot them like mad dogs!” he had said, just like everyone else, just like Benya Golden. Even now he was aware of his rashness in discussing such sensitive questions with the overexcitable Benya. He pulled Benya close, so close his beard tickled his ear.

“It was never only Yezhov!” he murmured. “The orders came from higher …”

“Higher? What are you saying…?”

“Don’t write that book on the Organs and don’t tease my niece about Komsomol cakes and the ‘furnaces’ of female steelworkers! And Benya, you need to write something, something that pleases. We’re off to Peredelkino—Fadeyev’s having a party and he hands out the writing jobs so you’d better be polite to him this time, and don’t hang around here anymore if you ever want to work again!”

“You’re right. Shall I say good-bye to Sashenka?”

“Do you want a kick in the balls? I’ll get the car and you go and get my girl and tell the frisky little minx we’re leaving.”

As they left, two black Buick town cars purred into the drive.

“Was that the Georgians?” hissed Benya from the back of Gideon’s car. Masha sat silently in the front, lighting a cigarette.

“Don’t look back,” bellowed Gideon, “or we’ll turn into pillars of salt!” He put his foot down and sped away with a screech of tires.

The party was over. The half moon poured a milky light into the well of warm darkness outside. Mendel, chain-smoking and coughing up phlegm in guttural thunderclaps, and Satinov, who both worked at Old Square, were talking about rebuilding cadres at the Machine Tractor Stations. Sashenka and Vanya started to tidy up.