Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

“How do you know?”

“Well, I told no one I was coming to your office, and you told no one we were going for a walk around Moscow. I was on my way home to my wife, and you were on your way to your husband at the Granovsky. So there was no reason to follow either of us. Your comrades imagine we’re earnestly discussing commissions in your office. If they cared, the Organs would assume that we were going home as we always do.”

“Except we didn’t.”

“Precisely, Sashenka, if I may call you that. Anyway no one would recognize me in my hat.” Benya doffed his white peaked cap and bowed low.

“Well, they’d certainly recognize you now,” she said, looking at the fair spiky strands of his receding hair.

“Look around you. The whole of Moscow is promenading tonight. Don’t you ever want to be rid of your responsibilities? Just for an hour.”

Sashenka sighed. “Just for an hour.” The soothing balmy air caressed her skin and reached into her white dress, inflating and rippling the cool cotton so she felt as light and gay as a sail on the wind. Golden was walking faster, talking as quickly, and she struggled to keep up, almost running in her high heels.

She thought about her responsibilities. There was her husband, conventional, industrious and successful, and their two mercurial, spirited cherubs in the bloom of health and happiness. They had two residences, the new dacha and the huge new apartment in the pink Granovsky building known as the Fifth House of Soviets in that little street near the Kremlin. There were the service workers: Carolina the nanny and cook, Razum the driver, the gardeners, the groom. Then there were Vanya’s parents, who lived with them at the apartment—they were a full-time job in themselves, especially Vanya’s mother, who sat in the yard all day gossiping in a dangerously loud voice. She considered Vanya’s stressful, prestigious position, and her own duties on the Women’s Committee and the Party Committee. They both had hectic lives; war was coming; they had to build their socialist world; they were emerging from deep sorrow and tragedy; many had vanished beneath the waves of revolution. That night, like most nights, Vanya would work until dawn—everyone did, following the Master’s nocturnal hours. Vanya told her how the leaders sat at their desks waiting until the words came down the vertushka : “The Master’s just left the Little Corner for the Nearby Dacha.”

Now, there was something big going on. After Munich, Stalin was changing his foreign policies—and his ministers. This was significant for the future of Europe—but it also meant that Vanya was busy working on the changes at the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.

As usual when he had secrets to share, he had pulled Sashenka into the garden at the dacha. “Litvinov’s out; Molotov’s in. I’ll be busy for a few days,” he had told her.

Sashenka knew that meant she would not see Vanya at night either and she must not mention this to anyone. Meanwhile Vanya’s parents were babysitting Snowy and Carlo at the Granovsky apartment.

Feeling lighthearted suddenly in Benya’s company, Sashenka stopped and twirled around like a girl. “Just for an hour. I can be lost for an hour. What a delicious idea!”

Her words sounded indulgently extravagant somehow—not like her at all, and she wanted to take them back.

“You were a Party member before the Revolution, weren’t you, Comrade Snowfox?” said Benya. “You must have been adept at dodging the Okhrana spooks. So are we being followed?”

She shook her head. “No. Our Organs have never been as good at surveillance as the Okhrana was.”

“Careful, Comrade Editor! Rash talk!”

She could see that he was teasing her. “And yet I feel I can trust you.”

“You can, I promise you that,” said Benya. “Isn’t it wonderful sometimes to be able to escape one’s duties and be completely selfish for a while?”

“We Communists can never do that,” she objected. “We mothers can never do it either…”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, just shut up and try it for a bit. Time is so short.”

Sashenka said nothing, but she was shocked and her head spun with a sort of vertigo.

They walked around the Kremlin. The Great Palace shimmered glass and gold beneath the evening sky. They passed the brooding dark modernist labyrinth of Government House on the Embankment, where Satinov, Mendel and many other bosses lived, where so many had been arrested in the dark times, where the elevators had groaned all night, as the NKVD drove people away in their Black Crows. There was no traffic on the streets now, just a couple of horses and carts—and an old lady selling greasy pirozhki from a kiosk.

Moscow, thought Sashenka, once called the city of a thousand cupolas because there were so many churches, is a grim place. Comrade Stalin will beautify it and make it a worthier capital for the workers of the world, but now it’s still partly palatial, partly a collection of villages—and the rest is just a building site. She had one of her periodic pangs of nostalgia for her home city: St. Petersburg—or Leningrad, as it was now called, the cradle of revolution.

I love you, Peter’s creation, she thought, quoting Pushkin.

“You’re missing Piter, aren’t you?” said Benya, out of the blue.

“How did you know?”

“I can read you, can’t you tell?”

She could, and it made her very uneasy.

They stood on the Stone Bridge, looking down on the Great Palace and the Moskva River, the whole of the city reflected and amplified in tiny detail as if it were resting on a mirror.

“Will you dance with me?” he asked, taking her hand.

“Here?” Goosebumps covered her arms and legs.

“Just here.”

“You really are the most foolish man.” She felt dizzy again, and recklessly young, and her skin scintillated where he touched her as he took her in his arms, confidently, and turned her left and left, back and forth in the foxtrot, all the time singing a Glenn Miller song in an American accent, in perfect tune.

When they parted, his body seemed to leave a burning imprint on her belly where he had pressed her against him. She saw there was another couple on the bridge. They did not react as Sashenka and Golden approached. They were youngsters, he in a Red Army uniform and she in a white coat over a dress with a slit up the side. She was probably one of the girls from the food shops on Gorky Street. They were openly kissing each other with an intense hunger, their mouths wide open, their tongues licking like cats at a dish of milk, faces shining, eyes closed, her curtain of thick flaxen hair getting caught in his teeth, his hands up her skirt, her fingertips on his zipper.

Sashenka felt disgusted: she remembered the couple necking on her street during the Revolution, and Gideon and Countess Loris outside the Astoria—yet she could not take her eyes off the couple and suddenly felt a starburst of the wildest wantonness in her body, and such urgency that she did not recognize herself, so foreign was it to her, so alien. This gulping spasm was so insistently physical that she feared it was her period arriving early to cramp her insides.

Benya towed her along the Embankment with insouciant arrogance, not talking anymore, just singing old romances and gypsy songs:

When he finished singing, her hand remained in his, first by accident, then tensely, and when she became aware of it she did not try to remove it.