Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

Benya led Sashenka by the hand up the steps from the Embankment and toward the Metropole Hotel. She hung back as the doorman in the top hat and braided tails opened the door, but Benya could tell that she wanted to dance as much as he did.

Benya loved the atmosphere at the Metropole. Even during the Terror, the jazz band went on playing there and he would dance away his troubles to the blare of the trumpets and saxophones. Before 1937, the hotel had been full of foreigners with their Russian girls in French gowns, but now the businessmen, diplomats, journalists and social delegations from abroad sat apart. Before the killing started, Gideon had sometimes brought him here for dinners with important foreign writers. He had met H. G. Wells, Gide and Feuchtwanger. He had heard his patron Gorky give a speech here to the Party writers and theater bureaucrats such as Averbakh and Kirshon. One by one, they had all vanished. Alien elements liquidated! But he had survived, and Sashenka had survived the Terror by some miracle, and it seemed to Benya all of a sudden that tonight they should celebrate being alive.

As they walked together through the doors, they were so close and so in step, momentarily, that he could see the dark wood and polished chrome of the front desk reflected in her grey eyes. But as soon as they were in the lobby, Benya noticed how Sashenka kept apart from him. He realized she was worried that she might be recognized—but she sometimes entertained her writers for the journal here and he was her new writer.

“Relax,” he whispered to her.

The waiters in black coats showed them to a black art-deco table. How different the dining room seemed. The brilliant mirrors, the curling blue smoke rising to the molded ceiling like mist on a mountain, the lights on the stage, the silhouettes of men with their hair en brosse and their tidy mustaches, the gleam of boots, the curve of jodhpur breeches on the Red Army officers, the permanent-wave hairdos of the girls—all were infinitely more glamorous tonight.

A girl in a white blouse with a flashlight and a tray of cigarettes and chocolates appeared before them. Never taking his eyes off Sashenka, Benya bought a pack of cigarettes, offering her one. He lit hers, then his own. They said nothing, but when she looked at him, her gaze seemed like the beam of a lighthouse shining out from a friendly shore. The smoke whirled around her in broken circles as if it too wanted to be close to her. Everything in the nightclub revolved around her.

He thought she seemed cool and calm again, the “Soviet woman of culture” in her white dress, but then her lips, which stayed just open enough for him to catch the glint of her teeth, twitched a little as she dragged on the cigarette. Her eyes closed for a second so that her dark eyelashes fanned against her skin and those rare archipelagos of freckles. The lights caught the chestnut in her thick dark hair, and he saw that beneath all the composure she was a little breathless. He was breathless himself. Tonight it seemed the world was turning a little faster and tilting a little bit more.

The show was about to start. The lights spun and then shone onto the fountain in the middle of the room. The drums rolled. It was not Utesov’s band tonight but another jazz group with three trumpeters, a saxophonist and two double-bassists, all in black suits with white collars. New Orleans met Odessa in the strut of a louche, smoky rhythm.

Benya ordered wine and vodka and zakuski —caviar, herring, pelmeni —and then realized he had barely a kopek in his pocket. “I order, you pay,” he told her. “I’m as broke as a cockroach on Millionaya Street!”

She drank the Georgian wine, and he watched her relish its taste and then swallow it and sigh as it quenched her thirst—and even that commonplace act seemed precious. At last, he pulled her up to dance.

“Just once,” she said.

Benya knew he was good at the foxtrot and the tango, and they danced for more than one song. His body was slim and slight but he spun her around, making the steps as if he were walking on air. He suddenly felt that time was short. The circumstances that had allowed this freedom might never coincide again and he must push things as far as they could go. So he held her against him, knowing just from her breath how exhilarated she was too.

She broke away quickly and sat down again.

“I’ve got to go now,” she said as he joined her.

“This is a night that doesn’t exist in our lives,” he whispered. “Nothing that happens tonight ever happened. Suppose we took a room?”

“Never! You’re insane!”

“But imagine what a joy it would be.”

“And how would we even book it?” she answered. “Good night, Benya.” She grabbed her bag.

“Wait.” He held her hand under the table and then, in a crazy gamble that would either ruin the night or make it, he put her hand right on his zipper.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, snatching it away.

“No,” he answered. “Look what you’re doing to me. I’m suffering.”

“I must go at once.” But she didn’t and he could see the effects of his brashness in her wide grey eyes. She was drunk, but not on the wine.

“Don’t you have a room here already, Sashenka? For your magazine?”

She blushed. “Room four hundred and three belongs to Litfond but, yes, the editors of Soviet Wife can use it for out-of-town writers, but that would be completely out of…”

“Anyone using it now?”

Cold anger flashed in her eyes and she stood up. “You must think I’m some sort of… bummekeh !” She stopped and he realized she was surprised by her use of the Yiddish for a disreputable woman, a relic from her childhood.

“Not a bummekeh ,” he answered quick as a flash, “just the most gorgeous bubeleh in Moscow!”

She started to laugh—no one had ever called her a babe, a little doll, before and Benya understood that they shared an oddly reassuring past in the old Jewish world of the Pale of Settlement.

“Room four hundred and three,” he said, almost to himself.

“ Bonsoir, Benya. You’ve made me surprise even myself but enough is enough. File your article by next Monday,” and she turned and walked out of the dining room, the chrome and glass double doors swinging behind her.

Sashenka laughed at her own stupidity. She had pushed through the wrong doors, but after such an exit she could not go back into the dining room. Now, she sat on the scarlet stairs leading to the rear elevators of the hotel and lit up one of her own Herzegovina Flors. Her presence in this hidden space right in the heart of the hotel seemed quite appropriate. No one knew she was there.

Without really thinking, she walked into the service elevator and rode it up to the fourth floor. Like a somnambulist, she crept along the musty, humid corridors, smelling the stale whiff of chlorine, cabbage and rotting carpet even in Moscow’s smartest hotel. She was lost. She must go home. She feared there might be the usual old lady (and NKVD informant) at the desk on the fourth floor, but then she realized that by entering the back way she had missed the crone altogether.

As she reached Room 403, she heard a step behind her. It was Benya. She opened the door with the key that she held as editor of the magazine, and they almost fell into the little room that, if she analyzed it (and she would never forget these smells as long as she lived), was like a sealed capsule of mothballs and disinfectant. Inside, the room was dark, lit only by the lurid scarlet of the electric stars atop each of the eight spires of the Kremlin outside the window. They backed onto a bed that sagged in the middle, the sheets rancid with what she later identified as old sperm and alcohol in a cocktail specially mixed for Soviet hotels. She wanted to struggle, to reprimand, to complain, but he grabbed her face and kissed her so forcefully that a lick of flame burned her to the core.