Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

“What is it, Mendel?” called out Mendel’s wife, Natasha.

Now my mother’s up too, thought Lena, and she could almost see the plump Yakut woman with the Eskimo features in her sweeping blue caftan. Her parents were talking to someone. Who could it be?

Lena jumped out of bed, put on a scarlet kimono and her glasses, and came round the corner from her room toward the front door.

She saw her father rubbing his red-rimmed eyes and squinting up at a bulging giant in NKVD uniform. In shining boots, immaculate in his blue and scarlet uniform, holding a riding crop in a hand covered in gaudy rings and a jewel-handled Mauser in the other, Bogdan Kobylov stared down at the three Barmakids. He was not alone.

“Who is it? What do they want, Papa?”

Before Mendel could answer, Kobylov swaggered into the hall, almost blinding Lena with his eye-watering Turkish cologne. “Evening, Mendel. On the orders of the Central Committee, you’re coming with us,” he said in a barely intelligible rustic Georgian accent. “We’ve got to search the apartment and seal your study.”

“You’re not taking him,” said Lena, blocking the way.

“All right! Step back,” said Kobylov in a surprisingly soft voice. “If you waste my time and fuck around, I’ll grind you all to dust, the little mare included. If we keep things polite, it’ll be better for you. As you can imagine, there are other things I’d far rather be doing at this time of night.” He flexed his muscles.

Lena glared up at their tormentor’s jewels and kinky hair but her father laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and pulled her out of Kobylov’s way.

“Thank you, Vladlena,” sneered the interloper with a flashy smile. Lena’s full, revolutionary name, Vlad-Lena, was short for Vladimir Lenin.

“Good evening, comrades,” said Mendel in that Polish-Yiddish Lublin accent that he had never lost. “As a Bolshevik since 1900, I obey any summons from the Central Committee.”

“Good!” Kobylov beamed mockingly.

Lena, who was twenty and studying, sensed how this uneducated secret policeman from some village in Georgia hated the Old Bolsheviks, Soviet nobility, with their libraries, fancy airs and intellectual pretensions.

“May I get dressed, Comrade Kobylov?” asked Mendel.

“Your women will help you. One of my boys will keep an eye on you. Where are the weapons?”

Lena knew from her father how Comrade Stalin hated suicides.

“There’s a Nagant in the bedside table, a Walther in the study,” boomed Mendel, limping back to the bedroom.

“I’ve got to sit down,” murmured Natasha. She collapsed onto the sofa in the sitting room.

“Mama,” cried Lena.

“Are you all right, Natasha?” called Mendel.

“I’m fine. Lena, help Papa dress, please.” Natasha lay down, breathing heavily.

Lena brought a glass of water to her mother, then watched the Chekists opening drawers and making piles of manuscripts in Mendel’s study. During ’37 and ’38, there had been arrests and raids in their building every night—she’d hear the elevators working in the early hours and see the NKVD Black Crows parked outside. The next morning, she’d noticed how the doors on the apartments had been sealed by the NKVD. “The Cheka’s defending the Revolution,” her father told her. “Never speak of this.” But that was all over. The arrests had stopped a year ago. This must be a mistake, she thought.

“Mendel,” called Kobylov. “Any letters to or from the Central Committee? Old things?” He meant letters from Comrade Stalin. “Your memoirs?”

“In the safe, it’s open,” retorted Mendel from the bedroom. To Lena’s surprise, there were a few postcards from Stalin in exile; some notes from the twenties; and typed memoirs on yellowing sheets of foolscap, marked by Mendel’s spidery notes. Her father was so modest. He told stories of his adventures but never dropped names. “Lena!”

Lena followed her father into his bedroom. She opened his wardrobe and took out his three-piece black suit, his black fedora, his walking boots with the built-up sole, a leather tie, his Order of Lenin. Then, struggling to show no emotion and aware that she must not add to his troubles, she helped him dress, as her mother often did. He said nothing until he was ready. “Thank you, Lenochka.”

“What’s it about, Papa? Do you know?” she asked, then wished she hadn’t bothered him.

He just shook his head. “Probably nothing.”

Mendel entered the sitting room and kissed his wife’s forehead. “I love you, Natasha,” he said in his deep voice. “Long live the Party!” Then he turned to his daughter.

“I’ll see you down,” said Lena, feeling numb. In the hall, she helped her lame father step over a heap of family photographs, papers, letters and proofs of his famous book, Bolshevik Morality . The floor looked like a shattered collage of their entire lives.

They rode down in the ornate but creaking elevator. Outside, the night was warm. The Great Palace of the Kremlin glowed majestically. Even though it was so late, there were two lovers on Stone Bridge; tango music escaped from an open window somewhere in the huge building. There was no traffic, just a Packard touring car and a Black Crow van that bore the words Eggs, Bread, Vegetables, both with engines idling.

In the humid street, the glossy, oversized Commissar of Security Kobylov somehow reminded Lena of a shiny papier-mâché statue on a May Day carnival float.

“Your carriage awaits, Mendel,” he said, inclining his kinky-haired head toward the Crow.

Lena watched her father, limping in his old-fashioned suit, his metallic boots clicking on the asphalt, as he approached the open door of the black van. He paused and Lena gasped, her heart in her mouth, but Mendel just looked up at the super-modern apartment building they were so proud to inhabit and said nothing, though a nervous tic fluttered on his cheek. Her severe, laconic and very old-fashioned father was not a demonstrative man but Lena knew from a million little things that he absolutely loved her, his only child. Now Lena did something she had never done before. She took his hand and, placing it between both of hers, she squeezed it. He looked away, and she could hear him wheezing. He was sixty but he looked much older.

Then he turned to Lena and, to her surprise and deep emotion, he bowed formally and then kissed her thrice, the old way, à la russe . “Be a good Communist. Good-bye, Lena Mendelovna.”

“Good-bye, Papa,” she answered.

She wanted to inhale his smell of coffee and cigarettes and soap, his presence, his love; she fought an urge to hold on to his suit, to fall to the pavement and grip his legs so they couldn’t take him—but it was over too fast.

Mendel didn’t look at her again—and she understood why. The step was too high. Two Chekists took Mendel and lifted him into the van. Inside, there were metal cages so Mendel could not sit. They closed him into one such compartment and as they slammed the van door, Lena saw not only her father’s liquid eyes catching the light—but others’ too.

Kobylov banged the top of his limousine as he swung into the passenger seat. Lena stood in the street and watched the two vehicles speed across the bridge past the Kremlin and out of sight.

The janitor, so friendly, always doing chores for the family, stood on the steps staring, but he said nothing and averted his eyes. Then Lena went upstairs to tend to Natasha.

Her mother was sobbing so hard she could not speak. Lena sat down wearily and wondered what to do. She remembered that her mother had cared for Sashenka during her night in prison in 1916.

At dawn, Lena called Sashenka from a phone on the street. She could hear Snowy singing in the background, the clack of cutlery. Sashenka was serving the children breakfast over at Granovsky.