Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

“Eleven strokes on your forehead,” she said.

“Yes, Mamochka, eleven strokes.”

Usually, Sashenka was completely engrossed in Carlo but today her mind was somewhere else. Where was she? With Benya in the cellars of the Lubianka? With Mendel in the dungeons of hell? And where did this leave her and her family? She prayed for a release from the suspense, and yet she feared it.

“Mamochka? Can I tell you something? Mama?”

“Yes, Carlo.”

“I love you in my heart, Mama.” This was a new expression and it hit Sashenka hard. She seized his sturdy cub’s body and hugged him tightly.

“What a lovely thing to say, darling. Mama loves you in her heart too.”

She laid her hands on his satiny forehead and they counted aloud: she stroked his face eleven times until his eyes were closed. Mercifully, Snowy was exhausted and went straight to sleep without a fuss.

It was a lush, sweltering night. The house was patrolled by fat fluttering moths, sleepy obese bluebottles and swarming greenflies. The ceiling fans whirred. Carolina was in her room.

No one had phoned.

Vanya went to sit on the rocking chair on the veranda, smoking and drinking. Jews, Sashenka thought, don’t drink when they’re in crisis, they get rashes and palpitations. She remembered her father. Vanya’s chair creaked back and forth and she heard the clanking of her father’s Trotting Chair all those years ago.

It was time. Crows cawed in the linden tree. Sashenka approached her husband nervously.

“Vanya?” she said. She needed to know how he had found out about Benya, what he knew. Until then, confess to nothing.

“Vanya, I did nothing,” she lied. “I flirted. I’m so sorry…” She expected more severity from him but when he turned his face to her, it was clammy and swollen with tears. Vanya never cried except when he was very drunk, during sad movies, at regimental reunions or when he saw Snowy in the school play.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Do you hate me?”

He shook his head.

“Please just tell me what you know.”

Vanya tried to speak but his generous mouth, swaggering jaw and teddy-bear eyes lost their definition, as he cried silently in that warm dusk.

“I know I’ve done something very wrong. Vanya, I am so sorry!”

“I know everything,” he said.

“Everything? What is there to know?”

He groaned with an awesome, weary pain. “Don’t bother, Sashenka. We’re beyond husbands and wives now.”

“You’re scaring me, Vanya.”

Tears flowed down his cheeks as the blood of the sunset spread across the sky.

Sashenka stood beside the rocking chair, breathing in the scent of the jasmine. She thought of Mendel. She thought of Benya. And the children asleep in their rooms.

Finally Vanya got up from his chair. He was drunk, his eyes hot and gritty—but drunk in the way that hard drinkers ride the alcohol—and he pulled her to him, lifting her feet off the ground. For the first time in a long while, she was grateful for his touch. She noticed the rabbits in the hutch and the pony gazing peacefully over the fence—but she and Vanya were as alone as they had ever been.

“I can separate from you,” she said. “No one needs to know. Let me separate and you’ll be rid of me. Divorce me!” (Just hours ago, this might have been a fantasy escape with Benya—now it seemed a measure of desperation.) “I did something terrible! I’m sorry, so sorry…”

“Don’t say that,” whispered Vanya, squeezing her tighter. “I’m angry with you, of course, you fool. But we don’t have time to be hurt.”

“For God’s sake, tell me what you mean? Who knows?”

“ They know everything—and it’s all my fault,” he said.

“Please! Just tell me what’s happened?”

He hugged her suddenly, kissing her neck, her eyes, her hair. “I’ve been moved off the Foreign Commissariat case. I’m being sent down to check out our comrades in Stalinabad in Turkestan.”

“Well, I’ll go with you. We can all go and live in Stalinabad.”

“Pull yourself together, Sashenka. They could arrest me at the station. They could come tonight.”

“But why? It’s me who’s done something…I beg for forgiveness but how can this be political?”

“Gideon, Mendel, now Benya Golden—there’s something out there, Sashenka, and I don’t know what it is. Perhaps they have something on your writer? Perhaps he’s a bastard connected to foreign spies. But they also have something on you and me. I don’t know what it is but I do know that it could destroy us altogether.” His feverish face was pale in the shrinking light. “We might not have any time. What are we going to do?”

The enormity of their predicament crushed Sashenka.

Two weeks earlier, Comrade Stalin had been in her house with Comrade Beria, Narkom of the NKVD. Stars of screen and stage had sung in their home; Vanya was newly promoted and trusted; Comrade Stalin admired her magazine, admired her and tweaked Snowy’s cheeks. No, Vanya was wrong. It was lies. Her heart fluttered, red sparks rose before her eyes and her guts spasmed.

“Vanya, I’m terrified.”

They sat at the table on the veranda, very close, cheek to cheek, hand in hand, closer now than on their honeymoon when they were young and in love, bound together now in more ways than any husband and wife would ever want to be.

Vanya gathered himself. “Sashenka, I’m frightened too. We’ve got to make a plan now.”

“Do you really believe they’re coming for us?”

“It’s possible.”

“Can’t we ask someone? Have you called Lavrenti Pavlovich? He likes you. He’s pleased with you. You even play on his basketball team. What about Hercules? He knows everything; Stalin loves him; he’ll help us.”

“I’ve called them both,” answered Vanya. “‘Comrade Beria is unavailable,’ said his apparat. Hercules hasn’t called back.”

“But that doesn’t mean anything. Beria’s probably tomcatting. And Hercules’ll call us.”

“We need to decide what to do tonight. They may arrest me, or you, or both of us. Who knows what they’re beating out of Mendel right now—or your fucking writer.”

“But surely they can’t make them invent things?”

“Christ save us!” Vanya exclaimed. “You’re joking, aren’t you? We have a saying in the Organs: ‘Give me a man tonight and I’ll have him confessing he’s the King of England by morning!’ You believed every confession at the trials? Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, the terrorists, killers, wreckers, spies?”

“They were true. You said they were true, in spirit, in essence.”

“Oh yes, they were true all right. They were all bastards. They were enemies in spirit. They lost faith, and faith is everything. But…” He shook his head.

“You beat people to say these things, didn’t you, Vanya?”

“For the Party, I’d do anything. I’ve done anything. Yes, I know what it is to break a man. Some break like a matchstick, some die rather than say a word. But better to shoot a hundred innocent men than let one spy escape, better a thousand.”

“Oh my God, Vanya.” Benya’s words, and Benya’s expression as he had said them, returned to her. He had known what Vanya did all night while she, she…

“What did you think I was doing? It was top secret but it suited you not to know.”

“But the Party’s right to destroy the spies. I knew there were mistakes but we all said the mistakes were worth it. Now, what if we become such a mistake? I believe in the Party and Stalin, it’s my life’s work. Vanya, do you still believe?”

“After what I’ve done for the Party, I have to believe. If I were shot tonight, I’d die a Communist. And you?”