Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

“Well, I don’t eat meat, you see. I hate killing anything. Those poor calves or lambs! No, I can’t bear it, and besides, Nina says I mustn’t put on weight! I’m a vegetarian so I eat only this—even at Josef Vissarionovich’s place. ‘Beria’s grass!’ says Comrade Stalin. ‘Look, Lavrenti Pavlovich is having his grass again!’ Now, let me look at you.” He kept her hand and turned her around as if they were dancing. ‘Ah, you’re so pale. But so beau-ti-ful still. That figure’s enough to drive a man like me to folly! To risk everything for just one caress. You’re like a cream cake. What a shame to meet like this, eh?’”

His colorless eyes ran over Sashenka with such gobbling greed that she flinched. The stocky and bald People’s Commissar with the pince-nez circled her noiselessly on his soft suede shoes. He was not in uniform, just baggy yellow slacks and a collarless, embroidered blouse, like a Georgian at the seaside. Sashenka had not forgotten that her husband used to play on Beria’s basketball team at his Sosnovka dacha. When she watched the games, she had noticed that Beria was incredibly quick on his feet.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she repeated. She meant it. Beria was ruthless but competent. Vanya had admired his diligence, industry and fairness after the drunken frenzy of Yezhov. “You can sort this out, Lavrenti Pavlovich! Bless you!”

“I could look at your hips and breasts all day, my cream cake, but you’re tired, I can see. Will you eat something?” He picked up a phone and said, “Bring in some sandwiches.”

At Beria’s invitation, she took one of the leather-seated chairs at the conference table adjoining Beria’s desk. He sat down too. The double doors opened and a woman in a white apron wheeled in a tea cart. Placing a white napkin over her arm (just like one of the waitresses at the Metropole Hotel), she served tea and set out some sandwiches and fish zakuski , then left.

“There!” said Beria, smacking his loose, balloon-like lips. “Now eat while we talk. You’re going to need your energy.”

Sashenka hesitated, afraid that eating these delicious snacks would somehow obligate her to betray her husband or Mendel. She concentrated and thought of her children. Now was her chance.

“I don’t know what I’m accused of, respected Comrade Beria, but I’m innocent. I know you know that. You have no idea what joy it gives me to see you.”

“Oh, and me you. Eat up, my dear cream cake. They’re not poisoned, I promise.” She started to eat the sandwiches. “You know, you’re my type absolutely, Sashenka. The moment I saw you, I knew something about that overbite of yours suggests a capacity for pleasure. Yet you didn’t look too happy when I flirted with you at your place on May Day, hmmm? I think of women all day, you know. I’m a real Georgian man, aren’t I, eh?” Beria’s eyes grew cloudy, the eyelids drooping. “You know what I’d like to do, Sashenka, I’d like to drive you over to my Moscow house. Nina and my son live at Sosnovka, at the dacha. We’d have a Georgian supra, you and me in my banya, we’d drink the best wines in that cozy bathhouse, and then I’d lay you on the divan and lift your skirt and run my nose up until I can smell your strawberries…”

Beria was letting her know that he could do anything he wished. Yet she did not want to encourage him. His obscenity might be a trick, a lure. Or was it a sign that he really did desire her and if she wanted to get out, there was a simple price?

But this was Lavrenti Beria, People’s Commissar, a man she respected and liked, a Bolshevik trusted and chosen by Comrade Stalin himself. How could he talk like this to a comrade who had known Lenin and entertained Stalin in her house? She thought quickly, and decided right then and there that she would do anything, however vile and demeaning, to see her children again.

“You’re embarrassing me, Lavrenti Pavlovich,” she whispered huskily. “I’m not used to this sort of…”

“Aren’t you? Come on, Sashenka. I was surprised myself. You’re so respectable—such a decent Soviet woman teaching our housewives how to cook cakes and darn the skirts of Young Pioneers. But we know what a wanton creature you are. The things you cry out, the acts you demand when you’re really revved up. Just like your mother. She was notorious too, wasn’t she?”

A shard of ice froze her belly. Benya Golden must have betrayed their sexual secrets, and this was how her husband had known too.

Beria beamed a smile at her with lips too fat, too wide.

“We know everything, dearest cream cake,” he said lasciviously. “If you’d have that Jewish writer, you could have had me too. But don’t get your hopes up. You didn’t confess to my boy, Mogilchuk. Have you read his stories? They’re shit, you know. He writes detective yarns, whodunits—he aspires to create a Soviet Sherlock Holmes. But alas, my duty interferes with my pleasures. Your case is a serious one, Sashenka, and much as I’d love to taste you, the Instantzia is following this affair closely.”

“Comrade Stalin knows I’m innocent.”

“Careful, careful. Don’t mention that name to me, Prisoner Zeitlin-Palitsyn. I want you to know that your only hope is to confess now. Disarm, reveal your treacherous anti-Soviet activities. We’re working hard here. Are you going to make us force you?” He stood up and walked around the desk, enveloping her in his lime cologne. He stroked her hair, ran his hands over a breast. Sashenka cringed, tried not to cry out. He touched her lips, then forced a knuckle into her mouth. It tasted coppery.

He put on a silly voice: “I don’t want to be rough. Don’t do that to me! I love women! Oh, the taste of them! Don’t make me.” He sat down, businesslike again. “Think carefully. There’s nothing I don’t know about you, your past, family, work, your cunt…Eh?” Beria drummed his fingers on the desk. “Are you going to help us? Stand up! Now! If you don’t we’ll grind you into dust and shoot you like a partridge! In a minute you’re going back to your cell and I’m going back to work. Hang on. Wait. Don’t turn around! Close your eyes.”

She heard him open a drawer in his desk. The single door at the other end of the office opened. She heard the breath of men and the creak of boots getting closer but passing behind her.

“Not on the Persian carpet, it’s a good one. Roll out that one. That’s it,” she heard Beria say.

A dull thud followed. Her eyes watered—there it was again, the pungent cologne of cloves—she could taste it on her lips.

“Thank you, Comrade Bull!”

It was Kobylov again. What was this? Some sort of game? Fear clawed at her suddenly.

“Right! Now. Let’s take Comrade Snowfox back to her cell—and…one-two-three and… turn !”

Something bludgeoned into Sashenka’s right cheek so hard that it spun her round and tossed her off her feet onto the parquet in the sitting area. The world dissolved into a blizzard of red specks in a diamond kaleidoscope. She was on the parquet floor, looking back at the desk where Beria stood smiling with a black truncheon in his hands.

Holding the side of her face, which seemed to be twitching of its own accord, she peered through the shiny boots in front of her at a bundle of clothes spattered in dried mud. She realized it was alive, quivering, stirring. Her gaze was drawn to the mass of raw red and blue and yellow bruises on bare skin, to fingers that bled from the tips, to an unshaven face with red-lidded eyes so swollen they could barely open. Her mouth gaped in shock.

“What do you think you’re doing bringing that in here?” asked Beria. “Didn’t you know I had Sashenka in here? You didn’t knock, Comrade Kobylov! Tut, tut, bad manners!”