Sashenka

“But it’s run by the NKVD…for the Party, and they care about reforging the children. Comrade Stalin said—”

“No! You don’t understand!” He was shouting again and she was a little afraid. She had never seen him angry before. He shook her off him, jumped up to get a piece of paper from his jacket and began to read:

The Felix Dzerzhinsky Communal Orphanage for the Re-education of Children of Traitors to the Motherland is one of the most delightful examples of redemption in our Soviet paradise. Here, in a charming rustic glade, these innocent children, tainted only by the cruelties of chance in their relationships to their wicked parents, the bloodsucking terrorists, wrecking spies, snakes, rats and Trotskyite murderers, are given a wonderful new introduction to the generosity of Soviet education. No wonder at 6:00 a.m. at morning assembly, they happily sing the “Internationale,” chant “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood” and then start to study the Short Course. Meanwhile, in the Little Red Corner, a gang of hungry, dirty and brutalized teenagers have started to torture a little girl of four with a switchblade and a cigarette lighter under the negligent gaze of the corrupt and depraved Director Khanchuk. Before the end of the day, she will probably be raped again by these feral children stripped of all the kindness and innocence of childhood. No wonder, because this very morning two children celebrating their twelfth birthdays were arrested as Trotskyite and Japanese spies and marched off to be sentenced to execution or hard labor in the camps…

Sashenka gasped. “We can’t publish that! If I handed that to Klavdia, my deputy, she would immediately take you to the Party Committee and they would denounce you to the Organs.”

Benya was silent.

“You don’t want me to hand it in, do you?” she said.

“I don’t want to die, if that’s what you mean—but I don’t want to be a Russian toady either. I didn’t sleep last night. I saw my own child in that Dantean hell and I woke up sobbing. I want you to mention that place to your husband.” Her husband. Following Benya’s imaginary book, “The Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery,” they had agreed never to mention Vanya or Benya’s wife, Katya.

“I’m not sure I should mention you to my husband at all.”

“I don’t suppose he’d be all that interested, especially if he’s still working boisterously on those diplomats…” There was an edge to his voice that she did not like.

“Boisterously? He works too hard.”

“Well, we’ve all heard about his hard work.”

Sashenka looked at him a long time, her belly churning at the sting in his words, which she did not quite understand. Their lovemaking had been so frenzied and it was hot under the eaves of the Metropole. She was horrified by Benya’s article, which brought back that song from her Petersburg youth:

Here I am abandoned, an orphan, with no one to look after me…

Only the nightingale…

Benya lay down beside her again and stroked her gleaming white back, his fingers exploring between her thighs, but she flicked his hand away and lit the article with her lighter, holding it as it flamed and fell.

“Do you despise me?” Her bumble-bee voice was breaking up.

He sighed, again. “‘The Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery’ reveals that this is the adulteress’s most commonly asked question. No, actually I think all the better of you…”

Craving him, she rolled him on top of her, dreaming of spending a night with him, of singing with him at the piano, and of waking up together.

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