Sashenka

When Sashenka’s uncle, Gideon Zeitlin, finished his usual lunch—borscht soup, salted herring and veal cutlets—at his usual table at the Writers’ Club in Moscow, he donned his fedora and walked out into the balmy streets. He had eaten with his cronies: the “Red Count,” the supple, worldly and fat Alexei Tolstoy, one of Stalin’s favorite writers; Fadeyev, the drunken secretary of the Writers’ Union; Ilya Ehrenburg, the raffish novelist; and Gideon’s own comely daughter Mouche, now an actress who was starting to earn big parts in the movies. These literary lions enjoyed their privileges—the food, the wine, the dachas in Peredelkino, the holidays in Sochi—because they had survived the terrible years of ’37 and ’38.

Afterward, Gideon, a giant with his prickly beard, ox-like jaw and playful black eyes, walked in the streets with Mouche. It was early summer. Girls were promenading.

“Mouche, did you notice that, until recently, everyone dressed like prissy nuns?” announced Gideon. “Thank God that’s over! Skirts are getting shorter, slits getting higher. I adore summertime!”

“Stop looking, Papa momzer,” Mouche scolded him, calling him a rogue in Yiddish, like in the old days. “You’re too old.”

“You’re right. I am too old, but I’m slightly soused and I can still look. And I can still do!”

“You’re a disgrace.”

“But you love me, don’t you, Mouche?” Gideon held Mouche’s hand. His daughter was now in her thirties, married with children, and dramatically good-looking, with black eyes, thick black hair, strong cheekbones—and almost famous in her own right. Gideon was a grandfather but damn that! The girls were out in force in Moscow that May, and the old connoisseur relished the legs, the bare shoulders, the new look of permed hair—oh, he could taste their skin, their thighs. He decided to call on his new mistress, Masha, the girl he’d brought along to Sashenka’s party. Masha, he mused, was one of those placid, easygoing girls who would be boring were it not for their almost insane appetite for sex in all its varieties. He was just playing the scene in his mind when he realized Mouche was pulling on his arm.

“Papa! Papa!”

A white Emka car had stopped right next to them. The driver was waving at Gideon, and his passenger, a young man in a baggy brown suit, round intellectual’s spectacles and a pompadour hairstyle, jumped out and opened the car’s back door.

“Gideon Moiseievich, any chance of a chat? It won’t take long.”

Mouche had gone quite pale. The pretty girls in the streets drifted out of Gideon’s vision, and he put his hand on his chest.

“If you’re not feeling well, we can talk another time,” said the young man, who sported a thin ginger mustache.

“Papa, will you be OK?” asked Mouche.

Gideon puffed up his barrel chest and nodded.

“It’s probably just a chat, darling. I’ll see you later.”

It was routine, he told himself. Nothing to worry about. He’d be back with Mouche in a couple of hours.

As Mouche watched her father get into the car, she had a terrible feeling that she might never see him again. Where was her uncle Samuil? Vanished. Half of her father’s friends had disappeared. First their works were mocked in the newspapers, then their apartments were searched and sealed. When she saw those friends again, she could barely say hello. They carried the plague of death. Finally they too were arrested, and vanished. But Gideon had strode over their bodies, and Mouche saw that he was a master of survival. He did what he had to do, although his family background was utterly damning. He survived only because it was said that Comrade Stalin liked his work and his connections with the European intelligentsia.

Now swaying in the summer wind, Mouche watched the car drive off with an ostentatious skid of the wheels up the hill toward the Lubianka. As it left, she had seen her father turn and blow her a kiss.

Mouche hurried to the public telephone and rang her cousin.

“Sashenka? Papa’s fallen ill unexpectedly.” She knew this was all she needed to say.

“Which hospital is he at?”

“The one at the top of the hill.”

18

At her apartment in the Granovsky, Sashenka was playing with the children in the playroom. Carolina, the nanny, had made them toast and peach jam for tea and was now frying calf’s livers for supper. Vanya was meant to be home by seven but he was late, and Satinov and his heavily pregnant wife, Tamara, had already arrived for dinner.

“What is it?” Satinov had asked, as soon as he saw her anxious face.

“Hercules, may I show you our new car downstairs?”

Sashenka knew that Satinov understood this code perfectly. Leaving the doll-like Tamara with the children, they took the elevator down to the courtyard where an array of the most dazzling limousines were parked under the watchful eye of the janitor and an NKVD guard. Granovsky was now such a bosses’ residence that it had its own wooden guardhouse.