Sashenka

“No, I’ve virtually nothing to do and no money to do it with. But”—here he whispered—“I am writing brilliantly all day on your delicious paper! Can I have some more? I’m so happy to set eyes on you. I just long to kiss you again, to savor you.”

She sighed, half closing her eyes.

“Shall I go on?”

“I can’t believe I want to hear your talk—but I do.”

“I want to tell you something crazy. I want to run away with you to the Black Sea. I want to walk with you along the seafront at Batum. On the boardwalk there’s a barrel organ that plays all our favorite love songs and I could sing along, and then when the tropical sun goes down we could sit at Mustapha’s café and kiss. No one would stop us, but at midnight some old Tatars I know would take us in their boat to Turkey—”

“What about my children? I could never leave them.”

“I know, I know. That’s one of your attractions.”

“You’re shamefully perverse, Benya. What am I doing with you?”

“You’re a wonderful mother. I’ve behaved badly all my life—but not you. You’re a real woman of milk and blood, a Party matron, an editor, a mother. Tell me, how’s the magazine?”

“Wildly busy. The Women’s Committee is planning a gala for Comrade Stalin’s sixtieth in December; we’re doing a special issue for the Revolution Holidays; I’ve managed to get Snowy into her first Pioneers’ Camp at Artek—she’s already dreaming of wearing her famous red scarf. But best of all, Gideon is back home.”

“But he could still be doomed, you know. They could just be playing him like a fish on a hook.”

“No, Vanya says he might be all right. Comrade Stalin said at the Congress—”

“No more Party claptrap, Sashenka,” Benya said urgently. “We haven’t time to talk about congresses. There’s only now! Only us.”

They turned a corner, away from the ponds, and suddenly they were on their own. Sashenka took his hand. “Do you look forward to seeing me?”

“All day. Every minute.”

“Then why are you looking so mischievous and crafty? Why have you lured me here?”

They were approaching an archway that led into a courtyard. Checking to see that no one was watching them, Golden pulled her into the archway, through the courtyard and into a garden where there was a rickety garden shed, the sort favored by pensioners to store their geranium seeds. He flashed a key. “This is our new dacha.”

“A shed?”

He laughed at her.

“You’re displaying bourgeois morality.”

“I am a Communist, Benya, but when it comes to lovemaking I couldn’t be more aristocratic if I tried!”

“Imagine it’s the secret pavilion of Prince Yusupov or Count Sheremetev!” He unlocked the wooden door. “See! Imagine!”

“How can you even think for a moment that I would…” Sashenka realized that the days of living with Vanya in the spartan bunk beds of their tiny room in the Sixth House of the Soviets were long ago. She was a Bolshevik—but she’d earned her luxuries. “It’s rotten and it stinks of manure.”

“No, that is Madame Chanel’s new perfume.”

“That looks like a garden fork to me!”

“No, Baroness Sashenka, that’s a diamond-encrusted fork made for the Empress herself by the celebrated craftsmen of Dresden.”

“And what’s that disgusting old rag?”

“That blanket? That is a pelt of silk and chinchilla fur for the baroness’s comfort.”

“I’m not going in there,” said Sashenka firmly.

Golden’s face fell but he persisted. “What if I just told you, with no bullshit at all, that this door leads us into a secret world where no one can see us or touch us and where I will love you more than life itself? It’s not a mansion, I know. It may be just a pathetic garden shed, but it is also the shed where I want to adore you and cherish you without wasting another second during my short lifetime in this menacing world. It may sound silly but you’ve arrived in the summer of my life. I’m not old, but I’m no longer young, and I know myself. You are the only woman of my life, the woman I will remember as I die.” He looked very serious suddenly, as he handed her a book he’d drawn out of his jacket—a volume of Pushkin. “I prepared this so we would never forget this moment.”

She opened it and on the page of her favorite poem, “The Talisman,” was a single, rare dried orchid.

He began to recite:

You must not lose it,
Its power is infallible,
Love gave it to you.

“You never stop surprising me,” she whispered. Sashenka felt so moved and desperate to kiss him that her hands shook. She stepped into the shed and kicked the door shut. Everything in there—tools and seeds and some old boots—seemed as alive and full of love as she was.