Sashenka

Benya took her in his arms, and somehow she could tell by the look in his eyes, and the cast of his lips, that he meant what he’d said, that he did love her, and that this moment, in their private world, was one of those sacred occasions that occur once or twice in a lifetime, and sometimes never at all. She wanted to bottle it, store it, keep it forever in a locket at the very front of her memory so she could always reach for it and live it all over again, but she was so entranced that she couldn’t even hold that thought. She just reached for him and kissed him again and again until they had to go home. But even as they parted, she repeated to herself, You must not lose it, its power is infallible, love gave it to you. And she could scarcely believe her own joy and luck that someone had actually said those words to her.

21

“What now? I’ll complain to the Housing Committee. Stop that rumpus! It’s three a.m.!” shouted Mendel Barmakid, Central Committee member, Orgburo member, Deputy Chairman of the Central Control Commission, Supreme Soviet deputy. His daughter Lena was also awakened by the banging on the door and for a moment she lay there, smiling at her father’s absurdly operatic fury, imagining him in his ancient corded dressing gown, moth-eaten and stained. She heard him open the door of the family apartment in the Government House on the Embankment.

“What is it, Mendel?” called out Mendel’s wife, Natasha.

Now my mother’s up too, thought Lena, and she could almost see the plump Yakut woman with the Eskimo features in her sweeping blue caftan. Her parents were talking to someone. Who could it be?

Lena jumped out of bed, put on a scarlet kimono and her glasses, and came round the corner from her room toward the front door.

She saw her father rubbing his red-rimmed eyes and squinting up at a bulging giant in NKVD uniform. In shining boots, immaculate in his blue and scarlet uniform, holding a riding crop in a hand covered in gaudy rings and a jewel-handled Mauser in the other, Bogdan Kobylov stared down at the three Barmakids. He was not alone.

“Who is it? What do they want, Papa?”

Before Mendel could answer, Kobylov swaggered into the hall, almost blinding Lena with his eye-watering Turkish cologne. “Evening, Mendel. On the orders of the Central Committee, you’re coming with us,” he said in a barely intelligible rustic Georgian accent. “We’ve got to search the apartment and seal your study.”

“You’re not taking him,” said Lena, blocking the way.

“All right! Step back,” said Kobylov in a surprisingly soft voice. “If you waste my time and fuck around, I’ll grind you all to dust, the little mare included. If we keep things polite, it’ll be better for you. As you can imagine, there are other things I’d far rather be doing at this time of night.” He flexed his muscles.

Lena glared up at their tormentor’s jewels and kinky hair but her father laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and pulled her out of Kobylov’s way.

“Thank you, Vladlena,” sneered the interloper with a flashy smile. Lena’s full, revolutionary name, Vlad-Lena, was short for Vladimir Lenin.

“Good evening, comrades,” said Mendel in that Polish-Yiddish Lublin accent that he had never lost. “As a Bolshevik since 1900, I obey any summons from the Central Committee.”

“Good!” Kobylov beamed mockingly.

Lena, who was twenty and studying, sensed how this uneducated secret policeman from some village in Georgia hated the Old Bolsheviks, Soviet nobility, with their libraries, fancy airs and intellectual pretensions.

“May I get dressed, Comrade Kobylov?” asked Mendel.

“Your women will help you. One of my boys will keep an eye on you. Where are the weapons?”

Lena knew from her father how Comrade Stalin hated suicides.

“There’s a Nagant in the bedside table, a Walther in the study,” boomed Mendel, limping back to the bedroom.

“I’ve got to sit down,” murmured Natasha. She collapsed onto the sofa in the sitting room.

“Mama,” cried Lena.

“Are you all right, Natasha?” called Mendel.

“I’m fine. Lena, help Papa dress, please.” Natasha lay down, breathing heavily.

Lena brought a glass of water to her mother, then watched the Chekists opening drawers and making piles of manuscripts in Mendel’s study. During ’37 and ’38, there had been arrests and raids in their building every night—she’d hear the elevators working in the early hours and see the NKVD Black Crows parked outside. The next morning, she’d noticed how the doors on the apartments had been sealed by the NKVD. “The Cheka’s defending the Revolution,” her father told her. “Never speak of this.” But that was all over. The arrests had stopped a year ago. This must be a mistake, she thought.

“Mendel,” called Kobylov. “Any letters to or from the Central Committee? Old things?” He meant letters from Comrade Stalin. “Your memoirs?”