Sashenka

Carlo kissed her on the nose with such pliant gentleness that Sashenka shivered with love.

22

The following Saturday, Sashenka was waiting for Vanya to come home. The dacha was quiet, its stillness suffocating. The children were baking a cake with Carolina.

Doves cooed in the dovecote and crows cawed in the birch trees. The horses in Marshal Budyonny’s stables whinnied and the children’s pony answered. Bees buzzed; the jasmine was sickly sweet. The important neighbor next door was singing a song from the movie Jolly Fellows. But the phone did not ring. Satinov had not called for his game of tennis.

Everything had slowed down. Sashenka sat on the veranda, pretending to read the newspapers and her magazine proofs. There was no clue in the newspapers, no hint of the spy mania and show trials of a year earlier. People were being freed; cases were being reviewed. Perhaps she was being paranoid. She had rung Benya and told him about the uncles in code. “The geraniums are budding,” he’d answered calmly and she remembered the garden shed and their talisman.

She thought about Benya all the time. They could meet next week. He would soothe her; he would make her laugh in that fatalistic Jewish way of his. How had she survived so long without the one and only Benya? She yearned to call him, but not from the dacha. There was a public phone down the lane. Benya kept teasing her, trying to make her say that she loved him. “Don’t you feel something special for me?” he’d ask. After ten days? She, Party member, mother, editor and Old Bolshevik, fall in love with an idle writer? Was he mad? No, it was she who was crazy. Oh, Benya! What would he make of all this?

The signs were confusing. Gideon had not been arrested, and Mouche had called to report that “they” had just wanted to discuss movies with him, “movies and the history of the Greeks and the Romans.” Was that a hint for Sashenka or a random throwaway phrase? Was Gideon warning them about Mendel’s arrest? “The Greeks and the Romans.” Mendel knew ancient history. He was ancient history. His arrest must stem from something in the distant Bolshevik past. Stalin’s old Georgian friend, “Uncle” Abel Yenukidze, had written a history of the Bolshevik printing press in Baku—yet fatally downplayed the Master’s role in it. Sashenka remembered Comrade Abel well, a sandy-haired playboy with blue eyes, wandering hands and a harem of ballerinas. He had been shot in 1937.

Yet Mendel was no Abel. Uncle Mendel had never joined an opposition and had fought for Stalin ferociously. He was the Conscience of the Party and no chatterer. Why Mendel and why now, when the Terror was really over? They could have arrested Mendel at any time since 1936. It did not make sense.

Or had Gideon meant ancient family history? But everyone knew about the Zeitlins and that she had typed for Lenin, she the millionaire’s Bolshevik daughter, Comrade Snowfox! Were the Organs circling her and her family? Her antecedents might be bourgeois—but she was protected by her marriage to Vanya Palitsyn, by his loyal service and proletarian pedigree, and by their joint Party orthodoxy.

Or perhaps the problem lay with her husband? Was this some rivalry inside the Organs, Beria’s new Georgians versus the old Muscovites? But Vanya had never been a vassal of the previous boss, Yezhov, and anyway Beria had sacked all Yezhov’s homicidal lags months earlier. Those maniacs were gone. Dust.

Family arrests did not necessarily reflect on her, Sashenka told herself. They happened all the time. Even Stalin’s in-laws, the Svanidzes, had been arrested. Even the brothers of Stalin’s dear Comrade Sergo had been executed. Her own father had vanished. Stalin had said the sons were not to blame for the sins of the fathers but at a secret dinner at the Kremlin, attended by Vanya himself, he had also threatened to destroy Enemies of the People “and their entire clans! Yes, their clans!”

Stalin, history and the Party worked in mysterious ways, she knew this. We Party members are devotees of a military-religious order in a time of intensifying class struggle and coming war, thought Sashenka. The greater the successes of our Party, the more our enemies will struggle against us: that was Comrade Stalin’s formula. We owe our loyalty to the Party and the holy grail of the Idea, not bourgeois sentimentality. Mendel is a politician and in our progressive but imperfect system, this is politics. It would be fine, she told herself. Mendel would return just like Gideon. This was a new, less carnivorous era. The bad times were over.

The doves in the dovecote flew up like a fan as a car drew up. Sashenka came down in her bare feet to help the chauffeur open the gates.