Sashenka

Her husband stepped out wearily but Sashenka felt reassured at the sight of him. Vanya was Assistant Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs and, since the March Congress, candidate member of the Central Committee—and here he was, right as rain. Just a little washed out and with more grey in his thick coarse hair—but he always came home tired.

She had been a fool for worrying. Snowy and Carlo rushed outside. Carlo was naked and Snowy wore her pink summer dress: she was growing fast. Their father hugged them, squeezed them, greeted their bunnies and cushions, heard about their cakes and candies in the kitchen—and sent them back inside. Then he was looking at Sashenka, looking at her as he had never looked at her before, his raging eyes crow black. He was about to say something when Carolina announced lunch from the veranda.

He turned his back on her and walked inside.

23

The meal at the veranda table seemed longer than usual. The scent of the lilacs was heavenly but then Snowy threw some bread at her brother. Vanya snapped, jumping up and wrenching her chair away from the table.

“Stop that!” he shouted.

Snowy was shocked and started to sob. Carlo looked terrified, then his wide face melted into tears. “I didn’t do anything!” he cried. He ran to his mother but Sashenka said nothing. All her senses were centered on her husband.

Vanya avoided her eyes and ate hardly anything. Instead of feeling guilty, as she expected to, she felt resentful. She longed for Benya and his irrepressible sense of fun, his Rabelaisian bawdiness and his sensitivity.

“Vanya, you need to sleep,” she said finally.

“Do I? What good will that do?”

Sashenka rose. “I’m going to take the children to swim in the river.” It was 2:30 p.m.

Vanya shut himself in his study.

In her bare feet, carrying the towels, Sashenka led the children by the hand down the dirt lane through the silver birches toward the banks of the Moskva. Vanya always returned grouchy from his nocturnal work, she told herself. Even walking, she felt how Benya had changed her life.

Her legs were bare, and the sun seemed to lick her cheekbones, shoulders and knees as if they were covered in syrup. Her thighs grazed each other, sticking a little, sweaty. Even the grit between her toes seemed sensual. The young Sashenka of the civil war and the twenties would never have noticed such things; the Party matron of the thirties was too serious, too full of the Party’s campaigns and slogans. Then she had dressed with deliberate dreariness, in the plainest, brownest stockings, in shapeless shift dresses, her hair in the tightest bun and always tied with the same kerchief. Now everything played with her senses in a way that amazed her. The buttoned cotton dress seemed to caress her on the thighs and neck. She longed to tell Benya about the delicious smell of pine resin and every detail of what she was doing and feeling. A cool breeze lifted the unbuttoned hem and showed her legs.

She grinned at the thought of Benya and his hands all over her, of him dancing and that way he laughed, with his mouth wide open. They discussed books and movies, paintings and plays but oh, how they laughed. And the laughter led back to her thighs and her breasts and her lips: all belonged to him.

They reached the golden banks of the mud-brown river, lined with cherry trees laden with pink blossom. Snowy picked her a spray. Other children were swimming, and she recognized some of the Party families. She waved and blew kisses, clapping for the children as they sprinted and dived. “Are you watching me, Mama?” called Carlo every time he jumped in and each time she answered, “When aren’t we watching you two?” She dried and dressed them when they began to feel chilled.

They returned by the woods. An army of bluebells lay under the trees awaiting them. Snowy and Carlo started to build a camp for the Wood Cushions, immersed in a world of mossy sofas and tree-trunk palaces.

She sat on the bench by the lane and watched them. She knew why she had brought them this way. Her eyes flickered between the camp and the nearby public telephone. Should she, shouldn’t she? No, she would not call.

“Darlings, we’ve got to go home now,” she said.

“No!” shouted Snowy. “We want to play.”

She knew she had to phone, that she was always going to use that phone. She closed her eyes. Benya had said he would be at his ramshackle dacha in Peredelkino, the writers’ village. She had the number and longed to suggest that they meet somehow. At some garden shed—clinging together among the spades and geraniums! But she must wait until the Mendel business was settled. Besides, he was with his family.

She would call him anyway. If Benya’s wife answered, she would introduce herself as his editor. She really was commissioning him to write a piece for the magazine: “How to celebrate at a real Soviet people’s masked ball! How to prepare your dresses, your masks and your feast!”