Sashenka

“I want to cure you, Mama. Can I put a bandage on your cut?” said Carlo, touching her lip and kissing her hands, while Snowy, refreshed and exuberant, trotted round the garden like a fresh pony. Sashenka looked down the corridor toward Vanya’s study, the possibilities ricocheting around her brain. She was almost glad Vanya had hit her and that he had not taken it out on the children. She would rather he beat her black and blue if it meant Benya would not suffer. But what if Benya wasn’t who he seemed to be? Suppose he’d been arrested not out of a cuckold’s vengeance but because he was an “unclean element,” some sort of Trotskyite spy? Or suppose Vanya had invented the arrest just to torment her? Or suppose Mendel was in real trouble and had somehow embroiled her and her friends? As each plausible scheme ripened in her imagination, she felt another lurch of fear until one of the children called her.

“Mamochka, are you watching me?” First Snowy, then Carlo. Sashenka almost sleepwalked through the exasperatingly slow afternoon, a perfect example of the delights of spring in the silver woods of the Moscow plain.

What have I done, she thought, what have I done?

At last, it was 8:00 p.m. and bedtime.

“Will you stroke me to sleep?” Carlo mumbled, brown eyes on hers.

“Eleven strokes on your forehead,” she said.

“Yes, Mamochka, eleven strokes.”

Usually, Sashenka was completely engrossed in Carlo but today her mind was somewhere else. Where was she? With Benya in the cellars of the Lubianka? With Mendel in the dungeons of hell? And where did this leave her and her family? She prayed for a release from the suspense, and yet she feared it.

“Mamochka? Can I tell you something? Mama?”

“Yes, Carlo.”

“I love you in my heart, Mama.” This was a new expression and it hit Sashenka hard. She seized his sturdy cub’s body and hugged him tightly.

“What a lovely thing to say, darling. Mama loves you in her heart too.”

She laid her hands on his satiny forehead and they counted aloud: she stroked his face eleven times until his eyes were closed. Mercifully, Snowy was exhausted and went straight to sleep without a fuss.

It was a lush, sweltering night. The house was patrolled by fat fluttering moths, sleepy obese bluebottles and swarming greenflies. The ceiling fans whirred. Carolina was in her room.

No one had phoned.

Vanya went to sit on the rocking chair on the veranda, smoking and drinking. Jews, Sashenka thought, don’t drink when they’re in crisis, they get rashes and palpitations. She remembered her father. Vanya’s chair creaked back and forth and she heard the clanking of her father’s Trotting Chair all those years ago.

It was time. Crows cawed in the linden tree. Sashenka approached her husband nervously.

“Vanya?” she said. She needed to know how he had found out about Benya, what he knew. Until then, confess to nothing.

“Vanya, I did nothing,” she lied. “I flirted. I’m so sorry…” She expected more severity from him but when he turned his face to her, it was clammy and swollen with tears. Vanya never cried except when he was very drunk, during sad movies, at regimental reunions or when he saw Snowy in the school play.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Do you hate me?”

He shook his head.

“Please just tell me what you know.”

Vanya tried to speak but his generous mouth, swaggering jaw and teddy-bear eyes lost their definition, as he cried silently in that warm dusk.

“I know I’ve done something very wrong. Vanya, I am so sorry!”

“I know everything,” he said.

“Everything? What is there to know?”

He groaned with an awesome, weary pain. “Don’t bother, Sashenka. We’re beyond husbands and wives now.”

“You’re scaring me, Vanya.”

Tears flowed down his cheeks as the blood of the sunset spread across the sky.

26

Sashenka stood beside the rocking chair, breathing in the scent of the jasmine. She thought of Mendel. She thought of Benya. And the children asleep in their rooms.

Finally Vanya got up from his chair. He was drunk, his eyes hot and gritty—but drunk in the way that hard drinkers ride the alcohol—and he pulled her to him, lifting her feet off the ground. For the first time in a long while, she was grateful for his touch. She noticed the rabbits in the hutch and the pony gazing peacefully over the fence—but she and Vanya were as alone as they had ever been.

“I can separate from you,” she said. “No one needs to know. Let me separate and you’ll be rid of me. Divorce me!” (Just hours ago, this might have been a fantasy escape with Benya—now it seemed a measure of desperation.) “I did something terrible! I’m sorry, so sorry…”

“Don’t say that,” whispered Vanya, squeezing her tighter. “I’m angry with you, of course, you fool. But we don’t have time to be hurt.”

“For God’s sake, tell me what you mean? Who knows?”

“They know everything—and it’s all my fault,” he said.

“Please! Just tell me what’s happened?”