Sashenka

Sashenka stood up and straightened her clothes. Everyone was safe. Hoping no NKVD informant had noticed her hysteria, she tidied her face, got to her feet and crossed Gorky Street, glancing down to the Kremlin and up at Uncle Gideon’s window. There was no point in calling him though she longed to do so. Her phones might be bugged and he would find out soon enough. She beamed him her love: would he ever know it? Now she thought about her father again: where was he? Would she join him in some forgotten grave? She could not, just could not conceive of her own vanishing from the surface of the turning world.

She chose a different route to Petrovka, not via Pushkin Square but taking the Stoleshnikov Alley. She tried to absorb everything—the little bars there, the Aragvi Georgian restaurant, the shoeshine stall, the kiosk selling newspapers, Zviad the Mingrelian’s barbershop—but nothing stayed with her. Like the night. There was too much to take in.

Where would Snowy and Carlo be now? Don’t even glance at your watch, she told herself. Suppose you are being observed: they might ask why you are checking the time constantly. But the train to the south was leaving at 10:00 a.m. and now it was 9:43. Her children were on their way.

32

The doorman straightened as Sashenka arrived at work; her secretary, Galya, blushed at the sight of her; Klavdia did not even look up as she passed. Everyone knew that Sashenka was no longer a real person. She was a Former Person; worse, they all knew somehow that she was the wife of an Enemy and Vanya was in the cellars of the Internal Prison of the Lubianka—and so was Benya Golden, her new writer whom she had met at her dacha on May Day night, with whom she had left the office, with whom she had been seen walking…

Sashenka sat at her desk. No one came in. She spent the entire day there, except for a brief visit to the cafeteria, where she ate some borscht alone. She tried to read the proofs of the magazine but could not concentrate. She had known many friends and comrades who had endured shadows and clouds over them but who had continued as if nothing had happened—and they had survived. Like Uncle Gideon. Keep your nerve and you might just keep your children, she promised herself.

She returned home in the evening.

The high ceilings, the shiny parquet floor, the ornate moldings on the walls, the dappled glossy brown of the Karelian pine furniture, the green lamps with the muscular bronze figures belonged to her life with the children. She hated the apartment now. It was echoingly quiet. She longed to look into the children’s rooms. Don’t do that to yourself. It will break you up, send you mad, she told herself. But just a glance?

Dropping her handbag and coat, she rushed down the corridor, throwing herself onto their beds and smelling their pillows, first Snowy’s then Carlo’s. There, at last, she could cry. She imitated their voices and she talked to their photographs. Then she burned their photographs, all of them, and their passports too. Snowy had left most of her cushions and Carlo had left most of his army of rabbits. Sashenka took them to bed with her, company for the sleepless night that lay ahead.

Presently she packed herself a suitcase with her toothbrush, warm clothes, underwear. She chose her best. Why not?

The next day she went to work again, taking her suitcase. And the next day. And the day after that. The stress was making her ill. She had a sore throat, her face was drawn and she could barely eat. At night she dreamed of Vanya and the children. Where were they now? Three nights on the road: were they with a family? Or in some railway station, lonely, hungry, lost? She talked to the children all the time, aloud, like a crazy woman.

Benya Golden came to her in the night. She awoke filled with regret, guilt, disgust—and, horribly, a feverish excitement. She hated him suddenly. She would like to kill him with her bare hands, gouge his eyes out: was it him, with his smug defiance, his refusal to write, his curiosity about the Organs, his famous friends in Paris and Madrid—was it his connections that would kill her and steal her children? Yes, she had loved him, yes, he had given her the wildest happiness, but now, compared to her love for her children—it was dust!

On the third day, she saw something different in the eyes of the guards. When she greeted the janitor, he looked up toward her apartment and she knew it was about to happen. She stopped on the stairs, almost relieved that this limbo was over.