Sashenka

When she let herself back into the apartment, the study was unsealed and she smelled cloves. She walked past the Red Corner into the sitting room and saw plates of half-eaten food on the dining-room table. A very large man in a specially tailored NKVD uniform lay with his patent leather boots on the sofa. High boots creaking, he got to his feet and gave Sashenka a gleaming white smile. His skin was brown and glossy, his hair kinky, and he had colorful rings on every fat brown finger. His clove-scented cologne was so pungent that Sashenka could taste it on her tongue. He was not alone. A couple of other Chekists tottered to their feet, perhaps a little drunk, sniggering.

Sashenka was wearing a pink cotton summer dress. She had had her hair styled recently, slightly curled at the front, arranged the new way in a permanent wave, and her face was made up. She drew herself up to her proudest.

“Comrades, sorry to have kept you. Have you been waiting long? I am Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn, whom Lenin called Comrade Snowfox.”

“Well, comrade, what a nice welcome,” said Commissar-General of State Security (Second Degree) and Deputy People’s Commissar NKVD Bogdan “the Bull” Kobylov. “You know Comrade Beria is an admirer of yours?”

Sashenka took a deep breath, nostrils flaring, grey eyes narrowed.

“I’ve been expecting you any minute. I’m almost pleased…”

“Now I see why Comrade Beria speaks so highly of you,” he said.

Like many oversized men, his voice was mellifluous, almost effete. Sashenka despised him. She thought of her children far away—they had been gone for three nights now. She knew that within minutes she would be stepping off the edge of the world but she remembered what she had to do. She coolly took out a cigarette and held it out like a film star. Kobylov, fluttering his rings on amber-skinned fingers, leaned over and lit it for her. She could smell his oily flesh—and those cloves.

“Thank you, comrade.” She inhaled, closing her eyes and blowing out the blue smoke. Someone was playing the piano in a nearby apartment and a child was singing, a family in a normal world. “What do you want?”

“When it’s a pretty woman,” said Kobylov, wrinkling his nose at her, “I like to come and get her myself.”

33

A thousand miles to the south in the small city of Tiflis, a grey-haired woman was packing an overnight bag. She lived alone in a single room, close to the city center, down a dark, overgrown lane just below the sulphur baths, the old town and the Orthodox church with the round Georgian tower.

Her tiny room, which contained a bed, a lamp, a wardrobe and old photographs of a rich family, all waxed mustaches, bowler hats, sailor suits and shiny limousines, was in an elegant mansion, once the property of a line of Georgian princes, the last of whom had been an eccentric antiquarian, book collector and owner of the sulphur baths. (He was now a taxi driver in Paris.) At the time of the 1905 revolution, he had sold the palace to a Jewish oil magnate based in St. Petersburg. Now the mansion was divided up into small apartments and the princely library on the ground floor was a café, a flamboyant venue of a kind that no longer existed in Moscow or anywhere in Russia proper. But here in Georgia, despite the recent killings that had decimated the intelligentsia, this curiosity shop of a café, with its damp old books, candlesticks overflowing with wax and dense, curling vines covering its steamed-up windows, still prospered, serving Turkish coffee and Georgian dishes.

The grey-haired lady worked in the café all day as a waitress. It was not well paid but it was a decent job for those times; she had the correct papers; it was all legal. She kept herself to herself, never chatted with customers or even with the other waitresses, who had given up gossiping about her. It was clear that she was a bourgeois and that she did not belong there, but provincial cities in those days were full of such flotsam and Georgia was more tolerant than anywhere else. It was said that Communism did not extend much beyond the limits of the capital. She had once lived with an older man but he had gone and she showed no interest in discussing her private life.

The waitress’s Russian was excellent, her Georgian more than adequate, but she spoke both with an accent. She was polite to everyone but they noticed she reserved her real solicitude for the library itself. The kitchen and bar had been jerry-built between two bookcases at the end of the dark old room. The humidity of the kettles and cauldrons had rotted the woodwork; the books were peeling and warping; the old pictures were mildewed and yellowing—but she did what she could, dusting the books, sometimes drying them out in her own room upstairs.

On the previous day, the woman had asked for a week off, something that had never happened before. But she had years of unused vacation, so Tengiz, the manager, gave her two weeks instead.