Sashenka

Today, she rose very early and walked across Beria Square to the Armenian Market, where she bought provisions. Returning to her room, she filled her suitcase not only with clothes but also with a bag of flat Georgian lavashi loaves, cured meats and candies. Taking a photograph of an awkward schoolgirl in the uniform of a Tsarist boarding school off the wall, she removed its back and took out some notes. She hid two hundred rubles in her girdle, kissed the photograph and replaced it on the wall.

She checked herself in the mirror and tutted: those apple cheeks in that heart-shaped face were now weathered and coarsened; there were bags under her eyes; and her clothes were dignified but frayed at the edges. She looked fifty but she was younger. How on earth, she asked herself, did you end up here? She shook her head and smiled.

A few hours later she caught the streetcar to the station, where she bought a ticket to Baku and from there to Rostov-on-Don. She changed at Baku Station, a place teeming with Muslims, Turks and Tartars in Soviet uniforms, skullcaps and robes, carrying chickens and sheep and children. One family offered her some Turkish plov, cold lamb stew, and she was grateful. She waited for her train. When it was called, it seemed that the entire station charged at it but her Turkish friends helped her and pulled her up into their carriage. She sat close to them and was again grateful for their protection. On the train, she tried to sleep but could not stop reflecting on the strange events of the previous week.

Four days earlier, a sweaty official in a Party tunic had arrived to inspect the residence and work permits of the employees at the café. All were asked to go to the Party Headquarters, the old Viceroy’s Palace, on Beria Boulevard to have their papers checked. Tengiz told her she was to go first. This was odd but one did not ask questions: checks, cleansings and purges were part of everyday life. Her husband was already gone, certainly dead; and she had been expecting them to come for her. Surely she would be arrested and vanish in her turn. Well, did it matter anymore?

The woman tramped up the hill to the splendid white Viceroy’s Palace, from where the First Secretary ruled Georgia. The wait made her very anxious. There were many questions she longed to ask. But like everyone else, she was helpless before the clumsy and colossal state. Questions from you could lead to questions about you—it was better to keep your head down. She waited like the other coughing, scratching, grunting, depressed people, old and young, in the filthy anteroom with its battered wooden window.

When it was her turn, she passed her papers through the hole. She was then called through into a grubby, unpainted office. She braced herself for the rude tyranny of some minor Georgian bureaucrat. But the official who awaited her was not that type at all. A slim and handsome man, clearly a Party boss, stood up when she came in, drew out a chair for her and then took his place behind the desk. His Stalinka tunic fitted his broad shoulders and slim waist perfectly. He radiated the energy of the Stalin generation and appeared much too sophisticated to belong in this chipped office. He must be a Muscovite, a potentate, she thought. Yet his blue eyes were bright, questioning.

“Audrey Lewis?”

She nodded.

“Don’t be nervous. I’ve always known you were here in Tiflis. Do you remember me?” he asked. “I saw you long ago in St. Petersburg. The house on Greater Maritime Street, the day Sashenka’s mother died. Three comrades came to collect her that day. One was her uncle Mendel. The second was Vanya. I was the third. Now, Lala, there is something I want you to do.”

34

The smell of sweat and clove cologne rose from Commissar Kobylov’s expansive neck and thighs during the ride through the summer night in Moscow. Sashenka was squeezed next to him and he was enjoying their proximity, shifting his elephantine bottom and wrinkling his nose at her like an oversized tabby cat.

The car drove up the hill to the brooding granite of the Lubianka, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, and then swerved into a side street, through the opening gates of a courtyard, driving Kobylov’s spicy breath onto her neck. But already Sashenka did not care. She was trying to pace herself, to conserve her energy, as all prisoners try to do.

The lights over the courtyard—invisible from the exterior—illuminated a scene that resembled a railway station where people arrived but never left. Sashenka guessed that this hidden nine-story building was the dreaded Internal Prison. Black Crow vans and Stolypin trucks, back doors open to reveal barred cages, unloaded bleary-eyed men in nightshirts with bleeding lips, shrieking women in cocktail dresses and smeared eye shadow, piles of badly bound papers and battered leather suitcases. Each of the arrivals had the white face of a once-settled person falling into an abyss of fear.