Sashenka

An officer opened Kobylov’s door. Breathing heavily, he raised his clumsy boots and leaned out until his weight landed him on the ground. The officer helped him out.

Sashenka’s door was opened and a Chekist gripped her arm and guided her into a large basement with chipped arches and battered wooden walls, where yet more bewildered people stood in lines. The room stank of cabbage soup, urine and despair. Sashenka—a special case, she noted ruefully—was led to the front.

“I am a Soviet woman and a member of the Party,” she told a bored Chekist. She had helped build this Soviet system; she believed this oppressive machine was necessary to create the new world according to the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist science of dialectical materialism; she wanted the Chekists to know she still believed in it even though it was about to consume her. But the Chekist just shook his head and told her to empty her pockets, handbag, suitcase. He waved a yellow hand to hurry her and filled in a form. Full name, patronymic, year of birth. He peered at her. Color of hair? Color of eyes? Distinguishing marks? He pressed her fingers on a blue inkpad and took her prints. She received a prisoner number.

“Watch? Rings? Any money?” He noted her belongings and cash, gave her the form to sign and tore off a receipt. Behind her, other bodies pushed against her. “Women that way!” pointed the Chekist. Sashenka remembered her arrest in St. Petersburg and the identical questions—but now she was much more afraid. The Tsarist Empire was soft; she had helped create this man-eating USSR.

She entered a small room where a woman in a white coat sat on a desk smoking an acrid makhorka cigarette.

“Clothes off!” the woman barked.

Sashenka removed her dress and shoes. She stood in her underwear and stockings, shivering slightly in the night chill of the cold concrete. She remembered that her underwear was silk. The woman’s beady eyes noticed too.

“Everything off! Don’t waste my time, and don’t be stuck up!” The woman rammed the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and pulled up her sleeves to reveal powerful hairy forearms.

Sashenka removed her brassiere and stood with her hands over her breasts. Not bad breasts after two children, she told herself stoically.

“And the rest!”

She took off her teddy, standing shyly, a hand over her pubis.

“No one’s interested in you and your clipped little tail. Move it! Mouth open!”

The woman stuck her fingers into Sashenka’s mouth. They tasted of stale cheese.

“Hands on desk now. Legs open.”

She pushed Sashenka’s head down. A finger scooped painfully into her vagina and then plunged into her rectum. Sashenka gasped at the invasion.

“Toughen up, princess. It wasn’t torture! Get dressed.” She took Sashenka’s shoes. “Take out the laces. Give me that belt. No pens allowed.” The woman measured her prisoner’s height and wrote it down. “Sit!”

Sashenka fell back into a chair, relieved to be dressed again.

“Vlad!” called the woman.

A skinny old photographer with slicked-back hair, a tiny head and a worn blue suit appeared in the room: clearly an alcoholic, he was shaking and could hardly hold his heavy camera. A round flashlight blossomed out of it like a chrome sunflower.

“Look at me,” he said.

Sashenka looked into the camera, wearily at first, but then she tried to primp herself up, touching her hair. Suppose one day her children saw that picture? She fixed her eyes on the lens trying to transmit a message: Snowy and Carlo—I love you, I love you! This is your mother! Remember me! Dream of me!

“Keep still! Done.” The bulb flashed with a sizzling pop. Sashenka saw silver stars melting across a black sky.

A guard led her by the arm through a locked door that clicked behind them. Her shoes were loose without the laces and her dress no longer fitted without the belt. There were three guards now, one in front, one holding her, one behind. She passed metal cages, climbed up steel staircases and down stone ones, waited in concrete assembly areas, marched along rows of cells with steel doors and sliding eyeholes. She heard the percussion of prisons—coughing and swearing, the clank of locks, slam of doors and scrape of feet, the clack of bunches of keys swinging. Floors of worn parquet glistened with burning detergent.

The smell of prisons—urine, sweat, feces, disinfectant, cabbage soup, the oil of guns and locks—reminded her of Piter in 1916. Back again—but this time Papa won’t be getting me out! she thought sadly. She felt that Vanya and Benya and Uncle Mendel were all nearby, and somehow it comforted her. In one corridor, another prisoner approached with a guard—she glimpsed a pretty young woman, younger than her, with a black eye.