Sashenka

Holding the side of her face, which seemed to be twitching of its own accord, she peered through the shiny boots in front of her at a bundle of clothes spattered in dried mud. She realized it was alive, quivering, stirring. Her gaze was drawn to the mass of raw red and blue and yellow bruises on bare skin, to fingers that bled from the tips, to an unshaven face with red-lidded eyes so swollen they could barely open. Her mouth gaped in shock.

“What do you think you’re doing bringing that in here?” asked Beria. “Didn’t you know I had Sashenka in here? You didn’t knock, Comrade Kobylov! Tut, tut, bad manners!”

“Sorry, Lavrenti Pavlovich, I didn’t know you were busy,” said the giant Kobylov. “We need to work a little on this old bag of shit, another stubborn case. But we don’t want her to see anything that might alarm her, do we?”

“Absolutely not,” said Beria. “Help her up and take her back to her cell.”

“Nasty bruise!” said Kobylov, touching her cheek and wrinkling his shiny nose. “You must have walked into something.” He helped her to her feet. Sashenka could not take her eyes off the body on the rough stained carpet. “Come on, we must protect you from this unsavory vision—it’s so hard to restrain Comrade Rodos when he gets the bit between his teeth.”

“Rodos?” she murmured.

On the other side of the room, a stocky man with a hairy mole on his cheek, a pointed face and a head like a chicken meatball was caressing a black truncheon.

Investigator Rodos, wearing dirty boots and a grey tunic girded with a wide army belt, shrugged modestly and, with a defiant glance at Sashenka, he started to land blows on the belly of the man on the carpet, raising the truncheon very slowly and deliberately over his shoulder as if he were lobbing a ball. The man on the floor groaned each time, like a cow that Sashenka had once seen giving birth at the Zeitlin estates in Ukraine.

“It’s rude to stare but it is fascinating, isn’t it?” said Beria as she left.

Kobylov took her arm and led her out into the corridor, where Investigator Mogilchuk’s toothy smile awaited her. “We’ll meet again, I hope,” said Kobylov, returning to Beria’s office in a waft of cloves.

Sashenka was shaking. Unable to control herself, she bent over and and vomited up the food she had eaten, which left a cheesy taste in her mouth. The thudding of the truncheons on the prone man was pulsating in her ears. She could not believe what she had seen. Who was it…? She knew—or was she seeing things? Was this how Beria treated Old Bolsheviks? Was that what Vanya did all night before coming home to the dacha and the children? Was this what had happened to the former owners of their dacha and their apartment?

She recited to herself Vanya’s instructions. “Confess nothing whatever happens until you know they have something so damning…I’ll never get out, but you, Sashenka, you can see the children again. Never forget them! Sign nothing whatever they do to you!” She still did not believe they had anything on her and it was clear that none of her associates had so far confessed. She could still get out if she kept her head. She had to hold on to this, whatever it cost her.

But where was Vanya? Where was Benya? She remembered their times together in the hotel, in the garden shed, kissing in the street like youngsters, singing “Black Eyes” by the river, exchanging pressed flowers as the most romantic days of her life. The seven thousand rubies of the Kremlin stars were theirs still! She loved them both now, Vanya and Benya, differently, insistently. They were her family now. They were all she had in this fathomless canyon of shadows.

They marched her back up the stairs, and down more stairs, out of the world of Karelian pine, palms and clove cologne and back through the pungency of cabbage, urine and detergent, into the Internal Prison. She had to lean on the wall a couple of times to keep herself from falling over. She touched her cheek; it was bleeding near the eye, swelling up.

Snowy, Carlo, Cushion, Bunny! Snowy, Carlo, Cushion, Bunny! she recited.

Were they safe? She calculated it had been six days since they left; three nights, three days since she was arrested. The knowledge that Satinov would keep the children safe formed a warm and untouchable locket of love deep inside her.

“Here we are, home again,” said Mogilchuk, shoving her into her cell. “Rest up. We’ll talk in the morning.” Sashenka sank heavily onto the bottom bunk in her cell. “Oh—and did you recognize your uncle Mendel? I think it was him—at least what was left of him.”

37

That night they moved her to a new cell with bright lights—but they refused to dim them. The pipes in her cell shook, groaned and started to heat even though it was high summer. In the cells, the air was already stifling.

Sashenka banged on her door.

“Sit on your bed, prisoner.” The locks rasped open. Two guards stood in the doorway.