Sashenka

41

A cadaverous old man with yellow translucent skin and tufts of pale hair on a peeling, scabby scalp sat opposite her in blue prison uniform. He sucked his gums, jerkily glanced around him, and scratched himself in bursts, rolling his eyes, followed by long minutes of comatose stillness.

Sashenka had never met a Zek, but everything about this broken-down ruin shouted Zek, a veteran of the Gulags. She sensed that he had spent years in Vorkuta or Kolyma, breaking rocks, cutting down trees. He no longer even smelled of prisons or possessed the shifty, artful craving for survival that she herself now displayed. This meager husk existed without hope or spirit. Now she saw the true meaning of that expression favored by Beria and even her Vanya: “ground into camp dust.” She had never understood it before.

At last she dared to peer into the face, tears welling: was it Baron Samuil Zeitlin, arrested in 1937? No, it could not be her father. This man did not look anything like her father.

Kobylov smacked his lips with a sportsman’s glee, and Sashenka observed how the investigators noted his impatience.

“Do you recognize each other?” asked Mogilchuk keenly.

“Speak up, prisoner,” said Rodos with surprising warmth. “You recognize her?”

Sashenka searched her memory. Who was he? He must be in his eighties or more.

He swallowed loudly and opened his mouth. He had no teeth, and his gums were pale with ulcerated streaks. She noticed a mark on his neck and realized it was blue-black bruising.

“It’s her! It’s her!” the creature said in a strikingly educated, level and delicate voice. “Of course I recognize her.”

“What’s her name?” demanded Rodos briskly.

“She looks exactly the same. But better.”

“Speak up! Who is she?”

The husk smirked at Rodos. “You think I’ve forgotten?”

“Do you want me to remind you?” said Rodos, still playing with the coarse hairs that grew out of his mole.

“What will you do with me after this? Put me out of my misery?”

Rodos ran a hand over his bumpy scalp. “If you don’t want any more French wrestling…” and then he stood up and shrieked in a voice of maniacal violence: “What is her name?”

The prisoner stiffened. Sashenka jumped, breaking into a sweat.

“Are you going to beat me again? You don’t have to. That’s Baroness Alexandra Zeitlin—Sashsh-enk-ka, whom I once loved.”

Rodos walked to the door. “I have another appointment,” he said to Kobylov.

“Enjoy it,” said Kobylov. “Carry on, Investigator Mogilchuk.”

“Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn,” said Mogilchuk, “do you recognize the prisoner?”

Sashenka shook her head, fascinated and horrified.

“Prisoner, your name?”

“Peter Ivanovich Pavlov.” It was another man’s voice, from another city in another vanished time.

“That’s not your real name, is it?” coaxed Mogilchuk gently. “That’s the false name under which you masqueraded as a teacher in Irkutsk for more than ten years when you were really a White Guardist spy. Now look at the accused and tell her your real name.”

42

In another interrogation room, Benya Golden sat in a chair in front of Investigator Boris Rodos.

“You’ve been arrested for treacherous anti-Soviet activities,” Rodos said. “Do you acknowledge your guilt?”

“No.”

“Why do you think you’ve been arrested?”

“A chain of coincidences and my inability to write.”

Rodos grunted and peered at his papers, with a sneer that further flattened his broad boxer’s nose. “So you’re a writer, are you? No wonder Mogilchuk wanted to interrogate you. I thought you were just a filthy traitor and a piece of shit. A writer, eh?”

Benya could not contain his surprise. “I wrote a book called Spanish Stories that was a success two years ago and then—”

“What the fuck do I care, you vain little prick?” spat Rodos. “I just see a smug Jew who I could break in half like a stick. I could grind you to dust.”

Benya did not doubt it. Rodos, with his squashed bald head, overdeveloped shoulders and short legs, reminded him of a hyena. Benya was scared of losing the things he loved, his child and, above all, his darling, his Sashenka. They were all that mattered now.

“Again, why did we arrest you?”

“I honestly don’t know. I lived in Paris, I was associated with French and American writers. I knew some of the generals arrested for being Trotskyites.”

“So? Don’t make me open the drawer on my desk where I keep my sticks and smash your Yid hook nose into pulp. I like French wrestling—that’s what we call it here. Confess your criminal and amoral activities and I won’t even have to raise a sweat. Tell me the full story of your sexual depravity in the Metropole Hotel, room four hundred and three.”

“That?” exclaimed Benya. So had he been arrested because of his affair with Sashenka? Gideon had warned him about meddling with a secret policeman’s wife. Even in such puritanical times that couldn’t be so serious, could it? Perhaps this meant that he would be sent into provincial exile, far from Moscow, but at least he’d live. He had to protect Sashenka.