Sashenka

The Judas port slid open, muddy, bored eyes blinked; it shut again. Sashenka lay back sweltering on her bunk, falling in and out of sleep. How many days since she had slept for longer than ten minutes? She had lost count. She had lost the sense of day and night. There was no window in her cell, just a brilliant light that penetrated and burned even the deepest and darkest and coolest chambers of her soul.

The confrontation with Captain Sagan had changed everything. She had thought about it all day and into the night, slipping in and out of delirium. Awake, she dreamed of the children, of Vanya, of Benya Golden, and debated absurd questions: could a woman love two men at the same time, one as a lover, one as a husband? Oh yes, it was possible. But each time, she passed into dreamless unconsciousness, she slipped under the surface of fathomless black water where she saw nothing.

Then she was shaken awake roughly. “No sleeping!”

She did not even know if Vanya was alive. She knew they would have been merciless. He was one of them, he knew where all the bodies lay buried, and now they were crushing him. She longed to see him.

She thought about asking to meet him to confirm that she should take the next step, but she feared that any suspicion that they had coordinated their plans would draw the investigators toward the children. They had had more than a week now, darling Cushion and Bunny, to go on their dread adventure.

What was their smell? Hay and vanilla. How did Snowy say, “Let’s do the Cushion dance”? Sashenka struggled to get the children’s intonation right, sketching their faces again and again, but sometimes the shape of a nose or the curve of a forehead (those delicious foreheads, her favorite places to kiss, just where the hair met the temple, oh, she could nuzzle them there forever!) confounded her and they sank beneath the remorseless black water. Perhaps this was Nature making it easier for her, allowing her to forget.

Her mind was barely functioning, she scarcely registered the life of the prison around her: she just existed on the conveyor. But if she went insane, she would be no use to Carlo and Snowy. She sensed it was time for the next step.

It was deep in the night when they came to get her. The whole Soviet government functioned throughout the night, from Stalin down. How naïve she had been about Vanya coming home at dawn, smelling like an old wolf, as if he had been in a barroom brawl. His secrecy had suited her too because she had never had to ask what he was doing all night. Now she knew the compromise they had both made.

When they reached the interrogation rooms that existed, in Sashenka’s mind, in limbo, exactly halfway between the paneled offices at the front of the Lubianka complex and the dungeons of the Interior Prison, she was relieved, just as she had been oddly relieved when they had arrested her.

She walked into the room and was struck so hard on the back with a rubber truncheon that she fell over. She was kicked viciously, which made her curl up with a groan. The truncheons—there were two men in there—fell on her back, her breasts, her stomach, wherever she turned, but especially on her legs and feet. She screamed in pain, and blood ran down her face into her eyes. She tried to pretend that this was a very unpleasant medical procedure that was necessary and even therapeutic and would be over soon, but this did not work for long.

In the compacted odors of vodka sweat, cologne and pork sausage that oozed from her persecutors, in the agony of the blows that struck her breasts, in the virile grunts and heaves of these unfit men as they swung their truncheons, Sashenka recognized that her tormentors found berserk sport in beating her. Perhaps her request had interrupted a banquet in the NKVD Club—or even an orgy at a safe house somewhere.

The men halted briefly, breathing heavily. Wiping her eyes, shivering and gasping with agony, she squinted up at Kobylov and Rodos, in boots, white shirts and jodhpurs held up with suspenders. They stood together, such different men but with the same eyes: bloodshot, yellowed and wild, like wolves caught in the headlights.

“I want to confess,” she said as loudly as she could. “Everything. I beg you. Stop it now!”

46

“Hurrah! Hurrah!” shouted Kobylov, jumping up and down like a schoolboy at a soccer match. “Christ is risen!”

He remembered his own mother, the big-breasted cheerful Georgian woman who so cherished him. The last time he was with her in her new apartment in Tiflis, she had warned him: “Careful of the unhappiness you cause, Bogdan! Remember God and Jesus Christ!”