Sashenka

He pulled on his tunic, wiping his forehead with a yellow silk kerchief. “Enough now! Get her cleaned up, Comrade Rodos, let her get some sleep, cool her cell down and give her some coffee when she wakes. Then give her a pen and paper and get Mogilchuk to charm her. I’m off back to the party where so many mares await me! Thank heaven we can stop before we ruin her looks altogether. This is hard work, Sashenka, for a man who loves women. It’s not easy, pure torture, not easy at all.” And with a fleshy wave of jeweled fingers and a gleaming boot kicking the door shut, he was gone.

Sashenka slept all the next day. The cell was deliciously cool and dark but her chest was agony—perhaps they had broken a rib? Some time in the night a doctor, a grey-bearded, white-coated specialist, fallen from his fancy city practice into this world of the living dead, came to see her. She was half awake but she dreamed that he was the vanished Professor Israel Paltrovich who had delivered Snowy in the Kremlin Hospital. Something about his hush of surprise when he saw it was her, something about his aristocratic and soft-spoken bedside manner, even though he himself looked so broken, something about his gentle reassurance in the middle of the night, reminded her of him. She wanted to talk to him about Snowy.

“Professor, is it you…?”

He put his calm fingers on her hand and squeezed it.

“Just rest,” he said, and more quietly, “sleep, dear.” He gave her injections and rubbed some healing cream into her muscles.

When she woke up, she could not move. Her body was black and blue, and her urine was red. She ate and slept some more, then they let her wash and walk in the exercise yard, where, hobbling along, she stared at the gorgeous turquoise tent above her. The air was racy and fresh and warm. It was as if she had been born again today.

She had been lucky after a fashion, she told herself. What luck to be loved by Lala and raised by her; to marry Vanya and create those children; to have enjoyed the seven-thousand-ruby caresses of Benya Golden, one wild, reckless love affair in her life of good sense and hard work. She had known Lenin and Stalin in person, the titans of human history. Given that it was all about to end, thank God she had known such things. What riches, what times she had enjoyed!

They would draw it out of her, she knew, and she would deliver all they wanted—and more. The words she would utter, the confessions she would make, were a long form of suicide, but addictively indispensable to her one reader: the Instantzia, Comrade Stalin, who would find in her breathless reminiscences all he had ever wanted to believe about the world and the people he hated. Vanya had told her about Stalin’s lurid visions and she would pander to every one of them. Vanya, if he was still alive, would do the same, less flamboyantly. She did not know, probably would never know now, why she, Mendel, Benya and Vanya had been arrested in the first place. The workings of spiders and webs were now beyond her. All that mattered was that she was the center of it all, she had destroyed them all. She and Peter Sagan.

They might just keep her on ice for months but by the time they sentenced her (and this part, this snuffing out, this unspeakable ending, this violent conclusion of the mysterious, boundless, vibrant thing called Life, she still found unimaginable), the children would be settled somewhere with new names and destinies, safe and sound and in the world of the living—not in her world of the dead. She beamed her love to them, her thanks to Satinov, her love for those precious to her. She had to let them go. She had been a Communist since she was sixteen. It had been her religion, the rapture of absolutism, the science of history. But now she saw, late in life, that this, her special fantastical confessional suicide, was her last mission. She had become a parent again, just as she ceased to be one. She was pregnant with purpose.

In the exercise yard, Sashenka saw wispy clouds in the dancing shapes of a train, a lion and a bearded rabbinical profile. Was that her grandfather, the Rabbi of Turbin? And could that be a rabbit and a pink cushion, lit by the rays of a sun just out of sight…Perhaps, after all, the mystics were right, life was just a chimera, a fire in the desert, a fevered trance, but the pain was real.

When the time comes for the Highest Measure, she promised herself, I’ll welcome the seven grams of lead and I’ll leave an expression of love for Snowy and Carlo out there on the gates of eternity. It was time for the final act.

47

“Here’s your prize,” said Kobylov, welcoming her into the interrogation room. The secret policeman watched as the beautiful prisoner caught first a whiff and then the strong aroma of the burnt, slightly sour coffee beans.

“You must confess your criminal and treacherous activities,” said Mogilchuk, pouring her coffee out of a brass flask.