Sashenka

And Lala had understood. “I know what sensitive children they are, Carolina. I cared for Sashenka for so long…”

“What was she like?” asked Carolina. “Was she like…?” and she looked toward the bedroom—but then she could speak no longer. No more details. It would be more than either of them could bear.

The two women, the Englishwoman and the Volga German, embraced in tears. In the end, lying each with one of the children, they managed to fall asleep too in the warm hotel room looking out over the Don, where Peter the Great had once sailed.

As she packed her bag and caught the bus to return to her little village, Carolina remembered how the three figures had wound their way toward the station. They were pulling the tottering Lala in different directions, laughing, she thought, from the way Carlo was tossing his head back and Snowy was skipping. She realized that she was seeing Snowy and Carlo Palitsyn for the last time. Very soon, they would be different children with new names, belonging to other families.

“Good-bye, my absolute darlings!” she said aloud. “God bless you. May my love travel with you wherever you go and whomsoever you become.”

To what awaited her, she gave not a thought.

There were such kind women as Carolina, in the agony of Russia, when even the most decent people became cruel or turned their eyes away. Such paragons were rare. But they existed. They alone kept the candles of love alight.

49

It was high summer, the time of year when Tiflis becomes a balmy, baking city of outdoor cafés and strolling boulevardiers. In the Café Biblioteka, Lala Lewis was pouring red wine for one of her regulars when the doors opened.

An ancient waxy-skinned man entered in a battered, dusty sepia-colored suit with a little leather suitcase. He sported a neat grey mustache, and walked painfully in pigeon steps toward the cashier’s desk. Tengiz the manager was not sure if he recognized this ghostly wraith: could it be a miracle? One of the “lucky stiffs” back from the dead?

The Englishwoman watched his staggering progress silently for a moment, her eyes opening wider and wider, her mouth breaking into a scream before any sound came out.

Then she gave the most girlish yelp, as if she were sixteen years old, and almost skipped across the wooden floor to meet her husband. She had recognized the “former person” Samuil Zeitlin, who had been arrested in 1937, sentenced to death but reprieved by a centimeter of ink from the pen of Comrade Stalin and dispatched to the Kolyma Gulags in northeastern Siberia. Then, a few short months ago, against all the odds of Fate, Zeitlin, the ultimate class enemy, had been reprieved again.

“Good God!” said Lala in English. “Samuil! You’re alive! You’re ALIVE!” She threw herself into his weak embrace, nearly knocking him over. It had never occurred to her that he might still live. She quickly poured him a thimble of brandy and he swallowed it and sighed.

“Thank God you’re still here, darling Lala,” he said, falling to his knees, right there in the café, and kissing her hands and even her feet.

“Let’s get you up,” she said, pulling him to his feet, anxious not to make any more of a scene. “You really are a miracle. Since the Terror ended, a few have come back—lucky stiffs is what they call them.”

“If you only knew, but you’d never believe it, the things I saw on the way to Kolyma, the things I saw men do to other men…”

Lala sat him down at a table and brought him a glass of brandy, a plate of lobio beans and a hot slice of khachapuri. He told how a strange thing had happened to him. An NKVD guard had come to the office, where he worked as camp accountant in the faraway hell of Kolyma, and summoned him to the commandant’s apparat, where he was asked to sign for his belongings. He was given his old suit and shoes then invited to lunch by the commandant, who served veal cutlets, by coincidence almost the same dish cooked daily by Delphine at the mansion on Greater Maritime Street. He was taken to the barber’s shop (the barber was a former nobleman). Then, with a small allowance, he was freed to set off on the long, slow journey back to Tiflis.

When he was a little restored, she and Tengiz helped him upstairs to her room. Tengiz brought them hot water. When the manager was gone, she undressed Zeitlin and washed his frail body with a warm sponge.

Samuil sat on the edge of the bed, looking at her, asking questions with his eyes. She knew he wanted to know about Sashenka—but he could not bring himself to ask.

He lay down with a sigh, closed his eyes and went to sleep immediately.

Lala lay beside him with her head on his shoulder. At that moment, she loved him so much that she regretted nothing. She felt that she had imagined her birth and childhood in England. It seemed her entire life had taken place in Russia with the Zeitlins. Her family in Hertfordshire had not received a letter from her for many years. They probably thought she was dead. And the English girl Audrey Lewis was dead.