Sashenka

In 1915, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, the Commander-in-Chief, had declared all Jews potential German spies and driven them out of their villages. They were given a few hours to load centuries of life onto carts. Zeitlin had rescued the rabbi and his wife, putting them up in St. Petersburg illegally because they had no permits. But while they denounced their godless daughter Ariadna, they were still proud, in spite of themselves, that she had married Zeitlin, a man with oilfields in Baku, ships in Odessa, forests in Ukraine…

“Is that you, Samuil?” a hoarse voice called out to him. In the cupboard-sized kitchen next door he found the rabbi’s wife, Miriam, bewigged and wearing a silk housecoat, stirring a cauldron of soup at an old gas stove with two sideboards, the separation of milk from meat roughly enforced on a sprawl of half-washed kitchenware.

“Sashenka’s been arrested,” said Samuil.

“Woe is me!” cried Miriam in her deep voice. “Before the light, a deeper darkness! This is our punishment, our own Gehenna on earth, for children who all turned away from God, apostates each one. We died long ago and thanks to God, you can only die once. My son Mendel’s a godless anarchist; Ariadna’s lost to God: a daughter who, God protect her, goes out half naked every night! My youngest boy, Avigdor, whose very name is dead to me, abandoned us altogether, long ago—where is he, still in London? And now our darling Silberkind’s in trouble too.” In her childhood Sashenka had been blond, and her grandparents still called her the Silberkind—the silver child. “Well, we mustn’t waste time.” The old woman started to pour honey onto an empty plate.

“What are you cooking?”

“Honeycakes and chicken soup for Sashenka. In prison.”

They already knew, via the household grapevine. Zeitlin almost wept—while he called ministers, the old rabbi’s wife was cooking honeycakes for her grandchild. He could hardly believe that these were the parents of Ariadna. How had they produced that hothouse flower in their Yiddish courtyard?

He stood watching Miriam as he had once watched his own mother in their family kitchen in a wooden-hutted village in the Pale of Settlement.

“I don’t even know what she’s been arrested for,” Zeitlin whispered.

Zeitlin was proud that he had never actually converted to Orthodoxy. He had not needed to do so. As a Merchant of the First Guild, he had the right to stay in St. Petersburg even as a Jew—and just before the war he had been elevated to the rank of the Emperor’s Secret Councillor, the equivalent of a lieutenant-general on the Table of Ranks. But despite all this, he was still a Jew, a discreet Jew but a Jew nonetheless. He still remembered the tune of Kol Nidre—and the excitement of asking the Four Questions at Passover.

“You’re as white as a sheet, Samuil,” Miriam told him. “Sit! Here, drink this!” She handed him a glass of vishniak and he downed it in one. Shaking his head slightly, he raised the empty glass to his mother-in-law and then, wordlessly kissing her blue-veined hand, he hurried downstairs, taking his beaver-skin coat and hat from Pantameilion at the front door. He was ready to begin.

10

The surface of the frozen canal shone grittily in the moonlight as Captain Sagan’s sleigh drew up outside the headquarters of the Department of Police, 16 Fontanka.

Taking the elevator to the top floor, Sagan passed the two checkpoints, each with two gendarmes on duty, to enter the heart of the Empire’s secret war against terrorists and traitors: the Tsar’s Security Department, the Okhrana. Even late at night, the cream of the security service was at work up here—young clerks in pince-nez and blue uniforms sorting the card indexes (blue for Bolsheviks, red for Socialist Revolutionaries) and adding names to labyrinthine charts of revolutionary sects and cells.

Sagan was one of the organization’s rising stars. He could have drawn the Bolshevik chart, with Lenin at its center, in his sleep, even with its latest names and arrows. He hesitated before the chart for a moment just to relish his success. Here it was: all the Central Committee arrested, except Lenin and Zinoviev, plus six Duma members—the whole lot in Siberian exile, too broken ever to launch a revolution. Similarly, the Mensheviks: castrated as a group. The SR Battle Organization: broken. There were only a few more Bolshevik cells left to smash.