Sashenka

As she crossed the spacious hall toward the kitchen, she heard a convoy of cars sweeping into the drive. Pasha was back. There was the sound of doors slamming then Pasha’s loud voice, his clumsy, shambling footsteps and an unfamiliar but husky chattering that stopped abruptly.

“Oh my God, it’s her!” the voice said.

Katinka turned, and found herself face to face with a slim old man with a long, sensitive face and a battered blue worker’s cap. He was obviously in his eighties at least but there was a jerky energy about him, and he was still dapper in a crumpled brown suit that was too baggy for his slight figure. She liked him immediately.

“Is it you, Sashenka?” said the man, looking at her intensely. “Is it you? God, am I dreaming? You’re so very like her—down to her grey eyes, her mouth, even the way she stands. Is this a trick?”

“No, it’s not,” said Pasha, standing right behind him. “Katinka, you weren’t the only one doing some research. I found someone too.”

Katinka let her backpack drop onto the floor and stepped back. “Who are you?” she asked shakily. “Who the hell are you?”

The old man wiped his face with a big linen handkerchief. “Who’s asking the questions here? Me or this slip of a girl?” Katinka noticed his eyes were a dazzling blue. “My name’s Benya Golden. Who are you?” He took her hand and kissed it. “Tell me, for God’s sake.”

“Benya Golden?” exclaimed Katinka. “But I thought you were…”

“Well…,” Benya shrugged, “so did everyone else. Can I sit down? I’d like a cognac, please?” He looked round at the exquisitely restored mansion, the Old Master paintings, the fat sofas. “This place looks as if your bar will have everything. Get me a Courvoisier before I drop. It’s been a long journey. Look—my hands are trembling.”

They moved into the sitting room, where Pasha lit a cigar and poured them all brandies.

“So you’ve heard of me?” Benya said after a while.

“Of course, I’ve even read your Spanish Stories,” answered Katinka.

“I didn’t know I had such young fans. I didn’t know I had any fans.” He was silent. “You know, you really are the image of a woman called Sashenka whom I loved with all my heart a long time ago. Hasn’t anyone told you that?”

Katinka shook her head but she remembered Sashenka’s face in that prison photograph and how she’d felt. “She was my grandmother,” she said. “I’ve been finding out what happened to her.”

“Have you been in those vile archives?”

“Oh yes.”

“And have you found how they tortured us and broke us?”

Katinka nodded. “Everything.”

“And so can you tell me why it all happened, to us I mean, to me and Sashenka?”

“There was no why,” Katinka said slowly. “Just a chain of events. I’ve discovered so much…But tell me, how did you survive?”

“Uh, there’s not much to tell. Stalin’s thugs beat me and I told them everything they wanted. But at the trial, I said I’d been lying because I’d been tortured. I knew they’d shoot me and I couldn’t face the bullet knowing I’d betrayed Sashenka. But they gave me ten years in Kolyma instead. I was released in the war—and I had quite a war—but then I was rearrested afterward, and released again in the fifties. I was a husk of a man, but I met a woman in the camps, a nurse, an angel, and she put me back together again. She got me a job as editor of a journal in Birobizhan, the Jewish region, near the Chinese border, and that’s the godforsaken place where we’ve been living ever since.”

“Do you still write?”

“They’d beaten all that out of me.” He brushed that aside with a gesture. “I am happy just to breathe. Do you have any food in this palace? I’m always hungry.”

“Of course,” said Pasha. “We can make anything you like. Just name it!”

“I’ll have a steak, dear prince, and all the trimmings, and a bottle of red wine,” said Benya. “Do you have any French wine? Or is that pushing this dream too far? I once loved French Bordeaux…I drank it in Paris, you know—do you have it? Well then, will you all join me?” He went quiet again, and Katinka could see that his eyes had filled with tears.

Finally he took her hand and kissed it a second time. “Meeting you is like a last summer for me. Not a day passes when I don’t remember your grandmother. We were the world’s greatest lovers, yet we were together for just eleven days.” He sighed deeply. “I gave her a flower for every day…”

Katinka’s heart gave a little skip. She reached into her backpack and pulled out the little envelope of materials from Sashenka’s file that Kuzma had given her. “Does this mean anything to you?” She handed him a much-creased old envelope addressed to “B. Golden” at the Soviet Writers’ Union, in a feminine hand.

He took it from her, opened it, fingers shaking, and pulled out a pressed mimosa so flimsy that it almost came apart in his hands.

“She sent it to you,” Katinka told him, “but it arrived too late, and you’d been arrested. The Writers’ Union gave it to the NKVD and they filed it.”