Sashenka

Natasha squeezed her hand as two guards waded through the sprawled bodies and fished her out of the cell. They manhandled her through the grey corridors and deposited her in an interrogation room with a plain desk, a metal chair and walls peeling with damp. She could hear a man crying next door.

A gendarme, a lieutenant with a square head, shaved close, and a long square-cut beard, opened the door, stalked up to her and banged his fist on the table.

“You’re going to tell us every single name,” he said, “and you’re never going to fuck around like this again.” Sashenka flinched as he hoisted himself onto the table’s edge and pushed his livid face up close to hers. “You’ve every advantage in life,” he shouted. “True, you’re not a real Russian. You’re a zhyd, you’re not nobility. Your Jew father probably salutes the Kaiser every night…”

“My father’s a Russian patriot! The Tsar gave him a medal!”

“Don’t answer me like that. That title of his ain’t a Russian title. Jews can’t have titles here. Everyone knows that. He bought it with stolen rubles from some German princeling…”

“The King of Saxony made him a baron.” Whatever Sashenka’s views on her father’s class and the capitalist war, she was still his daughter. “He works hard for his country.”

“Shut up unless you want a slap. Once a zhyd always a zhyd. Profiteers, revolutionaries, tinkers. You Evrei—Hebrews—are all at it, aren’t you? But you’re such a looker. Yes, you’re real fresh strawberries!”

“How dare you!” she said quietly, always uneasy about her appearance. “Do not speak to me like that!”

Sashenka had not eaten or drunk since the night before. After her brave moments of defiance, her courage and energy were draining away. She needed food like the furnace of an engine needs coal, and she longed for a hot bath. Yet as she listened to the bully shouting at her, he began to lose his power. She did not fear his small pink eyes and the blue uniform of a degenerate system. The spray of his spittle was grotesque but easily wiped away.

She closed her eyes for a second, removing herself from this police bully, this Derzhimorda. Not for the first time, she imagined the effect of her arrest at home. My dear distant father, where are you at this moment? she wondered. Am I just another problem for you to solve? What about Fanny Loris and the girls at school? How I’d love to hear their trivial chatter today. And my darling Lala, kind, thoughtful Mrs. Lewis with the lullaby voice. She does not know that the girl she loves no longer exists…

The shouting came closer again. Sashenka felt faint with hunger and fatigue as the interrogator filled in his forms in brutish semiliterate squiggles. Name? Age? Nationality? Schooling? Parents? Height? Distinguishing features? He wanted her fingerprints: she gave him her right hand. He pressed each finger down on an inkpad and then onto his form.

“You’ll be charged under paragraph one, article one hundred twenty-six, for being a member of the illegal Russian Socialist Democratic Workers’ Party, and paragraph one, article one hundred two, for being a member of a military organization. Yes, little girl, your friends are terrorists, murderers, fanatics!”

Sashenka knew this was all about the pamphlets she had been distributing for her uncle Mendel. Who wrote them? Where was the printing press? the man asked, again and again.

“Did you handle the ‘noodles’ and the ‘bulldogs’?”

“Noodles? I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t play the innocent with me! You know perfectly well that noodles are belts of ammunition for machine guns, and bulldogs are pistols, Mauser pistols.”

Another shower of saliva.

“I’m feeling faint. I think I need to eat…,” she whispered.

He stood up. “All right, princess, we’re having a funny turn, are we? A swoon like that countess in Onegin?” He scraped back his chair and took her elbow roughly. “Captain Sagan will see you now.”

14

“Greetings, Mademoiselle Baroness,” said the officer just down the corridor, in a tidy office that smelled of sawdust and cigars. “I am Captain Sagan. Peter Mikhailovich de Sagan. I do apologize for the bad manners—and breath—of some of my officers. Here, sit down.”

He stood up and looked at his new prisoner: a slim girl with luxuriant brown hair stood before him in a crumpled and stained Smolny uniform. He noticed that her lips, in contrast to her pale, bruised face, were crimson and slightly swollen. She stood awkwardly, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, looking down at the floor.