Sashenka

He looked up at her witheringly. “Mademoiselle, your life as you knew it is over. You will probably be sentenced by the Commission to the maximum five years of exile in Yeniseisk, close to the Arctic Circle. Yes, five years. You may never come back. The harsh sentence reflects your treason during wartime and, as you are a Jew, next time it will be harsher still.”

“Five years!” Her breaths grew quick and shallow. “It’s your war, Captain Sagan, a slaughter of working men on the orders of emperors and kings, not our war.”

“OK, here’s the game. These are the surveillance reports of my agents. Let me read what my files say about a certain person I will call Madame X. You have to guess her real name.” He took a breath, his eyes twinkling, then lowered his voice theatrically. “After following the erotic religion of Arzabyshev’s novel Sanin and taking part in sexual debauchery, she embraced the ‘Eastern’ teachings of the so-called healer Madame Aspasia del Balzo, who revealed through a process called spiritual retrogression that in a former life Mrs. X had been the handmaiden of Mary Magdalene and then the bodice-designer of Joan of Arc.”

“That’s too easy! Madame X is my mother,” said Sashenka. Her nostrils flared and Sagan noticed her lips never quite seemed to close. He turned back to his file.

“In a table-turning session, Madame Aspasia introduced Baroness Zeitlin to Julius Caesar, who told her not to allow her daughter Sashenka to mock their psychic sessions.”

“You’re making it up, Captain,” said Sashenka drily.

“In the lunatic asylum of Piter, we don’t need to make anything up. You appear quite often in this file, mademoiselle, or should I say Comrade Zeitlin. Here we are again. Baroness Zeitlin continues to pursue any road to happiness offered to her. Our investigations reveal that Madame del Balzo was formerly Beryl Crump, illegitimate daughter of Fineas O’Hara Crump, an Irish undertaker from Baltimore, whereabouts unknown. After embracing the teachings of the French hierophant doctor Monsieur Philippe and then the Tibetan healer Dr. Badmaev, Baroness Zeitlin is now a follower of the peasant known to his adepts as ‘Elder,’ whom she asked to exorcize the evil spirits of her daughter Sashenka who she says despises her and has destroyed her spiritual well-being.”

“You’ve made me laugh under interrogation,” Sashenka said, looking solemn. “But don’t think that you’ve got me that easily.”

Sagan spun the file onto his desk, sat back and held up his hands. “Apologies. I wouldn’t for a second underestimate you. I admired your article in the illegal Rabochnii Put—Workers’ Path—newspaper.” He drew out a grubby tabloid journal headed with a red star. “Title: ‘The Science of Dialectical Materialism, the Cannibalistic Imperialist Civil War, and Menshevik Betrayal of the Proletarian Vanguard.’”

“I never wrote that,” she protested.

“Of course not. But it’s very thorough and I understand from one of our agents in Zurich that your Lenin was quite impressed. I don’t imagine any other girls at the Smolny Institute could write such an essay, quoting from Plekhanov, Engels, Bebel, Jack London and Lenin—and that’s just the first page. I don’t mean to patronize.”

“I said I didn’t write it.”

“It’s signed ‘Tovarish Pesets.’ Comrade Snowfox. Your shadows tell me you always wear an Arctic fox fur, a gift from an indulgent father perhaps?”

“A frivolous nom de révolution. Not mine.”

“Come on, Sashenka—if I may call you that. No man would choose that name: we’ve got Comrade Stone, Kamenev, and Comrade Steel, Stalin, both of whom I have personally dispatched to Siberia. And Comrade Molotov, the Hammer. Do you know their real names?”

“No, I—”