Sashenka

Sashenka had been lying in the hammock behind their house at Zemblishino, rocking gently and reading Mayakovsky’s poetry to herself, when the sleepy swinging stopped. Mendel had his hand on the hammock.

“You’re ready,” he said, sucking on a cigarette. “When we get back to the city, you’ll take on some workers’ circles so you can teach them what you know. Then you’ll join the Party.”

“Not just because I’m your niece?”

“Family and sentiment mean nothing to me,” he replied. “What are such things compared to the course of history itself?”

“But what about Mama and Papa?”

“What about them? Your father is the arch exploiter and bloodsucker of the working class and your mother—yes, my own sister—is a degenerate haute bourgeoise. They’re enemies of the science of history. They’re irrelevant. Understand that and you’re free of them forever.”

He handed her a pamphlet with the same title as the first book he had given her weeks earlier: “What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Party” by Lenin. “Read it. You’ll see that to be a Bolshevik is like being a knight in a secret military-religious order, a knight of the grail.”

And sure enough, in the weeks that followed, she had felt the joy of being an austere and merciless professional in Lenin’s secret vanguard.

When she returned to the city, she began to lecture the workers’ groups. She met ordinary workers, proletarians in the colossal Petrograd arms factories, men, women, even children who possessed a gritty decency she had never encountered before. They slaved in dangerous factories and existed in airless grimy dormitories without bedding or baths or lavatories, without light or air, living like rats in a subterranean hell. And she met the workers who manufactured the rifles and howitzers that had made her own father a rich man. Daily, she worked with the most fiery and dedicated Party members who risked their lives for the Revolution. The clandestine world of committees, codes, conspiracy and comrades intoxicated her—and how could it not? It was the drama of history!

When she should have been at dance lessons or visiting Countess Loris’s house to play with her friend Fanny, she started to act as Mendel’s courier, carrying first leaflets and spare parts for printing presses but then “apples” (grenades), “noodles” (ammunition), and “bulldogs” (pistols). While Fanny Loris and her schoolfriends composed scented letters in curling, girlish handwriting to young lieutenants in the Guards, Sashenka’s billets-doux were notes with coded orders from “Comrade Furnace,” one of Mendel’s code names; and her polkas were rides on public streetcars or her father’s sleigh bearing secret cargoes in her lingerie or her fur-collared sluba cape.

“You’re the perfect courier,” said Mendel, “because who would search a Smolny schoolgirl in a snow fox stole riding in a bloodsucker’s crested sleigh?”

“Sashenka!” Lala was shaking her gently in her bath. “It’s lunchtime. You can sleep all afternoon. They’re waiting for you.”

As Lala rubbed her back, Sashenka thought of her interrogation by Sagan, the whispers of Natasha, Mendel’s woman, and her own ideals and plans. She realized she was stronger and older than she had been yesterday.

16

Five minutes later, Sashenka stood at the door of the drawing room.

“Come in,” said her father, who was warming his back against the fire and smoking a cigar. Above him hung an Old Master painting of the founding of Rome set in a colossal gold frame.

She was surprised to see that the room was full of people. In Russian tradition, a nobleman held open house at lunchtime every day, and Zeitlin liked to play the nobleman. But she had expected her parents to cancel this mockery on the day she was released from prison. As she looked around the room, she wanted to cry—and she remembered a time when she was a little girl and her parents were giving a dinner party for the Minister of War, a Grand Duke and various grandees. That evening she had longed for her parents’ attention, but when she appeared downstairs her father was in his study—“I asked not to be interrupted, could you take her out please”—and her mother, in a beaded velvet gown with gilded acanthus leaves, was arranging the placement—“Quick! Take her upstairs!” As she left, Sashenka secretly seized a crystal wine glass, and when, on the third floor, she heard the fuss as the Emperor’s cousin arrived, she dropped it over the banisters and watched it shatter on the flagstones below. In the fracas that followed, her mother slapped her, even though her father had banned any punishment, and once again, Sashenka had found Lala her only source of comfort.

Sashenka recognized the inevitable Missy Loris (in an ivory-colored brocade dress fringed with sable) talking to her husband, the simian but good-natured count. Gideon held up his glass for another cognac and addressed the lawyer Flek, whose bulging belly was pressed against the round table.