Sashenka

She ordered spicy ukha fish soup, goat’s cheese, black Borodinsky bread and some tea—and sat listening to the men’s gossip. When they talked about her as a dish, a looker, she did not quite understand what they meant. She could see her reflection in the little window and felt dissatisfied as always. She preferred to picture herself out in the freeze, buried in her high-necked coat, stole and shapka.

Cut out the vanity, Sashenka told herself. Her looks did not interest her. Like her uncle Mendel, she lived for the Revolution. Wherever she looked in the streets, she saw only those who would benefit from the beautiful march of the dialectic.

She dipped the bread and cheese into some mustard, and spluttered as the burn raced up her nose into her sinuses. Afterward, she nibbled at a shapeless sugar lump and reflected that she was happier now than she had ever been in her entire life.

As a child, her parents had taken her to Turbin to visit the rabbinical court of her grandfather, Abram Barmakid, the saintly rabbi, with his beadles, disciples, students and hangers-on. She was very young and her father was not yet such a swell, and they lived in Warsaw, which was full of Hasidic Jews. But nothing had prepared Sashenka for the medieval realm of Abram Barmakid. The honest fanaticism, the rigid joy, even the guttural Yiddish language, the men with ringlets, fringed shawls and gabardine coats, the bewigged women—all of it scared her. Even then, she had feared their medieval spells and superstitions.

Yet she now reflected that her grandparents’ world of golems and evil eyes was no worse than the secular money worship of her father’s marketplace. Since childhood, she had been shocked by the injustices she had seen at Zemblishino and the manor house on his vast estates on the Dnieper. The luxury and debauchery of her parents’ wretched marriage seemed to her to epitomize the rottenness of Russia and the capitalist world.

Mendel had rescued her from all this wickedness, and had changed her life. If you love then love with verve; if you threaten mean it well, the poet Alexei Tolstoy had written. That was her: “All or nothing!” She reveled in the delicious, almost amorous feeling of being part of a secret, a giant conspiracy. There was something seductive about sacrificing the old morality of the middle classes for the new morality of the Revolution. It was like sitting in this café: the very unromance of it was what made it so romantic.

She glanced at her watch: 4:45 a.m. Time to go. She pulled on the coat and hat again, tossed down some coins. The coachmen watched, nodding at her. On the street, the draymen were delivering the milk crates, the patisserie van loading up with freshly baked bread. Carters dragged in sacks of coal. Janitors cleaned the steps. Piter was awakening.

The freezing air was so refreshing after the musk of the little hut that she inhaled it until it burned her lungs. How she loved Piter with its peculiar climate, almost arctic in its gummy winter blackness, but in summer, when it never grew dark, as bright as Paradise before the Fall. Its gorgeous façades in eggshell blue and ocher were magnificently imperial. But behind them were the factories, the electric streetcars, the yellow smoke and the crowded workers’ dormitories. The beauty that surrounded her was a lie. The truth might seem ugly but it had its beauty too. Here was the future!

She crossed St. Isaac’s Square. Even in winter, you could spot the approach of dawn because the golden dome began to shine darkly long before there was as much as a glow on the horizon. The Astoria was still feasting—she could hear the band, glimpse in the gloom the diamonds of women, the orange tips of men’s cigars. The Yacht Club was still open, troikas and limousines waiting outside for the courtiers and financiers.

She headed down Greater Maritime. She heard the rumble of a car and sank back into a doorway, like the ghost she had described to Mendel.

The Delaunay stopped outside her home. Pantameilion, in his long shining boots, opened the door of the car. Her mother climbed out. First one gorgeously clad foot in the softest kid boot appeared. Then a glimpse of silk stockings, then the satin dress, the sequins glittering.

A white hand studded with rings held the car’s doorframe. Sashenka was disgusted. Here she was, coming from serving the working class; here, with perfect symmetry, came her mother, fresh from servicing the desires of some corrupt man who was not her father.

Sashenka did not know what exactly it was that lovers did, though she knew it was like the dogs on her father’s estate—and she was repulsed, yet rapt. She watched her mother pull herself out of the car and stand swaying. Pantameilion rushed to catch her hand.