Sashenka

She walked through an archway into another courtyard. This was one of Mendel’s rules: try to avoid entering any building through the front door and always check there are two exits. In Russia, janitors and doormen lingered on the street and tended not to watch the courtyards.

Inside, she hurried to the rear door, opened it and sprang up the cold dark steps, using the half light of the streetlamps to guide her to the top floor. She had been here earlier but her comrade had missed the rendezvous. Perhaps he would be here by now.

She unlocked the door, closing it behind her. The apartment was in darkness but it was somber even in daytime, a cavern of Asiatic rugs, old kerosene lamps, comforters and mattresses. She inhaled the friendly aroma of mothballs, salted fish and yellowing books: an intellectual lived here. She went into the kitchen and tested the samovar as Mendel had taught her: it was cold. In the bedroom, the walls were covered in bookcases, Apollo and other intellectual journals in piles on the floor.

Yet something was not right. Her breath caught in her throat. Bristling with Bolshevik vigilance, she moved silently, nerves like forked lightning that jazzed down her spinal column. She turned into the sitting room. There was the rasp of a rough strike and a kerosene lamp sprang to life.

“Greetings! I thought you’d never come.” A familiar voice—so why did it give her such a shock?

“Don’t mess with me,” she said, swallowing hard. She had the Mauser. “Lift up the light.”

He illuminated his face. “Did you buy some sweet dresses, Zemfira?”

Captain Sagan sat in the chair, wearing an ill-fitting black suit with a string tie. A fur coat lay on the floor.

“What are you doing here?” She was conscious that her voice sounded high and a little squeaky.

“Your comrade’s not coming. We picked him up. Tomorrow, the Special Commission’ll sentence him to two years of Siberian exile. Nothing too serious. So rather than leave you to waste your evening, I came instead.”

She shrugged, struggling to remain calm. “So? This safe house will no longer be safe. If you’re not arresting me, I’ll go home and get some sleep. Good night.” As she turned, she remembered Mendel’s order. She needed to get to know Sagan better. Besides, she was curious as to why he was here. “Or perhaps it’s too late for sleep?”

“I think so,” he said, pushing back his hair and looking younger suddenly. “Are you a night owl?”

“I feel lazy in the mornings but I come to life at night. All this conspiracy suits me. What about you, Captain? If I’m a night owl, you’re a bat.”

“I live on a knife-edge. Like you and your uncle Mendel. I sleep so little that when I go home to bed, I find I can hardly settle. I get up and read poems. This is what happens to us. We enjoy it so much that it changes us and we can’t do anything else. We conspirators, Sashenka, are like the undead. The vampires. We feed on the blood of the workers, and you feed on the blood of the bloodsuckers themselves who suck the blood of the workers. Quite Darwinian.”

She laughed aloud and sat on the edge of a metal bed, where the mattress was dyed sepia yellow by the hissing lamp.

“We conspirators? There’s no parallel between us, you police pharaoh. We have a scientific program; you’re simply reacting to us. We’ll win in the end. You’ll be finished. You’re digging the grave of the exploiters for us.”

Captain Sagan chuckled. “Yet I see no sign of this. At the moment, your vaunted Party is just a few freaks: the intellectual Mendel Barmakid, a worker named Shlyapnikov, a middle-class boy named Scriabin (Party alias Molotov), a few workers’ circles, some troublemakers at the front. Lenin’s abroad, and the rest are in Siberia. That leaves you, Sashenka. There can’t be more than a thousand experienced Bolsheviks in the whole of Russia. But you’re having a lot of fun, aren’t you? Playing the revolutionary.”

“You’re deluding yourself, Sagan,” she said hotly. “The lines are growing longer, the people getting angrier, hungrier. They want peace and you’re asking them to die for Nicholas the Last, Nicholas the Bloody, the German traitor Alexandra and the pervert Rasputin…”

“Whom you know all about from your mother. Let me try some thoughts on you. Your parents are the very definition of the corruption of the Russian system.”

“Agreed.”

“The aspirations and rights of the workers and peasants are totally ignored by the present system.”

“True.”

“And we know that the peasants need food but they also need rights and representation, and protection from the capitalists. They must have land, and they are desperate for peace. Your father’s dream of a progressive group taking power is too little, too late. We need a real change.”

“Since we agree on everything, why aren’t you a Bolshevik?”

“Because I believe a revolution could come soon.”

“So do I,” said Sashenka.