Sashenka

“You? But why? We’ve lived like this for years. You’re not a jealous man. You’re too…too confident for that. You’re joking surely, Samuil. We’ve been married for eighteen years. Why now?”

Zeitlin took a puff of his cigar, trying to appear calm and rational.

“It’s just…weariness.”

“Weariness? You’re divorcing me out of weariness?”

“You’ll have a generous allowance. Nothing will change. You’ll just be living in a different house. Is it such a shock?”

“You can’t!” He had turned to leave but she jumped out of bed and threw herself to the floor at his feet, knocking the cigar out of his hand. He bent to catch it and she gripped him so hard that he lost his balance and fell beside her. She’d begun to weep, her eyes wild, the whites rolling. He tried to release himself but, in the process, tore her nightgown, exposing her breasts. Yet still she held on to him so hard that the diamond studs on his stiff shirtfront popped out onto the floor.

They lay side by side, breathing heavily. He looked down and noticed her long dark-brown nipples peering through her thick tresses. She looked like a gypsy dancer. This is how her lovers must see her, he thought, marveling at her uninhibited wantonness. How strange are we humans, he reflected. The light is dark, the night is bright.

Over the years, while they were strangers by day, they had still shared a passion by night. In daylight she either worried or disgusted him, but then she would come to him in the early hours, her breath stale with old champagne, fresh brandy and yesterday’s perfume, other men’s cigars, and whisper to him of adventures of startling depravity. She hissed an argot of peasant Polish and gutter Yiddish, the language they had spoken when they first met at the court of her father, the Turbin rabbi, in that Jewish village near Lublin.

What things she told him, what delicious visions! Desires and exploits almost incredible for a respectable lady! One night a lover had taken her to the Summer Gardens, a place of dogs and prostitutes…she spared him no detail. Roused to a fever, he performed erotic feats worthy of an athlete, he the most moderate of men who regarded passion as a dangerous thing. But in the morning he awoke feeling filthy and remorseful, as if he had met a whore in a seedy room and made a fool of himself. And this was his own wife!

“Aren’t I still beautiful?” she asked him, smelling of tuberose and almonds. “How can you leave this? You can make love to me. Go on, push me down. You know you want to. But you’re so cold. No wonder I’ve been so unhappy. You’re joking about the divorce, aren’t you? Samuil?” She began to laugh, almost to herself, but then she threw back her head, laughing huskily from her belly. He could feel the warmth radiating from her skin like heat from a burning coal, could smell the taint of her excitement. She took his hand and plunged it between her thighs, then pointed at the mirror. “Look at us! Look at us, Samoilo! What a good-looking pair! Like when we met. Remember? You said you’d never met a girl like me. What did you say? ‘You’re like wild horses.’”

Samuil had meant it differently—he had wondered even then if she was too unpredictable to marry.

He stood up, not without difficulty, adjusting his clothes. “Ariadna, we’ve become ridiculous.”

The servants had talked: Pantameilion had told Leonid, who had agonized how to tell the master that Sashenka had rescued her mother, drunk in the street. The butler had dispatched Shifra, Zeitlin’s own ancient governess, to tell him this unpalatable news. Zeitlin had not reacted, simply thanking Shifra politely, kissing her blue-veined hand and showing her to the door again. Historians, thought Zeitlin, try to find a single explanation for events but really things happen for many reasons, not one. Lighting up his Montecristo cigar, he reflected on Sashenka’s arrest, on Mrs. Lewis’s belief that he barely knew his own daughter—and on the unwelcome arrival of Rasputin in his life (which was somehow worse than Ariadna’s lovers). While his irrepressible brother Gideon sought his pleasures recklessly because “I might croak at any minute and go straight to hell,” Zeitlin had believed that calm discipline would ensure a long life.

Then last night he had been visited by dreams of sudden death, train crashes, gunshots, smashed automobiles, the house on fire, overturned sleighs, revolution, blood on the snow, himself on a deathbed dying of consumption of the intestines and angina pectoris, with Sashenka weeping beside him—and at the very gates of heaven, he had realized he was carrying nothing. He’d invested in treasure, not love. He was naked and he had wasted his life.

At dawn, he had gone to Shifra in the pantry—but the old witch, crouched in the chair like a translucent spider, already knew his dreams. “You need love in your life too,” she’d told him. “Don’t always live for the future. There might not be a future. Who knows what’s written for you in the Book of Life?”