Sashenka

They climbed into the troika, pulled the bear rug over their laps and sat swathed in furs as the sleigh skated over the ice with that effervescent swish that felt like flight. The streets were already dark but the electric lights were shining. Low Finnish sledges decorated with ribbons and jingling bells and screaming students rushed through the streets, their silhouettes forming cutouts against the snow. The food shortages were spreading, prices rising, and Sashenka spotted a massive line of working women jostling outside a bakery. The worse, the better, she thought gleefully. The sirens of the Vyborg factories whistled. The snow, so rarely white, glowed a gritty orange.

“Are you taking me home?”

Sagan shook his head. “To Rasputin’s place. He’s disappeared. Dead, I think.”

“So? That’s a shame for us: he’s won us more recruits than the Communist Manifesto.”

“On that, Zemfira, we differ. For us, it’s a blessing from heaven. The body’s under the ice somewhere—we’ll find him. The Empress is distraught. He never came home from a party at the Yusupov Palace. Young Felix, the transvestite Prince Yusupov, is up to his neck in it but he’s married to a Grand Duchess.”

“And my mother?”

“Your mother was waiting for Rasputin at his apartment. I thought, after the other night, you’d be the one to help…”

Police in grey uniforms with lambskin collars guarded the doorway of 64 Gorokhovaya Street. Shabby young men in student overcoats with notebooks and unwieldy cameras tried to talk their way past the barriers but Sashenka and Captain Sagan were let straight through.

In the courtyard, gendarmes in their handsome dark blue uniforms with silver buttons sheltered from the cold. Sashenka noticed that even though Sagan was in plain clothes, they saluted him.

At the top of the stairs, the stiff shirts, well-cut suits and smart two-tone shoes marked out the urbane Okhrana officers from the grizzled beards, red noses and grubby shoes of the police detectives handling the murder investigation. The Okhrana officers greeted Sagan and updated him in coded jargon that reminded Sashenka of the Bolsheviks. Perhaps all secret organizations are the same, she thought.

“Come to collect her mother,” Sagan told his colleagues, taking her wrist. She decided not to withdraw it.

“Go on up—but hurry,” his Okhrana colleague told him. “The Director’s on his way over. The Minister’s been reporting to Her Imperial Majesty at Tsarskoe Selo but he’ll be here soon.”

As they neared the apartment, Sashenka could hear the sound of howling. It was raucously uninhibited in the way that peasants grieved. She thought of the air-raid sirens and then a dog she once saw, its legs sliced off by a car. She entered a lobby; to the left, the steamy kitchen with the samovar; a table spread with silks and furs; and then right, into the main sitting room, in the middle of which was a table with a half-drunk glass of the Elder’s Madeira. The place reminded Sashenka of the huts of the peasants on the Zeitlin estates in Ukraine but, among the soupy cabbagey smells, there was a hint of Parisian perfume. Nothing in the place quite fit, she thought: it was a peasant izba crossed with a government office and a bourgeois family home. It was like the hideout of a gypsy gang of robbers.

There was a sudden flurry of activity behind them and a general of the gendarmes, surrounded by an entourage, entered the main room.

Sagan hurried out, saluted, conferred and returned. “They’ve found the body. In the Neva. It’s him.” He crossed himself, then raised his voice. “All right. We’ve got to get her home now. She’s been here since last night.”

The howling grew louder and more shrill. Sagan opened the double doors into a small dark room with scarlet rugs and pillows and a large divan.

The shrieking was so animalistic, the shapes within the room so hard to identify that Sashenka stepped back, but Sagan caught her around the waist and again took her hand. She was grateful but most of all shocked. Bloody spots danced before her as her eyes adjusted to the gloom and she was able to see.

“She’s in there. I have a car waiting for you downstairs but she should go before the press get in here. Go on. Don’t be afraid,” Sagan said gently. “It’s just noise.”

She stepped inside.

It was hard at first to see how the bodies and limbs fit together. Some women, arms around one another, crouched on the floor, rocking together, sobbing hysterically and ululating like Asiatics. Among them Sashenka saw her mother, her head shaking convulsively, her features hollow, her mouth a gash of scarlet screaming.

“Where am I?” cried her mother, her voice high and rough from wailing. “Who are you?”

The air inside was a broth of raw sweat and expensive soaps. Sashenka knelt down and tried to reach Ariadna but her mother rolled away.

“No! No! Where’s Grigory? He’s coming, I know it.”