Sashenka

Captain Sagan stood wearily at the window of the safe house on Gogol Street, lighting a thin cigar. It was a new year but the Russian defeats were worsening. He took a pinch of cocaine from his snuffbox and rubbed it into his gums. Instantly the blood fountained through his veins and his fatigue was transformed into a roaring optimism that galloped through his temples.

In the early hours of a January night, lanterns blinked across the Neva from the ramparts of the Peter and Paul Fortress. To his right, along the Embankment, the lights burned in the Winter Palace too, although the Tsars had not lived there since 1905. The Empress lived outside the city at Tsarskoe Selo and the Emperor at headquarters near the front. But the fortress represented the power of the autocracy: in its church lay buried Peter the Great, Catherine and their successors all the way down to the present Emperor’s father. But it was a prison too: the freezing cells of the Trubetskoy Bastion held the anarchists, nihilists and socialists he himself had trapped.

He heard the door click. Footsteps behind him. Perhaps it was her? Or was it one of their assassins? One day, that click and this view might be the last thing his senses recorded before the shot that blew off the back of his head. It might even be her foolish finger on the trigger. But this was the Superlative Game, the risk of the life he led, the crusading work he did, his service to the Motherland. He believed in God, believed that he would go to Heaven: remove God and his son Jesus Christ and there was nothing, just chaos and sin. If he died now, he would never see his wife again. Yet it was meetings like this in the fathomless night that made his life worth living.

He did not turn round. Thrilling to the sight of the red Menshikov Palace, the fortress, the frozen river, Peter’s city, he waited. He knew it was her coming into the room behind him, sitting on the sofa. He could almost taste her.

Plainly dressed in a grey skirt and white blouse, like a virginal teacher, Sashenka was looking at a book. Sagan marveled at how she had changed since her arrest. Although her hair was pulled back into a severe bun and her drawn face bereft of any makeup, this only made those dove-grey eyes more intense, those little islands of freckles all the more exquisite. The less flirtatious she was, the more she concealed her figure, the more he looked at her when she was looking away. She seemed to him even more compelling…yes, even beautiful.

“So, Comrade Petro”—that was what she now called him—“have you got something for us or not? Is the samovar boiling? Can I have some tea?”

Sagan made the chai. They had met often and become quite informal. He could not know whether she was meeting him because she was beginning to like him or because the Party had ordered her to do so. We men are absurd, he thought, even as he hoped it was the former. It was fine to be attracted to her, even if she was barely a woman. But he did not need to remind himself that to become attached in any way, even fond, let alone in love, could risk not just his career but his sacred mission in life. He knew the rules. If Mendel was pulling the strings, the Bolshevik cripple would want Sagan to lust after her. This must never happen. It never would. Sagan was always in control.

“Happy New Year, Zemfira,” he said and he kissed her cheeks three times. “How was the coming of 1917 in your house?”

“Joyful. Our house was more like a sanatorium this year.”

“How’s your mother?”

“Ask your spies if you really want to know.” Accustomed to conspiracy, she seemed more confident than ever. Yet he was sure that, since Rasputin’s death, she had started to trust him, in spite of her Bolshevik vigilance. When they met the night after Rasputin’s death, she had thanked him. For a moment he even thought she might hug him in her prim comradely way, but she did not. Yet they kept meeting.

“Is the baroness’s opium working? Is she trying hypnosis? I understand it works.”

“I don’t care,” she replied. “She’s better, I think. She’s getting another dress made and grumbling about Uncle Gideon’s outrages.”

“And the divorce?”

“Papa should divorce her but I don’t think he’ll dare. She’s a lost soul. She believes in nothing but pleasure. I’m hardly at home now.” There was a pause. “The Party’s growing. Have you noticed? Have you seen the bread lines? There are fights every day for the last loaves.”

He sighed, suddenly craving more cocaine, fighting an urge to tell her more about himself, more of what he knew. He was surprised by a wave of hopelessness that seemed to blow in from the streets of the city and sweep over him. Were Tsar, Empire and Orthodoxy already lost?

“You know the truth from your reports,” she said, leaning forward, “and I know you sympathize with us. Come on, Petro. Show me a little of yourself—or I might get bored and never meet you again. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me what your reports say.”