Sashenka

“Lala! I’m coming home! I’m free!” For a moment, Sashenka forgot that she was a serious woman with a mission in life and no time for fripperies or sentimentality. She threw herself into Lala’s arms and then into the car, inhaling its reassuring aroma of treated leather and the Englishwoman’s floral perfume. “Where are the cookies?”

“On the seat, darling! You’ve survived the term!” said Lala, hugging her tightly. “You’ve grown so much! I can’t wait to get you home. Everything’s ready in the little salon: scones, ginger cake and tea. Now you can have the Huntley & Palmers.”

But just as she opened her arms to release Sashenka, a shadow fell across her face.

“Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin?” A gendarme stood on either side of the car door.

“Yes,” said Sashenka. She felt a little dizzy suddenly.

“Come with us,” said one of the gendarmes. He was standing so close that she could see the pores of his pockmarked skin and the hairs of his ginger mustache. “Now!”

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“Are you arresting me?” asked Sashenka slowly, looking round.

“We ask the questions, miss,” snapped the other gendarme, who had sour milky breath and a forked Poincaré beard.

“Wait!” pleaded Lala. “She’s a schoolgirl. What can you want with her? You must be mistaken, surely?” But they were already leading Sashenka toward a plain sleigh parked to one side.

“Ask her if you want to know,” the gendarme called over his shoulder, gripping Sashenka tightly. “Go on, you tell her, you silly little bitch. You know why.”

“I don’t know, Lala! I’m so sorry! Tell Papa!” Sashenka cried before they pushed her into the back of the sleigh.

The coachman, also in uniform, cracked his whip. The gendarmes climbed in after her.

Out of sight of her governess, she turned to the officer with the beard. “What took you so long?” she asked. “I’ve been expecting you for some time.” She had been preparing these lines for the inevitable moment of her arrest, but annoyingly the policeman did not seem to have heard her as the horses lurched forward.

Sashenka’s heart was pounding in her ears as the sleigh flew across the snow, right past the Taurida Palace and toward the center of the city. The winter streets were quiet, swaddled by the snow. Squeezed between the padded shoulders of the two gendarmes, she sat back, enveloped in the warmth of these servants of the Autocrat. Before her, Nevsky Prospect was jammed with sleighs and horses, a few cars, and streetcars that clattered and sparked down the middle of the street. The gas streetlamps, lit day and night in winter, glowed like pink halos in the falling snow. She looked past the officers: she wanted to be seen by someone she knew! Surely some of her mother’s friends would spot her as they came out of the shops in the arcades of Gostiny Dvor, the Merchant’s Row bazaar with its folksy Russian clutter—icons, stuffed bears and samovars.

Flickering lanterns and electric bulbs in the vast façades of the ministries, ocher palaces and glittering shops of Tsar Peter’s city rushed past her. There was the Passazh with her mother’s favorite shops: the English Shop with its Pears soap and tweed jackets, Druce’s with its English furniture, Brocard’s with its French colognes. Playful snowflakes twisted in a little whirlwind, and she hugged herself. She was nervous, she decided, not frightened. She had been put on earth to live this adventure: it was her vocation.

Where are they taking me? she wondered. The Department of Police on Fontanka? But then the sleigh turned fast on Garden Street, past the forbidding Mikhailovsky Castle where the nobles had murdered the mad Tsar Paul. Now the towers of the Peter and Paul Fortress rose through the gloom. Was she to be buried alive in the Trubetskoy Bastion? But then they were heading over the Liteiny Bridge.

The river was dark except for the lights hung across the bridges and the lamps of the Embankment. As they crossed, she leaned to her left so she could look at her beloved St. Petersburg just as Peter the Great had built it: the Winter Palace, the Admiralty, Prince Menshikov’s Palace and, somewhere in the gloom, the Bronze Horseman.

I love you, Piter, she thought. The Tsar had just changed the city’s name to Petrograd because St. Petersburg was too German—but to the natives it was always St. Petersburg, or just Piter. Piter, I may never, ever see you again! Adieu, native city, adieu Papa, adieu Lala!

She quoted one of Ibsen’s heroes: All or nothing! This was her motto—and always would be.

And then there it was: the drear dark-red brick of the Kresty Prison, looming up until its shadows swallowed her. For a moment the great walls towered over the little sleigh as the gates swung open and then clanged shut behind her.

Not so much a building, more of a tomb.

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