Sashenka

In her bedroom, she could hear soft voices speaking in Yiddish. Her parents were sitting with her. “Poor child,” murmured her mother. “Is she possessed by a dybbuk?”

“Everything is God’s will, even this,” replied her father. “That’s the point of free will. We can only ask for his mercy…” Ariadna could hear the creak of the leather strap as the rabbi tied his phylactery onto his arm and he switched to Hebrew. He was reciting the Eighteen Benedictions and this familiar, reassuring chant bore her like a magic carpet back in time…

A young and handsome Samuil Zeitlin was standing in the muddy lane outside the Talmudic studyhouse, near the workshop of Lazar the cobbler in the little Jewish-Polish town of Turbin, not far from Lublin. He was asking for her hand in marriage. She shrugged at first: he was not a Prince Dolgoruky or even a Baron Rothschild, not good enough for her—but then who would be? Her father shouted, “The Zeitlin boy’s a heathen! He doesn’t eat or dress like one of us: does he keep kosher? Does he know the Eighteen Benedictions? That father of his with his bow ties and holidays in Bad Ems: they’re apostates!”

Then she was circling the Jewish wedding canopy—the chuppah—seven times; Samuil was smashing a wineglass with a decisive stamp of his boot. Her new husband was borne aloft by the singing Hasids, with an expression on his face that said: I just pray I never have to see these primitive fanatics ever again—but I’ve got her! I’ve got her! Tonight I make love to the most beautiful girl in the Pale! Tomorrow, Warsaw! The day after, Odessa. And she would escape Turbin, at last, forever.

Then it was years later and she was caressing Captain Dvinsky in a suite at the Bristol in Paris, where she amazed even that connoisseur of flesh with her depravities. In a torn camisole, she was on all fours, pressing her loins down onto his face, smearing his face, revolving like a stripper, delighted by the wantonness of it, hissing swear words in Polish, obscenities in Yiddish. Even now, waves of lust, the stroking of naked men, the kisses of women, washed over her.

She sat up in bed, cold, sober. She thought she saw the Elder: yes, there was his beard and his glittering eyes at the end of the bed. “Is it you, Grigory?” she asked aloud. But then she realized that it was a combination of the curtain pelmet and a dress on a stand that somehow suggested a tall, thin man with a beard. She was alone and clearheaded suddenly.

Rasputin, who offered me a new road to happiness, is dead, she thought. Samuil, whose love and wealth were the pillars of my rickety palace, is divorcing me. Sashenka hates me—and who can blame her? My Hasidic parents shame me and I am ashamed of my shame. My whole life, every step of the way, has been a fiasco. My happiness has been tottering on a tightrope, only to tumble through the air. Even my pleasures are like the moment that high-wire artiste starts to tremble and loses her footing…

I mocked my father’s world of holiness and superstition. Perhaps my mother was right: was I cursed since birth? I mocked Fate because I had everything. Does the Evil Eye possess me?

Ariadna lay back on the pillow, alone and adrift on the oceans like a ship without a crew.

27

Sashenka left an emergency message for Mendel at Lordkipadze, the Georgian pharmacy on Alexandrovsky Prospect, and then walked home down Nevsky. The clouds billowed into creamy cauliflowers that hung low over the city. The ice that curled from the drainpipes and the roofs was stiffening. The thermometer was sinking to minus twenty. In the workers’ districts, the sirens and whistles blared. Strikes had started to spread from factory to factory.

On Nevsky, right in the center, clerks, workers, even bourgeois housewives lined up outside the bakeries for bread. Two women rolled around in the sludge fighting for the last loaves: a working woman repeatedly hit the other in the face, and Sashenka heard the crack as her nose broke.

At Yeliseyev’s Grocery Store, where the Zeitlins ordered their food, Sashenka watched as workers burst in and grabbed cakes and fruit. The shop assistant was bludgeoned.

That night, she could not even pretend to sleep. Her head was buzzing. The anger of the streets replayed in her mind. Outside, the sirens of the Vyborg echoed across the Neva, like the calling of whales.

She rose from her bed, and in the early hours Comrade Molotov met her at the coachmen’s café outside the Finland Station.

“Comrade Mendel is busy now. He sent me.” Molotov was humorless and stern but also meticulous and he listened carefully to Sashenka’s tip-off.

“Your s-s-source is r-reliable?” Molotov stammered, his forehead bulging.

“I think so.”

“Thank you, c-c-comrade. I’ll get to work.”