Sashenka

At dawn, Comrades Vanya and Satinov were already dismantling the printing press. Sashenka and other comrades removed the parts in beer barrels, milk churns, coal sacks. The bulky press itself was placed in a coffin, collected by a stolen undertaker’s hearse and accompanied by a carriage of weeping (Bolshevik) relatives in black to the new site in Vyborg.

At dusk the following afternoon, Mendel and Sashenka climbed the stairs of an office building down the street from the printing press. For Mendel, every step was an effort as he dragged his reinforced boot behind him.

They came out on the roof and Sashenka gave Mendel one of her Crocodile cigarettes, its gold tip incongruous beside his worker’s cap and rough leather coat. Together, they watched as three carriages of grey-clad police and two carloads of gendarmes pulled up outside the cellar and broke down the door.

“Good work, Comrade Snowfox,” said Mendel. “You were right.”

She flushed with pride. She really was an asset to the Party, not the spoiled child of the degenerate classes.

“Do I continue to meet Sagan?”

Mendel’s eyes, magnified by his bottle-glass lenses, pivoted toward her. “I suppose he’s in love with you.”

She laughed and shook her head simultaneously. “With me? You must be joking. No one looks at me like that. Sagan talks mostly about poetry. He really knows his stuff. He was helpful about Mama but he’s very proper. And I’m a Bolshevik, comrade, I don’t flirt.”

“Fucking poetry! Don’t be naïve, girl. So he lusts after you!”

“No! Certainly not!” She blushed with confusion. “But he sympathizes with us. That’s why he tipped us off.”

“They always say that. Sometimes it’s even true. But don’t trust any of his shtik.” Mendel often used the Yiddish of his childhood. While Ariadna had completely lost the accent, Sashenka noticed that Mendel still spoke Russian with a strong Polish-Jewish intonation.

“If you’re right about his immorality, comrade, I don’t think I should meet Sagan again. He sent me a note this morning, inviting me to take a sleigh ride with him in the countryside. I said no of course and now I certainly shan’t meet him.”

“Don’t be such a schlamazel, Sashenka,” he replied. “You don’t know what’s best here, girl. Beware bourgeois morality. We’ll decide what’s immoral and what isn’t. If the Party asks you to cover yourself in shit, you do it! If he desires you, so much the better.”

Sashenka felt even more flustered. “You mean…”

“Go on the sleigh ride,” he boomed, exasperated. “Meet the scum as often as it takes.”

“But he needs something to show for it too.”

“We’ll give him a morsel or two. But in return, we want a gold nugget. Get me the name of the traitor who betrayed the press in the first place. Without that name, this operation is a failure. The Party will be disappointed. Be vigilant. Tak! That’s it.” Mendel’s face was livid with the cold. “Let’s go down before we freeze. How’s your mother coping with the divorce?”

“I never see her. Dr. Gemp says she’s hysterical and melancholic. She’s on chloral, bromine, opium. Father wants her to try hypnotism.”

“Is he going to marry Mrs. Lewis?”

“What?” Sashenka felt this like a punch in the belly. Her father and Lala? What was he talking about? But Mendel was already on his way downstairs.

The factory whistles started up again across the city, yet the black slate of the rooftops revealed none of the seething furies beneath. The world really was going mad, she thought.

28

The next day was warmer. The sun and the moon watched each other suspiciously across a milky sky. The sparse clouds resembled two sheep and a ram, horns and all, on a snowy field. The factories were on strike.

As she took the streetcar to the Finland Station, Sashenka saw crowds crossing the bridges from the factories, demonstrating for bread for the third day running. The demonstration had started on Thursday, International Women’s Day, and grown since then.

“Arise, you starvelings, from your slumbers!” the crowds chanted, waving their red banners. “Down with autocracy! Give us bread and peace!”

The Cossacks tried to turn them back at the Alexander Bridge but tens of thousands marched anyway. Sashenka saw women in peasant shawls smash the windows of the English Shop and help themselves to food: “Our men are dying at the front! Give us bread! Our children are starving!” There were urchins on the streets now, creatures with the bodies of children but with swollen bellies and the faces of old monkeys. One sat on the street corner singing and playing his concertina:

Here I am abandoned, an orphan, with no one to look after me,

And I will die before long and there’ll be no one to pray at my grave,

Only the nightingale will sing sometimes on the nearest tree.