Sashenka

Zeitlin cheerfully tossed his hat at the stand. He appeared years younger, radiating confidence. So there! thought Ariadna, the Tsar is back in control. What nonsense the servants talk! Fools! Peasants!

Zeitlin leaned on his cane and looked up at Ariadna like a tenor about to sing an Italian aria.

“I have news,” he said in a voice quivering with excitement.

There! The Cossacks are guarding the streets, the Germans are retreating, everything will settle down again as it always does, decided Ariadna. Long live the Emperor!

On cue, Lala came down the stairs, Shifra emerged from the Black Way and Delphine the cook from the kitchen, her customary drip dangling from the end of her nose.

“The Emperor has abdicated,” announced Zeitlin. “First in favor of the Tsarevich then in favor of his brother Grand Duke Michael. Prince Lvov has formed a government. All political parties are now legal. That’s it! We’re entering a new era!”

“The Tsar gone!” Leonid crossed himself then started to sob. “Our little father—abdicated!”

Pantameilion grinned insolently, twisting his mustache and whistling through his teeth. The two parlormaids paled.

“Woe is me!” Shifra whispered. “Thrones tumble like in the Book of Revelation!”

“What next? George the Fifth?” said Lala. “What’ll become of me here?”

Delphine started to weep and her perpetual drip separated itself from the cozy berth of her nostrils and fell to the floor. The household had waited twenty years for this historic event but now that it had happened, no one noticed.

“Come on, Leonid,” said Zeitlin, offering the butler his silk handkerchief, a gesture that, Ariadna noted, he would never have made a week earlier. “Pull yourselves together. Nothing changes in my house. Take my coat. What time is lunch, Cook? I’m ravenous.”

Ariadna gripped the marble banisters, watching the servants pull off Zeitlin’s boots. The Emperor was gone. She had grown up with Nicholas II and suddenly felt quite rootless.

Zeitlin leaped up the stairs, taking two at a time, like a young man. Following her into her bedroom, he kissed her on the lips so energetically that it made her head spin and then talked about the new Russia. The crowds were still out of control. The police headquarters was burning; policemen and informers were being killed; soldiers and bandits were driving automobiles and armoured cars around the streets, shooting their rifles in the air. The former Emperor wanted to return to Tsarskoe Selo but was now under arrest, soon to be reunited with his wife and children—they would not be harmed. Grand Duke Michael would turn down the throne.

Zeitlin was elated, he told his wife, because many of his friends from the Kadets and Octobrists were serving in Prince Lvov’s government. The war would go on; he had already been commissioned by the new War Minister to deliver more rifles and howitzers; and it turned out that Sashenka was still a Bolshevik. He had seen her at the Taurida Palace with her comrades—a motley bunch of fanatics—but youth will be youth.

“There, you see, Ariadna? We’re a republic. Russia’s a sort of democracy!”

“What will happen to the Tsar?” asked Ariadna, feeling dazed. “What will happen to us?”

“What do you mean?” replied Zeitlin affably. “There’ll be changes of course. The Poles and Finns want independence, but we’ll be fine. There are opportunities in all this. In fact, when I was in the Taurida, I had a word with…”

Ariadna barely noticed when Zeitlin, still babbling about new ministers and juicy contracts, checked his gold fob watch and went downstairs to his office to make telephone calls. Almost in a trance, she followed him out of her room and watched him descend. She heard the Trotting Chair rumble into action.

Leonid rushed to the front door. Sashenka came into the hall, pale and elated, dressed in that plain blouse and grey skirt, her hair in an ugly bun, and no rouge at all. Ariadna was disappointed in her daughter: why did she dress like a provincial schoolteacher? What a sight the child was! She stank too, of smoke, soup kitchens and the people, the rushing gadding people. Even a Bolshevik needed to use powder and lipstick, and why did she refuse to wear her new dresses from Chernyshev’s? A decent dress would improve her no end.

But somehow Sashenka was utterly triumphant, glowing even. “Hello, Mama!” she called up but then, throwing off her fur shuba and boots, she swept on to answer the questions of Lala and the servants. Excitedly, Sashenka told them that the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ was sitting; that Uncle Mendel was on the Executive Committee. And that Uncle Gideon was there too—he was writing about it—and his friends, the Mensheviks, dominated the Soviet.