Sashenka

The rabbi’s chanting carried her to Turbin three decades earlier. Her father and the beadle were walking out of the studyhouse; her mother was cooking dumplings and noodles laced with saffron, cinnamon and cloves. Ariadna was in trouble even then: she had refused to marry the son of the Mogilevsky rabbi, had been seen talking to one of the Litvak lads who did not even wear ringlets—and she had met a Russian officer in the woods near the barracks. She adored that uniform, the gold buttons, the boots, the shoulder boards. No one knew she had kissed not only the Litvak boy but also the young Russian, sipping cognac that made her glow, their hands all over her, her skin fluttering under their caresses. How that officer must have boasted and laughed to his friends in the officers’ mess: “You’ll never guess what I found in the woods today. A lovely Jewess fresh as the dew…”

I was too beautiful for the rabbi’s court in Turbin, she told herself. I was a peacock in a stable. And now she was happily going back to Turbin. Or at least passing through there, on the way to somewhere else. What was written for her in the Book of Life?

But when Ariadna flew back to that familiar bedroom filled with family and re-entered her body, she realized that it was no longer her bedroom, Sashenka was no longer her daughter, Miriam no longer her mother—and she herself was no longer Ariadna Finkel Barmakid, Baroness Zeitlin. She became something else, and she was filled with joy.

Sashenka was the first to notice. “Papa,” she said, “look! Mama’s smiling.”

38

“She’s gone,” said Miriam, taking her daughter’s hand.

“Woe is to outlive your own child,” said the rabbi quietly and then he started to pray for his daughter. Sashenka felt that she had made some peace with her mother, but her father, who had been napping on the divan, awoke and threw himself onto the body, weeping.

Uncle Gideon, now writing for Gorky’s New Life newspaper, flirting with both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, was also there, waiting in the corridor, and he rushed into the room and lifted Zeitlin off Ariadna’s body. He was immensely strong and he carried the baron away and sat him in a chair outside.

The doctor sent them all out. He closed Ariadna’s mouth and her eyes and then called them back. “Come and see her now,” he instructed.

“She’s become…beautiful again,” Sashenka whispered. “Yet there’s no one there.” Sure enough, Ariadna was no longer the quivering ruin but as beautiful as she had been as a girl. She was serene, her skin white, her pretty nose upturned, and those lush lips slightly opened as if expecting to be kissed by some dashing young officer.

This is how I’ll remember her, thought Sashenka. What a beauty. Yet she felt a gnawing dissatisfaction and uneasiness: she had never known her. Her mother had been a stranger.

And who was she herself in this play? She no longer belonged there. While her mother was dying, she had become her daughter again. Her father, who had been unfazed by revolutions, wars, strikes and abdications, by his daughter’s arrest, his brother’s mischief, his wife’s affairs, who had defied Petrograd workers, Baku assassins and aristocratic anti-Semites, had crumpled under this, a domestic suicide. He had abandoned his business, left his contracts unsigned, his contacts neglected and, in a few weeks, he had lost almost all interest in money. The businesses in Baku, Odessa and Tiflis were already unraveling because the Azeri Turks, Ukrainians and Georgians were liberating themselves from the Russian Empire. But the details were in his mind, and it seemed that this unshaven, grief-stricken man was beset by doubts about everything. She could hear him jabbering and crying.

It seemed to Sashenka that she might be losing both parents in one day.

She did not cry anymore—she had cried often enough in recent nights—but still she longed to know why her mother had used her daughter’s gun. Was Ariadna punishing Sashenka? Or was it simply the first weapon that had come to hand?

Sashenka stood beside the bed for a long time as people came and went to pay their respects. Gideon staggered into the room and kissed Ariadna’s forehead. He ordered the doctor to sedate her father. The old Jews prayed. She watched as Turbin reclaimed the wicked she-devil of St. Petersburg.

Ariadna’s smile remained, but gradually her face started to subside. Her cheeks sank, and her gentile nose, the perfect little button that had allowed her to romance Guards officers and English noblemen, became Semitic and hooked. Sashenka’s grandfather covered the body with a white shroud and lit two candles in silver candlesticks at the head of the bed. Miriam covered the mirrors with cloths and opened the windows. Since Zeitlin himself seemed paralyzed, the rabbi took control. Orthodox Jews, liberated by the Revolution and allowed to visit the capital, appeared in this most secular of houses, as if by magic. Low stools were provided for the women to sit shiva.