Sashenka

“Look at me, look at me, Papochka and Mamochka!” He was off again.

“When aren’t we looking at you?” retorted Sashenka, tenderly. Turning round she could see that Snowy had mastered the bicycle. Triumphant, the little girl jumped off and danced away, waving her cushion.

“Right, it’s too hot and I’m hungry,” announced Vanya. “Brightness burns. I want you all out of the sun right now.”

2

An hour later, Sashenka, sitting cross-legged on the floor, was playing with the children in the nursery next to the Red Corner, with its posters of Lenin and Stalin, and the family radio mounted in a varnished oak casing. She could hear Razum and Vanya in the kitchen arguing about the soccer match between Dynamo Moscow and Spartak. Dynamo Moscow had played appallingly. Spartak had fouled the Moscow striker, who had been borne off the field, but the referee had not sent off the Spartak player.

“Perhaps he’s a saboteur!” Razum joked.

“Or maybe he needs new spectacles!”

No one would have laughed about a saboteur six months earlier, Sashenka reflected, even a soccer saboteur. People had been arrested and shot for lesser things. She recalled how the director of the Moscow Zoo had been detained for poisoning a Soviet giraffe, and how a schoolboy at School 118 near their Moscow apartment had been arrested for throwing a dart that accidentally hit a poster of Stalin. Whenever one of their friends was arrested, Vanya would close the kitchen door (so the children could not hear) and whisper the name. If it was someone famous like Bukharin, he would just shrug: “Enemies are everywhere.” If it was a good friend with whom they had holidayed in Sochi, for example, she would be mystified and concerned. “The Organs must know something but…”

“There’s always a reason,” he’d say. “It means it’s necessary.”

“The masks that people wear! The evil of our enemies beggars belief. Snowy was going to play with their children—”

“Cancel Snowy’s visit,” Vanya would say sharply, “and don’t call Elena! Careful!” He would kiss her forehead and no more would be said.

“You can’t make a revolution with silk gloves,” said Comrade Stalin, and Sashenka had repeated it to herself every day. But now Comrade Stalin had told the Eighteenth Congress that the Enemies of the People had been destroyed. Yezhov, the crazy secret-police boss, had been fired and arrested for his excesses, while the new Narkom of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, had brought back justice and moderation.

The men, their voices increasingly sticky from the succession of beers and the heat, were guffawing about a goal Vanya had scored in their amateur soccer team. Sashenka could not imagine why anyone would want to discuss soccer. She sighed. She and Vanya were opposites—he a worker of peasant origins, she an intellectual of bourgeois upbringing. But everyone knew that opposites make good marriages, and she had a kind, successful husband, two beautiful children, the drivers, the cars, this idyllic dacha—and now an American fridge.

Carolina started to set the big table on the veranda for an early May Day supper. Sashenka, who always held a party on May Day, thought about the evening ahead—and their guests. Uncle Gideon would bring his raffish friends and proposition somebody inappropriate, she supposed. There was a squeal. Carlo had grabbed Snowy’s beloved cushion and she was chasing him into the sitting room and out again, careering round the Red Corner, both laughing their heads off.

Sashenka walked onto the veranda, humming a tune, one of Liubov Orlova’s songs.

She stopped, jolted by a terrifying attack of happiness. She was on the right side of history; Soviet power, with its colossal steel plants and thousands of tanks and planes, was strong; Comrade Stalin was loved and admired. How much the Party had achieved! What joyous times she lived in! What would her grandfather, the Turbin rabbi, probably still alive in New York, have said about her dizzy happiness? “Don’t tempt the Fates.” That would have been his warning—all that nonsense about the Evil Eye and those dybbuks and golems. But this was just medieval superstition! There was much to celebrate.

“Have we got vodka?” she called out to Vanya.

“Yes, and a crate of Georgian wine in the trunk of the car.”

“Well, pour me a glass! Put Utesov’s jazz-tango on the gramophone.”

The children and her husband joined her on the veranda. Vanya lifted up Snowy and pretended to slow-dance with her as if she were a grown-up. Sashenka held Carlo and danced with him, singing along to the music. She and Vanya turned the children upside down at the same moment and then swooped them up again. The children squealed with joy. How many comrades dance with their children like we do? thought Sashenka. Most of them are much too dull.

3