Sashenka

Beria affably poked Palitsyn in the stomach as he passed. “Good to see you, Vanya.” He clicked his tongue. “All quiet? Everything running smoothly?”

“Absolutely. Welcome to my home, Lavrenti Pavlovich!”

“What did you think of the soccer? Spartak need to be taught a lesson, and if our strikers don’t play better next time I’ll bust their guts!” Beria clapped his hands cheerfully. “Will you come and play basketball on my team tomorrow? We’re playing Voroshilov’s guards.”

“I’ll be there, Lavrenti Pavlovlich.”

Sashenka knew that her husband admired Beria, who worked like a horse. He was young, his round face smooth and unlined.

“May I sit down here?” asked Stalin modestly, pointing at the table.

“Of course, Comrade Stalin, wherever you wish,” she said.

Comrade Egnatashvili laid out the food on the table and Sashenka leaned across for the wine bottle.

“Let me open it,” said Stalin. He poured glasses of the earthy red wine for everyone. Then he put some lobio beans, with their rich Georgian broth, into a bowl, tossed in some bread and added a plate on top to let the bread soak. He helped himself to shashlik lamb and Georgian spicy chicken, satsivi, and carried this assortment back to his place. Egnatashvili, blond and handsome in his well-cut uniform, with bulging wrestler’s shoulders, stood towering over Stalin, helping himself to the same dishes. Both of them sat down and started to eat, Egnatashvili tasting his lobio a moment earlier than Stalin. He really was Stalin’s food taster, Sashenka thought.

“Comrade Satinov,” Stalin said quietly, gesturing for Satinov to sit beside him, with Beria on the other side. Egnatashvili, Vanya and Mendel were farther down the table.

“Lavrenti Pavlovich, who shall be tamada?” Stalin asked Beria.

“Comrade Satinov should be toastmaster!” suggested Beria.

Satinov rose, holding up a Georgian wineglass in the curved shape of an ox’s horn, and made his first toast. “To Comrade Stalin, who has led us through such difficult times to shining triumphs!”

“Surely you can think of something more interesting than that!” joked Stalin, but everyone in the house stood up and drank to him.

“To Comrade Stalin!”

“Not him again,” protested Stalin. His voice was surprisingly soft and high. “Let me make a toast: to Lenin!”

Other toasts followed: to the Red Army, to their hosts, to Sashenka and Soviet women. Sashenka observed everything, topping up the glasses then rejoining the table. She wanted to remember every moment of this scene. Stalin bantered with Satinov in Georgian but Sashenka sensed the Leader was watching him, evaluating him. She knew that Stalin liked simple, decent young people who were ruthless and vigorous but easygoing and cheerful. Satinov was hardworking and competent but he was always singing opera to himself.

Mendel started coughing.

“How’s your lungs, Mendel?” Stalin asked, listening patiently as Mendel answered with an excess of medical detail. “Mendel and I shared a cell at the Bailovka Prison in Baku in 1908,” Stalin informed the table.

“Right,” said Mendel, stroking his modest goatee.

“And Mendel had a food hamper from his indulgent family and he shared it with me.”

“Right, I shared with all the comrades in the cell,” said Mendel in his starchy, pettifogging way, making clear there was no favoritism in his comradeship. But only one cellmate mattered, thought Sashenka.

“That’s Mendel! Incorruptible author of that best-selling tome Bolshevik Morality! You haven’t changed in the slightest, Mendel,” said Stalin teasingly but with a straight face. “You were old then and you’re old now!” He chuckled and the others joined in. “But we’ve all aged…”

“Not at all, Comrade Stalin,” insisted Egnatashvili, Vanya and Beria simultaneously. “You look great, Comrade Stalin.”

“That’s enough of that,” said Stalin. “Mendel once told me off for drinking too much at a meeting when we exiles shared that old stable in Siberia, and he’s still giving everyone a hard time!”

Sashenka remembered how Mendel had backed Stalin in the Control Commission ever since Lenin’s death, never wavering during the famine of ’32, nor hesitating to smash the “bastards” to smithereens at the Plenums of ’37.

“In fact,” Stalin teased Mendel, “I often have to hold him back or he’ll froth at the mouth and have a seizure!” Everyone laughed at Mendel because his pedantic fanaticism was notorious. But it was also the reason that Mendel was still alive.

Stalin sipped his wine, his half-slit eyes flicking from person to person.

“Would you like some music, Comrade Stalin?” suggested Satinov.

Stalin smiled like a cat. When he started to sing “Suliko,” all the Georgians joined in. Then Satinov called out, “Black Swallow.” Stalin grinned and, without missing a beat, took the lead in a beautiful, high tenor, backed by Egnatashvili in a baritone, and Beria and Satinov in polyphonic harmonies. Sashenka listened entranced.