Sashenka

“I can’t talk in this ink-shitting bureaucratic morgue,” he exclaimed in his gravelly voice. “The breeze outside is so balmy, it’ll make you want to sing. Follow me!”

Afterward, long afterward, when she had too much time to replay these moments, Sashenka knew this was where it had all started. Her blood pounding in her ears, she walked with him to the elevators, then stopped.

“I’ve left something on my desk, Benya. I must grab it. Excuse me!”

She left him in the foyer and ran back to her office. Her fingers touching her lips, she looked at her desk, her photographs of Vanya and the children, her phone, her proofs, at everyone and everything that was important to her. She told herself this preening man was bad news. He was rude, arrogant, insincere and lacking Party-mindedness (he was not even a Party member)—and not as afraid of life as he should be. She should not go walking with him.

Then, aware of what she was doing yet curiously unable to stop herself, she turned around and walked back to where Benya Golden was waiting for her.

10

“This is one of those rare moments when no one knows where we are,” said Benya Golden as they walked in the Alexander Gardens beside the red crenellated fortress towers of the Kremlin, which reached up to pierce the pink sky.

“You know, sometimes you strike me as very naïve for a writer,” replied Sashenka briskly, remembering his foolish comments at the dacha. “We’re both well known and we’re walking in the most famous park in the city.”

“That’s true but no one’s watching us.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I told no one I was coming to your office, and you told no one we were going for a walk around Moscow. I was on my way home to my wife, and you were on your way to your husband at the Granovsky. So there was no reason to follow either of us. Your comrades imagine we’re earnestly discussing commissions in your office. If they cared, the Organs would assume that we were going home as we always do.”

“Except we didn’t.”

“Precisely, Sashenka, if I may call you that. Anyway no one would recognize me in my hat.” Benya doffed his white peaked cap and bowed low.

“Well, they’d certainly recognize you now,” she said, looking at the fair spiky strands of his receding hair.

“Look around you. The whole of Moscow is promenading tonight. Don’t you ever want to be rid of your responsibilities? Just for an hour.”

Sashenka sighed. “Just for an hour.” The soothing balmy air caressed her skin and reached into her white dress, inflating and rippling the cool cotton so she felt as light and gay as a sail on the wind. Golden was walking faster, talking as quickly, and she struggled to keep up, almost running in her high heels.

She thought about her responsibilities. There was her husband, conventional, industrious and successful, and their two mercurial, spirited cherubs in the bloom of health and happiness. They had two residences, the new dacha and the huge new apartment in the pink Granovsky building known as the Fifth House of Soviets in that little street near the Kremlin. There were the service workers: Carolina the nanny and cook, Razum the driver, the gardeners, the groom. Then there were Vanya’s parents, who lived with them at the apartment—they were a full-time job in themselves, especially Vanya’s mother, who sat in the yard all day gossiping in a dangerously loud voice. She considered Vanya’s stressful, prestigious position, and her own duties on the Women’s Committee and the Party Committee. They both had hectic lives; war was coming; they had to build their socialist world; they were emerging from deep sorrow and tragedy; many had vanished beneath the waves of revolution. That night, like most nights, Vanya would work until dawn—everyone did, following the Master’s nocturnal hours. Vanya told her how the leaders sat at their desks waiting until the words came down the vertushka: “The Master’s just left the Little Corner for the Nearby Dacha.”

Now, there was something big going on. After Munich, Stalin was changing his foreign policies—and his ministers. This was significant for the future of Europe—but it also meant that Vanya was busy working on the changes at the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.

As usual when he had secrets to share, he had pulled Sashenka into the garden at the dacha. “Litvinov’s out; Molotov’s in. I’ll be busy for a few days,” he had told her.

Sashenka knew that meant she would not see Vanya at night either and she must not mention this to anyone. Meanwhile Vanya’s parents were babysitting Snowy and Carlo at the Granovsky apartment.

Feeling lighthearted suddenly in Benya’s company, Sashenka stopped and twirled around like a girl. “Just for an hour. I can be lost for an hour. What a delicious idea!”

Her words sounded indulgently extravagant somehow—not like her at all, and she wanted to take them back.