Sashenka

“So why have you stopped writing?”

“My ink is frozen.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She pushed his face away roughly, holding his chin in her hand. “I don’t believe you’re not writing. I think you’re writing secretly.”

He stared out at the river, where the lights of the British Embassy in its stately mansion right opposite glowed in the water.

“I’m a writer. Every writer has to write or he’ll die. If I didn’t I’d shrivel up and rot away. So I translate articles from socialist papers, and get commissions to work on film scripts. But they’ve almost dried up too. I’m nearly penniless now, even though I still have my apartment in the writers’ building.”

“Why didn’t you stay in Paris?”

“I’m a Russian. Without the Motherland, I’d be nothing.”

“So what are you working on?”

“You.”

“You’re writing about the secret police and the top of the Party, aren’t you? You write it by hand at night, and hide it in your mattress. Or maybe at the home of some girl in the suburbs? Am I just material for your secret work? Are you using me to see into our world?”

He sighed and scratched his head. “We writers all have something secret that keeps us alive and gives us hope, although we know we can never publish it. Isaac Babel’s working on something secret, Misha Bulgakov’s writing a novel about the devil in Moscow. But no one will ever read them. No one will ever read me.”

“I will. Can I read what you’re working on?”

He shook his head.

“You don’t trust me, do you?”

“I long to trust you, Sashenka. I’d love to show you the novel because no one knows of it, not even my wife, and if I showed it to you, then I would have one reader, one beautiful reader, instead of none and I’d feel an artist again instead of a washed-up scribbler in these days when we’ve all become cannibals.”

Benya looked away from her and she sensed, even if she did not see, that there were tears in his eyes.

“Let’s make a pact,” she said, taking both his hands. “You can trust me with anything, even the novel. I’ll be your reader. And in return, if you swear never to hurt me, never to break this confidence, you can kiss me again after sundown by the Moskva.”

He nodded and they held hands, their faces luminous in the summer night like the burnished death masks of pharaohs. Behind her, she heard the call and then the haunting creak of wings as two swans landed with a clean foamy swish on the rippling surface of the river.

She was happier at that moment, in herself and for herself, than she could ever remember.

11

Benya led Sashenka by the hand up the steps from the Embankment and toward the Metropole Hotel. She hung back as the doorman in the top hat and braided tails opened the door, but Benya could tell that she wanted to dance as much as he did.

Benya loved the atmosphere at the Metropole. Even during the Terror, the jazz band went on playing there and he would dance away his troubles to the blare of the trumpets and saxophones. Before 1937, the hotel had been full of foreigners with their Russian girls in French gowns, but now the businessmen, diplomats, journalists and social delegations from abroad sat apart. Before the killing started, Gideon had sometimes brought him here for dinners with important foreign writers. He had met H. G. Wells, Gide and Feuchtwanger. He had heard his patron Gorky give a speech here to the Party writers and theater bureaucrats such as Averbakh and Kirshon. One by one, they had all vanished. Alien elements liquidated! But he had survived, and Sashenka had survived the Terror by some miracle, and it seemed to Benya all of a sudden that tonight they should celebrate being alive.

As they walked together through the doors, they were so close and so in step, momentarily, that he could see the dark wood and polished chrome of the front desk reflected in her grey eyes. But as soon as they were in the lobby, Benya noticed how Sashenka kept apart from him. He realized she was worried that she might be recognized—but she sometimes entertained her writers for the journal here and he was her new writer.

“Relax,” he whispered to her.

The waiters in black coats showed them to a black art-deco table. How different the dining room seemed. The brilliant mirrors, the curling blue smoke rising to the molded ceiling like mist on a mountain, the lights on the stage, the silhouettes of men with their hair en brosse and their tidy mustaches, the gleam of boots, the curve of jodhpur breeches on the Red Army officers, the permanent-wave hairdos of the girls—all were infinitely more glamorous tonight.

A girl in a white blouse with a flashlight and a tray of cigarettes and chocolates appeared before them. Never taking his eyes off Sashenka, Benya bought a pack of cigarettes, offering her one. He lit hers, then his own. They said nothing, but when she looked at him, her gaze seemed like the beam of a lighthouse shining out from a friendly shore. The smoke whirled around her in broken circles as if it too wanted to be close to her. Everything in the nightclub revolved around her.