Sashenka

“Well, funny you should ask but according to ‘The Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery,’ it is the traditional female comment at this very moment of the first encounter.”

“And according to this…‘Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery,’ what is the correct male answer?”

“I’m meant to say, ‘Oh, I know!’ as if I believe you.”

“Which you don’t.”

“Actually, I do believe you.”

“And who is the author of this famous book of wisdom?”

“A certain B. Z. Golden,” answered Benya Golden.

“Does it say what happens next?”

He was silent, and she saw a shadow pass over his face.

“Are you afraid, Sashenka?”

She shivered. “Slightly.”

“We need never meet again,” he said.

“You don’t mean that, do you?” she asked, suddenly terrified that he might indeed mean it.

He shook his head, his eyes very close to hers. “Sashenka, I think this is the most joyful thing that has ever happened to me. I’ve had lots of girls, I sleep with lots of women…”

“Don’t boast, you filthy Galitzianer!” she scolded.

“Perhaps it’s the times. Perhaps we live everything so intensely now. But we deserve a little selfishness, don’t we?” He took her face in his hands and she was surprised how serious he became. “Do you feel anything for me?”

Sashenka pushed him away and stumbled to the window, sweat drying on her back, a pulse still beating between her legs. They were in the eaves of the old building. In the moon-blanched night, she looked down at the Moskva River, the bridges, the gaudy onion domes of St. Basil’s, and into the Kremlin, sixty-nine acres of ocher palaces, emerald rooftops, blood-red battlements, golden cupolas and cobbled courtyards, and saw where Comrade Stalin worked, in the triangular Sovnarkom Building with the domed green roof. She could even see the light on in his office. Was he there now? The people thought so but she knew he was probably at Kuntsevo. He was her friend, Josef Vissarionovich…well, not quite. Comrade Stalin was beyond friendship, but the Father of Peoples—yes, her new acquaintance and sometime guest who had promoted her husband and admired her magazine—was the greatest statesman in the history of the working class. She did not doubt it, and she remained a Bolshevik to her fingertips. What had happened in this room had not changed that.

But something had changed. Benya was lighting a cigarette, lying stretched out on the bed. He was watching her silently, barely breathing. The band might still have been playing downstairs, but in the room it was quiet and calm. She had everything but this in her life. She was a Communist woman and a mother, while Benya was a blocked writer out of tune with the boldest ideals of his time, alienated from the great dialectic of history, a piece of faithless flotsam who regarded Comrade Stalin and the workers’ state with sneering zoological interest. Yet this vain, impertinent and flashy Galitzianer with his dimpled chin, his low-set brows over dancing blue eyes, his forlorn last tuft of blond hair on his balding forehead, and yes, his sex, had made her savagely happy.

He got up and stood behind her. “What is it?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her.

“I’ve done something worse than be unfaithful—something I thought I would never do. I’ve become my mother.”

But he wasn’t listening. “You don’t even know how erotic you are,” he said, running his hands up her thighs from behind. And they started again, another shuddering tournament. When it was over, they had become creatures of the sea, their bodies as sleek and wet and lithe as leaping dolphins.

Later, she rested her elbows on the windowsill so she was looking at the Kremlin again and he touched her, from behind, with such delicate tracery, such gleeful tenderness, that she barely recognized the geography of her own body. “What a glutton you turn out to be!” he teased her. He seemed to live with joyfulness, a gaiety that dyed her monochrome world all the wild colors of the rainbow.

So this, she mused to herself, this is what all the fuss is about.

14

Her body still tingling and burning, Sashenka walked home past the Kremlin, higher and brighter than ever in the searchlights that sent strange white columns boring into the sky, across the Manege and alongside the National Hotel. When she looked back at the Kremlin, its eight red stars made her think of Benya. They were, she’d read in the newspaper, made of crystal, alexandrite, amethyst, aquamarine, topaz—and seven thousand rubies! Yes, seven thousand rubies to celebrate her and Benya Golden. What had happened to her? she wondered. She could not believe Benya’s uninhibited carnality or the fog of sweat that had blurred that little room. Passing the old university on her right, she turned down little Granovsky Street. Her pink turn-of-the-century wedding-cake home, the Fifth House of Soviets, was on the left with guards outside. The guards nodded at her. The janitor was hosing down the yard.