Sashenka

She let herself into the apartment on the first floor. She did not turn on the lights but she relished the shining parquet floors that smelled of polish and caught the meager light; she enjoyed the high ceilings, molded so beautifully; and the woody aroma of the Karelian pine furniture, issued by the government. Her parents-in-law were asleep round the corner of the L-shaped corridor but she turned on the lamp by her bedside, its base a muscular golden bicep holding a bulb surrounded by a green shade. She sat on her bed for a second and caught her breath. Was she betraying everyone she loved? Could she lose it all? Yet she could not regret what she had done.

She opened the door to the children’s rooms and looked in on them. Would they smell the reek of sin on her? But they slept on angelically. She had not betrayed them, she told herself firmly. She had just found a part of herself.

Sashenka stood looking down on them, then kissed Snowy’s forehead and Carlo’s nose. Carlo held one of his many bunnies in his arms. She suddenly longed to wake them up and cuddle them. I am still their mother, I am still Sashenka, she told herself.

Just then Snowy, holding her cushion, sat up. “Mama, is it you?”

“Yes, darling, I’m back. Did Babushka put you to bed?”

“Did you go dancing?”

“How did you know?”

“You’re still singing a song, Mama. What song are you singing? A silly song?”

Sashenka closed her eyes and sang softly just for her and Snowy:

Black eyes, passionate eyes, lovely burning eyes,

how I love you, how I fear you.

I first laid eyes on you in an unkind hour…

What a song she had sung with Benya Golden, she thought. Was he still singing it?

Snowy grabbed her mother’s hand, folded it into her floppy cushion, put them both under her golden head and went back to sleep.

Sitting on the bed, her hand trapped under Snowy’s alabaster cheek, Sashenka’s uneasiness evaporated. She was not Ariadna; she could not remember Ariadna ever kissing her good night. Her mother had become a wanton creature, a lunatic animal. But sitting there on Snowy’s bed, she remembered her mother’s death. She wished they had talked. Why had Ariadna killed herself with her Mauser? Sashenka would never forget sitting beside her wheezing mother, waiting for her to die.

Listening now to the soft breathing of the children, she thought of her father again. How proud she had been that he had not fled abroad but had renounced capitalism and joined the new regime. But she had not seen him since 1930, when he fell from being a “non-Party specialist” to a “former person” and “saboteur” and was sent into a lenient exile in Tiflis, where he’d lived in a single room. During the Terror, Sashenka might have been vulnerable as a “capitalist’s daughter” but she was an Old Bolshevik, an enthusiast even for the Terror, and she had “reforged” herself as one of Stalin’s New Soviet Women. Vanya’s working-class credentials and success protected her, but she’d accepted that she could not appeal for her father, help him or even send him packages.

“Let him go,” Vanya had told her. “It’ll be best for him and us.” She had almost appealed to Comrade Stalin, but Snowy had stopped her just in time.

She had last heard Samuil Zeitlin’s gentle, urbane voice—its tone and mannerisms so redolent of their old mansion and life before the Revolution—on the telephone just before his arrest in 1937. Her children had never met him: they believed that her parents had died long before. Sashenka never criticized the Party for the way it treated her father, not even in her own mind, but that did not stop her wondering now: are you out there, Papa? Are you chopping logs in Vorkuta, in the wastes of Kolyma? Or did they give you the seven grams of lead—the Highest Measure of Punishment—years ago?

Slowly she went back to her room, showered, then, collecting Carlo in her arms, she got into bed with him. Carlo awoke and kissed her on the nose. “You’ve found a baby bunny in the woods,” he whispered, and with his mouth still close to her ear, they slept.

The next morning, she had just sat down at her T-shaped desk in the office when the phone rang.

A low humorous voice with that Jewish Galician intonation that immediately, embarrassingly, resonated between her legs, said: “It’s your new writer, Comrade Editor. I wasn’t sure—did you commission that article or not?”

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