Sashenka

Ten days later, Benya Golden lunched as usual at the Writers’ Club with Uncle Gideon. Later they visited the Sandunovsky Baths and Benya continued on to Stas, the Armenian barber, in his little shop right next door. There was a portrait of Stalin on the wall, an array of metal clippers and naked razors stuck on a magnetic strip, and a plastic plant in the window. The radiogram, always playing at Stas’s place, reported clashes with the Japanese in Mongolia. War was coming. Benya sat in the soft leather chair as Stas bathed his face in foam and warm water.

“You seem happy enough,” said Stas, an old Caucasian with thick oily hair dyed an unnatural jet black and a small raffish mustache. “You’ve got a commission? Or you’re in love?”

“Both, Stas, both, simultaneously! Everything in my life has changed since I last saw you.”

As he luxuriated in the warm towels wrapped around his face and neck, Benya’s spirits soared. He didn’t give a fig for his commission. All he could think about was Sashenka. Her meltingly husky voice, how she would stroke her short upper lip when concentrating; how they danced, made love, sang, talked, and understood each other “as if we were born under the same star,” he said aloud, shaking his head slowly.

Not a day, not an hour, not a minute passed when he wasn’t consumed by his need to see her, talk to her, touch her. He wanted to feast his eyes on her and fill up his stores of memories, so that even if she was not with him he could almost reach out and feel her. Now he viewed even the most familiar places with reverence, if they were associated with her. That day he had wandered down Gorky Street. The stars and towers celebrated not the Tsars or Stalin, but her, Sashenka. When he ambled past Granovsky, where she lived, a diaphanous halo illuminated that very street. The NKVD guards were not guarding marshals or commissars, they were guarding his heart, which dwelled there.

Yet with love, there was always suffering: she was married. So was he. And they had met in cruel times. He had once loved his wife, but the struggle of everyday life had ground their passion into routine; they had become brother and sister—or, worse, lodgers in the same apartment that they shared with their little daughter. And Sashenka was—highfalutin romantic phrases failed him—simply the loveliest woman he had ever met. He felt he was sitting atop a dizzying peak, peering down on the glowing earth, crowned with stars. Could it last? We mustn’t waste a second, he thought.

“What time is it? I’m late. Hurry up, Stas!” He felt impatient suddenly as if he had to tell someone about his ardent secret. “I’m in love, Stas. No, more than love, I’m crazy about her!”

Across town in the Kitaigorod, Moscow’s Chinatown, Sashenka, in the smart scarlet suit she wore sometimes for work, was climbing up a small staircase to the atelier of Monsieur Abram Lerner, the last old-fashioned tailor in Moscow. He worked for the special services section of the NKVD, and it was he who had designed the new marshals’ uniforms when Stalin had restored the old ranks of the army. It was said that he made Stalin’s own tunics but the Master hated new clothes and it was probably just a rumor.

Lerner had taken on Cleopatra Fishman to serve the leaders’ wives. Sashenka knew that Polina Molotov and the other wives all came to her (and that some insisted on paying, while some did not pay at all). Now, at the end of a busy day, she had arrived to collect another new outfit. She waited impatiently in the reception area, where there were piles of Bazaar and Vogue magazines from America. If a client liked a certain design, she pointed to it in Vogue and Cleo and her team of seamstresses would work it up for her. Lerner and Cleopatra, who were not related but had worked together for decades, existed in an island of old-world courtesy: their atelier was probably the only institution in the entire Soviet Union where no one had been denounced or shot over the last decade.

Cleopatra Fishman, a stocky little woman with grey, curly hair who smelled of chicory, escorted Sashenka into the dressing room, where she unveiled the blue silk dress with the pleated flounces on the skirt.

“Do you want to try it now or just take it?”

Sashenka looked at her watch.

“I’ll put it on.” She quickly threw off her clothes—in a way, she reflected, that she would never have thrown them off before—and folded them away into a bag and pulled on her new outfit. She shivered as the silk settled onto her new-cast body.

“You’ve had a new hairdo too, Sashenka.”

“The permanent wave. Do you approve?”

The older woman looked her up and down. “You’re glowing, Comrade Sashenka. Are you pregnant? Anything you want to tell old Cleopatra?”