Sashenka (22 page)

Outside the Astoria, some soldiers were stealing a RollsRoyce, punching a uniformed chauffeur. The doorman, an officer and a gendarme ran outside, shouting. The soldiers calmly shot the officer and the gendarme, and the car drove off with its horn blowing.

Presently, a bearded man staggered heartily past her singing, “
Nightingale, nightingale,
”

with a blond woman in a fur coat and Sashenka recognized Gideon and Countess Loris.

She was relieved to find friends and was about to hail them when Gideon cupped Missy’s buttocks and pulled her out of the crowd and into a doorway where they started kissing frenziedly.

A volley of shots distracted Sashenka. Figures were climbing up the façade of the Mariinsky Palace and tearing down the doubleheaded eagle of the Romanovs.

The gendarme’s body lay in the street, splayed so that his white belly bulged out of his trousers, like a dead fish. Exhausted beyond belief, Sashenka stepped over it and hurried down Nevsky—toward the Taurida Palace.

33

“What are you all standing around for?” Ariadna called from the top of the stairs, her hair up, elegant in a flounced dress of shantung silk. The faces of Leonid the butler, the two chauffeurs and the parlormaids were raised toward her as she started to descend.

“Haven’t you heard, Baroness?” It was Pantameilion, always the cheekiest, his neat mustache, oiled hair and sharp chin thrusting impertinently.

“Heard what? Speak up!”

“They’ve formed a Workers’ Soviet at the Taurida Palace,” he said excitedly, “and we’ve heard that—”

“That’s yesterday’s news,” snapped Ariadna. “Please get on with your work.”

“And the crowds say…the Tsar’s abdicated!” said Pantameilion.

“Rubbish! Stop spreading rumors, Pantameilion. Go and decarbonize the car,” replied Ariadna. “The baron would know if anyone did—he’s at the Taurida!”

At that moment, the front door opened and Zeitlin swept in, a commanding figure in his floorlength black coat with a beaver collar and
shapka
. Ariadna and the servants stared openmouthed as if he alone could settle the great question of the epoch.

Zeitlin cheerfully tossed his hat at the stand. He appeared years younger, radiating confidence. So there! thought Ariadna, the Tsar is back in control. What nonsense the servants talk! Fools! Peasants!

Zeitlin leaned on his cane and looked up at Ariadna like a tenor about to sing an Italian aria.

“I have news,” he said in a voice quivering with excitement.

There! The Cossacks are guarding the streets, the Germans are retreating, everything will settle down again as it always does, decided Ariadna. Long live the Emperor!

On cue, Lala came down the stairs, Shifra emerged from the Black Way and Delphine the cook from the kitchen, her customary drip dangling from the end of her nose.

“The Emperor has abdicated,” announced Zeitlin. “First in favor of the Tsarevich then in favor of his brother Grand Duke Michael. Prince Lvov has formed a government. All political parties are now legal. That’s it! We’re entering a new era!”

“The Tsar gone!” Leonid crossed himself then started to sob. “Our little father—abdicated!”

Pantameilion grinned insolently, twisting his mustache and whistling through his teeth.

The two parlormaids paled.

“Woe is me!” Shifra whispered. “Thrones tumble like in the Book of Revelation!”

“What next? George the Fifth?” said Lala. “What’ll become of me here?”

Delphine started to weep and her perpetual drip separated itself from the cozy berth of her nostrils and fell to the floor. The household had waited twenty years for this historic event but now that it had happened, no one noticed.

“Come on, Leonid,” said Zeitlin, offering the butler his silk handkerchief, a gesture that, Ariadna noted, he would never have made a week earlier. “Pull yourselves together.

Nothing changes in my house. Take my coat. What time is lunch, Cook? I’m ravenous.”

Ariadna gripped the marble banisters, watching the servants pull off Zeitlin’s boots. The Emperor was gone. She had grown up with Nicholas II and suddenly felt quite rootless.

Zeitlin leaped up the stairs, taking two at a time, like a young man. Following her into her bedroom, he kissed her on the lips so energetically that it made her head spin and then talked about the new Russia. The crowds were still out of control. The police headquarters was burning; policemen and informers were being killed; soldiers and bandits were driving automobiles and armoured cars around the streets, shooting their rifles in the air. The former Emperor wanted to return to Tsarskoe Selo but was now under arrest, soon to be reunited with his wife and children—they would not be harmed. Grand Duke Michael would turn down the throne.

Zeitlin was elated, he told his wife, because many of his friends from the Kadets and Octobrists were serving in Prince Lvov’s government. The war would go on; he had already been commissioned by the new War Minister to deliver more rifles and howitzers; and it turned out that Sashenka was still a Bolshevik. He had seen her at the Taurida Palace with her comrades—a motley bunch of fanatics—but youth will be youth.

“There, you see, Ariadna? We’re a republic. Russia’s a sort of democracy!”

“What will happen to the Tsar?” asked Ariadna, feeling dazed. “What will happen to us?”

“What do you mean?” replied Zeitlin affably. “There’ll be changes of course. The Poles and Finns want independence, but we’ll be fine. There are opportunities in all this. In fact, when I was in the Taurida, I had a word with…”

Ariadna barely noticed when Zeitlin, still babbling about new ministers and juicy contracts, checked his gold fob watch and went downstairs to his office to make telephone calls. Almost in a trance, she followed him out of her room and watched him descend. She heard the Trotting Chair rumble into action.

Leonid rushed to the front door. Sashenka came into the hall, pale and elated, dressed in that plain blouse and grey skirt, her hair in an ugly bun, and no rouge at all. Ariadna was disappointed in her daughter: why did she dress like a provincial schoolteacher? What a sight the child was! She stank too, of smoke, soup kitchens and the people, the rushing gadding people. Even a Bolshevik needed to use powder and lipstick, and why did she refuse to wear her new dresses from Chernyshev’s? A decent dress would improve her no end.

But somehow Sashenka was utterly triumphant, glowing even. “Hello, Mama!” she called up but then, throwing off her fur
shuba
and boots, she swept on to answer the questions of Lala and the servants. Excitedly, Sashenka told them that the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ was sitting; that Uncle Mendel was on the Executive Committee. And that Uncle Gideon was there too—he was writing about it—and his friends, the Mensheviks, dominated the Soviet.

Ariadna did not care about this politicking but she could see that Sashenka needed to sleep. Her eyes were red, her hands shook from coffee and exhilaration. Yet as she watched her daughter’s animated face, she saw Sashenka anew. It was as if she had grown strong and beautiful, like a grub eating her mother’s flesh from the inside. Now she was shining with life while Ariadna was lifeless and empty.

Stifling a longing to weep, Ariadna retreated to her bedroom.

Feeling not so much calm as becalmed, Ariadna measured out Dr. Gemp’s opium tonic and swallowed it. But this time it did not work. Her limbs were heavy, as if moving through molasses. The earth seemed to slow down, almost stopping on its axis. Time became excruciating.

She lay down on her divan. She could not rejoice in the news that made her husband feel younger and her daughter seem beautiful; it merely aged her. The ground was splintering beneath her feet. No Tsar; Rasputin dead; Zeitlin had talked divorce; and somehow what most upset her was Sashenka’s joyous luminosity. She was playing grownup politics, laughing at her parents. She had a mission in life—but what did Ariadna have? Why was Sashenka happy? Why so smug? The clock ticked more and more slowly. She waited for each tick but it took ages to come and when it did, it was like the tolling of a distant bell.

When Ariadna was growing up in Turbin, she knew the Tsars were no friend of the Jews, but the Jews were convinced that without the Tsars it would be much worse. The Tsar was far away and he did much harm to the Jews and to the Russians too, even if his intentions were not too bad. But the Tsar had protected the Jews against the Cossacks, landowners, antiSemites and pogromists. Now he was gone, who would protect them? Who would look after her? Suddenly she craved her mother’s embrace, her mother whom she had ignored. Miriam was in the same house, so was her father—but they might have been in another universe. To reach them would take an eternity.

The sounds of the household were muffled. She had nothing to do and the nothingness took forever to pass. The world was soaked in blood, just as Rasputin had warned her it would be; the streets of Piter were in anarchy. Outside, she heard tramping feet, hooting cars, cheering and gunfire. The sounds meant nothing; everything had lost its taste; her perfume had turned to dust. Everything, even her scarlet dresses, her sapphires, looked grey.

She rose with a sigh and wandered toward Sashenka’s room. She realized that she had not visited it for years.

34

Baron Zeitlin was in his study, clanking energetically on his Trotting Chair, a cigar between his teeth. He was sure he could adapt to the new world, indeed he almost sympathized with the socialists. He was vibrating with new plans. Then he heard Sashenka’s voice in the foyer and remembered how he had failed to understand her. Now he must try harder—otherwise he would lose her.

“Darling Sashenka!” She burst in breathlessly but did not sit down. “I can’t believe the last few days. But life must go on. When are you starting your studies?”

“Studies? We’re much too busy for studies. I lied to you about my politics, Papa, because I had to. We Bolsheviks live by special rules. I was doing what was right.” Her face was firm, almost aggressive.

“It’s all right, Sashenka, I understand,” said Zeitlin, but he did not. He blamed himself for making his daughter into this godless avenger. She had lied to him and rejected the family. But he had taught her to disrespect faith and this was the result. And now was not the time for another quarrel. “Your mother thought you had a boyfriend.”

“How absurd! She hardly knows me. I have a job now at the
Pravda
newspaper as liaison with the Petrograd Committee and the Soviet.”

“But you must go back to school. The Revolution’s almost over, Sashenka. The government…”

“Papa, the Revolution’s just started. There are exploiters and exploited. No middle ground. This government’s just a temporary bourgeois stage in the march to Socialism.

The peasants must have their land, the workers their equality. The soldiers now take their orders from the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.” She was almost shouting at him now, flushed with defiance, her hands gripping his arms. “There’ll be one last stage of capitalist corruption and then all this rottenness, all the bloodsuckers—yes, even you, Papa—will be swept away. There’ll be blood on the streets. I love you, Papa, but we Bolsheviks don’t have families and my love counts for nothing in the face of history.”

Zeitlin had stopped trotting on his contraption. He looked at his daughter, at her exquisite freckles and dappled eyes, and was stunned.

Silence. From somewhere else in the house, there was a small pop.

“Did you hear that?” said Zeitlin, taking his cigar out of his mouth. “What was it?”

“It might have come from upstairs.”

Father and daughter went out into the hall and then, for some reason, they were running.

Leonid was at the top of the stairs, Lala on the landing. All were looking at the door of Ariadna’s room. A cold hand clutched his heart, and Zeitlin rushed up the stairs.

“Ariadna!” he shouted, knocking on the door. The staff peered past him, goggleeyed.

Ariadna was snowily naked on the divan. The smoking Mauser, dark and chunky, rested on her stomach. On her white skin, blood dripped crimson down her breast and pooled on the floor.

35

Sashenka stood at the window of the Gogol Street safe house, not far from the War Ministry, smoking a cigarette and peering out over the frozen Neva at the Peter and Paul Fortress. It was dark, yet the sky glowed an unnatural purple like a theatrical screen with a light behind it. The lantern atop the spire of the fortress’s church swung a little in the wind.

The workers controlled the fortress. Mendel and Trotsky had once been prisoners in the Trubetskoy Bastion but yesterday the prisoners had all been freed. It was early evening and the streets were still teeming as excited but goodnatured crowds tore down any remaining Romanov eagles. The Okhrana headquarters was on fire.

Sashenka’s dreams were coming true but now she was numb. She walked the streets without seeing or hearing the remarkable sights. Her mother had pulled off the impossible: she had upstaged the Russian Revolution. People bumped into Sashenka. Someone embraced her. Vanya Palitsyn called her name from a careering car filled with Red Guards, a Romanov crest on its doors.

The apartment was too hot; she was sweating because she had not taken off her coat or hat. Why on earth had she walked straight here again? A place she had promised never to revisit. She had tried to block Sagan out of her mind; his time was past and probably he was already in Stockholm or the south. Yet here she was, in the familiar apartment, waiting for the person she was accustomed to confiding in about her mother.

She heard a sound and turned slowly. Captain Sagan, still in full gendarme uniform but haggard and bleary, stood there pointing a Walther pistol at her. Suddenly he looked his age, older even.

They said nothing for a moment. Then he put the pistol back in its holster and without a word came to her. They hugged. She was grateful he was there.

“I’ve got some brandy,” he said, “and the samovar’s just boiled.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I came last night. I didn’t know where else to come. Some workers went to my home and my wife has gone. The trains aren’t running. I didn’t know where to go so I just came here.