Sashenka (43 page)

On the previous day, the woman had asked for a week off, something that had never happened before. But she had years of unused vacation, so Tengiz, the manager, gave her two weeks instead.

Today, she rose very early and walked across Beria Square to the Armenian Market, where she bought provisions. Returning to her room, she filled her suitcase not only with clothes but also with a bag of flat Georgian
lavashi
loaves, cured meats and candies. Taking a photograph of an awkward schoolgirl in the uniform of a Tsarist boarding school off the wall, she removed its back and took out some notes. She hid two hundred rubles in her girdle, kissed the photograph and replaced it on the wall.

She checked herself in the mirror and tutted: those apple cheeks in that heartshaped face were now weathered and coarsened; there were bags under her eyes; and her clothes were dignified but frayed at the edges. She looked fifty but she was younger. How on earth, she asked herself, did you end up here? She shook her head and smiled.

A few hours later she caught the streetcar to the station, where she bought a ticket to Baku and from there to RostovonDon. She changed at Baku Station, a place teeming with Muslims, Turks and Tartars in Soviet uniforms, skullcaps and robes, carrying chickens and sheep and children. One family offered her some Turkish
plov,
cold lamb stew, and she was grateful. She waited for her train. When it was called, it seemed that the entire station charged at it but her Turkish friends helped her and pulled her up into their carriage. She sat close to them and was again grateful for their protection. On the train, she tried to sleep but could not stop reflecting on the strange events of the previous week.

Four days earlier, a sweaty official in a Party tunic had arrived to inspect the residence and work permits of the employees at the café. All were asked to go to the Party Headquarters, the old Viceroy’s Palace, on Beria Boulevard to have their papers checked. Tengiz told her she was to go first. This was odd but one did not ask questions: checks, cleansings and purges were part of everyday life. Her husband was already gone, certainly dead; and she had been expecting them to come for her. Surely she would be arrested and vanish in her turn. Well, did it matter anymore?

The woman tramped up the hill to the splendid white Viceroy’s Palace, from where the First Secretary ruled Georgia. The wait made her very anxious. There were many questions she longed to ask. But like everyone else, she was helpless before the clumsy and colossal state. Questions
from
you could lead to questions
about
you—it was better to keep your head down. She waited like the other coughing, scratching, grunting, depressed people, old and young, in the filthy anteroom with its battered wooden window.

When it was her turn, she passed her papers through the hole. She was then called through into a grubby, unpainted office. She braced herself for the rude tyranny of some minor Georgian bureaucrat. But the official who awaited her was not that type at all. A slim and handsome man, clearly a Party boss, stood up when she came in, drew out a chair for her and then took his place behind the desk. His Stalinka tunic fitted his broad shoulders and slim waist perfectly. He radiated the energy of the Stalin generation and appeared much too sophisticated to belong in this chipped office. He must be a Muscovite, a potentate, she thought. Yet his blue eyes were bright, questioning.

“Audrey Lewis?”

She nodded.

“Don’t be nervous. I’ve always known you were here in Tiflis. Do you remember me?” he asked. “I saw you long ago in St. Petersburg. The house on Greater Maritime Street, the day Sashenka’s mother died. Three comrades came to collect her that day. One was her uncle Mendel. The second was Vanya. I was the third. Now, Lala, there is something I want you to do.”

34

The smell of sweat and clove cologne rose from Commissar Kobylov’s expansive neck and thighs during the ride through the summer night in Moscow. Sashenka was squeezed next to him and he was enjoying their proximity, shifting his elephantine bottom and wrinkling his nose at her like an oversized tabby cat.

The car drove up the hill to the brooding granite of the Lubianka, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, and then swerved into a side street, through the opening gates of a courtyard, driving Kobylov’s spicy breath onto her neck. But already Sashenka did not care. She was trying to pace herself, to conserve her energy, as all prisoners try to do.

The lights over the courtyard—invisible from the exterior—illuminated a scene that resembled a railway station where people arrived but never left. Sashenka guessed that this hidden ninestory building was the dreaded Internal Prison. Black Crow vans and Stolypin trucks, back doors open to reveal barred cages, unloaded blearyeyed men in nightshirts with bleeding lips, shrieking women in cocktail dresses and smeared eye shadow, piles of badly bound papers and battered leather suitcases. Each of the arrivals had the white face of a oncesettled person falling into an abyss of fear.

An officer opened Kobylov’s door. Breathing heavily, he raised his clumsy boots and leaned out until his weight landed him on the ground. The officer helped him out.

Sashenka’s door was opened and a Chekist gripped her arm and guided her into a large basement with chipped arches and battered wooden walls, where yet more bewildered people stood in lines. The room stank of cabbage soup, urine and despair. Sashenka—a special case, she noted ruefully—was led to the front.

“I am a Soviet woman and a member of the Party,” she told a bored Chekist. She had helped build this Soviet system; she believed this oppressive machine was necessary to create the new world according to the MarxistLeninistStalinist science of dialectical materialism; she wanted the Chekists to know she still believed in it even though it was about to consume her. But the Chekist just shook his head and told her to empty her pockets, handbag, suitcase. He waved a yellow hand to hurry her and filled in a form. Full name, patronymic, year of birth. He peered at her. Color of hair? Color of eyes? Distinguishing marks? He pressed her fingers on a blue inkpad and took her prints. She received a prisoner number.

“Watch? Rings? Any money?” He noted her belongings and cash, gave her the form to sign and tore off a receipt. Behind her, other bodies pushed against her. “Women that way!” pointed the Chekist. Sashenka remembered her arrest in St. Petersburg and the identical questions—but now she was much more afraid. The Tsarist Empire was soft; she had helped create this maneating USSR.

She entered a small room where a woman in a white coat sat on a desk smoking an acrid
makhorka
cigarette.

“Clothes off!” the woman barked.

Sashenka removed her dress and shoes. She stood in her underwear and stockings, shivering slightly in the night chill of the cold concrete. She remembered that her underwear was silk. The woman’s beady eyes noticed too.

“Everything off! Don’t waste my time, and don’t be stuck up!” The woman rammed the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and pulled up her sleeves to reveal powerful hairy forearms.

Sashenka removed her brassiere and stood with her hands over her breasts. Not bad breasts after two children, she told herself stoically.

“And the rest!”

She took off her teddy, standing shyly, a hand over her pubis.

“No one’s interested in you and your clipped little tail. Move it! Mouth open!”

The woman stuck her fingers into Sashenka’s mouth. They tasted of stale cheese.

“Hands on desk now. Legs open.”

She pushed Sashenka’s head down. A finger scooped painfully into her vagina and then plunged into her rectum. Sashenka gasped at the invasion.

“Toughen up, princess. It wasn’t torture! Get dressed.” She took Sashenka’s shoes. “Take out the laces. Give me that belt. No pens allowed.” The woman measured her prisoner’s height and wrote it down. “Sit!”

Sashenka fell back into a chair, relieved to be dressed again.

“Vlad!” called the woman.

A skinny old photographer with slickedback hair, a tiny head and a worn blue suit appeared in the room: clearly an alcoholic, he was shaking and could hardly hold his heavy camera. A round flashlight blossomed out of it like a chrome sunflower.

“Look at me,” he said.

Sashenka looked into the camera, wearily at first, but then she tried to primp herself up, touching her hair. Suppose one day her children saw that picture? She fixed her eyes on the lens trying to transmit a message: Snowy and Carlo—I love you, I love you! This is your mother! Remember me! Dream of me!

“Keep still! Done.” The bulb flashed with a sizzling pop. Sashenka saw silver stars melting across a black sky.

A guard led her by the arm through a locked door that clicked behind them. Her shoes were loose without the laces and her dress no longer fitted without the belt. There were three guards now, one in front, one holding her, one behind. She passed metal cages, climbed up steel staircases and down stone ones, waited in concrete assembly areas, marched along rows of cells with steel doors and sliding eyeholes. She heard the percussion of prisons—coughing and swearing, the clank of locks, slam of doors and scrape of feet, the clack of bunches of keys swinging. Floors of worn parquet glistened with burning detergent.

The smell of prisons—urine, sweat, feces, disinfectant, cabbage soup, the oil of guns and locks—reminded her of Piter in 1916. Back again—but this time Papa won’t be getting me out! she thought sadly. She felt that Vanya and Benya and Uncle Mendel were all nearby, and somehow it comforted her. In one corridor, another prisoner approached with a guard

—she glimpsed a pretty young woman, younger than her, with a black eye.

“Avert your eyes, Prisoner seven hundred seventyeight,” barked her guard, the first words he had spoken. He pushed Sashenka toward a corner where what appeared to be a metal coffin stood upright. He opened its door and pushed her inside, locking it. The coffin door pressed on her back. Was this a torture? She fought for breath in the airless space.

The other guards and prisoner were passing. When they were gone, the coffin was unlocked and they continued until they reached a line of cells where a guard held a door open. There,
778
was scrawled on an oily card.

The cell was small and cool with two bunk beds, no window whatsoever, a bucket of slops in the corner, brick walls and a damp floor. The door shut; the locks scraped; she stood there alone; the peephole opened; eyes stared at her. Then the Judas port shut. She closed her eyes and listened to the life around her. Prisoners sang, spat, coughed and spluttered, and tapped to one another using prisoners’ code that had not changed since the days of the Tsar. The giant building throbbed like a secret city. Pipes gurgled and shook. A metal pail was dragged along and then a wet mop swished outside. A cart clanked. There was the murmur of voices, the echo of metal cups and spoons. The eyehole opened and closed.

The door rasped open again.

“Supper!” Two prisoners, one bearded, old and frail, the other grey but probably her own age, were serving soup out of a swinging pan in the cart. The old one gave her a tin cup while the other poured from a ladle, filling up the cup with steaming water from a kettle.

Two guards, hands on their pistols, watched closely. There must be no contact between prisoners.

“Thank you!” she said.

“No talking!” said the guard. “Never look at other prisoners!”

The younger prisoner gave her a sugar lump and a small square of black bread and looked at her for a moment, with a spark of feeling on a sensitive, rather mischievous face. Before Benya she would not have recognized it but now she spoke that particular language. My God, she thought, it was lust! Sashenka was pleased: the people in here still feel desire!

Perhaps lust lasts beyond many other things. When the door slammed, she drank her watery buckwheat porridge. She used the slop bucket and lay down.

Vanya, wherever you are, she thought, I know what to do. All was not yet lost: the children had gone but there might be no case against her. Vanya knew that. She could still return. She
would
return. What could they have on her, the loyalest Communist? Then aloud she said one word: “Cushion!”

The lights remained on. Sashenka tried to sleep. She talked aloud to the children but already they belonged to another world. Could she still smell their smells? The texture of their skin, the sound of their voices, everything was still utterly fresh and vivid for her.

She started to cry, gently and with resignation.

The peephole slipped open.

“Silence, prisoner! Show your face and hands at all times!”

She slept and she was a child again, on the Zeitlin estate at Zemblishino: her father, in a white suit and yachting shoes, was holding a pony by the bridle—and Lala, darling Lala, was helping her climb up into the saddle…

35

Sashenka was woken by the grating of carts, swishing of mops, screeching of locks. The peephole opened and shut, the door rasped open.

“Slopping out! Bring your slop bucket!” A guard marched her to the washroom, where the chlorine stung her eyes. She poured out her slops and washed her face with water. Then it was back to her cell.

“Breakfast!” The same prisoner whose glance had been so slyly sensuous now wore a plywood tray like an usherette selling cigarettes. The other prisoner, a bearded old man covered in tattoos—a real criminal, Sashenka guessed—poured out the tea and handed over a small piece of bread, a lump of sugar, and eight cigarettes with a strip of phosphorus from a matchbox. Once again the long thin face of the server revealed nothing, but again his eyes roved over her body and neck and glinted with the rudest lust before the door slammed again. Already, the tea and bread tasted divine. She knew from Vanya that prisoners sometimes waited weeks even to be interrogated so it might be ages before she was able to make her stand, to defend herself as a Communist—and find out what had brought her here.

Then she lay again on the bed. Where are the children now? she wondered. And she said aloud the word that was becoming her talisman, her code to transmit her love across the vast steppes and powerful rivers of Russia to her distant children. “Cushion!”