Sashenka

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘She’s at the Kresty Temporary House of Detention right now: can we get her out tonight?’

  ‘Easy now, dearie! It’s a bit late for tonight, sweetheart. But we wouldn’t want her to get three years in Yeniseisk on the Arctic Circle, would we?’

  Zeitlin had palpitations at the thought: his darling Sashenka would never survive that! Andronnikov sank into an open-mouthed kiss with the youth next to him. When he came up for air, his lips still wet, Zeitlin pointed at the ceiling.

  ‘My Prince, I’d like to buy your … chandelier,’ he suggested. ‘I’ve always admired it …’

  ‘It’s very close to my heart, Baron. A present from the Empress herself.’

  ‘Really? Well, let me make you an offer for it. Shall we say at least …’

  12

  Ariadna’s companion for her nocturnal voyage from Baroness Rozen’s salon and on to dinner was Countess Missy Loris, a cheerful blonde born in America but married to a Russian. Missy had begged Ariadna to introduce her to Rasputin, who, it was said, was virtually ruling Russia.

  Holding Missy’s hand, Ariadna dismounted from the Russo-Balt limousine and passed through the shadowy archway of 64 Gorokhovaya Street, across an asphalt courtyard and up the steps of a red three-storey building. The door opened as if by magic. A doorman – unmistakably ex-military, surely an agent of the Okhrana – bowed. ‘Second floor.’

  The women walked up the stairs towards an open doorway lined in scarlet silk. A red-faced man in blue serge trousers and braces, clearly a policeman, pointed them inside brusquely. ‘Ladies, this way!’

  A squat peasant woman in a floral dress took their coats and showed them into a room where a tall silver samovar bubbled and steamed. Beside it, and toying with handfuls of silks, chinchilla and sable furs, diamonds and egret feathers, sat the Elder Grigory, known as Rasputin, in a lilac silk shirt tucked into a crimson sash, striped trousers, and kid leather boots. His face was weathered, moley and wrinkled, his nose pockmarked, his hair centre-parted into greasy bangs that formed arches on his forehead, and his beard was reddish brown. Yellow eyes gazed up at Ariadna without blinking, the glazed pupils flickering from side to side as if they saw nothing.

  ‘Ah, my Little Bee,’ he said. ‘Here!’ He offered his hand to the women. Ariadna tipsily fell on one knee and kissed the hand, which moved on to Missy. ‘I know what you’ve come about. Go into my reception room. My little doves are all here, dear Bee. And you’re new.’ He squeezed Missy’s waist, which tickled her, and she squealed. ‘Show her round, Little Bee.’

  ‘Little Bee,’ whispered Ariadna to Missy, ‘is his special name for me. We all have nicknames.’

  ‘Don’t forget to mention Sashenka.’

  ‘Sashenka, Sashenka. There, I’m remembering.’

  The pair entered the main room, where ten or so guests, mostly women, sat round a table covered in their offerings – a heap of black Beluga caviar, half a sturgeon in aspic, piles of peppermint gingersnaps, boiled eggs, a coffee cake and a bottle of Cahors.

  Rasputin was right behind them. He put his arm around Ariadna’s waist and swung her round, steering her to a seat at the table. He greeted them separately. ‘Wild Dove, meet Little Bee, Pretty Dandy, the Calm One …’

  Among the women sat a plump moon-faced blonde in a drab, badly ironed and poorly made beige dress – and a treble string of the biggest pearls that Ariadna had ever seen. This shiny-cheeked creature was Anna Vyrubova, and the pretty, dark lady next to her, wearing a fashionable sailor-suit dress and a black and white bonnet, was Julia ‘Lili’ von Dehn: these, Ariadna knew, were the Empress’s two best friends. The spirituality of the atmosphere was intensified by the exalted status of those present. Ariadna was keenly aware that, with the Emperor away at the front, the Empress ruled the Empire through the people in this room. She knew that Missy was not yet a devotee of the Elder – in fact she was there for the party. She was bored with sweet, banal Count Loris and adored anything that was fashionable or outré – and this was both. But for Ariadna it was different. Already drunk and high, she felt cleansed in this room. Whoever she was outside, however unhappy and insecure she felt at home, however desperate her love affairs and random her search for meaning in the universe, here things had a calm simplicity that she had never found before.

  Rasputin walked around the table so that each guest might kiss his hand. When he found an empty chair, he sat down and took a handful of sturgeon in his bare fist and started to eat, smearing the food in his beard. The ladies watched in silence as he gobbled handfuls of cake, fish, caviar, without the slightest self-consciousness, his chomping loud and hearty. When he was finished, he gazed at them all and then placed his hands on Ariadna’s hands and squeezed them.

  ‘You! Honeyed friend, you need me most tonight and I’m here.’

  A blushing glow started on Ariadna’s chest and rose up her neck and throughout her body, as if she felt something between teenage bashfulness, religious awe and sensual excitement. Vyrubova’s bulging eyes, crafty yet credulous, glared jealously at her. What does our Friend see in this lowborn zhyd, the Jew banker’s sluttish wife? Ariadna knew she was thinking – even though Vyrubova herself, and the Empress too, had benefited from Zeitlin’s generosity.

  Ariadna did not care even though the ugly flush was covering her neck and bare shoulders. Here she was no longer a Yiddeshe dochte born Finkel Barmakid in the court of the famous Rabbi of Turbin, or the troubled neurasthenic who could barely control her appetites. Here she was a woman worthy to be loved and cherished – even among the friends of the Tsars themselves. Rasputin talked to empresses and whores as though they were the same. This was the Elder’s genius – he made his bewildered doves into proud lionesses, his neurasthenic victims into beautiful champions. This sacred peasant would save Russia, the Tsars, the world. Ariadna’s breath hissed between her teeth; her tongue darted out to lick her dry lips. The room was quiet except for the murmur of the Elder and the humming of the samovar next door.

  ‘Little Bee,’ he said quietly in his simple country accent, raising her and leading her around the table to the sofa against the wall where he sat her down, pulling up his chair, squeezing her legs between his own. A tremor ran through her. ‘You have an emptiness inside you. You’re always balanced between despair and a void within. You’re a Hebrew? You’re a troublesome people but much wronged too. I will keep you all out of trouble. Just follow my holy way of love. Don’t listen to your priests or rabbis’ – he took in her shiny eyes in a single glance – ‘they don’t know the whole mystery. Sin is given so that we may repent and repentance brings joy to the soul and strength to the body, understand?’

  ‘We do, we do understand,’ said Vyrubova in a loud, crude voice behind Rasputin.

  ‘How is brutalized man with his beast’s habits to climb out of the pit of sin and live a life pleasing to God? Oh you are my darling, my Honey Bee.’ His face was so close to hers that Ariadna could smell the sturgeon and the Madeira wine on his breath, the scent on his beard and the alcohol in his sweat. ‘Sin should be understood. Without sin there is no life because there is no repentance and if there is no repentance there is no joy. How are you looking at me, Little Bee?’

  ‘With holiness, Father. I have sinned,’ she started. ‘I’d die without love. I need to be loved at every moment.’

  ‘You’re thirsty, Honey Bee.’ He kissed her lips very slowly. ‘For now, Honey Bee, come with me. Let us pray.’ Leaving the other women behind, he took her hand and led her through the curtain into the sanctum.

  13

  Sashenka’s jailhouse dawn was a blinding light and the heady fumes of a long night’s distilled urine as every woman in the cell emptied her bladder in turn. Her Smolny pinafore was wet and bloodstained and she ached in every fibre of her body. Boots on stone, the turning of keys and screeching of locks. The cell door swung open.

  A man stood in the doorway. ‘Ugh! It’s rank in here,’ he muttered then pointed at Sashenka. ‘That’s the one. Brin
g her.’

  Natasha squeezed her hand as two warders waded through the sprawled bodies and fished her out of the cell. They manhandled her through the grey corridors and deposited her in an interrogation room with a plain desk, a metal chair and walls peeling with damp. She could hear a man crying next door.

  A gendarme, a lieutenant with a square head, shaven close, and a long square-cut beard, opened the door, stalked up to her and banged his fist on the table.

  ‘You’re going to tell us every single name,’ he said, ‘and you’re never going to fuck around like this again.’ Sashenka flinched as he hoisted himself on to the table’s edge and pushed his livid face up close to hers. ‘You’ve every advantage in life,’ he shouted. ‘True, you’re not a real Russian. You’re a zhyd, you’re not nobility. Your Jew father probably salutes the Kaiser every night …’

  ‘My father’s a Russian patriot! The Tsar gave him a medal!’

  ‘Don’t answer me like that. That title of his ain’t a Russian title. Jews can’t have titles here. Everyone knows that. He bought it with stolen roubles from some German princeling …’

  ‘The King of Saxony made him a baron.’ Whatever Sashenka’s views on her father’s class and the capitalist war, she was still his daughter. ‘He works hard for his country.’

  ‘Shut up unless you want a slap. Once a zhyd always a zhyd. Profiteers, revolutionaries, tinkers. You Evrei – Hebrews – are all at it, aren’t you? But you’re such a looker. Yes, you’re real fresh strawberries!’

  ‘How dare you!’ she said quietly, always uneasy about her appearance. ‘Do not speak to me like that!’

  Sashenka had not eaten or drunk since the night before. After her brave moments of defiance, her courage and energy were draining away. She needed food like the furnace of an engine needs coal, and she longed for a hot bath. Yet as she listened to the bully shouting at her, he began to lose his power. She did not fear his small pink eyes and the blue uniform of a degenerate system. The spray of his spittle was grotesque but easily wiped away.

  She closed her eyes for a second, removing herself from this police bully, this Derzhimorda. Not for the first time, she imagined the effect of her arrest at home. My dear distant father, where are you at this moment? she wondered. Am I just another problem for you to solve? What about Fanny Loris and the girls at school? How I’d love to hear their trivial chatter today. And my darling Lala, kind, thoughtful Mrs Lewis with the lullaby voice. She does not know that the girl she loves no longer exists …

  The shouting came closer again. Sashenka felt faint with hunger and fatigue as the interrogator filled in his forms in brutish semi-literate squiggles. Name? Age? Nationality? Schooling? Parents? Height? Distinguishing features? He wanted her fingerprints: she gave him her right hand. He pressed each finger down on an inkpad and then on to his form.

  ‘You’ll be charged under Paragraph One, Article 126, for being a member of the illegal Russian Socialist Democratic Workers’ Party, and Paragraph One, Article 102, for being a member of a military organization. Yes, little girl, your friends are terrorists, murderers, fanatics!’

  Sashenka knew this was all about the pamphlets she had been distributing for her uncle Mendel. Who wrote them? Where was the printing press? the man asked, again and again.

  ‘Did you handle the “noodles” and the “bulldogs”?’

  ‘Noodles? I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Don’t play the innocent with me! You know perfectly well that noodles are belts of ammunition for machine guns, and bulldogs are pistols, Mauser pistols.’

  Another shower of saliva.

  ‘I’m feeling faint. I think I need to eat …’ she whispered.

  He stood up. ‘All right, princess, we’re having a funny turn, are we? A swoon like that countess in Onegin?’ He scraped back his chair and took her elbow roughly. ‘Captain Sagan will see you now.’

  14

  ‘Greetings, Mademoiselle Baroness,’ said the officer just down the corridor, in a tidy office that smelled of sawdust and cigars. ‘I am Captain Sagan. Peter Mikhailovich de Sagan. I do apologize for the bad manners – and breath – of some of my officers. Here, sit down.’

  He stood up and looked at his new prisoner: a slim girl with luxuriant brown hair stood before him in a crumpled and stained Smolny uniform. He noticed that her lips, in contrast to her pale, bruised face, were crimson and slightly swollen. She stood awkwardly, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, looking down at the floor.

  Sagan bowed, neat in his white-trimmed blue tunic, boot heels together, as if they were at a soirée and then offered his hand. He liked to shake his prisoners’ hands. It was one way of ‘taking their temperature’ and showing what the general called ‘Sagan’s steel under the charm’. He noticed this girl’s hands were shaking and that she carried the noxious smell of the cells. Was that blood on her Smolny pinafore? Some crazy hag had probably attacked her. Well, this was not the Yacht Club. Posh schoolgirls should think of such things before conspiring against their Emperor.

  He pulled a chair over and helped her to sit. His first impression was that she was absurdly young. But Sagan liked to say he was ‘a professional secret policeman, not a nurse’. There were opportunities for him among those who were absurdly young and spoilt and out of their depth. Insignificant as she was, she must know something. She was Mendel’s niece after all.

  She flopped into the chair. Sagan noted her exhaustion with satisfaction – and calibrated pity. She was really no more than a confused child. Still, it opened up interesting possibilities.

  ‘You look hungry, mademoiselle. Fancy ordering some breakfast? Ivanov?’ A gendarme NCO appeared in the doorway.

  She nodded, avoiding his eyes.

  ‘What can I get you, maga-mozelle?’ Ivanov flourished an imaginary pen and paper, playing the French waiter.

  ‘Let’s see!’ Captain Sagan answered for her, remembering the reports in the surveillance files. ‘I’ll bet you have hot cocoa, white bread lightly toasted, saltless butter and caviar for breakfast?’ Sashenka nodded mutely. ‘Well, we can’t do the caviar but we have cocoa, bread and I did find a little Cooper’s Fine Cut Marmalade from Yeliseyev’s on Nevsky Prospect. Any good to you?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘You’ve been bleeding.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Someone attacked you?’

  ‘Last night, it was nothing.’

  ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

  ‘I was read the charges. I’m innocent.’

  He smiled at her but she still did not look at him. Her arms remained crossed and she was shivering.

  ‘You’re guilty of course, the question is how guilty.’

  She shook her head. Sagan decided this was going to be a very dull interrogation. Ivanov, wearing an apron stretched lumpily over his blue uniform, wheeled in the breakfast and offered bread, marmalade and some cocoa in a mug.

  ‘Just as you ordered, maga-mozelle,’ he said.

  ‘Very good, Ivanov. Your French is exquisite.’ Sagan turned to his prisoner. ‘Does Ivanov remind you of the waiters at the Donan, your papa’s favourite, or the Grand Hotel Pupp at Carlsbad?’

  ‘I’ve never stayed there,’ Sashenka whispered, running her fingertips over her wide lips, a gesture she made, he noticed, when she was thoughtful. ‘My mother stays there: she puts me and my governess in a dingy boarding house. But you knew that.’ She was silent again.

  They’re always the same. Unhappy at home, they get mixed up in bad company, he thought. She must be starving, but he would wait for her to ask him whether she could eat.

  Instead she suddenly looked straight up at him as if the sight of the food had already restored her. Grey eyes, cool as slate, examined him. The speckled lightness of the irises – grains of gold amid the grey – under the hooded eyebrows, projecting a mocking curiosity, took him aback.

  ‘Are you going to sit there and watch me eat?’ she asked, taking a piece of bread.

  Fi
rst point to her, thought Sagan. The gentleman in him, the descendant of generations of Baltic barons and Russian generals, wanted to applaud her. Instead he just grinned.

  She picked up a knife, spread the bread with butter and marmalade and ate every piece, quickly and neatly. He noticed there were delicate freckles on either side of her nose, and now her arms were no longer crossed he could see that she had a most abundant bosom. The more she tried to hide her breasts, the more conspicuous they became. We interrogators, concluded Sagan, must understand such things.

  Ivanov removed the plates. Sagan held out a packet of cigarettes emblazoned with a crocodile.

  ‘Egyptian gold-tipped Crocodiles?’ she said.

  ‘Aren’t they your only luxury?’ he replied. ‘I know that Smolny girls don’t smoke but in prison, who’s watching?’ She took one and he lit it for her. Then he took one himself and threw it spinning into the air, catching it in his mouth.

  ‘A performing monkey as well as a torturer,’ she said in her soft voice with its bumble-bee huskiness, and blew out smoke in blue rings. ‘Thanks for breakfast. Am I going home now?’

  Ah, decided Sagan, she does have some spirit after all. The light caught a rich tinge of auburn in her dark hair.

  Sagan reached for a pile of handwritten reports.

  ‘Are you reading someone’s diary?’ she asked, cheekily.

  He looked up at her witheringly. ‘Mademoiselle, your life as you knew it is over. You will probably be sentenced by the Commission to the maximum five years of exile in Yeniseisk, close to the Arctic Circle. Yes, five years. You may never come back. The harsh sentence reflects your treason during wartime and, as you are a Jew, next time it will harsher still.’

  ‘Five years!’ Her breaths grew quick and shallow. ‘It’s your war, Captain Sagan, a slaughter of working men on the orders of emperors and kings, not our war.’