Sashenka

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Amazed at herself, she realized that she had become the mother, and the mother the child. She folded and hung her mother’s clothes, laid her jewels in the velvet box, threw her lingerie into the laundry basket. Then she helped her mother on to the bed, under the covers and kissed her cheek. She stroked her forehead and sat with her.

  ‘You and me …’ said Ariadna, as she fell asleep, rolling and tossing in her sad dreams.

  ‘Sleep, Mama. There, there. It’s over.’

  ‘Darling Sashenka, you and me …’

  When Ariadna finally slept, Sashenka wept. I don’t want children, she told herself. Never!

  19

  Sashenka was still asleep in the chair in Ariadna’s boudoir when she heard her mother calling her: ‘Sashenka! I’ll take you shopping today, just as your father wanted. Chernyshev’s for your day dresses! You might even be lucky enough to have a gown from Madame Brissac like the little Grand Duchesses!’

  ‘But I’ve got to study,’ said Sashenka, stretching, and going into her mother’s bedroom.

  ‘Don’t be foolish, my dear,’ said her mother cheerfully, as if nothing shocking had happened. ‘Look at how you dress. Like a schoolteacher!’

  Ariadna was having breakfast off a tray on her bed, and the room smelt of coffee, toast, caviar and poached eggs. ‘We’ve become firm friends, haven’t we, sladkaya – my sweetie?’

  As Leonid finished serving and left the room, Ariadna winked at Sashenka, who asked herself how her mother could possibly have recovered so absolutely, so shamelessly, from the night’s indulgences. The dissipated require constitutions of steel, she thought.

  ‘I’m not sure I can come.’

  ‘We leave at eleven. Lala’s drawing you a bath.’ Sashenka decided to acquiesce. Her days were interminably boring anyway. She lived for the dark hours.

  An hour later, the two-tone coffee-hued Benz, the third family car, piloted by Pantameilion sporting what Sashenka privately called his ‘bandmaster’s garb’, delivered them before the famous vitrines of mannequins in hats, toques and balldresses: the Chernyshev couture atelier on the corner of Greater Maritime and Nevsky.

  The doors of the fashion emporium were opened by flunkeys in green frock coats. Inside, women wearing white gloves, hats like fruit bowls and tight-waisted dresses, pleated and whaleboned, tried on racks of dresses. The air was dense with perfume and the scent of warm bodies.

  Ariadna commandeered the entire right side of the shop, much to Sashenka’s embarrassment. A smiling fever of submissive enthusiasm attended Ariadna’s every whim. At first Sashenka thought the staff were cringing like her at her mother’s brashness but then she realized that the atmosphere reflected the jubilation felt in all luxury shops at the arrival of a very rich client with little taste and less restraint.

  A stick insect in a red gown speaking poor French presided over this jamboree, barking orders. The assistants were almost too assiduous: weren’t they smirking a little? Models (who, Sashenka thought, wore far too much foundation) walked up and down in dresses that did not interest her. Her mother pointed at this one or that one, in brocade or lace, with flounces or sequins, and even made her try on a couple. Lala, who accompanied mother and daughter, helped Sashenka into the dresses.

  Sashenka had decided to enjoy the trip in order to avoid a row with her mother. But the dressing and undressing, the pulling and pushing, the staring and poking by the skinny non-Frenchwoman, who whipped pins in and out of the fabric with invisible speed, began to rile her. She hated the way she looked in every dress and found herself becoming angry and upset.

  ‘I’m so ugly, Lala, in this. I refuse to wear it! I’d burn it!’ Her mother, in her velvet skirt and fur-collar bolero jacket, was a gorgeous swan while Sashenka felt lumpier and fatter than a warthog. She could not bear to look in the mirrors again.

  ‘But Mademoiselle Zeitlin has such a perfect figure for the latest fashions,’ said the couturier.

  ‘I want to go home!’

  ‘Poor Sashenka’s tired, aren’t you, darling?’ Another wink. ‘You don’t have to have everything but there were some you liked, weren’t there, sweetie?’

  Feeling somewhat sheepish at this, Sashenka nodded.

  A wave of relief now passed over the staff. Glasses of Tokai were brought for Baroness Zeitlin, who threw her head back and laughed too loudly, paying in big green notes, and then the satisfied assistants helped the ladies rearrange their furs. Pantameilion followed them out of Chernyshev’s, carrying their purchases in bulging bags which he quickly stowed in the boot.

  ‘There!’ said Ariadna, settling herself in the car. ‘Now you have some grown-up dresses at last.’

  ‘But Mama,’ replied Sashenka, sickened by the expense and surprised such shops were still open in wartime, ‘I don’t lead that life. I just wanted something simple. I don’t need balldresses and tea dresses and day dresses.’

  ‘Oh yes you do,’ answered Lala.

  ‘I sometimes change six times in a day,’ declared Ariadna. ‘I wear a day dress in the morning. Then a tea dress and then today I’m going to call on the Lorises in my new chiffon dress with brocade, and then tonight …’

  Sashenka could hardly bear to think of her mother at night.

  ‘We women have got to make an effort to find husbands,’ explained Ariadna.

  ‘Where to, Baroness?’ asked Pantameilion through the speaking tube.

  ‘To the English Shop, Sashenka’s favourite,’ answered Ariadna.

  Inside the shop, behind the windows that displayed Penhaligon’s bath oils and scents, Pears soaps and Fortnum’s Gentleman’s Relish and Cooper’s jams, the women bought a ginger cake and biscuits while still lecturing Sashenka about the need for dresses.

  ‘Hello, Sashenka! Is it you? Yes, it is!’ Some young students in uniformed greatcoats and caps were lingering outside Chernyshev’s, smirking and pushing against each other. ‘Naughty Sashenka! We heard about your scrape with the gendarmes!’ they called.

  Sashenka noticed that the ‘aesthetes’ wore berets, the ‘dandies’ peaked caps. One of the aesthetes, who was heir to some magnate or other, had written her love poems. Sashenka smiled thinly and walked on ahead of her mother and Lala.

  ‘Mademoiselle, what a pleasure to meet again!’

  For a moment Sashenka froze, but then her senses returned as Captain Sagan walked briskly through the lurking students. He wore a tweed coat, a tartan tie and a Derby hat, all probably bought at the English Shop. He bowed, with a slight smile, raised the Derby and kissed her hand.

  ‘I was buying some cufflinks,’ he said. ‘Why is everyone so keen on English style? Why not Scottish or Welsh or even Indian? They’re our allies too.’

  Sashenka shook her head and tried to remember what Mendel had ordered her to do. Her heart was thumping in the rhythm of a speeding train. This is it, Comrade Mendel! she told herself.

  ‘I’m sure you never want to see me again, but there’s Mayakovsky to discuss, and remember we never got to Akhmatova? I must rush. I hope I haven’t … embarrassed you.’

  ‘You’ve a hell of a nerve!’ she exclaimed.

  He raised his Derby, and she could not help but notice that he wore his hair long, more like an actor than a policeman.

  Sagan waved at a waiting sleigh that slid forward with its bells ringing and carried him off down Nevsky.

  Ariadna and Lala caught up with her.

  ‘Sashenka!’ said her mother. ‘Who was that? You could have been a little more friendly.’

  But Sashenka now felt invincible, however many silly dresses they had made her try on. She adored the secret nocturnal work of a Bolshevik activist. Now, she thought, I’ll be a real asset to the Party. The house was watched. Sagan must have guessed that they would visit the English Shop, where he would stand out less than at Chernyshev’s. He had spoken to her out of earshot of her mother and governess because he wanted her to know that he had his eye on her. She could not wait to tell Mendel.

  On the way home,
Ariadna squeezed her daughter’s cheek.

  ‘Sashenka and I are going to be firm friends, firm friends, aren’t we, darling?’ her mother kept saying.

  Sitting on the tan leather between Ariadna and Lala, Sashenka remembered that in the past, whenever she had run to her mother for a cuddle, Ariadna had withdrawn from her, saying, ‘Mrs Lewis, Mrs Lewis, this is a new dress from Madame Brissac and the child’s got a dirty mouth …’

  Last night she had finally got her hug but now she no longer wanted it.

  When they reached home, Ariadna took Sashenka’s hand and coaxed her upstairs into her boudoir.

  ‘Come out with me tonight in a new dress that shows off your figure!’ she whispered huskily, sniffing the tuberose on her wrist. ‘After last night, when I saw you coming home late, I know about your secret lover! I won’t tell Papa but we can go out together. I thought you were such a prig, dear Sashenka, never smiling – no wonder you had no suitors – but I was wrong, wasn’t I? Creeping home in the early hours like a pussycat! Who was the tomcat? That tweed suit and Derby we saw just now? We’ll wear our gorgeous new gowns and people will think we’re sisters. You and me, we’re just the same …’

  But Sashenka had to deliver a Party rubber stamp and the receipt book for contributions. At the safehouse, she would meet the comrades and boil the gelatine used to print the leaflets on the hectograph.

  Before all those duties, she had to contact Mendel and tell him about her meeting with Sagan.

  She longed for the mysteries of the night like the embrace of a lover.

  20

  Sashenka left the house at 1 a.m. Noting the two spooks on the street, she walked up to Nevsky Prospect and into the Europa Hotel. From the lobby she took the service lift down to the basement, walked through the kitchens, where bloody-aproned porters with shaggy beards were delivering eggs, cabbages and the pink carcasses of pigs and lambs, and out into the street again, where she hailed a troika and left a coded note for Mendel at the Georgian pharmacy on Alexandrovsky Prospect.

  At the coachmen’s café outside the Finland Station, she was eating a lukewarm pirozhki and listening to ‘Yankee Doodle’ on the barrel organ for the third time when a young man slipped into the seat opposite her. He was older, but they shared the grey fatigue of the night-dweller and the radiant conviction of the revolutionary.

  ‘C-c-collect the b-b-bulldog from the comrade at the Horse Guards,’ stuttered the student, who had little hazel eyes, thick steel-rimmed spectacles and a leather worker’s cap on a peculiarly square head. This was Comrade Molotov, Sashenka realized, and he was twenty-six years old. He, Comrade Mendel and Comrade Shlyapnikov were the last Bolshevik leaders at liberty in the whole empire. When he took off his leather coat, he wore a short jacket and stiff collar like a clerk. Without his cap, his forehead bulged unnaturally. ‘Ask for C-c-comrade Palitsyn. Anything to report?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘G-g-good luck, comrade.’ Comrade Molotov was gone. Sashenka felt a thrill run down her spine.

  At the Horse Guards, the concierge Verezin let her in again.

  ‘What happened to the sable? And the Arctic fox?’ he asked.

  ‘Attracted too much attention,’ she said. ‘Is someone here for me?’

  Comrade Ivan Palitsyn sat waiting beside some bottles at the round table by the stove. He stood up when she entered.

  ‘I’m Comrade Vanya,’ he said. ‘I know you. I saw you talk to the workers’ circle at the Putilov Works.’ He offered a big red hand.

  ‘I remember you,’ she said. ‘You were the only one who asked a question. I was very nervous.’

  ‘No wonder,’ said Vanya, ‘a girl and an intellectual among us lot. You spoke passionately and we appreciated a girl like you coming to help us.’

  Sashenka knew what he meant by ‘a girl like you’ and it touched a nerve. He must have noticed because he added gently, ‘We come from such different worlds, but you tell me what you know, and I’ll share what I know.’

  She was grateful. Shaggy-haired and six foot tall with the cheekbones and slanting eyes of his Tatar forefathers, Vanya Palitsyn personified the pure Russian brawn of peasant stock and the plainspoken, practical fervour of the worker. She knew that, unlike Mendel or Molotov, he was the real thing, one who had toiled in the Putilov Works since he was eight, and he talked in the argot of a proletarian. This, thought Sashenka, is the hero for whom Marx had created his vision and for whom she had joined the movement.

  ‘Comrade Snowfox, I’ve got something for you, several things in fact. You know what to do with them?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Sit. Do you want a drink of cognac or vodka? Me and Comrade Verezin are having a bit of a feast, aren’t we, Igor?’

  ‘I’ve joined the Party,’ said Verezin.

  ‘Congratulations, Comrade Verezin,’ said Sashenka. Only Party members deserved the respectful moniker ‘comrade’. But Mendel had told her not to socialize, not to chatter. The intellectuals were much more paranoid than the real workers, she thought.

  Vanya Palitsyn, who wore a fringed peasant blouse, boots and breeches, handed her the bulldog and a small package. The oiled metal of the pistol gleamed liquidly.

  ‘Deliver this to the printer in the cellar bar on Gogol Street – he’s a Georgian, a handsome devil. Don’t lose your head!’ Vanya looked her in the eye and smiled. ‘The bulldog is for you.’

  She walked past the Taurida Palace just after 3 a.m., and caught a tram down Liteiny. She felt the weight in her coat. The bulldog – a Mauser pistol – was in her pocket, fully loaded and with a spare cardboard box of ammunition. She ran her fingers over the weapon; the steel was freezing. For the first time, the Party had armed her. She had never fired a gun in earnest. Perhaps it was just one of Mendel’s little tests? But what was revolution without dynamite? Did the Party need her to liquidate an agent provocateur? That set her thinking about Sagan. She knew he would find her again.

  She hailed a one-horse sleigh to the Caravanserai bar on Gogol, a subterranean cavern with Turkish alcoves, used by poorer students, soldiers, some workers. The entrance was unremarkable but once inside she found that a passageway led under the street. She could smell cigarettes, sausages, stale wine, and felt a table of ragged students go quiet as she passed.

  In a dark alcove on his own sat a man in a dashing Caucasian hood, white but lined with fur, and an army greatcoat. He raised a glass of red wine.

  ‘I was waiting for you, Comrade Snowfox. I’m Hercules Satinov,’ said the Georgian comrade, who had Russianized his real name of Satinadze. ‘Follow me, comrade.’

  He led her deeper into the bar, opening the door into a beer cellar. The air there was moist and fetid. Crouching, he lifted a manhole cover. Curling metal steps led down to the printing press. She could hear the deep rhythm of it turning over, like a mechanical bumble bee. Men in peasant smocks were bringing out piles of rough newspapers, which they bound up with red rope. The space reeked of oil and burnt paper.

  Satinov pulled back his dashing white hood. ‘I’m just back in Piter. From Baku.’ His stiff, thick hair shone blue-black, growing low on his forehead. He was tall, wiry and muscular, and he radiated clean virile power. ‘You have the newsprint for me?’

  She handed over the package.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Comrade Snowfox,’ he said without a hint of mockery, taking her hand and kissing it.

  ‘Quite the Georgian knight!’ she said a little defensively. ‘Do you dance the lezginka too? Can you sing “Suliko”?’

  ‘No one dances better than me. Perhaps we can sing some songs and drink some wine tonight?’

  ‘No, comrade,’ replied Sashenka. ‘I’ve no time for such frivolities. Nor should you.’

  Satinov did not seem to take offence. Instead he laughed loudly, raising his hands in surrender. ‘Forgive me, comrade, but we Georgians aren’t as cold-hearted as Russians! Good luck!’ He led her to a different exit that emerged in a deserted courtyard behind Gogol Street.


  At the end of the narrow alley, she checked her tail according to Mendel’s training. No one. She waited. No one on the street at all. Suddenly she experienced a sort of dizzy jubilation: she wanted to laugh and dance gaily at the bleak glamour of these conspirators – Palitsyn at the Horse Guards, Satinov at the printer’s, young men from different worlds but united in their determination. She knew in her heart that these characters were the future, her future. Her conviction made the dark roughness of this existence shine so bright. Small wonder that men like Mendel were addicted. Normality? Responsibility? Family, marriage, money? She thought of her father’s delight at receiving his latest contract to supply 200,000 rifles, and her deluded, unhappy mother. That was death, she told herself, dreary, drab, living death.

  She walked through an archway into another courtyard. This was one of Mendel’s rules: try to avoid entering any building through the front door and always check there are two exits. In Russia, janitors and doormen lingered on the street and tended not to watch the courtyards.

  Inside, she hurried to the rear door, opened it and sprang up the cold dark steps, using the half-light of the streetlamps to guide her to the top floor. She had been here earlier but her comrade had missed the rendezvous. Perhaps he would be here by now.

  She unlocked the door, closing it behind her. The apartment was in darkness but it was sombre even in daytime, a cavern of Asiatic rugs, old kerosene lamps, eiderdowns and mattresses. She inhaled the friendly aroma of mothballs, salted fish and yellowing books: an intellectual lived here. She went into the kitchen and tested the samovar as Mendel had taught her: it was cold. In the bedroom, the walls were covered in bookcases, Apollo and other intellectual journals in piles on the floor.

  Yet something was not right. Her breath caught in her throat. Bristling with Bolshevik vigilance, she moved silently, nerves like forked lightning that jazzed down her spinal column. She turned into the sitting room. There was the rasp of a rough strike and a kerosene lamp sprang to life.