“Take any books you want,” Zeitlin told her. “While we’re here, you must read whatever you like.” She followed him outside.
Their eyes met and glanced away and then met again in the darkening light of this perfume-heavy garden, the air so thick with the breath of vines and that special Georgian apple-and-almond scent of tkemali blossom that she could hardly breathe. She could smell his lemon cologne, his acrid cigar, and the sweet wine on his breath.
She would have done anything at that moment in the garden of the old house in Tiflis, anything he asked of her—yet just when she thought he was going to kiss her, he’d stepped back abruptly and left the garden. They hailed a phaeton on Golovinsky Prospect.
Next morning, when she brought Sashenka in to see Zeitlin at breakfast—madame of course was still sleeping—Lala was grateful that he had not touched her. Giving her a distant smile and a “Morning, Mrs. Lewis,” he kissed his daughter and returned to reading the shipping prices in his Black Sea Gazette. Neither of them had ever mentioned that evening again.
Since then, Lala’s days had been full of Sashenka and she had no time or inclination for gentlemen friends. But recently, Sashenka had grown up much too fast. The Silberkind had darkened and slimmed down, becoming quiet and thoughtful. “You and I will never marry, will we, Lala?” she had once said.
“Of course not.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Lala did not understand politics but lately she realized that Karl Marx had taken her place in Sashenka’s heart and she knew this was a bad, dangerous thing and it filled her with sorrow. She blamed that cripple with the trumpeting voice, Mendel.
Often, when she had turned out the oil lamp in her little room at the top of the house on Greater Maritime Street, her sleep was interrupted by dreams, wonderful dreams, of that moment with the master in that Georgian garden. As she turned over in bed, her skin flushed, and she imagined her breath against his chest, his lips touching her breasts, his hand between her thighs. Sometimes she awoke trembling all over.
And then, out of the blue, Zeitlin had invited her to the Donan.
“I really want my daughter back and you know her better than anyone,” he had said. “Let’s meet outside the house and plan her future. It’s too late to enrol her in the Gymnasium on Gagarin Street. I was thinking of Professor Raev’s Academy on Gorokhovaya…”
How differently things had turned out. At the restaurant he had never mentioned Sashenka. It had been like one of her disturbing dreams—yet Lala knew it was wrong and it alarmed her. She needed stability. If the master became reckless, what would happen to the household, to her, to Sashenka?
Lala feared change. The start of the war had been thrilling: she had stood among hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, maids and countesses on Palace Square. She had seen the Tsar, Tsarina, the pretty Grand Duchesses and the little Heir on the balcony of the Winter Palace, blessing the crowd. Lala, now almost a Russian, had sung the Russian anthem and rejoiced as the recruits marched down Nevsky singing, “Nightingale, nightingale, you little bird!”
Now she sensed something terrible was about to happen to her adopted country, yet it was too late for her to return home; she was too worldly, with her fluent Russian and visits to Biarritz and Baku; too set in her ways to start again in another household, and too attached to Sashenka to mother another child. She had saved a lot but not enough to live on.
She saw the bread lines in the streets, and the fast women outside the casinos and nightclubs of St. Petersburg. She read in the newspapers how the armies were retreating, how the Germans had conquered Poland and many of Zeitlin’s forests. She had to be civil to Ariadna’s parents, who were camping in the house, talking in guttural Yiddish and chanting in Hebrew. The Tsar was at the front. Her hero Lord Kitchener, victor over the Mahdi and the Boers, had set out to visit Russia but his ship had hit a mine and he had drowned. But she still believed that, even though there might be trouble, her Samuil, her baron, would get them all through it.
In all these years, Lala had kept herself to herself, knowing her responsibilities, living modestly, already a spinster destined for a solitary old age, the ghost in the attic of a grand family. Like Shifra, in fact. And yet, well concealed beneath her dutiful blandness, like a frothy brook rushing down a mountainside under a carapace of thick ice, her blood was foaming. That night, as she prepared for bed, she replayed her teatime encounter with the baron. Curiously unembarrassed, they had lain together naked in the kabinet at the Donan.
“I’m divorcing Ariadna,” he said afterward. “Marry me, will you?”
For so long her body had been untouched, ignored, that every slightest caress, inside and out, had left marks as if tiny bee-stings had grazed her skin.
Now, as she looked at herself in the little mirror in her well-ordered bedroom, she could feel, deliciously, where he had been. Her skin scintillated. Unused, unknown muscles in tender places fluttered like captive butterflies. Her legs kept turning to rubber. As she waited for Sashenka to return, she tried to read a new book from England but she had to put it down.
She trembled inside and out with the wildest joy.
The bell suddenly rang in her room. This was unusual. As Lala came out, she heard a woman shouting and ran downstairs. Sashenka, pale and drained, stood in the lobby with the front door open, and a bedraggled, murmuring Ariadna reclined on a chair with her head in her hands.
“Oh Lala, thank God you’re here. Help us to the bedroom. Then—let me think—call the maids and Dr. Gemp.” Sashenka paused, then looked at Lala. “Where’s my father?”
25
Captain Sagan stood wearily at the window of the safe house on Gogol Street, lighting a thin cigar. It was a new year but the Russian defeats were worsening. He took a pinch of cocaine from his snuffbox and rubbed it into his gums. Instantly the blood fountained through his veins and his fatigue was transformed into a roaring optimism that galloped through his temples.
In the early hours of a January night, lanterns blinked across the Neva from the ramparts of the Peter and Paul Fortress. To his right, along the Embankment, the lights burned in the Winter Palace too, although the Tsars had not lived there since 1905. The Empress lived outside the city at Tsarskoe Selo and the Emperor at headquarters near the front. But the fortress represented the power of the autocracy: in its church lay buried Peter the Great, Catherine and their successors all the way down to the present Emperor’s father. But it was a prison too: the freezing cells of the Trubetskoy Bastion held the anarchists, nihilists and socialists he himself had trapped.
He heard the door click. Footsteps behind him. Perhaps it was her? Or was it one of their assassins? One day, that click and this view might be the last thing his senses recorded before the shot that blew off the back of his head. It might even be her foolish finger on the trigger. But this was the Superlative Game, the risk of the life he led, the crusading work he did, his service to the Motherland. He believed in God, believed that he would go to Heaven: remove God and his son Jesus Christ and there was nothing, just chaos and sin. If he died now, he would never see his wife again. Yet it was meetings like this in the fathomless night that made his life worth living.