“Don’t be such a schlamazel, Sashenka,” he replied. “You don’t know what’s best here, girl. Beware bourgeois morality. We’ll decide what’s immoral and what isn’t. If the Party asks you to cover yourself in shit, you do it! If he desires you, so much the better.”
Sashenka felt even more flustered. “You mean…”
“Go on the sleigh ride,” he boomed, exasperated. “Meet the scum as often as it takes.”
“But he needs something to show for it too.”
“We’ll give him a morsel or two. But in return, we want a gold nugget. Get me the name of the traitor who betrayed the press in the first place. Without that name, this operation is a failure. The Party will be disappointed. Be vigilant. Tak! That’s it.” Mendel’s face was livid with the cold. “Let’s go down before we freeze. How’s your mother coping with the divorce?”
“I never see her. Dr. Gemp says she’s hysterical and melancholic. She’s on chloral, bromine, opium. Father wants her to try hypnotism.”
“Is he going to marry Mrs. Lewis?”
“What?” Sashenka felt this like a punch in the belly. Her father and Lala? What was he talking about? But Mendel was already on his way downstairs.
The factory whistles started up again across the city, yet the black slate of the rooftops revealed none of the seething furies beneath. The world really was going mad, she thought.
28
The next day was warmer. The sun and the moon watched each other suspiciously across a milky sky. The sparse clouds resembled two sheep and a ram, horns and all, on a snowy field. The factories were on strike.
As she took the streetcar to the Finland Station, Sashenka saw crowds crossing the bridges from the factories, demonstrating for bread for the third day running. The demonstration had started on Thursday, International Women’s Day, and grown since then.
“Arise, you starvelings, from your slumbers!” the crowds chanted, waving their red banners. “Down with autocracy! Give us bread and peace!”
The Cossacks tried to turn them back at the Alexander Bridge but tens of thousands marched anyway. Sashenka saw women in peasant shawls smash the windows of the English Shop and help themselves to food: “Our men are dying at the front! Give us bread! Our children are starving!” There were urchins on the streets now, creatures with the bodies of children but with swollen bellies and the faces of old monkeys. One sat on the street corner singing and playing his concertina:
Here I am abandoned, an orphan, with no one to look after me,
And I will die before long and there’ll be no one to pray at my grave,
Only the nightingale will sing sometimes on the nearest tree.
Sashenka gave the boy some money and a Red pamphlet: “After the Revolution,” she told him, “you’ll have bread; you’ll be the masters; read Marx and you’ll understand. Start with Das Kapital and then—” But the boy had scampered off.
Sashenka had no special orders from the Party. At first light, she’d checked with Shlyapnikov at the Shirokaya safe house. “The demonstrations are a waste of time, comrade,” he insisted. “Don’t squander any of our leaflets. This’ll lead to naught like all the other riots.” On Friday, a police officer had been killed by the workers on the bridge—and a mob had broken into Filippov’s, the patisserie where Delphine the cook bought Baron Zeitlin’s millefeuille.
Now the authorities were striking back. The city was filled with Cossacks and soldiers, and it seemed to Sashenka like an armed camp. Every side street, every bridge was guarded by machine-gun nests and armored cars; squadrons of horsemen massed on the squares; horse manure steamed on the snow.
The theaters were still playing and Ariadna was so improved that she and Zeitlin were off to the Alexandrinsky to see Lermontov’s Masquerade, a most avant-garde production. The Donan and the Contant were still crowded, and the orchestras played waltzes and tangos at the Europa and Astoria hotels.
Sashenka was meeting Sagan. She hurried first to the safe house at 153 Nevsky but Mendel, who was with Shlyapnikov and Molotov, ordered her to calm down. “Give these workers a few shots over their heads and a loaf of bread and the movement will be gone.” The others agreed. Perhaps they were right, Sashenka thought uncertainly.
At the Finland Station, Sashenka checked her police tails out of habit. There was one spook who fitted the bill but she lost him easily before she caught the train, traveling third class. In the cold, the steam seemed to wheeze out of the train, whirling around it like a wizard’s spell.
She had arranged to meet Sagan at Beloostrov, the small town nearest the Finnish border. When she arrived—the only passenger to leave the carriage—Sagan was waiting in a troika, a sleigh with three horses, smoking a cigar, shrouded in furs. She climbed in and he covered their laps with the fur blanket. The coachman spat out a spinning green gobbet of phlegm, cracked his whip and they were off. Sashenka remembered such trips with Lala in the family sleigh with its ivory fittings, the family crest on the doors, the sable rug. Now this flimsy sleigh, creaking and clattering, flew over the fields, the coachman in his sheepskin and fur hood leaning to one side, drunkenly flicking his whip over the mangy rumps of the skinny piebalds. Every now and then he talked to the horses or his passengers but it was hard to hear him over the swish of the sleigh and the thud of the hooves.
“Giddy-up… Oats… prices rising… Oats…”
“Shouldn’t you be in Piter fighting the wicked pharaohs?” Sagan asked her.
“The workers are just hungry, not rebels at all. Aren’t you worried though?”
He shook his head. “There’ll be riots but nothing more.”
“The Party agrees with you.” She peered up into Sagan’s face. He looked exhausted and anxious—the strain of his double life and miserable marriage, the headaches and insomnia, the rising turbulence in the city, all seemed to be catching up with him. She shook her head at Mendel’s accusations. How could he know what Sagan felt when he had never met him and certainly never seen them together? No, Sagan had become a sort of friend—he alone understood the pain of having a mother like Ariadna. She felt that he liked her too, for her own sake, but not like that! Not at all! Sagan was not even suited to police work. He was much more like a vague poet than a frightening policeman with his feathery blond hair that he wore much too long—and yet it suited him. They were enemies in many ways, she knew that, but their understanding was based on mutual respect and shared ideas and tastes. She had a serious mission and when it was over they might never see each other again. But she was glad Mendel had ordered her to see Sagan again. Very glad. She had family news to tell him and who else could she confide in?
“Something has happened at home,” she began. There was no harm in recounting harmless gossip. “Mrs. Lewis! My Lala! Mendel has a spy in the Donan. That’s how I discovered. When I confronted Papa, he blushed and denied it and looked away and then finally admitted that he had considered marrying her for me, to make me a happier home. As if that would make the slightest difference to my life! But now he says he’s not going to divorce Mama. She’s too fragile. I asked Lala and she hugged me and told me she refused him on the spot. They’re all such children, Comrade Petro. Their world’s about to end, the inevitable dialectic’s about to crush them and they’re still playing like that orchestra on the Titanic.”