Sashenka had loved his Red Cavalry stories, and admired the way he saw things. “Babel is our Maupassant,” she told Vanya when he came to watch but he shrugged his shoulders and returned to the study. She stood with the musicians, holding Carlo, who was staying up late, and sang along while the men pretended to sing to her, and Snowy danced around the room in a pink party dress, all long limbs like a new foal, waving her inevitable companion.
As the thieves’ songs of the Black Sea wafted over the dacha, Sashenka’s guests—writers in baggy cream suits, mustachioed Party men in matching white tunics, peaked caps and wide trousers, a pilot in uniform (one of “Stalin’s Eagles”), actresses in Coty perfume and low-cut silk dresses à la Schiaparelli—talked and sang, smoked and flirted. May Days started with the parade in Red Square and ended with a Soviet bacchanalia, from the top down. Somewhere, even Comrade Stalin and his comrades were toasting the Revolution. Vanya had told Sashenka there was a little room for drinks and zakuski behind the Mausoleum on Red Square, after which the leaders lunched all afternoon at Marshal Voroshilov’s place and then caroused at some dacha in the suburbs until the early hours.
Slightly drunk on the champagne and still strung up with an uneasy elation, Sashenka strolled into the garden and lay down in the hammock between two gnarled apple trees. She could hear herself singing those songs, watching her children, and swinging back and forth as the tipsy world spun a little.
“Sashenka.” It was Carolina, the nanny. Carolina appeared dry, serious and formal—but underneath she was very affectionate and loving to the children. Sashenka had chosen her carefully. “Shouldn’t we put the children to bed? Carlo’s exhausted. He’s still so young.”
Sashenka could see Carlo, in blue pajamas embroidered with Soviet airplanes, sitting in a chair watching the musicians in a dreamy way. Uncle Gideon was playing his bayan for Snowy, shouting, “Bravo, little Cushion! Hurrah!”
“My cushion, cushion, cushion is dancing with Uncle Gideon,” sang the little girl, in her own world. “Giddy-gush, giddy-gush, giddy, giddy-up!”
“Thank you, Carolina,” said Sashenka. “Let’s put Carlo to bed in a minute. They’re having such fun.” It was way past their bedtime but when they were older they would be able to boast, “We saw Utesov and Tseferman play thieves’ songs together! Yes, in 1939 during the Second Five Year Plan in the joyous period after the Great Turn, after collectivization and after the times of struggle, at our dacha!”
She congratulated herself on the success of her soirée. Why did they all come to her house? Was it because she was an editor? She was a “Soviet woman of culture” well known for her partiinost, her strict Party-mindedness. Was it because men found her attractive? I’ve never had so much fuss made of me, she thought, and was glad she had worn her white linen summer dress that showed off her tanned shoulders. And then of course there was the attraction of her husband’s power. All writers were fascinated by that!
Just then the hammock lurched so violently that she almost fell off.
“So here’s the comrade editor of Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine,” a mocking voice crooned from behind her.
“You gave me a shock creeping up on me like that,” she said, laughing as she swiveled in the hammock to see who had ambushed her. “You should treat the comrade editor with some Soviet respect! Who are you anyway?” she asked, sitting up, pleasurably dizzy from the champagne.
“You didn’t invite me,” said the man, “but I came anyway. I’ve heard about your parties. Everyone comes. Or almost everyone.”
“You mean I’ve always forgotten to invite you.”
“Precisely, but then I’m very hard to get.”
“You don’t seem too shy to me. Or too hard to get.” She was glad she had worn the Coty perfume. “Then why did you come?”
“I’ll give you three guesses who I am.”
“You’re a mining engineer from Yuzovka?”
“No.”
“You’re a hero-pilot, one of Stalin’s Eagles?”
“No. Last chance.”
“You’re an important apparatchik from Tomsk?”
“You’re tormenting me,” he whispered.
“All right then,” Sashenka said. “You’re Benya Golden, writer. My naughty uncle Gideon said he’d asked you. And I love your Spanish stories.”
“Gee, thanks,” he said in English with an American accent. “I’ve always really wanted to write for Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping. It’s one of my life’s ambitions.”
“Now you’re mocking me.” She sighed, aware of how much she was enjoying talking to this strange man. “But we do need a piece for the autumn on ‘How to prepare Happy Childhood chocolate cakes and Soviet Union candies—tasty and nutritious food for the Soviet family.’ Or if that doesn’t take your fancy, how about a thousand words on the new Red Square perfume produced by Comrade Polina Molotov’s Cosmetics Trust? Don’t laugh—I’m being serious.”
“I wouldn’t dare. No one laughs these days without thinking first, especially not at Comrade Polina’s perfume, which, as every Soviet woman knows, is a revolution in the struggle of perfumery.”
“But you usually handle wars,” Sashenka pointed out. “Do you think Benya Golden could handle a really serious subject for a change?”
“Yours are truly challenging subjects, Comrade Editor,” replied Benya Golden, “and I know you wouldn’t tease a poor scribbler.”
“Poor scribbler indeed. Your stories sell really well.”
There was a silence.
“Must I stand here in holy audience,” Benya asked, changing the subject, “or may I sit beside you?”
“Of course.” She made space in the hammock. Benya was wearing a white suit with very wide sailor trousers and was looking at her intensely from beneath eyebrows set low over blue eyes with yellow speckles. His fair hair was balding. In the dimming pink light, she could see he had long eyelashes like a girl. She knew he was originally a Jew from Habsburg Galicia, and she remembered her mother saying that Galitzianers were jackanapes and rogues, worse than Litvaks—and Ariadna had probably had personal experience of both. I’m not sure I like him, she decided suddenly; there is something brash about him.
She found herself aware of her movements as she rearranged herself in the hammock, and felt irritated by the way he had crept up on her. He was invading her privacy, and his proximity made her feel shivery inside.
“I have an idea for our article,” said Benya. “What about ‘The disturbing effect of Red Square ladies’ perfume and Moscow Tailoring Factory stockings on those promiscuous shock workers and Stakhanovites in the Magnitogorsk steelworks’? That will really get their furnaces stoked.”
He started to laugh and Sashenka thought he must be drunk to say something so clumsy and dangerous.
“I don’t much like that idea,” she said soberly. She stood up, sending the hammock rocking.
“Now you’re behaving like a solemn Bolshevik matron.” He lit a cigarette.
“I’ll be who I like in my own house. That was an un-Soviet philistine joke. I think you should leave.”
She stormed toward the dacha, so furious that she was shaking. She had relaxed for a moment, her head turned by his fame, his presence in her house, but her Party-mindedness now righted her tipsy mind. Was this sneering vulgarian here by coincidence or had he been sent to provoke her into a philistine joke that could ruin her and her family? Why was she so infuriated by his boozy arrogance and pushy flirtatiousness? Wasn’t he wary of her husband’s position? Her anxiety about her fragile happiness made it all the more unsettling.