8
Stalin sat in the middle pullout seat between the front and back seats of his new ZiS limousine, Beria in the back with Egnatashvili, and his chief bodyguard, Vlasik, in the front beside the driver. The rest were in other cars.
“To the Kremlin please, Comrade Salkov,” he told the driver gently. He knew the names and circumstances of all his bodyguards and drivers, was always kind to them and they were devoted to him. “Take the Arbat.”
“Right, Comrade Stalin,” said the driver. Stalin lit his pipe.
They sped down avenues of birch and spruce, the blossoms bright in the moonbeams. They came out on the Mozhaisk Highway, and took Dorogomilov Street.
“She’s a good Soviet woman, Sashenka,” said Stalin after a while to Beria, “don’t you think so, Lavrenti? And Vanya Palitsyn’s a good worker.”
“Agreed,” said Beria.
The convoy was on the Borodino Bridge with its stone bulls, its colonnades and obelisks, and about to cross Smolensk Square.
“That Sashenka can dance all right,” mused Egnatashvili, who was no politician but lived for sports, food, horses and girls.
“And she can edit too,” joked Stalin, “though that magazine’s hardly an academic journal. But that sort of housekeeping shit is important. Soviet women need to know these things.” They sped down the Arbat. “But what a family! She still has hints of her alien bourgeois origins—did you know she was at the Smolny? But she doesn’t bore us with stupid lectures like Molotov’s wife. Keeps home, makes cakes, raises children, works for the Party. She’s ‘reforged’ herself into a decent Soviet woman.”
“Agreed, Comrade Stalin,” said Beria.
“This’ll be about the tenth time I’ve seen Volga, Volga,” said Stalin. “It’s always like a holiday every time I see it! I think I know it by heart!”
“Me too,” said Beria.
They were approaching the Kremlin along wide empty roads, the security cars in front, alongside and behind. The blood-red towers of the medieval fortress appeared up ahead of them, gates opening slowly, preparing to swallow them up. Guards saluted. The wheels gave rubber gulps over the cobbles. “Ivan the Terrible walked here,” said Stalin quietly. It had been his home for more than twenty years, longer than he had spent in his mother’s house, longer than the Seminary.
Stalin looked round at Beria, whose eyes were closed.
“Tell me, Lavrenti,” he said loudly, pointing his pipe, and Beria awoke with a start. “Where’s Sashenka’s father, Zeitlin the capitalist? I remember we checked him out. Is he still with you at one of your places or was he shot? Can we find out?”
9
“I like the article ‘How to Do the Foxtrot,’” said Sashenka, inspecting the proofs at her T-shaped desk. “Are you happy with it, comrades?”
Two days had passed, and she was in the offices of Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping on Petrovka. There were portraits of Stalin, Pushkin and Maxim Gorky on the walls; photographs of Vanya Palitsyn in uniform last May Day parade with Snowy and Carlo stood on her desk; and one grey Bakelite telephone and a very small grey safe sat on a table in the corner. The size of the safe, the number of phones and the quality of the Stalin portraits were signs of power. This was not a powerful office.
“We must entertain our readers, of course, Comrade Editor,” said Klavdia Klimov, the pointy-faced, bug-eyed deputy editor who dressed in the hideous shrouds of the Moscow Tailoring Factory. “But shouldn’t we also look at the class implications of foxtrot?”
Sashenka was a master at playing this game: she was herself a believer and took the journal’s mission seriously. She might still be a little dizzy from the excitements of the May Day holiday, but she knew the rules: never talk about the bosses and especially not the Master. Nonetheless, she hoped somehow the story would leak out. She wanted Klavdia and the three other editors in her office to know who had come to visit the Palitsyns on May Day night! After all, Comrade Stalin had endorsed the journal and her work, so shouldn’t she share this with her comrades? Several times it was on the tip of her tongue but even she balked at the scale of this name-dropping and she swallowed it…Back to the foxtrot and jazz dancing.
“Do we agree with Comrade Deputy Editor? A vote?” All five of them raised their hands. “Can we resolve to commission a further piece on jazz dancing as an expression of the American capitalist’s oppression of the Negroes? Klavdia, would you write it yourself or do you have a writer in mind? And photographs? Should we pose a shot with professional dancers or send someone down to the Metropole one night?”
The editors agreed to pose a shot: there were sometimes alien elements at the Metropole. Finally they dispersed. The meeting was over. Sashenka took out a Herzegovina Flor cigarette and lit it with her lighter. She offered them round. The other four lit up too.
“You know, Utesov and Tseferman played at our house on the holiday,” Sashenka said, unable to prevent herself from a little harmless boasting.
There was an awkward silence and immediately Sashenka regretted it. “Would they give an interview to the magazine?” asked Klavdia.
“Well, I couldn’t ask them then and there,” said Sashenka, blowing out blue smoke. “But I’ll give it some thought.”
Just then there was a knock on the door. Sashenka’s secretary, Galya, stood in the doorway.
“There’s a writer waiting to see you.”
“Does he have an appointment?”
“No, but he’s very arrogant. He says you’ll know who he is and he wants to apologize.”
There was a leap in Sashenka’s belly as if she had driven over a hill too fast. “That must be Benya Golden,” she said dismissively. “What impudence! A very rude man. Tell him I haven’t got time, Galya.”
“Benya Golden?” said their one male editor, Misha Kalman. He had gotten up to leave but now he put his briefcase down again. “Will he write for the journal?”
“How do you know him?” asked Klavdia almost accusingly, eyes bulging. She remained in her seat, and when she inhaled she made a wet sucking sound.
“I don’t know him. But he came to the dacha on the weekend.”
“It must have been quite a party,” said the deputy editor in her shapeless brown shift dress. “Utesov, Tseferman—and now Golden too.” Sashenka wished she had not boasted about the guest list. She turned to Galya.
“I don’t wish to see him. He should make an appointment. Besides, I hear he’s washed up. He hasn’t written a thing for two years. Tell him to go, Galya.”
“Right, comrade,” said Galya.
“No, wait,” said Misha Kalman, whose voice was high and quizzical.
Galya turned as if to leave the room.
“Tell him, Galya,” Sashenka insisted, and Galya moved toward the door.
“Hang on!” said Kalman. “I’m a fan of his work. We so rarely get writers of his quality in the journal. Carpe diem!”
Klavdia’s protuberant eyes, like those of a big red crab, swiveled at Sashenka. “Are you allowing individualism to penalize the collective?” she asked.
Sashenka sensed danger in overplaying her dislike. Bathing in the majesty of Stalin himself, she felt suddenly generous. Besides, maybe she had overreacted at her party? Had Benya been that bad?
“Wait a minute, Galya,” she said at last, and Galya, giggling this time, stopped.
“Comrades, we need to decide if we really want him to write for Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping.”