The men halted briefly, breathing heavily. Wiping her eyes, shivering and gasping with agony, she squinted up at Kobylov and Rodos, in boots, white shirts and jodhpurs held up with suspenders. They stood together, such different men but with the same eyes: bloodshot, yellowed and wild, like wolves caught in the headlights.
“I want to confess,” she said as loudly as she could. “Everything. I beg you. Stop it now!”
46
“Hurrah! Hurrah!” shouted Kobylov, jumping up and down like a schoolboy at a soccer match. “Christ is risen!”
He remembered his own mother, the big-breasted cheerful Georgian woman who so cherished him. The last time he was with her in her new apartment in Tiflis, she had warned him: “Careful of the unhappiness you cause, Bogdan! Remember God and Jesus Christ!”
He pulled on his tunic, wiping his forehead with a yellow silk kerchief. “Enough now! Get her cleaned up, Comrade Rodos, let her get some sleep, cool her cell down and give her some coffee when she wakes. Then give her a pen and paper and get Mogilchuk to charm her. I’m off back to the party where so many mares await me! Thank heaven we can stop before we ruin her looks altogether. This is hard work, Sashenka, for a man who loves women. It’s not easy, pure torture, not easy at all.” And with a fleshy wave of jeweled fingers and a gleaming boot kicking the door shut, he was gone.
Sashenka slept all the next day. The cell was deliciously cool and dark but her chest was agony—perhaps they had broken a rib? Some time in the night a doctor, a grey-bearded, white-coated specialist, fallen from his fancy city practice into this world of the living dead, came to see her. She was half awake but she dreamed that he was the vanished Professor Israel Paltrovich who had delivered Snowy in the Kremlin Hospital. Something about his hush of surprise when he saw it was her, something about his aristocratic and soft-spoken bedside manner, even though he himself looked so broken, something about his gentle reassurance in the middle of the night, reminded her of him. She wanted to talk to him about Snowy.
“Professor, is it you…?”
He put his calm fingers on her hand and squeezed it.
“Just rest,” he said, and more quietly, “sleep, dear.” He gave her injections and rubbed some healing cream into her muscles.
When she woke up, she could not move. Her body was black and blue, and her urine was red. She ate and slept some more, then they let her wash and walk in the exercise yard, where, hobbling along, she stared at the gorgeous turquoise tent above her. The air was racy and fresh and warm. It was as if she had been born again today.
She had been lucky after a fashion, she told herself. What luck to be loved by Lala and raised by her; to marry Vanya and create those children; to have enjoyed the seven-thousand-ruby caresses of Benya Golden, one wild, reckless love affair in her life of good sense and hard work. She had known Lenin and Stalin in person, the titans of human history. Given that it was all about to end, thank God she had known such things. What riches, what times she had enjoyed!
They would draw it out of her, she knew, and she would deliver all they wanted—and more. The words she would utter, the confessions she would make, were a long form of suicide, but addictively indispensable to her one reader: the Instantzia, Comrade Stalin, who would find in her breathless reminiscences all he had ever wanted to believe about the world and the people he hated. Vanya had told her about Stalin’s lurid visions and she would pander to every one of them. Vanya, if he was still alive, would do the same, less flamboyantly. She did not know, probably would never know now, why she, Mendel, Benya and Vanya had been arrested in the first place. The workings of spiders and webs were now beyond her. All that mattered was that she was the center of it all, she had destroyed them all. She and Peter Sagan.
They might just keep her on ice for months but by the time they sentenced her (and this part, this snuffing out, this unspeakable ending, this violent conclusion of the mysterious, boundless, vibrant thing called Life, she still found unimaginable), the children would be settled somewhere with new names and destinies, safe and sound and in the world of the living—not in her world of the dead. She beamed her love to them, her thanks to Satinov, her love for those precious to her. She had to let them go. She had been a Communist since she was sixteen. It had been her religion, the rapture of absolutism, the science of history. But now she saw, late in life, that this, her special fantastical confessional suicide, was her last mission. She had become a parent again, just as she ceased to be one. She was pregnant with purpose.
In the exercise yard, Sashenka saw wispy clouds in the dancing shapes of a train, a lion and a bearded rabbinical profile. Was that her grandfather, the Rabbi of Turbin? And could that be a rabbit and a pink cushion, lit by the rays of a sun just out of sight…Perhaps, after all, the mystics were right, life was just a chimera, a fire in the desert, a fevered trance, but the pain was real.
When the time comes for the Highest Measure, she promised herself, I’ll welcome the seven grams of lead and I’ll leave an expression of love for Snowy and Carlo out there on the gates of eternity. It was time for the final act.
47
“Here’s your prize,” said Kobylov, welcoming her into the interrogation room. The secret policeman watched as the beautiful prisoner caught first a whiff and then the strong aroma of the burnt, slightly sour coffee beans.
“You must confess your criminal and treacherous activities,” said Mogilchuk, pouring her coffee out of a brass flask.
She sat in the chair, snow-white between the welts and bruises, and thin, but something about those lips that never quite closed, the little islands of freckles on either side of her nose, and that bosom distracted Kobylov, who sat on the windowsill, swinging a new pair of coffee-colored calf-leather boots. He liked this stage in a case. There was an end-of-semester chumminess in the air and he did not have to beat her anymore, even though a bout of French wrestling with a real bastard was bracing sport. He felt her grey eyes rest on him, bright again and bold and vigilant.
Kobylov winked at her and wrinkled his nose. He took out a packet of cigarettes emblazoned with a crocodile. “Your favorite Egyptians,” he said, taking one and tossing her the packet.
“I couldn’t have imagined when I became a Bolshevik that I would end here,” she told him.
“When you chose the revolutionary life, even at sixteen, you entered a game of life and death and put the quest for the holy grail above everything else,” said Kobylov, lighting her cigarette and then his own. “Comrade Stalin told me that himself.”
“But I changed,” said Sashenka, blowing out lacy ringlets of smoke.
Kobylov raised his eyes to heaven. “It’s irreversible,” he said.
“Like a sleigh ride that you can never get off…”
“Time to work,” said Kobylov.
Mogilchuk lifted his pen and smoothed the pristine sheet of paper. “Begin your confession.”
Sashenka brushed her hair back off her forehead. There was a cut on her cheek and one whole side of her face was still swollen, surrounded by a rainbow of deep blue, mustard yellow and poppy red.
Kobylov felt like the hunter who corners the noble stag and even as he aims his rifle at its heart he cannot help but admire it. He marveled at her self-possession and her courage.