It was time. Crows cawed in the linden tree. Sashenka approached her husband nervously.
“Vanya?” she said. She needed to know how he had found out about Benya, what he knew. Until then, confess to nothing.
“Vanya, I did nothing,” she lied. “I flirted. I’m so sorry…” She expected more severity from him but when he turned his face to her, it was clammy and swollen with tears. Vanya never cried except when he was very drunk, during sad movies, at regimental reunions or when he saw Snowy in the school play.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Do you hate me?”
He shook his head.
“Please just tell me what you know.”
Vanya tried to speak but his generous mouth, swaggering jaw and teddy-bear eyes lost their definition, as he cried silently in that warm dusk.
“I know I’ve done something very wrong. Vanya, I am so sorry!”
“I know everything,” he said.
“Everything? What is there to know?”
He groaned with an awesome, weary pain. “Don’t bother, Sashenka. We’re beyond husbands and wives now.”
“You’re scaring me, Vanya.”
Tears flowed down his cheeks as the blood of the sunset spread across the sky.
26
Sashenka stood beside the rocking chair, breathing in the scent of the jasmine. She thought of Mendel. She thought of Benya. And the children asleep in their rooms.
Finally Vanya got up from his chair. He was drunk, his eyes hot and gritty—but drunk in the way that hard drinkers ride the alcohol—and he pulled her to him, lifting her feet off the ground. For the first time in a long while, she was grateful for his touch. She noticed the rabbits in the hutch and the pony gazing peacefully over the fence—but she and Vanya were as alone as they had ever been.
“I can separate from you,” she said. “No one needs to know. Let me separate and you’ll be rid of me. Divorce me!” (Just hours ago, this might have been a fantasy escape with Benya—now it seemed a measure of desperation.) “I did something terrible! I’m sorry, so sorry…”
“Don’t say that,” whispered Vanya, squeezing her tighter. “I’m angry with you, of course, you fool. But we don’t have time to be hurt.”
“For God’s sake, tell me what you mean? Who knows?”
“They know everything—and it’s all my fault,” he said.
“Please! Just tell me what’s happened?”
He hugged her suddenly, kissing her neck, her eyes, her hair. “I’ve been moved off the Foreign Commissariat case. I’m being sent down to check out our comrades in Stalinabad in Turkestan.”
“Well, I’ll go with you. We can all go and live in Stalinabad.”
“Pull yourself together, Sashenka. They could arrest me at the station. They could come tonight.”
“But why? It’s me who’s done something…I beg for forgiveness but how can this be political?”
“Gideon, Mendel, now Benya Golden—there’s something out there, Sashenka, and I don’t know what it is. Perhaps they have something on your writer? Perhaps he’s a bastard connected to foreign spies. But they also have something on you and me. I don’t know what it is but I do know that it could destroy us altogether.” His feverish face was pale in the shrinking light. “We might not have any time. What are we going to do?”
The enormity of their predicament crushed Sashenka.
Two weeks earlier, Comrade Stalin had been in her house with Comrade Beria, Narkom of the NKVD. Stars of screen and stage had sung in their home; Vanya was newly promoted and trusted; Comrade Stalin admired her magazine, admired her and tweaked Snowy’s cheeks. No, Vanya was wrong. It was lies. Her heart fluttered, red sparks rose before her eyes and her guts spasmed.
“Vanya, I’m terrified.”
They sat at the table on the veranda, very close, cheek to cheek, hand in hand, closer now than on their honeymoon when they were young and in love, bound together now in more ways than any husband and wife would ever want to be.
Vanya gathered himself. “Sashenka, I’m frightened too. We’ve got to make a plan now.”
“Do you really believe they’re coming for us?”
“It’s possible.”
“Can’t we ask someone? Have you called Lavrenti Pavlovich? He likes you. He’s pleased with you. You even play on his basketball team. What about Hercules? He knows everything; Stalin loves him; he’ll help us.”
“I’ve called them both,” answered Vanya. “‘Comrade Beria is unavailable,’ said his apparat. Hercules hasn’t called back.”
“But that doesn’t mean anything. Beria’s probably tomcatting. And Hercules’ll call us.”
“We need to decide what to do tonight. They may arrest me, or you, or both of us. Who knows what they’re beating out of Mendel right now—or your fucking writer.”
“But surely they can’t make them invent things?”
“Christ save us!” Vanya exclaimed. “You’re joking, aren’t you? We have a saying in the Organs: ‘Give me a man tonight and I’ll have him confessing he’s the King of England by morning!’ You believed every confession at the trials? Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, the terrorists, killers, wreckers, spies?”
“They were true. You said they were true, in spirit, in essence.”
“Oh yes, they were true all right. They were all bastards. They were enemies in spirit. They lost faith, and faith is everything. But…” He shook his head.
“You beat people to say these things, didn’t you, Vanya?”
“For the Party, I’d do anything. I’ve done anything. Yes, I know what it is to break a man. Some break like a matchstick, some die rather than say a word. But better to shoot a hundred innocent men than let one spy escape, better a thousand.”
“Oh my God, Vanya.” Benya’s words, and Benya’s expression as he had said them, returned to her. He had known what Vanya did all night while she, she…
“What did you think I was doing? It was top secret but it suited you not to know.”
“But the Party’s right to destroy the spies. I knew there were mistakes but we all said the mistakes were worth it. Now, what if we become such a mistake? I believe in the Party and Stalin, it’s my life’s work. Vanya, do you still believe?”
“After what I’ve done for the Party, I have to believe. If I were shot tonight, I’d die a Communist. And you?”
“Die? I can’t die. I can’t vanish! I want to live. I love life. I’ll do anything to live.”
“Keep your voice down, dear Comrade Snowfox.” His new air of brisk conspiracy took her back to when he was an ardent young Bolshevik activist in Petrograd in 1916—it was one of the things that had attracted her to him. “Be calm! We’re not going to die but we need to plan ahead. If they take us, don’t confess a thing. That’s the key. If you don’t confess, they can’t touch you. Whatever they do to us, confess nothing!”
“I’m not sure I could take it. The pain,” Sashenka said shakily. “Vanya, you have your revolver here, don’t you?”
Vanya lifted the peaked cap that lay before them on the table. Underneath lay a Nagant pistol. Sashenka put her hand on the cold steel and remembered the “bulldogs” in Petrograd that she’d carried for the Party. How passionately and proudly she had borne those pistols for the Revolution. How she had admired Vanya, the strapping worker with those hands more like paws, his bold face, his brown eyes! What had he become? What had they both become?
“We could kill ourselves tonight, Vanya. I could kill myself and you’d be free of me. You’d be clean. I’ll do it if you just ask…”