Sashenka

1

“Three hours, twelve minutes and eighteen seconds until the train for London!” Katinka Vinsky cried out, running to her window in her pink nightgown, almost slipping on the wrinkled yellow carpet, throwing open the brown, damp-stained curtains. She caught a glimpse of herself smiling in the mirror and behind her a chaotic bedroom with clothes everywhere, and a half-filled carpetbag. It was dawn in the bungalow cottage on the main street of Beznadezhnaya, a village on the Russian borderlands of the north Caucasus, remote enough for locals to say that it was “lost in deafness.”

“Mamochka! Papochka! Where are you?” she called, opening her door.

Then she saw the doctor and his wife, already dressed, in the kitchen–cum–sitting room. She knew her father would be reassuring her mother that their daughter’s trip would be all right, that they would be at the station early enough, that the seat on the train was booked (facing the right way, because their darling felt sick if she had her back to the direction of the train), that the train would arrive in time for her to catch the bus to Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow to check in for the Aeroflot flight to Heathrow. Her mother was reassuring her father that Katinka would have enough food for the journey and that she had the right clothes for London, where, it was said, the rain never stopped and the fog never cleared. They were, Katinka decided, much more nervous than she was.

Katinka knew her parents were of two minds about her accepting the mysterious job in London. They had been so proud when she received the top grades in history at Moscow University, but when her professor, Academician Beliakov, showed her the advertisement in the Humanities Department Gazette, her father had begged her not to go. What sort of people lived in London and were rich enough to hire a historian? he asked. But Katinka could not resist it. Researching a family history, tracing the vanished past…She imagined a cultured young Count Vorontsov or Prince Golitsyn living in a dilapidated London town house full of ancient samovars, icons and family portraits, keen to find out what had become of his family, their palaces and works of art dating from the eighteenth century, her period, her speciality. She wished she’d been born in those more elegant times…

She had never been abroad before, although she had spent three years at the university in faraway Moscow. No, the offer was too good to miss: young historians specializing in eighteenth-century history do not often get the chance to earn much-needed U.S. dollars and travel to London.

Katinka’s father, Dr. Valentin Vinsky, was smoking a cigarette and pacing the floor while her mother Tatiana, a soft, feathery creature with bright red-dyed hair, busied herself in the kitchen with her mother-in-law, Babushka—or Baba for short. Through the fog of cooking, Baba, a low-slung, broad-shouldered peasant in a floral dress, scarlet kerchief and some old surgical socks held up with elastic, moved slowly like a dinosaur in the mist.

Steam rose so densely, so aromatically, from the bubbling pots of vegetable broth that it was hard to see the two women. It was as if the nourishing humidity had warped the entire house. Like a million Soviet homes, everything inside, carpets, curtains and clothes, was yellowed with steam and damp and grease.

“There you are!” said Katinka, bounding into the room. “How long have you been up?”

“I didn’t sleep a wink!” her father replied. He was tall and dark-skinned with brown eyes. Though his grey hair was thinning and he was always exhausted, Katinka thought he looked like one of those handsome forties film stars. “Everything packed?”

“Not so fast, Papochka!”

“Well, you must hurry…”

“Oh Papochka!” Father and daughter hugged, both with tears in their eyes. The family were always quick to cry and Katinka, the youngest of three children and a beloved afterthought, was its soft-hearted and much-indulged core. Her father was a thoughtful man. He did not laugh much; in fact, he did not say much at all and when he did he was tortuously inarticulate—yet he was worshipped virtually as a god in the neighborhood, where he had delivered the babies of babies he had delivered and even their babies. “I can’t imagine how I’ve brought up such a confident, loquacious child as you, Katinka,” he once told her. “But you’re the light of my life. Unlike me, you can do anything!” He was right—she knew she possessed all the assurance of a child utterly cherished in the happiest of families.

“Your food’ll be ready, don’t you worry, girl,” said Baba, her gums almost bare of teeth. “Go and wake up Bedbug or he’ll miss your departure!” “Klop,” or Bedbug, was Sergei Vinsky, Katinka’s grandfather.

Katinka trotted down the corridor toward the bathroom, passing her little bedroom with its single unit of bed, light and bedside table (standard Soviet issue) and its curling posters of Michael Jackson.

She heard the faucet running in the bathroom as she called out to her grandfather. The bathroom door opened and she met the rich, sweet distillation of Bedbug’s bowels and the familiar stale damp of old towels that was another ingredient of the provincial fug of home. Bedbug, a small weathered countryman in an undershirt and pouchy grey briefs, emerged from a bathroom that was so overshadowed by hanging laundry that it resembled a gypsy tent. Resting his hands on his hips and chewing his gums, he let rip an ungodly fart of orchestral proportions.

“Hear that? Good morning and good luck, dear girl!” and he cackled hoarsely. It was the same every morning at home. Katinka was used to it—but since her return from the university she had observed its customs with more detachment.

“Disgusting! Worse than a farmyard!” she said cheerfully. “At least in a farmyard the animals aren’t rude too. Come on, Bedbug, hurry up! Breakfast’s ready. I’m leaving soon!”

“So? Why should I hurry? I have my rituals!” He nodded at the Soviet lavatory with its unique basin-like design (guaranteed to preserve its fetid cargo as long as possible), and grinned.

“Yes, Bedbug, and no one enjoys their rituals like you. But you are coming to see me off?”

“Why bother? Good riddance!” More cackling. “Wait, Katinka! I’ve heard about a new murder on the radio! There’s a serial killer in Kiev who eats his victims, brains, livers and all, can you believe it?”

Katinka returned to the main room, shaking her head. Bedbug, an old collective farmer, lived in a world of his own. Now that the old order had gone and the Soviet Union had been abolished, he mourned the Communist Party and fulminated with his gambling cronies in the Vegaz-Kalifornia Klub against the New Russian rich—“crooked zhydy i chernyi i chinovniki”—Jews and Chechens and bureaucrats! There was nothing to equal the burning bitterness of old men in small villages, Katinka thought.

For Bedbug, though, the recent disintegration of the Workers’ Paradise had had one advantage. In these queer, unsettled times, Russia was enjoying a lurid harvest of serial killers, a banquet of cannibals. Apart from his bowels, Bedbug had found a new hobby for his old age—the lives of the murderers.

Katinka sighed and went back to the kitchen to eat her last breakfast before London.

2

When Katinka’s grandparents and parents emerged from the house to accompany her to the station, they were dressed up in their Revolution Day best.

It was a bracing day of sharp-edged brightness in this village of mixed Russian and Caucasian folk, a day that suited a new beginning. A ragged crust of grimy ice still covered the fields and pastures and the ditches on either side of the village’s one paved thoroughfare, Suvorov Street (known as Lenin Street until last year), with its dreary, squat cottages enlivened only by their blue or red shutters. There is no more thrilling time of year in Russia, for beneath this tainted whiteness Katinka could already hear the rushing of water. The ice was melting and, hidden from view, frothy streams seethed, merged and parted, unleashing the snowdrops that were already pushing through the black-edged snow. The trees oozed sap, and skylarks and finches trilled with joy, celebrating spring.

Katinka wore a rabbit-fur coat and white vinyl boots, a denim miniskirt (Turkish made) and a purple sweater, of which she was very proud, inlaid with rhinestones in rhomboid patterns. Her father, in a felt greatcoat that covered his medical smock, carried her single bag down to their white Volga. The car was old and rusty but its broad confident solidity summed up the best of the old USSR. In the village, the doctor’s car signified change: when it was parked outside a house, it meant that the family was expecting either the stork—or the reaper. Bedbug, wearing a shiny, greasy brown suit, red shirt buttoned up to the top without a tie, and his war medals (Stalingrad, Kursk, Berlin), joined Baba and Tatiana in the car. Katinka, the family mascot, the village heroine, sat in the front.

The villagers came out to wave good-bye as they drove down old Lenin Street, past the prefabricated concrete apartment building, with its 1970s orange and black panels. Katinka waved at the white-coated, peachy-cheeked women of the Milk and Meat shops; at the be-suited and permed typists of the Mayor’s office; at the Mayor himself, who looked like a Latin crooner with his bouffant hairdo and white suit. Beso and the Ingushetians of the Vegetable Shop tossed a brown bag of Georgian tomatoes in through the car window, and Stenka the Cossack, the tattooed bouncer/bodybuilder from the nightclub-café Vegaz-Kalifornia, in his leather vest and bleached jeans, proffered a can of Mexican beer and a little Greek-made bottle of Why Not? perfume. Gaidar, father of the dark Azeris in their sheepskins who ran the kiosk, tossed a Twix into the car—and Katinka gave it to her father, who often suffered low blood sugar during the day and would wolf down chocolate bars…But where was Andrei?

There he was, smiling in his soft, devoted way, with those winsome eyes that seemed meant for departing trains and long good-byes. Wearing his dark blue jeans, he was waiting for her on the steps of the little stationhouse. Like her father, Andrei hadn’t wanted her to go to London, and the night before he’d begged her to wait for the late spring when they could go on vacation and sun themselves in the Crimea. His alternating kisses and reasoning had almost persuaded her—until she stopped the charade with a playful “Not so fast, Andryushka. We’ll see.” He sulked; she consoled him, thinking how much she liked his green eyes—but where did he rank compared to London, Moscow, the doctorate she was starting to write, her vocation as a historian? She wanted to be a writer, a historian of Catherinian Russia; she imagined herself living in Moscow, publishing respected books and perhaps, one day, gaining a seat in the Academy…

Andrei wanted to carry her little bag to the train, and so did her father. In the end, after a slight tug of war, they compromised and each held one strap of the carpetbag. They all boarded the train and settled her into her compartment. Dr. Vinsky hugged Katinka and kissed her forehead, leaving with tears in his eyes. Andrei whispered, “I love you.”

Katinka stood at the open window, blowing kisses to family and boyfriend. Then the oil-stained steel engine clanked, jolted and, with a shrill whistle, rumbled into the distance, heading north into the heart of Russia.

Trains leaving empty provincial stations can seem sad even at the happiest of times—and partings are never that. The family said nothing for a moment then Tatiana dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, worrying about Katinka’s job: what sort of research would she be doing? How would she survive? Why did she have to go? She put her arms around Andrei.

Baba, a living study of the compatibility of Communist dogma and peasant superstitions, crossed herself. Bedbug had left Beznadezhnaya only once—in June 1941, to join the Red Army—and returned only once, in May 1945, but he had left on a locomotive with a tail of white steam that bore him all the way from Moscow to Berlin…The best and most dread times of his life, he’d told his wife: friends lost, friends made, “For Stalin and the Motherland!” Stalin: now there was a man!

Dr. Vinsky remained standing alone on the platform as the others left. It was just 10:00 a.m. but already his office at the medical center on Suvorov Street, between the local Party secretary’s office and the Milk Products Shop, would be full of pensioners with spring colds and shrinking savings.

He lit a cigarette and looked after the train. He was very proud of Katinka’s courage: would he have done the same? He had grown up with his parents, Bedbug and Baba, right here in Beznadezhnaya—and at eighteen he had left on this train too, to study medicine in faraway Leningrad. Baba had bought him a new jacket, new boots and a red chintz suitcase: they were poor but so proud he had been accepted by Leningrad Medical School. The first of the Vinsky family, and surely the first in the village, to attend a university.

Dr. Vinsky asked himself (not for the first time) why he had returned to this godforsaken place in the borderlands of the Empire as a young doctor. He could have studied more; he had dreamed of becoming a gynecologist, a specialist, a professor, in Moscow. But he came home—home to the blue-shuttered cottage where he’d been born, and still lived—to be with his old peasant parents and run the local clinic. Perhaps he would not have succeeded in Leningrad, or perhaps he was a coward, he thought now. But this was home and he craved it.

Dr. Vinsky hated partings: he hated anyone to go away; his sons were married and lived far off, and now his only daughter had gone. He himself was nearly sixty, with a weak heart, and he knew he would never leave.

He flicked his cigarette onto the tracks. What was this “family research” of Katinka’s? he asked himself yet again. In Russia, it was always better to leave the past alone. Here it had a way of poisoning the present. Without Academician Beliakov’s insistence that Katinka would be safe, he would never have let her go to London.

Katinka, he decided, was a bright bird of paradise stuck in a dingy cage: he had to let her fly. Unlike his old father, Dr. Vinsky was no Communist, yet, in these times of turbulence—in which chaos, corruption and democracy reigned—he yearned for stability.

Perhaps this was why he felt uneasy about Katinka’s journey. She was traveling into a world where he could not protect her.

3

The trip—the train ride to Moscow, the flight from Sheremetyevo Airport—was so dizzyingly exciting that Katinka recorded every moment in a diary she had bought especially. She described the people she met on the train, the check-in at the airport, the passengers who sat on either side of her on the flight (she had never flown before); her trip into London on the grimy Metro (or the Tube, as the English gracelessly called it), which was so dark and sordid compared with the vaulted marble cathedrals that were Moscow’s underground stations; and then the walk, staggering with her bag, from Sloane Square Station. And there she was, staring with wide-eyed amazement at the discreetly luxurious hotel booked for her in Cadogan Gardens, Chelsea.

The receptionist, a waxy paper pusher with a weave-over hairstyle, did not seem too pleased to see her. When he realized she was Russian, he appeared suspicious, examining her passport as if it might contain some trace of KGB biological weaponry. When he looked up her reservation and found it was prepaid in cash, she could see him re-evaluate her, reducing her status from KGB agent to gangster’s moll.

“What are you doing in London? Sightseeing or…,” he asked, without looking up from behind the desk.

“I’m a historian,” she replied, in hesitant English, trying not to giggle at his confusion. She thought she saw him shake his head a little: prostitute, spy or…or historian, he couldn’t work it out.

Upstairs in her room, she could only wonder at the canopied double bed and the marble bathroom containing two, yes two, basins, two, yes two, fluffy bathrobes and an Aladdin’s cave of free shampoos, soaps and bubble baths (all of which she immediately hid in her bag to take home), and cable television. It was so different from her home in the north Caucasus or her room in the dormitory in Moscow where she had lived for three years.

The desk was equipped with embossed envelopes and writing paper (straight into the bag with them too!). There were goosefeather pillows, bedspreads, curtains, pelmets like a palace, and downstairs a sitting room, silent except for a ticking grandfather clock, with deep well-stuffed sofas and piles of glossy new magazines such as Vogue and something called the Illustrated London News. Oh, the very Englishness of it! What a mercy, she thought, that her English had been so good at school and that she remembered some of it. When she had looked around, the receptionist gave her a note in a typed envelope:

Pick-up tomorrow 9:00 a.m. Your driver is Artyom.

This struck her as so iconic that she stuck it in her diary for posterity. Before taking a stroll around Sloane Square and down the King’s Road, she called her parents from the room to tell them she was safe. She got her father, who was always agonizingly shy on the phone.

“Katinka, trust no one out there,” he warned her, between gaping silences.

“They’re terrified of us here, Papa. In the hotel, they think I’m a gangster or a spy!”

“Promise me you’ll take no risks, darling,” he said.

“Oh, Papa. OK, I promise: no risks. I kiss you, Papa. Love to Mama and Baba and Bedbug!”

She laughed to herself—how could he understand? She adored her father but she could imagine him on the phone by the bookcase, smoking a cigarette late at night, in that faraway cottage in a village “lost in deafness”—while she was in London now. But when she got into her sumptuously soft bed with its incredible wealth of pillows, she closed her eyes and wondered what on earth she was doing there. A spiked barb of anxiety lodged deep inside her drumming heart.

4

Next morning, after an English breakfast of toast, marmalade and fried bacon and tomatoes (she ordered much of the menu), Katinka found a shaven-headed Russian man of military bearing standing in the lobby and staring at her with ill-concealed contempt. So this was Artyom, she thought, as he nodded toward the door and directed her to a large black Mercedes that smelled deliciously of new leather.

Artyom climbed stiffly into the seat right in front of her and she heard the locks click shut on all four doors. As he swung the car aggressively into traffic, pressing her against the passenger door, Katinka examined his hulking shoulders and muscle-knotted neck with foreboding. She felt small and helpless and wondered if her father, whom she’d so recently mocked for his caution, had been right after all.

What if her entire trip was a wicked trick arranged by some Russian master criminal? Was she about to be sold into white slavery? But why would a Thief-in-Power, as Russian gangster godfathers were known, bother to ask Academician Beliakov, author of the classic work Law-making and State-building under Catherine II: The Legislative Commission, to place an advertisement for him in the Humanities Department Gazette? Beliakov had been invited to put forward his top history graduate. And why would a gangster want a historian when surely the provincial villages and Muscovite streets were seething with booted, miniskirted girls eager to be sold into white slavery in London or New York?

“Where are we going?” she asked Artyom anxiously.

“The house,” muttered Artyom, as if this answer was already causing him considerable weariness.

“Who am I meeting?”

“The boss.” These two words fatigued him even more.

“Mr. Getman?” she asked.

Artyom did not answer.

“Is he very rich, Artyom?”

Artyom snorted with heavy-breathed superiority, and altered the air-conditioning on his gleaming dashboard as if he were piloting a supersonic MiG fighter.

“How did you come to work for Mr. Getman?”

“I served in the Spetsnats in Afghanistan,” he replied.

Katinka was amused that every thug and nightclub bouncer in Russia claimed to have fought with the Special Forces in Afghanistan. If all of them had been telling the truth, Russia might have won the war.

“Is Mr. Getman one of the oligarchs?”

There was another long, sneering pause as the Mercedes swung from the inner circle of Regent’s Park into a discreet driveway. High gates shivered, then opened slowly. Katinka heard the crunch of the Mercedes’s wheels on thick gravel and gasped at the beauty and scale of the house, a perfectly proportioned Queen Anne mansion hidden in the woods of Regent’s Park, right in the middle of London, one of those secret places that had been owned, she was told later, by several of the legendary millionaires of the past.

Artyom marched round to open Katinka’s door. “This way, girl,” he said, without looking at her. He turned and loped up the steps.

Katinka followed him nervously into a black-and-white-floored hall breathing fresh paint and polish, and where portraits of ruddy-cheeked English earls in bulging pantaloons and velvet frock coats glared down at her. A charging red-coated cavalryman, saber outstretched, caught her eye roguishly from a broad gold-framed canvas hanging on the sweeping staircase with the shiny oak banisters. But where was Artyom? Katinka looked round frantically, but the house seemed silent and forbidding. Then a door concealed in the opulent chinoiserie wallpaper swung on its hinges. She opened it and saw Artyom’s broad back turn a corner. Relieved, she ran after him into a gloomy corridor lined with framed English cartoons. He opened a black door. Bright sunlight pouring through a line of windows blinded her momentarily. Raising a hand to her eyes, she blinked and tried to gather herself.

She was in the biggest kitchen she had ever seen. Black marble covered every surface. A chrome fridge extended from floor to high ceiling. The gadgets—the oven, the washing machine, the dishwasher—seemed as wide as cars with control panels that belonged in a Sputnik, not a kitchen.

Was this where she was supposed to be? Perhaps she should have waited in the hall? Katinka was about to turn back and retrace her steps when a slim grey-haired woman rose from a pine table with a generous, uninhibited smile. Katinka stopped as Artyom marched past her toward a high-backed scarlet chair—almost a papal throne, she thought—which was occupied by a large, crumpled man with curly dark hair who was watching a wall of television screens that showed different rooms and approaches to the house.

“Boss,” said Artyom, halting before the papal throne. “Here’s the girl. Where do you want her?”

This was all a horrible mistake, Katinka decided, longing to escape, to go home, worrying about how to get a lift to the airport. But the scruffy man, who wore a checked seersucker jacket, jumped to his feet and greeted her exuberantly, hands outstretched.

“You must be Ekaterina Vinsky? Welcome, come in! We’ve been longing to see you!” He spoke Russian in a thick Jewish, Odessan accent that she’d heard only in old movies. “Thank you for coming to see us.” Us? Who was us?

The man glanced at the driver. “All right, Artyom, see you at eleven.” Artyom looked disappointed and lumbered away, leaving the kitchen door swinging behind him, but his dismissal lifted Katinka’s spirits.

“Now,” said the scruffy man, “come and sit down. I’m Pasha Getman.”

So this, thought Katinka, was what a real oligarch looked like, a billionaire who breezed through the corridors of the Kremlin itself—but he was already showing her to a chair.

“Come on, Mama,” he called to the slim lady. “Bring the honeycakes. Are they ready?” Then to Katinka, “What sort of tea do you like? What sort of milk? Let’s get started!”

Pasha seemed incapable of sitting down or even keeping still. He was bursting with sparky energy. But before he could continue, a telephone gadget, which appeared unlinked to any wires, started to ring and he answered it in Russian, then switched to English. He seemed to be discussing oil prices. Then, covering the phone with his large soft paw, he said, “Katinka, meet my mother, Roza Getman,” before giving orders into the phone again.

So these people were her new employers, Katinka thought. She looked more carefully at the woman approaching her with a silver tray. Steam curled out of a blue china teapot; cakes and apple strudel were arranged on plates; and teacups stood graciously on matching saucers. Placing the tray before her, Roza Getman started to pour the tea.

“Pasha’s always in a hurry,” she told Katinka, smiling at her son.

“No time to spare. Life’s short and my enemies would like to make it shorter. Understand that, understand everything,” explained Pasha, who seemed to be able to conduct several conversations simultaneously. Katinka didn’t know what to make of these Odessans, who seemed so haughty, so sophisticated, so un-Russian (she knew from her grandfather’s rantings that most oligarchs were Jews) that they made her feel gawky and provincial. But just as her spirits were sinking again, Roza handed her a plate.

“Try one of my honeycakes. You’re so slim, we need to feed you up. Now tell me, dear, how was your flight and did you like the hotel?”

“Oh my God, it’s beautiful,” answered Katinka. “I’ve never flown before and the hotel’s palatial. I couldn’t believe the breakfast and the fluffy towels…” She stopped and blushed, feeling provincial again, but Roza leaned toward her and touched her hand.

“I’m so pleased,” she said in the same Odessan accent as Pasha. She was dressed with understated elegance, thought Katinka, admiring the silk scarf around her neck. Her hair was greying but it must once have been blond and it was curled like that of a film star from the fifties. Her blouse was cream silk, her skirt pleated and tweedy, and she wore no jewelry except a wedding ring and a butterfly brooch on her cashmere cardigan. But none of this impressed Katinka as much as her once beautiful—no, still beautiful—face, her pale skin, and her warm eyes that were the most extraordinary shade of blue she’d ever seen.

Pasha finished his call but almost instantly the big phone on the table started to ring. He pressed a button on a flashing control panel and started talking in Russian about an art auction—“Mama, you start, don’t wait for me,” he said, covering the mouthpiece again—so that Katinka was able to concentrate all her curiosity on this somehow alluring older woman who seemed to have everything, she suddenly realized, except happiness. What am I doing here? she asked herself again, biting into a honeycake so sweet it made her shiver.

“I’m so glad you could come,” Roza said. “We wanted a historical researcher so I consulted Academician Beliakov.”

“Are you a specialist in the eighteenth century?” Katinka asked earnestly, pulling a notebook out of her rucksack.

“Of course not!” Pasha interrupted, banging down the telephone. “I started selling concert tickets in Odessa and things expanded from there, first metals, then cars, now oil and nickel, so no, I know nothing about the eighteenth century and nor does Mama.”

Katinka felt crushed.

“Pasha, don’t be so bombastic,” said Roza. “Katinka, we need the best historian, and the professor recommended you. You’ve done research, haven’t you? In the archives?”

“Yes, in the State Archive, on Catherine the Second’s Legislative Commission and recently for my doctorate on the impact on local government of Catherine the Second’s 1775 prikaz on…”

“That’s perfect,” said Roza, “because we want you to do genealogical research.”

“We want you to discover the history of our family,” added Pasha, hovering over them impatiently and lighting a monstrous cigar.

“In the eighteenth century? Your family origins?”

“No, dear,” said Roza, “only in the twentieth century.” A trickle of unease ran down Katinka’s spine. “You’ll be paid well. Does a thousand dollars a month plus expenses sound about right to you?”

Katinka sat up very straight. “No, no,” she said. “It’s not necessary.” The money worried her, it was much too much, and this meant something was wrong. What would her father say? As for Bedbug, he regarded these oligarchs as the Antichrist. “I don’t think I can do this job. I only know the eighteenth century.”

Pasha looked at his mother, exhaling a noxious cloud of smoke. “Are you saying you don’t want the job?”

“Pasha,” said Roza, “take it easy on her. She’s right to ask questions.” She turned to Katinka. “This is your first job, isn’t it?”

First job, first trip abroad, first oligarch, first palace, first everything, thought Katinka, nodding.

“Look,” said Pasha, “you’ve worked on one set of archives so why not another? What’s the difference? Catherine’s archives, Stalin’s archives.”

Katinka stiffened. The Stalin era! Another alarm bell! It was not done to look into that period. “Never ask people what their grandfathers did,” her father once told her. “Why? Because one grandfather was denouncing the other!” Yet now her esteemed patron, Academician Beliakov, had tossed her into this snakepit. She had come all this way and now she had to escape—but how? She took a deep breath.

“I can’t do it. I don’t know that period and I don’t want to be involved in matters that concern the Party and the Security Organs,” she said, her face hot. “I don’t know Moscow well enough, and I can’t accept this excessive salary. You’ve got the wrong person. I feel guilty because you’ve flown me all this way and I’ll never forget the hotel and I promise I’ll repay the cost of the—”

“That’s it!” Pasha slammed down his cup and saucer, spilling tea across the table, muttered something about “Soviet-minded girls from the provinces” and clamped the cigar between his teeth.

Katinka was shocked by his outburst and was about to stand up to say good-bye when two lines and the mobile started to ring simultaneously in a screeching cacophony.

“Pasha, take these calls in your study,” said Roza briskly, “or I’ll throw all those phones out of the window. And that repulsive cigar!”

When he was gone, she took Katinka’s hands in her own. “I’m so sorry. Now we can talk properly.” She paused and looked searchingly at Katinka. “Please understand, this isn’t about vanity or even curiosity. It’s not about Pasha’s money. It’s about me.”

“But Mr. Getman is right,” said Katinka. “I can’t do this. I don’t know anything about the twentieth century.”

“Listen to me a little and if you still don’t want to help us, then I understand. I want you anyway to have a lovely time seeing London before we fly you home. But if you could help us…” A shadow clouded her deep blue eyes for a moment. “Katinka, I grew up with a hole in my heart, an empty place right here, like a frozen chamber, and all my life I’ve never been able to talk about it and I’ve never even let myself think about it. But I do know that I’m not alone. All over Russia there are people like me, men and women of my age who’ve never known who their parents were. We look like everyone else, we married, we had children, we grew old, but I could never be carefree. All the time I’ve been carrying this sense of loss inside me, and I still carry it. Perhaps that is why I brought up Pasha to be so confident and extroverted, because I didn’t want him to go through life like me.” She frowned and laughed softly at herself; it was, thought Katinka, the gentlest of sounds. “I never talked about this with my late husband or even Pasha, but recently Pasha wanted to buy me a present. I told him that all I wanted was my family and he said, ‘Mama, the Communists have gone, the KGB’s gone and I’ll pay anything to help you.’ That’s why you’re here.”

“Are you…an orphan?” asked Katinka. She couldn’t imagine how this might feel.

“I don’t even know,” answered Roza. “Where are my parents? Who were they? I don’t know who I am. I’ve never known. Look on this task any way you like—as a challenge, a historical project, a vacation job to earn some money, or just an act of real kindness. But this is my last chance. Please, please say you’ll help me find out what happened to my family?”

5

It was spring in a newly schizophrenic Moscow, a city in the midst of the craziest personality crisis of its history. Grim and neon lit, it had become an Asiatic and Americanized metropolis of BMWs and Ladas, Communists and oligarchs, apparatchiks and whores.

Creaking chandeliers of gutter-soiled ice still hung off the ornate pink eaves of the Granovsky Building as Katinka found the bell for staircase one, apartment 4. On this small private street, the cascades of ice dangled so treacherously over the pavement that the janitors had fenced off sections to protect the pedestrians. Meanwhile the cherry blossom was bursting into flower; rap music blared in the street; there were Mercedeses and Range Rovers parked outside the building.

Katinka walked slowly along its wall, reading the orange plaques recording the famous Communists who had once lived here: marshals and commissars, Stalin’s henchmen, names from a vanished black time. Again she wanted to escape. She couldn’t do this; she shouldn’t be doing this—yet here she was.

Three days had passed, three days in which Katinka and Roza Getman had drunk tea, and walked round the rose gardens of Regent’s Park, and talked about Roza’s childhood, her adoptive parents and her hazy memories of another life. And Katinka had agreed. Against all her instincts and her father’s advice, she was here in Moscow—for Roza.

Katinka approached the wooden door with the glass windows and rang the old-fashioned brass bell hard. She waited a long time and was about to give up when there came the sound of an aged throat being cleared.

“I’m listening!” said a hoarse voice.

Katinka smiled at the superior way that old chinovniki—bureaucrats—answered their phones, as in “Make your submission, slave!”

“This is Katinka Vinsky. The history student? I called and you told me to come.”

A long pause. Rasping breaths, then the door clicked. Katinka pushed through the battered wooden doors into a foyer and up a dingy but once glorious staircase to another door with reinforced locks. She was about to knock when it swung open into a gleaming hall lined with boots and shoes.

“Hello?” she called out.

“Who are you?” asked a swarthy middle-aged woman with a long nose and shabby black clothes. She spoke well, Katinka noted, as if she had been to the best schools.

“I’m the historian who’s come to see the marshal.”

“He’s waiting for you,” said the woman, pointing down a shining parquet corridor and retreating into the kitchen.

“Leave your shoes!” said the voice of an old man. “Come and join me! Where are you?”

Katinka took off her shoes, slipped on some yellowed foam slippers and followed the voice through an archway. So this was how the bosses lived? She had never seen an apartment like it. The ceilings were high; a chandelier glistened; the wainscoting was bright Karelian pine, as was the art-deco thirties furniture. The L-shaped corridor led off to many rooms but she turned right into the living room. The brash spring glare beamed through the four windows, but then her vision cleared and she saw, across a piano thick with family photographs, the ten-foot-high painting of Lenin at the Finland Station on one wall and on the other an original Gerasimov portrait, of a handsome, sharp-faced marshal in full uniform, gold shoulder boards and a chestful of medals like a Christmas tree.

To her right, a table was heaped with Soviet and foreign magazines; a new-fangled mobile phone was charging on the windowsill, and a Sony CD player played Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante through small black speakers on little platforms high in the four corners of the room. Katinka was amazed. It was true what they said—the Soviet leaders really did live like princes.

In a deep leather chair with its back to the light sat a dignified specimen of ancient Homo sovieticus.

“Hello, girl, come in!” Katinka had expected the oily Soviet comb-over hairdo, the waxy pallor (the “Kremlin tan”) and the paunch of a much older man, but this antique, sitting erect in a blue Soviet suit with only the star of the Order of the Red Banner, for courage in the Great Patriotic War, on his lapel, was lean and chiseled. His hair was steel hewn, spiky and thick, and his aquiline nose that of a Persian shah. She recognized a shrunken version of the marshal in the portrait.

The original stood up, bowed, showing her to an upright Karelian pine chair opposite his own, then sat again. “Sit, please. That’s it. Now, girl…”

“Ekaterina,” she said, taking the seat indicated.

“Katinka—if I may—what can I do for you?”

Katinka took out her notebook and a pencil, her hands shaking a little. “Hercules Alexandrovich…” She turned too many pages at once, dropped the pencil, picked it up, lost her place, all while intensely aware of his eyes—an astonishing cornflower blue—scanning her.

She had never met such an important man. The marshal had known every Soviet leader from Lenin to Andropov. The provincial modesty of the doctor’s daughter from Beznadezhnaya, the life-preserving urge bred into every Soviet citizen to avoid officials, Muscovites and especially secret policemen, and the dangers of power itself—all of these dueled within her. She remembered the story that Roza Getman had told her in London and was just about to ask the marshal about it when he asked her a question.

“How old do you think I am?”

“I know how old you are,” she replied, deciding to pretend to be more confident that she felt. “The same age as the century.”

“Pravilno! Right!” The marshal laughed. “Not bad then for ninety-four, eh?” Katinka noticed that his Georgian accent was still strong despite many decades in Moscow. “Do you know I can still dance? Mariko!” The middle-aged woman appeared in the doorway with a tray of tea. “This is my daughter, Mariko; she looks after me.” Katinka thought that the old marshal had much more life in him than his daughter. “Put on the lezginka, dear!”

Mariko put the tray on the table by the window and then changed the CD in the corner.

“Don’t overdo it, Father,” she said. “Your breathing is already bad. No smoking! And don’t scald yourself, the tea is hot.” She glanced at Katinka, then stomped out of the room.

As the wild strings and pipes of the lezginka rang out, Marshal Satinov stood up, bowed and then adopted the lithe pose, hands on hips, one foot sideways, the other on the tips of the toes, of the Caucasian dancer. Katinka acknowledged, as he presumably hoped she would, that he was still trim and elegant. He danced a few steps, then sat down again, smiling at her. “Now…Katinka…Vinsky…have I got your name right? You’re a historian?”

“I’m writing a doctorate on Catherine the Second’s legal program for Academician Beliakov.”

“You’re a beautiful scholar, eh? A flower of the provinces!” Katinka blushed, pleased that she had dressed up in her good skirt, an example of fine Soviet fashion with pyramidal spangles and a high slit. “Well, I’m a piece of Soviet history myself. I should be in a museum. Ask whatever you want while I catch my breath.”

“I’m working on a specific project,” she began. “Does the name Getman mean anything to you?”

The blue eyes focused on her again suddenly, expression neutral.

“The rich banker…how do they say nowadays? An oligarch.”

“Yes, Pasha Getman. He’s employed me to research his family.”

“Family genealogy for the new rich? I’m sure the Princes Dolgoruky or Yusupov did the same thing in Tsarist times. Getman isn’t an unusual name; Jewish naturally. From Odessa, I’d guess, but originally Austrian Galicia, Lvov probably, intelligentsia…”

“You’re right. They’re from Odessa, but do you know the Getman family personally?”

There was a sharp, wintery silence. “My memory’s no longer what it was…but no, I don’t think so,” Satinov said at last.

Katinka made a note in her book. “Pasha Getman’s mother inspired this project of family history.”

“Using his money.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, with money, you might find out something. But the name means nothing to me. Who is she trying to find?”

“Herself,” said Katinka, watching him carefully. “Her maiden name was Liberhart. Does that name ring any bells, Marshal?”

A shadow crossed Satinov’s face. “I just can’t place it…I’ve met so many people in my life, you understand, but the names…” He sighed and shifted in his chair. “Tell me some more.”

Katinka took a deep breath. “Pasha Getman’s mother is called Roza. All she knows about her origins is this: a professor of musicology at the Odessa Conservatoire and his wife, also a teacher, adopted her in the late thirties. Their name was Liberhart, Enoch and Perla Liberhart. They had been unable to have children of their own so they adopted this five-year-old child. She was fair-haired so they called her the Silberkind—the silver child.”

“What about before?” asked Satinov.

“Roza remembers fragments of a life before the adoption,” Katinka said, thinking of their recent conversations in the bracing air of a London spring. “The laughter of a beautiful woman in a cream suit and a blouse with a pretty white collar, handsome men in Stalinka tunics, games with other children, journeys and train stations, and then the adoption…”

“A common story in those days,” interrupted Satinov. “Children were often lost and resettled. In the building of a new world, there were many mistakes and tragedies. But is it possible she’s imagined this story? That happens a lot too, especially now that the newspapers are digging up all this misery again and printing such lies.” The blue eyes teased her obliquely, cynically.

“Well, it’s my job to believe her but, yes…I do believe her. The Liberharts discouraged her from probing into her past because they came to love her as their own. They didn’t want to lose Roza—and they were afraid to attract attention. The adoption was arranged under the aegis of a very high official and everything in those days was secret.”

“But after Stalin’s death, surely…”

“Yes,” said Katinka, “after Stalin’s death, Roza insisted that the Liberharts make an official inquiry. They told Roza that both her parents died during the Great Patriotic War, which fits because her adoption was around that time.”

Satinov opened his hands. “And she accepts this?”

“She accepted it for decades. She loved her adoptive parents. Enoch died in 1979 but Perla lived until recently. Before she died, Communism fell. Only then did Perla admit to Roza that she had lied to her. The Liberharts had not made an official inquiry because they never knew the name of her real parents.”

“Tell me, Katinka, were these Liberharts…good people, kind parents?” Satinov asked, leaning toward her.

Katinka sensed the sudden swirl of deeper, more treacherous waters. She thought nostalgically of her studies: of Catherine the Great at the State Archive, of nobler, more golden times. But she was a historian and what historian wouldn’t be fascinated to meet a relic like Satinov, a real breath of the recent past, a past that was itself shrouded in mystery?

“Roza says they were unworldly intellectuals unsuited to having children. Professor Liberhart couldn’t boil an egg or drive a car, and Roza said he once went to work with his shoes on the wrong feet. Perla was an overweight bluestocking who couldn’t cook, darn or make a bed and never even used makeup or had a hairdo (though she could have done with both!). She devoted her life to translating Shakespeare’s sonnets into Russian. So Roza grew up like a mini-adult caring for eccentric parents. She remembers the terrible things that happened in that war. There was the siege of Odessa; the slaughter of the Odessan Jews by the Nazis and Romanians; the Holocaust. But through everything, Enoch and Perla loved her with the love of parents who have been blessed with a child they never expected.”

Satinov stirred some plum jam into his tea and licked the spoon. Then, checking no one was at the door, he pulled out a pack of Lux cigarettes and lit one with a silver lighter, holding it over the top like a young man. “I’m not allowed to smoke, but the Devil, get thee behind…” He inhaled deeply, eyes closed. “So why have you come to see me?”

“When Roza needed an operation in her teens and her parents were worried about her health, they called someone in Moscow who arranged everything.”

“Perhaps it was an uncle?”

“Once there was a big Party conference in Odessa. Roza thinks it was in the fifties. Many bosses came to town. One afternoon, she saw a black ZiL limousine outside her school with a man in uniform inside, a big boss. She had the feeling, no, more than a feeling, she was certain that he was waiting for her. All week, he was there watching her every morning. I don’t know who that man was, Marshal Satinov.” Katinka looked directly at Satinov, who shifted slightly in his chair. “Roza forgave the Liberharts for their lie but she begged her mother for a name. Before she died, Perla told Roza that the Muscovite they called was you. You helped her get this treatment. Maybe you were the man in the limousine?”

Satinov took another toke of his cigarette. Katinka could tell he was listening carefully. “Stories, just stories,” he said.

Katinka felt a sharp surge of impatience. She leaned forward on her uncomfortable chair. “Roza and I want to know why you helped her, Marshal. She is convinced that you know who her parents were.”

Satinov frowned and shook his head. “Do you realize, girl, how many so-called historians ring me up to ask impertinent questions? Because I’m old, they expect me to undermine the greatest achievements of the twentieth century—the creation of Socialism, the victory in the Great Patriotic War, my life’s work.” He stood up. “Thank you for visiting me, Katinka. Before you go, I want to present you with my autobiography.”

He handed her a book with his picture on the cover in full uniform. It was entitled In the Service of the Glorious October Revolution, the Great Patriotic War and Building a Socialist Motherland: Recollections, Notes and Speeches by Marshal Hercules Satinov.

Sexy title, thought Katinka, I’ll bet the speeches are a laugh a minute. She realized she was being dismissed and was certain that he was concealing something. “Will you sign it?” she asked a little breathlessly, determined to stand her ground.

“With pleasure.”

She moved toward his chair. She could tell that he liked looking at her, so she leaned closer to him, shaking her hair back as she did so.

Patting her hand playfully, he signed: To a beautiful scientist of truth. Hercules. “It was published in many languages—Polish and Czech,” he said proudly, handing her the book. “Even Mongolian.”

“Thank you, Marshal. You’re the first famous war hero I’ve met and I know you would help me if you could. Is it possible Roza’s family did die during the war? Were they repressed in the Great Terror? If so, their records would be in the KGB archives. Now, families can apply for their case records, but without a name how can we apply for anything? Could you help us apply?”

He smiled at her, looking at her quite boldly. “I’ve always loved women,” he said quietly, “even though I’m an old ruin.”

“You must have danced quite a lot of them into your arms,” Katinka said.

There was a silence.

“Well, I still have a few contacts left,” Satinov said at last, “although most of my friends have gone to Lenin.”

“Where?”

“To the Politburo in the sky. You’re not a Communist, I suppose?”

“No, but my grandparents are true believers.”

“I became a Marxist at sixteen and I’ve never wavered.”

He wasn’t going to tell her anything, Katinka realized, feeling depressed suddenly. In her meeting with the only link to the Getmans’ past, she had already let Roza down. Her face must have dropped because Satinov took her right hand between his own and pressed it. “Katinka, the past in our country is a dark cell. You may never find the old people but concentrate on the young. Trace the young! They deserve your attention. You understand Catherine’s court but you know nothing about me or my work. You must immerse yourself in the age of building Socialism if you wish to find anything. Speak to those researchers who are digging in the archives. Search more deeply, trace the links of the chain. It was an underwater world, but not everything was submerged. There were friendships even then, in the hardest times, and if you find a name, the thread to the past, then come back and talk to me.”

Katinka sensed that he did not really want her to give up, so she plucked up her courage for one final push. “Marshal, may I ask you one embarrassing question that might save me a lot of work—and then I could go back to Catherine the Second.”

“You’ll have to work harder to make progress in your project,” Satinov said briskly, showing her toward the door, “or you’ll find nothing at all. What was the question?”

Katinka’s heart was thudding so loudly in her ears that she realized she was almost shouting.

“Are you Roza’s real father?”

6

Katinka enjoyed the hushed mysteries that reign in all libraries. Some of her friends thought they were boring, with their musty smell and their rigid silence broken only by the occasional cough, the illicit whispers, and the turning of pages. But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.

As she did not know where to start with her research, she began where everyone begins—in the reading room of the Lenin Library on Vozdvizhenka. She had worked there before and she already had a library card, but this time she noticed that the building’s Stalinist Gothic façade was covered in the bronze silhouettes of Soviet heroes—writers and scientists. As she walked through the stacks of bookshelves, steering around the messy tables with their crews of stretching, yawning students and obsessional, grey-skinned old men, eyes flicked up to watch her surreptitiously. She felt the excitement of discovery again and remembered Roza’s extraordinary eyes, how she had begged Katinka for help. Katinka was on a quest, though she had no idea where she was headed.

She sat at an empty table beneath the high windows and tried to think. Where to start? Usually she only noticed the students in the library but now she stared at the old people, in their brown suits and ties, burrowing, scratching out notes in spidery handwriting on yellowed pads: why were they so hungry for information when their lives were so nearly over? Did any of them have a clue for her? If she had access to all their soon-to-vanish memories of Bolshevik secrets, one of them, surely, would be able to solve her quest. What did they know? What had they seen? As she watched an old man licking his finger as he wrinkled up his eyes and turned the pages, a sentence of Satinov’s came back to her: “It was an underwater world but not everything was submerged.” Everything was secret at that time—except what? Except the newspapers, of course.

She walked, then almost ran to the front desk, where the librarian directed her to the large green books of bound newspapers from the thirties. She knew Satinov had started his rise in 1939 when he joined the Central Committee. Somewhere in those old newspapers, somewhere, she told herself, there might be a clue that linked him to Roza’s family. Those yellowed newspapers were another world, written in an unnatural Bolshevik language that made her smile at its absurdities, at its news of Five Year Plans, of the achievements of collective farms and motor tractor stations and iron smelters in Magnitogorsk; of heroic pilots, proletarian comrades and Stakhanovite miners. As the light outside changed from bright blue to powdery dusk, she sat there, reading Izvestia and Pravda, beginning to understand that Satinov and Roza came from a different planet, recent in time but as foreign to her life as Mars or Jupiter. Twice she found mentions of “Comrade Satinov” giving a speech on Abkhazian tea production, brought back to Moscow by Comrade Stalin, promoted in the Party apparat—but there was not a hint of personal life, of friendships or connections.

Several times she walked around the colossal library just to stay awake and get her blood running; several times she was tempted to stop and read the Western magazines or the satirical Ogonyuk, yet each time she returned to her newspapers and their stories of the past.

She was about to give up when she turned to page five of Pravda in March 1939 and found a photograph of the young Satinov, in Stalinka tunic and boots, hair brushed back en brosse, beside a burly barrel-chested man in NKVD uniform. An article about the first Central Committee Plenum after the Eighteenth Congress had been placed beneath the photograph.

Comrade Stalin praised the new generation of cadres promoted to candidate members of the Central Committee, reflecting how “some comrades had come of age in the school of the Party itself, fresh steel tempered by the Revolution…” Afterward, in informal comments to delegates, Comrade Stalin reminisced with paternal fondness that he had first encountered Comrades H. A. Satinov and I. N. Palitsyn together as young Party workers, in Petrograd in 1917. “They were young, they were comrades-in-arms, they were devoted Bolsheviks. The Party has given them many hard tasks,” said Comrade Stalin, “but now again these brothers-in-arms are reunited at the top of the great worker state…”

She read it carefully twice, noted down its details and the new name: I. N. Palitsyn. She looked round the reading room: it was emptier than it had been. Half the table lights were off. The youngsters were all gone, only the old still there, those old men with so little time, like Roza with her terrifying sense of loss. Was this the name she was looking for? “There were friendships even then…”

Katinka slammed the book shut with a muffled boom that made one of the older readers jump and twitch as if he were waking from a long sleep. It was time to go. She had an appointment.

7

The motorcyclist in the leather trousers, pale brown bomber jacket and horned, Viking-style helmet skidded to a halt outside the Black Dog nightclub. It was on the Moskva Embankment a few hundred yards from the British Embassy and just across from the Kremlin. An occasional chunk of ice still floated down the Moskva River and the dark earth was edged with snow like a frill of lace, but the air held the spring tang of moist earth. It was already dusk, but the night was warm and grainy.

Katinka could hear a heavy-metal band playing the Scorpions’ song “Winds of Change” inside the nightclub. She wondered if she had come to the wrong place: she was no Muscovite and she barely knew the city center. It seemed a strange spot for a meeting of historians.

Then the biker dismounted and walked toward her, pulling off his horned helmet and extending a leather paw. “Katinka? Is it you? I’m Maxy Shubin.”

“Oh, hi…” Katinka felt the flush rise up her face—much to her embarrassment—because he was so much younger than she had expected. Maxy’s dark hair was a long, tousled mane, his caramel eyes were wide, and his light beard looked as if it had been grown over a weekend, by accident rather than design. When she saw he wore tight leather trousers punctuated with silver zippers, she tried not to smile. “You don’t look like a researcher,” she told him.

Maxy smiled. “And you don’t look like an academic. Would you like a drink?”

The doorman, a punk rocker with too many piercings in his lips and nose, waved them into the club. Upstairs there was a sitting area with smoke hanging in the air, used glasses, plastic cups and decaying sandwiches on every surface. The band playing downstairs made the floor shake but at least they could talk.

Maxy found a seat on a sofa, hailed a waif-like waitress in vinyl boots, stockings and leather shorts, and ordered them two cold Ochakov beers. “You’re new in Moscow, aren’t you?”

“I studied here and I do research here but—”

“Let me guess from your accent: you’re from the north Caucasus somewhere? Mineralnye Vody or Vladikavkaz?”

“Not bad,” said Katinka, her confidence returning as she sipped the icy beer, unaware that she had left the foam on her nose and that her clothes made it obvious she was from somewhere far away. “You’re a Muscovite?”

“Originally from Piter.”

“The window on Europe. How romantic!”

“Do you really think so?” said Maxy. “I’m someone who still believes that. Actually it’s a backwater, an elegant poetical backwater, a city of empty palaces. But it has a tradition of freedom so perhaps it played some part in my working at the Redemption Foundation.” He pulled off his leather jacket. “How did you find me? And what’s this project of yours?”

“I read your article on the NKVD during the Terror in Voprosy Istorii and of course I’d heard of Redemption’s research into the victims of the Terror—so I just rang you. It was good of you to meet me so quickly.”

Maxy looked somewhat sheepish—and it occurred to Katinka that he had agreed to meet her only because she was a girl—but she dismissed such base motives in this genial crusader for truth. “I’m studying Catherine the Great for my doctorate…”

Maxy leaned toward her, brown eyes on hers. “So why are you leaving the graceful, noble, romantic court of the Empress for the sordid psychopathic killers of Stalin?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I didn’t want this job. And I refused it at first.”

“But you took it anyway?”

“Have you ever met someone who’s so beautiful and intriguing that you can’t resist her?”

Maxy put his head on one side and looked at her suggestively. “Only very occasionally,” he said.

“I mean in your research,” she said coldly, sitting back.

Maxy’s face fell. “Yes, in my work I often meet people who’ve been so damaged by the crimes of the past that I want to do all I can to put them back together again—that’s my vocation.” He looked young and earnest now, and she liked him better.

“Well, I met someone just like that. Her name’s Roza Getman and she’s so wounded by the past that I had to help her…” Maxy listened carefully as Katinka recounted her trip to London, the oligarch and his palace, the walks in Regent’s Park—and how she had phoned Roza’s one link to the past, a powerful old Communist, and had been to see him on a quest that she had made her own…

“It sounds like a million stories, a thousand cases I’m working on right now,” said Maxy at last. “I can’t help you in detail—I’m so overstretched—but I can give you some rough guidelines. Look, call me again next week and I’ll put you in touch with a coworker who might be more use.” He took a sip of beer and Katinka realized he was ending the conversation. She had slapped down his flirtation and, because her case was like so many others, there was no real reason for him to help her. The sooner she got back to the eighteenth century, the better. “By the way, who was the old Communist?” he asked as he got up.

“Oh, he was called Satinov,” Katinka said, wondering how she was going to tell Roza that no one would help them.

Maxy sat down again abruptly. “Hercules Satinov?”

“Yes.”

“He saw you?”

She nodded.

Maxy lit a cigarette, offered her one and lit it for her. “He never sees anyone, Katinka,” he said, talking fast, his face animated. “I’ve tried to meet Satinov for fifteen years and not one of my colleagues at the foundation, no liberal historian, has ever gotten to see him. All the other old dinosaurs are dead and Satinov’s the very last of them, the keeper of the secrets, the great survivor of the twentieth century. He knows where the elephants lie buried. If he’s seen you, it’s because he’s interested in you. It means he can help you.”

Katinka looked at him witheringly.

Maxy spread his hands. “If you share the results of your research with me, I’ll help you all I can. Don’t look at me like that, Katinka—believe me, you’re really going to need me to find your way through this vanished world. You’d find it easier charting the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt than the labyrinth of Stalin’s Kremlin. What do you say? Do we have a deal?”

Katinka thought of Roza again, and sighed. “Yes,” she said, “but remember, I’m a serious historian—not some girl to be chatted up.”

He laughed and called for two more bottles of Ochakov beer. They raised them.

“To our unlikely partnership.” They drank and clinked their bottles. “Now,” Maxy said, “tell me about your meeting with Comrade Satinov. I want everything. No detail is too small. Everything matters, even what socks he was wearing.”

Maxy questioned her carefully, listened earnestly and raised further queries. Even though they were in a smoky, somewhat squalid bar, such was the intensity of their conversation that they might have been sitting in the hushed sanctuary of the archives themselves.

“Without a doubt, he knows something about the family you’re looking for. And it’s something important,” said Maxy.

“I can’t understand why he doesn’t just tell me,” she said. “Then I could go back to my studies.”

“No, that’s not the style of these people,” explained Maxy. “You shouldn’t think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervor was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail. People died of gossip at Stalin’s court. For a man like Satinov, secrecy was everything.”

“But Stalin died forty years ago and Communism’s been gone for three years,” Katinka objected. “What’s stopping Satinov telling us his secrets now?”

“You have to understand that silence and secrecy were deeply ingrained in people like Satinov. When Stalin was alive, his apparatchiks were silent partly because they believed in what they were doing, partly because they were born conspirators—conspiracy was their natural habitat—and partly out of fear. And it was the sort of fear that doesn’t pass: it lives in the bones forever. After Stalin died, they were silent because they wished to protect the Idea, the Soviet Union, the holy grail. For someone like Satinov, secrecy wasn’t just a habit, it was the essence of the revolutionary code.”

They were both silent as they thought about this.

“So did you find anything to take back to him?” Maxy asked at last.

Katinka shrugged and blew out the smoke of her cigarette. “I hoped you might have some idea. I waded through years of newspapers and I found no personal link—except this.” She handed him a photocopy of the article and picture she had found in the Lenin Library. “I don’t think it’ll help us much…”

Maxy took it and studied it carefully, and whistled. “Vanya Palitsyn. I know exactly who he was. A veteran secret policeman of the old school who vanished soon after this photograph was taken. He was important in the thirties but he appears in no memoirs, no histories. His arrest was never announced and we don’t know what happened to him.”

“But how does this help us?”

“Well, I never knew that Satinov and Palitsyn were friends—and they had to be very close friends, well known for their friendship, for Stalin to refer to such a thing in his ‘informal comments.’ It may be a dead end, but you’ve found a possible link to Satinov’s past. Isn’t this what he told you to do?”

The thrill of historical revelation, of past humanity refound and resuscitated, inflamed Katinka. The reverberating music, the chattering of the other denizens of the club, everything else seemed distant and irrelevant. All she could think about was Roza, and Roza’s elusive family. “But will this be enough to make him talk to me?” she asked.

“I think you should do some more research first, just to make sure,” said Maxy slowly. “You have the name Palitsyn. Apply for his file in the KGB archives—I’ll file the applications for you—and find out what happened to him, if he had a family, children. That’s the easy bit. Then you can go back to Satinov. You’ve worked in archives?”

“I love archives,” she said, hugging herself.

“Why?”

“You can smell the life in the paper. I’ve sat in the State Archives and held the love letters of Catherine and Potemkin, the most passionate notes, fragrant with her scent and soaked in his tears as he lay dying on the steppes.”

Maxy nodded. “Well, these are different archives. Where there is such suffering, there’s a kind of holiness. The Nazis knew they were doing wrong, so they hid everything; the Bolsheviks were convinced they were doing right, so they kept everything. Like it or not, you’re a Russian historian, a searcher for lost souls, and in Russia the truth is always written not in ink, like in other places, but in innocent blood. These archives are as sacred as Golgotha. In the dry rustle of the files you can hear the crying of children, the shunting of trains, the echo of footsteps down to the cellars, the single shot of the Nagant pistol delivering the seven grams. The very paper smells of blood.”

8

Two days later, Katinka came out of the decaying Stalinist hulk of the Moskva Hotel, where she was staying, and climbed the hill past the Kremlin, the Bolshoi and the Metropole Hotel, up to Lubianka Square. The crowds of office workers poured out of the Metro past the kiosks with their collage of lurid magazines; traffic raced around the middle of the square where the empty plinth of Dzerzhinsky’s statue marked the fall of Communism. There before her was the KGB headquarters, an invincible stronghold of red and grey granite, containing offices, archives, tunnels and dungeons. Once the offices of the Russia Insurance Company, this had been the home of the fearless, merciless and incorruptible knights of the Communist Party since 1917. They’d operated under many names—the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB—and now there were other dread letters, but their power was gone: Katinka was sure the KGB would never dominate Russia again.

She had not wanted to come here. No Russian ever wanted to visit the Lubianka—it was the national charnel house. But she had only to recall her phone call to Roza to walk faster toward this brutal slab that still radiated power, the power to crush human happiness. Over the telephone line from London, Roza hadn’t commented on what Katinka had found but she’d urged her on…Yet if Katinka’s father had known that her research would bring her here to the Lubianka, he would never have let her take the job.

“Leave well enough alone! Don’t snoop around cemeteries. It’s too dangerous,” he would have said. “You know how much I love you? More than anyone else in the entire existence of mankind since the beginning of time! That’s how much!” It was wonderful to have a father—and mother—who so loved you. Katinka thought, again, of Roza, and what it must be like not to know who your parents were.

She elbowed open the double wooden doors of the Lubianka and entered a vaulted marble foyer. Two corporals in blue examined her passport, called upstairs and sent her up a flight of marble steps so wide that a tank could have driven up it. A bust of Andropov, the bespectacled KGB boss and Soviet leader, stood halfway up.

She found herself in a long corridor with a red carpet, old banners and portraits of past Chekists. Maxy had told her that within this fortress stood the yellow Internal Prison where the parents of her employer might have perished, although they might also have received the seven grams at the Butyrki or the Lefortovo prisons or Beria’s special torture center, the Sukhanovka, a beautiful former monastery on the outskirts of Moscow. Maxy had explained that now was a good time to apply to see files. He had called her the previous evening. “The Lubianka phoned me. Your file’s ready.”

“But are you sure I should be looking at Palitsyn? Marshal Satinov advised me to forget about the adults and start with the children.”

Maxy laughed. “Remember what I told you about Satinov and these veteran Bolsheviks? Lies were their duty to the Revolution. That just confirms you must start with the adults and then we’ll think about the children.”

“I’m beginning to get the hang of this,” she said.

“Wait until you see the archives. Remember, Katinka, no one ever found a jewel in full view.”

She followed her instructions, turned right and then left, and saw the door that read Colonel Lentin, Director, Department of Registration and Archives. She knocked, a voice replied and she entered a boxy office with the flounced white blinds pulled down. The air was densely fuggy, the glass fogged up, the sofa rumpled, so she knew that the colonel had been sleeping in his office. But where was he?

“Good morning,” said the voice and she turned round. A fleshy silky-haired man in civilian clothes was just buttoning up his shirt and tightening his tie in a mirror behind the door. “Excuse me! I’m just beautifying myself for visitors. Have a seat!”

She sat at the T-shaped conference table and placed her notebook in front of her. Her instinct in this place was to obey every command but at that moment her curiosity was more powerful than her fear. What had happened to Satinov’s friend Palitsyn all those years ago, maybe in this very building? She realized that she was beginning to catch Maxy’s enthusiasm, the thrill of the chase.

“Now.” Colonel Lentin sat behind his desk and, wetting a finger with an orange tongue, opened a file on the desk. He spoke beautiful, educated Russian. “You’re a historian studying eighteenth-century law under Academician Beliakov and then, fa-la-la, you suddenly apply to see files from the time of the Cult of Personality.” Fa-la-la? Colonel Lentin must be a fan of those crass Mexican soap operas that now pollute Russian television, thought Katinka. His skin looked as if it had never known a razor; he had oily eyelashes that were encrusted with flakes of sleep. But the small face, prominent jaw and flat nose reminded her of an animal. Yes, Lentin was a preeningly officious marmoset. “I didn’t know Catherine the Great reformed the laws of the nineteen thirties—or have I missed something?”

“I have never been interested in the Cult of Personality. I’m just doing this as a little project of family research,” Katinka said casually. “To make a bit of money to pay for my Catherine studies.”

“I see,” said the Marmoset. “Well, your friend Max Shubin and his sort are doing some research too, but it seems to me that you should keep your little project separate from theirs. We have no problem with yours but those liberals are American flunkies who rejoice in Russia’s humiliation today. They are hammering away at the foundations of the State, hoping, fa-la-la, that we will just disappear. But without us, Miss Katinka, Russia would be lost to corrupt speculators and American hegemony—lost, quite lost. And we Chekists take our vows seriously. We’ll always be here.”

Katinka sighed. This KGB claptrap was out of date in the new Russia she and Maxy lived in. “I understand what you’re saying, Colonel,” she said. Just then, the door opened and an old man in a white coat entered with a metal cart piled high with speckled brown paper files, corners hooked with rubber bands, each with different file numbers and stickers on the front.

“Here we are, Colonel.” The old man spat thickly into a brass spittoon that rested on his cart. Beside the spittoon a fat ginger cat was sleeping deeply. “More gold in dust!”

“Good morning to you, Comrade…Mr. Archivist,” said Katinka, standing up and bowing slightly. She recognized a real archive rat, a Quasimodo of the secret stacks. Every archive had such a man, a true descendant of the troglodytic species that thrived in the twilight tunnels and storerooms deep under the pavements of Moscow. But they had power too, and Katinka knew that historians had to give them respect and win their favor.

“Two files from the archives, Comrade Col-o-nel! Good day!” He handed them to the Marmoset, then wheeled his cart toward the door. A very skinny kitten peeped out from under the cat.

“May I ask your name, Comrade Archivist?” Katinka asked quickly.

“Kuzma,” said the specter. He spat again, and Katinka saw that the spittoon was engraved with the KGB crest. Was it a gift for long service?

“I so appreciate your help, Comrade Kuzma,” said Katinka. “You must know so much that you could write the histories yourself. What’s her name?” She gestured toward the cat.

“Utesov,” Kuzma told her.

“You’re a fan of Odessan jazz?”

Kuzma nodded.

“So what’s the name of the kitten? Tseferman?”

Kuzma did not look her in the eye or smile but just stood there for a moment stroking the cats, humming in a satisfied manner like a father whose children have been complimented. Katinka had guessed right.

“Little Tseferman, eh? My father loves that music so I was brought up with it. Maybe I’ll bring Utesov and Tseferman some milk when I next visit?”

Kuzma responded with a specially dense gobbet of spit that did two somersaults before landing in the brimming spittoon. Katinka managed to look as though she appreciated this graceful demonstration.

“Thank you, Comrade Kuzma—and good-bye, Utesov and Tseferman.”

The archivist shut the door.

“Here are your files. Some dust for you to breathe,” said the Marmoset. “Let’s see,” and he read out:

Investigation File May/June 1939

Case 16373 Main Administration of State Security

Ivan Nikolaievich Palitsyn…

He lifted up the file and dropped it on the table in front of her, making her jump: dust flew out of it, tiny particles and silvery satellites vibrating and shimmering in the light.

Katinka hesitated, letting her eyes run over its brown, speckled cover, its KGB-crested stamp, its array of printed and handwritten scrawls listing the number of its fond, opis and papka—the location code of the archives.

“Can I take notes?”

“Yes, but we reserve the right to check them. In 1991, we let too many files be copied by alien influences. Procedures got sloppy. What do you hope to find out?”

“Whether this Palitsyn is connected to my clients…”

“You might find out some answers but it’s not your right to know everything, even now.”

“Did he have a wife and children, do you know?”

The Marmoset nodded and placed another slim papka file on top of the other. “Palitsyn’s wife has her own file, right here. Do you want to see it?”

Katinka picked it up and read:

Investigation File May/June 1939

Case 16374

Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin-Palitsyn, Prisoner 778

“Samuilovna Zeitlin. Not a Russian name. There were a lot of them in the Party in those days and many turned out to be traitors,” said the Marmoset, leaning over her shoulder. He opened the file. There was a photograph clipped to the few papers inside.

“There, that’s the photograph they take on the day of arrest.”

Katinka looked at it, her heart beating. It showed a woman with a full mouth slightly open and ash-grey eyes that burned into the lens.

“She’s beautiful, whoever she was.” Katinka was fascinated suddenly, and a little touched.

“Yes, she was quite well known once, that Delilah. Then, fa-la-la, she vanished!”

“May I examine the file now?” Katinka could not wait to free herself of the Marmoset’s gaze.

“You have thirty minutes.” He pushed the file over to her then returned to his seat and sat watching.

“For this one file?”

“For both. These are the rules.”

“Do feel free to do your other work, Colonel,” Katinka said self-consciously.

“Watching you,” he replied, “is my work.”

9

Katinka placed the photograph above the file, which she pulled closer, and looked into the woman’s face: the eyes reflected the flashbulb of an old-fashioned camera but, far from a vacant self-pity, the gaze radiated warmth and a mocking jauntiness, even as Katinka traced in the set of the muscles a straining to show, at the brink of the abyss, the best face she could.

“Hello,” whispered Katinka, imagining that the photograph might answer, that those beseeching eyes might blink. “Who are you?” Stapled to the inside cover of the file was a scuffed, stained scrap of paper to be signed by everyone who had looked at the file—but it was blank. No one outside the KGB had ever examined it. She grabbed at the first sheet of paper, a short biography:

Born 1900 in St. Petersburg, Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin-

Palitsyn, known as Sashenka, Comrade Snowfox. Nationality:

Jewish. Party member since 1916. Last place of work: editor,

Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine, State

Publishing House. Educated at Smolny Institute…

“Sash-en-ka…,” Katinka said to herself. “Will you help Roza and me?”

Family: father, Baron Samuil Zeitlin, capitalist banker, later non-Party specialist at People’s Commissariats of Finance, then Foreign Trade, then State Bank, dismissed 1928, exiled 1929, arrested 1937, sentenced to ten years Kolyma. Mother: Ariadna Zeitlin, nee Barmakid, dead 1917.

Mother’s brother: Mendel Barmakid, Jewish, Party member since 1904, member Central Committee 1911–1939, arrested 1939.

Father’s brother: Gideon Zeitlin, writer. Not a Party member. Jewish.

Husband: Ivan Palitsyn, born St. Petersburg 1895. Russian, Party member since 1911, married 1922, arrested 1939, last place of work: Assistant Deputy People’s Commissar, NKVD.

Children: Volya and Karlmarx.

“Pleased to meet you all,” said Katinka under her breath. Sashenka and her husband would be very old now but they could still be alive—there was nothing in the file to say they weren’t. And their children wouldn’t even be old. She didn’t know if this woman was relevant to her search, yet her pulse quickened. “I wonder what happened to you.”

“You’re talking to yourself,” said the Marmoset. “Silence, please.”

“Sorry.” Katinka turned over the page to find a form, filled in on May 16, 1939, giving Sashenka’s description. Color of eyes: grey. Hair: dark brown with chestnut streaks. And there were her smudged fingerprints. Then a creased and stained piece of paper, headed Main Administration of State Security, Very Important Cases Department. In the middle, typed in a large, curvaceous, open typeface that looked bold and honest as if it had nothing to hide, was the following command: Zeitlin-Palitsyn, along with her husband Palitsyn, has been unmasked as a long-serving Okhrana and White Guardist spy, Trotskyite saboteur, and agent of Japan. It is essential to arrest her and carry out a search.

This was surrounded by stamps, squiggles and signatures. The first name was Captain Melsky, Head of Ninth Section of Fourth Department, Main Administration of State Security. But a thick felt pen had been put through his name and underneath, in what appeared to be a child’s handwriting and spelling, someone had written: I will carry out this oberation myself. B. Kobylov, Commissar-General, State Security, second degree. Then later: Oberation compleded. Prisoner Alexandra Zeitlin-Palitsyn delivered to Internal Prison. B. Kobylov, Commissar-General, State Security, second degree.

The Marmoset was still sitting there leering, but Katinka did not care. She was gripped. So Sashenka and her husband had fallen in 1939. Why? When she turned the page, she found the testimony of a man named Peter Sagan, ex-Captain of the Gendarmes, Okhrana officer and later (under a false name) a schoolteacher in Irkutsk. Sagan revealed that Sashenka and Vanya had been in Petersburg in 1917—just like Satinov. But soon the outpouring of crazed accusations against the Palitsyns became too much to absorb. It seemed a ghost had emerged out of the mists of time bearing a plague of lies and accusations. But then she looked at the date of the Sagan confession: it was July 5—after Sashenka’s arrest. Sagan had not arrived in Lubianka until July 1. So Sashenka had been arrested for something else. But what?

Katinka leafed hungrily through the badly typed fifteen-page confession signed at each corner with Sagan’s frail, anemic markings—how strange, she thought, that these characters’ lives were reduced to strokes of the pen. She tried to imagine the personality behind the fading lines of ink, and trembled.

Next she found a single piece of paper with a paragraph headed Extract from confession of Beniamin Lazarovich “Benya” Golden: attach to file of Alexandra Zeitlin-Palitsyn. The writer Benya Golden. She’d heard of him and his one masterpiece, those stories of the Spanish Civil War. She read on:

B. Golden: Using the depraved seductive techniques of the Mata Hari type of spy, Sashenka—accused Alexandra Zeitlin-Palitsyn—first seduced me sexually under guise of inviting me to write for her magazine and persuaded me to meet her for corrupt sexual practices in room 403 at the Metropole Hotel, set aside by the Writers’ Union/Litfond for the use of non-Moscow writers for Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine, which she edited. While wearing the mask of a new Soviet woman, Zeitlin-Palitsyn admitted to me she was an Okhrana agent and Trotskyite and asked me to introduce her to the French secret service, who had recruited me in Paris in 1935 when I was traveling to the International Writers’ Congress with the Soviet delegation. She had already recruited her uncle Mendel Barmakid, a member of the Central Committee, and I recruited her other relative, my friend the famous writer Gideon Zeitlin, to help plan the assassination of Comrades Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and Marshal Voroshilov at a party at Sashenka’s house by spraying the gramophone that Comrade Stalin would use with poison. The first attempt at her house—when Comrade Stalin visited on May Day 1939—failed because I failed to spray the gramophone…

Witnessed: Investigator Rodos, Very Important Cases Department, Main Administration of State Security

Katinka recoiled. So Benya Golden, that talented, elegiac writer, had rolled over and incriminated Sashenka. It must have been Golden’s denunciation that got her arrested. How could he have done so? The accusations against Sashenka seemed preposterous.

Yet this was dated August 6, even later than the Peter Sagan confession. Katinka hurriedly turned more pages. She had been reading for more than fifteen minutes. After a rather picturesque collage of stamps, triangular, square and round, she read a note dated six months later:

Office of Military Procurator, 19 January 1940

The case against the Zeitlin-Palitsyn-Barmakid terrorist spy

group is now complete and must be handed over to the court…

Send the case to the Military Tribunal, 21 January 1940.

Katinka felt a nervous twinge as if she, or someone close to her, was going to be tried on January 21, 1940. Sashenka’s eyes looked out anxiously from the photograph. Maxy was right: there was an intimacy in these mysterious old papers, and an unbearable sense of tragedy. What happened to these people at the trial? Did Sashenka live or die? Katinka eagerly turned the page. There was nothing more.

“Five minutes!” said the Marmoset, drumming his fingers on the desk. Katinka noticed he was reading a magazine on soccer, Manchester United Fanzine. She noted down the basic facts in her notebook and the new names: Benya Golden—famed writer. Mendel Barmakid—forgotten apparatchik. Gideon Zeitlin—literary figure.

Katinka quickly reached for the Palitsyn file. First the photograph: Ivan Palitsyn, Sashenka’s husband and Satinov’s friend, side and front views, a burly, athletic man, with thick greying hair, a Tatar slant to the cheekbones. A handsome specimen of that shaggy Russian proletarian type, he had been a real worker at the Putilov Works. But in the picture, he had a black eye and bleeding lip. He must have put up a fight, decided Katinka. He wore a torn NKVD tunic. She looked into his eyes and saw…weariness, disdain, anger, not the fear and the appealing sarcasm in his wife’s eyes.

“Four minutes,” said the Marmoset.

She read his biography. Vanya was a top Chekist who had guarded Lenin himself in the early years in Petrograd and Moscow, 1917–19. Rising over the bodies of his bosses during the Terror, he must have been responsible for his share of crimes until…She found an arrest order, shortly before that of his wife. That must be why he looked more weary and angry than afraid: yes, he understood what was to come but he was bored by the procedures that he knew so well. What happened to him? She read and reread the file, noting the dates, trying to understand the sequence. Everything was there but nothing was what it said it was: it was in Soviet gibberish, the code of Bolshevism. She leafed ahead: Palitsyn had started to confess on June 7 and continued into July, August, and September. He too had been sent for trial.

“Time’s up,” said the Marmoset.

“Please—one second!” She skipped some pages and jumped to the end of the file. She had to find out what had happened to Palitsyn. She found a signed confession.

Accused Palitsyn: I plead guilty to spying for the Japanese and British intelligence services, to serving Trotsky, and planning a terrorist plot against the leadership of the Soviet Union. But there was no end to his story—and no mention of Satinov, no link to a common past.

She noted down the dates in her notebook and sighed, wanting to cry. Why? For these two people whom she had never known?

“There’s no record of a sentence,” she said aloud. “Could they have survived? Could they be alive?”

“Does it say in the file that they died?” asked the colonel.

She shook her head.

“Well then…” He stood up and stretched.

“But there’s a lot missing from these files, Colonel. No details of sentencing. Perhaps the Palitsyns were sent to the Gulags and pardoned after Stalin’s death. I wish to apply for more files. I want to find out what happened to these people.”

“Is this a game, girl? Fa-la-la! Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe not. I’ll refer your request to my superior, General Fursenko. I’m just a cog in the machine.”

Katinka felt downcast suddenly. She had still not found out why Sashenka and her husband had been arrested. Captain Sagan’s confession was dated after their arrest. She did not believe Benya Golden’s story of his affair with Sashenka, let alone the conspiracy to assassinate the Party leaders, so perhaps this too was invented? And she still didn’t know if all this was in any way connected to Satinov.

As she slid the Sashenka file across the desk to the colonel, she accidentally bent back the blank list of those who had examined the file. On the other side were some scrawled names from 1956: her heart leaped. There it was: Hercules Satinov.

The Marmoset started to check if each document was present, wetting his fingertips with his tongue as he turned the pages.

Katinka saw she had another minute or two. She quickly reopened Ivan Palitsyn’s file—and something caught her eye.

There it was, on the State Security letterhead, a handwritten order dated May 4, 1939:

Top Secret.

Captain Zubenko, Special Technical Group, State Security Set up immediate surveillance in Moscow city limits only on Comrade Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn, editor, Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping, 23 Petrovka, and set up listening equipment in room 403, Metropole Hotel, with immediate effect. Reports only to me, no copies.

Katinka stared at the signature. Vanya Palitsyn, Commissar-General of State Security, third degree.

Sashenka’s husband.

Afterward, Katinka walked through the Moscow streets, down the hill past the Bolshoi toward the Kremlin. She gripped her notebook and glanced at the stalls of the street vendors offering pirated CDs, sensationalist history pamphlets, American pornography, Italian showbiz magazines, even Peter the Great’s Book of Manners. But she was not really looking at them. Once she bumped into a man, who shouted at her, and another time she walked right into a Lada parked on the pavement. She was trying to make sense of what she had found in the file. Finally, she walked up the cobbled hill from the river, past the Kremlin’s ramparts and then round and round Red Square.

Perhaps Benya Golden’s confession had been true after all. Could Sashenka really have had an affair with a famous writer in room 403 at the Metropole Hotel? But it would have been such a dangerous thing to seduce the wife of a Chekist, who had all the weapons of the secret police—surveillance, bugging, arrest—at his disposal. Somehow Vanya seemed to have found out about the affair and he himself had set the ball rolling, unleashing the thunderbolt: a personal investigation without official sanction. Reports only to me, no copies. Palitsyn.

Jealousy, Katinka thought. Were they all ruined because of one man’s fear of being cuckolded? Did they all die because of his jealousy?

10

“So Vanya Palitsyn recorded his wife in bed with a writer?” said Maxy that evening, sitting on his motorbike in leathers, outside the nightclub near the British Embassy. “He gets the report: all the oohs and aahs of fucking…”

“…Vanya was outraged,” Katinka continued, “and ordered Benya Golden’s arrest.”

“No, no,” said Maxy. “Benya Golden’s a famous writer and Sashenka was well known, the niece of Mendel Barmakid, ‘Conscience of the Party.’ And if this just concerned adultery, why was Vanya himself arrested?”

“Benya was arrested and then denounced his mistress Sashenka who denounced her husband?”

“No, Katinka, you’re missing the point. They couldn’t have been arrested without Stalin’s approval.” Maxy lit a cigarette. “Besides, the dates don’t tally. You must realize the archives are full of lies and distortions. We have to read them like hieroglyphics.”

Katinka sighed. It was getting cold, and her miniskirt did not keep out the wind. “What shall I do now?”

“Don’t get upset about all this. You’ve done really well—better than I thought possible.” Maxy looked at his Red Army watch. “Wait—it’s only nine p.m.: why don’t you ring his eminence the marshal? You need his help to get the rest of the KGB files, the stuff they didn’t show you. And now you know more, you can ask more. We need him to confirm that the Palitsyn family are the ones to follow.”

Business concluded, he offered her a cigarette and struck a match. They both sheltered the flame with cupped hands. As their skin touched, his eyes narrowed, and she was conscious of him looking at her carefully.

“Tell me—are you spending all that oligarch’s money? On clothes? Or makeup? No, you’re too sensible, too serious. You’re not spending any of it. You should enjoy life more!” He laughed. “You’re too cute, Katinka, for a historian.” He leaned over and brushed the hair off her face.

“Not so fast,” she said coolly, allowing him to kiss her on the cheek. His stubble burned her skin.

Flicking his cigarette into the air so that it landed on the embankment by the Moskva, he pulled on his helmet, kick-started the bike and sped away toward the Stone Bridge.

Katinka watched him go then touched her cheek where he had kissed her and repeated his line mockingly to herself: You’re too cute for a historian. What a ridiculous gambit, she thought. You may be my teacher, but you’re a bit of a poser. I decide who kisses me and who doesn’t.

Then slowly, thoughtfully, with the eight red stars of the Kremlin sparkling above her, she walked over to the public telephone and dialed a number.

“I’m listening,” answered an old man with a Georgian accent.

“I won’t be dancing this time,” said Hercules Satinov with a wintry smile. He was sitting in his chair at Granovsky, surrounded as usual by the photographs of his family, beneath the portrait of himself as the bemedaled marshal. “I’m getting sicker.”

“No smoking, Father! He was showing off to a pretty girl,” said Mariko, bringing in the tea. “He had to go to bed afterward, you know.” She sounded angry, as if this were Katinka’s fault. “You shouldn’t have come now. It’s much too late. You should go.” Mariko banged the tray on the table and left the room, tossing a sour glare at the visitor.

“It’s all right, Mariko…” Mariko shut the door, though a creaking suggested she was never far away. “Well,” said Satinov, “I am rather ancient.” When Katinka sat in the same chair as last time and crossed her legs, the old man glanced at her approvingly. “You look as if you’ve been out dancing in nightclubs. Well, why not? Why should a flower as young and fresh as you waste her youth on dusty archives and ancient miseries?” He pulled out his cigarettes again, lighting up and closing his eyes.

“It’s what I do best, Marshal.”

“You might not have as long as you think for your research,” he said, “or are you getting fond of me?” He looked right at her. “Well, girl, what did you find?”

Katinka took a deep breath. “In 1956 you visited the Lubianka and examined the files of Sashenka and Vanya Palitsyn. They were old friends of yours from before the Revolution. They were the link with the past you wanted me to find.”

“You seem keener on the subject than you were before,” he observed.

“I am. These people—they seem so real somehow.”

“Ah. So the historian of Catherine the Great is getting involved in our own times. You smell the happy flowers and the bitter ashes? That shows you’re a real historian.”

“Thank you, Marshal.”

“Tell me again,” he said, leaning forward suddenly. “Your name’s Vinsky. Why did you get this job?”

“I was recommended by Academician Beliakov. I was his top student.”

“Of course,” Satinov said, sucking on his cigarette, eyelids sliding down. “I can see you’re a clever girl, a special person. Academician Beliakov was right to choose you out of all his hundreds of students over his many decades of teaching…Think of that.”

“I think he wanted to help me.” Katinka felt annoyed. She could see that he was toying with her, as he had with so many other inferior beings in his lifetime. This was another Satinov, sly and reptilian. The chilliness shocked her, poisoning her liking for him.

“Marshal, please could you answer my question. Sashenka and Vanya Palitsyn are the people I was meant to find, aren’t they? What became of them?”

Satinov shook his head, and Katinka noticed a muscle twitching in his cheek.

“There’s no record of their trial or sentencing. Could they have survived?”

“Unlikely but possible. Last year a woman found her husband, who had been arrested in 1938—he was living in Norilsk.” He gave her a brief, bitter smile. “You’re on a quest for the philosopher’s stone, which so many have sought and none has found.”

Katinka gritted her teeth and started again. “I really need your help. I need to see their files—the ones the KGB are still holding.”

He inhaled, taking his time, as always. “All right,” he said, “I’ll call some old friends in the Organs—they’re all geriatrics like me, waiting to die at their dachas, fishing, playing chess, cursing the new rich. But I’ll do my best.”

“Thank you.” She sat forward in her chair. “The files mentioned that the Palitsyns had two children, Volya and Karlmarx. What happened to them?”

“I have no idea. Like so many children of those times, they too perhaps just disappeared.”

“But how?”

“That’s your job to find out,” he said coldly, shifting in his chair. “Where did you say you came from? The northern Caucasus, wasn’t it?”

Katinka took a quick breath of excitement. He’d changed the subject, a petty diversion. She scented her prey. “May I just ask—you knew the Palitsyns. What were they like?”

He sighed. “They were dedicated Bolsheviks.”

“I saw her photograph in the file. She was so beautiful and unusual…”

“Once you saw her, you never forgot her,” he said quietly.

“But such sad eyes,” said Katinka.

Satinov’s face hardened, the angles of his Persian nose and cheekbones sharpened, became more triangular. His eyes slid closed. “She was hardly alone. There are millions of such photographs. Millions of repressed people just like her.”

Katinka could feel Satinov closing down, so she pressed him again.

“Marshal, I know you’re tired, and I’m going now…but was Roza Getman one of their children?”

“That’s enough, girl!” Mariko, draped in a black shawl like a Spanish mantilla, had come into the room. She placed herself between Katinka and Satinov. “You shouldn’t have come here in the first place. What kind of questions are you asking? My father’s tired now. You must go.”

Satinov sat back in the chair, wheezing a little.

“We’ll talk again,” he said heavily. “God willing.”

“Sorry, I’ve asked too much. I stayed too long…”

He did not smile at her again but he offered his hand, looking away.

“I’m tired now.” There was a piece of paper in his hand. “Someone you must meet. Don’t wait. You may already be too late. Say hello from me.”

11

Two days later, Katinka was awakened by the green plastic phone in her tiny, fusty room deep inside the square colossus of the Moskva Hotel. Her bed, bedside table, light and desk were all one piece of wooden furniture. The bedspread, carpet and the curtains the color of brimstone. She was dreaming about Sashenka: the woman in the photograph was talking to her.

“Don’t give up! Persevere with Satinov…” But why was Satinov so obstructive? Would he refuse to meet her again? She was still half asleep when she grabbed the phone.

“Hello,” she said. She expected it to be her parents—or maybe Roza Getman, who was phoning regularly for updates on her progress. “Hello, Katinka, any jewels in the dust?” was how Roza always started her calls.

“This is Colonel Lentin.” Katinka was amazed: it was the Marmoset of the KGB archives. “You wish to see more documents?”

“Yes,” she said, heart surging. “That would be wonderful.”

“Wonderful? Wonderful indeed. You’re such an enthusiast. Meet us at the Café-Bar Piano at the Patriarchy Ponds at two.”

Katinka pulled on her boots and the denim miniskirt with the spangles. She was earning money for the first time in her life but still it did not feel like her own. She was using it to pay for her room, food and transportation but nothing else. She was only doing this for Roza, she told herself, so that she, like Katinka, would have a family.

She took the elevator down to the grey marble lobby, damp as wet rat fur, and walked through to another hall, where she climbed the steps, followed a corridor left then right and finally opened a red curtain to reveal a little cubbyhole with three tables and an old woman in a minuscule kitchen. The tempting tang of cooking fat and the music of sizzling eggs welcomed her. A young English journalist and an ancient Armenian man were at their usual tables, sipping espresso coffees.

“Morning, senorita,” said the old woman in a blue apron, speaking bad Russian. Her brown face, with its large jaw, was deeply wrinkled. “Spanish omelette?”

“The usual,” said Katinka. The cook was an old Spaniard who claimed to have been cooking in this cubbyhole since the Spanish Civil War.

“The best cook in Moscow!” murmured the Armenian, kissing his hand and blowing it toward the old woman.

An hour later, Katinka walked slowly up Tverskaya—the new name for Gorky Street—and then took a left through an archway that led down to the Patriarchy Ponds, a square with a park in the middle containing two lakes surrounded by trees. Bulgakov, she knew, had lived around here, when he was writing The Master and Margarita. She bought an ice cream at the open-air café and sat watching the couples, the children promenading, the old folk watching her watching them. Why did the Marmoset want to meet her here and not at the Lubianka? Could he be bringing the documents? No, that was impossible. So why? She did not trust these people.

At 2:00 p.m. she walked out of the square and looked around the far end of the street. There it was—a black and white sign, BAR-CAFÉ PIANO. She went in. Rod Stewart was singing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” on the stereo. The small café was empty except for a specter-thin grey-haired man behind the bar, smoking a cigarette as he poured out three thimbles of vodka, and two men at a chrome table. One of them was the Marmoset, Colonel Lentin, wearing a green sports coat and a Wimbledon tennis tie. He stood up and offered his hand.

“Come and sit down, girl.” He guided her to a chair. “Let me introduce you to my comrade here, Oleg Sergeievich Trofimsky.”

“Delighted, Katinka, delighted. Yes, sit!” Trofimsky’s head was wide and misshapen and looked as if it had been fired out of a medieval cannon, and his pitchfork beard gave him the air of an aging magician. The barman brought the vodkas and slammed them down on the table.

“No, no,” the Magician remonstrated coarsely. “Dima, bring us your oldest Scotch whiskey. This young lady’s much too cultured for mere Russian vodka.”

The barman shrugged and returned to the bar.

“Dima’s a retired comrade,” explained the Magician to Katinka, “so we—shall we say—patronize his establishment. He’s used to my tastes, aren’t you, Dima?”

The barman rolled his eyes and brought the amber liquid.

The Magician turned back to Katinka. “Now, drink carefully. This is fifty years old, aged in oaken barrels in the Scottish isles. Its name? Laphroaig. Taste it: you see? You can taste the peat; that is the soil there. When I was in the London Embassy—my work was, shall we say, clandestine—I toured the Caledonian isles. The British royal family drink only this when they are hunting in the Scottish region. Go on, drink!”

Katinka drank, but only a sip.

“You’re a historian, are you not?” asked the Magician, stroking his pitchfork beard.

“Yes, I specialize in the eighteenth century.”

“I’ve studied history myself and I know the Velvet Book intimately, the Romanovs, Saxe-Coburgs, even the collateral lines,” he said. “It’s a hobby, shall we say. But now I’ve taught you something about civilized living, let me get straight to the point. You are researching something very different? The period of the Cult of Personality?”

“Yes, one family,” answered Katinka, cautiously.

“I know, I know, Colonel Lentin has told me. And you weren’t satisfied with the documents you were shown?”

“I would like to see others,” she said.

“Well, you may, that is totally possible. You will see them.”

“Thank you,” said Katinka, surprised. “When?”

The Magician waved a finger at her. “We’re adapting to the new era, aren’t we, Colonel Lentin? We’re embracing it! But we’re still patriots. We don’t wish to be American. Make no mistake, girl, we in the Competent Organs are the conscience of this country. We’ll make it strong again!”

“But what about the documents? When can I see them?”

“You’re young, in a hurry. As soon as tomorrow?”

“Yes, please,” she said, as eager as she was uneasy.

“Can we do it tomorrow, Colonel?” asked the Magician.

“Three days perhaps,” said the Marmoset, clearly the junior partner here. “Maybe a week.”

“Then that is that,” said the Magician. “And it won’t be too expensive.”

“Expensive?” cried Katinka. “But…”

“Ahhh, look at her!” cried the Magician theatrically. “Look at that worried pretty face! Ha ha. You’re new in Moscow, just a kitten in the big city, I can tell. Yes, everything has its price. The Colonel and I are embracing the new mentality! More whiskey, Dima. Let’s drink to it!”

12

Just after midday next day, Katinka walked through the high halls, past window displays and along vestibules of the new shops in the GUM arcade on Red Square. She had an appointment at the Bosko Restaurant, where slim, tanned girls with long legs in boots and skirts and gleaming Versace chains sat with squat men in Italian suits. The aromas of ground coffee and scented skin filled the air. The place was so chic that Katinka felt she might be in Venice or New York, even though she had never been anywhere but London.

What a place! she thought, not noticing the maître d’, an Italianate Tatar with the profile of a pigeon, scowling at her spangled skirt and white boots. “Oh look!” she burst out. “What a view!”

She sighed with the sensual pleasure of a provincial girl at Bosko’s wall-sized panorama of Red Square and its expanse of shiny cobbles. From here, the gaudy ice-cream cones of St. Basil’s seemed more Tatar than Russian. Just under the Kremlin walls stood that strangely unslavic Egyptian mausoleum in freckled red granite wherein lay the mummified Lenin. There, farther away, almost hidden against the Kremlin Wall, was the little green marble bust of Stalin himself, rudely removed from its resting place in the Mausoleum. The Russianness of the Kremlin, with its Orthodox churches, its green and ocher Tsarist palaces, even those red stars, filled Katinka with Slavic pride.

She could see the domed roof of the Council of Ministers Building, where Lenin and Stalin had worked. Now President Yeltsin held office there. Sashenka had known Lenin and Stalin in the early years of Soviet power, Katinka remembered—and her obsession jolted her: she was relating to a woman whom she knew only from a photograph and a file.

“Can I help you, mademoiselle?” said the Tatar maître d’. “A table with a view?”

“She’s with me,” said a voice behind her. Pasha Getman towered awkwardly over her. He moved clumsily and none of his clothes quite seemed to fit even though they looked expensive. The trousers were too baggy; the shirt, open necked, was wrongly buttoned, yet he exuded cosmopolitan confidence, and Odessan haughtiness with the pungent smoke of his oversized cigar.

Katinka had spoken to Roza after her meeting with the Magician and the Marmoset, and Roza had asked her to talk to Pasha, who had agreed to meet her straight away.

She was now not sure if he would embrace her. Both leaned toward each other but at the last minute he withdrew and offered his hand. Katinka blushed but was rescued by the maître d’.

“Welcome, Gospodin Getman! Your usual table in the alcove? Sir and mademoiselle, please follow me!”

Getman’s three bulky, shaven-headed bodyguards, tattoos peeping over their shirt collars, sat at the neighboring table. Katinka followed Pasha, noticing that he walked like a juggling bear with his paw-like hands ready to catch the balls.

“I haven’t got long,” said Pasha when they were seated.

“I didn’t know you were here. I thought you were in London.”

“Water?” Pasha reached for the water and spilled it. Waiters rushed to clear up but he did not seem to care. “I came home again. There’s going to be an election soon. The President needs our help—we must keep out the Communists. Mama’s on her way back from London. You understand that this is her last chance to find out who she really is. Imagine not knowing, Katinka! I knew my parents so well, so intimately, but she has always this burning sense of loss inside her. Do you know your parents?”

“Of course.”

“Happy childhood?”

She nodded, unable to conceal her pleasure in the thought. “My father’s a doctor. They really love me and we live with my grandparents in their old house.”

“We’re so lucky, you and I. Now I know you’ve been talking to Mama”—Katinka was amused that this bear of a billionaire in his mid-thirties still called his mother “Mama”—“but I’d like to know myself what you’ve found so far.”

As Katinka explained, Pasha’s mobile phone continued to ring. Once the bodyguards took a call and gave him a message; a red-haired girl in a leather miniskirt and Chanel boots and belt greeted him; and several businessmen came to shake hands—but navigating these interruptions, she managed to reveal her story. While she talked, Pasha leaned forward and listened to her, chewing on his cigar, his sharp, dark eyes looking straight into hers.

“So Satinov does know something but he’s very old and mysterious. Typical of that generation for whom secrecy is a fetish. You’re doing well.”

Katinka flushed with pleasure. “But the documents were incomplete and I met with the KGB to discuss the ones that were missing and I’m so embarrassed—and of course, I told them it wasn’t possible—but they asked…”

“Asked what?”

“For money! It’s disgusting!”

“How much?” asked Pasha.

“I told them it was ridiculous.”

“Look,” said Pasha, “I don’t mean to sound…I’m older than you so…I’m sorry I lost my temper in London. Mama told me off. But you’re so unworldly. I meet a lot of greedy girls. I understand you’re not like that. Mama says too that you’re not doing this for the money—that you genuinely want to help us. So I hope you’ll keep working on this day and night. How much do they want?”

“But we shouldn’t pay them,” Katinka objected. “Not the Organs! These are not decent people.”

“Just tell me how much they’ve asked for.”

“They mentioned…it’s so much, it’s a crime and they’re Mafiosi…,” she sighed. “Fifteen thousand dollars. A sin! What has happened to Russians these days?”

Pasha shrugged, the juggling paws opening and closing. “Well, this is my gift to Mama. Truth is expensive, but I think family is priceless. Understand that, understand everything. I’ll pay it.”

“No.”

“Stop telling me what to do!” he growled and crumpled up the tablecloth, almost sending all the cups to the floor. “It’s my money, and we need their information.”

“Well, OK…,” Katinka said at last. “And there’s one other thing. Satinov gave me this and said I must meet this person and not leave it too long.” She handed over a scrap of paper.

“But this is a Tbilisi number. In Georgia.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? You must go immediately, Katinka.”

“Now?”

“Sure, pick up your passport and suitcase from the hotel. When you get back, I’ll give you the cash and you can meet your KGB crooks.” He dialed on his cell phone. “It’s me. Book a flight to Tbilisi for this afternoon. Four o’clock? Fine. Ekaterina Vinsky. Put her in the Metechi Palace Hotel. Bye.” He called to the next table. “Hey, Tiger!” One of the bodyguards lumbered over. “Take Katinka back to the hotel and then on to Sheremetyevo. Right now.”

13

It was already dark in Tbilisi—once known as Tiflis—when Katinka arrived at the airport, a bazaar of shouting taxi drivers, gunmen, traders, soldiers and footpads. But there was a driver waiting for her with a sign that read Vinsky—and a Volga that apparently could only be started with two wires and a hummed song. As they drove into town, the gunshots of a small wild land in the midst of a civil war ricocheted over the half-lit city. The Metechi Palace Hotel, an ugly modern construction with glass elevators and a big open foyer with ranks of green metal balconies reaching up toward a giant skylight, was patrolled by Georgian gunmen in glittery gun holsters toting battered Kalashnikovs.

Leaving her bags at the hotel, Katinka caught a taxi into the city, passing through checkpoints manned by militiamen of motley uniform belonging to any of several private armies. The police themselves looked shabby and lost in their own city. The buildings were grandly decayed, and the streets had the flavor of a Levantine dream of a Paris that never was.

Katinka had never been to Georgia—her family spent their holidays in Sochi on the Black Sea—but she had heard a lot about it, of course: the fruit basket, the wine barrel, the playboy capital, the jewel in the crown, the pleasure dome of the Soviet Imperium with its luscious harvests of grapes and vegetables, its sulphurous Borzhomi water in those famous green bottles, its earthy red wines, its privileged, corrupt Communist bosses who lived like sultans, its argumentative intellectuals and its flashy Casanovan lovers. But Georgia had its dark side too. It had produced Stalin and Beria—and other famous Communists with unpronounceable, slightly ridiculous Georgian names: Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Abel Yenukidze—and Marshal Hercules Satinov.

The taxi took her right to the city center through Freedom Square (once Yerevan Square under the Tsar, then Beria Square, then Lenin Square) and into the broad and handsome Rustaveli Avenue (Golovinsky during Tsarist times) with its theaters and palaces. The driver did not know the way to the house she wanted: he shouted at people to ask. He turned the car round, oblivious to the hooting traffic, and showed her the burnt-out wreck of the Tbilisi Hotel, once the grandest south of Moscow. Finally they stopped on a steep cobbled hill, beneath a church with a round tower in the Georgian Orthodox style, and the driver pointed into the dark.

“There!”

Katinka paid him in dollars then walked carefully down the darkened street. Behind high walls the mansions were embraced by long-fingered vines, their courtyards overhung by flower-draped balconies where laughter and lanterns flickered. A bearded man with the thick white hair that Georgians never seem to lose held up a lantern.

“Where are you going? Are you lost?”

She saw he had a shotgun but did not feel afraid. “Café Biblioteka?” she asked.

“Come on!” His Russian was abysmal but he took her arm and led her down the cobbled street until they reached a house almost completely concealed in the vines. He opened the wooden double doors into a crumbling marble hall, lit with a candle, that reeked of Georgian feasts. To the right was a large shabby door and he pushed it open, jabbering in Georgian, the shotgun angled alarmingly over his shoulder. “Come on! Here is Café Biblioteka!”

With a gasp of wonder, Katinka entered the café, in the flickering light of candles decorated with wings of wax. She thought it smelled delicious: of tkemali, ginger, apple and almond. It was an old library, the bookshelves still standing in between the tables and behind the bar. Maps, banners of Tsarist Guards regiments, Georgian brigades and Bolshevik workers, drawings, noble and obscene, paintings, icons, pieces of old Georgian uniforms, swords and daggers, busts of Mozart, Queen Tamara, Stalin and Roman senators covered the walls. Some of the bookshelves had rotted and collapsed, tossing their priceless antique volumes onto the floors, where they lay, their yellow parchment pages open like fans.

At small tables, a single old man in a black fedora read in the half light; a group of American backpackers in yellow Timberlands and big shorts with their wallets on belts round their waists (advertising their Western riches to any brigands present) toasted one another in Georgian wine; and two grey-haired Georgians argued loudly about their politicians.

“Shevardnadze’s a traitor, a spy, KGB!” shouted one.

“Zviad’s a lunatic, a spy, KGB!” retorted the other.

“Do you want a table? Wine? Dinner?” asked a tall slim Georgian man with a blue beret on his head and a chokha coat, wasp-waisted with pouches for bullets, and a jeweled dagger in his belt. He bowed. “I’m Nugzar. Who are you? You look lost.”

“Do you know Audrey Zeitlin? I want to see her.”

“The old English lady? She’s our icon, our lucky charm! We feed her every day. She worked here for a long time, she taught us English and our children! Upstairs, come on!”

Katinka followed Nugzar to the first floor, along a corridor where the vine had punched its way through the wall and joined up with another of its limbs through a window that could no longer be closed. He knocked on the door at the end.

“Anuko!” he called.

Those Georgians, Katinka thought, with their funny diminutives!

“A visitor, Anuko!”

No reply.

Peering tentatively into the gloom, Nugzar opened the door.

14

“I always hoped you would come,” said Lala in the squeezed pitch of the ancient.

She wore a housecoat over a nightgown, and had long white hair. There was little left of her, just a bag of bones held together by white skin so delicate one could almost see through it. But it was her eyes, which seemed enormous in their glowing opalescence, that drew in Katinka, for they had a bold, exuberant will that held the spotlight and challenged the energy of the young. “I’ve waited for fifty years. What took you so long?”

“Hello,” Katinka said hesitantly, afraid she had come to the wrong place, yet surprised that this antique woman seemed to know who she was. “Marshal Satinov sent me to see you.”

“Ah—Satinov. He was our hero, our guardian angel. He’s old now, of course. Not as old as me, though. Sit down, sit down.”

Katinka sat in the soft chair in the corner of the small room musty with tissues and hand cream. There was a single candle beside the bed; sepia photographs of grandees in stiff white collars and bowler hats; a haughty schoolgirl in a white pinafore; a silver model of an oil derrick; and many old books.

“Here, girl, puff up my pillow behind me, and bring me a glass of wine. Ask Nugzar downstairs. Then we must talk. All night. You don’t sleep much when you’re as old as me. Who wants to be alive at my age? It’s miserable. All my friends are dead and that’s no fun! My husband’s been dead for forty years. But I think I’ve been waiting. I’ve been waiting for you, darling child. And now you’re here, sent by Marshal Satinov. He wants you to find my lost children, doesn’t he? Are you taking notes, dear?”

Feeling as though she had stepped into a dream, Katinka dug into her bag for her notebook and pen.

“I’m going to tell you about Sashenka, Snowy and Carlo.”

“Wait, I know Sashenka but who’s Snowy and…”

“Don’t you know anything, girl? Snowy and Carlo were Sashenka’s children. Their real names were Volya and Karlmarx. I’m going to tell you their story but first, open the window, will you?” Katinka was only too glad to let in the fragrant air. The dreamy garden seethed outside. The scent of violets, roses and that almondish, appleish tkemali blossom slowly penetrated the stuffy room in waves through the slats of the old-fashioned shutters. From the rooms below, the kitchen cauldrons in which chakapuli was boiling released powerful aromas of ginger and nutmeg.

And so it was that, as she drank her wine and ate slices of khachapuri brought up by the Georgian warrior from the café, Katinka traveled back in time to an unimaginable epoch in a house on Greater Maritime Street in St. Petersburg, where a rich Jewish banker and his flighty wife brought up a daughter named Sashenka with the help of a young English nanny whose parents had run the Live and Let Live public house in a village named Pegsdon, not far from the market town of Hitchin, Hertfordshire. “Lala” Lewis, as Sashenka had once called her, “and you must call me that too, Katinka,” seemed to know everything about the Zeitlin family. She described the solemn gawky child, bullied and disdained by her mother, loved distantly by her father, nourished by the devotion of her nanny.

What a picture Lala Lewis painted of those times: of cars with split windshields, chrome lights, leather and teak upholstery, carriages and sledges with postilions in top hats and sheepskins; millionaires, counts and revolutionaries, uncles and chauffeurs, breakdowns and suicides.

“I fell in love with Baron Zeitlin right here in this Tbilisi house—it had belonged to him, long, long ago,” Lala told Katinka, and that later he’d asked her to marry him in a kabinet at a smart restaurant, the Donan in St. Petersburg.

“Samuil lost everything in 1917, but he rebuilt his career in the Soviet service then lost it all again in 1929, and we returned here. We thought it would be safer. We felt that we didn’t have long so we didn’t waste a moment,” she said. “We so loved each other. Every day was a honeymoon, every kiss was a bonus, a gift. In Moscow, Sashenka and Vanya—as everyone called her husband—were bosses. They knew everyone, even Stalin—Sashenka was a magazine editor and Vanya a secret policeman, probably a terrible butcher, although he seemed a jovial fellow. We longed to see them—I loved Sashenka as much as Samuil did. It was our love of Sashenka that first brought us together, you know. When the NKVD took Samuil away, I knew he was doomed, and I waited for them to take me too. I kept working here in the café; I taught English; I looked after children; I became the best English teacher in the town. I taught the bosses’ children and I still do a little teaching today! But I’m getting ahead of myself. When they took Samuil, I grieved for him. The mail and money I sent him was returned: that meant he was dead. Then they took Sashenka and Vanya too. I despaired then. So imagine my amazement when Samuil came back. Oh, the randomness of death in those times!”

“How did Samuil take Sashenka’s disappearance?”

“When Samuil was sinking in and out of coma on his deathbed, he said, ‘Sashenka darling, my lisichka, my little fox, will you kiss me, Sashenka, before I die?’ He was sure Sashenka would come back. So I promised that I’d wait for her instead.”

“Are you tired, Lala?” asked Katinka, anxious about Lala’s strength yet greedy for her stories. “Do you want to sleep for a bit?” She noticed tears seeping down the old lady’s cheeks.

“I’m tired but I’ve waited so long to tell this. You see, when Samuil was in the camps, Comrade Satinov called me to the Viceroy’s Palace with a proposal that I could not refuse. Listen to me, Katinka. I only have the strength to tell this once.”

“I’m listening, I promise!”

“Hercules Satinov was a hero. He had a young wife and new baby and all the privileges of his rank. He could have been shot for helping Sashenka’s children but he fixed everything. When everyone else was a lackey, a coward and a killer, he alone dared to be decent. If you write this story, write that!”

“I will,” said Katinka, remembering the sly old marshal and his expression of pain when she asked him about Sashenka and her children.

“At the Viceroy’s Palace—it was then the Communist headquarters—Satinov told me that something terrible had happened to Sashenka and Vanya, and I needed to care for their children. He told me to go to Rostov Station, where I found the children and their nanny, Carolina, in the canteen. They were exhausted, hungry and filthy, but I loved them instantly. It was as if I’d raised them myself because Sashenka had cared for them just like I’d cared for her. Snowy so reminded me of Sashenka that I kissed her the moment I saw her and she melted into my arms! Carlo was adorable, bold and playful—like his father but with Samuil’s eyes and smile, even his dimple. They immediately trusted me, who knows why—perhaps they sensed a connection to their mama. Oh, it was heartbreaking! First they were parted from father, then mother, then Carolina: she was like a mother to them herself. I left the hotel in Rostov when she was still asleep—I still feel guilty about that—but I hope she understood because she too had risked her life for those children.”

“What happened to her?” asked Katinka but the old lady did not stop, as if afraid to waste an ounce of energy on anything not strictly necessary. Katinka understood suddenly that Lala Lewis was telling her the story that perhaps Satinov could not bear to tell her himself.

Lala sipped her red wine, spilling some on her nightie. A shaky hand tried to wipe it but she missed the stain and soon gave up.

“I begged him to let me keep the children but he told me I would be arrested myself and then what? I knew then that I would only have them for the briefest of times, and I needed to make the most of it. Our five days and nights together were too short for me. I’d lost Samuil but gained them. Satinov had given me enough money to feed the children well and we had papers so we could move about openly. I was with family. ‘Where’s Mama? When’s Mama coming back?’ the children asked, but Satinov had told me that I had to tell them their parents had died in an accident. That was a terrible moment. More than ever, they clung to me and to that cushion, that absurd cushion, that became mother and father to darling Snowy, and to that pink rabbit that Carlo kissed at night. I wanted to kiss and hug those children, spoil them, soothe them, heal them. I wanted to cover them in love. But I couldn’t let them get too close because I knew that I would soon have to disappear too. They slept in my bed, yes, this very bed, and I relished those nights with them, every second. As I lay there between them, with their soft limbs and sweet breath on me, I sobbed for them and Sashenka, but I couldn’t move or make a sound so the tears flowed silently. Like an underground stream. In the morning the pillow was soaked.

“One morning, Snowy kissed me. ‘Can we go home, Lala? Where is Mummy now?’ she asked.

‘I think she’s watching you.’

‘Like the stars in the sky?’

‘Just like that. She’ll always watch you, darling!’

‘Why did she go away and leave us?’

‘She didn’t want to, darling. I know she loved you and Carlo more than anything in the world. At night, wherever you are, I think she’ll kiss your forehead just like this and you won’t awaken. But in the morning, you’ll just feel a light breeze over you and you’ll know she’s been there.’

‘What about Daddy?’

‘Daddy will kiss you too, on the other side of your forehead.’

‘Will you be like our mummy for us?’

“Oh, Katinka, dear child, can you imagine such a conversation? I had to take them to the Lavrenti Beria Orphanage outside town. A hellish place. Even visiting was a bad experience. But there they got the stamps on their papers assigning them to the families who would adopt them. Satinov had arranged it meticulously so they weren’t registered as children of Enemies of the People, just ordinary orphans. How he did it all I don’t know. I dreaded parting with them. I loved them both, Snowy and Carlo. Dear child, I can still smell their skin now, still look into their eyes, still hear their voices—I had to leave them and, worst of all, I had to part brother and sister. They would never see each other again. It was one blow after another!”

Tears ran down her lined cheeks. Katinka was so moved that she too burst into tears and, without a word, she sat on the bed and they held each other. Finally Lala drank a little wine, ate some khachapuri, and cleared her throat.

“Are you strong enough to go on?” Katinka asked.

“I am. Are you?” said the old lady, wiping her eyes. “I’m not bad for my age, am I?”

“Who were the families who took them? Can you remember?”

“I never knew the names of the families. Satinov made sure of that. Only he knew. But I remember the day I met them both as if it were yesterday. Oh, it was agony! Carlo was playing with trains in one room at the orphanage. Snowy was creating a dinner party of pillows and cushions. And then the families came. I suppose they were good people but they weren’t like Sashenka or me—not cozy. The Jewish couple—they didn’t say but they were from Odessa or Nikolaev, somewhere on the Black Sea—were kind enough, I think, but quite unsuited to looking after children—he was already middle-aged with wild fuzzy hair, some kind of intellectual, and she was a bluestocking. I wanted to tell them that Snowy’s mother was Jewish too so they were her sort in a way. I did explain about Snowy’s favorite toys and games, and in their stiff way they started to play along with her. That comforted me later. I left Snowy with them, hoping they would get to know one another. But they didn’t. Snowy kept running back to me. ‘Where’s Lala?’ she’d scream. ‘Lala, you won’t leave us, will you, Lala? Where’s Carlo, I want to stay with Carlo! Carlo!’”

“When they took her away, Snowy howled. ‘Lala, you promised, Lala, help me, Lala!’ She wanted me, she wanted her brother. Finally, the nurses and guards had to force her into their car. She was kicking and crying, ‘Lala, you promised!’ At last, her new parents got into the car and drove off into the distance. And I sank onto the floor and howled too, like an animal, in front of everyone in that orphanage…”

Katinka felt exhausted, and yet, in spite of the tragedy, excited too. “That couple from Odessa must have been the Liberharts,” she said. “Roza is Snowy.” But Lala kept talking as if she hadn’t heard. “It was the same with Carlo and the peasants.”

“The peasants?” asked Katinka, taking notes.

“The couple who took Carlo. The moment Snowy was gone, he started crying: ‘Where’s Snowy? I want to cuddle Snowy! Lala, you won’t leave me, will you, Lala?’ I barely survived that day. He struggled too as they took him. I can still hear his voice right now…In some ways it was easier for him as he was only three. I prayed he wouldn’t even remember Sashenka and Vanya, and perhaps he didn’t. They were going to rename him. They say three is the borderline between what you remember and what you forget.”

Katinka took Lala’s hands in hers again. “Lala, I’ve got wonderful news for you.”

“What? Is it Sashenka?” She peered at the shadows by the door. “Is Sashenka here? I knew she’d come.”

“No, Lala. We don’t know where Sashenka is.”

“I dream of her so often, you know. I’m sure she’s alive because we all thought Samuil was dead and he came back from the dead. Find her, Katinka. Bring her to me.”

“I’m going to do my best, but I have something else to tell you. I think I’ve found your Snowy. The family who adopted her were called Liberhart and they renamed Snowy Roza. I’m going to phone her tonight and bring her to you. Then you can tell her these things yourself.”

Lala looked at Katinka and turned her face away, a hand over her eyes. “I knew I hadn’t waited in vain. That Satinov’s an angel, an angel,” she whispered. Then, sitting up straight, she faced Katinka. “I want to meet Snowy. But don’t leave it too long. I’m not immortal.”

When Katinka stood up, she was dizzy. It seemed as if she had experienced the tragic partings herself. “I must go back to my hotel and phone Roza.”

But the old lady reached up to her. “No, no…stay with me. I’ve waited so long, I’m afraid you won’t return and that this is just a vision. There’s a dream I’ve had so often. Samuil, holding a glass of Georgian wine, leads me into the library, full of old books and strange curiosities, in a ruined mansion wrapped in vines and lilacs. And Sashenka, on a sleigh with bells galloping through the streets of Petersburg, is laughing and saying, ‘Faster, Lala, faster…’ And then I wake up, here in this little room, alone.”

“Of course I’ll stay,” said Katinka, settling down again in the comfortable chair in the corner. She was glad not to have to go back to her unfriendly hotel on the outskirts of town.

During the warm night, she was woken by Lala, who was sitting up in bed. “She was arrested at the school gates, Baron. Yes, the gendarmes arrested her…What shall we do today, Sashenka? Shall we go skating, darling? No, if you’re a good girl, we’ll buy a tin of Huntley & Palmers biscuits at the English Shop on Nevsky. Pantameilion, bring round the sleigh…”

Katinka approached the bed. Lala’s eyes were open and she was holding a photograph to her breast: it was Sashenka in the white pinafore of the Smolny Institute, with the same amused eyes.

“Go back to sleep, Lala. Go back to sleep,” Katinka hushed her, stroking her forehead.

“Is that you, Sashenka? Oh, my darling, I knew you’d come back. I’m so happy to see you…” Lala’s head sank back onto her pillow. Katinka thought her sleeping face was ageless, the tender heart-shaped face of the girl who had come from England all those years ago.

Then she returned to her chair and sobbed—she wasn’t quite sure why—until she fell asleep again.

15

It was a balmy morning in the Georgian spring. When Katinka woke, the curtains were open. Lala, wearing a frayed pink dressing gown, was holding a small cup of Turkish coffee and a flat loaf of lavashi bread, delivered by Nugzar the warrior from downstairs.

Outside the window, Georgian men were singing “Suliko” on their way to work. There was so much music in Tbilisi. That very Georgian tkemali smell of almonds and apple blossom rose from the garden, the zest of fresh coffee, and the clatter of kitchens, came from the café beneath them.

“Good morning, dear child,” said Lala. “Run downstairs and get some coffee.”

Katinka sat right up. She rubbed her eyes. She had to get back to the hotel and call Roza. Her job was almost done, yet there was still so much to find out. Was Carlo still alive? And she was burning to know what had happened to Sashenka and Vanya. As if reading her mind, Lala said, “I know in my heart that Sashenka’s alive—and I know someone who might help us find her.”

By 10:00 a.m. next day, Katinka was back in Moscow and walking up Tverskaya Street. As a student, she had browsed at the World of Books shop on Tverskaya. Now she rang the bell on the third door of the building. The door clicked open into a naked stone hall with the usual stench of cabbage and she rode up to the penthouse in a tiny, dyspeptic elevator that reminded her of a sardine tin hanging on a cable. But when the doors groaned open, she gasped in surprise. Instead of a landing with three or four doors, the elevator opened into a high-ceilinged apartment decorated in gracious, airy pine, filled with the sort of dark, noble furniture she usually saw in museums. The walls were stacked high with books and thick magazines of the Soviet era, and hung with paintings in gold frames and old movie posters. It was not overpoweringly grand like Marshal Satinov’s place but cozy and aristocratic, the apartment of a well-off aesthete of Tsarist times.

“Welcome, Katinka,” said a striking elderly woman standing in the middle of the room. Well dressed, with a busty figure neatly shown off in one of those tweed suits worn by Marlene Dietrich in the forties and a hairstyle to match, she suited the room so well she might have been posed there by a fashion photographer. Katinka guessed she was well over eighty, yet with her strong eyebrows and thick hair dyed black she held herself like an actress on her very last tour.

“I’m Mouche Zeitlin,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “Come on in and I’ll show you round. This was my father’s study…” She led Katinka into a small room still heaped with papers and books, pointing out a wall of volumes. “These are all his works. You probably remember some of them—or maybe you’re too young…”

“No, I knew his name,” answered Katinka. “In my father’s bookcase we have all the Gideon Zeitlin books along with Gorky, Ehrenburg and Sholokhov…”

“A giant of the Soviet era,” said Mouche, who spoke the noble Russian of a trained actress. “Here!” She pointed at the large black and white photographs on the wall that showed a beaming black-eyed man with a grey-black beard and the same eyes and smile as his daughter. “That’s my father with Picasso and Ehrenburg in Paris, and that’s him with Marshal Zhukov at Hitler’s Chancellery in 1945. Oh, and that’s him with one of his many girlfriends. I used to call him Papa momzer—that’s Yiddish for ‘Daddy the rogue.’ As for us, my sister and mother died in the Siege of Leningrad but my father and I, with our sense of humor, survived wars, revolutions and terror. In fact, we flourished—I’m a little ashamed to say. See those posters? That’s me in my films. You’ve probably seen a few. Let’s have tea.” They crossed the impressive hall and Katinka found herself sitting at a big kitchen table. “Are you writing about my father or me?”

“No, actually, that’s not why I came see you…” Katinka blushed but Mouche Zeitlin waved it away.

“Of course not, why should you, dear? You’re the new generation. But you said you were a historian.” She lit up a Gauloise, which she smoked in a silver holder, offering a cigarette to Katinka.

“No, thanks,” said Katinka. Then she told Mouche about meeting Roza and Pasha, and the story up to the previous day with Lala. “Lala sent me to you. She had your address; I think she must have kept it when Samuil died. And now we know that my client Roza Getman is Snowy, Sashenka’s daughter.”

“God! Snowy!” Mouche lost her brashness and suddenly she dissolved in tears. “I can’t believe it! How we longed to find that child. And what about Carlo?”

“I hope we can find him somehow.”

“But Snowy’s alive and well? I can’t believe it!” Mouche held out her arms to Katinka as if the visitor herself were long-lost family. “You’re a messenger bringing us blessings! Can I phone her? When can I meet her?”

“I hope very soon,” replied Katinka. “But there’s still so much to discover. I came to tell you this good news but also to ask you—did you ever look for Sashenka and Vanya?”

“Right up until his death, my father tried to find out what had happened to them and the children. There were many times during Stalin’s reign when my father was close to destruction himself, even though he was one of the dictator’s pet writers. At the end of the war, my father traveled down to Tbilisi to meet up again with his elder brother Samuil—and Lala Lewis, of course. They were very happy together. It was such a joyous reunion, the two brothers hadn’t seen each other for so many years. Anyway, Samuil made my father promise that as soon as he could, he would find out about Sashenka and her family.”

“Did you find anything?” asked Katinka, taking out her notebook.

“Oh yes. Even during Stalin’s lifetime, Papa inquired of the Cheka and was told that Sashenka and Vanya had received ten years in the camps in 1939. We applied again in 1949, when Sashenka was due to be released, but were told that she had received another ten years without rights of correspondence. During the Thaw after Stalin’s death, we were told that they had both died of heart attacks in the camps during the war.”

“So there’s really no hope for her.”

“We thought not,” said Mouche. “But in 1956 a female ex-prisoner, a newly released Zek, called on us here and told us that she’d been with Sashenka in the Kolyma camps, that she’d last seen Sashenka very recently, and she was alive when Stalin died in March 1953.”

Katinka’s heart leaped.

Later that day, a black armored Mercedes collected Katinka from the Moskva Hotel and drove her to Pasha Getman’s headquarters, a former prince’s mansion off Ostazhenka Street. Katinka was curious to see “The Palace,” as it was known in the press. It was said to be a hive of political and financial intrigue so she was almost disappointed when they drove through the security gates and stopped in front of a graceful but small two-story residence in white marble with curling oriental-style pilasters. Inside, the hall was decorated, decided Katinka, like a Turkish sultan’s harem, with many divans and fountains. She was met by a beautiful black-haired secretary, a Russian girl not much older than she, in a little black suit with a tiny skirt and colossal high heels, all set off by a clinking gold belt. Katinka knew at once, just from the girl’s proprietorial slink, that this “Versace girl” was not exclusively Pasha’s typist.

With her heels clicking on the marble floors, the assistant led Katinka, feeling dowdy in her denim skirt, past a room filled with electronic equipment and television screens, watched by guards in blue uniforms; then a dining room where a young man was checking place settings, flowers and cutlery; and then an airy modern office, all glass and chrome, where Pasha Getman waved at her.

He was on the phone but Roza was sitting on the sofa beneath some pieces of expensive (and hideous, in Katinka’s view) modern art.

“Dear girl, you’ve done so well already,” said Roza, kissing Katinka thrice and holding on to her warmly. “I just can’t believe that you’ve found all this. I’m going to call Mouche right away…As soon as you mentioned the name Palitysn, Sashenka and Vanya, it was as if I already knew them.”

“You didn’t mention you also had a brother.”

“I wanted to start with my parents, and even now I find it hard to say his name, to talk about him…” Roza stopped and closed her eyes for a second. “Anyway, I wasn’t sure what you’d find. But oh, Katinka, I just can’t thank you enough. You’ve given me back a slice of myself, my identity.” Now that those violet eyes were open again, Katinka saw how hard Roza was fighting not to break down.

“Do you want me to go on?” Katinka realized she very badly wanted to find out what had happened to the rest of Roza’s family, especially Carlo, but she felt guilty too. Was she becoming addicted to the drama of someone else’s tragedy?

“Yes—and here’s the cash for the KGB,” said Pasha Getman, coming around the desk to embrace her. He handed her an envelope. “I knew I’d hired the right person.” Katinka caught Roza’s eye as he said this, and they exchanged a conspiratorial smile. “But now, go and find the other Palitsyns. If any of them are alive…”

Katinka felt very nervous about carrying the money in her handbag. She had never held so much and was sure it would be stolen, or she would drop it. She was relieved when she entered the Café-Bar Piano near the Patriarchy Ponds to meet the two KGBsti, the Marmoset and the Magician.

She played with the thick envelope for a minute, then opened it in front of them to show the U.S. greenbacks.

“For this much cash, we’d like the files fast. You said tomorrow, didn’t you?”

“It’s all there?” asked the shiny-cheeked Marmoset, eyeing the envelope.

“Yes, against my advice,” said Katinka, “Mr. Getman insisted on paying.”

“All in Abraham Lincolns?” asked the Magician.

“I have no idea,” she said, disdainful of this gangster jargon.

“An angel of the north Caucasus! You’ll learn the way things work!” The Magician laughed and stroked his coarse gingery hair. As she pushed the envelope across the table, he slapped his hand onto hers. “Beautiful, girl. Beautiful, like you.”

Katinka removed her hand quickly, and shuddered.

“Tomorrow, in my office, you’ll have the files on Sashenka and Vanya as well as Mendel and Golden,” promised the Marmoset. “Everything we have.”

Katinka stood up but the Magician took her hand again in a clammy grip.

“Hey, girl, wait, what’s the hurry? Please tell Mr. Getman we hope this is the start of a relationship. And for you as a historian. We have some espionage materials about the Cold War period that would interest the Western media and publishers. Now you know Londongrad, you flew there. We would share a commission with you if you could interest newspapers or publishers in London…”

“I’ll tell Mr. Getman.”

“A little taste of a malt whiskey much favored by the royal families of Europe? It’s Glenfiddich, a famous name,” suggested the Magician. “A toast to our English historical partnership?”

“I’m late,” answered Katinka, longing to be away from these disgusting hucksters, the successors of the Chekists who had arrested Sashenka and Vanya.

She fled outside. Spring in Moscow seethed with the tang of new life, and the ponds were surrounded by cherry blossom and new growth. She bought an ice cream and sat admiring the daffodils growing under the trees and the majestic swans on the pond with their grey-feathered cygnets.

At the pay phone, she called Satinov.

Mariko answered. “My father is ill. He fell. He also has respiratory problems.”

“But I’ve got a lot to tell him. I’ve found Snowy, and Lala Lewis who told me what a hero he’d been to help those children—”

“You’ve talked enough to him already. No more calls.”

And Mariko slammed down the phone.

16

Sitting of Military Tribunal, office of the Narkom L. P. Beria, at Special Object 110 [Sukhanovka Prison, Beria’s special jail in the former St. Catherine’s Nunnery at Vidnoe, outskirts of Moscow] 3:00 a.m. 21 January 1940

Chairman of the Military Tribunal V. S. Ulrikh: Accused Palitysn, have you read the indictment? You understand the charges?

Palitsyn: Yes, I, Vanya Palitsyn, understand the charges.

Ulrikh: Do you object to any of the judges?

Palitsyn: No.

Ulrikh: Do you admit your guilt?

Palitsyn: Yes.

Ulrikh: Did you not meet with Mendel Barmakid and your wife Sashenka Zeitlin to plot the assassination of Comrade Stalin and the Politburo?

Palitsyn: My wife was never involved in this conspiracy.

Ulrikh: Come now, Accused Palitsyn, we have before us your full signed confession that states how you and said accused Sashenka Zeitlin…

Palitsyn: If the Party wants…

Ulrikh: The Party demands the truth. Stop playing games with us now. Speak up.

Palitsyn: Long live the Party. I have been a dedicated and devoted Bolshevik since the age of sixteen. I have never betrayed the Party. I have served Comrade Stalin and the Party with absolute fervor all my adult life. So has my wife, Sashenka. However, if the Party demands it…

Ulrikh: The Party demands: do you confess your guilt to all charges?

Palitysn: I do.

Ulrikh: Do you wish to add anything else, Accused Palitsyn?

Palitsyn: I remain in my heart devoted to the Communist Party and Comrade Stalin personally: I have committed grave sins and crimes. If I face the Supreme Measure of Punishment, I shall gladly die a Bolshevik with the name Stalin reverently on my lips. Long live the Party! Long live Stalin!

Ulrikh: Then let the judges retire.

3:22 a.m. The judges return.

Ulrikh: In the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court has examined the case and established that Ivan Palitsyn was a member of an anti-Soviet Trotskyite group, connected to Okhrana double agents and White Guardists, and controlled by the Japanese and French secret services, linked to his wife Alexandra “Sashenka” Zeitlin-Palitsyn (known in Party circles as Comrade Snowfox), Mendel Barmakid (known in Party circles as Comrade Furnace) and the writer Beniamin Golden. Having found Accused Palitsyn guilty of all said offenses under Article 58, the Tribunal sentences him to the Highest Measure of Punishment, to be shot. The verdict is final and to be effected without delay…

Katinka was sitting at the T-shaped desk in the Marmoset’s office at the Lubianka, reading the transcript of Vanya’s trial and the originals of his confessions. The Marmoset buffed his nails and read his Manchester United fanzine—but Katinka, her flesh creeping, could hear only the brutal verdict of the judge. Vanya Palitsyn was no longer a historical character to her. He was Roza’s father—and somehow she was going to have to tell her that he’d died so terribly. She was just searching through the papers for a certificate of execution when the door opened and the archives rat, Kuzma, hobbled into the room, pushing his cart with its cats frolicking together on the lower tray.

“Collecting files, Colonel,” murmured Kuzma in his white coat, placing some papki on his cart and sorting them into piles.

Katinka returned to Palitsyn’s interrogations: he confessed to the crimes specified by Captain Sagan, whose confessions were also stowed in his file. But here was something odd: the confessions, signed by “Vanya Palitsyn” on the top right-hand corner of each page, were filthy, as if they had been splashed in a muddy winter puddle. Had the interrogator spilled his coffee? Only while she was turning the pages did she realize that this muddy spray was surely the spatter of blood. She raised the paper to her face, sniffed it and thought that she could divine the telltale copperiness…Katinka felt disgust for the Marmoset, and for this evil place.

“Excuse me, Colonel,” said Katinka, her head full of Roza’s family and their sufferings. “There’s no death certificate in Palitsyn’s file. What happened to it?”

“That’s all there is,” said the colonel.

“Was Vanya Palitsyn executed?”

“If it’s in the file, yes; if it’s not, no.”

“I saw Mouche Zeitlin yesterday. She said that the KGB sentenced Sashenka to ‘ten years without rights of correspondence.’ What did that mean?”

“It means she couldn’t receive or send letters or packages.”

“So she could be alive?”

“Sure.”

“But these files are empty. There’s so much missing!”

The Marmoset shrugged and his nonchalance infuriated her.

“I thought we had a deal.” Katinka was aware she was almost shouting. They both glanced at Kuzma, who was edging slowly toward the door in his stiff, cadaverous gait.

“I’m not an alchemist,” said the Marmoset testily.

Now she understood what Maxy had told her: archives start out as sheets of crushed tree pulp but they come to life, they assume the grit of existence, they sing of life and death. Sometimes they are all that is left of families, and then they metamorphose. The stamps, signatures and instructions on scuffed, stained scraps of curling yellow paper can convey something approaching life, even sometimes love.

The Marmoset came round the table and pulled a chit from the back of the file: Send files of Palitsyn case to Central Committee.

“What does that mean?” she asked him.

“It means it’s not in this file. It’s in another one, and it’s not here. And that is not my problem.”

Just then Kuzma unleashed a jet of gob into his KGB spittoon.

“Comrade Kuzma, how good to see you,” she said, jumping up. The fat marmalade cat sat on the cart licking the scrawny kitten. “How are Utesov and Tseferman, our jazz cats?”

This time, Kuzma opened a toothless mouth and emitted a high-pitched yelp of pleasure. “Ha!”

“I brought them something. I hope they like it,” Katinka said, taking a bottle of milk and a tin of cat food out of her handbag.

Kuzma seized both these objects as if he were in a hurry, snorting loudly and muttering to himself. He produced a brown saucer from his cart and poured out milk for the cats, who immediately started to lap it up with pink tongues. When he spat enthusiastically in a high green arc, Katinka realized that the gobbing was the weathervane of his mood.

The Marmoset sneered at her and shook his head, but Katinka ignored him, smiled at Kuzma instead, and then returned to the next file as the cats purred in the background.

Investigation File June 1939

Case 161375

Mendel Barmakid (Comrade Furnace)

Sashenka’s uncle; Roza’s great-uncle; comrade of Lenin and Stalin, the so-called Conscience of the Party—but the file contained just one piece of paper.

To Narkom L. P. Beria, Commissar-General, State Security, first degree

From: Deputy Narkom B. Kobylov, Commissar-General, State Security, second degree

12 October 1939

Accused Mendel Barmakid died today 3:00 a.m. NKVD Dr. Medvedev examined prisoner and certified death by cardiac arrest. Medical report attached.

So Mendel died of natural causes. At least she had discovered the fate of one of the family.

“Put the papers down,” ordered the Marmoset.

“But I haven’t gotten to Sashenka’s file!”

“Two more minutes.”

“We paid for these files,” she whispered vehemently at him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he replied. “Two minutes.”

“You’ve wasted my time. You broke your word!”

“One minute fifty seconds.”

Katinka could barely stand this filthy place where those dear to her employer had suffered grievous sorrow. She wanted to weep, but not under the eyes of the Marmoset. She turned to Sashenka’s file, which contained a single sheet of paper that “read Please find enclosed the confession of Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn. But it was not in there. Just a note: Send files of Zeitlin-Palitsyn case to Central Committee.

She cursed herself for her rudeness to the Marmoset. “Sashenka’s confession is missing: please may I have it?”

“You insult me and through me the Soviet Union and the Competent Organs!” He pointed at the white bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky. “You insult Iron Felix!”

“Please! I apologize!”

“I’ll report all this to my superior, General Fursenko, but it is unlikely to be permitted.”

“In that case,” said Katinka, emboldened by the courage of those who had been in far greater peril than she, “I doubt very much Mr. Getman will be interested in helping you sell your spy secrets to the newspapers abroad.”

The Marmoset stared at her, sucked in his cheeks, then crossly got up and opened the door. “Fuck off, you little bitch! Your sort have had their day! You blame everything on us, but America’s done more damage to Russia in a few years than Stalin did in decades! And your oligarch can go fuck his mother. You’re finished in here—get out!”

Katinka stood up, gathered her notebook and handbag and, trying to maintain some dignity, walked out slowly right past Kuzma, who stood outside collating some files on his cart. She was crying: she had spoiled everything with her own foolish temper.

Now she would never discover what happened to Sashenka, never find Carlo. She felt faint. It was hopeless.

17

“You again?” said Mariko sourly. “What did I tell you? Don’t call.”

“But Mariko, please! Just listen one second,” beseeched Katinka, the desperation audible in her voice. “I’m calling from the public phone outside the Lubianka! I’ve been to see Lala in Tbilisi. Just listen one second. I want to thank Marshal Satinov. I’ve learned how your father saved those children, Snowy and Carlo, how he risked his life. They want to thank him.”

A silence. She could hear Mariko breathing.

“My father’s very sick. I’ll tell him. Don’t call again!”

“But please…”

The line was dead. Groaning in frustration, she called Maxy at the Redemption office.

“There you are!” he greeted her affably. “Our sort of research isn’t easy—this happens to me all the time. Don’t lose heart. I’ve got an idea. Meet me at the feet of the poet—Pushkin Square.”

Katinka waved down a Lada car, handing the driver two dollars. She reached the Pushkin statue first. It was a dazzling spring day, the sky metallic blue, the breeze biting, the sunlight raw. In the gasoline fumes and lilac scent, girls were waiting for their lovers beneath the poet, bespectacled students read their notes on the benches, guides in polyester suits lectured American tourists, limousines for German bankers and Russian wheeler-dealers drew up at the Pushkin Restaurant. My verses will be sung throughout all Russia’s vastness, Katinka read on the monument. My ashes will outlive and know no pale decay. Pushkin consoled her, calmed her.

A motorbike scooted up onto the pavement. Maxy pulled off his Viking helmet, holding it by the horns, and kissed her in his over-familiar way.

“You look flustered,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s sit in the sun and you can tell me everything.”

Once seated, Katinka told him about her visit to Tbilisi, her night with Lala, her discovery that Roza Getman was Sashenka’s daughter—and her more recent encounter with the KGB.

“You’ve done so well,” Maxy told her. “I’m impressed! But let me interpret some of this for you. Mouche Zeitlin says the KGB told her Sashenka was sentenced to ‘ten years without rights of correspondence.’ Usually that was a euphemism for execution.”

Katinka caught her breath. “But what about the ex-prisoner who’d seen Sashenka in the camps in the fifties?”

“The KGB liked to trick people that way. The KGB files say Mendel died of ‘cardiac arrest.’ That was another euphemism. It means he died under interrogation: he was beaten to death.”

“So these files have their own language?” she said.

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “There was a terrible randomness in the Terror, but at the same time there were no coincidences in that world: everything was linked by invisible threads. We just need to find them. Send files of Palitsyn case to Central Committee,” he repeated. “I know what that means. Come with me. Climb on.”

Katinka joined him on the back of his bike, pulling her denim skirt down over her thighs. The engine revved raucously and Maxy weaved in and out of the unruly Moscow traffic, down Tverskaya until he took a sharp left at the statue of Prince Dolgoruky, founder of Moscow, and went down a steep hill. The wind blew in Katinka’s hair and she closed her eyes, allowing the rich spring air to refresh her.

They stopped alongside a Brezhnevite concrete box with a shabby glass front, a dark frieze of Marx, Engels and Lenin over the revolving door.

Maxy scissored off the bike in his leathers and tugged off his helmet, pushing back his hair. She thought him more seventies heavy-metal singer than historian. He strode ahead into a marble hall and Katinka followed him, almost running. In the grey foyer, women behind tables sold Bon Jovi CDs, hats and gloves, like a flea market, but at the back, where the entrance to the elevators was guarded by two pimply teenage soldiers, stood a white Lenin bust. Maxy showed his card and they checked Katinka’s passport, kept it and gave her a chit.

Maxy led her up the steps, past a canteen with its moldy cabbage-soup fug and into an elevator, which chugged to the top of the building. Before she could take in her surroundings, he was leading her into the glass-walled reading room with its circular panorama of the roofs of Moscow.

“No time to admire the view,” he whispered as disapproving old Communists looked up crossly from their studies. Maxy’s leathers creaked loudly in the hushed room. “I’ve got a little place for us here.” They sat in a cul-de-sac formed by towering bookshelves. “Wait here,” he said. She listened to the rasp of his biking gear with a smile. Moments later, he returned with a pile of brown papki files and sat very close to her. He radiated a blend of leathers, coffee, bike oil and lemon cologne.

“This place,” he whispered, “is the Party archive. You see these papki, numbered five hundred fifty-eight? Stalin’s own archive. It’s still officially closed and I don’t think it’ll ever open.” He flipped the first files toward him. “I was looking at these earlier and I noticed Satinov’s name. When it said your files were sent to the Central Committee, that meant to Stalin himself. This is Stalin’s miscellaneous correspondence. Go ahead, Katinka, look under S for Satinov.”

She opened the file and found a cover note, stamped by Poskrebyshev at 9:00 p.m. on May 6, 1939:

“You see,” explained Maxy, “Beria had discovered that Palitsyn was bugging his wife.”

“How did he find out?”

“Probably by a tiny bureaucratic mistake. Wiretaps were always copied to Beria, who decided which to send on to Stalin. Palitsyn, foolish with jealousy, had ordered that the transcripts of his wiretap be shown only to him. Remember how he wrote no copies? Probably his secretary forgot this, as secretaries do—and sent it by mistake to Beria, who, by the rules of the time, had to report this abuse of government resources to Stalin himself. Beria had no malice toward the Palitsyns and he knew that, after the May Day party, Stalin took a paternal interest in Sashenka. That’s why his note”—Maxy tapped the cover note—“is neutral. Stalin was often tolerant or even amused by steamy private gossip—unless he felt he had somehow been misled.”

“But then he read the transcripts?”

To: Comrade Ivan Palitsyn, Commissar-General, State Security, third degree

As requested, surveillance and transcript on Alexandra “Sashenka” Zeitlin-Palitsyn, room 403, Metropole Hotel, 6 May 1939 Midday: Zeitlin-Palitsyn left office on Petrovka and walked to Metropole, took elevator to room 403. Writer Benya Golden entered the room fifteen minutes past midday, leaving separately at 3:30 p.m. Snacks and wine were delivered to the room.

Katinka turned the pages and found a place marked with a red crayon:

Golden: God, I love you. You’re so lovely to me, Sashenka.

Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I can’t believe I’m here.

Golden: What, darling? Didn’t I please you enough last time? Until you called my name?

Zeitlin-Palitsyn: How could I forget it? I think I imagined the whole thing. I think you’ve made me delusional.

Golden: Come here. Unbutton me. That’s paradise. Get on your hands and knees on the bed and let me unwrap the present. Oh my God, what a delicious sight. What a sweet [word deleted]. How [word deleted] you are. If only your tight-assed Communist wives’ committee could see you now…

Katinka was peeping into an intimate pocket of time, a vanished wrinkle of private passion, in a cruel world, long ago. Her eyes were drawn to the words underlined by three harsh thick crayon marks.

Zeitlin-Palitsyn: Oh my God, Benya, I love your [word indecipherable], I can’t believe you got me to do that, I thought I might die of pleasure…

“That red crayon there, the underlining, is Stalin himself,” said Maxy, pulling a fat oilskinned notebook out of his stack of files. “This is Poskrebyshev’s list of visitors to Stalin’s office here on Trinity Square in the Kremlin—known to the cognoscenti as the Little Corner.” He opened it. Poskrebyshev’s tiny, immaculate handwriting listed names, dates, times. “Look up May seventh, evening.”

Katinka read the page:

10:00 p.m. L. P. Beria.

Leaves 10:30 p.m.

10:30 p.m. H. A. Satinov.

Leaves 10:45 p.m.

10:40 p.m. L. P. Beria.

Leaves 10:52 p.m.

“So Satinov was there soon after Beria showed Stalin the transcripts. Why?”

“Beria comes to see the Master and gives him the transcripts. Stalin reads this hot stuff, red crayon in hand. He orders Poskrebyshev to summon Satinov, who’s at Old Square, Party headquarters, up the hill. The vertushka telephone rings on Satinov’s desk. Poskrebyshev says, ‘Comrade Satinov, Comrade Stalin awaits you now. A Buick will collect you.’ Stalin’s already appalled by what Sashenka and Benya have done.” Maxy read Stalin’s note to Beria:

I misjudged this morally corrupt woman. I thought she was a decent Soviet woman. She teaches Soviet women how to be housewives. She’s the wife of a top Chekist. Who knows what secrets she chatters about? She behaves like a streetwalker. Comrade Beria, perhaps we should check her out. J. St.

“You know what ‘checking out’ means?” asked Maxy. “It means arrest them. You see how, in a few accidental steps, this reached Stalin?”

Katinka shook her head, her heart pounding in sympathy. If it hadn’t been for Stalin’s visit, if it hadn’t been for Sashenka’s affair, if it hadn’t been for Vanya’s jealousy…

“Isn’t there anything else in the file?” she asked.

Maxy sighed. “No, not in this archive. But the Russian State Archive of Special Secret Political-Administrative Documents off Mayakovsky Square is filled with Stalin’s papers and somewhere in there, one day, future generations may find out what happened, if they care. But it’s closed. These are all the records we can read. Oh, except for one small thing.” He picked up Stalin’s note again and pointed to the top right-hand corner, where, in small letters, his red crayon had written these words: Bicho to curate.

“What does that mean?” Katinka asked.

“I thought I knew everything about the Stalin era,” said Maxy, “but for once I can’t work it out.”

Katinka swayed with exhaustion and sadness. “I don’t think I’ll ever find Sashenka or little Carlo,” she whispered. “Poor Roza, how am I going to tell her?”

18

Outside the archive, the streets were already dark. Still shocked by what they’d found, Maxy and Katinka parted awkwardly like two teenagers after an unsatisfactory date. As Maxy rode away, Katinka walked slowly up the dark hill toward the glitzy neon lights of Tverskaya just beyond Prince Dolgoruky’s statue. Slowing to adjust the way her bag was hanging over her shoulder, she became aware that someone was walking much too close to her.

She quickened her step but so did the shadow. She slowed to let him overtake but he slowed too. She was suddenly frightened: was it the KGB? Or a Chechen mugger? Then the figure gathered up a wad of phlegm in his mouth and launched it in a phosphorescent, light-catching arc toward the gutter.

“Kuzma!” she gasped. “What are you—”

Without a word he pulled her aside, behind the statue, where there was no one around. He was holding a big canvas bag, which he opened to reveal the marmalade jazz cat and its kitten. “Cozy!” he blurted out in his queer, unbroken voice.

“Very cozy,” Katinka said, still concerned. What did he have in mind for her?

Kuzma reached into the cat bag and pulled out an old-fashioned yellow envelope, closed with red string, which he shoved into her hands, glancing around as he did so with comical vigilance—even though she knew this was no joke. He was risking his life.

“For you,” he muttered.

“But what is it?”

“You read it, you see!” Peering around again, he started to move away from her up toward Tverskaya.

“Kuzma! Wait! I want to thank you properly!” Kuzma shrank from her like a vampire before holy water but she grabbed his wrist. “One question. When it says ‘the Central Committee asked for the files,’ where are they now? Can I see them?”

Kuzma walked back, and stood so close his unshaven muzzle pricked her ear. He pointed into the earth, into the cellars, the dungeons, the graves, and only a hiss came out of him.

“So how will I ever know what happened?”

Kuzma shrugged but then he pointed up the hill. “Better to sing well as a goldfinch than badly as a nightingale.” And then he marched stiffly away, disappearing into the blurred greyness of Tverskaya’s rush-hour crowds.

The envelope burned her hands. Katinka could hardly restrain herself from opening it but she tried to stay calm. She glanced around to see if she was being followed but decided that if the KGB wanted to follow her she would never know about it anyway.

She couldn’t wait to reach her hotel room so she crossed the road to the sleazy foyer of the Intourist Hotel, a hideous seventies construction of glass and concrete. Its ceiling, made up of what appeared to be white polystyrene squares, was low; its floor was a faded, frayed burgundy “carpet” and the security staff at its brown, padded-vinyl desk were aggressive, lantern-jawed Soviet “bulls.”

But the place seethed like a souk. One-armed bandits rumbled and whirred, and garish whores sat about on orange sofas. As one of the security thugs approached her, Katinka pointed at the whores and he shrugged: he’d collect his share later. Sitting on a foam sofa next to two booted, stockinged girls with bare, bruised white thighs, she offered them both a cigarette. Each of them grabbed one: the first put it in her handbag, the other in her stocking top.

Katinka lit up her own, inhaled and then tore open the envelope. Inside were a few trinkets and a wad of photocopied documents. The first was dated May 1953, two months after Stalin’s death:

To all case officers: Palitsyn/Zeitlin Case

For security reasons, relatives enquiring about sentences of abovementioned state criminals are to be informed that the prisoners were resentenced after a ten-year term in Gulags.

Signed: I. V. Serov, Chairman, State Security Committee (KGB)

Anger and confusion coursed through Katinka, followed by a sinking sadness. Everything she had so far learned from Mouche and the KGB archives was a callous lie. She must have paled because one of the prostitutes leaned over and asked gently: “Your test results, love? Bad news?”

“Something like that,” said Katinka, her forehead prickly with sweat.

“Tough, tough, but we survive,” said the prostitute, lighting up and turning back to her friend.

Katinka looked again at the typed pages.

Sitting of Military Tribunal, office of the Narkom L. P. Beria, at Special Object 110, 2:30 a.m. 22 January 1940. Trial of Accused Alexandra “Sashenka” Zeitlin-Palitsyn (Comrade Snowfox).

Chairman of the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court Vasily Ulrikh presiding in person.

Katinka leafed to the end, looking for the sentencing—but there was that maddening note again: Send documents on Palitsyn case to Central Committee.

Then she started to read Sashenka’s trial notes—and what she read shocked her so deeply that she stuffed the papers back in the envelope and ran out of the hotel into the street, turning right and heading down the hill toward the Kremlin, its eight red stars glowing high above her through the hazy rhapsody of a spring night.

“You’ve gone too far this time!” said Mariko, barely raising her voice, which made the implied threat all the more powerful.

Marshal Satinov sat in his high chair in the elegant, breezy sitting room with an oxygen mask held onto his face by elastic and a large oxygen cylinder on wheels beside him. He appeared to have shrunk in just a few days, and his blinking eyes followed Katinka’s every move.

“Please, let me talk to your father for one minute,” said Katinka, breathless and flushed with running. “I’ve so much to tell him and he himself asked me to let him know what I found…”

She fixed her eyes, imploringly, onto Satinov’s sharp orbs with their half-closed lids. At first they showed nothing. But then they seemed to twinkle and the old man wrenched off his oxygen mask. “Oh Mariko, stop fussing.” He spoke with difficulty. “Bring us tea.” Mariko sighed loudly and stomped out. “How did you get in, girl?”

“Someone let me in through the street door and then I found your door ajar.”

Satinov absorbed this. “Fate, that’s what it is. Don’t forget that’s why you’re here.” He gave a skull-like smile.

Katinka sat down on the sofa near him and he opened his wizened hands as if to say Go on then, girl, give it to me.

“I found Snowy.” He nodded appreciatively. “Lala Lewis told me everything. You were a hero. You saved the children. Snowy wants to meet you to say thank you.”

He shook his head and waved his hand. “Too late,” he rasped. “Have you found her brother too?”

“Not yet. I’m still trying to work out what happened to Sashenka.”

“Leave them. Concentrate on Carlo! The children, the future…”

“Sashenka and Vanya were your best friends, weren’t they?”

“Sashenka was…there was no one like her—and the children…” His blue eyes softened and for a moment Katinka thought she saw tears. She made herself go on.

“That was why Stalin summoned you to the Little Corner when he read the transcript of Benya and Sashenka. He was aware you’d known them since Petersburg and that you were Roza’s godfather. He’d seen you all together at the May Day party. Did he want to find out what you knew about them?”

Satinov blinked and said nothing.

“Beria left and you arrived at ten thirty p.m.—I’ve seen Stalin’s appointment book. But then what happened? Sashenka had had an affair. Vanya was jealous and bugged their hotel room. How did that grow into Captain Sagan’s conspiracy and the destruction of an entire family?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Satinov.

“Why did Stalin request all the files on the case?” She glared at him. Cold bloodshot eyes looked back. “You’re not going to answer that either? How can you pretend you don’t know what happened?”

“Just find Carlo,” Satinov wheezed. “You must be so close.”

“And what did Stalin mean when he wrote Bicho to curate?”

There was a long pause during which Satinov breathed painfully. “Read my memoirs carefully,” he said at last.

“Believe it or not, I’ve read every word of your interminable speeches on peaceful coexistence and your heroic role in forging the socialist Motherland and there’s not a word of humanity in it.” His eyes were fixed on her but she didn’t stop. “You’ve lied to me again and again. The KGB has concealed its crimes but today I got hold of the transcript of Sashenka’s trial. You were at the trial of your best friend!”

His breathing creaked.

“Take a look,” she said, pulling out the first page of the trial.

“I haven’t got my glasses.”

“Well, let me help you then. Here, look at this. It’s you, Marshal Satinov! You didn’t just attend the trial,” she was almost yelling at him, “you were a judge.”

“Read my judgment,” he gasped.

“You sat there in judgment on your best friend, the mother of your godchild. Sashenka found you at the trial. What did she think when she saw you? What went through her mind? I thought you were a hero. You saved Snowy and Carlo yet you presided over Sashenka’s destruction! Was she sentenced to death? Or did she die in the Gulags? Tell me, tell me! You owe it to her children!”

Satinov’s face tightened as his breathing constricted and his mouth gaped open.

To her shame, Katinka fought back her own tears. “How could you have done such a thing? How could you?”

“What’s going on in here?” Mariko appeared in the doorway, holding a tea tray. “What is it, Papa?”

As Katinka left the room, she looked back at the old man. The oxygen mask was on his face, his lips were blue, a wiry arm was raised—and a gnarled finger pointed toward the door.

19

Judge Ulrikh: Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn, you have confessed to a remarkable conspiracy to kill our heroic leaders, Comrade Stalin and the Politburo, at your own house. We have read your confession. Do you have anything more to say?

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I plotted to kill the great Stalin at my house. I rubbed arsenic and cyanide powder onto the curtains of the room where Comrade Stalin would stand.

Judge Ulrikh: And the gramophone?

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: Yes, on the gramophone too. I had heard from various comrades, including my husband Vanya, that Comrade Stalin liked to listen to music after dinner so I dusted the gramophone with cyanide dust.

Judge Satinov: Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn, we need more details…

Satinov was speaking for the first time at the trial. Katinka could almost hear the voices of these flint-hearted men in the pine-paneled office in the Sukhanovka Prison, lit up in a bright electric glare in the middle of the night. NKVD guards in blue stood armed at the doors. Ulrikh, with his bullet-like bald head, sat behind the desk with Satinov and the other judge, all in their Stalinka tunics and gleaming boots.

As soon as she had left that disastrous meeting with Satinov, Katinka had called Maxy, repeating what had been said word for word, trying to disguise her tears. But Maxy was encouraging. Satinov had told her to read his judgment, so she must read it right away. Satinov had told her to read his memoirs—and that must mean something too. Maxy proposed that they meet at midday the next day at the closed Archive for Special Secret Political-Administrative Documents, through the archway off Mayakovsky Square.

Now it was the middle of the night and Katinka was reading the trial in her seedy room at the Moskva Hotel. She poured herself a shot of vodka—for courage and to overcome her exhaustion. Through her little window, the red stars of the Kremlin glowed.

Judge Satinov: How did you procure this cyanide? Tell the Tribunal!

Katinka imagined Sashenka standing at the end of the T-shaped table, pale, thin, battered but still beautiful. But what must she have thought as she was tried for her life and found Hercules Satinov on the Tribunal right there in front of her? She must have struggled to show no emotion, not even a flicker of recognition—everyone would be watching for her reaction and his. But imagine her surprise, her shock—and her overriding concern: are the children safe? Or does Satinov’s presence mean that the children…

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I will, Comrade Judge. Vanya procured it from the the NKVD Laboratory.

Judge Satinov: How did you know which records to poison?

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I knew Comrade Stalin enjoys Georgian folk music, the songs from the movies Volga, Volga and Jolly Fellows, and the arias of Glinka and Tchaikovsky. So I poisoned those.

Judge Satinov: You were serving the Japanese Emperor, the Polish landowners and the British lords in conspiracy with Trotsky?

Katinka’s skin crawled as she pictured what was going through Sashenka’s mind: Snowy and Carlo—where are you?

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: Yes, Trotsky ordered the assassination in diabolical compact with the Japanese Emperor and the British lords.

Judge Satinov: And the network of the White Guard, Captain Sagan, who controlled you on Trotsky’s behalf, forcing you to use the methods he had taught you as a young girl?

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: You mean the sexual depravity? Yes, and I used that to recruit further agents such as the writer Benya Golden.

Judge Satinov: Did the writer Golden become an agent?

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I tried to recruit him using the wiles taught me by Captain Sagan but—as I must tell the truth before the Party—Golden was a dilettante non-Party philistine who lacked vigilance but he never joined the conspiracy. He regarded it as “play-acting.”

Judge Ulrikh: You’re amending your confession?

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I have to tell the truth before Comrade Stalin and the Party. I am myself guilty; my husband and Captain Sagan are guilty but Golden was a child incapable of conspiracy.

Katinka could not help but smile at this. Now she knew that Sashenka had truly loved Benya Golden too. Wasn’t this insult to Golden more romantic than any love song?

Judge Satinov: Comrade Judges, I’m almost overcome with disgust at the evil and depravity of this serpent woman, this black widow spider. Are we ready to consider the case?

Katinka fought back tears as she read this tragic-comic exchange. Did Satinov mean this? Did Sashenka believe he meant it? Sashenka must have looked at her friend, sending him message after message: are the children settled? Are they safe? Or have you betrayed us? A mother’s questions. Katinka lit a cigarette and read on.

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I must declare before the court that my greatest regret and shame are the crimes I’ve committed before the Party and that the future…posterity…will remember me as a scoundrel.

Posterity? Was this a message to Satinov?

Judge Ulrikh (presiding): All right, are we Comrade Judges ready? Any comment?

Judge Lansky (second judge): What wickedness. No other comment.

Judge Ulrikh: Comrade Satinov?

Judge Satinov (third judge): Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn confesses to shocking crimes in a lifetime of deception and mask wearing. I must ask the court to forgive me for saying that, due to the vigilance of the NKVD investigation, we the Soviet people are grateful that our brilliant Leader of the Peoples, Comrade Stalin, is safe, that his loyal comrades Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Andreyev and other Politburo members are now safe finally from spies, traitors and Trotskyites, safe in their offices and homes from this poisoning viper in their midst. They are now safe, quite safe. There is only one possible punishment, the way we treat mad, rabid dogs, the justice of the people…Thank you, Comrade Ulrikh.

Katinka could scarcely breathe. She read it again, and then again, and it was unmistakable: the sign. Satinov said ‘safe,’ and then repeated it four times in all. Two ‘safe’s for Snowy, two ‘safe’s for Carlo. So Satinov had not betrayed Sashenka. Instead he was really saying, “Dear friend, die easy if you can, the children are safe! I repeat, the children are safe!”

What relief for Sashenka. Yet the judgment was missing: did she survive after all? There it was, just the same note—Papers sent to Central Committee.

Dawn was coming up over Moscow, as Katinka’s head fell forward onto the transcripts that still rested on her knee.

Judge Ulrikh: Thank you, Comrade Satinov, let us retire to make our judgment.

Judges retire.

20

An upstart sun in an eggshell-blue sky threw golden beams onto Mayakovsky’s statue. Katinka walked up Tverskaya, first passing the statue of Prince Dolgoruky on one side and then Pushkin on the other, toward the new archive. She had woken up too early and with a crick in her neck when Maxy had phoned, then gone back to sleep. But she still ached as if she had been pummeled and only a bracing double espresso at the Coffee Bean café on Tverskaya—good coffee was one of the benefits of democracy, she thought—had restored some of her spirits.

Carrying a bulky package under her arm, she passed Mayakovsky Metro and took a left through one of those red granite archways that help give Moscow its somber and hostile grandeur. She found herself on a tiny road that seemed to be a cul-de-sac, but just when she could go no farther it turned sharply once and then again, becoming narrower. Katinka relished this unlikely, meandering lane in the midst of the unforgiving metropolis, as if she were discovering a jumbled village behind the granite walls and ramparts of those roaring boulevards. After the second twist, she came upon an ocher wall with a white top and then a black steel gate, which was open and led to some steps. Maxy’s bike was parked next to a plaque engraved with Lenin’s domed profile.

“You look tired—did you get any sleep? You procured what I suggested?” he asked.

Katinka nodded at her package. “It was the most expensive stuff I’ve ever bought and I had to ask Pasha Getman for permission.”

“Three hundred dollars is nothing to him. Did you tell him what it was?”

“I thought it better not to.”

“Well, it’s our only hope. This woman will do anything for that.” Then Maxy took her hand. “I fear you’re becoming even more obsessed than me about the secret lives of fifty years ago. Are you ready?”

“Yes, but how are you getting us in? I thought you said—”

“Don’t worry, I’ve organized it all. Now remember,” he continued, straight-faced, “I booked you an appointment to apply to make an application to apply to peruse the list of documents held in this archive, and I can now inform you that our application to make an application will of course be refused. Go on in, Katinka. Good luck.”

“I feel uneasy about this. Will it work or will I get arrested?”

“One or the other.” He laughed. “Just think, two weeks ago you’d never have tried such a stunt. But be confident. Look as if you know where you’re going and you’re entitled to get what you want. I’ll see you later.”

She watched him kick-start the bike and saw the horned helmet disappear into the hidden lanes before she turned to enter the high Gothic slab with pillars and balconies embellished by heroes carved in stone and bronze.

At the wooden desk, the two teenaged Interior Ministry soldiers half dozed in their battered chairs but sat up at the sight of Katinka. The pimplier of the two conscripts slid the signing-in book along the desk, examined her passport with a sneer intended to project the power invested in him by the Russian state, checked a collage of yellow chits on his desk and found one bearing her name, wrote out another chit on a further badly printed scrap and then with the hint of a virile smirk handed back the paper, keeping the passport, and gestured grandly toward the elevators in the white marble hall behind him. “Application for archives, fourth floor.”

She scarcely dared look back but sensed a presence. A skinny young man with a bald head, yellow vinyl shoes, and a grey parka was hanging up his coat in the cloakroom and watching her intently. A strange crew, these archive rats, Katinka thought, as she hurried on and entered the elevator. As its doors were about to close, a hand held them back and the archive rat came in, nodding at her nervously but saying nothing. He was pulling on his archivist’s stained yellow coat, like a laboratory assistant, his red-rimmed eyes magnified and eager through his smeared spectacles.

The elevator was small and they stood so awkwardly close that the archive rat kept trying to apologize but never quite managed it, as each of his attempts at conversation ended in him starting to hum. Katinka flattened herself against the wall, horribly close to the pasty dome of his head with its sparse colorless hairs, livid blotches and beads of sweat. She pressed the bell for the fifth floor but he pressed the fourth and when the quivering elevator jolted to a halt, the doors opened and he got out, holding them open.

“Your floor.” He wasn’t asking, he was telling her. “Applications.”

But Katinka shook her head twice. The rat looked surprised and remained standing there quizzically as the doors closed. Katinka cringed, knowing she’d been found out because, as Maxy had explained, “outside applicants are not permitted to visit the fifth floor.”

The elevator opened on a landing with misted glass doors, some shabby plastic palms and a grand portrait frame—with no picture inside it. Directorate of the Study of Dialectical Materialism and Leninist Economic-Political Historical Questions of the Soviet Union read the plaque, to which someone had taped a note: The Russian State Archive of Special Secret Political-Administrative Documents.

“It would be best if you didn’t meet anyone up there,” Maxy had told her—so she expected the archive rat to jump out at her with the pimpled teenaged guards at any moment.

The long parquet corridors with lines of closed pine doors were hushed. The passages were much too hot—the winter heating was still on. Katinka checked the engraved plaques that announced a name and title on each door. She turned right and then right again until she heard the blare of opera—Glinka’s famous aria from A Life for the Tsar. When she turned again, the music got louder and louder as she approached the last door.

Agrippina Constantinovna Begbulatov, Director of Manuscripts read the plaque. Quite a name. Katinka listened at the door: the music was reaching a climax. Should she have made an appointment? No, Maxy had said that was too dangerous.

She knocked. No answer. She knocked again. Nothing. Katinka cursed obstructive dinosaurs like Satinov, the maddeningly rigid bureaucrats, the frustrations of this project, and just opened the door.

A very large, white-skinned woman of advanced years lay sleeping on a divan in her underwear, her eyes covered by a mask that read American Airways.

The room was hot, the music rippled out of a modern CD player, and the perfumes within were heady. Katinka had only a moment to register two fans whirring, piles of yellowed manuscripts and two mountainous thighs flowing over lacy stocking tops before the woman was pulling off her mask and coming toward her.

“How dare you barge in here! Who are you? Have you no manners? Are you some sort of cultureless philistine?” The whale-sized woman looked Katinka up and down as if she had never seen a young girl in denim and boots in the sacred archive. “Who gave you permission to burst in on me?”

“Umm, no one.” Katinka was lost momentarily.

“Then please leave and never return!” cried the woman, whose capacious milky bosoms strained even her rigidly structured brassiere.

“No, no.” Katinka was struggling now, blushing and stammering. “I was just asked to deliver something to you. It’s here…for you.” She raised the package.

The woman angrily yanked off a mauve hairnet. “I’m not expecting anything,” she said, peering craftily at the package. Katinka had little left to lose. She tried not to look at the garter belt, the generous flesh-colored underpants or any of the other eye-catching parts of the vision before her. “It’s a gift from…” She checked up and down the corridor, to suggest that the lady might not like her colleagues to witness the delivery of the package, “well, I’d prefer to tell you in private.”

The woman frowned, apparently remembering where she was and what she was wearing. “One minute!” She shoved Katinka out of the door and closed it. The music stopped. The door reopened.

“I’m Agrippina Begbulatov,” declared the woman, offering a firm, sweaty hand. “I like to take a nap in the middle of the day. Please, sit!”

Katinka sat on the red divan, on which she could instantly feel the heat radiating from where the director of manuscripts’ generous body had recently rested. Agrippina wore rouge and scarlet lipstick, a blue Soviet-style dress with lace over the décolletage and a pyramid of spangles on both hips. Katinka recognized the towering dyed-auburn coiffure of a Soviet grande dame of the Brezhnev era.

“You know I’m in charge of collecting all the memoirs of Party members so that they can be cataloged and filed in this special archive?” said Agrippina, sitting in a soft chair.

“Agrippina Constantinovna, thank you for receiving me,” said Katinka.

“My pleasure,” said Agrippina, coldly gracious, haughtily patient.

Katinka realized she had one second to explain herself—or ultimately face the Organs. When she started to speak, she hadn’t yet decided which lie to tell (indeed she had never told a lie, not a serious one, ever) and she knew that every lie would carry a high risk of exposure because all these top Communists knew one another, had been to school together, then to the Institute for Foreign Languages, after which they married each other and lived close to one another in their dachas and bred the next generation of Golden Youth. But already Katinka could hear her own voice sounding different, a lying voice.

“Comrade Agrippina Constantinova,” she started, “I bring you a gift from…Mariko Satinov. You know her, of course?”

Katinka clenched her teeth, trying to conceal her internal torment.

“Mariko?” queried Agrippina, head on one side.

“Yes.”

“I know Comrade Hercules Satinov,” said Agrippina reverently. “Not well of course, but I met him once at a concert at the Conservatoire and in the course of my work here, naturally.”

“Naturally,” agreed Katinka. “But you don’t know Mariko?”

Agrippina shook her head. “But she’s sent me a gift?”

“Yes, yes, by way of introducing me to you. She knows you, comrade, by name because of your dedicated and important work with her father, Comrade Marshal Satinov.”

Agrippina’s nostrils flared nobly as she puffed up her breast and seemed to swell with pride. “Comrade Satinov mentioned me?”

“Oh yes. I’m a friend of the family and he most certainly did mention you when he was telling me about how you helped him write his memoirs. He said he couldn’t have done the job without you.”

“Well, legendary Comrades Gromyko and Mikoyan, with whom I was fortunate enough to work on their books, said that their memoirs would not have been accomplished without my editorial skills.”

“That does not surprise me in the least,” said Katinka, finding that a lie, when it works, is an exhilarating thing, and soon leads to other lies. “Indeed, Comrade Satinov told me, ‘Young comrade, visit Agrippina Constantinovna, that master of editors, that keeper of the holy flame, and she’ll show you how we worked on the memoir, she’ll show you the drafts…’”

“You are a Communist, comrade…?”

“Katinka Vinsky. Yes, I was a Young Pioneer, then Komsomol and now I’m a historian writing a paper for Comrade Satinov about his role in the storming of Berlin.”

“Ah. There are so few young comrades left, how refreshing to meet one,” said Agrippina. She paused, and stopped smiling. “But why hasn’t Comrade Satinov called me? He knows he should make an appointment…”

“He is very ill,” said Katinka. “Lung cancer.”

“I heard. But I should ring his daughter, this Mariko, and check…” She moved toward the phones on the T-shaped desk.

“Wait, Agrippina Constantinova,” said Katinka, a little frantically, “Mariko’s nursing him today…at the Kremlevka Hospital. That’s why I just came without an appointment. Comrade Satinov, in a lucid moment, told Mariko to give you a certain gift—and you would know it was from him.” She patted her package.

“It’s for me?”

“Oh yes.”

“From Mariko Satinov and the marshal?” Her beetle eyes fixed on the gift.

Agrippina wiggled her bottom closer to the edge of her seat so that she was closer to the package. Katinka rested her hand on it protectively. “Do you have Marshal Satinov’s full memoirs here, the manuscript?” Katinka was following Maxy’s instructions.

“Yes, young girl, I do, in this pile.” A blue-ringed hand pointed at the heaps of yellowing manuscripts that covered every inch of the room. “You understand that our famous comrades dictated their memoirs to their assistants or to me personally and then it was my task to edit the book for the Party, according to the guidance of the Central Committee, leaving out any materials that might distract the public. Not all the episodes in Marshal Satinov’s memoirs, as with all the memoirs of our leaders, were included in the final version.”

“Marshal Satinov is most keen for me to glance at those sections…so I can appreciate your editorial work. Before he became too ill in the last day or so, he told Mariko to give you this present as another mark of his gratitude.” Katinka took the package in her hands. “Do you have the manuscript?”

“I really must ring the marshal’s house or speak to the Archive Director about this…”

“If you wish,” said Katinka, “but then I would have to give the gift to someone else.”

That decided the matter. Agrippina fell to her swollen, dimpled knees on the carpet and, bending over the heaps of paper, so that Katinka could again see the scaffolding of her garter belt, she began talking to herself softly, naming each manuscript. Finally, in triumph, she held up Satinov’s memoir. Breathing heavily and pink in the face, she sat back on the chair and focused her eyes on the package.

Katinka waited, expecting Agrippina to hand over the document now resting so comfortably on her lap, but nothing happened. Agrippina looked at her, plucked red eyebrows raised, and Katinka looked back. The atmosphere in the room changed as the air changes when it is about to rain.

“Oh yes, Agrippina Constantinovna, I almost forgot,” said Katinka at last. “A gift from the Satinovs,” and she handed over the weighty package.

Agrippina, beaming, grabbed the bag and drew out an enormous three-hundred-dollar bottle of Chanel No. 5.

“My favorite!” exclaimed Agrippina, hugging the bottle. “How did the marshal remember?”

“May I look at the manuscript?” asked Katinka.

“Only in this room,” answered Agrippina. “There are a few fragments that weren’t published. No one has ever read them except me.”

Katinka felt a sense of foreboding as she took the wad of pages.

“Put your feet up on the divan,” said Agrippina. “Enjoy the cold air of the fans, and the music of Glinka. You may take notes.”

Katinka glanced through the pages quickly. Much of it was familiar from Satinov’s turgid book—“How we conquered the Virgin Lands,” “Building homes for Soviet workers,” “Creating the Motor Tractor Stations,” “An interesting conversation with Comrade Gagarin on our conquest of space” and so on…Another waste of time, thought Katinka, but then, as Agrippina anointed her wrists and neck and even behind her ears with Madame Chanel’s priceless nectar, she found something that made her heart pound.

21

A conversation with J.V. Stalin, January 1940

By Hercules Satinov

One night about 2:00 a.m., I was at my desk in Old Square when the phone rang.

“It’s Poskrebyshev. Comrade Stalin wants to see you at the dacha. There’s a car waiting for you downstairs.”

Stalin favored me. We had made an alliance with Nazi Germany but we knew the war would come soon. The Party had ordered me to supervise the creation of new tanks and artillery for the Red Army. I had been invited to the dacha twice already to discuss my work. So I wasn’t afraid, though when you went to see Stalin you never quite knew where it would end.

The car had chains on its wheels to avoid skidding on the ice—it was minus twenty degrees, a truly freezing winter. We sped up the Mozhaisk Highway and turned off into a drive through a forest of oaks, pines, firs, maples and birches. The occasional guard could be seen against the snows.

Two security gates let us through. Lastly a green steel gate opened and there was Stalin’s real home, the Kuntsevo dacha, a plain two-story house, recently painted khaki in case war came.

A guard in NKVD blue met us at the door and showed me inside. I left my coat on the coatrack. Stalin’s office was on the left, heaped with books and journals, but then out of the library on the right, which was filled with bookcases, came Stalin himself in a grey tunic and boots.

“Evening, bicho,” he said quietly, grinning. He always called me bicho—it means “boy” in Georgian. “Come in and have a drink and some food. Have you eaten?”

Of course I had eaten already but in those days we all worked according to Stalin’s nocturnal habits.

“Comrade Beria’s here and the others are coming.” He led the way into a big room with a huge dining-room table, heavy chairs and divans, the ceiling and walls paneled in Karelian pine, with posters by Russian artists. At one end of the table there was a buffet, a Georgian feast, with plates for us to help ourselves.

Lavrenti Beria was already standing at the table, holding a glass of wine. He greeted me in Georgian. With Stalin, you see, we were three Georgians in icy Russia!

Stalin, pouring me some wine and taking some himself, sat down at the table. I sat between the two of them.

“So,” said Stalin, lighting up a Herzegovina Flor cigarette, “what happened with the Sashenka case?”

The mention of her name always had an emotional effect on me, which I hoped was invisible.

“She seemed such a decent Soviet woman,” said Stalin. “I remember seeing her in Lenin’s office in Petrograd…” He shook his head sadly. “In our world, people can wear masks for decades.”

I looked at Beria.

“She confessed everything,” said Beria.

“The trial went smoothly,” I added.

“You knew her well, didn’t you, boy?” said Stalin to me.

I nodded.

“Did they all disarm and show remorse?” asked Stalin, dropping his cigarette into the bowl of his pipe and making puffs of smoke. “At the end?”

“Vanya Palitsyn disarmed,” said Beria, laughing hoarsely. “He took it well, shouting out, ‘Long live Comrade Stalin!’ at the last moment.”

Stalin sucked on his pipe, golden eyes half closed.

“But Mendel, what an old fool!” Beria continued. “He refused to disarm.”

“He was always such a stickler for rules,” said Stalin rather fondly.

“I did as you asked with Mendel,” said Beria.

Stalin and Beria exchanged a quick conspiratorial smile—I knew they enjoyed their intrigues. I once heard Beria talking about arranging a fatal car crash for a comrade who was too well known to arrest and execute.

“Boy, are you interested in hearing about Mendel?” Stalin asked me.

“Yes,” I said, though in truth I dreaded it.

“Tell him, Lavrenti,” ordered Stalin.

“I told Mendel, ‘Confess your crimes and Comrade Stalin will guarantee your life,’” explained Beria, “and you know what Mendel did? He shouted, ‘Never! I’m innocent and will be an honest Bolshevik until I die!’ He spat at me and then in Kobylov’s face…”

“That was a mistake,” mused Stalin.

“Kobylov went crazy and gave him a real beating, and that was that.”

“What pride! What foolish pride!” Stalin looked at me. “But you curated the case, boy?”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin. I curated as you asked.” I could not help but give Beria a heavy look. Stalin was so sensitive, he divined it immediately.

“Well?” he asked.

“Nothing special,” said Beria, and he kicked my shin hard under the table. But however dangerous Beria may have been, it was never a good idea to hide anything from Stalin.

“There was an irregularity, Comrade Stalin, in one of the executions,” I said finally, feeling unwell.

“An irregularity?” repeated Stalin coldly.

Beria gave me another kick in the leg but it was too late.

“The NKVD has professional and devoted cadres but this was a rare example of philistine infantilism,” I said, starting to sweat.

“Did you know about this, Comrade Beria?”

“I heard about it, Comrade Stalin, and am investigating.”

“I thought you’d cleansed the Organs of this sort of shit? The guilty must be punished.” He turned to us both and scrutinized us carefully. “Right. Comrades Beria and Satinov, form a commission of Comrades Shkiryatov, Malenkov, Merkulov. I want a report fast.”

Just then we heard the purr of cars driving up to the house, doors slamming. Stalin stood up and went to greet members of the Politburo, who had arrived for dinner.

Beria and I were left alone.

“You motherfucker,” said Beria, jabbing me in the side, “why the fuck did you have to mention that to him?” But then Molotov, Voroshilov and the other leaders joined us in the dining room.

When we were helping ourselves to dinner, Stalin appeared next to me, standing very close.

“That pretty girl Sashenka,” he murmured. “What terrible decisions we have to make.”

22

“Have you finished, dear?” asked Agrippina. As the Parisian perfume thickened the air, Katinka absorbed Satinov’s revelation. Maxy was right; she was becoming obsessed with these strangers—people who had nothing to do with her, yet whose stories consumed her. She had longed to find out what had happened to them, but the excised pages from Satinov’s memoir had raised even more questions. Saddest of all, she was now sure that Sashenka was dead. She would have to ring Roza and tell her both her parents had been killed by Stalin’s thugs. Sashenka’s husband had been shot crying “Long live Comrade Stalin” and her uncle Mendel had not died of a heart attack but been bludgeoned to death.

But how had Sashenka died? What had been the “irregularity?” Had she been gang-raped by the guards, tortured to death, starved? Only one person could tell her: she had to rush to Satinov. However angry he had been with her last night, she had to see him before he died.

“Thank you,” she managed to say to Agrippina.

“Please give my regards to the comrade marshal and his daughter and thank them for remembering me with this gift.”

“Yes, of course.” Katinka was already on her way to the elevator.

Fighting back tears, she waited a few minutes but it didn’t come, and suddenly she realized she was not alone. The archive rat who had ridden up with her to the fourth floor was standing beside her, leaning on his cart of files and humming. Finally he cleared his throat.

“This elevator’s broken. You must use our elevator.”

Katinka noticed that he said “must”—but she was so upset she did not care. He hummed as they walked round the rectangular building, his yellow shoes squeaking, until they reached a dirtier, rustier elevator with sawdust on its floor. It soon grunted and heaved on its way.

What would she tell Roza? A wave of despair overcame her. Satinov wouldn’t see her again; Mariko would throw her out. And now she would never find Carlo.

At last the elevator jerked to a halt but they weren’t in the foyer; they were underground somewhere. The archive rat held open the door.

“Please,” he said.

“But this is the wrong floor,” she objected.

The archive rat looked up and down an underground passageway.

“I’ve got some documents to show you.”

“I’m sorry,” Katinka said, suddenly scared and vigilant, “I don’t know you. I’ve got to—” She pressed the button for the first floor but the man held the door.

“I’m Apostollon Shcheglov,” he said, as if expecting her to know the name, which meant “goldfinch.”

“I’m late. I must rush,” she insisted, pressing the button again and again.

“Better to sing well as a goldfinch than badly as a nightingale,” he said, quoting the Krylov fable.

Katinka stopped and stared at him.

Shcheglov’s smile was adorned by two gold teeth.

“Do you remember who said that to you?” he asked. “Let me give you a clue: Utesov and Tseferman.”

Of course, it was Kuzma’s weird good-bye.

“We archivists all know one another. We’re a secret order. Come on,” he said, showing her a well-lit corridor of solid concrete. “This is one of the safest places in the world, Katinka, if I may call you that. This is where our nation’s history is protected.”

Still feeling nervous, Katinka allowed herself to be led. They came to a white steel door like the entrance to a submarine or a bomb shelter. Shcheglov turned a large chrome wheel, opened three different locks and then tapped a code into an electronic pad. The door shifted sideways and then slid open: it was about two feet thick. “This can withstand a full nuclear assault. If the Americans attacked us with all their H-bombs, you and I, the President in the Kremlin and the generals at headquarters would be the only people left alive in Moscow.”

Another reinforced door had to be opened like the first. Katinka glanced behind her. She felt horribly vulnerable—suppose Kuzma had been caught giving her the documents and the KGB had forced him to lure her here?

Still humming, Shcheglov entered a small office to one side, always holding a tune at the back of his throat. His desk was tidy, stacked with files, but the expansive table in front of it was covered in a colored relief map, showing valleys, rivers and houses, peopled by tin soldiers, cannons, banners and horses, all exquisitely painted.

“I made and decorated every one of them myself. Would you like me to show you? Are you in a hurry?”

Katinka had never been in such a hurry. Satinov was dying, taking Sashenka’s secret with him, and she had to get to him fast. But suppose this archive rat had the documents she needed? She knew that top secret and closed files were stored down here and he must have asked her to follow him for a reason. She decided to humor him.

“I’d love to see more of your toy soldiers,” she said.

“Not toys. This is a historical re-enactment,” he insisted, “precise in every detail, even down to the ammunition in the cannons and the shakos of the Dragoons. You’re a historian, can you guess the battle?”

Katinka circled the table as Shcheglov bounced on his yellow plastic toes with pleasure.

She noted the Napoleonic Grande Armée on one side and the Russian Guards Regiments on the other. “It’s 1812 of course,” she said slowly. “That must be the Raevsky Redoubt, Barclay de Tolly’s forces here, Prince Bagration here facing French Marshals Murat and Ney. Napoleon himself with the Guard here. It’s the Battle of Borodino!” she said triumphantly.

“Hurrah!” he cried. “Now let me show you where we keep our documents.” He opened a further steel door into a subterranean hall stacked with metal cabinets holding thousands upon thousands of numbered files. “Many of these will still be closed long after we’re dead. This is my life’s work and I wouldn’t show you anything that I felt undermined the security of the Motherland. But your research is just a footnote, albeit a very interesting footnote. Please sit at my desk and I’ll show you your materials.”

“Why are you helping me?” she asked.

“Only as a favor to a respected comrade archivist—and uncle. Yes, Kuzma’s my uncle. We archivists are all related: my father works at the State Archive and my grandfather before him.”

“An imperial dynasty of archivists,” said Katinka.

“Between ourselves, that’s exactly how I see it!” Shcheglov beamed, gold teeth flashing in the electric light. “You’re not to copy anything even into a notebook. Remember, girl, none of this is ever to be published. Agreed?”

Katinka nodded and sat at his desk. He took a shallow pile of beige files off a shelf, opened a file, licked his finger and turned some pages.

“Scene one. A list of one hundred and twenty-three names—each with a number—signed by Stalin and a quorum of the Politburo on nine January 1940.”

Katinka’s heart raced. A deathlist. Shcheglov hummed as he ran his finger down the list.

82. Palitsyn, I. N.

83. Zeitlin-Palitsyn, A. S. (Comrade Snowfox)

84. Barmakid, Mendel

She noted the list was addressed to Stalin and the Politburo and signed in a tiny, neat green ink by L. P. Beria, Narkom NKVD.

Shcheglov’s finger traveled to the scrawls around the typed names:

Agreed. Molotov

Crush these traitors like snakes. I vote for the Vishka! Kaganovich

Shoot these whores and scoundrels like dogs. Voroshilov

And most decisively:

Shoot them all.

J. St.

“So they were sentenced,” she said, “but were they all…?”

“Scene two.” Shcheglov slid the document across the desk with a flourish, turned back to the shelf, hunted around for a few moments and then presented a scuffed memorandum, bearing in its careless scrawl and clumsy blotting the grinding boredom, stained desks, greasy fingers and the rough routine of prisons.

To Comrade Commandant of Special Object 110, Golechev

21 January 1940

Transfer to Major V. S. Blokhin, Head of Command Operations, the below-mentioned prisoners condemned to be shot…

The 123 names on the list were typed below. Sashenka and Vanya were near the top. A bunch of more than a hundred blotched, crumpled chits—pro-forma memoranda with the names and dates filled in—was held together by a thick red string pushed through a hole in the sheaf.

Her hands shaking, Katinka found Vanya Palitsyn’s chit.

On the orders of Comrade Kobylov, Deputy Narkom NKVD, the undersigned on 21 January 1940 at 4:41 a.m. carried out the sentence of shooting on…and here the semiliterate scribble of a half-drunk executioner added the name Palitsyn, Ivan. The man who carried out the sentence was V. S. Blokhin. Katinka had heard of him from Maxy: he usually wore a butcher’s leather apron and cap to shield his beloved NKVD uniform from the spatter of blood.

Katinka felt herself in the presence of evil and nothingness. She was not crying, she was too overwhelmed for that. Instead she felt dizzy and faint.

The other chits were the same. She could only think that every scrap, so sloppily filled in, was the end of a life and a family. She could barely bring herself to look at Sashenka’s—but then she started to turn the pages too fast, almost tearing them.

“I can’t find her,” she said, her voice shaking.

Shcheglov looked at his watch. “We haven’t got long before my colleague returns. Now we go back over six months to how the case began. Take a look at this. Scene three.”

He placed a yellowing piece of paper before her, headed in black type—OFFICE OF J. V. STALIN. Its entire surface was covered in squiggles and shading in thick green and red crayon, doodles of wolves and apparently random words. But Stalin’s secretary had annotated the exact date and time: 7 May 1939. Sent to archives 11:42 p.m. That was the evening when Beria had shown Stalin the transcript of Sashenka and Benya in bed together at the Metropole.

Katinka looked into the bottle-thick, greasy lenses of Shcheglov’s spectacles, which reflected her own anxious eyes, then down at the papers before her. Slowly, she started to piece together the drama of the night that had doomed Sashenka and her whole family. She knew how Stalin had read the bugging transcript and hated it, calling Sashenka morally corrupt…like a streetwalker. She got her notebook out of her bag and glanced back at the order of Stalin’s visitors that night:

10:00 p.m. L. P. Beria.

Leaves 10:30 p.m.

10:30 p.m. H. A. Satinov.

Leaves 10:45 p.m.

10:40 p.m. L. P. Beria.

Leaves 10:52 p.m.

By the time Beria left Stalin’s office at 10:30 p.m., Satinov was waiting in the anteroom. Stalin called in Satinov and asked him about Sashenka’s affair.

Katinka perused the new page of Stalin’s squiggles and, with a rising horror, she started to understand.

Questions for Comrade Satinov: Sashenka in St. Petersburg was in the middle of the page, surrounded by circles, squares and a finely drawn fox’s face, shaded in red and entitled Comrade Snowfox. Satinov must have answered these questions coolly because Stalin scrawled down his answer: Old friends, devoted Bolsheviks.

Then Stalin called in Beria again and they intensified their cross-examination of Satinov. The next words were scarcely legible.

“I can’t quite read this,” she said.

The archivist followed the words with his finger and read out:

Snowfox in St. Petersburg reliable/unreliable?

L. P. Beria: Molotov and Mendel in St. Petersburg?

Katinka realized that these were all questions to Satinov. She started to imagine his struggle for survival during those five minutes. What could he say? He must have been pale, sweating, his mind spinning. He had a sweet wife and a new baby, but he was a devoted Communist and an ambitious man. His answers during those five minutes would either save his life and make his career, or destroy his own life and that of his wife and baby.

When Stalin asked about Sashenka’s “reliability” in Petersburg, a name must have come to Satinov’s mind: Captain Sagan, whom he knew of only from his dealings with Mendel in late 1916.

Did Stalin already know about Sashenka’s mission to turn Sagan, and that it had been ordered by the Petersburg Committee? If he talked about it now, and no one knew of it, it could taint Sashenka, although this was unlikely since Sagan had been dead for twenty-two years.

But what if Molotov or Mendel, the only others apart from Sashenka who knew about the Sagan operation, had already discussed it with Stalin? Satinov would then be accused of hiding it from the Party, from Stalin himself. That was unthinkable. That would mean death.

Katinka stared down at the crayoned hieroglyphics that revealed this feverish game of Russian roulette that would still decree the destinies of people fifty years later.

So what did Satinov do? Did he panic and say more than he meant? Or did he calculate and act in cold blood?

“We’ll probably never know.” She found she was talking aloud.

“But we do know he said this…,” replied Shcheglov, his finger showing her the next words written by Stalin on this crowded piece of paper: Hercules S: Cpt Sagan. Petersburg. SAGAN

Katinka went cold. So Satinov had told Stalin and Beria about Sashenka and Captain Sagan of the Okhrana. She felt pity for Satinov, and then anger, and then pity again. He might have answered differently if he had known that Captain Sagan was alive—and in one of Beria’s camps, his name meticulously filed in the NKVD roster of prisoners. Within hours, Sagan was on his way to Moscow and Kobylov was beating him into testifying against Sashenka.

“If Satinov had brazened it out,” she whispered, “they might all have survived.”

“Or he might have faced the Vishka too,” Shcheglov pointed out. “Have you seen enough?” He started to gather up the papers and put them away in his orderly files where they would rest, perhaps forever.

“So Satinov doomed his best friends,” Katinka mused, “but then risked everything to save their children. Does that redeem him?”

Shcheglov gestured toward the elevator, in a hurry to get her out of his office, but she gripped his arms. “Hang on, there’s one thing missing. Stalin created a commission to investigate Sashenka’s execution. Where is its report?”

“There was a number for the file,” said Shcheglov, guiding her toward the elevator. “But the file’s not here. Sorry, but only God knows everything.” He pressed the button to call the elevator.

“Thank you for showing me this,” she said, kissing him as she left. “You’ve been very kind. I can’t tell you what this means to me.”

“And you care too much,” he said, squeezing her hands.

As she stepped into the elevator, she reviewed the combination of the extract from Satinov’s memoirs and Stalin’s enigmatic note, Bicho to curate, on the papers Maxy had shown her in the Party archive.

Bicho—boy in Georgian—was Stalin’s nickname for Satinov. “Curate” was Stalin’s word for what he wanted Satinov to do: supervise the destruction of a family he loved.

“Oh God,” she gasped, finally understanding it all. “Satinov saw her die. What did they do to her?”

23

Rushing out of the archive and onto Mayakovsky Square, Katinka waved down a Lada. It sped her down the hill toward the Granovsky. Fizzing with urgency, she rang five bells simultaneously, the door buzzed and she raced upstairs to the Satinov apartment. The door was again open but when she entered, Mariko was standing in the hall beneath the crystal chandelier.

“Mariko, I know what you think but please—I’ve got to tell him what I’ve discovered. He’s helped me every step of the way without me realizing. I know he’ll want to talk to me now.”

Katinka stopped and caught her breath. Mariko did not throw her out. She didn’t say anything at all and Katinka, who had never really looked at her before, noticed that Mariko did not seem angry. Her dark, pointed face was desperately tired.

“Come in,” she said quietly. “You can see him.” She walked down the hallway, passing the sitting room. Katinka followed, peering eagerly ahead. “Go on in.”

Satinov lay in bed, propped up on pillows with his eyes closed. His face, his hair, his lips seemed the color of ashes. A nurse was by the bed, adjusting the oxygen tank and the plastic mask, but when she saw them she nodded briskly and left the room.

Katinka, who had so much to ask, was suddenly uncertain what to do. Satinov’s breathing was ragged; sometimes his chest rose jerkily, at other times he did not breathe for some seconds. He was sweating with effort and fear. Katinka knew she should feel pity for this dying man but instead she felt only fury and frustration. How could he escape her like this? How could he be so cruel as to leave Roza without ever telling anyone what happened to her mother?

Katinka glanced at Mariko, who gestured at the low chair by the bed. “You can talk to him,” Mariko said. “For a minute or two. He asked where you were. He was thinking about you and your research. That’s why I let you in.”

“Can he hear me?”

“I think so. He speaks sometimes, his lips move. He’s talked about my mother a bit but it’s hard to understand. The doctors say…We’re not sure.” Mariko leaned back against the doorpost, stretched her back and rubbed her face.

Katinka stood up, leaned over the bed, then looked back at Mariko.

“Go ahead,” she said.

Katinka took Satinov’s hand in hers. “It’s Katinka. Your researcher. I say ‘your’ researcher because you’ve held all the cards all along and you’ve sent me this way and that…If you can hear me, let me know somehow. You can squeeze my hand or even just blink.” She waited but he took another desperate breath, his entire body shivered, and he settled down again. “I know you loved Sashenka and Vanya, I know you did a terrible thing and I know how you saved their children. But what happened to Sashenka? What did you see? Please tell me how she died.”

There was no reaction. Katinka realized that this old man was a study in ambiguities. He had helped and encouraged her but also tricked and obstructed her, just as he had doomed Sashenka and saved her children. She grieved for him yet at the same time she’d never felt more enraged.

He was quiet for a few minutes but then his breathing became more of a struggle, his hands clawing the bedspread as his body twisted to get oxygen. The nurse returned and gave him oxygen and an injection, and he grew calmer again.

“I’ll get my brothers in a minute,” said Mariko. “They’re sleeping down the corridor. We’ve been up all night.”

Katinka stood up and walked to the door.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Thank you for letting me in. I wish now I’d brought Roza to see him…I had so much to ask him.” She looked back at the bed, hoping for him to call her back. “I’ll let myself out.”

Just then they heard his voice. Katinka spun round and the two of them returned to the bedside. Satinov’s lips were moving a little.

“What’s he saying?” asked Katinka.

Mariko took his hands and kissed his forehead. “Papa, it’s Mariko, right here with you, darling Papa.”

He moved his lips again, but they could hear nothing. After a while his lips stopped moving and, as his family filed into the room, Katinka slipped away.

Outside, Maxy waited, smoking as he leaned on his bike. Katinka walked out into his arms, smelling the leather of his jacket and the smoke of his cigarette. She was very glad he was there.

“He’s dying? A terrible thing to see. But you’ve done all you can…”

“It’s over,” she said, “and I’m exhausted. I’ll phone Roza, collate my notes and put her in contact with anyone she wants to meet.”

“What will you do now?”

“I’m going home. I want to see my friends, and there’s a boy who wants to take me on vacation. Perhaps it’s best that we never know how Sashenka died. My papa was right. I should never have taken this job. I’m going back to Catherine the Great.”

“But you’re so good at this,” said Maxy. “Katinka, please come and work with me at the foundation. We could achieve so much together.”

She shook her head and collected herself. “No thanks. There’s no fruit, no harvest in this sort of history; all these fields are sown with salt. It may be old history but the poison is fresh and the unhappiness lives on. No, the turning over of old graves isn’t for me. It’s too painful. Good-bye, Maxy, and thanks for everything.”

She wiped her eyes and started to walk away.

“Katinka!” Maxy called after her.

She half turned.

“Katinka, can I call you sometime?”

24

But Katinka had reckoned without the persuasive force of Pasha Getman.

“You can’t just give up and walk away from us,” he’d roared at her when she’d phoned to say she’d done all she could. Then he’d said in a quieter voice, “What about my mother? She’s so fond of you. We need you to do one final thing for us. Think of it as a personal favor to Roza.”

And so it was that three days later, taking Pasha’s private plane, Katinka and Roza had flown down to Tbilisi (which was, as Pasha reminded Katinka, almost on her way home). Some of Pasha’s bodyguards had driven them straight to the picturesque café in the old vine-entangled mansion.

“Lala,” said Katinka to the old lady in the small room upstairs. “I’ve brought someone to meet you.”

Lala Lewis, holding her usual glass of Georgian wine, sat up in bed and focused on the doorway.

“Is it her? Is it Sashenka?” she asked.

“No, Lala, but it is almost Sashenka. This is Roza Getman, Sashenka’s daughter, whom you knew as Snowy.”

“Ohh,” Lala sighed and held out her hands. “Come closer. I’m very old. Come sit on my bed. Let me look at you. Let me see into your eyes.”

“Hello, Lala,” said Roza, her voice trembling, “it’s been more than fifty years since you cared for us.”

Katinka watched as Roza, dressed neatly in a white blouse, blue cardigan and cream skirt, her grey hair still coiffed in the style of her youth, walked forward slowly, looking around her at the trinkets of a vanished life. She seemed to hesitate for a moment at the sight of the old nanny’s outstretched hands and then, smiling, as if Lala were somehow familiar to her, she sat on the bed.

Lala took Roza’s hands, not only squeezing them with all her might but shaking them too. Neither woman said a word, but from where she was standing Katinka could see Roza’s shoulders shaking, and the tears streaming down Lala’s cheeks. Feeling like an intruder suddenly, she walked to the window and looked out. The sounds and smells of Tbilisi—the singing of someone in the street and the aromas of tkemali, lavashi bread, ground coffee and apple blossom—rose around her.

This is the last scene of the drama, Katinka told herself. She’d done what Pasha asked. She’d brought these two women together, exposing herself in the process to more pain than she’d thought possible. Now she would go home, back to Papa and Mama—and to Andrei.

Lala stroked Roza’s face. “Dear child, I dreamed of seeing your mother again. I must tell you all about her because there was no one like her. Look, there’s her picture as a schoolgirl at the Smolny. See? I used to collect her in the baron’s landaulet, or motorcar I should say nowadays. Samuil, the baron, was your grandfather and you never met him though he knew all about you. And not a day passed when I didn’t think of you and your brother Carlo. As a girl you were so like your mother—she was blond as an angel when she was young—and you have the violet eyes of your grandmother, Ariadna. Oh darling child, think of me, a girl from England. I’ve lived long enough to see the Tsar fall and the barbarians come to power and fall too and now to see you here—I can’t quite believe it.”

“I’m hardly a child,” Roza laughed, “I’m sixty.”

“Methuselah’s young to me!” Lala answered. “Do you remember the days we spent together before…”

Roza nodded. “I think so…Yes, I remember seeing you in a canteen in a station. You had Carlo’s favorite cookies. I remember walking hand in hand with you and then…”

“I struggled in those times to keep my head above water,” Lala continued. “I had lost my darling charge, Sashenka, and your grandfather. And then I was granted a few days of such happiness with you and Carlo. When I had settled you with your new parents, I considered killing myself. Only the thought that someone dear to me would return kept me alive. And do you know, the most unlikely person of all did come back.”

“Lala,” interrupted Katinka, trying not to interfere yet still burning with curiosity, “only Stalin could have saved Samuil’s life. Did you ever learn why?”

Lala nodded. “After the monster died, everyone here sobbed and mourned. There were even demonstrations in his honor. But I was delighted. Samuil was very ill then so I said, ‘Now you can tell me why you were released.’ He said he didn’t know exactly but in 1907 he had given shelter—and a hundred rubles—to a pockmarked Georgian revolutionary. He let him stay in the doorman’s cottage of his house here in Tbilisi when the police were searching for him. Later he realized it was Stalin, and Stalin never forgot a slight or a favor.” Lala looked back at Roza, whose hands she still held. Sometimes she raised Roza’s hands to her lips and kissed them. “I’ll die happy now,” she said.

“You’re my only connection to my mother,” said Roza. “You know, I almost hated my parents all through my childhood. They’d abandoned me and I never knew why. I couldn’t imagine what I had done wrong for them to reject me. Yet I thought of them all the time. Sometimes I dreamed they were dead; often I looked at the Bear in the sky because Papa had told me that he would always be there. Only when I was older did I realize that perhaps something bad had happened to them and they had had no choice but to leave me. But all through my life I’ve never been able to cry about them.”

Roza turned to Katinka. “You’ve done so well, my dear. Thank you from the bottom of my heart—thank you. You’ve changed my life. But I know you’re keen to get home and Pasha’s plane’s waiting at the airport to fly you to Vladikavkaz. Please go whenever you want to.”

Katinka kissed Roza and Lala and walked to the door—then stopped.

“I can’t go quite yet,” she said, turning back. “May I stay and listen? I’m afraid I’ve become more involved than I should have.”

Roza jumped up and hugged her. “Of course, I’m so pleased you feel like that. I’ve become very fond of you.” She sat on the bed again. “Lala, thanks to Katinka, I know about you and my parents. But please, tell me about Carlo.”

Lala took a sip of her wine and closed her eyes. “He was the sweetest child, built just like a little bear with adorable brown eyes, and he was such a child of love, so affectionate. He used to stroke my face with his hands and kiss me on the nose. The day I had to let him go was one of the cruelest of my life. We were at the Beria Orphanage—can you imagine a children’s home named after that creature? The day before, Snowy, I had seen you go away with the Liberharts and I could tell they were intelligentsia, Jewish professors, but you fought and kicked and screamed, and I cried for hours. I’d have kept you myself if I’d had the chance. But Satinov said, ‘Your husband won’t come back; they’ll come for you any day—and what of the children then? No, we must settle them so they have stable, loving families.’ The next day, two peasants from the north Caucasus turned up. They were collective-farm workers, Russians with some Cossack blood, but so primitive they actually came into Tbilisi on a tractor and cart, having delivered vegetables from their collective to the marketplace. I could tell they were uneducated and tough—they had hay in their hair. But I couldn’t question anything. We were so lucky that Satinov had arranged the whole thing. But Carlo was so sensitive. He had to have his Kremlin cookies because he had low blood sugar and felt faint. He had to be stroked to sleep at night, no fewer than eleven strokes—as Carolina the nanny had shown me. When they took him, I sank to the floor so distraught that I may have fainted. I don’t remember much of what happened afterward but a doctor came. I was inconsolable…”

Katinka felt a sudden shiver of excitement. Satinov had arranged the whole thing. Of course, it all came back to her. What had he said at their second meeting? Your name is Vinsky? How did you get this job? Yes, Academician Beliakov was right to choose you out of his hundreds of students. She remembered how annoyed she’d been, how she’d felt he was playing with her. But he hadn’t been. He’d been telling her something. How naïve she’d been, she thought. The spark of revelation fluttered, then blazed inside her. The Getmans’ advertisement for a researcher had appeared in the faculty newsletter, but she had been given the job even though she hadn’t even applied. Academician Beliakov had approached her in the library and told her, “The job’s for you. No other applicants necessary.”

“How did you choose me as your researcher?” Katinka asked Roza. “Did you interview other applicants?”

“No,” she said. “We first sent a letter to Marshal Satinov. He was the only name I had. The only link. He refused to help us and said there was no connection to him. He insisted we needed a historian and put us in contact with Academician Beliakov, who placed the advert.”

“What did Beliakov tell you?”

“There were lots of applicants but you were the best—we didn’t need to see anyone else.”

Katinka got up, aware that Roza and Lala were looking at her strangely. Her heart was pounding. Only Satinov knew the names of the adoptive families, she thought. Did this mean that he knew something about her too? If so, when he received Roza’s letter, all he had to do was call his friend Academician Beliakov: “When some millionaires want to hire a student for some family research, give them the Vinsky girl.” She had been searching for Carlo in the archives, when all the time he’d been much, much closer.

“I have to go,” she told Roza, already at the door and running down the steps. “I have to talk to my father.”

25

“We longed for a child of our own,” Baba told the family as they sat in the shabby living room of their blue-shuttered cottage.

Katinka looked around the familiar room in the house where she had grown up. Every face was anguished and it was her doing. Her sturdy grandmother, Baba, in her floral housecoat and with a red kerchief on her head, sat in the middle on the frayed, sunken chair, her wide face a picture of anxiety. Katinka had never seen her so distraught. Her peppery, splenetic grandfather, Bedbug, paced the room, spitting curses at her. But it was her beloved father who caused her the greatest pain.

Dr. Vinsky had driven straight from his office, still in his white coat, to meet her at the airport. When he saw his precious daughter, he had hugged and kissed her.

“I’m so pleased you’re home,” he said. “The light of my life. Is everything all right? Are you OK, darling?”

She looked into his thoughtful and serious face, so matinee-idol handsome with that dimple in his chin, and realized that she was a time bomb about to shatter his family. “What is it?” he said.

Then and there, she told him the whole story.

He said nothing for a while then lit up a cigarette. Katinka waited nervously but he did not argue with her. He just went on smoking and pondering.

“Papochka, tell me, should I have kept silent? Shall we forget it?”

“No,” he said. “If it’s true, I want to find my sister, if I have one. I want to know who my real parents were. But beyond that, I think it will change little for me. I know who I am. My parents have loved me all my life and they’ll always be my parents and I’ll always be the boy they loved. But it could break their hearts—and that would break mine in turn. Let me talk to them…”

The rest of the drive home was silent. As they drove into the village of Beznadezhnaya, Katinka should have been full of the joy of homecoming. But now the village itself seemed different; the cottage had changed; it was as if everything had been shaken up and put together differently in a thousand little ways.

Without Katinka’s mother, the family might have broken apart on her father’s anguished silence and the obstinate secrecy of the grandparents. But as soon as Katinka explained everything to her, Tatiana—often so vague and featherbrained—set to work calming her husband and reassuring Bedbug and Baba.

At first, her grandparents claimed to know nothing. They said it was all a mistake and Katinka wondered if she had imagined everything. Perhaps she had become overinvolved in Sashenka’s story? Perhaps she was so obsessed she was losing her mind?

“This is a dagger through my heart,” Baba had told her son. “A lie, a libel!” She sat down defiantly. “What a thing to say!”

Bedbug was raging. “Haven’t we loved you all your life? Haven’t we been good parents? And this is how you thank us—by claiming we’re nothing to you!” He turned on Katinka. “Why toss these lies in our faces? Shame on you, Katinka! Is this some trick, some joke of those rich Jews in Moscow?”

Katinka was racked with pain and doubt. She looked at her father. She had never seen his face so tormented.

Then Katinka’s mother intervened. “Dear parents,” she said, “you’ve been like parents to me and I know Valentin loves you more than you can know.” She turned to her husband. “Darling, tell them how you feel. Tell them now.”

“Papa, Mama,” he said, kneeling at the feet of the old peasant woman and taking her hands. “You’re my parents. You’ll always be my beloved Mamochka and Papochka. If I was adopted, it’ll change nothing for me. You’ve loved me all my life. I know nothing but your loving kindness. I know who I am, and I will always be the little boy you’ve loved as long as I can remember. If you chose not to tell me before, I understand. In those days, people didn’t talk about such things. But if there is anything you’d like to tell me now, we’ll all listen and love you just the same afterward.”

His speech touched Katinka deeply, and she looked into Baba’s face and saw it soften by degrees. The old peasants exchanged glances, then her grandmother shrugged. “I want to tell the story,” she said to her husband.

“All lies,” said Bedbug but he was quieter now.

Some secrets are denied for so long, thought Katinka, that they no longer seem real.

Then Bedbug waved his gnarled fingers at his wife. “Tell it if you must.” He sat on the sofa and lit a cigarette.

“Go on, Mama,” said Dr. Vinsky, lighting up too. He got up and poured some cha-cha into a tiny glass and gave it to her. “I want to hear your story—whatever it is.”

Baba took a deep breath, downed the cha-cha and, looking round the room, opened her hands. “Me and Bedbug had been married for eight years—and no children. Nothing. It was a curse to be childless. Even though I was a true Communist, I visited the priests for a blessing; I saw the quack in the next village. Still nothing. Bedbug wouldn’t discuss it…Then one day, I heard in the collective-farm office that a bigshot official from Moscow was coming on a tour to inspect our new tractor stations. He was talking to everyone informally and he wanted to talk to us. It was Comrade Satinov.”

“Did you already know him?” asked Katinka.

“Yes,” said Baba. “In 1931, the campaign to collectivize the villages and destroy the richer peasants, the kulaks, came to our region. All the kulaks were being deported; many were shot here in the villages; there were grain searches and famine. It was a time of dread. Bedbug was denounced as a kulak. We were on the list to be arrested. All the others on that list were shot. Comrade Satinov was in charge, and I don’t know why but for some reason he intervened and had our names taken off the list. We owed him our lives. Eight years later, in 1939, he again blessed us. He asked us to take in a three-year-old boy. ‘Love him as a treasured gift,’ he said. ‘Take this secret to your grave. Bring him up as if he were your own.’ One day we got the call from the Beria Orphanage and we went into Tbilisi and collected…a little boy with brown eyes and a dimple in his chin. The most beautiful little boy in the world.”

“You were our son, our own,” said Bedbug.

“We loved you from the moment we saw you,” added Baba.

“Did you ever contact Satinov?” asked Katinka.

“Only once.” Bedbug turned to address his son. “You wanted to be a doctor. It was hard to get into the best medical schools and none of my family had ever been past grade school. So I called Comrade Satinov—and he got you into Leningrad University.”

“When you were little,” continued Baba, “you remembered something. You cried about your mother, and your father, and your nanny, a dacha and a journey. You had a toy rabbit that you loved so much that we raised our own rabbits in the hutch in the garden and you fed them, gave them names, loved them like we loved you. I held you at night and gradually you forgot the past and loved us. And we adored you so much in return, we could never tell you…And that’s God’s truth. If we’ve done wrong, tell us.”

When her father kissed his parents, Katinka could not watch. She stepped outside onto the veranda to admire the budding plenty of spring, the lush honeysuckle, the trilling, diving swallows, the rushing of frothy streams and far away the snow-peaked mountains. But she could see and hear nothing—just her father’s loving face and the howling of her grandmother, who cried in the uninhibited way that peasants have always cried.

26

The body of Hercules Satinov lay in a casket of glazed oak and scarlet satin in the sitting room of the Granovsky apartment. Standing on an easel behind the coffin was a portrait of Satinov that Katinka hadn’t seen before: it depicted him as a dashing commissar in the civil war, in his early twenties. He was on horseback in a leather coat, Mauser pistol in his hand and a rifle slung across his back, leading a line of Red Cossacks in a charge across snowy wastes. Katinka thought that this Red Cavalry commander was probably no older than she was now.

Two days earlier, Mariko had called Katinka at home to say that her father had died the night before and to invite Sashenka’s children to pay their respects.

Roza was already in Moscow so Pasha sent his plane for Katinka and her father. Roza was almost girlish in her excitement: “I’m going to meet Carlo again,” she told Katinka on the phone. “I can’t believe it. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him, I don’t know what to wear. Is your father as excited as I am?”

As she lay in bed that night, Katinka imagined the reunion of brother and sister, how happy it would have made Sashenka and Vanya and how it would play out: who would run into whose arms? Who would cry and who would laugh? Her diffident father would hold back a little while Roza would hug him passionately…She had made it happen; she was responsible for this meeting, and she wanted it to go according to plan.

At that moment when the black of night turns into the blue of dawn, Katinka sat up in bed, pulled on her dressing gown and hurried into the sitting room. She knew she would find her father there on the sofa, smoking in the half light. He put out his hand to take hers. “You haven’t packed,” she said.

“I’m not coming,” he answered. “This is my home. I have all the family I need…”

She sat beside him. “But don’t you want to meet your sister? Satinov so wanted you to meet. We can’t put everything back together, but if you don’t come you’re letting the people who killed your mother and father win.” Her father said nothing for a while. “Please, Papochka!”

He shook his head slowly. “I think they’ve toyed with us enough.”

The plane ride to Moscow seemed desolate to Katinka, who sat forlorn and disappointed amid the resplendent luxury of Pasha’s converted Boeing. She couldn’t help feeling furious with her father for letting her down, yet she also respected his quiet determination. She kept thinking about the tragedy of her grandparents’ lives and each time she did so she saw it differently: it was the black work of men who believed they had the right to play with the lives of others and they were still toying with hers too.

Roza was waiting on the tarmac at the private airport at Vnukovo. Pasha stood beside her with two bodyguards while behind him, parked in a fan of gleaming steel, stood the customary oligarch’s cavalcade of black Bentley and two Land Cruisers filled with guards, engines purring, ready to convey them into Moscow.

When she saw Katinka’s downcast face, Roza put out her arms to her. “Don’t worry, Katinka. I’m disappointed too, but I think I understand. I left it all much too late.” Then she squeezed Katinka’s hand. “The most important thing is that I’ve found out who I am—and I’ve found a niece I never knew I had. I’ve got you, darling Katinka.”

They stood there for a moment as if they were alone in the world—until Pasha kissed his mother gently on the top of the head.

“Let’s go home,” he said, walking her to the car. “It’ll take time, Mama.”

As he closed Roza’s door, he whispered to Katinka: “It’s understandable. It’s not your fault. Don’t you see? They’re strangers. Your father didn’t want to find his past. It found him.”

Now Katinka and Roza, her newly discovered aunt, whom she was coming to love, stood arm in arm waiting their turn in the short line that led across the sitting room at Satinov’s home. Even without her brother, Roza had insisted on coming to see the man who had changed her life so decisively, once damningly, once selflessly and now, belatedly, in an attempt at redemption.

The other mourners seemed to belong, Katinka thought, in a bizarre seventies time warp. She watched as bloated women in bosom-squeezing suits and sporting giant nut-red hairdos passed by with their men, sausagey apparatchiks with oiled comb-overs on bald pates and brown suits with medals. But there were younger army officers too and some children, probably Satinov’s grandchildren. Their parents kept trying to hush their giggles and games at such a solemn ritual.

At the front of the line, Katinka held Roza’s hand as they stepped up onto the slightly raised plinth and looked down into the coffin. She couldn’t help but look at Satinov’s face with fondness, despite the games he had played with her. Death—and the attentions of a meticulous embalmer and hairdresser—had restored to him the graceful virility and serene grandeur of a Soviet hero of the older generation. Four rows of medals glinted on his chest; the starred and gilded shoulder boards of a marshal of the Soviet Union glistened; the grey hair reared up stiffly in razor-cut spikes.

“I remember playing with him long ago,” said Roza, looking at him. “And he was the man in the car who watched me going to school in Odessa from his limousine.” She leaned into the coffin and kissed Satinov’s forehead, but stepping off the plinth she tottered and Katinka caught her. “I’m fine,” Roza said. “It’s all so much to absorb.”

Katinka helped her to a chair, from where Roza watched the children running up the long corridor and sliding on their knees along the gleaming parquet floor. Katinka went to the kitchen to get Roza a glass of water. Mariko and a couple of relatives, obviously Georgians, perhaps her brothers, were drinking tea and nibbling on Georgian snacks.

“Oh, Katinka,” said Mariko, “I’m pleased you came. Would you like some chai or a glass of wine?” Mariko looked weary in her black suit but Katinka was sure she had grown younger and prettier in the last few days. “Tomorrow he’s going to lie in state in the Red Army Hall,” she said proudly.

“Thanks to your father, I found Sashenka’s children,” explained Katinka, “and—you’ll never guess—thanks to him, I learned that Sashenka was my grandmother. Imagine that!”

Mariko brought Roza into the kitchen. Mariko’s relatives left them alone and she poured chai and offered them food.

“Do you know,” said Roza as she sipped her tea, “I remember sliding on the floor of this apartment.”

“Your apartment was in this building too, wasn’t it?” asked Katinka.

“Not just in this building,” said Roza sharply. “This was our home, this very apartment, and I remember when the men in shiny boots came here: a pile of photographs, papers in a heap on the floor over there, and us being hugged by a pretty woman in tears.”

Katinka glanced at Mariko, who said nothing for a moment: she and Roza were close in age but they had led very different, almost mirrored lives.

“I was born in 1939,” said Mariko, taking a sip of red wine. “I think we were granted this apartment at that time too. It was impossible to refuse a gift from the Party—it was a test of loyalty…”—she swallowed hard and looked away—“but I never dreamed it came to us like that. I don’t know what to say.”

Roza reached out and put her hand on Mariko’s. “It is so wonderful to meet you. If things hadn’t happened the way they did, we might have grown up together.”

“I wish we had. It must be so hard for you to come here…It’s hard to learn some things, and it was hard for my father.”

“He helped me,” Katinka told her, “but there were some things he didn’t want me to discover.”

“He so wanted you to find Sashenka’s children again,” said Mariko, “but he’d devoted his life to the Soviet Union and the Party. He needed to help you without undermining his beliefs. And he never wanted anyone to know the terrible thing he had done. My father saw much tragedy in his life but, you know, I think Sashenka was always in the back of his mind, in his dreams. She and all her family. He must have seen them every day in this apartment.”

“But we still don’t know what happened to her,” said Katinka with a touch of bitterness. “The file was missing. Only your father knew, and he’s taken the secret to his grave.”

There was nothing else to say. Mariko stood up, collecting the plates and the cups, piling them in the sink.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” said Roza.

Mariko dried her hands on a towel. “And I’m s—” but she stopped herself sharply. “Thank you for coming,” she said at last.

A few minutes later, Katinka and Roza walked down the stone steps to the street where Pasha’s Bentley waited. A chauffeur opened the door. History is so messy, so unsatisfactory, Katinka thought, remembering her father’s sorrowful words earlier that morning. She too hated the way history toyed with people.

“Katinka!” She looked up. “Katinka!” Mariko was calling to her from the first-floor landing.

The front door was still open and Katinka turned and ran back up the steps.

“Take this.” Mariko thrust a yellow envelope into Katinka’s hands. “My father made me promise to destroy it. But I want you to have it. Go on, Katinka, it’s your story as well as ours. Yours and Roza’s.”

27

“I need your help, Maxy, one last time,” Katinka told him on the telephone once she and Roza were back at the Getman mansion.

“It’s lovely to hear your voice,” answered Maxy. “I missed you. And I’ve got something to show you, out in the countryside. What better place to talk and think. Can I pick you up?”

Half an hour later, Katinka heard the welcome roar of his motorbike. Feeling excited and suddenly pleased to see him, she ran outside, and soon they were racing along roads newly covered with sleek black asphalt, paid for by the oligarchs and ministers who owned dachas in that region, no longer ramshackle wooden villas but gigantic chalets and mock-Tudor palaces, guarded by watchtowers and high walls. After a while Maxy turned the bike off the road and onto a rougher lane into the forest.

The sunlight shone through the leaves of birch and pine and linden. Katinka enjoyed the bumpiness of the ride and the clarity of the air after all the hours she had spent recently on planes and in dusty archives. Finally they stopped in a clearing near an old-fashioned wooden villa. Katinka pulled off her helmet and found herself among raspberry canes and blackberry bushes.

“What a beautiful place,” she said, shaking back her hair.

“I’ve brought some Borodinsky bread and cheese to nibble while we talk, and some juice.”

“I never thought you’d be so domesticated,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

Maxy looked embarrassed but pleased. He put the food on the grass and sat down. “Well? Who’s first?”

“You!” they both said at the same time—and then they laughed.

“No,” Maxy said, “I want to hear your news first, and how I can help you. But I just wondered…what was it like being home?”

“Fine,” she answered. She sat down on the grass, enjoying the way the dappled beams made puzzle shapes on Maxy’s face. The sun heated the pine resin so that it sweetened the air.

He broke up the black bread, cut a slice of cheese and offered her both.

“How’s your boyfriend down there?”

“Oh, I see what you meant. About being home.”

“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. I was just…”

“Curious? He’s the same as he was before, but I’m not sure how long I’ll stay down there. Meeting Roza and Pasha, researching Sashenka”—she was surprised at how nervously he seemed to be listening to her words—“has changed things a bit, changed me in fact. So I’m thinking of staying in Moscow this summer. I might get on with my research or, if you’re kind to me, I might even help you out a bit at the foundation…”

“That’s great!” Maxy smiled so sunnily at her that Katinka wanted to laugh. But she discovered that his pleasure delighted her, though she resolved not to show it. He was too pleased with himself as it was.

“Anyway,” he said, changing tone, returning to business, “what did Satinov’s daughter give you?”

Katinka pulled the envelope out of her jacket, undid the string at the top and drew out an old file from the archives. “I’ve only glanced at it. It’s the missing file.”

Top Secret.

To: J. V. Stalin; L. P. Beria

Report of the Commission of Inquiry on behalf of Central Committee—Comrades Merkulov, Malenkov, Shkiryatov—on the official misconduct concerning the Highest Degree of Punishment of Object 83 at Special Object 110 on 21 January 1940. Report filed 12 March 1940.

Katinka noticed the doodlings—circles, rhomboids and crescents in green crayon—around the heading, and gasped: “It’s Stalin’s own copy.”

“Right,” said Maxy.

“How did Satinov get it?”

“That’s easy. After Stalin’s death in fifty-three, each leader wanted to save his own skin so they all rifled through the archives to remove any especially incriminating documents. Usually they burned them. But Satinov kept this.” He studied the document carefully, absentmindedly putting a cigarette in his mouth, striking a match but forgetting to light it.

“Now let’s interpret this. The Highest Degree of Punishment is execution with a single bullet to the back of the neck. The Special Object One Hundred Ten is Beria’s special prison, Sukhanovka, the former St. Catherine’s Nunnery at Vidnoe, where Sashenka and Vanya were tried and executed. It was so secret that prisoners there were known by numbers, not by their names, so Object Eighty-three is—”

“Sashenka,” interrupted Katinka. “It was her number on the death list.” She leaned over and started to read. “First they interviewed Golechev, the prison commandant…”

Commission: Comrade Commandant Golechev, you were responsible for the completion of the Highest Degree of Punishment on sentenced prisoners on 21 January 1940. The Highest Degree was to be witnessed on behalf of the Central Committee by Comrade Hercules Satinov. Why did you begin early and in such a disorderly and un-Bolshevik way?

Golechev: The Highest Degrees were carried out in the professional manner expected of an NKVD officer.

Commission: I warn you, Comrade Golechev, this is a serious offense. Your conduct helped our enemies. Were you working for the enemy? You may well face the Highest Degree yourself.

Golechev: I confess before the Central Committee to serious and foolish mistakes. It was my birthday. We started drinking early, at lunchtime, and drinking helps when there’s a Vishka to conduct. Cognac, champagne, wine, vodka. At midnight it was time to bring the prisoners down, but Comrade Satinov was late and we couldn’t start without him.

Commission: Comrade Satinov, why were you, the witness, so late?

Satinov: I was taken ill, seriously ill, but I reported my illness to the commandant and arrived at Sukhanovka as soon as I could.

Commission: Comrade Satinov, you knew some of the convicted prisoners, especially Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn. Were you suffering from a neurasthenic crisis caused by bourgeois sentimentality?

Satinov: No, on my word as a Communist. I simply had food poisoning. In our times of struggle and war, Enemies of the People must be liquidated.

“You get the picture?” asked Maxy. “The NKVD guards are wildly drunk; Sashenka, Vanya and more than a hundred others are awaiting execution; and Satinov is so upset that he is too sick to attend. So what happens?”

Golechev: As we drank, our talk turned to the depravity of our female Enemies, most particularly Prisoner Zeitlin-Palitsyn—the famous Sashenka. We’d heard about this traitor’s repellent, snakelike depravity, how she used her devious female wiles to seduce and entrap other traitors, and since Comrade Satinov was not yet present, we, under the influence of alcohol and our disgust for her betrayal, decided to begin with her. We brought her up to my dining room and…

In green pen, beside this statement, Stalin had written one word: Hooligans.

“Now we hear from Blokhin,” said Maxy.

Commission: Comrade Major Blokhin, you were designated to conduct the Highest Measure of the 123 prisoners on this list, yet you complained about the commandant’s conduct.

“Blokhin was Stalin’s top executioner,” Maxy explained. “In the case of the Polish prisoners at Katyn, he personally executed about eleven thousand men in a series of nights.”

Blokhin: At midnight, I arrived ready to begin my duties as Chief of the Command Operations Section in the Highest Degree of this list of 123, but I wish to report to the Central Committee that I found the commandant and his officers drunk in the presence of Prisoner Zeitlin-Palitsyn, who was being treated in a highly unprofessional way, against the noble Chekist morality. She was already partially disrobed. I protested strongly. I offered to carry out the sentence myself at once but I was sent away. I tried to call Comrade Satinov. When he arrived I reported everything to him. These drunken and bungling amateurs made a mockery of my Chekist professionalism and skill in this special and sensitive work. They were taking bets and shouting. At approximately thirty-three minutes after midnight, they forced Prisoner Zeitlin-Palitsyn outside into the courtyard near the officers’ garages, which is lit up very brightly by searchlights. The temperature was approximately minus 40 degrees.

Golechev: When she was outside, we performed the Highest Degree, the sentence of the Military Collegium against Prisoner Zeitlin-Palitsyn, but in our drunkenness and because of the unprofessional lateness of Comrade Satinov…we did so in an unacceptable, frivolous and depraved manner. Yes, I admit we were curious about her as a seductive agent of the Japanese Emperor and British lords, and as a woman.

Katinka felt cold. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Did they rape her?”

“No. If they had done, it would say so here,” said Maxy. “But they were certainly excited by her beauty, her reputation as a seductress. They’d heard of the transcript of Sashenka and Benya.”

Satinov: I arrived at 3:06 a.m. and noticed something strange in the courtyard near where my driver parked my car. I admit before the Central Committee that my lateness was partly the cause of this misconduct. Commandant Golechev was drunk and tried to conceal what he had done. I summoned Major Blokhin and reviewed the List of Prisoners to Face the Highest Measure. I noted the absence of Prisoner Zeitlin-Palitsyn. I ordered Commandant Golechev to take me to her. Afterward, I ordered Commandant Golechev and Major Blokhin to begin at once. The prisoners were brought down to the cell designed for this purpose and I observed the Vishka of 122 prisoners as the witness of the Central Committee. Major Blokhin put on a butcher’s apron and conducted himself very competently. As a devoted Communist, I delighted in the liquidation of these Enemies, traitors, scoundrels and bastards.

Golechev: We committed a crime against the highest morals of the Communist Party but I’m devoted heart and soul to the Party and Comrade Stalin. I expect pitiless punishment for this but I throw myself upon the mercy of the Central Committee. At around 3:00 a.m., Comrade Satinov finally arrived and he behaved in an unprofessional manner, exposing his bourgeois sentimentality…

Stalin’s red crayon encircled this accusation and scrawled the words Satinov sympathy???

“So what happened? What did Satinov see?” asked Katinka, concentrating absolutely—no question had ever seemed so vital.

Satinov: She was completely…exposed. Commandant Golechev displayed depraved infantilism and corrupt philistinism, as I reported in person and on paper to the Instantzia. I confess that, while questioning Golechev, I struck him twice and he fell to the ground. This was due to my outrage as a good Communist, not any bourgeois sentimentality toward the Enemy.

Maxy whistled. “So whatever happened to Sashenka, it made Satinov, an iron man of that pitiless generation, lose control. How extraordinary—to have cracked up like that in front of those secret policemen could have signed his own death warrant then and there.”

“But what did he see?” Katinka realized she was actually shouting.

“Hang on…” Maxy went on reading. “Here.” He pointed at the bottom of the document. In the midst of a maze of green shading and squiggles, Stalin had written a word.

Hose.

“Hose? Have I misread it?”

Maxy shook his head. “I don’t think so…” He hesitated.

“But what does it mean?”

“I heard of a similar case at Vladimir Prison in 1937. I think they tied Sashenka to a post and turned the hose on her. She was naked. It was an unusually cold night. They took bets on how long it would take…the water to freeze. Gradually the ice encased her. Like a glass statue.”

28

Neither of them spoke for a long time. The finches serenaded them in the woods, bees danced around the cherry blossoms and the lilacs peeked their white and purple heads through the silvery birches.

As Katinka wept for the grandmother she’d never known, she thought of what Sashenka must have endured during that long, terrifying night in the cold winter of 1940. After a while, Maxy put his arms around her.

“What are we doing here?” she asked finally, slipping out of his arms.

“I did a little more research and found the burial records of Sashenka, Vanya, even Uncle Mendel. After execution, they were cremated and the ashes were buried in the grounds of an NKVD dacha in the birch woods just outside Moscow. Afterward, following NKVD orders on mass graves, raspberry canes and blackberry bushes were planted on the site. Look, there’s a plaque on the tree there.” He pointed.

Here lie buried the remains

of the innocent tortured and executed victims

of the political repressions.

May they never be forgotten!

“She’s here, isn’t she?” said Katinka, standing close to him. He put his arms around her again, and this time she didn’t object.

“Not just her,” he said. “They’re all here, together.”

Evening was falling—that rosy, grainy dusk when it seems as if Moscow is lit from below, not above—as Maxy dropped Katinka back at the Getman mansion. She stood on the steps and waved as he drove off.

When the guards admitted her the house was unusually hushed, but she found Roza in the kitchen.

“You need some chai and honeycakes,” said Roza, giving her a look. Katinka realized that her skin must be raw, and her eyes red. “Sit down.”

Katinka watched as Roza made the tea, adding honey and two teaspoons of brandy to each cup. Her aunt didn’t miss much, she thought.

“Here,” said Roza, “drink this. We both need it. Don’t worry about your father. I was rushing him too much. You know, I can still see that sturdy little boy with his beloved rabbit at our dacha. I’ve thought of him like that all my life and I’ve been aching to find him again—but of course, I don’t know him anymore. Will you tell me what to do?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Katinka, still reeling from what she had learned with Maxy, her mind stalked by visions of Sashenka’s death. She suddenly longed to share what she knew, to tell Roza everything, to work out exactly how death had come to Sashenka, how it had happened, and how she had looked—what Satinov had seen. “I’ve got something else to show you,” she said, drawing out a wad of photocopied papers from her backpack.

“Wait,” answered Roza. “Before I look at that, I want to ask you—I know my father was shot but you said there was something unusual…How did my mother die?”

“I was just about to come to that,” said Katinka but something made her keep the papers close to her.

She took a breath, eager to go on, but as she did so she saw Sashenka in the snow, her skin white in the electric glare of the searchlights…and Satinov, horrified, standing before Sashenka just minutes later. If he had really broken, if he hadn’t supervised the other 122 executions with Stalinist toughness immediately afterward, then he too would have been tortured until he revealed how he had rescued Sashenka’s children…

Katinka sensed Roza’s gentle but penetrating gaze on her, and she shook herself—there were some secrets she should keep.

She looked into Roza’s intelligent, violet eyes and saw that she was tensed, ready to absorb this blow too. Instead she took her hands. “Like the others. She died just like the others.”

Roza held her stare and then smiled. “I thought so. That’s good to know. But what were you going to show me?”

Katinka deftly put the investigation into Sashenka’s death at the back of her papers so that another document was on top. “I’ve got a few things I was given by Kuzma the archive rat, including this, your mother’s confession. I hadn’t read it in full because she gave them two hundred pages of crazy confessions of secret meetings with enemy agents and her plot to kill Stalin by spraying cyanide onto the gramophone at the dacha—all to give Satinov time to settle you and Carlo with your families. But there’s one bit that sounds strange. May I read it to you?”

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: In 1933, as a reward from the Party for our work, Vanya and I were allowed to seek treatment for my neurasthenia in London. We visited a well-known clinic in Harley Street called the Cushion House, where, under cover of medical treatment, we met agents of the British secret service and Trotsky himself, who asked us to arrange the assassination of Comrade Stalin.

Interrogator Mogilchuk: At the Cushion House?

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: Yes.

“This ‘Cushion House’ is an odd name, even in English,” explained Katinka. “I checked it. There’s never been a Cushion House anywhere in London, ever. Does it ring a bell?”

Roza started to laugh. “Come with me.” She took Katinka’s hand and led her upstairs to her tidy bedroom. “Do you see?” she asked.

“What?” asked Katinka.

“Look!” She pointed at her bed. “Here!” Roza picked up a ragged old cushion, the material so threadbare and motheaten it was almost transparent, so bleached by time it was nearly white. “This was Cushion, moya Podoushka, the companion of my childhood and the only thing I could take with me to my new existence.”

She hugged it like a baby.

“You see how she remembered me?” said Roza. “My mother was telling me that she loved me, wasn’t she? She was sending me a message. So that if I ever found out who I really was, I’d know that she always loved me.”

The air in the room was suddenly taut and Roza turned her back on Katinka and looked out of the window.

“Is there anything else in there that seems strange?” she asked, hopefully, and Katinka understood that she wanted something to offer her brother.

“Yes, now I see what she was doing, there is something. You said my father loved rabbits. Well, in the confession, Sashenka says she and Vanya hid some of the cyanide in the rabbit hutch—of all places—at the dacha. So I think she left something for him too…”

“I’d like to tell him that myself,” said Roza, “but I don’t want to do anything to upset him. I thought I might wait a bit and then call him and perhaps go down to see him. What do you think?”

“Of course, but don’t leave it too long,” smiled Katinka, “will you?”

29

It had been an extraordinary day, Katinka thought as she came downstairs. But it was not quite over yet.

As she crossed the spacious hall toward the kitchen, she heard a convoy of cars sweeping into the drive. Pasha was back. There was the sound of doors slamming then Pasha’s loud voice, his clumsy, shambling footsteps and an unfamiliar but husky chattering that stopped abruptly.

“Oh my God, it’s her!” the voice said.

Katinka turned, and found herself face to face with a slim old man with a long, sensitive face and a battered blue worker’s cap. He was obviously in his eighties at least but there was a jerky energy about him, and he was still dapper in a crumpled brown suit that was too baggy for his slight figure. She liked him immediately.

“Is it you, Sashenka?” said the man, looking at her intensely. “Is it you? God, am I dreaming? You’re so very like her—down to her grey eyes, her mouth, even the way she stands. Is this a trick?”

“No, it’s not,” said Pasha, standing right behind him. “Katinka, you weren’t the only one doing some research. I found someone too.”

Katinka let her backpack drop onto the floor and stepped back. “Who are you?” she asked shakily. “Who the hell are you?”

The old man wiped his face with a big linen handkerchief. “Who’s asking the questions here? Me or this slip of a girl?” Katinka noticed his eyes were a dazzling blue. “My name’s Benya Golden. Who are you?” He took her hand and kissed it. “Tell me, for God’s sake.”

“Benya Golden?” exclaimed Katinka. “But I thought you were…”

“Well…,” Benya shrugged, “so did everyone else. Can I sit down? I’d like a cognac, please?” He looked round at the exquisitely restored mansion, the Old Master paintings, the fat sofas. “This place looks as if your bar will have everything. Get me a Courvoisier before I drop. It’s been a long journey. Look—my hands are trembling.”

They moved into the sitting room, where Pasha lit a cigar and poured them all brandies.

“So you’ve heard of me?” Benya said after a while.

“Of course, I’ve even read your Spanish Stories,” answered Katinka.

“I didn’t know I had such young fans. I didn’t know I had any fans.” He was silent. “You know, you really are the image of a woman called Sashenka whom I loved with all my heart a long time ago. Hasn’t anyone told you that?”

Katinka shook her head but she remembered Sashenka’s face in that prison photograph and how she’d felt. “She was my grandmother,” she said. “I’ve been finding out what happened to her.”

“Have you been in those vile archives?”

“Oh yes.”

“And have you found how they tortured us and broke us?”

Katinka nodded. “Everything.”

“And so can you tell me why it all happened, to us I mean, to me and Sashenka?”

“There was no why,” Katinka said slowly. “Just a chain of events. I’ve discovered so much…But tell me, how did you survive?”

“Uh, there’s not much to tell. Stalin’s thugs beat me and I told them everything they wanted. But at the trial, I said I’d been lying because I’d been tortured. I knew they’d shoot me and I couldn’t face the bullet knowing I’d betrayed Sashenka. But they gave me ten years in Kolyma instead. I was released in the war—and I had quite a war—but then I was rearrested afterward, and released again in the fifties. I was a husk of a man, but I met a woman in the camps, a nurse, an angel, and she put me back together again. She got me a job as editor of a journal in Birobizhan, the Jewish region, near the Chinese border, and that’s the godforsaken place where we’ve been living ever since.”

“Do you still write?”

“They’d beaten all that out of me.” He brushed that aside with a gesture. “I am happy just to breathe. Do you have any food in this palace? I’m always hungry.”

“Of course,” said Pasha. “We can make anything you like. Just name it!”

“I’ll have a steak, dear prince, and all the trimmings, and a bottle of red wine,” said Benya. “Do you have any French wine? Or is that pushing this dream too far? I once loved French Bordeaux…I drank it in Paris, you know—do you have it? Well then, will you all join me?” He went quiet again, and Katinka could see that his eyes had filled with tears.

Finally he took her hand and kissed it a second time. “Meeting you is like a last summer for me. Not a day passes when I don’t remember your grandmother. We were the world’s greatest lovers, yet we were together for just eleven days.” He sighed deeply. “I gave her a flower for every day…”

Katinka’s heart gave a little skip. She reached into her backpack and pulled out the little envelope of materials from Sashenka’s file that Kuzma had given her. “Does this mean anything to you?” She handed him a much-creased old envelope addressed to “B. Golden” at the Soviet Writers’ Union, in a feminine hand.

He took it from her, opened it, fingers shaking, and pulled out a pressed mimosa so flimsy that it almost came apart in his hands.

“She sent it to you,” Katinka told him, “but it arrived too late, and you’d been arrested. The Writers’ Union gave it to the NKVD and they filed it.”

Benya muttered something, shaking his head in disbelief. Then he raised the flower to his face, sniffed its old petals, kissed it and when he could finally speak, he sat up straight and proud, beaming at her through flooded eyes.

Suddenly he threw off his peaked cap and, with a dashing and triumphant smile, spun it across the room. “Even after fifty years,” he said, “I know what this means.”

30

It was a lazy sommerki in Moscow over a week later. A sleepy, orange-headed sun had lost the swagger of the day and struggled to remain in the sky. The light spread a tender pink veil over the cool waters while the shadows beneath the trees were dyed a dark blue. There was so much blossom on the warm breeze, it almost snowed gossamer as Katinka walked with Maxy around the Patriarchy Ponds. Katinka felt dizzy and joyful to be away from her family and the past. Here only the present mattered as she strolled around this sanctuary in the middle of the clamoring city.

She had not seen Maxy since that day out in the woods and she had things to tell him that only he would understand and that only they could share. Though they weren’t touching, she felt that they moved in sync, as if their limbs were linked with invisible threads.

“I’m so glad I’m living now,” she was saying to him, “because I don’t think I would have been as brave as Sashenka and Vanya if I’d lived then.”

“I think you might have been braver,” answered Maxy as, like one, they headed toward the outdoor café beside the water.

“Well, thank God that in our times we don’t need to be that brave,” she said. “We’re free in Russia. For the first time in history. We can do what we want, say whatever we want. No one’s watching us anymore—that’s all over now.”

“But for how long?” asked Maxy so seriously that Katinka thought he was being absurdly gloomy. The joy of being alive and young suddenly took hold of her—and she spun around and kissed him, quite recklessly.