Sashenka (50 page)

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 darkskinned 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 softhearted and muchindulged 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 basinlike 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 VegazKalifornia 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 sharpedged 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 blackedged snow. The trees oozed sap, and skylarks and finches trilled with joy, celebrating spring.

Katinka wore a rabbitfur 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 goodbye as they drove down old Lenin Street, past the prefabricated concrete apartment building, with its 1970s orange and black panels.

Katinka waved at the whitecoated, peachycheeked women of the Milk and Meat shops; at the besuited 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 nightclubcafé VegazKalifornia, in his leather vest and bleached jeans, proffered a can of Mexican beer and a little Greekmade 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 goodbyes. 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 oilstained 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 blueshuttered 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 checkin 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 wideeyed amazement at the discreetly luxurious hotel booked for her in Cadogan Gardens, Chelsea.

The receptionist, a waxy paper pusher with a weaveover 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 reevaluate 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 wellstuffed 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:
Pickup 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.