Sashenka (53 page)

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, greyskinned 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 soontovanish 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 for eign 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 barrelchested 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
comradesinarms, they were devoted Bolsheviks. The Party has given them many hard tasks,” said
Comrade Stalin, “but now again these brothersinarms 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, Vikingstyle 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 heavymetal 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 waiflike 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?”