Sashenka (59 page)

“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 heartshaped 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 highceilinged 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 welloff 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 blackeyed man with a greyblack 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 longlost 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 exprisoner, 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 twostory residence in white marble with curling orientalstyle 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 blackhaired 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 CaféBar 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 shinycheeked 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 greyfeathered 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.