‘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 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 tarmac 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 plastic 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 her off as they drove down old Lenin Street, past the prefabricated concrete block, 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 waistcoat and bleached jeans, proffered a can of Mexican beer and a little Greek-made bottle of Why Not? scent. 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 sugar shortages 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 denims, 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 holiday 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 case 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 carpet bag. 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 a.m. but already his surgery at the medical centre 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 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 gynaecologist, a consultant, 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 surgery. 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 on to
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 travelling 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 hall of residence 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 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 towards 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 the 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 was 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 where portraits of ruddy-cheeked English earls in bulging pantaloons and velvet frock coats glared down at her. A charging red-coated cavalryman, sabre 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 f
loor 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 towards 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 seersucker checked 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!’
Sashenka Page 40
