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 towards 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 blonde 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 jewellery 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 II’s Legislative Commission and recently for my doctorate on the impact on local government of Catherine II’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, ‘be 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 goodbye 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 extrovert, 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 m
y 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 holiday 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 Mercedes saloons 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 reception 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 shoulderboards and a chestful of medals like a Christmas tree.
To her right, a table was heaped with Soviet and foreign journals; 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 combover 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 chiselled. 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 exercise book 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 duelled 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 II’s legal programme 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, wintry 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 exercise 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.’
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