Sashenka

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘We paid for these files,’ she whispered vehemently at him.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he replied. ‘Two minutes.’

  ‘You’ve wasted my time. You broke your word!’

  ‘One minute fifty seconds.’

  Katinka could barely stand this filthy place where those dear to her employer had suffered grievous sorrow. She wanted to weep, but not under the eyes of the Marmoset. She turned to Sashenka’s file, which contained a single sheet of paper that read Please find enclosed the confession of Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn (167 pages). But it was not in there. Just a note: Send files of Zeitlin-Palitsyn case to Central Committee.

  She cursed herself for her rudeness to the Marmoset. ‘Sashenka’s confession is missing: please may I have it?’

  ‘You insult me and through me the Soviet Union and the Competent Organs!’ He pointed at the white bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky. ‘You insult Iron Felix!’

  ‘Please! I apologize!’

  ‘I’ll report all this to my superior, General Fursenko, but it is unlikely to be permitted.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Katinka, emboldened by the courage of those who had been in far greater peril than her, ‘I doubt very much Mr Getman will be interested in helping you sell your spy secrets to the newspapers abroad.’

  The Marmoset stared at her, sucked in his cheeks, then crossly got up and opened the door. ‘Fuck off, you little bitch! Your sort have had their day! You blame everything on us, but America’s done more damage to Russia in a few years than Stalin did in decades! And your oligarch can go fuck his mother. You’re finished in here – get out!’

  Katinka stood up, gathered her notebook and handbag and, trying to maintain some dignity, walked out slowly right past Kuzma, who stood outside collating some files on his trolley. She was crying: she had spoiled everything with her own foolish temper.

  Now she would never discover what happened to Sashenka, never find Carlo. She felt faint. It was hopeless.

  17

  ‘You again?’ said Mariko sourly. ‘What did I tell you? Don’t call.’

  ‘But Mariko please! Just listen one second,’ beseeched Katinka, the desperation audible in her voice. ‘I’m calling from the public phone outside the Lubianka! I’ve been to see Lala in Tbilisi. Just listen one second. I want to thank Marshal Satinov. I’ve learned how your father saved those children, Snowy and Carlo, how he risked his life. They want to thank him.’

  A silence. She could hear Mariko breathing.

  ‘My father’s very sick. I’ll tell him. Don’t call again!’

  ‘But please …’

  The line was dead. Groaning in frustration, she called Maxy at the Redemption office.

  ‘There you are!’ he greeted her affably. ‘Our sort of research isn’t easy – this happens to me all the time. Don’t lose heart. I’ve got an idea. Meet me at the feet of the poet – Pushkin Square.’

  Katinka waved down a Lada car, handing the driver two dollars. She reached the Pushkin statue first. It was a dazzling spring day, the sky metallic blue, the breeze biting, the sunlight raw. In the petrol fumes and lilac scent, girls were waiting for their lovers beneath the poet, bespectacled students read their notes on the benches, guides in polyester suits lectured American tourists, limousines for German bankers and Russian wheeler-dealers drew up at the Pushkin Restaurant. My verses will be sung throughout all Russia’s vastness, Katinka read on the monument, My ashes will outlive and know no pale decay. Pushkin consoled her, calmed her.

  A motorbike scooted up on to the pavement. Maxy pulled off his Viking helmet, holding it by the horns, and kissed her in his overfamiliar way.

  ‘You look flustered,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘Let’s sit in the sun and you can tell me everything.’

  Once seated, Katinka told him about her visit to Tbilisi, her night with Lala, her discovery that Roza Getman was Sashenka’s daughter – and her more recent encounter with the KGB.

  ‘You’ve done so well,’ Maxy told her. ‘I’m impressed! But let me interpret some of this for you. Mouche Zeitlin says the KGB told her Sashenka was sentenced to “ten years without rights of correspondence”. Usually that was a euphemism for execution.’

  Katinka caught her breath. ‘But what about the ex-prisoner who’d seen Sashenka in the camps in the fifties?’

  ‘The KGB liked to trick people that way. The KGB files say Mendel died of “cardiac arrest”. That was another euphemism. It means he died under interrogation: he was beaten to death.’

  ‘So these files have their own language?’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘There was a terrible randomness in the Terror, but at the same time there were no coincidences in that world: everything was linked by invisible threads. We just need to find them. Send files of Palitsyn case to Central Committee,’ he repeated. ‘I know what that means. Come with me. Climb on.’

  Katinka joined him on the back of his bike, pulling her denim skirt down over her thighs. The engine revved raucously and Maxy weaved in and out of the unruly Moscow traffic, down Tverskaya until he threw a sharp left at the statue of Prince Dolgoruky, founder of Moscow, and went down a steep hill. The wind blew in Katinka’s hair and she closed her eyes, allowing the rich spring air to refresh her.

  They stopped alongside a Brezhnevite concrete box with a shabby glass front, a dark frieze of Marx, Engels and Lenin over the revolving door.

  Maxy scissored off the bike in his leathers and tugged off his helmet, pushing back his hair. He looked, she thought, more seventies heavy-metal singer than historian. He strode ahead into a marble hall and Katinka followed him, almost running. In the grey foyer, women behind tables sold Bon Jovi CDs, hats and gloves, like a flea market, but at the back, where the entrance to the lifts was guarded by two poxy teenage soldiers, stood a white Lenin bust. Maxy showed his card and they checked Katinka’s passport, kept it and gave her a chit.

  Maxy led her up the steps, past a canteen with its mouldy cabbage-soup fug and into a lift, which chugged to the top of the building. Before she could take in her surroundings, he was leading her into the glass-walled reading room with its circular panorama of the roofs of Moscow.

  ‘No time to admire the view,’ he whispered as disapproving old Communists looked up crossly from their studies. Maxy’s leathers creaked loudly in the hushed room. ‘I’ve got a little place for us here.’ They sat in a cul-de-sac formed by towering bookstacks. ‘Wait here,’ he said. She listened to the rasp of his biking gear with a smile. Moments later, he returned with a pile of brown papki files and sat very close to her. He radiated a blend of leathers, coffee, bike oil and lemon cologne.

  ‘This place,’ he whispered, ‘is the Party archive. You see these papki, numbered 558? Stalin’s own archive. It’s still officially closed and I don’t think it’ll ever open.’ He flipped the first files towards him. ‘I was looking at these earlier and I noticed Satinov’s name. When it said your files were sent to the Central Committee, that meant to Stalin himself. This is Stalin’s miscellaneous correspondence. Go ahead, Katinka, look under “S” for Satinov.’

  She opened the file and found a cover note, stamped by Poskrebyshev at 9 p.m. on 6 May 1939:

  To J. V. Stalin

  Top Secret. It has come to my notice that Ivan ‘Vanya’ Palitsyn ordered surveillance of his wife, Party member Alexandra ‘Sashenka’ Zeitlin-Palitsyn, without the knowledge of Narkom NKVD or Politburo.

  Signed: L. P. Beria, Commissar-General, State Security, first degree, Narkom NKVD

  ‘You see,’ explained Maxy, ‘Beria had discovered that Palitsyn was bugging his wife.’

  ‘How did he find out?’

  ‘Probably by a tiny bureaucratic mistake. Wiretaps were always copied to Beria, who decided which to send on to Stalin. Palitsyn, foolish with jealousy, had ordered that the transcripts of his wiretap be shown only to him. Remember how he wrote no copies? Probably his secretary forgot this, as secretaries do – and sent it by mistake to Beria, who, by
the rules of the time, had to report this abuse of government resources to Stalin himself. Beria had no malice towards the Palitsyns and he knew that, after the May Day party, Stalin took a paternal interest in Sashenka. That’s why his note’ – Maxy tapped the cover note – ‘is neutral. Stalin was often tolerant of or even amused by steamy private gossip – unless he felt he had somehow been misled.’

  ‘But then he read the transcripts?’

  To: Comrade Ivan Palitsyn, Commissar-General, State Security, third degree

  As requested, surveillance and transcript on Alexandra ‘Sashenka’ Zeitlin-Palitsyn, Room 403, Metropole Hotel, 6 May 1939

  Midday: Zeitlin-Palitsyn left office on Petrovka and walked to Metropole, took elevator to Room 403. Writer Benya Golden entered the room fifteen minutes past midday, leaving separately at 3.03 p.m. Snacks and wine were delivered to the room.

  Katinka turned the pages and found a place marked with a red crayon:

  Golden: God, I love you. You’re so lovely to me, Sashenka.

  Zeitlin-Palitsyn: I can’t believe I’m here.

  Golden: What, darling? Didn’t I please you enough last time? Until you called my name?

  Zeitlin-Palitsyn: How could I forget it? I think I imagined the whole thing. I think you’ve made me delusional.

  Golden: Come here. Unbutton me. That’s paradise. Get on your hands and knees on the bed and let me unwrap the present. Oh my God, what a delicious sight. What a sweet [word deleted]. How [word deleted] you are. If only your tight-arsed Communist wives’ committee could see you now …

  Katinka was peeping into an intimate pocket of time, a vanished wrinkle of private passion, in a cruel world, long ago. Her eyes were drawn to the words underlined by three harsh thick crayon marks.

  Zeitlin-Palitsyn: Oh my God, Benya, I love your [word indecipherable], I can’t believe you got me to do that, I thought I might die of pleasure …

  ‘That red crayon there, the underlining, is Stalin himself,’ said Maxy, pulling a fat oilskinned A4 notebook out of his stack of files. ‘This is Poskrebyshev’s list of visitors to Stalin’s office here on Trinity Square in the Kremlin – known to the cognoscenti as the Little Corner.’ He opened it. Poskrebyshev’s tiny, immaculate handwriting listed names, dates, times. ‘Look up 7 May, evening.’

  Katinka read the page:

  10 p.m. L. P. Beria.

  Leaves 10.30 p.m.

  10.30 p.m. H. A. Satinov.

  Leaves 10.45 p.m.

  10.40 p.m. L. P. Beria.

  Leaves 10.52 p.m.

  ‘So Satinov was there soon after Beria showed Stalin the transcripts. Why?’

  ‘Beria comes to see the Master and gives him the transcripts. Stalin reads this hot stuff, red crayon in hand. He orders Poskrebyshev to summon Satinov, who’s at Old Square, Party headquarters, up the hill. The vertushka telephone rings on Satinov’s desk. Poskrebyshev says, “Comrade Satinov, Comrade Stalin awaits you now. A Buick will collect you.” Stalin’s already appalled by what Sashenka and Benya have done.’ Maxy read Stalin’s note to Beria:

  I misjudged this morally corrupt woman. I thought she was a decent Soviet woman. She teaches Soviet women how to be housewives. She’s the wife of a top Chekist. Who knows what secrets she chatters about? She behaves like a streetwalker. Comrade Beria, perhaps we should check her out. J. St.

  ‘You know what “checking out” means?’ asked Maxy. ‘It means arrest them. You see how, in a few accidental steps, this reached Stalin?’

  Katinka shook her head, her heart pounding in sympathy. If it hadn’t been for Stalin’s visit, if it hadn’t been for Sashenka’s affair, if it hadn’t been for Vanya’s jealousy …

  ‘Isn’t there anything else in the file?’ she asked.

  Maxy sighed. ‘No, not in this archive. But the Russian State Archive of Special Secret Political-Administrative Documents off Mayakovsky Square is filled with Stalin’s papers and somewhere in there, one day, future generations may find out what happened, if they care. But it’s closed. These are all the records we can read. Oh, except for one small thing.’ He picked up Stalin’s note again and pointed to the top right-hand corner, where, in small letters, his red crayon had written these words: Bicho to curate.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Katinka asked.

  ‘I thought I knew everything about the Stalin era,’ said Maxy, ‘but for once I can’t work it out.’

  Katinka swayed with exhaustion and sadness. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever find Sashenka or little Carlo,’ she whispered. ‘Poor Roza, how am I going to tell her?’

  18

  Outside the archive, the streets were already dark. Still shocked by what they’d found, Maxy and Katinka parted awkwardly like two teenagers after an unsatisfactory date. As Maxy rode away, Katinka walked slowly up the dark hill towards the glitzy neon lights of Tverskaya just beyond Prince Dolgoruky’s statue. Slowing to adjust the way her bag was hanging over her shoulder, she became aware that someone was walking much too close to her.

  She quickened her step but so did the shadow. She slowed to let him overtake but he slowed too. She was suddenly frightened: was it the KGB? Or a Chechen mugger? Then the figure gathered up a wad of phlegm in his mouth and launched it in a phosphorescent, light-catching arc towards the gutter.

  ‘Kuzma!’ she gasped. ‘What are you—’

  Without a word he pulled her aside, behind the statue, where there was no one around. He was holding a big canvas bag, which he opened to reveal the marmalade jazz cat and its kitten. ‘Cosy!’ he blurted out in his queer, unbroken voice.

  ‘Very cosy,’ Katinka said, still concerned. What did he have in mind for her?

  Kuzma reached into the cat bag and pulled out an old-fashioned yellow envelope, closed with red string, which he shoved into her hands, glancing around as he did so with comical vigilance – even though she knew this was no joke. He was risking his life.

  ‘For you,’ he muttered.

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘You read it, you see!’ Peering around again, he started to move away from her up towards Tverskaya.

  ‘Kuzma! Wait! I want to thank you properly!’ Kuzma shrank from her like a vampire before holy water but she grabbed his wrist. ‘One question. When it says “the Central Committee asked for the files”, where are they now? Can I see them?’

  Kuzma walked back, and stood so close his unshaven chin pricked her ear. He pointed into the earth, into the cellars, the dungeons, the graves, and only a hiss came out of him.

  ‘So how will I ever know what happened?’

  Kuzma shrugged but then he pointed up the hill. ‘Better to sing well as a goldfinch than badly as a nightingale.’ And then he marched stiffly away, disappearing into the blurred greyness of Tverskaya’s rush-hour crowds.

  The envelope burned her hands. Katinka could hardly restrain herself from opening it but she tried to stay calm. She glanced around to see if she was being followed but decided that if the KGB wanted to follow her she would never know about it anyway.

  She couldn’t wait to reach her hotel room so she crossed the road to the sleazy foyer of the Intourist Hotel, a hideous seventies construction of glass and concrete. Its ceiling, made up of what appeared to be white polystyrene squares, was low; its floor was a faded, frayed burgundy fabric and the security staff at its brown, padded-plastic desk were aggressive, lantern-jawed Soviet ‘bulls’.

  But the place seethed like a souk. One-armed bandits rumbled and whirred, and garish whores sat about on orange sofas. As one of the security thugs approached her, Katinka pointed at the whores and he shrugged: he’d collect his share later. Sitting on a foam sofa next to two booted, stockinged girls with bare, bruised white thighs, she offered them both a cigarette. Each of them grabbed one: the first put it in her handbag, the other in her stocking top.

  Katinka lit up her own, inhaled and then tore open the envelope. Inside were a few trinkets and a wad of photocopied documents. The first was dated May 1953, two months after Stalin’s dea
th:

  To all case officers: Palitsyn/Zeitlin Case

  For security reasons, relatives enquiring about sentences of above-mentioned state criminals are to be informed that the prisoners were resentenced after a ten-year term in Gulags.

  Signed: I. V. Serov, Chairman, State Security Committee (KGB)

  Anger and confusion coursed through Katinka, followed by a sinking sadness. Everything she had so far learned from Mouche and the KGB archives was a callous lie. She must have paled because one of the prostitutes leaned over and asked gently: ‘Your test results, love? Bad news?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Katinka, her forehead prickly with sweat.

  ‘Tough, tough, but we survive,’ said the prostitute, lighting up and turning back to her friend.

  Katinka looked again at the typed pages.

  Sitting of Military Tribunal, office of the Narkom L. P. Beria, at Special Object 110, 22 January 1940. Trial of Accused Alexandra ‘Sashenka’ Zeitlin-Palitsyn (Comrade Snowfox).

  Chairman of the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court Vasily Ulrikh presiding in person.

  Katinka leafed to the end, looking for the sentencing – but there was that maddening note again: Send documents on Palitsyn case to Central Committee.

  Then she started to read Sashenka’s trial notes – and what she read shocked her so deeply that she stuffed the papers back in the envelope and ran out of the hotel into the street, turning right and heading down the hill towards the Kremlin, its eight red stars glowing high above her through the hazy rhapsody of a spring night.

  ‘You’ve gone too far this time!’ said Mariko, barely raising her voice, which made the implied threat all the more powerful.

  Marshal Satinov sat in his high chair in the elegant, breezy sitting room with an oxygen mask held on to his face by elastic and a large oxygen cylinder on wheels beside him. He appeared to have shrunk in just a few days, and his blinking eyes followed Katinka’s every move.

  ‘Please, let me talk to your father for one minute,’ said Katinka, breathless and flushed with running. ‘I’ve so much to tell him and he himself asked me to let him know what I found …’