‘I made and decorated every one of them myself. Would you like me to show you? Are you in a hurry?’
Katinka had never been in such a hurry. Satinov was dying, taking Sashenka’s secret with him, and she had to get to him fast. But suppose this archive rat had the documents she needed? She knew that top secret and closed files were stored down here and he must have asked her to follow him for a reason. She decided to humour him.
‘I’d love to see more of your toy soldiers,’ she said.
‘Not toys. This is a historical re-enactment,’ he insisted, ‘precise in every detail, even down to the ammunition in the cannons and the shakos of the Dragoons. You’re a historian, can you guess the battle?’
Katinka circled the table as Shcheglov bounced on his yellow plastic toes with pleasure.
She noted the Napoleonic Grande Armée on one side and the Russian Guards Regiments on the other. ‘It’s 1812 of course,’ she said slowly. ‘That must be the Raevsky Redoubt, Barclay de Tolly’s forces here, Prince Bagration here facing French Marshals Murat and Ney. Napoleon himself with the Guard here. It’s the Battle of Borodino!’ she said triumphantly.
‘Urrah!’ he cried. ‘Now let me show you where we keep our documents.’ He opened a further steel door into a subterranean hall stacked with metal cabinets holding thousands upon thousands of numbered files. ‘Many of these will still be closed long after we’re dead. This is my life’s work and I wouldn’t show you anything that I felt undermined the security of the Motherland. But your research is just a footnote, albeit a very interesting footnote. Please sit at my desk and I’ll show you your materials.’
‘Why are you helping me?’ she asked.
‘Only as a favour to a respected comrade archivist – and uncle. Yes, Kuzma’s my uncle. We archivists are all related: my father works at the State Archive and my grandfather before him.’
‘An imperial dynasty of archivists,’ said Katinka.
‘Between ourselves, that’s exactly how I see it!’ Shcheglov beamed, gold teeth flashing in the electric light. ‘You’re not to copy anything even into a notebook. Remember, girl, none of this is ever to be published. Agreed?’
Katinka nodded and sat at his desk. He took a shallow pile of beige files off a shelf, opened a file, licked his finger and turned some pages.
‘Scene one. A list of 123 names – each with a number – signed by Stalin and a quorum of the Politburo on 9 January 1940.’
Katinka’s heart raced. A deathlist. Shcheglov hummed as he ran his finger down the list.
82. Palitsyn, I. N.
83. Zeitlin-Palitsyn, A. S. (Comrade Snowfox)
84. Barmakid, Mendel
She noted the list was addressed to Stalin and the Politburo and signed in a tiny, neat green ink by L. P. Beria, Narkom NKVD.
Shcheglov’s finger travelled to the scrawls around the typed names:
Agreed. Molotov
Crush these traitors like snakes. I vote for the Vishka!
Kaganovich
Shoot these whores and scoundrels like dogs. Voroshilov
And most decisively:
Shoot them all.
J. St.
‘So they were sentenced,’ she said, ‘but were they all …?’
‘Scene two.’ Shcheglov slid the document across the desk with a flourish, turned back to the shelf, hunted around for a few moments and then presented a scuffed memorandum, bearing in its careless scrawl and clumsy blotting the grinding boredom, stained desks, greasy fingers and the rough routine of prisons.
To Comrade Commandant of Special Object 110, Golechev
21 January 1940
Transfer to Major V. S. Blokhin, Head of Command Operations, the below-mentioned prisoners condemned to be shot …
The 123 names on the list were typed below. Sashenka and Vanya were near the top. A bunch of over a hundred blotched, crumpled chits – pro-forma memoranda with the names and dates filled in – was held together by a thick red string pushed through a hole in the sheaf.
Her hands shaking, Katinka found Vanya Palitsyn’s chit.
On the orders of Comrade Kobylov, Deputy Narkom NKVD, the undersigned on 21 January 1940 at 4.41 a.m. carried out the sentence of shooting on … and here the semi-literate scribble of a half-drunk executioner added the name Palitsyn, Ivan. The man who carried out the sentence was V. S. Blokhin. Katinka had heard of him from Maxy: he usually wore a butcher’s leather apron and cap to shield his beloved NKVD uniform from the spatter of blood.
Katinka felt herself in the presence of evil and nothingness. She was not crying, she was too overwhelmed for that. Instead she felt dizzy and faint.
The other chits were the same. She could only think that every scrap, so sloppily filled in, was the end of a life and a family. She could barely bring herself to look at Sashenka’s – but then she started to turn the pages too fast, almost tearing them.
‘I can’t find her,’ she said, her voice shaking.
Shcheglov looked at his watch. ‘We haven’t got long before my colleague returns. Now we go back over six months to how the case began. Take a look at this. Scene three.’
He placed a yellowing piece of paper before her, headed in black type – OFFICE OF J. V. STALIN. Its entire surface was covered in squiggles and shading in thick green and red crayon, doodles of wolves and apparently random words. But Stalin’s secretary had annotated the exact date and time: 7 May 1939. Sent to archives 11.42 p.m. That was the evening when Beria had shown Stalin the transcript of Sashenka and Benya in bed together at the Metropole.
Katinka looked into the bottle-thick, greasy lenses of Shcheglov’s spectacles that reflected her own anxious eyes, then down at the papers before her. Slowly, she started to piece together the drama of the night that had doomed Sashenka and her whole family. She knew how Stalin had read the bugging transcript and hated it, calling Sashenka morally corrupt … like a streetwalker. She got her notebook out of her bag and glanced back at the order of Stalin’s visitors that night:
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.
By the time Beria left Stalin’s office at 10.30 p.m., Satinov was waiting in the anteroom. Stalin called in Satinov and asked him about Sashenka’s affair.
Katinka perused the new page of Stalin’s squiggles and, with a rising horror, she started to understand.
Questions for Comrade Satinov: Sashenka in St Petersburg was in the middle of the page, surrounded by circles, squares and a finely drawn fox’s face, shaded in red and entitled Comrade Snowfox. Satinov must have answered these questions coolly because Stalin scrawled down his answer: Old friends, devoted Bolsheviks.
Then Stalin called in Beria again and they intensified their cross-examination of Satinov. The next words were scarcely legible.
‘I can’t quite read this,’ she said.
The archivist followed the words with his finger and read out:
Snowfox in St Petersburg reliable/unreliable?
L. P. Beria: Molotov and Mendel in St Petersburg?
Katinka realized that these were all questions to Satinov. She started to imagine his struggle for survival during those five minutes. What could he say? He must have been pale, sweating, his mind spinning. He had a sweet wife and a new baby, but he was a devoted Communist and an ambitious man. His answers during those five minutes would either save his life and make his career, or destroy his own life and that of his wife and baby.
When Stalin asked about Sashenka’s ‘reliability’ in Petersburg, a name must have come to Satinov’s mind: Captain Sagan, whom he knew of only from his dealings with Mendel in late 1916.
Did Stalin already know about Sashenka’s mission to turn Sagan, and that it had been ordered by the Petersburg Committee? If he talked about it now, and no one knew of it, it could taint Sashenka, although this was unlikely since Sagan had been dead for
twenty-two years.
But what if Molotov or Mendel, the only others apart from Sashenka who knew about the Sagan operation, had already discussed it with Stalin? Satinov would then be accused of hiding it from the Party, from Stalin himself. That was unthinkable. That would mean death.
Katinka stared down at the crayoned hieroglyphics that revealed this feverish game of Russian roulette that would still decree the destinies of people fifty years later.
So what did Satinov do? Did he panic and say more than he meant? Or did he calculate and act in cold blood?
‘We’ll probably never know.’ She found she was talking aloud.
‘But we do know he said this …’ replied Shcheglov, his finger showing her the next words written by Stalin on this crowded piece of paper: Hercules S: Cpt Sagan. Petersburg. SAGAN
Katinka went cold. So Satinov had told Stalin and Beria about Sashenka and Captain Sagan of the Okhrana. She felt pity for Satinov, and then anger, and then pity again. He might have answered differently if he had known that Captain Sagan was alive – and in one of Beria’s camps, his name meticulously filed in the NKVD roster of prisoners. Within hours, Sagan was on his way to Moscow and Kobylov was beating him into testifying against Sashenka.
‘If Satinov had brazened it out,’ she whispered, ‘they might all have survived.’
‘Or he might have faced the Vishka too,’ Shcheglov pointed out. ‘Have you seen enough?’ He started to gather up the papers and put them away in his orderly files where they would rest, perhaps for ever.
‘So Satinov doomed his best friends,’ Katinka mused, ‘but then risked everything to save their children. Does that redeem him?’
Shcheglov gestured towards the lift, in a hurry to get her out of his office, but she gripped his arms. ‘Hang on, there’s one thing missing. Stalin created a commission to investigate Sashenka’s execution. Where is its report?’
‘There was a number for the file,’ said Shcheglov, guiding her towards the lift. ‘But the file’s not here. Sorry, but only God knows everything.’ He pressed the button to call the lift.
‘Thank you for showing me this,’ she said, kissing him as she left. ‘You’ve been very kind. I can’t tell you what this means to me.’
‘And you care too much,’ he said, squeezing her hands.
As she stepped into the lift, she reviewed the combination of the extract from Satinov’s memoirs and Stalin’s enigmatic note, Bicho to curate, on the papers Maxy had shown her in the Party archive.
Bicho – boy in Georgian – was Stalin’s nickname for Satinov. ‘Curate’ was Stalin’s word for what he wanted Satinov to do: supervise the destruction of a family he loved.
‘Oh God,’ she gasped, finally understanding it all. ‘Satinov saw her die. What did they do to her?’
23
Rushing out of the archive and on to Mayakovsky Square, Katinka waved down a Lada. It sped her down the hill towards the Granovsky. Fizzing with urgency, she rang five bells simultaneously, the door buzzed and she raced upstairs to the Satinov apartment. The door was again open but when she entered, Mariko was standing in the hall beneath the crystal chandelier.
‘Mariko, I know what you think but please – I’ve got to tell him what I’ve discovered. He’s helped me every step of the way without me realizing. I know he’ll want to talk to me now.’
Katinka stopped and caught her breath. Mariko did not throw her out. She didn’t say anything at all and Katinka, who had never really looked at her before, noticed that Mariko did not seem angry. Her dark, pointed face was desperately tired.
‘Come in,’ she said quietly. ‘You can see him.’ She walked down the hallway, passing the sitting room. Katinka followed, peering eagerly ahead. ‘Go on in.’
Satinov lay in bed, propped up on pillows with his eyes closed. His face, his hair, his lips seemed the colour of ashes. A nurse was by the bed, adjusting the oxygen cylinder and the plastic mask, but when she saw them she nodded briskly and left the room.
Katinka, who had so much to ask, was suddenly uncertain what to do. Satinov’s breathing was ragged; sometimes his chest rose jerkily, at other times he did not breathe for some seconds. He was sweating with effort and fear. Katinka knew she should feel pity for this dying man but instead she felt only fury and frustration. How could he escape her like this? How could he be so cruel as to leave Roza without ever telling anyone what happened to her mother?
Katinka glanced at Mariko, who gestured at the low chair by the bed. ‘You can talk to him,’ Mariko said. ‘For a minute or two. He asked where you were. He was thinking about you and your research. That’s why I let you in.’
‘Can he hear me?’
‘I think so. He speaks sometimes, his lips move. He’s talked about my mother a bit but it’s hard to understand. The doctors say … We’re not sure.’ Mariko leaned back against the doorpost, stretched her back and rubbed her face.
Katinka stood up, leaned over the bed, then looked back at Mariko.
‘Go ahead,’ she said.
Katinka took Satinov’s hand in hers. ‘It’s Katinka. Your researcher. I say “your” researcher because you’ve held all the cards all along and you’ve sent me this way and that … If you can hear me, let me know somehow. You can squeeze my hand or even just blink.’ She waited but he took another desperate breath, his entire body shivered, and he settled down again. ‘I know you loved Sashenka and Vanya, I know you did a terrible thing and I know how you saved their children. But what happened to Sashenka? What did you see? Please tell me how she died.’
There was no reaction. Katinka realized that this old man was a study in ambiguities. He had helped and encouraged her but also tricked and obstructed her, just as he had doomed Sashenka and saved her children. She grieved for him yet at the same time she’d never felt more enraged.
He was quiet for a few minutes but then his breathing became more of a struggle, his hands clawing the counterpane as his body twisted to get oxygen. The nurse returned and gave him oxygen and an injection, and he grew calmer again.
‘I’ll get my brothers in a minute,’ said Mariko. ‘They’re sleeping down the corridor. We’ve been up all night.’
Katinka stood up and walked to the door.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Thank you for letting me in. I wish now I’d brought Roza to see him … I had so much to ask him.’ She looked back at the bed, hoping for him to call her back. ‘I’ll let myself out.’
Just then they heard his voice. Katinka spun round and the two of them returned to the bedside. Satinov’s lips were moving a little.
‘What’s he saying?’ asked Katinka.
Mariko took his hands and kissed his forehead. ‘Papa, it’s Mariko, right here with you, darling Papa.’
He moved his lips again, but they could hear nothing. After a while his lips stopped moving and, as his family filed into the room, Katinka slipped away.
* * *
Outside, Maxy waited, smoking as he leaned on his bike. Katinka walked out into his arms, smelling the leather of his jacket and the smoke of his cigarette. She was very glad he was there.
‘He’s dying? A terrible thing to see. But you’ve done all you can …’
‘It’s over,’ she said, ‘and I’m exhausted. I’ll phone Roza, collate my notes and put her in contact with anyone she wants to meet.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘I’m going home. I want to see my friends, and there’s a boy who wants to take me on holiday. Perhaps it’s best that we never know how Sashenka died. My papa was right. I should never have taken this job. I’m going back to Catherine the Great.’
‘But you’re so good at this,’ said Maxy. ‘Katinka, please come and work with me at the foundation. We could achieve so much together.’
She shook her head and collected herself. ‘No thanks. There’s no fruit, no harvest in this sort of history; all these fields are sown with salt. It may be old history but the poison is fresh and the unhappiness lives on. No, th
e turning over of old graves isn’t for me. It’s too painful. Goodbye, Maxy, and thanks for everything.’
She wiped her eyes and started to walk away.
‘Katinka!’ Maxy called after her.
She half turned.
‘Katinka, can I call you some time?’
24
But Katinka had reckoned without the persuasive force of Pasha Getman.
‘You can’t just give up and walk away from us,’ he’d roared at her when she’d phoned to say she’d done all she could. Then he’d said in a quieter voice, ‘What about my mother? She’s so fond of you. We need you to do one final thing for us. Think of it as a personal favour to Roza.’
And so it was that three days later, taking Pasha’s private plane, Katinka and Roza had flown down to Tbilisi (which was, as Pasha reminded Katinka, almost on her way home). Some of Pasha’s bodyguards had driven them straight to the picturesque café in the old vine-entangled mansion.
‘Lala,’ said Katinka to the old lady in the small room upstairs. ‘I’ve brought someone to meet you.’
Lala Lewis, holding her usual glass of Georgian wine, sat up in bed and focused on the doorway.
‘Is it her? Is it Sashenka?’ she asked.
‘No, Lala, but it is almost Sashenka. This is Roza Getman, Sashenka’s daughter, whom you knew as Snowy.’
‘Ohh,’ Lala sighed and held out her hands. ‘Come closer. I’m very old. Come sit on my bed. Let me look at you. Let me see into your eyes.’
‘Hello, Lala,’ said Roza, her voice trembling, ‘it’s been more than fifty years since you cared for us.’
Katinka watched as Roza, dressed neatly in a white blouse, blue cardigan and cream skirt, her grey hair still coiffured in the style of her youth, walked forward slowly, looking around her at the trinkets of a vanished life. She seemed to hesitate for a moment at the sight of the old nanny’s outstretched hands and then, smiling, as if Lala was somehow familiar to her, she sat on the bed.
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