‘What are we doing here?’ she asked finally, slipping out of his arms.
‘I did a little more research and found the burial records of Sashenka, Vanya, even Uncle Mendel. After execution, they were cremated and the ashes were buried in the grounds of an NKVD dacha in the birch woods just outside Moscow. Afterwards, following NKVD orders on mass graves, raspberry canes and blackberry bushes were planted on the site. Look, there’s a plaque on the tree there.’ He pointed.
Here lie buried the remains
of the innocent tortured and executed victims
of the political repressions.
May they never be forgotten!
‘She’s here, isn’t she?’ said Katinka, standing close to him. He put his arms around her again, and this time she didn’t object.
‘Not just her,’ he said. ‘They’re all here, together.’
* * *
Evening was falling – that rosy, grainy dusk when it seems as if Moscow is lit from below, not above – as Maxy dropped Katinka back at the Getman mansion. She stood on the steps and waved as he drove off.
When the guards admitted her the house was unusually hushed, but she found Roza in the kitchen.
‘You need some chai and honeycakes,’ said Roza, giving her a look. Katinka realized that her skin must be raw, and her eyes red. ‘Sit down.’
Katinka watched as Roza made the tea, adding honey and two teaspoons of brandy to each cup. Her aunt didn’t miss much, she thought.
‘Here,’ said Roza, ‘drink this. We both need it. Don’t worry about your father. I was rushing him too much. You know, I can still see that sturdy little boy with his beloved rabbit at our dacha. I’ve thought of him like that all my life and I’ve been aching to find him again – but of course, I don’t know him any more. Will you tell me what to do?’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Katinka, still reeling from what she had learned with Maxy, her mind stalked by visions of Sashenka’s death. She suddenly longed to share what she knew, to tell Roza everything, to work out exactly how death had come to Sashenka, how it had happened, and how she had looked – what Satinov had seen. ‘I’ve got something else to show you,’ she said, drawing out a wad of photocopied papers from her backpack.
‘Wait,’ answered Roza. ‘Before I look at that, I want to ask you – I know my father was shot but you said there was something unusual … How did my mother die?’
‘I was just about to come to that,’ said Katinka but something made her keep the papers close to her.
She took a breath, eager to go on, but as she did so she saw Sashenka in the snow, her skin white in the electric glare of the searchlights; and Satinov, horrified, standing before Sashenka just minutes later. If he had really broken, if he hadn’t supervised the other 122 executions with Stalinist toughness immediately afterwards, then he too would have been tortured until he revealed how he had rescued Sashenka’s children …
Katinka sensed Roza’s gentle but penetrating gaze on her, and she shook herself – there were some secrets she should keep.
She looked into Roza’s intelligent, violet eyes and saw that she was tensed, ready to absorb this blow too. Instead she took her hands. ‘Like the others. She died just like the others.’
Roza held her stare and then smiled. ‘I thought so. That’s good to know. But what were you going to show me?’
Katinka deftly put the investigation into Sashenka’s death at the back of her papers so that another document was on top. ‘I’ve got a few things I was given by Kuzma the archive rat, including this, your mother’s confession. I hadn’t read it in full because she gave them two hundred pages of crazy confessions of secret meetings with enemy agents and her plot to kill Stalin by spraying cyanide on to the gramophone at the dacha – all to give Satinov time to settle you and Carlo with your families. But there’s one bit that sounds strange. May I read it to you?’
Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: In 1933, as a reward from the Party for our work, Vanya and I were allowed to seek treatment for my neurasthenia in London. We visited a well-known clinic in Harley Street called the Cushion House, where, under cover of medical treatment, we met agents of the British secret service and Trotsky himself, who asked us to arrange the assassination of Comrade Stalin.
Interrogator Mogilchuk: At the Cushion House? Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: Yes.
‘This “Cushion House” is an odd name, even in English,’ explained Katinka. ‘I checked it. There’s never been a Cushion House anywhere in London, ever. Does it ring a bell?’
Roza started to laugh. ‘Come with me.’ She took Katinka’s hand and led her upstairs to her tidy bedroom. ‘Do you see?’ she asked.
‘What?’ asked Katinka.
‘Look!’ She pointed at her bed. ‘Here!’ Roza picked up a ragged old cushion, the material so threadbare and moth-eaten it was almost transparent, so bleached by time it was nearly white. ‘This was Cushion, moya Podoushka, the companion of my childhood and the only thing I could take with me to my new existence.’
She hugged it like a baby.
‘You see how she remembered me?’ said Roza. ‘My mother was telling me that she loved me, wasn’t she? She was sending me a message. So that if I ever found out who I really was, I’d know that she always loved me.’
The air in the room was suddenly taut and Roza turned her back on Katinka and looked out of the window.
‘Is there anything else in there that seems strange?’ she asked, hopefully, and Katinka understood that she wanted something to offer her brother.
‘Yes, now I see what she was doing, there is something. You said my father loved rabbits. Well, in the confession, Sashenka says she and Vanya hid some of the cyanide in the rabbit hutch – of all places – at the dacha. So I think she left something for him too …’
‘I’d like to tell him that myself,’ said Roza, ‘but I don’t want to do anything to upset him. I thought I might wait a bit and then call him and perhaps go down to see him. What do you think?’
‘Of course, but don’t leave it too long,’ smiled Katinka, ‘will you?’
29
It had been an extraordinary day, Katinka thought as she came downstairs. But it was not quite over yet.
As she crossed the spacious hall towards the kitchen, she heard a convoy of cars sweeping into the drive. Pasha was back. There was the sound of doors slamming then Pasha’s loud voice, his clumsy, shambling footsteps and an unfamiliar but husky chattering that stopped abruptly.
‘Oh my God, it’s her!’ the voice said.
Katinka turned, and found herself face to face with a slim old man with a long, sensitive face and a battered blue worker’s cap. He was obviously in his eighties at least but there was a jerky energy about him, and he was still dapper in a crumpled brown suit that was too baggy for his slight figure. She liked him immediately.
‘Is it you, Sashenka?’ said the man, looking at her intensely. ‘Is it you? God, am I dreaming? You’re so very like her – down to her grey eyes, her mouth, even the way she stands. Is this a trick?’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Pasha, standing right behind him. ‘Katinka, you weren’t the only one doing some research. I found someone too.’
Katinka let her rucksack drop on to the floor and stepped back. ‘Who are you?’ she asked shakily. ‘Who the hell are you?’
The old man wiped his face with a big linen handkerchief. ‘Who’s asking the questions here? Me or this slip of a girl?’ Katinka noticed his eyes were a dazzling blue. ‘My name’s Benya Golden. Who are you?’ He took her hand and kissed it. ‘Tell me, for God’s sake.’
‘Benya Golden?’ exclaimed Katinka. ‘But I thought you were …’
‘Well …’ Benya shrugged, ‘so did everyone else. Can I sit down? I’d like a cognac please?’ He looked round at the exquisitely restored mansion, the Old Master paintings, the fat sofas. ‘This place looks as if your bar will have everything. Get me a Courvoisier before I drop. It’s been a long journey. Look – my hands are trembli
ng.’
They moved into the sitting room, where Pasha lit a cigar and poured them all brandies.
‘So you’ve heard of me?’ Benya said after a while.
‘Of course, I’ve even read your Spanish Stories,’ answered Katinka.
‘I didn’t know I had such young fans. I didn’t know I had any fans.’ He was silent. ‘You know, you really are the image of a woman called Sashenka whom I loved with all my heart a long time ago. Hasn’t anyone told you that?’
Katinka shook her head but she remembered Sashenka’s face in that prison photograph and how she’d felt. ‘She was my grandmother,’ she said. ‘I’ve been finding out what happened to her.’
‘Have you been in those vile archives?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘And have you found how they tortured us and broke us?’
Katinka nodded. ‘Everything.’
‘And so can you tell me why it all happened, to us I mean, to me and Sashenka?’
‘There was no why,’ Katinka said slowly. ‘Just a chain of events. I’ve discovered so much … But tell me, how did you survive?’
‘Uh, there’s not much to tell. Stalin’s thugs beat me and I told them everything they wanted. But at the trial, I said I’d been lying because I’d been tortured. I knew they’d shoot me and I couldn’t face the bullet knowing I’d betrayed Sashenka. But they gave me ten years in Kolyma instead. I was released in the war – and I had quite a war – but then I was rearrested afterwards, and released again in the fifties. I was a husk of a man, but I met a woman in the camps, a nurse, an angel, and she put me back together again. She got me a job as editor of a journal in Birobizhan, the Jewish region, near the Chinese border, and that’s the godforsaken place where we’ve been living ever since.’
‘Do you still write?’
‘They’d beaten all that out of me.’ He brushed that aside with a gesture. ‘I am happy just to breathe. Do you have any food in this palace? I’m always hungry.’
‘Of course,’ said Pasha. ‘We can make anything you like. Just name it!’
‘I’ll have a steak, dear prince, and all the trimmings, and a bottle of red wine,’ said Benya. ‘Do you have any French wine? Or is that pushing this dream too far? I once loved French claret … I drank it in Paris, you know – do you have it? Well then, will you all join me?’ He went quiet again, and Katinka could see that his eyes had filled with tears.
Finally he took her hand and kissed it a second time. ‘Meeting you is like a last summer for me. Not a day passes when I don’t remember your grandmother. We were the world’s greatest lovers, yet we were together for just eleven days.’ He sighed deeply. ‘I gave her a flower for every day …’
Katinka’s heart gave a little skip. She reached into her rucksack and pulled out the little envelope of materials from Sashenka’s file that Kuzma had given her. ‘Does this mean anything to you?’ She handed him a much-creased old envelope addressed to ‘B. Golden’ at the Soviet Writers’ Union, in a feminine hand.
He took it from her, opened it, fingers shaking, and pulled out a pressed mimosa so flimsy that it almost came apart in his hands.
‘She sent it to you,’ Katinka told him, ‘but it arrived too late, and you’d been arrested. The Writers’ Union gave it to the NKVD and they filed it.’
Benya muttered something, shaking his head in disbelief. Then he raised the flower to his face, sniffed its old petals, kissed it and when he could finally speak, he sat up straight and proud, beaming at her through flooded eyes.
Suddenly he threw off his peaked cap and, with a dashing and triumphant smile, spun it across the room. ‘Even after fifty years,’ he said, ‘I know what this means.’
30
It was a lazy soomerki in Moscow over a week later. A sleepy, orange-headed sun had lost the swagger of the day and struggled to remain in the sky. The light spread a tender pink veil over the cool waters while the shadows beneath the trees were dyed a dark blue. There was so much blossom on the warm breeze, it almost snowed gossamer as Katinka walked with Maxy around the Patriarchy Ponds. Katinka felt dizzy and joyful to be away from her family and the past. Here only the present mattered as she strolled around this sanctuary in the middle of the clamouring city.
She had not seen Maxy since that day out in the woods and she had things to tell him that only he would understand and that only they could share. Though they weren’t touching, she felt that they moved in sync, as if their limbs were linked with invisible threads.
‘I’m so glad I’m living now,’ she was saying to him, ‘because I don’t think I would have been as brave as Sashenka and Vanya if I’d lived then.’
‘I think you might have been braver,’ answered Maxy as, like one, they headed towards the outdoor café beside the water.
‘Well, thank God that in our times we don’t need to be that brave,’ she said. ‘We’re free in Russia. For the first time in history. We can do what we want, say whatever we want. No one’s watching us any more – that’s all over now.’
‘But for how long?’ asked Maxy so seriously that Katinka thought he was being absurdly gloomy. The joy of being alive and young suddenly took hold of her – and she spun around and kissed him, quite recklessly.
THE END
Acknowledgements
This is the story of the women and children of a fictional family across several generations and I hope it will be enjoyed as that: an intimate novel about a family. But it was inspired by the many stories, letters and cases that I found in archives and heard in interviews over ten years of researching Russian history.
There are some historical characters in the book – Rasputin and Stalin being among the most obvious – and their portrayals are as accurate as I could make them. But as I wrote this book, Sashenka and her family began to seem more real than their factual contemporaries.
Historians generally write about extraordinary people who’ve shaped world events. But in this novel I wanted to write about how an ordinary family coped with the triumphs and tragedies of twentieth-century Russian history. I was fascinated by the courage and endurance of the many thousands of women who lost their husbands and children and wondered: how did they survive? And how would any of us have behaved in such terrible times?
Above all, this is a book about love and family – but I also wanted to make these strange and tragic times in Russian history interesting for readers who perhaps wouldn’t read history books. The details of high society in St Petersburg, its shops, restaurants and clubs, prisons and dives, its tycoons and secret policemen, the Smolny school and the Okhrana offices, and many of its outrageous characters such as Prince Andronnikov are mainly factual. In the Soviet period, Stalin, Beria, Rodos and Kobylov are historical, as are the details of the prisons, their guards, and the customs of the labyrinthine Soviet bureacracy. The language and details of the documents in Part Three are real too, although some of the archives have been invented. The village of Beznadezhnaya is imaginary, though typical of many places I’ve known in the north Caucasus.
The story of Sashenka and her family is inspired by many true stories, including those of the Jewish wives of Stalin’s henchmen, the arrests of writers such as Isaac Babel, and the case of Zhenya, the wife of Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD boss who destroyed all those who loved her. (This also appears in my history Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.)
I owe a huge debt to my sources, whose work I have used liberally: for Part One (St Petersburg, 1916), I used Vladimir Nabokov’s famous and exquisite memoir, Speak Memory; a brilliant privately published memoir of a wealthy Jewish family, The Silver Samovar by Alexander Poliakoff, whom I knew as a boy; The Five by Vladimir Jabotinsky; Ilya Ehrenburg’s multi-volumed memoirs as well as novels such as The Moskat Family and The Manor by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
On the history, politics, art and society, I used a superb book, Passage Through Armageddon by W. Bruce Lincoln. On the details of the Tsarist secret police, see Russian Hide-and-Seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St P
etersburg, 1906–14 by Iain Lauchlan and The Foe Within by William C. Fuller Jr. But I found most of this material during the research for my latest history book, Young Stalin.
On the Stalin period in Part Two, most of the material comes from my own research into the Soviet élite for my history, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, but I owe much to brilliant material in The KGB’s Literary Archive by Vitaly Shentalinsky. I also used the novella The House on the Embankment by Yury Trifonov, and the novels in the Children of the Arbat trilogy by Anatoli Rybakov.
Recent history books such as Stalinism as a Way of Life by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, Thank You Comrade Stalin by Jeffrey Brooks and Rulers and Victims by Geoffrey Hosking were invaluable sources. The outstanding and unforgettable book The Whisperers by Orlando Figes is especially enlightening because it reveals how Sashenka’s story was, in many ways, commonplace. I recommend it to anyone who is intrigued by my story and wants to know what really happened to private lives and families in Russia. Even in the 1990s – even now – Russian families are discovering their extraordinary pasts and being reunited with vanished relations.
Experts will recognize that Mendel’s letter complaining of his treatment in prison is closely based on the tragic letter written by the theatrical director V. Meyerhold.
As for my sources for Part Three, the age of the oligarchs, and of course the mysteries and delights of archival research in Russia, all I can say is that I spent a lot of time as a journalist and then a historian in both Moscow and the Caucasus during the 1990s. Most of the material in this section has been drawn from my own experiences.
Thanks to Galina Babkova for investigating what it was like to study at the Smolny; to Galina Oleksiuk, who taught me Russian, and has corrected and checked the script for Russian context; to Nestan Charkviani for giving me Georgian colour; to Marc and Rachel Polonsky for having me to stay at their apartment in the Granovsky building; and to Dominic Lieven for his encouragement.
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