Sashenka (52 page)

“Are you…an orphan?” asked Katinka. She couldn’t imagine how this might feel.

“I don’t even know,” answered Roza. “Where are my 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 vacation 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 guttersoiled 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 Mercedeses 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 oldfashioned 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 middleaged 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 artdeco thirties furniture. The Lshaped corridor led off to many rooms but she turned right into the living 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 tenfoothigh painting of Lenin at the Finland Station on one wall and on the other an original Gerasimov portrait, of a handsome, sharpfaced marshal in full uniform, gold shoulder boards and a chestful of medals like a Christmas tree.

To her right, a table was heaped with Soviet and foreign magazines; a newfangled 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 chiseled. 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 notebook 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 lifepreserving urge bred into every Soviet citizen to avoid officials, Muscovites and especially secret policemen, and the dangers of power itself—all of these dueled 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 ninetyfour, eh?” Katinka noticed that his Georgian accent was still strong despite many decades in Moscow. “Do you know I can still dance? Mariko!” The middleaged 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 the Second’s legal program 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, wintery 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 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 fiveyearold child. She was fairhaired 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.”

“But after Stalin’s death, surely…”

“Yes,” said Katinka, “after Stalin’s death, Roza insisted that the Liberharts make an official inquiry. They told Roza that both her parents died during the Great Patriotic War, which fits because her adoption was around that time.”

Satinov opened his hands. “And she accepts this?”

“She accepted it for decades. She loved her adoptive parents. Enoch died in 1979 but Perla lived until recently. Before she died, Communism fell. Only then did Perla admit to Roza that she had lied to her. The Liberharts had not made an official inquiry because they never knew the name of her real parents.”

“Tell me, Katinka, were these Liberharts…good people, kind parents?” Satinov asked, leaning toward her.

Katinka sensed the sudden swirl of deeper, more treacherous waters. She thought nostalgically of her studies: of Catherine the Great at the State Archive, of nobler, more golden times. But she was a historian and what historian wouldn’t be fascinated to meet a relic like Satinov, a real breath of the recent past, a past that was itself shrouded in mystery?

“Roza says they were unworldly intellectuals unsuited to having children. Professor Liberhart couldn’t boil an egg or drive a car, and Roza said he once went to work with his shoes on the wrong feet. Perla was an overweight bluestocking who couldn’t cook, darn or make a bed and never even used makeup or had a hairdo (though she could have done with both!). She devoted her life to translating Shakespeare’s sonnets into Russian. So Roza grew up like a miniadult caring for eccentric parents. She remembers the terrible things that happened in that war. There was the siege of Odessa; the slaughter of the Odessan Jews by the Nazis and Romanians; the Holocaust. But through everything, Enoch and Perla loved her with the love of parents who have been blessed with a child they never expected.”

Satinov stirred some plum jam into his tea and licked the spoon. Then, checking no one was at the door, he pulled out a pack of Lux cigarettes and lit one with a silver lighter, holding it over the top like a young man. “I’m not allowed to smoke, but the Devil, get thee behind…” He inhaled deeply, eyes closed. “So why have you come to see me?”

“When Roza needed an operation in her teens and her parents were worried about her health, they called someone in Moscow who arranged everything.”

“Perhaps it was an uncle?”

“Once there was a big Party conference in Odessa. Roza thinks it was in the fifties. Many bosses came to town. One afternoon, she saw a black ZiL limousine outside her school with a man in uniform inside, a big boss. She had the feeling, no, more than a feeling, she was certain that he was waiting for her. All week, he was there watching her every morning. I don’t know who that man was, Marshal Satinov.” Katinka looked directly at Satinov, who shifted slightly in his chair. “Roza forgave the Liberharts for their lie but she begged her mother for a name. Before she died, Perla told Roza that the Muscovite they called was you. You helped her get this treatment. Maybe you were the man in the limousine?”

Satinov took another toke of his cigarette. Katinka could tell he was listening carefully.

“Stories, just stories,” he said.

Katinka felt a sharp surge of impatience. She leaned forward on her uncomfortable chair.

“Roza and I want to know why you helped her, Marshal. She is convinced that you know who her parents were.”

Satinov frowned and shook his head. “Do you realize, girl, how many socalled historians ring me up to ask impertinent questions? Because I’m old, they expect me to undermine the greatest achievements of the twentieth century—the creation of Socialism, the victory in the Great Patriotic War, my life’s work.” He stood up. “Thank you for visiting me, Katinka. Before you go, I want to present you with my autobiography.”