Sashenka (55 page)

The Marmoset nodded and placed another slim
papka
file on top of the other. “Palitsyn’s wife has her own file, right here. Do you want to see it?”

Katinka picked it up and read:

Investigation File May/June 1939

Case 16374

Alexandra Samuilovna ZeitlinPalitsyn, Prisoner 778

“Samuilovna Zeitlin. Not a Russian name. There were a lot of
them
in the Party in those days and many turned out to be traitors,” said the Marmoset, leaning over her shoulder.

He opened the file. There was a photograph clipped to the few papers inside.

“There, that’s the photograph they take on the day of arrest.”

Katinka looked at it, her heart beating. It showed a woman with a full mouth slightly open and ashgrey eyes that burned into the lens.

“She’s beautiful, whoever she was.” Katinka was fascinated suddenly, and a little touched.

“Yes, she was quite well known once, that Delilah. Then, falala, she vanished!”

“May I examine the file now?” Katinka could not wait to free herself of the Marmoset’s gaze.

“You have thirty minutes.” He pushed the file over to her then returned to his seat and sat watching.

“For this one file?”

“For both. These are the rules.”

“Do feel free to do your other work, Colonel,” Katinka said selfconsciously.

“Watching you,” he replied, “is my work.”

9

Katinka placed the photograph above the file, which she pulled closer, and looked into the woman’s face: the eyes reflected the flashbulb of an oldfashioned camera but, far from a vacant selfpity, the gaze radiated warmth and a mocking jauntiness, even as Katinka traced in the set of the muscles a straining to show, at the brink of the abyss, the best face she could.

“Hello,” whispered Katinka, imagining that the photograph might answer, that those beseeching eyes might blink. “Who are you?” Stapled to the inside cover of the file was a scuffed, stained scrap of paper to be signed by everyone who had looked at the file—but it was blank. No one outside the KGB had ever examined it. She grabbed at the first sheet of paper, a short biography:

Born 1900 in St. Petersburg, Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin

Palitsyn, known as Sashenka, Comrade Snowfox. Nationality:
Jewish. Party member since 1916. Last place of work: editor,
Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping
magazine, State
Publishing House. Educated at Smolny Institute…

“Sashenka…,” Katinka said to herself. “Will you help Roza and me?”

Family: father, Baron Samuil Zeitlin, capitalist banker, later nonParty specialist at People’s Commissariats of Finance, then Foreign Trade, then State Bank, dismissed 1928, exiled 1929, arrested
1937, sentenced to ten years Kolyma. Mother: Ariadna Zeitlin, nee Barmakid, dead 1917.

Mother’s brother: Mendel Barmakid, Jewish, Party member since 1904, member Central Committee
1911–1939, arrested 1939.

Father’s brother: Gideon Zeitlin, writer. Not a Party member. Jewish.

Husband: Ivan Palitsyn, born St. Petersburg 1895. Russian, Party member since 1911, married
1922, arrested 1939, last place of work: Assistant Deputy People’s Commissar, NKVD.

Children: Volya and Karlmarx.

“Pleased to meet you all,” said Katinka under her breath. Sashenka and her husband would be very old now but they could still be alive—there was nothing in the file to say they weren’t. And their children wouldn’t even be old. She didn’t know if this woman was relevant to her search, yet her pulse quickened. “I wonder what happened to you.”

“You’re talking to yourself,” said the Marmoset. “Silence, please.”

“Sorry.” Katinka turned over the page to find a form, filled in on May 16, 1939, giving Sashenka’s description.
Color of eyes: grey. Hair: dark brown with chestnut streaks
. And there were her smudged fingerprints. Then a creased and stained piece of paper, headed
Main
Administration of State Security, Very Important Cases Department
. In the middle, typed in a large, curvaceous, open typeface that looked bold and honest as if it had nothing to hide, was the following command:
ZeitlinPalitsyn, along with her husband Palitsyn, has been unmasked as a longserving Okhrana and White Guardist spy, Trotskyite saboteur, and agent of
Japan. It is essential to arrest her and carry out a search.

This was surrounded by stamps, squiggles and signatures. The first name was
Captain
Melsky, Head of Ninth Section of Fourth Department, Main Administration of State Security
. But a thick felt pen had been put through his name and underneath, in what appeared to be a child’s handwriting and spelling, someone had written:
I will carry out this oberation myself.

B. Kobylov, CommissarGeneral, State Security, second degree.
Then later:
Oberation compleded.

Prisoner Alexandra ZeitlinPalitsyn delivered to Internal Prison. B. Kobylov, CommissarGeneral,
State Security, second degree
.

The Marmoset was still sitting there leering, but Katinka did not care. She was gripped. So Sashenka and her husband had fallen in 1939. Why? When she turned the page, she found the testimony of a man named Peter Sagan, exCaptain of the Gendarmes, Okhrana officer and later (under a false name) a schoolteacher in Irkutsk. Sagan revealed that Sashenka and Vanya had been in Petersburg in 1917—just like Satinov. But soon the outpouring of crazed accusations against the Palitsyns became too much to absorb. It seemed a ghost had emerged out of the mists of time bearing a plague of lies and accusations. But then she looked at the date of the Sagan confession: it was July 5—
after
Sashenka’s arrest. Sagan had not arrived in Lubianka until July 1. So Sashenka had been arrested for something else. But what?

Katinka leafed hungrily through the badly typed fifteenpage confession signed at each corner with Sagan’s frail, anemic markings—how strange, she thought, that these characters’ lives were reduced to strokes of the pen. She tried to imagine the personality behind the fading lines of ink, and trembled.

Next she found a single piece of paper with a paragraph headed
Extract from confession of
Beniamin Lazarovich “Benya” Golden: attach to file of Alexandra ZeitlinPalitsyn
. The writer Benya Golden. She’d heard of him and his one masterpiece, those stories of the Spanish Civil War. She read on:

B. Golden: Using the depraved seductive techniques of the Mata Hari type of spy, Sashenka—accused Alexandra ZeitlinPalitsyn—first seduced me sexually under guise of inviting me to write
for her magazine and persuaded me to meet her for corrupt sexual practices in room 403 at the
Metropole Hotel, set aside by the Writers’ Union/Litfond for the use of nonMoscow writers for
Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping
magazine, which she edited. While wearing the mask
of a new Soviet woman, ZeitlinPalitsyn admitted to me she was an Okhrana agent and Trotskyite
and asked me to introduce her to the French secret service, who had recruited me in Paris in 1935

when I was traveling to the International Writers’ Congress with the Soviet delegation. She had already recruited her uncle Mendel Barmakid, a member of the Central Committee, and I recruited
her other relative, my friend the famous writer Gideon Zeitlin, to help plan the assassination of
Comrades Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and Marshal Voroshilov at a party at Sashenka’s house by
spraying the gramophone that Comrade Stalin would use with poison. The first attempt at her
house—when Comrade Stalin visited on May Day 1939—failed because I failed to spray the
gramophone…

Witnessed: Investigator Rodos, Very Important Cases Department, Main Administration of State
Security

Katinka recoiled. So Benya Golden, that talented, elegiac writer, had rolled over and incriminated Sashenka. It must have been Golden’s denunciation that got her arrested. How could he have done so? The accusations against Sashenka seemed preposterous.

Yet this was dated August 6, even later than the Peter Sagan confession. Katinka hurriedly turned more pages. She had been reading for more than fifteen minutes. After a rather picturesque collage of stamps, triangular, square and round, she read a note dated six months later:

Office of Military Procurator, 19 January 1940

The case against the ZeitlinPalitsynBarmakid terrorist spy
group is now complete and must be handed over to the court…

Send the case to the Military Tribunal, 21 January 1940.

Katinka felt a nervous twinge as if she, or someone close to her, was going to be tried on January 21, 1940. Sashenka’s eyes looked out anxiously from the photograph. Maxy was right: there was an intimacy in these mysterious old papers, and an unbearable sense of tragedy. What happened to these people at the trial? Did Sashenka live or die? Katinka eagerly turned the page. There was nothing more.

“Five minutes!” said the Marmoset, drumming his fingers on the desk. Katinka noticed he was reading a magazine on soccer,
Manchester United Fanzine
. She noted down the basic facts in her notebook and the new names: Benya Golden—famed writer. Mendel Barmakid

—forgotten apparatchik. Gideon Zeitlin—literary figure.

Katinka quickly reached for the Palitsyn file. First the photograph: Ivan Palitsyn, Sashenka’s husband and Satinov’s friend, side and front views, a burly, athletic man, with thick greying hair, a Tatar slant to the cheekbones. A handsome specimen of that shaggy Russian proletarian type, he had been a real worker at the Putilov Works. But in the picture, he had a black eye and bleeding lip. He must have put up a fight, decided Katinka.

He wore a torn NKVD tunic. She looked into his eyes and saw…weariness, disdain, anger, not the fear and the appealing sarcasm in his wife’s eyes.

“Four minutes,” said the Marmoset.

She read his biography. Vanya was a top Chekist who had guarded Lenin himself in the early years in Petrograd and Moscow, 1917–19. Rising over the bodies of his bosses during the Terror, he must have been responsible for his share of crimes until…She found an arrest order, shortly before that of his wife. That must be why he looked more weary and angry than afraid: yes, he understood what was to come but he was bored by the procedures that he knew so well. What happened to him? She read and reread the file, noting the dates, trying to understand the sequence. Everything was there but nothing was what it said it was: it was in Soviet gibberish, the code of Bolshevism. She leafed ahead: Palitsyn had started to confess on June 7 and continued into July, August, and September. He too had been sent for trial.

“Time’s up,” said the Marmoset.

“Please—one second!” She skipped some pages and jumped to the end of the file. She had to find out what had happened to Palitsyn. She found a signed confession.

Accused Palitsyn: I plead guilty to spying for the Japanese and British intelligence services, to serving Trotsky, and planning a terrorist plot against the leadership of the Soviet Union.
But there was no end to his story—and no mention of Satinov, no link to a common past.

She noted down the dates in her notebook and sighed, wanting to cry. Why? For these two people whom she had never known?

“There’s no record of a sentence,” she said aloud. “Could they have survived? Could they be alive?”

“Does it say in the file that they died?” asked the colonel.

She shook her head.

“Well then…” He stood up and stretched.

“But there’s a lot missing from these files, Colonel. No details of sentencing. Perhaps the Palitsyns were sent to the Gulags and pardoned after Stalin’s death. I wish to apply for more files. I want to find out what happened to these people.”

“Is this a game, girl? Falala! Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe not. I’ll refer your request to my superior, General Fursenko. I’m just a cog in the machine.”

Katinka felt downcast suddenly. She had still not found out why Sashenka and her husband had been arrested. Captain Sagan’s confession was dated after their arrest. She did not believe Benya Golden’s story of his affair with Sashenka, let alone the conspiracy to assassinate the Party leaders, so perhaps this too was invented? And she still didn’t know if all this was in any way connected to Satinov.

As she slid the Sashenka file across the desk to the colonel, she accidentally bent back the blank list of those who had examined the file. On the other side were some scrawled names from 1956: her heart leaped. There it was:
Hercules Satinov
.

The Marmoset started to check if each document was present, wetting his fingertips with his tongue as he turned the pages.

Katinka saw she had another minute or two. She quickly reopened Ivan Palitsyn’s file—

and something caught her eye.

There it was, on the State Security letterhead, a handwritten order dated May 4, 1939:
Top Secret.

Captain Zubenko, Special Technical Group, State Security Set up immediate surveillance in Moscow city limits only on Comrade Sashenka ZeitlinPalitsyn, editor,
Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping,
23 Petrovka, and set up listening equipment in room 403, Metropole Hotel, with
immediate effect. Reports only to me, no copies.

Katinka stared at the signature.
Vanya Palitsyn, CommissarGeneral of State Security, third degree.

Sashenka’s husband.

Afterward, Katinka walked through the Moscow streets, down the hill past the Bolshoi toward the Kremlin. She gripped her notebook and glanced at the stalls of the street vendors offering pirated CDs, sensationalist history pamphlets, American pornography, Italian showbiz magazines, even Peter the Great’s
Book of Manners
. But she was not really looking at them. Once she bumped into a man, who shouted at her, and another time she walked right into a Lada parked on the pavement. She was trying to make sense of what she had found in the file. Finally, she walked up the cobbled hill from the river, past the Kremlin’s ramparts and then round and round Red Square.