Sashenka (61 page)

“But then he read the transcripts?”

To: Comrade Ivan Palitsyn, CommissarGeneral, State Security, third degree
As requested, surveillance and transcript on Alexandra “Sashenka” ZeitlinPalitsyn, room 403,
Metropole Hotel, 6 May 1939 Midday: ZeitlinPalitsyn 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 3:30 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.

ZeitlinPalitsyn: I can’t believe I’m here.

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

ZeitlinPalitsyn: 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 tightassed 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.

ZeitlinPalitsyn: 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 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 May seventh, evening.”

Katinka read the page:

10:00 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 PoliticalAdministrative 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 righthand 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 toward 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, lightcatching arc toward 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. “Cozy!” he blurted out in his queer, unbroken voice.

“Very cozy,” Katinka said, still concerned. What did he have in mind for her?

Kuzma reached into the cat bag and pulled out an oldfashioned 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 toward 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 muzzle 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 rushhour 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 “carpet” and the security staff at its brown, paddedvinyl desk were aggressive, lanternjawed Soviet “bulls.”

But the place seethed like a souk. Onearmed 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 death:
To all case officers: Palitsyn/Zeitlin Case

For security reasons, relatives enquiring about sentences of abovementioned state criminals are to
be informed that the prisoners were resentenced after a tenyear 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, 2:30 a.m. 22

January 1940. Trial of Accused Alexandra “Sashenka” ZeitlinPalitsyn (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 toward 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 onto 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…”

She fixed her eyes, imploringly, onto Satinov’s sharp orbs with their halfclosed lids. At first they showed nothing. But then they seemed to twinkle and the old man wrenched off his oxygen mask. “Oh Mariko, stop fussing.” He spoke with difficulty. “Bring us tea.”

Mariko sighed loudly and stomped out. “How did you get in, girl?”

“Someone let me in through the street door and then I found your door ajar.”

Satinov absorbed this. “Fate, that’s what it is. Don’t forget that’s why you’re here.” He gave a skulllike smile.

Katinka sat down on the sofa near him and he opened his wizened hands as if to say Go on then, girl, give it to me.

“I found Snowy.” He nodded appreciatively. “Lala Lewis told me everything. You were a hero. You saved the children. Snowy wants to meet you to say thank you.”

He shook his head and waved his hand. “Too late,” he rasped. “Have you found her brother too?”

“Not yet. I’m still trying to work out what happened to Sashenka.”

“Leave them. Concentrate on Carlo! The children, the future…”

“Sashenka and Vanya were your best friends, weren’t they?”

“Sashenka was…there was no one like her—and the children…” His blue eyes softened and for a moment Katinka thought she saw tears. She made herself go on.

“That was why Stalin summoned you to the Little Corner when he read the transcript of Benya and Sashenka. He was aware you’d known them since Petersburg and that you were Roza’s godfather. He’d seen you all together at the May Day party. Did he want to find out what you knew about them?”

Satinov blinked and said nothing.

“Beria left and you arrived at ten thirty p.m.—I’ve seen Stalin’s appointment book. But then what happened? Sashenka had had an affair. Vanya was jealous and bugged their hotel room. How did that grow into Captain Sagan’s conspiracy and the destruction of an entire family?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Satinov.

“Why did Stalin request all the files on the case?” She glared at him. Cold bloodshot eyes looked back. “You’re not going to answer that either? How can you pretend you don’t know what happened?”

“Just find Carlo,” Satinov wheezed. “You must be so close.”

“And what did Stalin mean when he wrote
Bicho to curate
?”

There was a long pause during which Satinov breathed painfully. “Read my memoirs carefully,” he said at last.

“Believe it or not, I’ve read every word of your interminable speeches on peaceful coexistence and your heroic role in forging the socialist Motherland and there’s not a word of humanity in it.” His eyes were fixed on her but she didn’t stop. “You’ve lied to me again and again. The KGB has concealed its crimes but today I got hold of the transcript of Sashenka’s trial. You were at the trial of your best friend!”

His breathing creaked.

“Take a look,” she said, pulling out the first page of the trial.

“I haven’t got my glasses.”

“Well, let me help you then. Here, look at this. It’s you, Marshal Satinov! You didn’t just attend the trial,” she was almost yelling at him, “you were a judge.”

“Read my judgment,” he gasped.

“You sat there in judgment on your best friend, the mother of your godchild. Sashenka found
you
at the trial. What did she think when she saw you? What went through her mind? I thought you were a hero. You saved Snowy and Carlo yet you presided over Sashenka’s destruction! Was she sentenced to death? Or did she die in the Gulags? Tell me, tell me! You owe it to her children!”

Satinov’s face tightened as his breathing constricted and his mouth gaped open.

To her shame, Katinka fought back her own tears. “How could you have done such a thing? How could you?”

“What’s going on in here?” Mariko appeared in the doorway, holding a tea tray. “What is it, Papa?”

As Katinka left the room, she looked back at the old man. The oxygen mask was on his face, his lips were blue, a wiry arm was raised—and a gnarled finger pointed toward the door.

19

Judge Ulrikh: Sashenka ZeitlinPalitsyn, you have confessed to a remarkable conspiracy to kill our
heroic leaders, Comrade Stalin and the Politburo, at your own house. We have read your confession. Do you have anything more to say?