Sashenka (64 page)

“Thank you,” she managed to say to Agrippina.

“Please give my regards to the comrade marshal and his daughter and thank them for remembering me with this gift.”

“Yes, of course.” Katinka was already on her way to the elevator.

Fighting back tears, she waited a few minutes but it didn’t come, and suddenly she realized she was not alone. The archive rat who had ridden up with her to the fourth floor was standing beside her, leaning on his cart of files and humming. Finally he cleared his throat.

“This elevator’s broken. You must use our elevator.”

Katinka noticed that he said “must”—but she was so upset she did not care. He hummed as they walked round the rectangular building, his yellow shoes squeaking, until they reached a dirtier, rustier elevator with sawdust on its floor. It soon grunted and heaved on its way.

What would she tell Roza? A wave of despair overcame her. Satinov wouldn’t see her again; Mariko would throw her out. And now she would never find Carlo.

At last the elevator jerked to a halt but they weren’t in the foyer; they were underground somewhere. The archive rat held open the door.

“Please,” he said.

“But this is the wrong floor,” she objected.

The archive rat looked up and down an underground passageway.

“I’ve got some documents to show you.”

“I’m sorry,” Katinka said, suddenly scared and vigilant, “I don’t know you. I’ve got to—”

She pressed the button for the first floor but the man held the door.

“I’m Apostollon Shcheglov,” he said, as if expecting her to know the name, which meant

“goldfinch.”

“I’m late. I must rush,” she insisted, pressing the button again and again.

“Better to sing well as a goldfinch than badly as a nightingale,” he said, quoting the Krylov fable.

Katinka stopped and stared at him.

Shcheglov’s smile was adorned by two gold teeth.

“Do you remember who said that to you?” he asked. “Let me give you a clue: Utesov and Tseferman.”

Of course, it was Kuzma’s weird goodbye.

“We archivists all know one another. We’re a secret order. Come on,” he said, showing her a welllit corridor of solid concrete. “This is one of the safest places in the world, Katinka, if I may call you that. This is where our nation’s history is protected.”

Still feeling nervous, Katinka allowed herself to be led. They came to a white steel door like the entrance to a submarine or a bomb shelter. Shcheglov turned a large chrome wheel, opened three different locks and then tapped a code into an electronic pad. The door shifted sideways and then slid open: it was about two feet thick. “This can withstand a full nuclear assault. If the Americans attacked us with all their Hbombs, you and I, the President in the Kremlin and the generals at headquarters would be the only people left alive in Moscow.”

Another reinforced door had to be opened like the first. Katinka glanced behind her. She felt horribly vulnerable—suppose Kuzma had been caught giving her the documents and the KGB had forced him to lure her here?

Still humming, Shcheglov entered a small office to one side, always holding a tune at the back of his throat. His desk was tidy, stacked with files, but the expansive table in front of it was covered in a colored relief map, showing valleys, rivers and houses, peopled by tin soldiers, cannons, banners and horses, all exquisitely painted.

“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 humor him.

“I’d love to see more of your toy soldiers,” she said.

“Not toys. This is a historical reenactment,” 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.

“Hurrah!” 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 favor 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 one hundred and twentythree names—each with a number—signed by Stalin and a quorum of the Politburo on nine January 1940.”

Katinka’s heart raced. A deathlist. Shcheglov hummed as he ran his finger down the list.

82. Palitsyn, I. N.

83. ZeitlinPalitsyn, 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 traveled 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 belowmentioned prisoners
condemned to be shot…

The 123 names on the list were typed below. Sashenka and Vanya were near the top. A bunch of more than a hundred blotched, crumpled chits—proforma 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 semiliterate scribble of a halfdrunk 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 bottlethick, greasy lenses of Shcheglov’s spectacles, which 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:

10:00 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.

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 crossexamination 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 twentytwo 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 forever.

“So Satinov doomed his best friends,” Katinka mused, “but then risked everything to save their children. Does that redeem him?”

Shcheglov gestured toward the elevator, 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 toward the elevator. “But the file’s not here. Sorry, but only God knows everything.” He pressed the button to call the elevator.

“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 elevator, 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.