Sashenka (62 page)

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: I plotted to kill the great Stalin at my house. I rubbed arsenic and
cyanide powder onto the curtains of the room where Comrade Stalin would stand.

Judge Ulrikh: And the gramophone?

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: Yes, on the gramophone too. I had heard from various comrades, including my husband Vanya, that Comrade Stalin liked to listen to music after dinner so I dusted the
gramophone with cyanide dust.

Judge Satinov: Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn, we need more details…

Satinov was speaking for the first time at the trial. Katinka could almost hear the voices of these flinthearted men in the pinepaneled office in the Sukhanovka Prison, lit up in a bright electric glare in the middle of the night. NKVD guards in blue stood armed at the doors. Ulrikh, with his bulletlike bald head, sat behind the desk with Satinov and the other judge, all in their Stalinka tunics and gleaming boots.

As soon as she had left that disastrous meeting with Satinov, Katinka had called Maxy, repeating what had been said word for word, trying to disguise her tears. But Maxy was encouraging. Satinov had told her to read his judgment, so she must read it right away. Satinov had told her to read his memoirs—and that must mean something too. Maxy proposed that they meet at midday the next day at the closed Archive for Special Secret PoliticalAdministrative Documents, through the archway off Mayakovsky Square.

Now it was the middle of the night and Katinka was reading the trial in her seedy room at the Moskva Hotel. She poured herself a shot of vodka—for courage and to overcome her exhaustion. Through her little window, the red stars of the Kremlin glowed.

Judge Satinov: How did you procure this cyanide? Tell the Tribunal!

Katinka imagined Sashenka standing at the end of the Tshaped table, pale, thin, battered but still beautiful. But what must she have thought as she was tried for her life and found Hercules Satinov on the Tribunal right there in front of her? She must have struggled to show no emotion, not even a flicker of recognition—everyone would be watching for her reaction and his. But imagine her surprise, her shock—and her overriding concern: are the children safe? Or does Satinov’s presence mean that the children…

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: I will, Comrade Judge. Vanya procured it from the the NKVD Laboratory.

Judge Satinov: How did you know which records to poison?

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: I knew Comrade Stalin enjoys Georgian folk music, the songs from the
movies
Volga, Volga
and
Jolly Fellows,
and the arias of Glinka and Tchaikovsky. So I poisoned
those.

Judge Satinov: You were serving the Japanese Emperor, the Polish landowners and the British lords
in conspiracy with Trotsky?

Katinka’s skin crawled as she pictured what was going through Sashenka’s mind: Snowy and Carlo—where are you?

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: Yes, Trotsky ordered the assassination in diabolical compact with the Japanese Emperor and the British lords.

Judge Satinov: And the network of the White Guard, Captain Sagan, who controlled you on Trotsky’s behalf, forcing you to use the methods he had taught you as a young girl?

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: You mean the sexual depravity? Yes, and I used that to recruit further
agents such as the writer Benya Golden.

Judge Satinov: Did the writer Golden become an agent?

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: I tried to recruit him using the wiles taught me by Captain Sagan but—

as I must tell the truth before the Party—Golden was a dilettante nonParty philistine who lacked
vigilance but he never joined the conspiracy. He regarded it as “playacting.”

Judge Ulrikh: You’re amending your confession?

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: I have to tell the truth before Comrade Stalin and the Party. I am myself
guilty; my husband and Captain Sagan are guilty but Golden was a child incapable of conspiracy.

Katinka could not help but smile at this. Now she knew that Sashenka had truly loved Benya Golden too. Wasn’t this insult to Golden more romantic than any love song?

Judge Satinov: Comrade Judges, I’m almost overcome with disgust at the evil and depravity of this
serpent woman, this black widow spider. Are we ready to consider the case?

Katinka fought back tears as she read this tragiccomic exchange. Did Satinov mean this?

Did Sashenka believe he meant it? Sashenka must have looked at her friend, sending him message after message: are the children settled? Are they safe? Or have you betrayed us?

A mother’s questions. Katinka lit a cigarette and read on.

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: I must declare before the court that my greatest regret and shame are the
crimes I’ve committed before the Party and that the future…posterity…will remember me as a
scoundrel.

Posterity? Was this a message to Satinov?

Judge Ulrikh (presiding): All right, are we Comrade Judges ready? Any comment?

Judge Lansky (second judge): What wickedness. No other comment.

Judge Ulrikh: Comrade Satinov?

Judge Satinov (third judge): Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn confesses to shocking crimes in a lifetime of
deception and mask wearing. I must ask the court to forgive me for saying that, due to the vigilance
of the NKVD investigation, we the Soviet people are grateful that our brilliant Leader of the Peoples, Comrade Stalin, is safe, that his loyal comrades Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Andreyev and
other Politburo members are now safe finally from spies, traitors and Trotskyites, safe in their offices and homes from this poisoning viper in their midst. They are now safe, quite safe. There is
only one possible punishment, the way we treat mad, rabid dogs, the justice of the people…Thank
you, Comrade Ulrikh.

Katinka could scarcely breathe. She read it again, and then again, and it was unmistakable: the sign. Satinov said ‘safe,’ and then repeated it four times in all. Two ‘safe’s for Snowy, two ‘safe’s for Carlo. So Satinov had not betrayed Sashenka. Instead he was really saying,

“Dear friend, die easy if you can,
the children are safe! I repeat, the children are safe!
”

What relief for Sashenka. Yet the judgment was missing: did she survive after all? There it was, just the same note—
Papers sent to Central Committee.

Dawn was coming up over Moscow, as Katinka’s head fell forward onto the transcripts that still rested on her knee.

Judge Ulrikh: Thank you, Comrade Satinov, let us retire to make our judgment.

Judges retire.

20

An upstart sun in an eggshellblue sky threw golden beams onto Mayakovsky’s statue.

Katinka walked up Tverskaya, first passing the statue of Prince Dolgoruky on one side and then Pushkin on the other, toward the new archive. She had woken up too early and with a crick in her neck when Maxy had phoned, then gone back to sleep. But she still ached as if she had been pummeled and only a bracing double espresso at the Coffee Bean café on Tverskaya—good coffee was one of the benefits of democracy, she thought—had restored some of her spirits.

Carrying a bulky package under her arm, she passed Mayakovsky Metro and took a left through one of those red granite archways that help give Moscow its somber and hostile grandeur. She found herself on a tiny road that seemed to be a culdesac, but just when she could go no farther it turned sharply once and then again, becoming narrower.

Katinka relished this unlikely, meandering lane in the midst of the unforgiving metropolis, as if she were discovering a jumbled village behind the granite walls and ramparts of those roaring boulevards. After the second twist, she came upon an ocher wall with a white top and then a black steel gate, which was open and led to some steps. Maxy’s bike was parked next to a plaque engraved with Lenin’s domed profile.

“You look tired—did you get any sleep? You procured what I suggested?” he asked.

Katinka nodded at her package. “It was the most expensive stuff I’ve ever bought and I had to ask Pasha Getman for permission.”

“Three hundred dollars is nothing to him. Did you tell him what it was?”

“I thought it better not to.”

“Well, it’s our only hope. This woman will do
anything
for that.” Then Maxy took her hand. “I fear you’re becoming even more obsessed than me about the secret lives of fifty years ago. Are you ready?”

“Yes, but how are you getting us in? I thought you said—”

“Don’t worry, I’ve organized it all. Now remember,” he continued, straightfaced, “I booked you an appointment to apply to make an application to apply to peruse the list of documents held in this archive, and I can now inform you that our application to make an application will of course be refused. Go on in, Katinka. Good luck.”

“I feel uneasy about this. Will it work or will I get arrested?”

“One or the other.” He laughed. “Just think, two weeks ago you’d never have tried such a stunt. But be confident. Look as if you know where you’re going and you’re entitled to get what you want. I’ll see you later.”

She watched him kickstart the bike and saw the horned helmet disappear into the hidden lanes before she turned to enter the high Gothic slab with pillars and balconies embellished by heroes carved in stone and bronze.

At the wooden desk, the two teenaged Interior Ministry soldiers half dozed in their battered chairs but sat up at the sight of Katinka. The pimplier of the two conscripts slid the signingin book along the desk, examined her passport with a sneer intended to project the power invested in him by the Russian state, checked a collage of yellow chits on his desk and found one bearing her name, wrote out another chit on a further badly printed scrap and then with the hint of a virile smirk handed back the paper, keeping the passport, and gestured grandly toward the elevators in the white marble hall behind him. “Application for archives, fourth floor.”

She scarcely dared look back but sensed a presence. A skinny young man with a bald head, yellow vinyl shoes, and a grey parka was hanging up his coat in the cloakroom and watching her intently. A strange crew, these archive rats, Katinka thought, as she hurried on and entered the elevator. As its doors were about to close, a hand held them back and the archive rat came in, nodding at her nervously but saying nothing. He was pulling on his archivist’s stained yellow coat, like a laboratory assistant, his redrimmed eyes magnified and eager through his smeared spectacles.

The elevator was small and they stood so awkwardly close that the archive rat kept trying to apologize but never quite managed it, as each of his attempts at conversation ended in him starting to hum. Katinka flattened herself against the wall, horribly close to the pasty dome of his head with its sparse colorless hairs, livid blotches and beads of sweat. She pressed the bell for the fifth floor but he pressed the fourth and when the quivering elevator jolted to a halt, the doors opened and he got out, holding them open.

“Your floor.” He wasn’t asking, he was telling her. “Applications.”

But Katinka shook her head twice. The rat looked surprised and remained standing there quizzically as the doors closed. Katinka cringed, knowing she’d been found out because, as Maxy had explained, “outside applicants are not permitted to visit the fifth floor.”

The elevator opened on a landing with misted glass doors, some shabby plastic palms and a grand portrait frame—with no picture inside it.
Directorate of the Study of Dialectical Materialism and Leninist EconomicPolitical Historical Questions of the Soviet Union
read the plaque, to which someone had taped a note:
The Russian State Archive of Special Secret PoliticalAdministrative Documents
.

“It would be best if you didn’t meet anyone up there,” Maxy had told her—so she expected the archive rat to jump out at her with the pimpled teenaged guards at any moment.

The long parquet corridors with lines of closed pine doors were hushed. The passages were much too hot—the winter heating was still on. Katinka checked the engraved plaques that announced a name and title on each door. She turned right and then right again until she heard the blare of opera—Glinka’s famous aria from
A Life for the Tsar
.

When she turned again, the music got louder and louder as she approached the last door.

Agrippina Constantinovna Begbulatov, Director of Manuscripts
read the plaque. Quite a name.

Katinka listened at the door: the music was reaching a climax. Should she have made an appointment? No, Maxy had said that was too dangerous.

She knocked. No answer. She knocked again. Nothing. Katinka cursed obstructive dinosaurs like Satinov, the maddeningly rigid bureaucrats, the frustrations of this project, and just opened the door.

A very large, whiteskinned woman of advanced years lay sleeping on a divan in her underwear, her eyes covered by a mask that read
American Airways
.

The room was hot, the music rippled out of a modern CD player, and the perfumes within were heady. Katinka had only a moment to register two fans whirring, piles of yellowed manuscripts and two mountainous thighs flowing over lacy stocking tops before the woman was pulling off her mask and coming toward her.

“How dare you barge in here! Who are you? Have you no manners? Are you some sort of cultureless philistine?” The whalesized woman looked Katinka up and down as if she had never seen a young girl in denim and boots in the sacred archive. “Who gave you permission to burst in on me?”

“Umm, no one.” Katinka was lost momentarily.

“Then please leave and never return!” cried the woman, whose capacious milky bosoms strained even her rigidly structured brassiere.

“No, no.” Katinka was struggling now, blushing and stammering. “I was just asked to deliver something to you. It’s here…for you.” She raised the package.

The woman angrily yanked off a mauve hairnet. “I’m not expecting anything,” she said, peering craftily at the package. Katinka had little left to lose. She tried not to look at the garter belt, the generous fleshcolored underpants or any of the other eyecatching parts of the vision before her. “It’s a gift from…” She checked up and down the corridor, to suggest that the lady might not like her colleagues to witness the delivery of the package,