Sashenka (68 page)

Maxy whistled. “So whatever happened to Sashenka, it made Satinov, an iron man of that pitiless generation, lose control. How extraordinary—to have cracked up like that in front of those secret policemen could have signed his own death warrant then and there.”

“But what did he see?” Katinka realized she was actually shouting.

“Hang on…” Maxy went on reading. “Here.” He pointed at the bottom of the document.

In the midst of a maze of green shading and squiggles, Stalin had written a word.

Hose
.

“Hose? Have I misread it?”

Maxy shook his head. “I don’t think so…” He hesitated.

“But what does it mean?”

“I heard of a similar case at Vladimir Prison in 1937. I think they tied Sashenka to a post and turned the hose on her. She was naked. It was an unusually cold night. They took bets on how long it would take…the water to freeze. Gradually the ice encased her. Like a glass statue.”

28

Neither of them spoke for a long time. The finches serenaded them in the woods, bees danced around the cherry blossoms and the lilacs peeked their white and purple heads through the silvery birches.

As Katinka wept for the grandmother she’d never known, she thought of what Sashenka must have endured during that long, terrifying night in the cold winter of 1940. After a while, Maxy put his arms around her.

“What are we doing here?” she asked finally, slipping out of his arms.

“I did a little more research and found the burial records of Sashenka, Vanya, even Uncle Mendel. After execution, they were cremated and the ashes were buried in the grounds of an NKVD dacha in the birch woods just outside Moscow. Afterward, following NKVD orders on mass graves, raspberry canes and blackberry bushes were planted on the site.

Look, there’s a plaque on the tree there.” He pointed.

Here lie buried the remains

of the innocent tortured and executed victims

of the political repressions.

May they never be forgotten!

“She’s here, isn’t she?” said Katinka, standing close to him. He put his arms around her again, and this time she didn’t object.

“Not just her,” he said. “They’re all here, together.”

Evening was falling—that rosy, grainy dusk when it seems as if Moscow is lit from below, not above—as Maxy dropped Katinka back at the Getman mansion. She stood on the steps and waved as he drove off.

When the guards admitted her the house was unusually hushed, but she found Roza in the kitchen.

“You need some
chai
and honeycakes,” said Roza, giving her a look. Katinka realized that her skin must be raw, and her eyes red. “Sit down.”

Katinka watched as Roza made the tea, adding honey and two teaspoons of brandy to each cup. Her aunt didn’t miss much, she thought.

“Here,” said Roza, “drink this. We both need it. Don’t worry about your father. I was rushing him too much. You know, I can still see that sturdy little boy with his beloved rabbit at our dacha. I’ve thought of him like that all my life and I’ve been aching to find him again—but of course, I don’t know him anymore. Will you tell me what to do?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Katinka, still reeling from what she had learned with Maxy, her mind stalked by visions of Sashenka’s death. She suddenly longed to share what she knew, to tell Roza everything, to work out exactly how death had come to Sashenka, how it had happened, and how she had looked—what Satinov had seen. “I’ve got something else to show you,” she said, drawing out a wad of photocopied papers from her backpack.

“Wait,” answered Roza. “Before I look at that, I want to ask you—I know my father was shot but you said there was something unusual…How did my mother die?”

“I was just about to come to that,” said Katinka but something made her keep the papers close to her.

She took a breath, eager to go on, but as she did so she saw Sashenka in the snow, her skin white in the electric glare of the searchlights…and Satinov, horrified, standing before Sashenka just minutes later. If he had really broken, if he hadn’t supervised the other 122

executions with Stalinist toughness immediately afterward, then he too would have been tortured until he revealed how he had rescued Sashenka’s children…

Katinka sensed Roza’s gentle but penetrating gaze on her, and she shook herself—there were some secrets she should keep.

She looked into Roza’s intelligent, violet eyes and saw that she was tensed, ready to absorb this blow too. Instead she took her hands. “Like the others. She died just like the others.”

Roza held her stare and then smiled. “I thought so. That’s good to know. But what were you going to show me?”

Katinka deftly put the investigation into Sashenka’s death at the back of her papers so that another document was on top. “I’ve got a few things I was given by Kuzma the archive rat, including this, your mother’s confession. I hadn’t read it in full because she gave them two hundred pages of crazy confessions of secret meetings with enemy agents and her plot to kill Stalin by spraying cyanide onto the gramophone at the dacha—all to give Satinov time to settle you and Carlo with your families. But there’s one bit that sounds strange. May I read it to you?”

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: In 1933, as a reward from the Party for our work, Vanya and I were allowed to seek treatment for my neurasthenia in London. We visited a wellknown clinic in Harley
Street called the Cushion House, where, under cover of medical treatment, we met agents of the
British secret service and Trotsky himself, who asked us to arrange the assassination of Comrade
Stalin.

Interrogator Mogilchuk: At the Cushion House?

Accused ZeitlinPalitsyn: Yes.

“This ‘Cushion House’ is an odd name, even in English,” explained Katinka. “I checked it.

There’s never been a Cushion House anywhere in London, ever. Does it ring a bell?”

Roza started to laugh. “Come with me.” She took Katinka’s hand and led her upstairs to her tidy bedroom. “Do you see?” she asked.

“What?” asked Katinka.

“Look!” She pointed at her bed. “Here!” Roza picked up a ragged old cushion, the material so threadbare and motheaten it was almost transparent, so bleached by time it was nearly white. “This was Cushion,
moya Podoushka
, the companion of my childhood and the only thing I could take with me to my new existence.”

She hugged it like a baby.

“You see how she remembered me?” said Roza. “My mother was telling me that she loved me, wasn’t she? She was sending me a message. So that if I ever found out who I really was, I’d know that she always loved me.”

The air in the room was suddenly taut and Roza turned her back on Katinka and looked out of the window.

“Is there anything else in there that seems strange?” she asked, hopefully, and Katinka understood that she wanted something to offer her brother.

“Yes, now I see what she was doing, there is something. You said my father loved rabbits.

Well, in the confession, Sashenka says she and Vanya hid some of the cyanide in the rabbit hutch—of all places—at the dacha. So I think she left something for him too…”

“I’d like to tell him that myself,” said Roza, “but I don’t want to do anything to upset him.

I thought I might wait a bit and then call him and perhaps go down to see him. What do you think?”

“Of course, but don’t leave it too long,” smiled Katinka, “will you?”

29

It had been an extraordinary day, Katinka thought as she came downstairs. But it was not quite over yet.

As she crossed the spacious hall toward the kitchen, she heard a convoy of cars sweeping into the drive. Pasha was back. There was the sound of doors slamming then Pasha’s loud voice, his clumsy, shambling footsteps and an unfamiliar but husky chattering that stopped abruptly.

“Oh my God, it’s her!” the voice said.

Katinka turned, and found herself face to face with a slim old man with a long, sensitive face and a battered blue worker’s cap. He was obviously in his eighties at least but there was a jerky energy about him, and he was still dapper in a crumpled brown suit that was too baggy for his slight figure. She liked him immediately.

“Is it you, Sashenka?” said the man, looking at her intensely. “Is it you? God, am I dreaming? You’re so very like her—down to her grey eyes, her mouth, even the way she stands.

Is this a trick?”

“No, it’s not,” said Pasha, standing right behind him. “Katinka, you weren’t the only one doing some research. I found someone too.”

Katinka let her backpack drop onto the floor and stepped back. “Who are you?” she asked shakily. “Who the hell are you?”

The old man wiped his face with a big linen handkerchief. “Who’s asking the questions here? Me or this slip of a girl?” Katinka noticed his eyes were a dazzling blue. “My name’s Benya Golden. Who are you?” He took her hand and kissed it. “Tell me, for God’s sake.”

“Benya Golden?” exclaimed Katinka. “But I thought you were…”

“Well…,” Benya shrugged, “so did everyone else. Can I sit down? I’d like a cognac, please?” He looked round at the exquisitely restored mansion, the Old Master paintings, the fat sofas. “This place looks as if your bar will have everything. Get me a Courvoisier before I drop. It’s been a long journey. Look—my hands are trembling.”

They moved into the sitting room, where Pasha lit a cigar and poured them all brandies.

“So you’ve heard of me?” Benya said after a while.

“Of course, I’ve even read your
Spanish Stories
,” answered Katinka.

“I didn’t know I had such young fans. I didn’t know I had any fans.” He was silent. “You know, you really are the image of a woman called Sashenka whom I loved with all my heart a long time ago. Hasn’t anyone told you that?”

Katinka shook her head but she remembered Sashenka’s face in that prison photograph and how she’d felt. “She was my grandmother,” she said. “I’ve been finding out what happened to her.”

“Have you been in those vile archives?”

“Oh yes.”

“And have you found how they tortured us and broke us?”

Katinka nodded. “Everything.”

“And so can you tell me why it all happened, to us I mean, to me and Sashenka?”

“There was no why,” Katinka said slowly. “Just a chain of events. I’ve discovered so much…But tell me, how did you survive?”

“Uh, there’s not much to tell. Stalin’s thugs beat me and I told them everything they wanted. But at the trial, I said I’d been lying because I’d been tortured. I knew they’d shoot me and I couldn’t face the bullet knowing I’d betrayed Sashenka. But they gave me ten years in Kolyma instead. I was released in the war—and I had quite a war—but then I was rearrested afterward, and released again in the fifties. I was a husk of a man, but I met a woman in the camps, a nurse, an angel, and she put me back together again. She got me a job as editor of a journal in Birobizhan, the Jewish region, near the Chinese border, and that’s the godforsaken place where we’ve been living ever since.”

“Do you still write?”

“They’d beaten all that out of me.” He brushed that aside with a gesture. “I am happy just to breathe. Do you have any food in this palace? I’m always hungry.”

“Of course,” said Pasha. “We can make anything you like. Just name it!”

“I’ll have a steak, dear prince, and all the trimmings, and a bottle of red wine,” said Benya.

“Do you have any French wine? Or is that pushing this dream too far? I once loved French Bordeaux…I drank it in Paris, you know—do you have it? Well then, will you all join me?” He went quiet again, and Katinka could see that his eyes had filled with tears.

Finally he took her hand and kissed it a second time. “Meeting you is like a last summer for me. Not a day passes when I don’t remember your grandmother. We were the world’s greatest lovers, yet we were together for just eleven days.” He sighed deeply. “I gave her a flower for every day…”

Katinka’s heart gave a little skip. She reached into her backpack and pulled out the little envelope of materials from Sashenka’s file that Kuzma had given her. “Does
this
mean anything to you?” She handed him a muchcreased old envelope addressed to “B. Golden”

at the Soviet Writers’ Union, in a feminine hand.

He took it from her, opened it, fingers shaking, and pulled out a pressed mimosa so flimsy that it almost came apart in his hands.

“She sent it to you,” Katinka told him, “but it arrived too late, and you’d been arrested.

The Writers’ Union gave it to the NKVD and they filed it.”

Benya muttered something, shaking his head in disbelief. Then he raised the flower to his face, sniffed its old petals, kissed it and when he could finally speak, he sat up straight and proud, beaming at her through flooded eyes.

Suddenly he threw off his peaked cap and, with a dashing and triumphant smile, spun it across the room. “Even after fifty years,” he said, “I know what this means.”

30

It was a lazy
sommerki
in Moscow over a week later. A sleepy, orangeheaded sun had lost the swagger of the day and struggled to remain in the sky. The light spread a tender pink veil over the cool waters while the shadows beneath the trees were dyed a dark blue.

There was so much blossom on the warm breeze, it almost snowed gossamer as Katinka walked with Maxy around the Patriarchy Ponds. Katinka felt dizzy and joyful to be away from her family and the past. Here only the present mattered as she strolled around this sanctuary in the middle of the clamoring city.

She had not seen Maxy since that day out in the woods and she had things to tell him that only he would understand and that only they could share. Though they weren’t touching, she felt that they moved in sync, as if their limbs were linked with invisible threads.

“I’m so glad I’m living now,” she was saying to him, “because I don’t think I would have been as brave as Sashenka and Vanya if I’d lived then.”

“I think you might have been braver,” answered Maxy as, like one, they headed toward the outdoor café beside the water.

“Well, thank God that in our times we don’t need to be that brave,” she said. “We’re free in Russia. For the first time in history. We can do what we want, say whatever we want.