The woman frowned, apparently remembering where she was and what she was wearing. ‘One minute!’ She shoved Katinka out of the door and closed it. The music stopped. The door reopened.
‘I’m Agrippina Begbulatov,’ declared the woman, offering a firm, sweaty hand. ‘I like to take a nap in the middle of the day. Please, sit!’
Katinka sat on the red divan, on which she could instantly feel the heat radiating from where the director of manuscripts’ generous body had recently rested. Agrippina wore rouge and scarlet lipstick, a blue Soviet-style dress with lace over the décolletage and a pyramid of spangles on both hips. Katinka recognized the towering dyed-auburn coiffure of a Soviet grand dame of the Brezhnev era.
‘You know I’m in charge of collecting all the memoirs of Party members so that they can be catalogued and filed in this special archive?’ said Agrippina, sitting in a soft chair.
‘Agrippina Constantinovna, thank you for receiving me,’ said Katinka.
‘My pleasure,’ said Agrippina, coldly gracious, haughtily patient.
Katinka realized she had one second to explain herself – or ultimately face the Organs. When she started to speak, she hadn’t yet decided which lie to tell (indeed she had never told a lie, not a serious one, ever) and she knew that every lie would carry a high risk of exposure because all these top Communists knew each other, had been to school together, then to the Institute for Foreign Languages, after which they married each other and lived close to one another in their dachas and bred the next generation of Golden Youth. But already Katinka could hear her own voice sounding different, a lying voice.
‘Comrade Agrippina Constantinova,’ she started, ‘I bring you a gift from … Mariko Satinov. You know her, of course?’
Katinka clenched her teeth, trying to conceal her internal torment.
‘Mariko?’ queried Agrippina, head on one side.
‘Yes.’
‘I know Comrade Hercules Satinov,’ said Agrippina reverently. ‘Not well of course, but I met him once at a concert at the Conservatoire and in the course of my work here, naturally.’
‘Naturally,’ agreed Katinka. ‘But you don’t know Mariko?’
Agrippina shook her head. ‘But she’s sent me a gift?’
‘Yes, yes, by way of introducing me to you. She knows you, comrade, by name because of your dedicated and important work with her father, Comrade Marshal Satinov.’
Agrippina’s nostrils flared nobly as she puffed up her breast and seemed to swell with pride. ‘Comrade Satinov mentioned me?’
‘Oh yes. I’m a friend of the family and he most certainly did mention you when he was telling me about how you helped him write his memoirs. He said he couldn’t have done the job without you.’
‘Well, legendary Comrades Gromyko and Mikoyan, with whom I was fortunate enough to work on their books, said that their memoirs would not have been accomplished without my editorial skills.’
‘That does not surprise me in the least,’ said Katinka, finding that a lie, when it works, is an exhilarating thing, and soon leads to other lies. ‘Indeed, Comrade Satinov told me, “Young comrade, visit Agrippina Constantinovna, that master of editors, that keeper of the holy flame, and she’ll show you how we worked on the memoir, she’ll show you the drafts …”’
‘You are a Communist, comrade …?’
‘Katinka Vinsky. Yes, I was a Young Pioneer, then Komsomol and now I’m a historian writing a paper for Comrade Satinov about his role in the storming of Berlin.’
‘Ah. There are so few young comrades left, how refreshing to meet one,’ said Agrippina. She paused, and stopped smiling. ‘But why hasn’t Comrade Satinov called me? He knows he should make an appointment …’
‘He is very ill,’ said Katinka. ‘Lung cancer.’
‘I heard. But I should ring his daughter, this Mariko, and check …’ She moved towards the phones on the T-shaped desk.
‘Wait, Agrippina Constantinova,’ said Katinka, a little frantically, ‘Mariko’s nursing him today … at the Kremlevka hospital. That’s why I just came without an appointment. Comrade Satinov, in a lucid moment, told Mariko to give you a certain gift – and you would know it was from him.’ She patted her package.
‘It’s for me?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘From Mariko Satinov and the marshal?’ Her beetle eyes fixed on the gift.
Agrippina wiggled her bottom closer to the edge of her seat so that she was closer to the package. Katinka rested her hand on it protectively. ‘Do you have Marshal Satinov’s full memoirs here, the manuscript?’ Katinka was following Maxy’s instructions.
‘Yes, young girl, I do, in this pile.’ A blue-ringed hand pointed at the heaps of yellowing manuscripts that covered every inch of the room. ‘You understand that our famous comrades dictated their memoirs to their assistants or to me personally and then it was my task to edit the book for the Party, according to the guidance of the Central Committee, leaving out any materials that might distract the public. Not all the episodes in Marshal Satinov’s memoirs, as with all the memoirs of our leaders, were included in the final version.’
‘Marshal Satinov is most keen for me to glance at those sections … so I can appreciate your editorial work. Before he became too ill in the last day or so, he told Mariko to give you this present as another mark of his gratitude.’ Katinka took the package in her hands. ‘Do you have the manuscript?’
‘I really must ring the marshal’s house or speak to the Archive Director about this …’
‘If you wish,’ said Katinka, ‘but then I would have to give the gift to someone else.’
That decided the matter. Agrippina fell to her swollen, dimpled knees on the carpet and, bending over the heaps of paper, so that Katinka could again see the scaffolding of her suspender belt, she began talking to herself softly and naming each manuscript. Finally, in triumph, she held up Satinov’s memoir. Breathing heavily and pink in the face, she sat back on the chair and focused her eyes on the package.
Katinka waited, expecting Agrippina to hand over the document now resting so comfortably on her lap, but nothing happened. Agrippina looked at her, plucked red eyebrows raised, and Katinka looked back. The atmosphere in the room changed as the air changes when it is about to rain.
‘Oh yes, Agrippina Constantinovna, I almost forgot,’ said Katinka at last. ‘A gift from the Satinovs,’ and she handed over the weighty package.
Agrippina, beaming, grabbed the bag and drew out an enormous $300 bottle of Chanel No. 5.
‘My favourite!’ exclaimed Agrippina, hugging the bottle. ‘How did the marshal remember?’
‘May I look at the manuscript?’ asked Katinka.
‘Only in this room,’ answered Agrippina. ‘There are a few fragments that weren’t published. No one has ever read them except me.’
Katinka felt a sense of foreboding as she took the wad of pages.
‘Put your feet up on the divan,’ said Agrippina. ‘Enjoy the cold air of the fans, and the music of Glinka. You may take notes.’
Katinka glanced through the pages quickly. Much of it was familiar from Satinov’s turgid book – ‘How we conquered the Virgin Lands’, ‘Building homes for Soviet workers’, ‘Creating the Motor Tractor Stations’, ‘An interesting conversation with Comrade Gagarin on our conquest of space’ and so on … Another waste of time, thought Katinka, but then, as Agrippina anointed her wrists and neck and even behind her ears with Madame Chanel’s priceless nectar, she found something that made her heart pound.
21
A conversation with J. V. Stalin, January 1940
By Hercules Satinov
One night about 2 a.m., I was at my desk in Old Square when the phone rang.
‘It’s Poskrebyshev. Comrade Stalin wants to see you at the dacha. There’s a car waiting for you downstairs.’
Stalin favoured me. We had made an alliance with Nazi Germany but we knew the war would come soon. The Party had ordered me to supervise the creation of new tanks
and artillery for the Red Army. I had been invited to the dacha twice already to discuss my work. So I wasn’t afraid, though when you went to see Stalin you never quite knew where it would end.
The car had chains on its wheels to avoid skidding on the ice – it was minus twenty degrees, a truly freezing winter. We sped up the Mozhaisk Highway and turned off into a drive through a forest of oaks, pines, firs, maples and birches. The occasional guard could be seen against the snows.
Two security gates let us through. Lastly a green steel gate opened and there was Stalin’s real home, the Kuntsevo dacha, a plain two-storey house, recently painted khaki in case war came.
A guard in NKVD blue met us at the door and showed me inside. I left my coat on the coat rack. Stalin’s office was on the left, heaped with books and journals, but then out of the library on the right, which was filled with bookcases, came Stalin himself in a grey tunic and boots.
‘Evening, bidio,’ he said quietly, grinning. He always called me bicho – it means ‘boy’ in Georgian. ‘Come in and have a drink and some food. Have you eaten?’
Of course I had eaten already but in those days we all worked according to Stalin’s nocturnal habits.
‘Comrade Beria’s here and the others are coming.’ He led the way into a big room with a huge dining-room table, heavy chairs and divans, the ceiling and walls panelled in Karelian pine, with posters by Russian artists. At one end of the table there was a buffet, a Georgian feast, with plates for us to help ourselves.
Lavrenti Beria was already standing at the table, holding a glass of wine. He greeted me in Georgian. With Stalin, you see, we were three Georgians in icy Russia!
Stalin, pouring me some wine and taking some himself, sat down at the table. I sat between the two of them.
‘So,’ said Stalin, lighting up a Herzegovina Flor cigarette, ‘what happened with the Sashenka case?’
The mention of her name always had an emotional effect on me, which I hoped was invisible.
‘She seemed such a decent Soviet woman,’ said Stalin. ‘I remember seeing her in Lenin’s office in Petrograd …’ He shook his head sadly. ‘In our world, people can wear masks for decades.’
I looked at Beria.
‘She confessed everything,’ said Beria.
‘The trial went smoothly,’ I added.
‘You knew her well, didn’t you, boy?’ said Stalin to me.
I nodded.
‘Did they all disarm and show remorse?’ asked Stalin, dropping his cigarette into the bowl of his pipe and making puffs of smoke. ‘At the end?’
‘Vanya Palitsyn disarmed,’ said Beria, laughing hoarsely. ‘He took it well, shouting out, “Long live Comrade Stalin!” at the last moment.’
Stalin sucked on his pipe, golden eyes half closed.
‘But Mendel, what an old fool!’ Beria continued. ‘He refused to disarm.’
‘He was always such a stickler for rules,’ said Stalin rather fondly.
‘I did as you asked with Mendel,’ said Beria.
Stalin and Beria exchanged a quick conspiratorial smile – I knew they enjoyed their intrigues. I once heard Beria talking about arranging a fatal car crash for a comrade who was too well known to arrest and execute.
‘Boy, are you interested in hearing about Mendel?’ Stalin asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said, though in truth I dreaded it.
‘Tell him, Lavrenti,’ ordered Stalin.
‘I told Mendel, “Confess your crimes and Comrade Stalin will guarantee your life,”’ explained Beria, ‘and you know what Mendel did? He shouted, “Never! I’m innocent and will be an honest Bolshevik until I die!” He spat at me and then in Kobylov’s face …’
‘That was a mistake,’ mused Stalin.
‘Kobylov went crazy and gave him a real beating, and that was that.’
‘What pride! What foolish pride!’ Stalin looked at me. ‘But you curated the case, boy?’
‘Yes, Comrade Stalin. I curated as you asked.’ I could not help but give Beria a heavy look. Stalin was so sensitive, he divined it immediately.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘Nothing special,’ said Beria, and he kicked my shin hard under the table. But however dangerous Beria may have been, it was never a good idea to hide anything from Stalin.
‘There was an irregularity, Comrade Stalin, in one of the executions,’ I said finally, feeling unwell.
‘An irregularity?’ repeated Stalin coldly.
Beria gave me another kick in the leg but it was too late.
‘The NKVD has professional and devoted cadres but this was a rare example of philistine infantilism,’ I said, starting to sweat.
‘Did you know about this, Comrade Beria?’
‘I heard about it, Comrade Stalin, and am investigating.’
‘I thought you’d cleansed the Organs of this sort of shit? The guilty must be punished.’ He turned to us both and scrutinized us carefully. ‘Right. Comrades Beria and Satinov, form a commission of Comrades Shkiryatov, Malenkov, Merkulov. I want a report fast.’
Just then we heard the purr of cars driving up to the house, doors slamming. Stalin stood up and went to greet members of the Politburo, who had arrived for dinner.
Beria and I were left alone.
‘You motherfucker,’ said Beria, jabbing me in the side, ‘why the fuck did you have to mention that to him?’ But then Molotov, Voroshilov and the other leaders joined us in the dining room.
When we were helping ourselves to dinner, Stalin appeared next to me, standing very close.
‘That pretty girl Sashenka,’ he murmured. ‘What terrible decisions we have to make.’
22
‘Have you finished, dear?’ asked Agrippina. As the Parisian scent thickened the air, Katinka absorbed Satinov’s revelation. Maxy was right; she was becoming obsessed with these strangers – people who had nothing to do with her, yet whose stories consumed her. She had longed to find out what had happened to them, but the excised pages from Satinov’s memoir had raised even more questions. Saddest of all, she was now sure that Sashenka was dead. She would have to ring Roza and tell her both her parents had been killed by Stalin’s thugs. Sashenka’s husband had been shot crying ‘Long live Comrade Stalin’ and her uncle Mendel had not died of a heart attack but been bludgeoned to death.
But how had Sashenka died? What had been the ‘irregularity’? Had she been gang-raped by the guards, tortured to death, starved? Only one person could tell her: she had to rush to Satinov. However angry he had been with her last night, she had to see him before he died.
‘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 lift.
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 trolley of files and humming. Finally he cleared his throat.
‘This lift’s broken. You must use our lift.’
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 lift 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 lift 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 vig
ilant, ‘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 each other. We’re a secret order. Come on,’ he said, showing her a well-lit 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 nuclear 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 H-bombs, 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 coloured relief map, showing valleys, rivers and houses, peopled by tin soldiers, cannons, banners and horses, all exquisitely painted.