Sashenka

  Lala took Roza’s hands, not only squeezing them with all her might but shaking them too. Neither woman said a word, but from where she was standing Katinka could see Roza’s shoulders shaking, and the tears streaming down Lala’s cheeks. Feeling like an intruder suddenly, she walked to the window and looked out. The sounds and smells of Tbilisi – the singing of someone in the street and the aromas of tkemali, lavashi bread, ground coffee and apple blossom – rose around her.

  This is the last scene of the drama, Katinka told herself. She’d done what Pasha asked. She’d brought these two women together, exposing herself in the process to more pain than she’d thought possible. Now she would go home, back to Papa and Mama – and to Andrei.

  Lala stroked Roza’s face. ‘Dear child, I dreamed of seeing your mother again. I must tell you all about her because there was no one like her. Look, there’s her picture as a schoolgirl at the Smolny. See? I used to collect her in the baron’s landaulet, or motor car I should say nowadays. Samuil, the baron, was your grandfather and you never met him though he knew all about you. And not a day passed when I didn’t think of you and your brother Carlo. As a girl you were so like your mother – she was blonde as an angel when she was young – and you have the violet eyes of your grandmother, Ariadna. Oh darling child, think of me, a girl from England. I’ve lived long enough to see the Tsar fall and the barbarians come to power and fall too and now to see you here – I can’t quite believe it.’

  ‘I’m hardly a child,’ Roza laughed, ‘I’m sixty.’

  ‘Methuselah’s young to me!’ Lala answered. ‘Do you remember the days we spent together before …’

  Roza nodded. ‘I think so … Yes, I remember seeing you in a canteen in a station. You had Carlo’s favourite biscuits. I remember walking hand-in-hand with you and then …’

  ‘I struggled in those times to keep my head above water,’ Lala continued. ‘I had lost my darling charge, Sashenka, and your grandfather. And then I was granted a few days of such happiness with you and Carlo. When I had settled you with your new parents, I considered killing myself. Only the thought that someone dear to me would return kept me alive. And do you know, the most unlikely person of all did come back.’

  ‘Lala,’ interrupted Katinka, trying not to interfere yet still burning with curiosity, ‘only Stalin could have saved Samuil’s life. Did you ever learn why?’

  Lala nodded. ‘After the monster died, everyone here sobbed and mourned. There were even demonstrations in his honour. But I was delighted. Samuil was very ill then so I said, “Now you can tell me why you were released.” He said he didn’t know exactly but in 1907 he had given shelter – and a hundred roubles – to a pockmarked Georgian revolutionary. He let him stay in the doorman’s cottage of his house here in Tbilisi when the police were searching for him. Later he realized it was Stalin, and Stalin never forgot a slight or a favour.’ Lala looked back at Roza, whose hands she still held. Sometimes she raised Roza’s hands to her lips and kissed them. ‘I’ll die happy now,’ she said.

  ‘You’re my only connection to my mother,’ said Roza. ‘You know, I almost hated my parents all through my childhood. They’d abandoned me and I never knew why. I couldn’t imagine what I had done wrong for them to reject me. Yet I thought of them all the time. Sometimes I dreamed they were dead; often I looked at the Bear in the sky because Papa had told me that he would always be there. Only when I was older did I realize that perhaps something bad had happened to them and they had had no choice but to leave me. But all through my life I’ve never been able to cry about them.’

  Roza turned to Katinka. ‘You’ve done so well, my dear. Thank you from the bottom of my heart – thank you. You’ve changed my life. But I know you’re keen to get home and Pasha’s plane’s waiting at the airport to fly you to Vladikavkaz. Please go whenever you want to.’

  Katinka kissed Roza and Lala and walked to the door – then stopped.

  ‘I can’t go quite yet,’ she said, turning back. ‘May I stay and listen? I’m afraid I’ve become more involved than I should have.’

  Roza jumped up and hugged her. ‘Of course, I’m so pleased you feel like that. I’ve become very fond of you.’ She sat on the bed again. ‘Lala, thanks to Katinka, I know about you and my parents. But please, tell me about Carlo.’

  Lala took a sip of her wine and closed her eyes. ‘He was the sweetest child, built just like a little bear with adorable brown eyes, and he was such a child of love, so affectionate. He used to stroke my face with his hands and kiss me on the nose. The day I had to let him go was one of the cruellest of my life. We were at the Beria Orphanage – can you imagine a children’s home named after that creature? The day before, Snowy, I had seen you go away with the Liberharts and I could tell they were intelligentsia, Jewish professors, but you fought and kicked and screamed, and I cried for hours. I’d have kept you myself if I’d had the chance. But Satinov said, “Your husband won’t come back; they’ll come for you any day – and what of the children then? No, we must settle them so they have stable, loving families.” The next day, two peasants from the north Caucasus turned up. They were collective-farm workers, Russians with some Cossack blood, but so primitive they actually came into Tbilisi on a tractor and cart, having delivered vegetables from their collective to the marketplace. I could tell they were uneducated and tough – they had hay in their hair. But I couldn’t question anything. We were so lucky that Satinov had arranged the whole thing. But Carlo was so sensitive. He had to have his Kremlin biscuits because he had sugar shortages and felt faint. He had to be stroked to sleep at night, no fewer than eleven strokes – as Carolina the nanny had shown me. When they took him, I sank to the floor so distraught that I may have fainted. I don’t remember much of what happened afterwards but a doctor came. I was inconsolable …’

  Katinka felt a sudden shiver of excitement. Satinov had arranged the whole thing. Of course, it all came back to her. What had he said at their second meeting? Your name is Vinsky? How did you get this job? Yes, Academician Beliakov was right to choose you out of his hundreds of students. She remembered how annoyed she’d been, how she’d felt he was playing with her. But he hadn’t been. He’d been telling her something. How naïve she’d been, she thought. The spark of revelation fluttered, then blazed inside her. The Getmans’ advertisement for a researcher had appeared in the faculty newsletter, but she had been given the job even though she hadn’t even applied. Academician Beliakov had approached her in the library and told her, ‘The job’s for you. No other applicants necessary.’

  ‘How did you choose me as your researcher?’ Katinka asked Roza. ‘Did you interview other applicants?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We first sent a letter to Marshal Satinov. He was the only name I had. The only link. He refused to help us and said there was no connection to him. He insisted we needed a historian and put us in contact with Academician Beliakov, who placed the advert.’

  ‘What did Beliakov tell you?’

  ‘There were lots of applicants but you were the best – we didn’t need to see anyone else.’

  Katinka got up, aware that Roza and Lala were looking at her strangely. Her heart was pounding. Only Satinov knew the names of the adoptive families, she thought. Did this mean that he knew something about her too? If so, when he received Roza’s letter, all he had to do was call his friend Academician Beliakov: ‘When some millionaires want to hire a student for some family research, give them the Vinsky girl.’ She had been searching for Carlo in the archives, when all the time he’d been much, much closer.

  ‘I have to go,’ she told Roza, already at the door and running down the steps. ‘I have to talk to my father.’

  25

  ‘We longed for a child of our own,’ Baba told the family as they sat in the shabby living room of their blue-shuttered cottage.

  Katinka looked around the familiar room in the house where she had grown up. Every face was anguished and it was her doing. Her sturdy grandmother, Baba, in her floral
housecoat and with a red kerchief on her head, sat in the middle on the frayed, sunken chair, her wide face a picture of anxiety. Katinka had never seen her so distraught. Her peppery, splenetic grandfather, Bedbug, paced the room, spitting curses at her. But it was her beloved father who caused her the greatest pain.

  Dr Vinsky had driven straight from his surgery, still in his white coat, to meet her at the airport. When he saw his precious daughter, he had hugged and kissed her.

  ‘I’m so pleased you’re home,’ he said. ‘The light of my life. Is everything all right? Are you OK, darling?’

  She looked into his thoughtful and serious face, so matinee-idol handsome with that dimple in his chin, and realized that she was a time bomb about to shatter his family. ‘What is it?’ he said.

  Then and there, she told him the whole story.

  He said nothing for a while then lit up a cigarette. Katinka waited nervously but he did not argue with her. He just went on smoking and pondering.

  ‘Papochka, tell me, should I have kept silent? Shall we forget it?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘If it’s true, I want to find my sister, if I have one. I want to know who my real parents were. But beyond that, I think it will change little for me. I know who I am. My parents have loved me all my life and they’ll always be my parents and I’ll always be the boy they loved. But it could break their hearts – and that would break mine in turn. Let me talk to them …’

  The rest of the drive home was silent. As they drove into the village of Beznadezhnaya, Katinka should have been full of the joy of homecoming. But now the village itself seemed different; the cottage had changed; it was as if everything had been shaken up and put together differently in a thousand little ways.

  Without Katinka’s mother, the family might have broken apart on her father’s anguished silence and the obstinate secrecy of the grandparents. But as soon as Katinka explained everything to her, Tatiana – often so vague and feather-brained – set to work calming her husband and reassuring Bedbug and Baba.

  At first, her grandparents claimed to know nothing. They said it was all a mistake and Katinka wondered if she had imagined everything. Perhaps she had become over-involved in Sashenka’s story? Perhaps she was so obsessed she was losing her mind?

  ‘This is a dagger through my heart,’ Baba had told her son. ‘A lie, a libel!’ She sat down defiantly. ‘What a thing to say!’

  Bedbug was raging. ‘Haven’t we loved you all your life? Haven’t we been good parents? And this is how you thank us – by claiming we’re nothing to you!’ He turned on Katinka. ‘Why toss these lies in our faces? Shame on you, Katinka! Is this some trick, some joke of those rich Jews in Moscow?’

  Katinka was racked with pain and doubt. She looked at her father. She had never seen his face so tormented.

  Then Katinka’s mother intervened. ‘Dear parents,’ she said, ‘you’ve been like parents to me and I know Valentin loves you more than you can know.’ She turned to her husband. ‘Darling, tell them how you feel. Tell them now.’

  ‘Papa, Mama,’ he said, kneeling at the feet of the old peasant woman and taking her hands. ‘You’re my parents. You’ll always be my beloved Mamochka and Papochka. If I was adopted, it’ll change nothing for me. You’ve loved me all my life. I know nothing but your loving kindness. I know who I am, and I will always be the little boy you’ve loved as long as I can remember. If you chose not to tell me before, I understand. In those days, people didn’t talk about such things. But if there is anything you’d like to tell me now, we’ll all listen and love you just the same afterwards.’

  His speech touched Katinka deeply, and she looked into Baba’s face and saw it soften by degrees. The old peasants exchanged glances, then her grandmother shrugged. ‘I want to tell the story,’ she said to her husband.

  ‘All lies,’ said Bedbug but he was quieter now.

  Some secrets are denied for so long, thought Katinka, that they no longer seem real.

  Then Bedbug waved his gnarled fingers at his wife. ‘Tell it if you must.’ He sat on the sofa and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Go on, Mama,’ said Dr Vinsky, lighting up too. He got up and poured some cha-cha into a tiny glass and gave it to her. ‘I want to hear your story – whatever it is.’

  Baba took a deep breath, downed the cha-cha and, looking round the room, opened her hands. ‘Me and Bedbug had been married for eight years – and no children. Nothing. It was a curse to be childless. Even though I was a true Communist, I visited the priests for a blessing; I saw the quack in the next village. Still nothing. Bedbug wouldn’t discuss it … Then one day, I heard in the collective-farm office that a bigshot official from Moscow was coming on a tour to inspect our new tractor stations. He was talking to everyone informally and he wanted to talk to us. It was Comrade Satinov.’

  ‘Did you already know him?’ asked Katinka.

  ‘Yes,’ said Baba. ‘In 1931, the campaign to collectivize the villages and destroy the richer peasants, the kulaks, came to our region. All the kulaks were being deported; many were shot here in the villages; there were grain searches and famine. It was a time of dread. Bedbug was denounced as a kulak. We were on the quota to be arrested. All the others on that list were shot. Comrade Satinov was in charge, and I don’t know why but for some reason he intervened and had our names taken off the list. We owed him our lives. Eight years later, in 1939, he again blessed us. He asked us to take in a three-year-old boy. “Love him as a treasured gift,” he said. “Take this secret to your grave. Bring him up as if he was your own.” One day we got the call from the Beria Orphanage and we went into Tbilisi and collected … a little boy with brown eyes and a dimple in his chin. The most beautiful little boy in the world.’

  ‘You were our son, our own,’ said Bedbug.

  ‘We loved you from the moment we saw you,’ added Baba.

  ‘Did you ever contact Satinov?’ asked Katinka.

  ‘Only once.’ Bedbug turned to address his son. ‘You wanted to be a doctor. It was hard to get into the best medical schools and none of my family had ever been past school. So I called Comrade Satinov – and he got you into Leningrad University.’

  ‘When you were little,’ continued Baba, ‘you remembered something. You cried about your mother, and your father, and your nanny, a dacha and a journey. You had a toy rabbit that you loved so much that we raised our own rabbits in the hutch in the garden and you fed them, gave them names, loved them like we loved you. I held you at night and gradually you forgot the past and loved us. And we adored you so much in return, we could never tell you … And that’s God’s truth. If we’ve done wrong, tell us.’

  When her father kissed his parents, Katinka could not watch. She stepped outside on to the verandah to admire the budding plenty of spring, the lush honeysuckle, the trilling, diving swallows, the rushing of frothy streams and far away the snow-peaked mountains. But she could see and hear nothing – just her father’s loving face and the howling of her grandmother, who cried in the uninhibited way that peasants have always cried.

  26

  The body of Hercules Satinov lay in a casket of glazed oak and scarlet satin in the sitting room of the Granovsky apartment. Standing on an easel behind the coffin was a portrait of Satinov that Katinka hadn’t seen before: it depicted him as a dashing commissar in the Civil War, in his early twenties. He was on horseback in a leather coat, Mauser pistol in his hand and a rifle slung across his back, leading a line of Red Cossacks in a charge across snowy wastes. Katinka thought that this Red Cavalry commander was probably no older than she was now.

  Two days earlier, Mariko had called Katinka at home to say that her father had died the night before and to invite Sashenka’s children to pay their respects.

  Roza was already in Moscow so Pasha sent his plane for Katinka and her father. Roza was almost girlish in her excitement: ‘I’m going to meet Carlo again,’ she told Katinka on the phone. ‘I can’t believe it. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him, I don’t know what to we
ar. Is your father as excited as me?’

  As she lay in bed that night, Katinka imagined the reunion of brother and sister, how happy it would have made Sashenka and Vanya and how it would play out: who would run into whose arms? Who would cry and who would laugh? Her diffident father would hold back a little while Roza would hug him passionately … She had made it happen; she was responsible for this meeting, and she wanted it to go according to plan.

  At that moment when the black of night turns into the blue of dawn, Katinka sat up in bed, pulled on her dressing gown and hurried into the sitting room. She knew she would find her father there on the divan, smoking in the half-light. He put out his hand to take hers. ‘You haven’t packed,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not coming,’ he answered. ‘This is my home. I have all the family I need …’

  She sat beside him. ‘But don’t you want to meet your sister? Satinov so wanted you to meet. We can’t put everything back together, but if you don’t come you’re letting the people who killed your mother and father win.’ Her father said nothing for a while. ‘Please, Papochka!’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘I think they’ve toyed with us enough.’

  The plane ride to Moscow seemed desolate to Katinka, who sat forlorn and disappointed amid the resplendent luxury of Pasha’s converted Boeing. She couldn’t help feeling furious with her father for letting her down, yet she also respected his quiet determination. She kept thinking about the tragedy of her grandparents’ lives and each time she did so she saw it differently: it was the black work of men who believed they had the right to play with the lives of others and they were still toying with hers too.

  Roza was waiting on the tarmac at the private airport at Vnukovo. Pasha stood beside her with two bodyguards while behind him, parked in a fan of gleaming steel, stood the customary oligarch’s cavalcade of black Bentley and two Land Cruisers filled with guards, engines purring, ready to convey them into Moscow.