Sashenka

She had loved Samuil for nearly thirty years and they had been together for more than twenty: his family was her family. She had mourned him and grieved in the stoical silence of the times.

She never blamed Samuil for keeping her in Russia—they had been happy together. And it had been such a blessing that she had not been arrested but was still working in the café, healthy and prepared, waiting for him to return. Here he was, her Samuil, alive and back from the camps, returned from the dead.

She kissed his face and his hands, smelled his male smoky biscuit smell. He was almost as she remembered.

He opened his eyes as if he couldn’t quite believe where he was, smiled, and went back to sleep.

Lala stroked his skin, the parchment of the Gulags, and wondered how, and when, to tell him about the heroism of his daughter, what had happened in the railway station just a few weeks ago, and how together she and Sashenka had saved Snowy and Carlo.

PART THREE The Caucasus, London, Moscow, 1994

1

“Three hours, twelve minutes and eighteen seconds until the train for London!” Katinka Vinsky cried out, running to her window in her pink nightgown, almost slipping on the wrinkled yellow carpet, throwing open the brown, damp-stained curtains. She caught a glimpse of herself smiling in the mirror and behind her a chaotic bedroom with clothes everywhere, and a half-filled carpetbag. It was dawn in the bungalow cottage on the main street of Beznadezhnaya, a village on the Russian borderlands of the north Caucasus, remote enough for locals to say that it was “lost in deafness.”

“Mamochka! Papochka! Where are you?” she called, opening her door.

Then she saw the doctor and his wife, already dressed, in the kitchen–cum–sitting room. She knew her father would be reassuring her mother that their daughter’s trip would be all right, that they would be at the station early enough, that the seat on the train was booked (facing the right way, because their darling felt sick if she had her back to the direction of the train), that the train would arrive in time for her to catch the bus to Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow to check in for the Aeroflot flight to Heathrow. Her mother was reassuring her father that Katinka would have enough food for the journey and that she had the right clothes for London, where, it was said, the rain never stopped and the fog never cleared. They were, Katinka decided, much more nervous than she was.

Katinka knew her parents were of two minds about her accepting the mysterious job in London. They had been so proud when she received the top grades in history at Moscow University, but when her professor, Academician Beliakov, showed her the advertisement in the Humanities Department Gazette, her father had begged her not to go. What sort of people lived in London and were rich enough to hire a historian? he asked. But Katinka could not resist it. Researching a family history, tracing the vanished past…She imagined a cultured young Count Vorontsov or Prince Golitsyn living in a dilapidated London town house full of ancient samovars, icons and family portraits, keen to find out what had become of his family, their palaces and works of art dating from the eighteenth century, her period, her speciality. She wished she’d been born in those more elegant times…

She had never been abroad before, although she had spent three years at the university in faraway Moscow. No, the offer was too good to miss: young historians specializing in eighteenth-century history do not often get the chance to earn much-needed U.S. dollars and travel to London.

Katinka’s father, Dr. Valentin Vinsky, was smoking a cigarette and pacing the floor while her mother Tatiana, a soft, feathery creature with bright red-dyed hair, busied herself in the kitchen with her mother-in-law, Babushka—or Baba for short. Through the fog of cooking, Baba, a low-slung, broad-shouldered peasant in a floral dress, scarlet kerchief and some old surgical socks held up with elastic, moved slowly like a dinosaur in the mist.

Steam rose so densely, so aromatically, from the bubbling pots of vegetable broth that it was hard to see the two women. It was as if the nourishing humidity had warped the entire house. Like a million Soviet homes, everything inside, carpets, curtains and clothes, was yellowed with steam and damp and grease.

“There you are!” said Katinka, bounding into the room. “How long have you been up?”

“I didn’t sleep a wink!” her father replied. He was tall and dark-skinned with brown eyes. Though his grey hair was thinning and he was always exhausted, Katinka thought he looked like one of those handsome forties film stars. “Everything packed?”

“Not so fast, Papochka!”

“Well, you must hurry…”