Sashenka

Dr. Vinsky asked himself (not for the first time) why he had returned to this godforsaken place in the borderlands of the Empire as a young doctor. He could have studied more; he had dreamed of becoming a gynecologist, a specialist, a professor, in Moscow. But he came home—home to the blue-shuttered cottage where he’d been born, and still lived—to be with his old peasant parents and run the local clinic. Perhaps he would not have succeeded in Leningrad, or perhaps he was a coward, he thought now. But this was home and he craved it.

Dr. Vinsky hated partings: he hated anyone to go away; his sons were married and lived far off, and now his only daughter had gone. He himself was nearly sixty, with a weak heart, and he knew he would never leave.

He flicked his cigarette onto the tracks. What was this “family research” of Katinka’s? he asked himself yet again. In Russia, it was always better to leave the past alone. Here it had a way of poisoning the present. Without Academician Beliakov’s insistence that Katinka would be safe, he would never have let her go to London.

Katinka, he decided, was a bright bird of paradise stuck in a dingy cage: he had to let her fly. Unlike his old father, Dr. Vinsky was no Communist, yet, in these times of turbulence—in which chaos, corruption and democracy reigned—he yearned for stability.

Perhaps this was why he felt uneasy about Katinka’s journey. She was traveling into a world where he could not protect her.

3

The trip—the train ride to Moscow, the flight from Sheremetyevo Airport—was so dizzyingly exciting that Katinka recorded every moment in a diary she had bought especially. She described the people she met on the train, the check-in at the airport, the passengers who sat on either side of her on the flight (she had never flown before); her trip into London on the grimy Metro (or the Tube, as the English gracelessly called it), which was so dark and sordid compared with the vaulted marble cathedrals that were Moscow’s underground stations; and then the walk, staggering with her bag, from Sloane Square Station. And there she was, staring with wide-eyed amazement at the discreetly luxurious hotel booked for her in Cadogan Gardens, Chelsea.

The receptionist, a waxy paper pusher with a weave-over hairstyle, did not seem too pleased to see her. When he realized she was Russian, he appeared suspicious, examining her passport as if it might contain some trace of KGB biological weaponry. When he looked up her reservation and found it was prepaid in cash, she could see him re-evaluate her, reducing her status from KGB agent to gangster’s moll.

“What are you doing in London? Sightseeing or…,” he asked, without looking up from behind the desk.

“I’m a historian,” she replied, in hesitant English, trying not to giggle at his confusion. She thought she saw him shake his head a little: prostitute, spy or…or historian, he couldn’t work it out.

Upstairs in her room, she could only wonder at the canopied double bed and the marble bathroom containing two, yes two, basins, two, yes two, fluffy bathrobes and an Aladdin’s cave of free shampoos, soaps and bubble baths (all of which she immediately hid in her bag to take home), and cable television. It was so different from her home in the north Caucasus or her room in the dormitory in Moscow where she had lived for three years.

The desk was equipped with embossed envelopes and writing paper (straight into the bag with them too!). There were goosefeather pillows, bedspreads, curtains, pelmets like a palace, and downstairs a sitting room, silent except for a ticking grandfather clock, with deep well-stuffed sofas and piles of glossy new magazines such as Vogue and something called the Illustrated London News. Oh, the very Englishness of it! What a mercy, she thought, that her English had been so good at school and that she remembered some of it. When she had looked around, the receptionist gave her a note in a typed envelope:

Pick-up tomorrow 9:00 a.m. Your driver is Artyom.

This struck her as so iconic that she stuck it in her diary for posterity. Before taking a stroll around Sloane Square and down the King’s Road, she called her parents from the room to tell them she was safe. She got her father, who was always agonizingly shy on the phone.

“Katinka, trust no one out there,” he warned her, between gaping silences.

“They’re terrified of us here, Papa. In the hotel, they think I’m a gangster or a spy!”

“Promise me you’ll take no risks, darling,” he said.

“Oh, Papa. OK, I promise: no risks. I kiss you, Papa. Love to Mama and Baba and Bedbug!”