Sashenka

“I don’t even know,” answered Roza. “Where are my parents? Who were they? I don’t know who I am. I’ve never known. Look on this task any way you like—as a challenge, a historical project, a vacation job to earn some money, or just an act of real kindness. But this is my last chance. Please, please say you’ll help me find out what happened to my family?”

5

It was spring in a newly schizophrenic Moscow, a city in the midst of the craziest personality crisis of its history. Grim and neon lit, it had become an Asiatic and Americanized metropolis of BMWs and Ladas, Communists and oligarchs, apparatchiks and whores.

Creaking chandeliers of gutter-soiled ice still hung off the ornate pink eaves of the Granovsky Building as Katinka found the bell for staircase one, apartment 4. On this small private street, the cascades of ice dangled so treacherously over the pavement that the janitors had fenced off sections to protect the pedestrians. Meanwhile the cherry blossom was bursting into flower; rap music blared in the street; there were Mercedeses and Range Rovers parked outside the building.

Katinka walked slowly along its wall, reading the orange plaques recording the famous Communists who had once lived here: marshals and commissars, Stalin’s henchmen, names from a vanished black time. Again she wanted to escape. She couldn’t do this; she shouldn’t be doing this—yet here she was.

Three days had passed, three days in which Katinka and Roza Getman had drunk tea, and walked round the rose gardens of Regent’s Park, and talked about Roza’s childhood, her adoptive parents and her hazy memories of another life. And Katinka had agreed. Against all her instincts and her father’s advice, she was here in Moscow—for Roza.

Katinka approached the wooden door with the glass windows and rang the old-fashioned brass bell hard. She waited a long time and was about to give up when there came the sound of an aged throat being cleared.

“I’m listening!” said a hoarse voice.

Katinka smiled at the superior way that old chinovniki—bureaucrats—answered their phones, as in “Make your submission, slave!”

“This is Katinka Vinsky. The history student? I called and you told me to come.”

A long pause. Rasping breaths, then the door clicked. Katinka pushed through the battered wooden doors into a foyer and up a dingy but once glorious staircase to another door with reinforced locks. She was about to knock when it swung open into a gleaming hall lined with boots and shoes.

“Hello?” she called out.

“Who are you?” asked a swarthy middle-aged woman with a long nose and shabby black clothes. She spoke well, Katinka noted, as if she had been to the best schools.

“I’m the historian who’s come to see the marshal.”

“He’s waiting for you,” said the woman, pointing down a shining parquet corridor and retreating into the kitchen.

“Leave your shoes!” said the voice of an old man. “Come and join me! Where are you?”

Katinka took off her shoes, slipped on some yellowed foam slippers and followed the voice through an archway. So this was how the bosses lived? She had never seen an apartment like it. The ceilings were high; a chandelier glistened; the wainscoting was bright Karelian pine, as was the art-deco thirties furniture. The L-shaped corridor led off to many rooms but she turned right into the living room. The brash spring glare beamed through the four windows, but then her vision cleared and she saw, across a piano thick with family photographs, the ten-foot-high painting of Lenin at the Finland Station on one wall and on the other an original Gerasimov portrait, of a handsome, sharp-faced marshal in full uniform, gold shoulder boards and a chestful of medals like a Christmas tree.

To her right, a table was heaped with Soviet and foreign magazines; a new-fangled mobile phone was charging on the windowsill, and a Sony CD player played Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante through small black speakers on little platforms high in the four corners of the room. Katinka was amazed. It was true what they said—the Soviet leaders really did live like princes.

In a deep leather chair with its back to the light sat a dignified specimen of ancient Homo sovieticus.

“Hello, girl, come in!” Katinka had expected the oily Soviet comb-over hairdo, the waxy pallor (the “Kremlin tan”) and the paunch of a much older man, but this antique, sitting erect in a blue Soviet suit with only the star of the Order of the Red Banner, for courage in the Great Patriotic War, on his lapel, was lean and chiseled. His hair was steel hewn, spiky and thick, and his aquiline nose that of a Persian shah. She recognized a shrunken version of the marshal in the portrait.

The original stood up, bowed, showing her to an upright Karelian pine chair opposite his own, then sat again. “Sit, please. That’s it. Now, girl…”

“Ekaterina,” she said, taking the seat indicated.

“Katinka—if I may—what can I do for you?”