Sashenka

Patting her hand playfully, he signed: To a beautiful scientist of truth. Hercules. “It was published in many languages—Polish and Czech,” he said proudly, handing her the book. “Even Mongolian.”

“Thank you, Marshal. You’re the first famous war hero I’ve met and I know you would help me if you could. Is it possible Roza’s family did die during the war? Were they repressed in the Great Terror? If so, their records would be in the KGB archives. Now, families can apply for their case records, but without a name how can we apply for anything? Could you help us apply?”

He smiled at her, looking at her quite boldly. “I’ve always loved women,” he said quietly, “even though I’m an old ruin.”

“You must have danced quite a lot of them into your arms,” Katinka said.

There was a silence.

“Well, I still have a few contacts left,” Satinov said at last, “although most of my friends have gone to Lenin.”

“Where?”

“To the Politburo in the sky. You’re not a Communist, I suppose?”

“No, but my grandparents are true believers.”

“I became a Marxist at sixteen and I’ve never wavered.”

He wasn’t going to tell her anything, Katinka realized, feeling depressed suddenly. In her meeting with the only link to the Getmans’ past, she had already let Roza down. Her face must have dropped because Satinov took her right hand between his own and pressed it. “Katinka, the past in our country is a dark cell. You may never find the old people but concentrate on the young. Trace the young! They deserve your attention. You understand Catherine’s court but you know nothing about me or my work. You must immerse yourself in the age of building Socialism if you wish to find anything. Speak to those researchers who are digging in the archives. Search more deeply, trace the links of the chain. It was an underwater world, but not everything was submerged. There were friendships even then, in the hardest times, and if you find a name, the thread to the past, then come back and talk to me.”

Katinka sensed that he did not really want her to give up, so she plucked up her courage for one final push. “Marshal, may I ask you one embarrassing question that might save me a lot of work—and then I could go back to Catherine the Second.”

“You’ll have to work harder to make progress in your project,” Satinov said briskly, showing her toward the door, “or you’ll find nothing at all. What was the question?”

Katinka’s heart was thudding so loudly in her ears that she realized she was almost shouting.

“Are you Roza’s real father?”

6

Katinka enjoyed the hushed mysteries that reign in all libraries. Some of her friends thought they were boring, with their musty smell and their rigid silence broken only by the occasional cough, the illicit whispers, and the turning of pages. But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.

As she did not know where to start with her research, she began where everyone begins—in the reading room of the Lenin Library on Vozdvizhenka. She had worked there before and she already had a library card, but this time she noticed that the building’s Stalinist Gothic façade was covered in the bronze silhouettes of Soviet heroes—writers and scientists. As she walked through the stacks of bookshelves, steering around the messy tables with their crews of stretching, yawning students and obsessional, grey-skinned old men, eyes flicked up to watch her surreptitiously. She felt the excitement of discovery again and remembered Roza’s extraordinary eyes, how she had begged Katinka for help. Katinka was on a quest, though she had no idea where she was headed.

She sat at an empty table beneath the high windows and tried to think. Where to start? Usually she only noticed the students in the library but now she stared at the old people, in their brown suits and ties, burrowing, scratching out notes in spidery handwriting on yellowed pads: why were they so hungry for information when their lives were so nearly over? Did any of them have a clue for her? If she had access to all their soon-to-vanish memories of Bolshevik secrets, one of them, surely, would be able to solve her quest. What did they know? What had they seen? As she watched an old man licking his finger as he wrinkled up his eyes and turned the pages, a sentence of Satinov’s came back to her: “It was an underwater world but not everything was submerged.” Everything was secret at that time—except what? Except the newspapers, of course.