Sashenka

She walked, then almost ran to the front desk, where the librarian directed her to the large green books of bound newspapers from the thirties. She knew Satinov had started his rise in 1939 when he joined the Central Committee. Somewhere in those old newspapers, somewhere, she told herself, there might be a clue that linked him to Roza’s family. Those yellowed newspapers were another world, written in an unnatural Bolshevik language that made her smile at its absurdities, at its news of Five Year Plans, of the achievements of collective farms and motor tractor stations and iron smelters in Magnitogorsk; of heroic pilots, proletarian comrades and Stakhanovite miners. As the light outside changed from bright blue to powdery dusk, she sat there, reading Izvestia and Pravda, beginning to understand that Satinov and Roza came from a different planet, recent in time but as foreign to her life as Mars or Jupiter. Twice she found mentions of “Comrade Satinov” giving a speech on Abkhazian tea production, brought back to Moscow by Comrade Stalin, promoted in the Party apparat—but there was not a hint of personal life, of friendships or connections.

Several times she walked around the colossal library just to stay awake and get her blood running; several times she was tempted to stop and read the Western magazines or the satirical Ogonyuk, yet each time she returned to her newspapers and their stories of the past.

She was about to give up when she turned to page five of Pravda in March 1939 and found a photograph of the young Satinov, in Stalinka tunic and boots, hair brushed back en brosse, beside a burly barrel-chested man in NKVD uniform. An article about the first Central Committee Plenum after the Eighteenth Congress had been placed beneath the photograph.

Comrade Stalin praised the new generation of cadres promoted to candidate members of the Central Committee, reflecting how “some comrades had come of age in the school of the Party itself, fresh steel tempered by the Revolution…” Afterward, in informal comments to delegates, Comrade Stalin reminisced with paternal fondness that he had first encountered Comrades H. A. Satinov and I. N. Palitsyn together as young Party workers, in Petrograd in 1917. “They were young, they were comrades-in-arms, they were devoted Bolsheviks. The Party has given them many hard tasks,” said Comrade Stalin, “but now again these brothers-in-arms are reunited at the top of the great worker state…”

She read it carefully twice, noted down its details and the new name: I. N. Palitsyn. She looked round the reading room: it was emptier than it had been. Half the table lights were off. The youngsters were all gone, only the old still there, those old men with so little time, like Roza with her terrifying sense of loss. Was this the name she was looking for? “There were friendships even then…”

Katinka slammed the book shut with a muffled boom that made one of the older readers jump and twitch as if he were waking from a long sleep. It was time to go. She had an appointment.

7

The motorcyclist in the leather trousers, pale brown bomber jacket and horned, Viking-style helmet skidded to a halt outside the Black Dog nightclub. It was on the Moskva Embankment a few hundred yards from the British Embassy and just across from the Kremlin. An occasional chunk of ice still floated down the Moskva River and the dark earth was edged with snow like a frill of lace, but the air held the spring tang of moist earth. It was already dusk, but the night was warm and grainy.

Katinka could hear a heavy-metal band playing the Scorpions’ song “Winds of Change” inside the nightclub. She wondered if she had come to the wrong place: she was no Muscovite and she barely knew the city center. It seemed a strange spot for a meeting of historians.

Then the biker dismounted and walked toward her, pulling off his horned helmet and extending a leather paw. “Katinka? Is it you? I’m Maxy Shubin.”