Sashenka

Maxy spread his hands. “If you share the results of your research with me, I’ll help you all I can. Don’t look at me like that, Katinka—believe me, you’re really going to need me to find your way through this vanished world. You’d find it easier charting the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt than the labyrinth of Stalin’s Kremlin. What do you say? Do we have a deal?”

Katinka thought of Roza again, and sighed. “Yes,” she said, “but remember, I’m a serious historian—not some girl to be chatted up.”

He laughed and called for two more bottles of Ochakov beer. They raised them.

“To our unlikely partnership.” They drank and clinked their bottles. “Now,” Maxy said, “tell me about your meeting with Comrade Satinov. I want everything. No detail is too small. Everything matters, even what socks he was wearing.”

Maxy questioned her carefully, listened earnestly and raised further queries. Even though they were in a smoky, somewhat squalid bar, such was the intensity of their conversation that they might have been sitting in the hushed sanctuary of the archives themselves.

“Without a doubt, he knows something about the family you’re looking for. And it’s something important,” said Maxy.

“I can’t understand why he doesn’t just tell me,” she said. “Then I could go back to my studies.”

“No, that’s not the style of these people,” explained Maxy. “You shouldn’t think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervor was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail. People died of gossip at Stalin’s court. For a man like Satinov, secrecy was everything.”

“But Stalin died forty years ago and Communism’s been gone for three years,” Katinka objected. “What’s stopping Satinov telling us his secrets now?”

“You have to understand that silence and secrecy were deeply ingrained in people like Satinov. When Stalin was alive, his apparatchiks were silent partly because they believed in what they were doing, partly because they were born conspirators—conspiracy was their natural habitat—and partly out of fear. And it was the sort of fear that doesn’t pass: it lives in the bones forever. After Stalin died, they were silent because they wished to protect the Idea, the Soviet Union, the holy grail. For someone like Satinov, secrecy wasn’t just a habit, it was the essence of the revolutionary code.”

They were both silent as they thought about this.

“So did you find anything to take back to him?” Maxy asked at last.

Katinka shrugged and blew out the smoke of her cigarette. “I hoped you might have some idea. I waded through years of newspapers and I found no personal link—except this.” She handed him a photocopy of the article and picture she had found in the Lenin Library. “I don’t think it’ll help us much…”

Maxy took it and studied it carefully, and whistled. “Vanya Palitsyn. I know exactly who he was. A veteran secret policeman of the old school who vanished soon after this photograph was taken. He was important in the thirties but he appears in no memoirs, no histories. His arrest was never announced and we don’t know what happened to him.”

“But how does this help us?”

“Well, I never knew that Satinov and Palitsyn were friends—and they had to be very close friends, well known for their friendship, for Stalin to refer to such a thing in his ‘informal comments.’ It may be a dead end, but you’ve found a possible link to Satinov’s past. Isn’t this what he told you to do?”

The thrill of historical revelation, of past humanity refound and resuscitated, inflamed Katinka. The reverberating music, the chattering of the other denizens of the club, everything else seemed distant and irrelevant. All she could think about was Roza, and Roza’s elusive family. “But will this be enough to make him talk to me?” she asked.

“I think you should do some more research first, just to make sure,” said Maxy slowly. “You have the name Palitsyn. Apply for his file in the KGB archives—I’ll file the applications for you—and find out what happened to him, if he had a family, children. That’s the easy bit. Then you can go back to Satinov. You’ve worked in archives?”

“I love archives,” she said, hugging herself.

“Why?”

“You can smell the life in the paper. I’ve sat in the State Archives and held the love letters of Catherine and Potemkin, the most passionate notes, fragrant with her scent and soaked in his tears as he lay dying on the steppes.”