Sashenka

“Yes, but we reserve the right to check them. In 1991, we let too many files be copied by alien influences. Procedures got sloppy. What do you hope to find out?”

“Whether this Palitsyn is connected to my clients…”

“You might find out some answers but it’s not your right to know everything, even now.”

“Did he have a wife and children, do you know?”

The Marmoset nodded and placed another slim papka file on top of the other. “Palitsyn’s wife has her own file, right here. Do you want to see it?”

Katinka picked it up and read:

Investigation File May/June 1939

Case 16374

Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin-Palitsyn, Prisoner 778

“Samuilovna Zeitlin. Not a Russian name. There were a lot of them in the Party in those days and many turned out to be traitors,” said the Marmoset, leaning over her shoulder. He opened the file. There was a photograph clipped to the few papers inside.

“There, that’s the photograph they take on the day of arrest.”

Katinka looked at it, her heart beating. It showed a woman with a full mouth slightly open and ash-grey eyes that burned into the lens.

“She’s beautiful, whoever she was.” Katinka was fascinated suddenly, and a little touched.

“Yes, she was quite well known once, that Delilah. Then, fa-la-la, she vanished!”

“May I examine the file now?” Katinka could not wait to free herself of the Marmoset’s gaze.

“You have thirty minutes.” He pushed the file over to her then returned to his seat and sat watching.

“For this one file?”

“For both. These are the rules.”

“Do feel free to do your other work, Colonel,” Katinka said self-consciously.

“Watching you,” he replied, “is my work.”

9

Katinka placed the photograph above the file, which she pulled closer, and looked into the woman’s face: the eyes reflected the flashbulb of an old-fashioned camera but, far from a vacant self-pity, the gaze radiated warmth and a mocking jauntiness, even as Katinka traced in the set of the muscles a straining to show, at the brink of the abyss, the best face she could.

“Hello,” whispered Katinka, imagining that the photograph might answer, that those beseeching eyes might blink. “Who are you?” Stapled to the inside cover of the file was a scuffed, stained scrap of paper to be signed by everyone who had looked at the file—but it was blank. No one outside the KGB had ever examined it. She grabbed at the first sheet of paper, a short biography:

Born 1900 in St. Petersburg, Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin-

Palitsyn, known as Sashenka, Comrade Snowfox. Nationality:

Jewish. Party member since 1916. Last place of work: editor,

Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine, State

Publishing House. Educated at Smolny Institute…

“Sash-en-ka…,” Katinka said to herself. “Will you help Roza and me?”

Family: father, Baron Samuil Zeitlin, capitalist banker, later non-Party specialist at People’s Commissariats of Finance, then Foreign Trade, then State Bank, dismissed 1928, exiled 1929, arrested 1937, sentenced to ten years Kolyma. Mother: Ariadna Zeitlin, nee Barmakid, dead 1917.

Mother’s brother: Mendel Barmakid, Jewish, Party member since 1904, member Central Committee 1911–1939, arrested 1939.

Father’s brother: Gideon Zeitlin, writer. Not a Party member. Jewish.

Husband: Ivan Palitsyn, born St. Petersburg 1895. Russian, Party member since 1911, married 1922, arrested 1939, last place of work: Assistant Deputy People’s Commissar, NKVD.

Children: Volya and Karlmarx.

“Pleased to meet you all,” said Katinka under her breath. Sashenka and her husband would be very old now but they could still be alive—there was nothing in the file to say they weren’t. And their children wouldn’t even be old. She didn’t know if this woman was relevant to her search, yet her pulse quickened. “I wonder what happened to you.”

“You’re talking to yourself,” said the Marmoset. “Silence, please.”