Sashenka

“Sorry.” Katinka turned over the page to find a form, filled in on May 16, 1939, giving Sashenka’s description. Color of eyes: grey. Hair: dark brown with chestnut streaks. And there were her smudged fingerprints. Then a creased and stained piece of paper, headed Main Administration of State Security, Very Important Cases Department. In the middle, typed in a large, curvaceous, open typeface that looked bold and honest as if it had nothing to hide, was the following command: Zeitlin-Palitsyn, along with her husband Palitsyn, has been unmasked as a long-serving Okhrana and White Guardist spy, Trotskyite saboteur, and agent of Japan. It is essential to arrest her and carry out a search.

This was surrounded by stamps, squiggles and signatures. The first name was Captain Melsky, Head of Ninth Section of Fourth Department, Main Administration of State Security. But a thick felt pen had been put through his name and underneath, in what appeared to be a child’s handwriting and spelling, someone had written: I will carry out this oberation myself. B. Kobylov, Commissar-General, State Security, second degree. Then later: Oberation compleded. Prisoner Alexandra Zeitlin-Palitsyn delivered to Internal Prison. B. Kobylov, Commissar-General, State Security, second degree.

The Marmoset was still sitting there leering, but Katinka did not care. She was gripped. So Sashenka and her husband had fallen in 1939. Why? When she turned the page, she found the testimony of a man named Peter Sagan, ex-Captain of the Gendarmes, Okhrana officer and later (under a false name) a schoolteacher in Irkutsk. Sagan revealed that Sashenka and Vanya had been in Petersburg in 1917—just like Satinov. But soon the outpouring of crazed accusations against the Palitsyns became too much to absorb. It seemed a ghost had emerged out of the mists of time bearing a plague of lies and accusations. But then she looked at the date of the Sagan confession: it was July 5—after Sashenka’s arrest. Sagan had not arrived in Lubianka until July 1. So Sashenka had been arrested for something else. But what?

Katinka leafed hungrily through the badly typed fifteen-page confession signed at each corner with Sagan’s frail, anemic markings—how strange, she thought, that these characters’ lives were reduced to strokes of the pen. She tried to imagine the personality behind the fading lines of ink, and trembled.

Next she found a single piece of paper with a paragraph headed Extract from confession of Beniamin Lazarovich “Benya” Golden: attach to file of Alexandra Zeitlin-Palitsyn. The writer Benya Golden. She’d heard of him and his one masterpiece, those stories of the Spanish Civil War. She read on: