Sashenka

B. Golden: Using the depraved seductive techniques of the Mata Hari type of spy, Sashenka—accused Alexandra Zeitlin-Palitsyn—first seduced me sexually under guise of inviting me to write for her magazine and persuaded me to meet her for corrupt sexual practices in room 403 at the Metropole Hotel, set aside by the Writers’ Union/Litfond for the use of non-Moscow writers for Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine, which she edited. While wearing the mask of a new Soviet woman, Zeitlin-Palitsyn admitted to me she was an Okhrana agent and Trotskyite and asked me to introduce her to the French secret service, who had recruited me in Paris in 1935 when I was traveling to the International Writers’ Congress with the Soviet delegation. She had already recruited her uncle Mendel Barmakid, a member of the Central Committee, and I recruited her other relative, my friend the famous writer Gideon Zeitlin, to help plan the assassination of Comrades Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and Marshal Voroshilov at a party at Sashenka’s house by spraying the gramophone that Comrade Stalin would use with poison. The first attempt at her house—when Comrade Stalin visited on May Day 1939—failed because I failed to spray the gramophone…

Witnessed: Investigator Rodos, Very Important Cases Department, Main Administration of State Security

Katinka recoiled. So Benya Golden, that talented, elegiac writer, had rolled over and incriminated Sashenka. It must have been Golden’s denunciation that got her arrested. How could he have done so? The accusations against Sashenka seemed preposterous.

Yet this was dated August 6, even later than the Peter Sagan confession. Katinka hurriedly turned more pages. She had been reading for more than fifteen minutes. After a rather picturesque collage of stamps, triangular, square and round, she read a note dated six months later:

Office of Military Procurator, 19 January 1940

The case against the Zeitlin-Palitsyn-Barmakid terrorist spy

group is now complete and must be handed over to the court…

Send the case to the Military Tribunal, 21 January 1940.

Katinka felt a nervous twinge as if she, or someone close to her, was going to be tried on January 21, 1940. Sashenka’s eyes looked out anxiously from the photograph. Maxy was right: there was an intimacy in these mysterious old papers, and an unbearable sense of tragedy. What happened to these people at the trial? Did Sashenka live or die? Katinka eagerly turned the page. There was nothing more.

“Five minutes!” said the Marmoset, drumming his fingers on the desk. Katinka noticed he was reading a magazine on soccer, Manchester United Fanzine. She noted down the basic facts in her notebook and the new names: Benya Golden—famed writer. Mendel Barmakid—forgotten apparatchik. Gideon Zeitlin—literary figure.

Katinka quickly reached for the Palitsyn file. First the photograph: Ivan Palitsyn, Sashenka’s husband and Satinov’s friend, side and front views, a burly, athletic man, with thick greying hair, a Tatar slant to the cheekbones. A handsome specimen of that shaggy Russian proletarian type, he had been a real worker at the Putilov Works. But in the picture, he had a black eye and bleeding lip. He must have put up a fight, decided Katinka. He wore a torn NKVD tunic. She looked into his eyes and saw…weariness, disdain, anger, not the fear and the appealing sarcasm in his wife’s eyes.

“Four minutes,” said the Marmoset.