Sashenka

“Come on!” His Russian was abysmal but he took her arm and led her down the cobbled street until they reached a house almost completely concealed in the vines. He opened the wooden double doors into a crumbling marble hall, lit with a candle, that reeked of Georgian feasts. To the right was a large shabby door and he pushed it open, jabbering in Georgian, the shotgun angled alarmingly over his shoulder. “Come on! Here is Café Biblioteka!”

With a gasp of wonder, Katinka entered the café, in the flickering light of candles decorated with wings of wax. She thought it smelled delicious: of tkemali, ginger, apple and almond. It was an old library, the bookshelves still standing in between the tables and behind the bar. Maps, banners of Tsarist Guards regiments, Georgian brigades and Bolshevik workers, drawings, noble and obscene, paintings, icons, pieces of old Georgian uniforms, swords and daggers, busts of Mozart, Queen Tamara, Stalin and Roman senators covered the walls. Some of the bookshelves had rotted and collapsed, tossing their priceless antique volumes onto the floors, where they lay, their yellow parchment pages open like fans.

At small tables, a single old man in a black fedora read in the half light; a group of American backpackers in yellow Timberlands and big shorts with their wallets on belts round their waists (advertising their Western riches to any brigands present) toasted one another in Georgian wine; and two grey-haired Georgians argued loudly about their politicians.

“Shevardnadze’s a traitor, a spy, KGB!” shouted one.

“Zviad’s a lunatic, a spy, KGB!” retorted the other.

“Do you want a table? Wine? Dinner?” asked a tall slim Georgian man with a blue beret on his head and a chokha coat, wasp-waisted with pouches for bullets, and a jeweled dagger in his belt. He bowed. “I’m Nugzar. Who are you? You look lost.”

“Do you know Audrey Zeitlin? I want to see her.”

“The old English lady? She’s our icon, our lucky charm! We feed her every day. She worked here for a long time, she taught us English and our children! Upstairs, come on!”

Katinka followed Nugzar to the first floor, along a corridor where the vine had punched its way through the wall and joined up with another of its limbs through a window that could no longer be closed. He knocked on the door at the end.

“Anuko!” he called.

Those Georgians, Katinka thought, with their funny diminutives!

“A visitor, Anuko!”

No reply.

Peering tentatively into the gloom, Nugzar opened the door.

14

“I always hoped you would come,” said Lala in the squeezed pitch of the ancient.

She wore a housecoat over a nightgown, and had long white hair. There was little left of her, just a bag of bones held together by white skin so delicate one could almost see through it. But it was her eyes, which seemed enormous in their glowing opalescence, that drew in Katinka, for they had a bold, exuberant will that held the spotlight and challenged the energy of the young. “I’ve waited for fifty years. What took you so long?”

“Hello,” Katinka said hesitantly, afraid she had come to the wrong place, yet surprised that this antique woman seemed to know who she was. “Marshal Satinov sent me to see you.”

“Ah—Satinov. He was our hero, our guardian angel. He’s old now, of course. Not as old as me, though. Sit down, sit down.”

Katinka sat in the soft chair in the corner of the small room musty with tissues and hand cream. There was a single candle beside the bed; sepia photographs of grandees in stiff white collars and bowler hats; a haughty schoolgirl in a white pinafore; a silver model of an oil derrick; and many old books.

“Here, girl, puff up my pillow behind me, and bring me a glass of wine. Ask Nugzar downstairs. Then we must talk. All night. You don’t sleep much when you’re as old as me. Who wants to be alive at my age? It’s miserable. All my friends are dead and that’s no fun! My husband’s been dead for forty years. But I think I’ve been waiting. I’ve been waiting for you, darling child. And now you’re here, sent by Marshal Satinov. He wants you to find my lost children, doesn’t he? Are you taking notes, dear?”

Feeling as though she had stepped into a dream, Katinka dug into her bag for her notebook and pen.

“I’m going to tell you about Sashenka, Snowy and Carlo.”

“Wait, I know Sashenka but who’s Snowy and…”

“Don’t you know anything, girl? Snowy and Carlo were Sashenka’s children. Their real names were Volya and Karlmarx. I’m going to tell you their story but first, open the window, will you?” Katinka was only too glad to let in the fragrant air. The dreamy garden seethed outside. The scent of violets, roses and that almondish, appleish tkemali blossom slowly penetrated the stuffy room in waves through the slats of the old-fashioned shutters. From the rooms below, the kitchen cauldrons in which chakapuli was boiling released powerful aromas of ginger and nutmeg.