Sashenka

By 10:00 a.m. next day, Katinka was back in Moscow and walking up Tverskaya Street. As a student, she had browsed at the World of Books shop on Tverskaya. Now she rang the bell on the third door of the building. The door clicked open into a naked stone hall with the usual stench of cabbage and she rode up to the penthouse in a tiny, dyspeptic elevator that reminded her of a sardine tin hanging on a cable. But when the doors groaned open, she gasped in surprise. Instead of a landing with three or four doors, the elevator opened into a high-ceilinged apartment decorated in gracious, airy pine, filled with the sort of dark, noble furniture she usually saw in museums. The walls were stacked high with books and thick magazines of the Soviet era, and hung with paintings in gold frames and old movie posters. It was not overpoweringly grand like Marshal Satinov’s place but cozy and aristocratic, the apartment of a well-off aesthete of Tsarist times.

“Welcome, Katinka,” said a striking elderly woman standing in the middle of the room. Well dressed, with a busty figure neatly shown off in one of those tweed suits worn by Marlene Dietrich in the forties and a hairstyle to match, she suited the room so well she might have been posed there by a fashion photographer. Katinka guessed she was well over eighty, yet with her strong eyebrows and thick hair dyed black she held herself like an actress on her very last tour.

“I’m Mouche Zeitlin,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “Come on in and I’ll show you round. This was my father’s study…” She led Katinka into a small room still heaped with papers and books, pointing out a wall of volumes. “These are all his works. You probably remember some of them—or maybe you’re too young…”

“No, I knew his name,” answered Katinka. “In my father’s bookcase we have all the Gideon Zeitlin books along with Gorky, Ehrenburg and Sholokhov…”

“A giant of the Soviet era,” said Mouche, who spoke the noble Russian of a trained actress. “Here!” She pointed at the large black and white photographs on the wall that showed a beaming black-eyed man with a grey-black beard and the same eyes and smile as his daughter. “That’s my father with Picasso and Ehrenburg in Paris, and that’s him with Marshal Zhukov at Hitler’s Chancellery in 1945. Oh, and that’s him with one of his many girlfriends. I used to call him Papa momzer—that’s Yiddish for ‘Daddy the rogue.’ As for us, my sister and mother died in the Siege of Leningrad but my father and I, with our sense of humor, survived wars, revolutions and terror. In fact, we flourished—I’m a little ashamed to say. See those posters? That’s me in my films. You’ve probably seen a few. Let’s have tea.” They crossed the impressive hall and Katinka found herself sitting at a big kitchen table. “Are you writing about my father or me?”

“No, actually, that’s not why I came see you…” Katinka blushed but Mouche Zeitlin waved it away.

“Of course not, why should you, dear? You’re the new generation. But you said you were a historian.” She lit up a Gauloise, which she smoked in a silver holder, offering a cigarette to Katinka.

“No, thanks,” said Katinka. Then she told Mouche about meeting Roza and Pasha, and the story up to the previous day with Lala. “Lala sent me to you. She had your address; I think she must have kept it when Samuil died. And now we know that my client Roza Getman is Snowy, Sashenka’s daughter.”

“God! Snowy!” Mouche lost her brashness and suddenly she dissolved in tears. “I can’t believe it! How we longed to find that child. And what about Carlo?”

“I hope we can find him somehow.”

“But Snowy’s alive and well? I can’t believe it!” Mouche held out her arms to Katinka as if the visitor herself were long-lost family. “You’re a messenger bringing us blessings! Can I phone her? When can I meet her?”

“I hope very soon,” replied Katinka. “But there’s still so much to discover. I came to tell you this good news but also to ask you—did you ever look for Sashenka and Vanya?”

“Right up until his death, my father tried to find out what had happened to them and the children. There were many times during Stalin’s reign when my father was close to destruction himself, even though he was one of the dictator’s pet writers. At the end of the war, my father traveled down to Tbilisi to meet up again with his elder brother Samuil—and Lala Lewis, of course. They were very happy together. It was such a joyous reunion, the two brothers hadn’t seen each other for so many years. Anyway, Samuil made my father promise that as soon as he could, he would find out about Sashenka and her family.”

“Did you find anything?” asked Katinka, taking out her notebook.