Sashenka

Katinka waved down a Lada car, handing the driver two dollars. She reached the Pushkin statue first. It was a dazzling spring day, the sky metallic blue, the breeze biting, the sunlight raw. In the gasoline fumes and lilac scent, girls were waiting for their lovers beneath the poet, bespectacled students read their notes on the benches, guides in polyester suits lectured American tourists, limousines for German bankers and Russian wheeler-dealers drew up at the Pushkin Restaurant. My verses will be sung throughout all Russia’s vastness, Katinka read on the monument. My ashes will outlive and know no pale decay. Pushkin consoled her, calmed her.

A motorbike scooted up onto the pavement. Maxy pulled off his Viking helmet, holding it by the horns, and kissed her in his over-familiar way.

“You look flustered,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s sit in the sun and you can tell me everything.”

Once seated, Katinka told him about her visit to Tbilisi, her night with Lala, her discovery that Roza Getman was Sashenka’s daughter—and her more recent encounter with the KGB.

“You’ve done so well,” Maxy told her. “I’m impressed! But let me interpret some of this for you. Mouche Zeitlin says the KGB told her Sashenka was sentenced to ‘ten years without rights of correspondence.’ Usually that was a euphemism for execution.”

Katinka caught her breath. “But what about the ex-prisoner who’d seen Sashenka in the camps in the fifties?”

“The KGB liked to trick people that way. The KGB files say Mendel died of ‘cardiac arrest.’ That was another euphemism. It means he died under interrogation: he was beaten to death.”

“So these files have their own language?” she said.

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “There was a terrible randomness in the Terror, but at the same time there were no coincidences in that world: everything was linked by invisible threads. We just need to find them. Send files of Palitsyn case to Central Committee,” he repeated. “I know what that means. Come with me. Climb on.”

Katinka joined him on the back of his bike, pulling her denim skirt down over her thighs. The engine revved raucously and Maxy weaved in and out of the unruly Moscow traffic, down Tverskaya until he took a sharp left at the statue of Prince Dolgoruky, founder of Moscow, and went down a steep hill. The wind blew in Katinka’s hair and she closed her eyes, allowing the rich spring air to refresh her.

They stopped alongside a Brezhnevite concrete box with a shabby glass front, a dark frieze of Marx, Engels and Lenin over the revolving door.

Maxy scissored off the bike in his leathers and tugged off his helmet, pushing back his hair. She thought him more seventies heavy-metal singer than historian. He strode ahead into a marble hall and Katinka followed him, almost running. In the grey foyer, women behind tables sold Bon Jovi CDs, hats and gloves, like a flea market, but at the back, where the entrance to the elevators was guarded by two pimply teenage soldiers, stood a white Lenin bust. Maxy showed his card and they checked Katinka’s passport, kept it and gave her a chit.

Maxy led her up the steps, past a canteen with its moldy cabbage-soup fug and into an elevator, which chugged to the top of the building. Before she could take in her surroundings, he was leading her into the glass-walled reading room with its circular panorama of the roofs of Moscow.

“No time to admire the view,” he whispered as disapproving old Communists looked up crossly from their studies. Maxy’s leathers creaked loudly in the hushed room. “I’ve got a little place for us here.” They sat in a cul-de-sac formed by towering bookshelves. “Wait here,” he said. She listened to the rasp of his biking gear with a smile. Moments later, he returned with a pile of brown papki files and sat very close to her. He radiated a blend of leathers, coffee, bike oil and lemon cologne.

“This place,” he whispered, “is the Party archive. You see these papki, numbered five hundred fifty-eight? Stalin’s own archive. It’s still officially closed and I don’t think it’ll ever open.” He flipped the first files toward him. “I was looking at these earlier and I noticed Satinov’s name. When it said your files were sent to the Central Committee, that meant to Stalin himself. This is Stalin’s miscellaneous correspondence. Go ahead, Katinka, look under S for Satinov.”

She opened the file and found a cover note, stamped by Poskrebyshev at 9:00 p.m. on May 6, 1939: