Sashenka

She couldn’t wait to reach her hotel room so she crossed the road to the sleazy foyer of the Intourist Hotel, a hideous seventies construction of glass and concrete. Its ceiling, made up of what appeared to be white polystyrene squares, was low; its floor was a faded, frayed burgundy “carpet” and the security staff at its brown, padded-vinyl desk were aggressive, lantern-jawed Soviet “bulls.”

But the place seethed like a souk. One-armed bandits rumbled and whirred, and garish whores sat about on orange sofas. As one of the security thugs approached her, Katinka pointed at the whores and he shrugged: he’d collect his share later. Sitting on a foam sofa next to two booted, stockinged girls with bare, bruised white thighs, she offered them both a cigarette. Each of them grabbed one: the first put it in her handbag, the other in her stocking top.

Katinka lit up her own, inhaled and then tore open the envelope. Inside were a few trinkets and a wad of photocopied documents. The first was dated May 1953, two months after Stalin’s death:

To all case officers: Palitsyn/Zeitlin Case

For security reasons, relatives enquiring about sentences of abovementioned state criminals are to be informed that the prisoners were resentenced after a ten-year term in Gulags.

Signed: I. V. Serov, Chairman, State Security Committee (KGB)

Anger and confusion coursed through Katinka, followed by a sinking sadness. Everything she had so far learned from Mouche and the KGB archives was a callous lie. She must have paled because one of the prostitutes leaned over and asked gently: “Your test results, love? Bad news?”

“Something like that,” said Katinka, her forehead prickly with sweat.

“Tough, tough, but we survive,” said the prostitute, lighting up and turning back to her friend.

Katinka looked again at the typed pages.

Sitting of Military Tribunal, office of the Narkom L. P. Beria, at Special Object 110, 2:30 a.m. 22 January 1940. Trial of Accused Alexandra “Sashenka” Zeitlin-Palitsyn (Comrade Snowfox).

Chairman of the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court Vasily Ulrikh presiding in person.

Katinka leafed to the end, looking for the sentencing—but there was that maddening note again: Send documents on Palitsyn case to Central Committee.

Then she started to read Sashenka’s trial notes—and what she read shocked her so deeply that she stuffed the papers back in the envelope and ran out of the hotel into the street, turning right and heading down the hill toward the Kremlin, its eight red stars glowing high above her through the hazy rhapsody of a spring night.

“You’ve gone too far this time!” said Mariko, barely raising her voice, which made the implied threat all the more powerful.

Marshal Satinov sat in his high chair in the elegant, breezy sitting room with an oxygen mask held onto his face by elastic and a large oxygen cylinder on wheels beside him. He appeared to have shrunk in just a few days, and his blinking eyes followed Katinka’s every move.

“Please, let me talk to your father for one minute,” said Katinka, breathless and flushed with running. “I’ve so much to tell him and he himself asked me to let him know what I found…”

She fixed her eyes, imploringly, onto Satinov’s sharp orbs with their half-closed lids. At first they showed nothing. But then they seemed to twinkle and the old man wrenched off his oxygen mask. “Oh Mariko, stop fussing.” He spoke with difficulty. “Bring us tea.” Mariko sighed loudly and stomped out. “How did you get in, girl?”

“Someone let me in through the street door and then I found your door ajar.”

Satinov absorbed this. “Fate, that’s what it is. Don’t forget that’s why you’re here.” He gave a skull-like smile.

Katinka sat down on the sofa near him and he opened his wizened hands as if to say Go on then, girl, give it to me.

“I found Snowy.” He nodded appreciatively. “Lala Lewis told me everything. You were a hero. You saved the children. Snowy wants to meet you to say thank you.”

He shook his head and waved his hand. “Too late,” he rasped. “Have you found her brother too?”

“Not yet. I’m still trying to work out what happened to Sashenka.”

“Leave them. Concentrate on Carlo! The children, the future…”

“Sashenka and Vanya were your best friends, weren’t they?”

“Sashenka was…there was no one like her—and the children…” His blue eyes softened and for a moment Katinka thought she saw tears. She made herself go on.