Sashenka

“Don’t worry, I’ve organized it all. Now remember,” he continued, straight-faced, “I booked you an appointment to apply to make an application to apply to peruse the list of documents held in this archive, and I can now inform you that our application to make an application will of course be refused. Go on in, Katinka. Good luck.”

“I feel uneasy about this. Will it work or will I get arrested?”

“One or the other.” He laughed. “Just think, two weeks ago you’d never have tried such a stunt. But be confident. Look as if you know where you’re going and you’re entitled to get what you want. I’ll see you later.”

She watched him kick-start the bike and saw the horned helmet disappear into the hidden lanes before she turned to enter the high Gothic slab with pillars and balconies embellished by heroes carved in stone and bronze.

At the wooden desk, the two teenaged Interior Ministry soldiers half dozed in their battered chairs but sat up at the sight of Katinka. The pimplier of the two conscripts slid the signing-in book along the desk, examined her passport with a sneer intended to project the power invested in him by the Russian state, checked a collage of yellow chits on his desk and found one bearing her name, wrote out another chit on a further badly printed scrap and then with the hint of a virile smirk handed back the paper, keeping the passport, and gestured grandly toward the elevators in the white marble hall behind him. “Application for archives, fourth floor.”

She scarcely dared look back but sensed a presence. A skinny young man with a bald head, yellow vinyl shoes, and a grey parka was hanging up his coat in the cloakroom and watching her intently. A strange crew, these archive rats, Katinka thought, as she hurried on and entered the elevator. As its doors were about to close, a hand held them back and the archive rat came in, nodding at her nervously but saying nothing. He was pulling on his archivist’s stained yellow coat, like a laboratory assistant, his red-rimmed eyes magnified and eager through his smeared spectacles.

The elevator was small and they stood so awkwardly close that the archive rat kept trying to apologize but never quite managed it, as each of his attempts at conversation ended in him starting to hum. Katinka flattened herself against the wall, horribly close to the pasty dome of his head with its sparse colorless hairs, livid blotches and beads of sweat. She pressed the bell for the fifth floor but he pressed the fourth and when the quivering elevator jolted to a halt, the doors opened and he got out, holding them open.

“Your floor.” He wasn’t asking, he was telling her. “Applications.”

But Katinka shook her head twice. The rat looked surprised and remained standing there quizzically as the doors closed. Katinka cringed, knowing she’d been found out because, as Maxy had explained, “outside applicants are not permitted to visit the fifth floor.”

The elevator opened on a landing with misted glass doors, some shabby plastic palms and a grand portrait frame—with no picture inside it. Directorate of the Study of Dialectical Materialism and Leninist Economic-Political Historical Questions of the Soviet Union read the plaque, to which someone had taped a note: The Russian State Archive of Special Secret Political-Administrative Documents.

“It would be best if you didn’t meet anyone up there,” Maxy had told her—so she expected the archive rat to jump out at her with the pimpled teenaged guards at any moment.

The long parquet corridors with lines of closed pine doors were hushed. The passages were much too hot—the winter heating was still on. Katinka checked the engraved plaques that announced a name and title on each door. She turned right and then right again until she heard the blare of opera—Glinka’s famous aria from A Life for the Tsar. When she turned again, the music got louder and louder as she approached the last door.

Agrippina Constantinovna Begbulatov, Director of Manuscripts read the plaque. Quite a name. Katinka listened at the door: the music was reaching a climax. Should she have made an appointment? No, Maxy had said that was too dangerous.

She knocked. No answer. She knocked again. Nothing. Katinka cursed obstructive dinosaurs like Satinov, the maddeningly rigid bureaucrats, the frustrations of this project, and just opened the door.

A very large, white-skinned woman of advanced years lay sleeping on a divan in her underwear, her eyes covered by a mask that read American Airways.