Sashenka

He moved his lips again, but they could hear nothing. After a while his lips stopped moving and, as his family filed into the room, Katinka slipped away.

Outside, Maxy waited, smoking as he leaned on his bike. Katinka walked out into his arms, smelling the leather of his jacket and the smoke of his cigarette. She was very glad he was there.

“He’s dying? A terrible thing to see. But you’ve done all you can…”

“It’s over,” she said, “and I’m exhausted. I’ll phone Roza, collate my notes and put her in contact with anyone she wants to meet.”

“What will you do now?”

“I’m going home. I want to see my friends, and there’s a boy who wants to take me on vacation. Perhaps it’s best that we never know how Sashenka died. My papa was right. I should never have taken this job. I’m going back to Catherine the Great.”

“But you’re so good at this,” said Maxy. “Katinka, please come and work with me at the foundation. We could achieve so much together.”

She shook her head and collected herself. “No thanks. There’s no fruit, no harvest in this sort of history; all these fields are sown with salt. It may be old history but the poison is fresh and the unhappiness lives on. No, the turning over of old graves isn’t for me. It’s too painful. Good-bye, Maxy, and thanks for everything.”

She wiped her eyes and started to walk away.

“Katinka!” Maxy called after her.

She half turned.

“Katinka, can I call you sometime?”

24

But Katinka had reckoned without the persuasive force of Pasha Getman.

“You can’t just give up and walk away from us,” he’d roared at her when she’d phoned to say she’d done all she could. Then he’d said in a quieter voice, “What about my mother? She’s so fond of you. We need you to do one final thing for us. Think of it as a personal favor to Roza.”

And so it was that three days later, taking Pasha’s private plane, Katinka and Roza had flown down to Tbilisi (which was, as Pasha reminded Katinka, almost on her way home). Some of Pasha’s bodyguards had driven them straight to the picturesque café in the old vine-entangled mansion.

“Lala,” said Katinka to the old lady in the small room upstairs. “I’ve brought someone to meet you.”

Lala Lewis, holding her usual glass of Georgian wine, sat up in bed and focused on the doorway.

“Is it her? Is it Sashenka?” she asked.

“No, Lala, but it is almost Sashenka. This is Roza Getman, Sashenka’s daughter, whom you knew as Snowy.”

“Ohh,” Lala sighed and held out her hands. “Come closer. I’m very old. Come sit on my bed. Let me look at you. Let me see into your eyes.”

“Hello, Lala,” said Roza, her voice trembling, “it’s been more than fifty years since you cared for us.”

Katinka watched as Roza, dressed neatly in a white blouse, blue cardigan and cream skirt, her grey hair still coiffed in the style of her youth, walked forward slowly, looking around her at the trinkets of a vanished life. She seemed to hesitate for a moment at the sight of the old nanny’s outstretched hands and then, smiling, as if Lala were somehow familiar to her, she sat on the bed.

Lala took Roza’s hands, not only squeezing them with all her might but shaking them too. Neither woman said a word, but from where she was standing Katinka could see Roza’s shoulders shaking, and the tears streaming down Lala’s cheeks. Feeling like an intruder suddenly, she walked to the window and looked out. The sounds and smells of Tbilisi—the singing of someone in the street and the aromas of tkemali, lavashi bread, ground coffee and apple blossom—rose around her.

This is the last scene of the drama, Katinka told herself. She’d done what Pasha asked. She’d brought these two women together, exposing herself in the process to more pain than she’d thought possible. Now she would go home, back to Papa and Mama—and to Andrei.

Lala stroked Roza’s face. “Dear child, I dreamed of seeing your mother again. I must tell you all about her because there was no one like her. Look, there’s her picture as a schoolgirl at the Smolny. See? I used to collect her in the baron’s landaulet, or motorcar I should say nowadays. Samuil, the baron, was your grandfather and you never met him though he knew all about you. And not a day passed when I didn’t think of you and your brother Carlo. As a girl you were so like your mother—she was blond as an angel when she was young—and you have the violet eyes of your grandmother, Ariadna. Oh darling child, think of me, a girl from England. I’ve lived long enough to see the Tsar fall and the barbarians come to power and fall too and now to see you here—I can’t quite believe it.”

“I’m hardly a child,” Roza laughed, “I’m sixty.”

“Methuselah’s young to me!” Lala answered. “Do you remember the days we spent together before…”

Roza nodded. “I think so…Yes, I remember seeing you in a canteen in a station. You had Carlo’s favorite cookies. I remember walking hand in hand with you and then…”