Sashenka

Katinka felt a sudden shiver of excitement. Satinov had arranged the whole thing. Of course, it all came back to her. What had he said at their second meeting? Your name is Vinsky? How did you get this job? Yes, Academician Beliakov was right to choose you out of his hundreds of students. She remembered how annoyed she’d been, how she’d felt he was playing with her. But he hadn’t been. He’d been telling her something. How naïve she’d been, she thought. The spark of revelation fluttered, then blazed inside her. The Getmans’ advertisement for a researcher had appeared in the faculty newsletter, but she had been given the job even though she hadn’t even applied. Academician Beliakov had approached her in the library and told her, “The job’s for you. No other applicants necessary.”

“How did you choose me as your researcher?” Katinka asked Roza. “Did you interview other applicants?”

“No,” she said. “We first sent a letter to Marshal Satinov. He was the only name I had. The only link. He refused to help us and said there was no connection to him. He insisted we needed a historian and put us in contact with Academician Beliakov, who placed the advert.”

“What did Beliakov tell you?”

“There were lots of applicants but you were the best—we didn’t need to see anyone else.”

Katinka got up, aware that Roza and Lala were looking at her strangely. Her heart was pounding. Only Satinov knew the names of the adoptive families, she thought. Did this mean that he knew something about her too? If so, when he received Roza’s letter, all he had to do was call his friend Academician Beliakov: “When some millionaires want to hire a student for some family research, give them the Vinsky girl.” She had been searching for Carlo in the archives, when all the time he’d been much, much closer.

“I have to go,” she told Roza, already at the door and running down the steps. “I have to talk to my father.”

25

“We longed for a child of our own,” Baba told the family as they sat in the shabby living room of their blue-shuttered cottage.

Katinka looked around the familiar room in the house where she had grown up. Every face was anguished and it was her doing. Her sturdy grandmother, Baba, in her floral housecoat and with a red kerchief on her head, sat in the middle on the frayed, sunken chair, her wide face a picture of anxiety. Katinka had never seen her so distraught. Her peppery, splenetic grandfather, Bedbug, paced the room, spitting curses at her. But it was her beloved father who caused her the greatest pain.

Dr. Vinsky had driven straight from his office, still in his white coat, to meet her at the airport. When he saw his precious daughter, he had hugged and kissed her.

“I’m so pleased you’re home,” he said. “The light of my life. Is everything all right? Are you OK, darling?”

She looked into his thoughtful and serious face, so matinee-idol handsome with that dimple in his chin, and realized that she was a time bomb about to shatter his family. “What is it?” he said.

Then and there, she told him the whole story.

He said nothing for a while then lit up a cigarette. Katinka waited nervously but he did not argue with her. He just went on smoking and pondering.

“Papochka, tell me, should I have kept silent? Shall we forget it?”

“No,” he said. “If it’s true, I want to find my sister, if I have one. I want to know who my real parents were. But beyond that, I think it will change little for me. I know who I am. My parents have loved me all my life and they’ll always be my parents and I’ll always be the boy they loved. But it could break their hearts—and that would break mine in turn. Let me talk to them…”

The rest of the drive home was silent. As they drove into the village of Beznadezhnaya, Katinka should have been full of the joy of homecoming. But now the village itself seemed different; the cottage had changed; it was as if everything had been shaken up and put together differently in a thousand little ways.

Without Katinka’s mother, the family might have broken apart on her father’s anguished silence and the obstinate secrecy of the grandparents. But as soon as Katinka explained everything to her, Tatiana—often so vague and featherbrained—set to work calming her husband and reassuring Bedbug and Baba.

At first, her grandparents claimed to know nothing. They said it was all a mistake and Katinka wondered if she had imagined everything. Perhaps she had become overinvolved in Sashenka’s story? Perhaps she was so obsessed she was losing her mind?

“This is a dagger through my heart,” Baba had told her son. “A lie, a libel!” She sat down defiantly. “What a thing to say!”