Katinka thought of Roza again, and sighed. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but remember, I’m a serious historian – not some girl to be chatted up.’
He laughed and called for two more bottles of Ochakov beer. They raised them.
‘To our unlikely partnership.’ They drank and clinked their bottles. ‘Now,’ Maxy said, ‘tell me about your meeting with Comrade Satinov. I want everything. No detail is too small. Everything matters, even what socks he was wearing.’
Maxy questioned her carefully, listened earnestly and raised further queries. Even though they were in a smoky, somewhat squalid bar, such was the intensity of their conversation that they might have been sitting in the hushed sanctuary of the archives themselves.
‘Without a doubt, he knows something about the family you’re looking for. And it’s something important,’ said Maxy.
‘I can’t understand why he doesn’t just tell me,’ she said. ‘Then I could go back to my studies.’
‘No, that’s not the style of these people,’ explained Maxy. ‘You shouldn’t think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervour was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail. People died of gossip at Stalin’s court. For a man like Satinov, secrecy was everything.’
‘But Stalin died forty years ago and Communism’s been gone for three years,’ Katinka objected. ‘What’s stopping Satinov telling us his secrets now?’
‘You have to understand that silence and secrecy were deeply ingrained in people like Satinov. When Stalin was alive, his apparatchiks were silent partly because they believed in what they were doing, partly because they were born conspirators – conspiracy was their natural habitat – and partly out of fear. And it was the sort of fear that doesn’t pass: it lives in the bones for ever. After Stalin died, they were silent because they wished to protect the Idea, the Soviet Union, the holy grail. For someone like Satinov, secrecy wasn’t just a habit, it was the essence of the revolutionary code.’
They were both silent as they thought about this.
‘So did you find anything to take back to him?’ Maxy asked at last.
Katinka shrugged and blew out the smoke of her cigarette. ‘I hoped you might have some idea. I waded through years of newspapers and I found no personal link – except this.’ She handed him a photocopy of the article and picture she had found in the Lenin Library. ‘I don’t think it’ll help us much …’
Maxy took it and studied it carefully, and whistled. ‘Vanya Palitsyn. I know exactly who he was. A veteran secret policeman of the old school who vanished soon after this photograph was taken. He was important in the thirties but he appears in no memoirs, no histories. His arrest was never announced and we don’t know what happened to him.’
‘But how does this help us?’
‘Well, I never knew that Satinov and Palitsyn were friends – and they had to be very close friends, well known for their friendship, for Stalin to refer to such a thing in his “informal comments”. It may be a dead end, but you’ve found a possible link to Satinov’s past. Isn’t this what he told you to do?’
The thrill of historical revelation, of past humanity refound and resuscitated, enflamed Katinka. The reverberating music, the chattering of the other denizens of the club, everything else seemed distant and irrelevant. All she could think about was Roza, and Roza’s elusive family. ‘But will this be enough to make him talk to me?’ she asked.
‘I think you should do some more research first, just to make sure,’ said Maxy slowly. ‘You have the name Palitsyn. Apply for his file in the KGB archives – I’ll make the applications for you – and find out what happened to him, if he had a family, children. That’s the easy bit. Then you can go back to Satinov. You’ve worked in archives?’
‘I love archives,’ she said, hugging herself.
‘Why?’
‘You can smell the life in the paper. I’ve sat in the State Archives and held the love letters of Catherine and Potemkin, the most passionate notes, fragrant with her scent and soaked in his tears as he lay dying on the steppes.’
Maxy nodded. ‘Well, these are different archives. Where there is such suffering, there’s a kind of holiness. The Nazis knew they were doing wrong, so they hid everything; the Bolsheviks were convinced they were doing right, so they kept everything. Like it or not, you’re a Russian historian, a searcher for lost souls, and in Russia the truth is always written not in ink, like in other places, but in innocent blood. These archives are as sacred as Golgotha. In the dry rustle of the files you can hear the crying of children, the shunting of trains, the echo of footsteps down to the cellars, the single shot of the Nagan pistol delivering the seven grammes. The very paper smells of blood.’
8
Two days later, Katinka came out of the decaying Stalinist hulk of the Moskva Hotel, where she was staying, and climbed the hill past the Kremlin, the Bolshoi and the Metropole Hotel, up to Lubianka Square. The crowds of office workers poured out of the Metro past the kiosks with their collage of lurid magazines; traffic raced around the middle of the square where the empty plinth of Dzerzhinsky’s statue marked the fall of Communism. There before her was the KGB headquarters, an invincible stronghold of red and grey granite, containing offices, archives, tunnels and dungeons. Once the offices of the Russia Insurance Company, this had been the home of the fearless, merciless and incorruptible knights of the Communist Party since 1917. They’d operated under many names – the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB – and now there were other dread letters but their power was gone: Katinka was sure the KGB would never dominate Russia again.
She had not wanted to come here. No Russian ever wanted to visit the Lubianka – it was the national charnel house. But she had only to recall her phone call to Roza to walk faster towards this brutal slab that still radiated power, the power to crush human happiness. Over the telephone line from London, Roza hadn’t commented on what Katinka had found but she’d urged her on … Yet if Katinka’s father had known that her research would bring her here to the Lubianka, he would never have let her take the job.
‘Leave well alone! Don’t snoop around cemeteries. It’s too dangerous,’ he would have said. ‘You know how much I love you? More than anyone else in the entire existence of mankind since the beginning of time! That’s how much!’ It was wonderful to have a father – and mother – who so loved you. Katinka thought, again, of Roza, and what it must be like not to know who your parents were.
She elbowed open the double wooden doors of the Lubianka and entered a vaulted marble foyer. Two corporals in blue examined her passport, called upstairs and sent her up a flight of marble steps so wide that a tank could have driven up it. A bust of Andropov, the bespectacled KGB boss and Soviet leader, stood halfway up.
She found herself on a long corridor with a red carpet, old banners and portraits of past Chekists. Maxy had told her that within this fortress stood the yellow Internal Prison where the parents of her employer might have perished, although they might also have received the seven grammes at the Butyrki or the Lefortovo prisons or Beria’s special torture centre, the Sukhanovka, a beautiful former monastery on the outskirts. Maxy had explained that now was a good time to apply to see files. He had called her the previous evening. ‘The Lubianka phoned me. Your file’s ready.’
‘But are you sure I should be looking at Palitsyn? Marshal Satinov advised me to forget about the adults and start with the children.’
Maxy laughed. ‘Remember what I told you about Satinov and these veteran Bolsheviks? Lies were their duty to the Revolution. That just confirms you must start with the adults and then we’ll think about the children.’
‘I’m beginning to get the hang of this,’ she said.
> ‘Wait until you see the archives. Remember, Katinka, no one ever found a jewel in full view.’
She followed her instructions, turned right and then left, and saw the door that read Colonel Lentin, Director, Department of Registration and Archives. She knocked, a voice replied and she entered a boxy office with the flounced white blinds pulled down. The air was densely fuggy, the glass fogged up, the divan ruffled, so she knew that the colonel had been sleeping in his office. But where was he?
‘Good morning,’ said the voice and she turned round. A fleshy silky-haired man in civilian clothes was just buttoning up his shirt and tightening his tie in a mirror behind the door. ‘Excuse me! I’m just beautifying myself for visitors. Have a seat!’
She sat at the T-shaped conference table and placed her exercise book in front of her. Her instinct in this place was to obey every command but at that moment her curiosity was more powerful than her fear. What had happened to Satinov’s friend Palitsyn all those years ago, maybe in this very building? She realized that she was beginning to catch Maxy’s enthusiasm, the thrill of the chase.
‘Now.’ Colonel Lentin sat behind his desk and, wetting a finger with an orange tongue, opened a file on the desk. He spoke beautiful, educated Russian. ‘You’re a historian studying eighteenth-century law under Academician Beliakov and then, fa-la-la, you suddenly apply to see files from the time of the Cult of Personality.’ Fa-la-la? Colonel Lentin must be a fan of those crass Mexican soap operas that now pollute Russian television, thought Katinka. His skin looked as if it had never known a razor; he had oily eyelashes that were encrusted with flakes of sleep. But the small face, prominent jaw and flat nose reminded her of an animal. Yes, Lentin was a preeningly officious marmoset. ‘I didn’t know Catherine the Great reformed the laws of the 1930s – or have I missed something?’
‘I have never been interested in the Cult of Personality. I’m just doing this as a little project of family research,’ Katinka said casually. ‘To make a bit of money to pay for my Catherine studies.’
‘I see,’ said the Marmoset. ‘Well, your friend Max Shubin and his sort are doing some research too, but it seems to me that you should keep your little project separate from theirs. We have no problem with yours but those liberals are American catspaws who rejoice in Russia’s humiliation today. They are hammering away at the foundations of the State, hoping, fa-la-la, that we will just disappear. But without us, Miss Katinka, Russia would be lost to corrupt speculators and American hegemony – lost, quite lost. And we Chekists take our vows seriously. We’ll always be here.’
Katinka sighed. This KGB claptrap was out of date in the new Russia she and Maxy lived in. ‘I understand what you’re saying, Colonel,’ she said. Just then, the door opened and an old man in a white coat entered with a metal trolley piled high with speckled brown paper files, corners hooked with elastic, each with different file numbers and stickers on the front.
‘Here we are, Colonel.’ The old man spat thickly into a brass spittoon that rested on his trolley. Beside the spittoon a fat ginger cat was sleeping deeply. ‘More gold in dust!’
‘Good morning to you, Comrade … Mr Archivist,’ said Katinka, standing up and bowing slightly. She recognized a real archive rat, a Quasimodo of the secret stacks. Every archive had such a man, a true descendant of the troglodytic species that thrived in the twilight tunnels and storerooms deep under the pavements of Moscow. But they had power too, and Katinka knew that historians had to give them respect and win their favour.
‘Two files from the archives, Comrade Col-o-nel! Good day!’ He handed them to the Marmoset, then wheeled his trolley towards the door. A very skinny kitten peeped out from under the cat.
‘May I ask your name, Comrade Archivist?’ Katinka asked quickly.
‘Kuzma,’ said the spectre. He spat again, and Katinka saw that the spittoon was engraved with the KGB crest. Was it a gift for long service?
‘I so appreciate your help, Comrade Kuzma,’ said Katinka. ‘You must know so much that you could write the histories yourself. What’s her name?’ she gestured towards the cat.
‘Utesov,’ Kuzma told her.
‘You’re a fan of Odessan jazz?’
Kuzma nodded.
‘So what’s the name of the kitten? Tseferman?’
Kuzma did not look her in the eye or smile but just stood there for a moment stroking the cats, humming in a satisfied manner like a father whose children have been complimented. Katinka had guessed right.
‘Little Tseferman, eh? My father loves that music so I was brought up with it. Maybe I’ll bring Utesov and Tseferman some milk when I next visit?’
Kuzma responded with a specially dense gobbet of spit that did two somersaults before landing in the brimming spittoon. Katinka managed to look as though she appreciated this graceful demonstration.
‘Thank you, Comrade Kuzma – and goodbye, Utesov and Tseferman.’
The archivist shut the door.
‘Here are your files. Some dust for you to breathe,’ said the Marmoset. ‘Let’s see,’ and he read out:
Investigation File May/June 1939
Case 16373 Main Administration of State Security
Ivan Nikolaievich Palitsyn …
He lifted up the file and dropped it on the table in front of her, making her jump: dust flew out of it, tiny particles and silvery satellites vibrating and shimmering in the light.
Katinka hesitated, letting her eyes run over its brown, speckled cover, its KGB-crested stamp, its array of printed and hand-written scrawls listing the number of its fond, opis and papka – the location code of the archives.
‘Can I take notes?’
‘Yes, but we reserve the right to check them. In 1991, we let too many files be copied by alien influences. Procedures got sloppy. What do you hope to find out?’
‘Whether this Palitsyn is connected to my clients …’
‘You might find out some answers but it’s not your right to know everything, even now.’
‘Did he have a wife and children, do you know?’
The Marmoset nodded and placed another slim papka file on top of the other. ‘Palitsyn’s wife has her own file, right here. Do you want to see it?’
Katinka picked it up and read:
Investigation File May/June 1939
Case 16374
Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin-Palitsyn, Prisoner 778
‘Samuilovna Zeitlin. Not a Russian name. There were a lot of them in the Party in those days and many turned out to be traitors,’ said the Marmoset, leaning over her shoulder. He opened the file. There was a photograph clipped to the few papers inside.
‘There, that’s the photograph they take on the day of arrest.’
Katinka looked at it, her heart beating. It showed a woman with a full mouth slightly open and ash-grey eyes that burned into the lens.
‘She’s beautiful, whoever she was.’ Katinka was fascinated suddenly, and a little touched.
‘Yes, she was quite well known once, that Delilah. Then, fa-la-la, she vanished!’
‘May I examine the file now?’ Katinka could not wait to free herself of the Marmoset’s gaze.
‘You have thirty minutes.’ He pushed the file over to her then returned to his seat and sat watching.
‘For this one file?’
‘For both. These are the rules.’
‘Do feel free to do your other work, Colonel,’ Katinka said self-consciously.
‘Watching you,’ he replied, ‘is my work.’
9
Katinka placed the photograph above the file, which she pulled closer, and looked into the woman’s face: the eyes reflected the flashbulb of an old-fashioned camera but, far from a vacant self-pity, the gaze radiated warmth and a mocking jauntiness, even as Katinka traced in the set of the muscles a straining to show, at the brink of the abyss, the best face she could.
‘Hello,’ whispered Katinka, imagining that the photograph might answer, that those beseeching eyes might blink. ‘Who are you?
’ Stapled to the inside cover of the file was a scuffed, stained scrap of paper to be signed by everyone who had looked at the file – but it was blank. No one outside the KGB had ever examined it. She grabbed at the first sheet of paper, a short biography:
Born 1900 in St Petersburg, Alexandra Samuilovna Zeitlin-Palitsyn, known as Sashenka, Comrade Snowfox. Nationality: Jewish. Party member since 1916. Last place of work: editor, Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine, State Publishing House. Educated at Smolny Institute …
‘Sash-en-ka …’ Katinka said to herself. ‘Will you help Roza and me?’
Family: father, Baron Samuil Zeitlin, capitalist banker, later non-Party specialist at People’s Commissariats of Finance, then Foreign Trade, then State Bank, dismissed 1928, exiled 1929, arrested 1937, sentenced to ten years Kolyma. Mother: Ariadna Zeitlin, née Barmakid, dead 1917.
Mother’s brother: Mendel Barmakid, Jewish, Party member since 1904, member Central Committee 1911–1939, arrested 1939.
Father’s brother: Gideon Zeitlin, writer. Not a Party member. Jewish.
Husband: Ivan Palitsyn, born St Petersburg 1895. Russian, Party member since 1911, married 1922, arrested 1939, last place of work: Assistant Deputy People’s Commissar, NKVD.
Children: Volya and Karlmarx.
‘Pleased to meet you all,’ said Katinka under her breath. Sashenka and her husband would be very old now but they could still be alive – there was nothing in the file to say they weren’t. And their children wouldn’t even be old. She didn’t know if this woman was relevant to her search yet her pulse quickened. ‘I wonder what happened to you.’
‘You’re talking to yourself,’ said the Marmoset. ‘Silence, please.’
‘Sorry.’ Katinka turned over the page to find a form, filled in on 16 May 1939, giving Sashenka’s description. Colour of eyes: grey. Hair: dark brown with chestnut streaks. And there were her smudged fingerprints. Then a creased and stained piece of paper, headed Main Administration of State Security, Very Important Cases Department. In the middle, typed in a large, curvaceous, open typeface that looked bold and honest as if it had nothing to hide, was the following command: Zeitlin-Palitsyn, along with her husband Palitsyn, has been unmasked as a long-serving Okhrana and White Guardist spy, Trotskyite saboteur, and agent of Japan. It is essential to arrest her and carry out a search.
Sashenka Page 43