Sashenka (66 page)

“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 blueshuttered 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 matineeidol 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!”

Bedbug was raging. “Haven’t we loved you all your life? Haven’t we been good parents?

And this is how you thank us—by claiming we’re nothing to you!” He turned on Katinka.

“Why toss these lies in our faces? Shame on you, Katinka! Is this some trick, some joke of those rich Jews in Moscow?”

Katinka was racked with pain and doubt. She looked at her father. She had never seen his face so tormented.

Then Katinka’s mother intervened. “Dear parents,” she said, “you’ve been like parents to me and I know Valentin loves you more than you can know.” She turned to her husband.

“Darling, tell them how you feel. Tell them now.”

“Papa, Mama,” he said, kneeling at the feet of the old peasant woman and taking her hands. “You’re my parents. You’ll always be my beloved Mamochka and Papochka. If I was adopted, it’ll change nothing for me. You’ve loved me all my life. I know nothing but your loving kindness. I know who I am, and I will always be the little boy you’ve loved as long as I can remember. If you chose not to tell me before, I understand. In those days, people didn’t talk about such things. But if there is anything you’d like to tell me now, we’ll all listen and love you just the same afterward.”

His speech touched Katinka deeply, and she looked into Baba’s face and saw it soften by degrees. The old peasants exchanged glances, then her grandmother shrugged. “I want to tell the story,” she said to her husband.

“All lies,” said Bedbug but he was quieter now.

Some secrets are denied for so long, thought Katinka, that they no longer seem real.

Then Bedbug waved his gnarled fingers at his wife. “Tell it if you must.” He sat on the sofa and lit a cigarette.

“Go on, Mama,” said Dr. Vinsky, lighting up too. He got up and poured some
chacha
into a tiny glass and gave it to her. “I want to hear your story—whatever it is.”

Baba took a deep breath, downed the
chacha
and, looking round the room, opened her hands. “Me and Bedbug had been married for eight years—and no children. Nothing. It was a curse to be childless. Even though I was a true Communist, I visited the priests for a blessing; I saw the quack in the next village. Still nothing. Bedbug wouldn’t discuss it…

Then one day, I heard in the collectivefarm office that a bigshot official from Moscow was coming on a tour to inspect our new tractor stations. He was talking to everyone informally and he wanted to talk to us. It was Comrade Satinov.”

“Did you already know him?” asked Katinka.

“Yes,” said Baba. “In 1931, the campaign to collectivize the villages and destroy the richer peasants, the kulaks, came to our region. All the kulaks were being deported; many were shot here in the villages; there were grain searches and famine. It was a time of dread. Bedbug was denounced as a kulak. We were on the list to be arrested. All the others on that list were shot. Comrade Satinov was in charge, and I don’t know why but for some reason he intervened and had our names taken off the list. We owed him our lives. Eight years later, in 1939, he again blessed us. He asked us to take in a threeyearold boy. ‘Love him as a treasured gift,’ he said. ‘Take this secret to your grave. Bring him up as if he were your own.’ One day we got the call from the Beria Orphanage and we went into Tbilisi and collected…a little boy with brown eyes and a dimple in his chin. The most beautiful little boy in the world.”

“You were our son, our own,” said Bedbug.

“We loved you from the moment we saw you,” added Baba.

“Did you ever contact Satinov?” asked Katinka.

“Only once.” Bedbug turned to address his son. “You wanted to be a doctor. It was hard to get into the best medical schools and none of my family had ever been past grade school.

So I called Comrade Satinov—and he got you into Leningrad University.”

“When you were little,” continued Baba, “you remembered something. You cried about your mother, and your father, and your nanny, a dacha and a journey. You had a toy rabbit that you loved so much that we raised our own rabbits in the hutch in the garden and you fed them, gave them names, loved them like we loved you. I held you at night and gradually you forgot the past and loved us. And we adored you so much in return, we could never tell you…And that’s God’s truth. If we’ve done wrong, tell us.”

When her father kissed his parents, Katinka could not watch. She stepped outside onto the veranda to admire the budding plenty of spring, the lush honeysuckle, the trilling, diving swallows, the rushing of frothy streams and far away the snowpeaked mountains. But she could see and hear nothing—just her father’s loving face and the howling of her grandmother, who cried in the uninhibited way that peasants have always cried.

26

The body of Hercules Satinov lay in a casket of glazed oak and scarlet satin in the sitting room of the Granovsky apartment. Standing on an easel behind the coffin was a portrait of Satinov that Katinka hadn’t seen before: it depicted him as a dashing commissar in the civil war, in his early twenties. He was on horseback in a leather coat, Mauser pistol in his hand and a rifle slung across his back, leading a line of Red Cossacks in a charge across snowy wastes. Katinka thought that this Red Cavalry commander was probably no older than she was now.

Two days earlier, Mariko had called Katinka at home to say that her father had died the night before and to invite Sashenka’s children to pay their respects.

Roza was already in Moscow so Pasha sent his plane for Katinka and her father. Roza was almost girlish in her excitement: “I’m going to meet Carlo again,” she told Katinka on the phone. “I can’t believe it. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him, I don’t know what to wear. Is your father as excited as I am?”

As she lay in bed that night, Katinka imagined the reunion of brother and sister, how happy it would have made Sashenka and Vanya and how it would play out: who would run into whose arms? Who would cry and who would laugh? Her diffident father would hold back a little while Roza would hug him passionately…She had made it happen; she was responsible for this meeting, and she wanted it to go according to plan.

At that moment when the black of night turns into the blue of dawn, Katinka sat up in bed, pulled on her dressing gown and hurried into the sitting room. She knew she would find her father there on the sofa, smoking in the half light. He put out his hand to take hers. “You haven’t packed,” she said.

“I’m not coming,” he answered. “This is my home. I have all the family I need…”

She sat beside him. “But don’t you want to meet your sister? Satinov so wanted you to meet. We can’t put everything back together, but if you don’t come you’re letting the people who killed your mother and father win.” Her father said nothing for a while. “Please, Papochka!”

He shook his head slowly. “I think they’ve toyed with us enough.”

The plane ride to Moscow seemed desolate to Katinka, who sat forlorn and disappointed amid the resplendent luxury of Pasha’s converted Boeing. She couldn’t help feeling furious with her father for letting her down, yet she also respected his quiet determination.

She kept thinking about the tragedy of her grandparents’ lives and each time she did so she saw it differently: it was the black work of men who believed they had the right to play with the lives of others and they were still toying with hers too.

Roza was waiting on the tarmac at the private airport at Vnukovo. Pasha stood beside her with two bodyguards while behind him, parked in a fan of gleaming steel, stood the customary oligarch’s cavalcade of black Bentley and two Land Cruisers filled with guards, engines purring, ready to convey them into Moscow.

When she saw Katinka’s downcast face, Roza put out her arms to her. “Don’t worry, Katinka. I’m disappointed too, but I think I understand. I left it all much too late.” Then she squeezed Katinka’s hand. “The most important thing is that I’ve found out who I am—

and I’ve found a niece I never knew I had. I’ve got you, darling Katinka.”

They stood there for a moment as if they were alone in the world—until Pasha kissed his mother gently on the top of the head.

“Let’s go home,” he said, walking her to the car. “It’ll take time, Mama.”

As he closed Roza’s door, he whispered to Katinka: “It’s understandable. It’s not your fault. Don’t you see? They’re strangers. Your father didn’t want to find his past. It found him.”

Now Katinka and Roza, her newly discovered aunt, whom she was coming to love, stood arm in arm waiting their turn in the short line that led across the sitting room at Satinov’s home. Even without her brother, Roza had insisted on coming to see the man who had changed her life so decisively, once damningly, once selflessly and now, belatedly, in an attempt at redemption.

The other mourners seemed to belong, Katinka thought, in a bizarre seventies time warp.

She watched as bloated women in bosomsqueezing suits and sporting giant nutred hairdos passed by with their men, sausagey apparatchiks with oiled combovers on bald pates and brown suits with medals. But there were younger army officers too and some children, probably Satinov’s grandchildren. Their parents kept trying to hush their giggles and games at such a solemn ritual.

At the front of the line, Katinka held Roza’s hand as they stepped up onto the slightly raised plinth and looked down into the coffin. She couldn’t help but look at Satinov’s face with fondness, despite the games he had played with her. Death—and the attentions of a meticulous embalmer and hairdresser—had restored to him the graceful virility and serene grandeur of a Soviet hero of the older generation. Four rows of medals glinted on his chest; the starred and gilded shoulder boards of a marshal of the Soviet Union glistened; the grey hair reared up stiffly in razorcut spikes.

“I remember playing with him long ago,” said Roza, looking at him. “And he
was
the man in the car who watched me going to school in Odessa from his limousine.” She leaned into the coffin and kissed Satinov’s forehead, but stepping off the plinth she tottered and Katinka caught her. “I’m fine,” Roza said. “It’s all so much to absorb.”

Katinka helped her to a chair, from where Roza watched the children running up the long corridor and sliding on their knees along the gleaming parquet floor. Katinka went to the kitchen to get Roza a glass of water. Mariko and a couple of relatives, obviously Georgians, perhaps her brothers, were drinking tea and nibbling on Georgian snacks.