Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

Just then we heard the purr of cars driving up to the house, doors slamming. Stalin stood up and went to greet members of the Politburo, who had arrived for dinner.

Beria and I were left alone.

“You motherfucker,” said Beria, jabbing me in the side, “why the fuck did you have to mention that to him?” But then Molotov, Voroshilov and the other leaders joined us in the dining room.

When we were helping ourselves to dinner, Stalin appeared next to me, standing very close.

“That pretty girl Sashenka,” he murmured. “What terrible decisions we have to make.”

“Have you finished, dear?” asked Agrippina. As the Parisian perfume thickened the air, Katinka absorbed Satinov’s revelation. Maxy was right; she was becoming obsessed with these strangers—people who had nothing to do with her, yet whose stories consumed her. She had longed to find out what had happened to them, but the excised pages from Satinov’s memoir had raised even more questions. Saddest of all, she was now sure that Sashenka was dead. She would have to ring Roza and tell her both her parents had been killed by Stalin’s thugs. Sashenka’s husband had been shot crying “Long live Comrade Stalin” and her uncle Mendel had not died of a heart attack but been bludgeoned to death.

But how had Sashenka died? What had been the “irregularity?” Had she been gang-raped by the guards, tortured to death, starved? Only one person could tell her: she had to rush to Satinov. However angry he had been with her last night, she had to see him before he died.

“Thank you,” she managed to say to Agrippina.

“Please give my regards to the comrade marshal and his daughter and thank them for remembering me with this gift.”

“Yes, of course.” Katinka was already on her way to the elevator.

Fighting back tears, she waited a few minutes but it didn’t come, and suddenly she realized she was not alone. The archive rat who had ridden up with her to the fourth floor was standing beside her, leaning on his cart of files and humming. Finally he cleared his throat.

“This elevator’s broken. You must use our elevator.”

Katinka noticed that he said “must”—but she was so upset she did not care. He hummed as they walked round the rectangular building, his yellow shoes squeaking, until they reached a dirtier, rustier elevator with sawdust on its floor. It soon grunted and heaved on its way.

What would she tell Roza? A wave of despair overcame her. Satinov wouldn’t see her again; Mariko would throw her out. And now she would never find Carlo.

At last the elevator jerked to a halt but they weren’t in the foyer; they were underground somewhere. The archive rat held open the door.

“Please,” he said.

“But this is the wrong floor,” she objected.

The archive rat looked up and down an underground passageway.

“I’ve got some documents to show you.”

“I’m sorry,” Katinka said, suddenly scared and vigilant, “I don’t know you. I’ve got to—” She pressed the button for the first floor but the man held the door.

“I’m Apostollon Shcheglov,” he said, as if expecting her to know the name, which meant “goldfinch.”

“I’m late. I must rush,” she insisted, pressing the button again and again.

“Better to sing well as a goldfinch than badly as a nightingale,” he said, quoting the Krylov fable.

Katinka stopped and stared at him.

Shcheglov’s smile was adorned by two gold teeth.

“Do you remember who said that to you?” he asked. “Let me give you a clue: Utesov and Tseferman.”

Of course, it was Kuzma’s weird good-bye.

“We archivists all know one another. We’re a secret order. Come on,” he said, showing her a well-lit corridor of solid concrete. “This is one of the safest places in the world, Katinka, if I may call you that. This is where our nation’s history is protected.”

Still feeling nervous, Katinka allowed herself to be led. They came to a white steel door like the entrance to a submarine or a bomb shelter. Shcheglov turned a large chrome wheel, opened three different locks and then tapped a code into an electronic pad. The door shifted sideways and then slid open: it was about two feet thick. “This can withstand a full nuclear assault. If the Americans attacked us with all their H-bombs, you and I, the President in the Kremlin and the generals at headquarters would be the only people left alive in Moscow.”

Another reinforced door had to be opened like the first. Katinka glanced behind her. She felt horribly vulnerable—suppose Kuzma had been caught giving her the documents and the KGB had forced him to lure her here?

Still humming, Shcheglov entered a small office to one side, always holding a tune at the back of his throat. His desk was tidy, stacked with files, but the expansive table in front of it was covered in a colored relief map, showing valleys, rivers and houses, peopled by tin soldiers, cannons, banners and horses, all exquisitely painted.

“I made and decorated every one of them myself. Would you like me to show you? Are you in a hurry?”

Katinka had never been in such a hurry. Satinov was dying, taking Sashenka’s secret with him, and she had to get to him fast. But suppose this archive rat had the documents she needed? She knew that top secret and closed files were stored down here and he must have asked her to follow him for a reason. She decided to humor him.

“I’d love to see more of your toy soldiers,” she said.

“Not toys. This is a historical re-enactment,” he insisted, “precise in every detail, even down to the ammunition in the cannons and the shakos of the Dragoons. You’re a historian, can you guess the battle?”

Katinka circled the table as Shcheglov bounced on his yellow plastic toes with pleasure.

She noted the Napoleonic Grande Armée on one side and the Russian Guards Regiments on the other. “It’s 1812 of course,” she said slowly. “That must be the Raevsky Redoubt, Barclay de Tolly’s forces here, Prince Bagration here facing French Marshals Murat and Ney. Napoleon himself with the Guard here. It’s the Battle of Borodino!” she said triumphantly.

“Hurrah!” he cried. “Now let me show you where we keep our documents.” He opened a further steel door into a subterranean hall stacked with metal cabinets holding thousands upon thousands of numbered files. “Many of these will still be closed long after we’re dead. This is my life’s work and I wouldn’t show you anything that I felt undermined the security of the Motherland. But your research is just a footnote, albeit a very interesting footnote. Please sit at my desk and I’ll show you your materials.”

“Why are you helping me?” she asked.

“Only as a favor to a respected comrade archivist—and uncle. Yes, Kuzma’s my uncle. We archivists are all related: my father works at the State Archive and my grandfather before him.”

“An imperial dynasty of archivists,” said Katinka.

“Between ourselves, that’s exactly how I see it!” Shcheglov beamed, gold teeth flashing in the electric light. “You’re not to copy anything even into a notebook. Remember, girl, none of this is ever to be published. Agreed?”

Katinka nodded and sat at his desk. He took a shallow pile of beige files off a shelf, opened a file, licked his finger and turned some pages.

“Scene one. A list of one hundred and twenty-three names—each with a number—signed by Stalin and a quorum of the Politburo on nine January 1940.”

Katinka’s heart raced. A deathlist. Shcheglov hummed as he ran his finger down the list.

82. Palitsyn, I. N.

83. Zeitlin-Palitsyn, A. S. (Comrade Snowfox)

84. Barmakid, Mendel