Simon Montefiore: Sashenka

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

“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!”

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 cha-cha 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 cha-cha 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 collective-farm 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 three-year-old 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 snow-peaked 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.