Simon Montefiore: Sashenka

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 bosom-squeezing suits and sporting giant nut-red hairdos passed by with their men, sausagey apparatchiks with oiled comb-overs 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 razor-cut 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.

“Oh, Katinka,” said Mariko, “I’m pleased you came. Would you like some chai or a glass of wine?” Mariko looked weary in her black suit but Katinka was sure she had grown younger and prettier in the last few days. “Tomorrow he’s going to lie in state in the Red Army Hall,” she said proudly.

“Thanks to your father, I found Sashenka’s children,” explained Katinka, “and—you’ll never guess—thanks to him, I learned that Sashenka was my grandmother. Imagine that!”

Mariko brought Roza into the kitchen. Mariko’s relatives left them alone and she poured chai and offered them food.

“Do you know,” said Roza as she sipped her tea, “I remember sliding on the floor of this apartment.”

“Your apartment was in this building too, wasn’t it?” asked Katinka.

“Not just in this building,” said Roza sharply. “This was our home, this very apartment, and I remember when the men in shiny boots came here: a pile of photographs, papers in a heap on the floor over there, and us being hugged by a pretty woman in tears.”

Katinka glanced at Mariko, who said nothing for a moment: she and Roza were close in age but they had led very different, almost mirrored lives.

“I was born in 1939,” said Mariko, taking a sip of red wine. “I think we were granted this apartment at that time too. It was impossible to refuse a gift from the Party—it was a test of loyalty…”—she swallowed hard and looked away—“but I never dreamed it came to us like that. I don’t know what to say.”

Roza reached out and put her hand on Mariko’s. “It is so wonderful to meet you. If things hadn’t happened the way they did, we might have grown up together.”

“I wish we had. It must be so hard for you to come here…It’s hard to learn some things, and it was hard for my father.”