Simon Montefiore: Sashenka

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Katinka, still reeling from what she had learned with Maxy, her mind stalked by visions of Sashenka’s death. She suddenly longed to share what she knew, to tell Roza everything, to work out exactly how death had come to Sashenka, how it had happened, and how she had looked—what Satinov had seen. “I’ve got something else to show you,” she said, drawing out a wad of photocopied papers from her backpack.

“Wait,” answered Roza. “Before I look at that, I want to ask you—I know my father was shot but you said there was something unusual…How did my mother die?”

“I was just about to come to that,” said Katinka but something made her keep the papers close to her.

She took a breath, eager to go on, but as she did so she saw Sashenka in the snow, her skin white in the electric glare of the searchlights…and Satinov, horrified, standing before Sashenka just minutes later. If he had really broken, if he hadn’t supervised the other 122 executions with Stalinist toughness immediately afterward, then he too would have been tortured until he revealed how he had rescued Sashenka’s children…

Katinka sensed Roza’s gentle but penetrating gaze on her, and she shook herself—there were some secrets she should keep.

She looked into Roza’s intelligent, violet eyes and saw that she was tensed, ready to absorb this blow too. Instead she took her hands. “Like the others. She died just like the others.”

Roza held her stare and then smiled. “I thought so. That’s good to know. But what were you going to show me?”

Katinka deftly put the investigation into Sashenka’s death at the back of her papers so that another document was on top. “I’ve got a few things I was given by Kuzma the archive rat, including this, your mother’s confession. I hadn’t read it in full because she gave them two hundred pages of crazy confessions of secret meetings with enemy agents and her plot to kill Stalin by spraying cyanide onto the gramophone at the dacha—all to give Satinov time to settle you and Carlo with your families. But there’s one bit that sounds strange. May I read it to you?”

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: In 1933, as a reward from the Party for our work, Vanya and I were allowed to seek treatment for my neurasthenia in London. We visited a well-known clinic in Harley Street called the Cushion House, where, under cover of medical treatment, we met agents of the British secret service and Trotsky himself, who asked us to arrange the assassination of Comrade Stalin.

Interrogator Mogilchuk: At the Cushion House?

Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn: Yes.

“This ‘Cushion House’ is an odd name, even in English,” explained Katinka. “I checked it. There’s never been a Cushion House anywhere in London, ever. Does it ring a bell?”

Roza started to laugh. “Come with me.” She took Katinka’s hand and led her upstairs to her tidy bedroom. “Do you see?” she asked.

“What?” asked Katinka.

“Look!” She pointed at her bed. “Here!” Roza picked up a ragged old cushion, the material so threadbare and motheaten it was almost transparent, so bleached by time it was nearly white. “This was Cushion, moya Podoushka , the companion of my childhood and the only thing I could take with me to my new existence.”

She hugged it like a baby.

“You see how she remembered me?” said Roza. “My mother was telling me that she loved me, wasn’t she? She was sending me a message. So that if I ever found out who I really was, I’d know that she always loved me.”

The air in the room was suddenly taut and Roza turned her back on Katinka and looked out of the window.

“Is there anything else in there that seems strange?” she asked, hopefully, and Katinka understood that she wanted something to offer her brother.

“Yes, now I see what she was doing, there is something. You said my father loved rabbits. Well, in the confession, Sashenka says she and Vanya hid some of the cyanide in the rabbit hutch—of all places—at the dacha. So I think she left something for him too…”

“I’d like to tell him that myself,” said Roza, “but I don’t want to do anything to upset him. I thought I might wait a bit and then call him and perhaps go down to see him. What do you think?”

“Of course, but don’t leave it too long,” smiled Katinka, “will you?”

It had been an extraordinary day, Katinka thought as she came downstairs. But it was not quite over yet.

As she crossed the spacious hall toward the kitchen, she heard a convoy of cars sweeping into the drive. Pasha was back. There was the sound of doors slamming then Pasha’s loud voice, his clumsy, shambling footsteps and an unfamiliar but husky chattering that stopped abruptly.

“Oh my God, it’s her!” the voice said.

Katinka turned, and found herself face to face with a slim old man with a long, sensitive face and a battered blue worker’s cap. He was obviously in his eighties at least but there was a jerky energy about him, and he was still dapper in a crumpled brown suit that was too baggy for his slight figure. She liked him immediately.

“Is it you, Sashenka?” said the man, looking at her intensely. “Is it you? God, am I dreaming? You’re so very like her—down to her grey eyes, her mouth, even the way she stands. Is this a trick?”

“No, it’s not,” said Pasha, standing right behind him. “Katinka, you weren’t the only one doing some research. I found someone too.”

Katinka let her backpack drop onto the floor and stepped back. “Who are you?” she asked shakily. “Who the hell are you?”

The old man wiped his face with a big linen handkerchief. “Who’s asking the questions here? Me or this slip of a girl?” Katinka noticed his eyes were a dazzling blue. “My name’s Benya Golden. Who are you?” He took her hand and kissed it. “Tell me, for God’s sake.”

“Benya Golden?” exclaimed Katinka. “But I thought you were…”

“Well…,” Benya shrugged, “so did everyone else. Can I sit down? I’d like a cognac, please?” He looked round at the exquisitely restored mansion, the Old Master paintings, the fat sofas. “This place looks as if your bar will have everything. Get me a Courvoisier before I drop. It’s been a long journey. Look—my hands are trembling.”

They moved into the sitting room, where Pasha lit a cigar and poured them all brandies.

“So you’ve heard of me?” Benya said after a while.

“Of course, I’ve even read your Spanish Stories ,” answered Katinka.

“I didn’t know I had such young fans. I didn’t know I had any fans.” He was silent. “You know, you really are the image of a woman called Sashenka whom I loved with all my heart a long time ago. Hasn’t anyone told you that?”

Katinka shook her head but she remembered Sashenka’s face in that prison photograph and how she’d felt. “She was my grandmother,” she said. “I’ve been finding out what happened to her.”

“Have you been in those vile archives?”

“Oh yes.”

“And have you found how they tortured us and broke us?”

Katinka nodded. “Everything.”

“And so can you tell me why it all happened, to us I mean, to me and Sashenka?”

“There was no why,” Katinka said slowly. “Just a chain of events. I’ve discovered so much…But tell me, how did you survive?”

“Uh, there’s not much to tell. Stalin’s thugs beat me and I told them everything they wanted. But at the trial, I said I’d been lying because I’d been tortured. I knew they’d shoot me and I couldn’t face the bullet knowing I’d betrayed Sashenka. But they gave me ten years in Kolyma instead. I was released in the war—and I had quite a war—but then I was rearrested afterward, and released again in the fifties. I was a husk of a man, but I met a woman in the camps, a nurse, an angel, and she put me back together again. She got me a job as editor of a journal in Birobizhan, the Jewish region, near the Chinese border, and that’s the godforsaken place where we’ve been living ever since.”