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.
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.”