“How old do you think I am?”
“I know how old you are,” she replied, deciding to pretend to be more confident that she felt. “The same age as the century.”
“Pravilno! Right!” The marshal laughed. “Not bad then for ninety-four, eh?” Katinka noticed that his Georgian accent was still strong despite many decades in Moscow. “Do you know I can still dance? Mariko!” The middle-aged woman appeared in the doorway with a tray of tea. “This is my daughter, Mariko; she looks after me.” Katinka thought that the old marshal had much more life in him than his daughter. “Put on the lezginka, dear!”
Mariko put the tray on the table by the window and then changed the CD in the corner.
“Don’t overdo it, Father,” she said. “Your breathing is already bad. No smoking! And don’t scald yourself, the tea is hot.” She glanced at Katinka, then stomped out of the room.
As the wild strings and pipes of the lezginka rang out, Marshal Satinov stood up, bowed and then adopted the lithe pose, hands on hips, one foot sideways, the other on the tips of the toes, of the Caucasian dancer. Katinka acknowledged, as he presumably hoped she would, that he was still trim and elegant. He danced a few steps, then sat down again, smiling at her. “Now…Katinka…Vinsky…have I got your name right? You’re a historian?”
“I’m writing a doctorate on Catherine the Second’s legal program for Academician Beliakov.”
“You’re a beautiful scholar, eh? A flower of the provinces!” Katinka blushed, pleased that she had dressed up in her good skirt, an example of fine Soviet fashion with pyramidal spangles and a high slit. “Well, I’m a piece of Soviet history myself. I should be in a museum. Ask whatever you want while I catch my breath.”
“I’m working on a specific project,” she began. “Does the name Getman mean anything to you?”
The blue eyes focused on her again suddenly, expression neutral.
“The rich banker…how do they say nowadays? An oligarch.”
“Yes, Pasha Getman. He’s employed me to research his family.”
“Family genealogy for the new rich? I’m sure the Princes Dolgoruky or Yusupov did the same thing in Tsarist times. Getman isn’t an unusual name; Jewish naturally. From Odessa, I’d guess, but originally Austrian Galicia, Lvov probably, intelligentsia…”
“You’re right. They’re from Odessa, but do you know the Getman family personally?”
There was a sharp, wintery silence. “My memory’s no longer what it was…but no, I don’t think so,” Satinov said at last.
Katinka made a note in her book. “Pasha Getman’s mother inspired this project of family history.”
“Using his money.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, with money, you might find out something. But the name means nothing to me. Who is she trying to find?”
“Herself,” said Katinka, watching him carefully. “Her maiden name was Liberhart. Does that name ring any bells, Marshal?”
A shadow crossed Satinov’s face. “I just can’t place it…I’ve met so many people in my life, you understand, but the names…” He sighed and shifted in his chair. “Tell me some more.”
Katinka took a deep breath. “Pasha Getman’s mother is called Roza. All she knows about her origins is this: a professor of musicology at the Odessa Conservatoire and his wife, also a teacher, adopted her in the late thirties. Their name was Liberhart, Enoch and Perla Liberhart. They had been unable to have children of their own so they adopted this five-year-old child. She was fair-haired so they called her the Silberkind—the silver child.”
“What about before?” asked Satinov.
“Roza remembers fragments of a life before the adoption,” Katinka said, thinking of their recent conversations in the bracing air of a London spring. “The laughter of a beautiful woman in a cream suit and a blouse with a pretty white collar, handsome men in Stalinka tunics, games with other children, journeys and train stations, and then the adoption…”
“A common story in those days,” interrupted Satinov. “Children were often lost and resettled. In the building of a new world, there were many mistakes and tragedies. But is it possible she’s imagined this story? That happens a lot too, especially now that the newspapers are digging up all this misery again and printing such lies.” The blue eyes teased her obliquely, cynically.
“Well, it’s my job to believe her but, yes…I do believe her. The Liberharts discouraged her from probing into her past because they came to love her as their own. They didn’t want to lose Roza—and they were afraid to attract attention. The adoption was arranged under the aegis of a very high official and everything in those days was secret.”
“But after Stalin’s death, surely…”
“Yes,” said Katinka, “after Stalin’s death, Roza insisted that the Liberharts make an official inquiry. They told Roza that both her parents died during the Great Patriotic War, which fits because her adoption was around that time.”
Satinov opened his hands. “And she accepts this?”
“She accepted it for decades. She loved her adoptive parents. Enoch died in 1979 but Perla lived until recently. Before she died, Communism fell. Only then did Perla admit to Roza that she had lied to her. The Liberharts had not made an official inquiry because they never knew the name of her real parents.”
“Tell me, Katinka, were these Liberharts…good people, kind parents?” Satinov asked, leaning toward her.
Katinka sensed the sudden swirl of deeper, more treacherous waters. She thought nostalgically of her studies: of Catherine the Great at the State Archive, of nobler, more golden times. But she was a historian and what historian wouldn’t be fascinated to meet a relic like Satinov, a real breath of the recent past, a past that was itself shrouded in mystery?
“Roza says they were unworldly intellectuals unsuited to having children. Professor Liberhart couldn’t boil an egg or drive a car, and Roza said he once went to work with his shoes on the wrong feet. Perla was an overweight bluestocking who couldn’t cook, darn or make a bed and never even used makeup or had a hairdo (though she could have done with both!). She devoted her life to translating Shakespeare’s sonnets into Russian. So Roza grew up like a mini-adult caring for eccentric parents. She remembers the terrible things that happened in that war. There was the siege of Odessa; the slaughter of the Odessan Jews by the Nazis and Romanians; the Holocaust. But through everything, Enoch and Perla loved her with the love of parents who have been blessed with a child they never expected.”
Satinov stirred some plum jam into his tea and licked the spoon. Then, checking no one was at the door, he pulled out a pack of Lux cigarettes and lit one with a silver lighter, holding it over the top like a young man. “I’m not allowed to smoke, but the Devil, get thee behind…” He inhaled deeply, eyes closed. “So why have you come to see me?”
“When Roza needed an operation in her teens and her parents were worried about her health, they called someone in Moscow who arranged everything.”
“Perhaps it was an uncle?”
“Once there was a big Party conference in Odessa. Roza thinks it was in the fifties. Many bosses came to town. One afternoon, she saw a black ZiL limousine outside her school with a man in uniform inside, a big boss. She had the feeling, no, more than a feeling, she was certain that he was waiting for her. All week, he was there watching her every morning. I don’t know who that man was, Marshal Satinov.” Katinka looked directly at Satinov, who shifted slightly in his chair. “Roza forgave the Liberharts for their lie but she begged her mother for a name. Before she died, Perla told Roza that the Muscovite they called was you. You helped her get this treatment. Maybe you were the man in the limousine?”