Satinov took another toke of his cigarette. Katinka could tell he was listening carefully. “Stories, just stories,” he said.
Katinka felt a sharp surge of impatience. She leaned forward on her uncomfortable chair. “Roza and I want to know why you helped her, Marshal. She is convinced that you know who her parents were.”
Satinov frowned and shook his head. “Do you realize, girl, how many so-called historians ring me up to ask impertinent questions? Because I’m old, they expect me to undermine the greatest achievements of the twentieth century—the creation of Socialism, the victory in the Great Patriotic War, my life’s work.” He stood up. “Thank you for visiting me, Katinka. Before you go, I want to present you with my autobiography.”
He handed her a book with his picture on the cover in full uniform. It was entitled In the Service of the Glorious October Revolution, the Great Patriotic War and Building a Socialist Motherland: Recollections, Notes and Speeches by Marshal Hercules Satinov.
Sexy title, thought Katinka, I’ll bet the speeches are a laugh a minute. She realized she was being dismissed and was certain that he was concealing something. “Will you sign it?” she asked a little breathlessly, determined to stand her ground.
“With pleasure.”
She moved toward his chair. She could tell that he liked looking at her, so she leaned closer to him, shaking her hair back as she did so.
Patting her hand playfully, he signed: To a beautiful scientist of truth. Hercules. “It was published in many languages—Polish and Czech,” he said proudly, handing her the book. “Even Mongolian.”
“Thank you, Marshal. You’re the first famous war hero I’ve met and I know you would help me if you could. Is it possible Roza’s family did die during the war? Were they repressed in the Great Terror? If so, their records would be in the KGB archives. Now, families can apply for their case records, but without a name how can we apply for anything? Could you help us apply?”
He smiled at her, looking at her quite boldly. “I’ve always loved women,” he said quietly, “even though I’m an old ruin.”
“You must have danced quite a lot of them into your arms,” Katinka said.
There was a silence.
“Well, I still have a few contacts left,” Satinov said at last, “although most of my friends have gone to Lenin.”
“Where?”
“To the Politburo in the sky. You’re not a Communist, I suppose?”
“No, but my grandparents are true believers.”
“I became a Marxist at sixteen and I’ve never wavered.”
He wasn’t going to tell her anything, Katinka realized, feeling depressed suddenly. In her meeting with the only link to the Getmans’ past, she had already let Roza down. Her face must have dropped because Satinov took her right hand between his own and pressed it. “Katinka, the past in our country is a dark cell. You may never find the old people but concentrate on the young. Trace the young! They deserve your attention. You understand Catherine’s court but you know nothing about me or my work. You must immerse yourself in the age of building Socialism if you wish to find anything. Speak to those researchers who are digging in the archives. Search more deeply, trace the links of the chain. It was an underwater world, but not everything was submerged. There were friendships even then, in the hardest times, and if you find a name, the thread to the past, then come back and talk to me.”
Katinka sensed that he did not really want her to give up, so she plucked up her courage for one final push. “Marshal, may I ask you one embarrassing question that might save me a lot of work—and then I could go back to Catherine the Second.”
“You’ll have to work harder to make progress in your project,” Satinov said briskly, showing her toward the door, “or you’ll find nothing at all. What was the question?”
Katinka’s heart was thudding so loudly in her ears that she realized she was almost shouting.
“Are you Roza’s real father?”
6
Katinka enjoyed the hushed mysteries that reign in all libraries. Some of her friends thought they were boring, with their musty smell and their rigid silence broken only by the occasional cough, the illicit whispers, and the turning of pages. But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.
As she did not know where to start with her research, she began where everyone begins—in the reading room of the Lenin Library on Vozdvizhenka. She had worked there before and she already had a library card, but this time she noticed that the building’s Stalinist Gothic façade was covered in the bronze silhouettes of Soviet heroes—writers and scientists. As she walked through the stacks of bookshelves, steering around the messy tables with their crews of stretching, yawning students and obsessional, grey-skinned old men, eyes flicked up to watch her surreptitiously. She felt the excitement of discovery again and remembered Roza’s extraordinary eyes, how she had begged Katinka for help. Katinka was on a quest, though she had no idea where she was headed.
She sat at an empty table beneath the high windows and tried to think. Where to start? Usually she only noticed the students in the library but now she stared at the old people, in their brown suits and ties, burrowing, scratching out notes in spidery handwriting on yellowed pads: why were they so hungry for information when their lives were so nearly over? Did any of them have a clue for her? If she had access to all their soon-to-vanish memories of Bolshevik secrets, one of them, surely, would be able to solve her quest. What did they know? What had they seen? As she watched an old man licking his finger as he wrinkled up his eyes and turned the pages, a sentence of Satinov’s came back to her: “It was an underwater world but not everything was submerged.” Everything was secret at that time—except what? Except the newspapers, of course.
She walked, then almost ran to the front desk, where the librarian directed her to the large green books of bound newspapers from the thirties. She knew Satinov had started his rise in 1939 when he joined the Central Committee. Somewhere in those old newspapers, somewhere, she told herself, there might be a clue that linked him to Roza’s family. Those yellowed newspapers were another world, written in an unnatural Bolshevik language that made her smile at its absurdities, at its news of Five Year Plans, of the achievements of collective farms and motor tractor stations and iron smelters in Magnitogorsk; of heroic pilots, proletarian comrades and Stakhanovite miners. As the light outside changed from bright blue to powdery dusk, she sat there, reading Izvestia and Pravda, beginning to understand that Satinov and Roza came from a different planet, recent in time but as foreign to her life as Mars or Jupiter. Twice she found mentions of “Comrade Satinov” giving a speech on Abkhazian tea production, brought back to Moscow by Comrade Stalin, promoted in the Party apparat—but there was not a hint of personal life, of friendships or connections.
Several times she walked around the colossal library just to stay awake and get her blood running; several times she was tempted to stop and read the Western magazines or the satirical Ogonyuk, yet each time she returned to her newspapers and their stories of the past.