Sashenka

20

An upstart sun in an eggshell-blue sky threw golden beams onto Mayakovsky’s statue. Katinka walked up Tverskaya, first passing the statue of Prince Dolgoruky on one side and then Pushkin on the other, toward the new archive. She had woken up too early and with a crick in her neck when Maxy had phoned, then gone back to sleep. But she still ached as if she had been pummeled and only a bracing double espresso at the Coffee Bean cafe on Tverskaya—good coffee was one of the benefits of democracy, she thought—had restored some of her spirits.

Carrying a bulky package under her arm, she passed Mayakovsky Metro and took a left through one of those red granite archways that help give Moscow its somber and hostile grandeur. She found herself on a tiny road that seemed to be a cul-de-sac, but just when she could go no farther it turned sharply once and then again, becoming narrower. Katinka relished this unlikely, meandering lane in the midst of the unforgiving metropolis, as if she were discovering a jumbled village behind the granite walls and ramparts of those roaring boulevards. After the second twist, she came upon an ocher wall with a white top and then a black steel gate, which was open and led to some steps. Maxy’s bike was parked next to a plaque engraved with Lenin’s domed profile.

“You look tired—did you get any sleep? You procured what I suggested?” he asked.

Katinka nodded at her package. “It was the most expensive stuff I’ve ever bought and I had to ask Pasha Getman for permission.”

“Three hundred dollars is nothing to him. Did you tell him what it was?”

“I thought it better not to.”

“Well, it’s our only hope. This woman will do anything for that.” Then Maxy took her hand. “I fear you’re becoming even more obsessed than me about the secret lives of fifty years ago. Are you ready?”

“Yes, but how are you getting us in? I thought you said—”

“Don’t worry, I’ve organized it all. Now remember,” he continued, straight-faced, “I booked you an appointment to apply to make an application to apply to peruse the list of documents held in this archive, and I can now inform you that our application to make an application will of course be refused. Go on in, Katinka. Good luck.”

“I feel uneasy about this. Will it work or will I get arrested?”

“One or the other.” He laughed. “Just think, two weeks ago you’d never have tried such a stunt. But be confident. Look as if you know where you’re going and you’re entitled to get what you want. I’ll see you later.”

She watched him kick-start the bike and saw the horned helmet disappear into the hidden lanes before she turned to enter the high Gothic slab with pillars and balconies embellished by heroes carved in stone and bronze.

At the wooden desk, the two teenaged Interior Ministry soldiers half dozed in their battered chairs but sat up at the sight of Katinka. The pimplier of the two conscripts slid the signing-in book along the desk, examined her passport with a sneer intended to project the power invested in him by the Russian state, checked a collage of yellow chits on his desk and found one bearing her name, wrote out another chit on a further badly printed scrap and then with the hint of a virile smirk handed back the paper, keeping the passport, and gestured grandly toward the elevators in the white marble hall behind him. “Application for archives, fourth floor.”

She scarcely dared look back but sensed a presence. A skinny young man with a bald head, yellow vinyl shoes, and a grey parka was hanging up his coat in the cloakroom and watching her intently. A strange crew, these archive rats, Katinka thought, as she hurried on and entered the elevator. As its doors were about to close, a hand held them back and the archive rat came in, nodding at her nervously but saying nothing. He was pulling on his archivist’s stained yellow coat, like a laboratory assistant, his red-rimmed eyes magnified and eager through his smeared spectacles.

The elevator was small and they stood so awkwardly close that the archive rat kept trying to apologize but never quite managed it, as each of his attempts at conversation ended in him starting to hum. Katinka flattened herself against the wall, horribly close to the pasty dome of his head with its sparse colorless hairs, livid blotches and beads of sweat. She pressed the bell for the fifth floor but he pressed the fourth and when the quivering elevator jolted to a halt, the doors opened and he got out, holding them open.

“Your floor.” He wasn’t asking, he was telling her. “Applications.”

But Katinka shook her head twice. The rat looked surprised and remained standing there quizzically as the doors closed. Katinka cringed, knowing she’d been found out because, as Maxy had explained, “outside applicants are not permitted to visit the fifth floor.”

The elevator opened on a landing with misted glass doors, some shabby plastic palms and a grand portrait frame—with no picture inside it. Directorate of the Study of Dialectical Materialism and Leninist Economic-Political Historical Questions of the Soviet Union read the plaque, to which someone had taped a note: The Russian State Archive of Special Secret Political-Administrative Documents.

“It would be best if you didn’t meet anyone up there,” Maxy had told her—so she expected the archive rat to jump out at her with the pimpled teenaged guards at any moment.

The long parquet corridors with lines of closed pine doors were hushed. The passages were much too hot— the winter heating was still on. Katinka checked the engraved plaques that announced a name and title on each door. She turned right and then right again until she heard the blare of opera—Glinka’s famous aria from A Life for the Tsar. When she turned again, the music got louder and louder as she approached the last door.

Agrippina Constantinovna Begbulatov, Director of Manuscripts read the plaque. Quite a name. Katinka listened at the door: the music was reaching a climax. Should she have made an appointment? No, Maxy had said that was too dangerous.

She knocked. No answer. She knocked again. Nothing. Katinka cursed obstructive dinosaurs like Satinov, the maddeningly rigid bureaucrats, the frustrations of this project, and just opened the door.

A very large, white-skinned woman of advanced years lay sleeping on a divan in her underwear, her eyes covered by a mask that read American Airways.

The room was hot, the music rippled out of a modern CD player, and the perfumes within were heady. Katinka had only a moment to register two fans whirring, piles of yellowed manuscripts and two mountainous thighs flowing over lacy stocking tops before the woman was pulling off her mask and coming toward her.

“How dare you barge in here! Who are you? Have you no manners? Are you some sort of cultureless philistine?” The whale-sized woman looked Katinka up and down as if she had never seen a young girl in denim and boots in the sacred archive. “Who gave you permission to burst in on me?”

“Umm, no one.” Katinka was lost momentarily.

“Then please leave and never return!” cried the woman, whose capacious milky bosoms strained even her rigidly structured brassiere.

“No, no.” Katinka was struggling now, blushing and stammering. “I was just asked to deliver something to you. It’s here…for you.” She raised the package.

The woman angrily yanked off a mauve hairnet. “I’m not expecting anything,” she said, peering craftily at the package. Katinka had little left to lose. She tried not to look at the garter belt, the generous flesh-colored underpants or any of the other eye-catching parts of the vision before her. “It’s a gift from…” She checked up and down the corridor, to suggest that the lady might not like her colleagues to witness the delivery of the package, “well, I’d prefer to tell you in private.”

The woman frowned, apparently remembering where she was and what she was wearing. “One minute!” She shoved Katinka out of the door and closed it. The music stopped. The door reopened.

“I’m Agrippina Begbulatov,” declared the woman, offering a firm, sweaty hand. “I like to take a nap in the middle of the day. Please, sit!”

Katinka sat on the red divan, on which she could instantly feel the heat radiating from where the director of manuscripts’ generous body had recently rested. Agrippina wore rouge and scarlet lipstick, a blue Soviet-style dress with lace over the decolletage and a pyramid of spangles on both hips. Katinka recognized the towering dyed-