enough to hire a historian? he asked. But Katinka could not resist it. Researching a family history, tracing the vanished past…She imagined a cultured young Count Vorontsov or Prince Golitsyn living in a dilapidated London town house full of ancient samovars, icons and family portraits, keen to find out what had become of his family, their palaces and works of art dating from the eighteenth century, her period, her speciality. She wished she’d been born in those more elegant times…
She had never been abroad before, although she had spent three years at the university in faraway Moscow. No, the offer was too good to miss: young historians specializing in eighteenth-century history do not often get the chance to earn much-needed U.S. dollars and travel to London.
Katinka’s father, Dr. Valentin Vinsky, was smoking a cigarette and pacing the floor while her mother Tatiana, a soft, feathery creature with bright red-dyed hair, busied herself in the kitchen with her mother-in-law, Babushka —or Baba for short. Through the fog of cooking, Baba, a low-slung, broad-shouldered peasant in a floral dress, scarlet kerchief and some old surgical socks held up with elastic, moved slowly like a dinosaur in the mist.
Steam rose so densely, so aromatically, from the bubbling pots of vegetable broth that it was hard to see the two women. It was as if the nourishing humidity had warped the entire house. Like a million Soviet homes, everything inside, carpets, curtains and clothes, was yellowed with steam and damp and grease.
“There you are!” said Katinka, bounding into the room. “How long have you been up?”
“I didn’t sleep a wink!” her father replied. He was tall and dark-skinned with brown eyes. Though his grey hair was thinning and he was always exhausted, Katinka thought he looked like one of those handsome forties film stars. “Everything packed?”
“Not so fast, Papochka!”
“Well, you must hurry…”
“Oh Papochka!” Father and daughter hugged, both with tears in their eyes. The family were always quick to cry and Katinka, the youngest of three children and a beloved afterthought, was its soft-hearted and much-indulged core. Her father was a thoughtful man. He did not laugh much; in fact, he did not say much at all and when he did he was tortuously inarticulate—yet he was worshipped virtually as a god in the neighborhood, where he had delivered the babies of babies he had delivered and even
“Your food’ll be ready, don’t you worry, girl,” said Baba, her gums almost bare of teeth. “Go and wake up Bedbug or he’ll miss your departure!” “Klop,” or Bedbug, was Sergei Vinsky, Katinka’s grandfather.
Katinka trotted down the corridor toward the bathroom, passing her little bedroom with its single unit of bed, light and bedside table (standard Soviet issue) and its curling posters of Michael Jackson.
She heard the faucet running in the bathroom as she called out to her grandfather. The bathroom door opened and she met the rich, sweet distillation of Bedbug’s bowels and the familiar stale damp of old towels that was another ingredient of the provincial fug of home. Bedbug, a small weathered countryman in an undershirt and pouchy grey briefs, emerged from a bathroom that was so overshadowed by hanging laundry that it resembled a gypsy tent. Resting his hands on his hips and chewing his gums, he let rip an ungodly fart of orchestral proportions.
“Hear that? Good morning and good luck, dear girl!” and he cackled hoarsely. It was the same every morning at home. Katinka was used to it—but since her return from the university she had observed its customs with more detachment.
“Disgusting! Worse than a farmyard!” she said cheerfully. “At least in a farmyard the animals aren’t rude too. Come on, Bedbug, hurry up! Breakfast’s ready. I’m leaving soon!”
“So? Why should I hurry? I have my rituals!” He nodded at the Soviet lavatory with its unique basin-like design (guaranteed to preserve its fetid cargo as long as possible), and grinned.
“Yes, Bedbug, and no one enjoys their rituals like you. But you are coming to see me off?”
“Why bother? Good riddance!” More cackling. “Wait, Katinka! I’ve heard about a new murder on the radio! There’s a serial killer in Kiev who eats his victims, brains, livers and all, can you believe it?”
Katinka returned to the main room, shaking her head. Bedbug, an old collective farmer, lived in a world of his own. Now that the old order had gone and the Soviet Union had been abolished, he mourned the Communist Party and fulminated with his gambling cronies in the Vegaz-Kalifornia Klub against the New Russian rich—“crooked
For Bedbug, though, the recent disintegration of the Workers’ Paradise had had one advantage. In these queer, unsettled times, Russia was enjoying a lurid harvest of serial killers, a banquet of cannibals. Apart from his bowels, Bedbug had found a new hobby for his old age—the lives of the murderers.
Katinka sighed and went back to the kitchen to eat her last breakfast before London.
2
When Katinka’s grandparents and parents emerged from the house to accompany her to the station, they were dressed up in their Revolution Day best.
It was a bracing day of sharp-edged brightness in this village of mixed Russian and Caucasian folk, a day that suited a new beginning. A ragged crust of grimy ice still covered the fields and pastures and the ditches on either side of the village’s one paved thoroughfare, Suvorov Street (known as Lenin Street until last year), with its dreary, squat cottages enlivened only by their blue or red shutters. There is no more thrilling time of year in Russia, for beneath this tainted whiteness Katinka could already hear the rushing of water. The ice was melting and, hidden from view, frothy streams seethed, merged and parted, unleashing the snowdrops that were already pushing through the black-edged snow. The trees oozed sap, and skylarks and finches trilled with joy, celebrating spring.
Katinka wore a rabbit-fur coat and white vinyl boots, a denim miniskirt (Turkish made) and a purple sweater, of which she was very proud, inlaid with rhinestones in rhomboid patterns. Her father, in a felt greatcoat that covered his medical smock, carried her single bag down to their white Volga. The car was old and rusty but its broad confident solidity summed up the best of the old USSR. In the village, the doctor’s car signified change: when it was parked outside a house, it meant that the family was expecting either the stork—or the reaper. Bedbug, wearing a shiny, greasy brown suit, red shirt buttoned up to the top without a tie, and his war medals (Stalingrad, Kursk, Berlin), joined Baba and Tatiana in the car. Katinka, the family mascot, the village heroine, sat in the front.
The villagers came out to wave good-bye as they drove down old Lenin Street, past the prefabricated concrete apartment building, with its 1970s orange and black panels. Katinka waved at the white-coated, peachy- cheeked women of the Milk and Meat shops; at the be-suited and permed typists of the Mayor’s office; at the Mayor himself, who looked like a Latin crooner with his bouffant hairdo and white suit. Beso and the Ingushetians of the Vegetable Shop tossed a brown bag of Georgian tomatoes in through the car window, and Stenka the Cossack, the tattooed bouncer/bodybuilder from the nightclub-cafe Vegaz-Kalifornia, in his leather vest and bleached jeans, proffered a can of Mexican beer and a little Greek-made bottle of Why Not? perfume. Gaidar, father of the dark Azeris in their sheepskins who ran the kiosk, tossed a Twix into the car—and Katinka gave it to her father, who often suffered low blood sugar during the day and would wolf down chocolate bars…But where was Andrei?
There he was, smiling in his soft, devoted way, with those winsome eyes that seemed meant for departing trains and long good-byes. Wearing his dark blue jeans, he was waiting for her on the steps of the little stationhouse. Like her father, Andrei hadn’t wanted her to go to London, and the night before he’d begged her to wait for the late spring when they could go on vacation and sun themselves in the Crimea. His alternating kisses and reasoning had almost persuaded her—until she stopped the charade with a playful “Not so fast, Andryushka. We’ll see.” He sulked; she consoled him, thinking how much she liked his green eyes—but where did he rank compared to London, Moscow, the doctorate she was starting to write, her vocation as a historian? She wanted to be a writer, a historian of Catherinian Russia; she imagined herself living in Moscow, publishing respected books and perhaps, one day, gaining a seat in the Academy…
