Andrei wanted to carry her little bag to the train, and so did her father. In the end, after a slight tug of war, they compromised and each held one strap of the carpetbag. They all boarded the train and settled her into her compartment. Dr. Vinsky hugged Katinka and kissed her forehead, leaving with tears in his eyes. Andrei whispered, “I love you.”
Katinka stood at the open window, blowing kisses to family and boyfriend. Then the oil-stained steel engine clanked, jolted and, with a shrill whistle, rumbled into the distance, heading north into the heart of Russia.
Trains leaving empty provincial stations can seem sad even at the happiest of times—and partings are never that. The family said nothing for a moment then Tatiana dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, worrying about Katinka’s job: what sort of research would she be doing? How would she survive? Why did she have to go? She put her arms around Andrei.
Baba, a living study of the compatibility of Communist dogma and peasant superstitions, crossed herself. Bedbug had left Beznadezhnaya only once—in June 1941, to join the Red Army—and returned only once, in May 1945, but he had left on a locomotive with a tail of white steam that bore him all the way from Moscow to Berlin… The best and most dread times of his life, he’d told his wife: friends lost, friends made, “For Stalin and the Motherland!” Stalin: now there was a man!
Dr. Vinsky remained standing alone on the platform as the others left. It was just 10:00 a.m. but already his office at the medical center on Suvorov Street, between the local Party secretary’s office and the Milk Products Shop, would be full of pensioners with spring colds and shrinking savings.
He lit a cigarette and looked after the train. He was very proud of Katinka’s courage: would he have done the same? He had grown up with his parents, Bedbug and Baba, right here in Beznadezhnaya—and at eighteen he had left on this train too, to study medicine in faraway Leningrad. Baba had bought him a new jacket, new boots and a red chintz suitcase: they were poor but so proud he had been accepted by Leningrad Medical School. The first of the Vinsky family, and surely the first in the village, to attend a university.
Dr. Vinsky asked himself (not for the first time) why he had returned to this godforsaken place in the borderlands of the Empire as a young doctor. He could have studied more; he had dreamed of becoming a gynecologist, a specialist, a professor, in Moscow. But he came home—home to the blue-shuttered cottage where he’d been born, and still lived—to be with his old peasant parents and run the local clinic. Perhaps he would not have succeeded in Leningrad, or perhaps he was a coward, he thought now. But this was home and he craved it.
Dr. Vinsky hated partings: he hated anyone to go away; his sons were married and lived far off, and now his only daughter had gone. He himself was nearly sixty, with a weak heart, and he knew he would never leave.
He flicked his cigarette onto the tracks. What was this “family research” of Katinka’s? he asked himself yet again. In Russia, it was always better to leave the past alone. Here it had a way of poisoning the present. Without Academician Beliakov’s insistence that Katinka would be safe, he would never have let her go to London.
Katinka, he decided, was a bright bird of paradise stuck in a dingy cage: he had to let her fly. Unlike his old father, Dr. Vinsky was no Communist, yet, in these times of turbulence—in which chaos, corruption and democracy reigned—he yearned for stability.
Perhaps this was why he felt uneasy about Katinka’s journey. She was traveling into a world where he could not protect her.
3
The trip—the train ride to Moscow, the flight from Sheremetyevo Airport—was so dizzyingly exciting that Katinka recorded every moment in a diary she had bought especially. She described the people she met on the train, the check-in at the airport, the passengers who sat on either side of her on the flight (she had never flown before); her trip into London on the grimy Metro (or the Tube, as the English gracelessly called it), which was so dark and sordid compared with the vaulted marble cathedrals that were Moscow’s underground stations; and then the walk, staggering with her bag, from Sloane Square Station. And there she was, staring with wide-eyed amazement at the discreetly luxurious hotel booked for her in Cadogan Gardens, Chelsea.
The receptionist, a waxy paper pusher with a weave-over hairstyle, did not seem too pleased to see her. When he realized she was Russian, he appeared suspicious, examining her passport as if it might contain some trace of KGB biological weaponry. When he looked up her reservation and found it was prepaid in cash, she could see him re-evaluate her, reducing her status from KGB agent to gangster’s moll.
“What are you doing in London? Sightseeing or…,” he asked, without looking up from behind the desk.
“I’m a historian,” she replied, in hesitant English, trying not to giggle at his confusion. She thought she saw him shake his head a little: prostitute, spy or…or historian, he couldn’t work it out.
Upstairs in her room, she could only wonder at the canopied double bed and the marble bathroom containing two, yes two, basins, two, yes two, fluffy bathrobes and an Aladdin’s cave of free shampoos, soaps and bubble baths (all of which she immediately hid in her bag to take home), and cable television. It was so different from her home in the north Caucasus or her room in the dormitory in Moscow where she had lived for three years.
The desk was equipped with embossed envelopes and writing paper (straight into the bag with them too!). There were goosefeather pillows, bedspreads, curtains, pelmets like a palace, and downstairs a sitting room, silent except for a ticking grandfather clock, with deep well-stuffed sofas and piles of glossy new magazines such as
This struck her as so iconic that she stuck it in her diary for posterity. Before taking a stroll around Sloane Square and down the King’s Road, she called her parents from the room to tell them she was safe. She got her father, who was always agonizingly shy on the phone.
“Katinka, trust no one out there,” he warned her, between gaping silences.
“They’re terrified of us here, Papa. In the hotel, they think I’m a gangster or a spy!”
“Promise me you’ll take no risks, darling,” he said.
“Oh, Papa. OK, I promise: no risks. I kiss you, Papa. Love to Mama and Baba and Bedbug!”
She laughed to herself—how could he understand? She adored her father but she could imagine him on the phone by the bookcase, smoking a cigarette late at night, in that faraway cottage in a village “lost in deafness”— while
4
Next morning, after an English breakfast of toast, marmalade and fried bacon and tomatoes (she ordered much of the menu), Katinka found a shaven-headed Russian man of military bearing standing in the lobby and staring at her with ill-concealed contempt. So this was Artyom, she thought, as he nodded toward the door and directed her to a large black Mercedes that smelled deliciously of new leather.
Artyom climbed stiffly into the seat right in front of her and she heard the locks click shut on all four doors. As he swung the car aggressively into traffic, pressing her against the passenger door, Katinka examined his hulking shoulders and muscle-knotted neck with foreboding. She felt small and helpless and wondered if her father, whom she’d so recently mocked for his caution, had been right after all.
What if her entire trip was a wicked trick arranged by some Russian master criminal? Was she about to be sold into white slavery? But why would a Thief-in-Power, as Russian gangster godfathers were known, bother to ask Academician Beliakov, author of the classic work
