Hold sacred all the riches of our homeland.

POSTER SLOGAN

For days after this encounter, my grandfather was stupefied. He walked around as if in a dream, astonished at the peculiar turn of events that had catapulted him not into the arms of a prostitute, but straight into his first love affair. He was torn between his days at the Naval School with its strict discipline and the nights of abandonment in the dimly lit apartment on Vasilievsky Island.

To his father, he pretended to be a model son; in the drinking sessions with his comrades, he played the ringleader with tremendous panache. But in his thoughts, Kostya was constantly in the dizzying proximity of the unknown woman, whose depths he began devotedly to explore.

‘Ida.’ This was the name his lips would form during class, or on board ship in the Gulf of Finland; he would repeat this name in his thoughts like an incantation as he lay in bed, sleepless, at night. He would cling to these three letters when the longing for her skin, for her deep, smoky voice, for her ambiguous smile, became too much and he didn’t know how to quench his painful desire for her.

Some nights he could stand it no longer. He would jump out of bed, grab his coat, and run down the street like a man possessed to hammer breathlessly at her door, hoping she would open it and take him in like a hungry, homeless animal, feed him and care for him, give him warmth and protection.

And she did. Always. She never left him standing outside.

With a mischievous smile, she would open the door a crack, look at him, sometimes with curlers in her hair or an open book in her hand, then shake her head and say, ‘Konstantin, what is it now? I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow evening.’ She would say it in a tone of mild reproach, and at the same time he could sense how pleased she was that he didn’t stick to their arrangements, that he was paying her a surprise visit. He could speak to Ida with his body; he didn’t need words. From the taste of her skin, he could guess the measure of her sorrow; from the way she touched him, he could guess her fears; from her kisses, he could tell whether that night she would behave with particular abandon.

During the daily shooting practice, he had to screw his eyes tight shut so as not to blink, then open them again, close them, open them, until the images from the previous night had gone from his head and he could concentrate on the target again.

All his life, Kostya would remain in thrall to this incurable beauty — incurable because, to him, she radiated a sense of something endangered, something utterly unprotected, a beauty with the capacity to destroy you.

For the rest of his life, he would never stop seeking this beauty, and his ability to love would depend on the extent to which he found it again in his subsequent love interests. As if he could only experience desire when he felt this desire would destroy him. As if he needed to dive for hidden pearls, concealed in the deepest depths of the sea, and in doing so run the risk of drowning.

*

In her previous life, Ida was meant to become a pianist. She had studied with one of Rubinstein’s star pupils. She came from a well-to-do St Petersburg family of Jewish intellectuals; her father was a doctor, and her mother had also aspired to a career as a concert pianist until severe depression rendered this impossible. Ida had spent half of her life in Paris, where her family had settled after the Revolution and the subsequent wave of anti-Semitism in Russia. In her early years, she was said to have had a nervous disposition, anaemia, a marked tendency towards excessive passion, and inspired fingers, destined for a world-class career. But she cut the umbilical cord of predestination with her own hands when she announced to her family that she had fallen hopelessly in love with an exiled violinist, who had a wife and two children in a little attic apartment in Paris, earned his money in dubious locales, and could scarcely keep his head above water. Despite pleas and threats from members of her family, Ida appointed herself the saviour of the violinist’s battered soul; she, of course, considered him brilliant, and even converted to Christianity in the hope the violinist would want to marry her once he was legally divorced from his wife.

That, however, didn’t happen.

Instead, he lived with her in a seedy room in a hotel that charged by the hour; he allowed her to cook for and spoil him, was also very happy to take the extra money Ida earned giving piano lessons, and never even dreamed of asking his wife for a divorce. One day, he announced to Ida that he was in trouble: he had run up a mountain of debts, and his only hope of escaping the debt-collectors was to flee to Russia. All attempts by Ida’s family to stop their daughter failed; Ida returned with her martyr to St Petersburg, which was not even called St Petersburg any longer, and where nothing was as it had been before.

They moved into a communal apartment on the outskirts of the city. Ida taught piano and worked at surviving the post-war years. She provided her violinist with food, began to hate him, berated him, lamented her suffering, missed Paris and her family’s affluence, reproached herself, and was ashamed of her miserable existence. The violinist would disappear for days at a time while Ida, caught up in her masochistic feelings of love and loathing, was being driven up the wall by worry, disgust, and socialism, which was profoundly abhorrent to her. She started punishing the most precious thing she owned for her unhappiness: she draped a cloth over her piano, the only valuable thing she had sent for from Paris. The violinist doubled his alcohol consumption and ran up more debts, with, among others, a Siberian butcher who controlled the black market. There was a fight. The violinist was given a kicking; he cracked his head against a wall, and crawled through the streets on all fours until he reached the hallway of the communal apartment, where he collapsed. He died of internal bleeding before a doctor could get there. Ida managed to procure this single room on Vasilievsky Island, formerly inhabited by a lady from Dnipropetrovsk who, as previously mentioned, earned her living with her sturdy body until one day someone reported her to the authorities and she was sent packing.

The only thing Ida took with her from her old life was the piano. She found herself a job as a ticket attendant at the theatre, applied twice more to leave the country and was rejected both times, upon which she cut all contact with the people from her old life, but did not try to make any new acquaintances, lived with her records and books, and drank her strong black tea.

She lived like that until one day Konstantin Jashi appeared at her door.

When Kostya’s youth and willing body fell into her hands, Ida pounced on him as if famished: she lost herself, let herself go, forgot, and began to hope.

Even if Ida was now a woman who no longer had any romantic illusions, there was nothing she could do about the fact that, with Kostya at her side, she had started to hope again — unintentionally, against her will, entirely without wanting to. Because until then hopelessness had been the only constant in her life, and the gradual erosion of this constant frightened her; she believed that, for her, the renewed hope of a different life could be life threatening.

With each day that passed, Ida let another little piece of hopelessness drop away. With every word Kostya addressed to her, with every touch, she scratched the thick layer of desolation from her skin and allowed herself to be infected by his youth, his greed for her, his joy in her body, and in an unspoken future.

And Kostya, fearful and insecure, because he craved her nearness, her nocturnal enchantment, her secrets, stumbled after his desires at night only to punish himself for it the next day. He didn’t tell his fellow students about his new love; he was embarrassed about it because he assumed Ida would not be seen as a suitable match for him. He reproached himself for the fact that he could never take her out for a meal, never go for a walk with her; that she existed for him only at night, and by day he tried to banish her from his thoughts, from his daily life, acting as if she didn’t exist.

But Ida was good at hiding her feelings: it was something she had learned well in her years of struggling with life, or with what life had denied her. She had learned that words are not always promises, that music cannot save you, that your own abilities do not always lead to their predestined objective, that love is sometimes just camouflage for something much worse; she had learned to tame her dreams, had learned to paint over her disappointments with a dash of lipstick; and so Kostya knew nothing of how painful she found the waiting for those nights, the effort it cost her to keep pace with his pent-up longing; all the words she left unsaid, all the reproaches she spared him, the understanding his divided life required of her, how impossible it sometimes seemed to her to be part of his parallel world. And how moved she was by his desire to experience love through her; and how much, at the same time, it frightened her.

But Ida had always been a good teacher, and all the things that, years earlier, she had tried to show her students, on the black and white keys, she now taught Kostya, devoting her entire body and soul to the task. She taught him to prepare a nourishing winter soup from leftovers, taught him to iron his uniform immaculately, taught him to keep secrets, and to speak without words.

Holding each other close, they danced to every Vertinsky song in Ida’s record collection: for every song, a different dance. Their dances were slow and fast, restrained and unbridled, risqué and accompanied by full-throated laughter, sad and oblivious to the world around them; they danced together and alone; they danced and danced.

She told him the stories behind each of her many rings, kissing the tips of his fingers as she did so; she laughed at him when he bored her with lectures about ships; she tickled him as he slept and woke him to show him the full moon, which was particularly yellow and sickly that night. She showed him photographs of her old life while he massaged her feet; she told him that her house plants were her true friends, and introduced them all to Kostya by name. She giggled like a schoolgirl when he took off her clothes, and ordered him to undress with the stern face of a headmistress.

They lent each other happiness. They lent each other the present, and gave each other memories for the future.

*

She stretched luxuriously, like a Persian cat, on the squeaky metal bed. Kostya was ironing his shirt; he had to be at the academy in less than an hour. Suddenly, as if stricken, Ida jumped up, rushed over to Kostya, flung her arms around him, and clung on.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, laughing, already calculating in his head whether he had enough time to comfort her with another, brief bout of lovemaking. But Ida pulled away and gazed at him, wide-eyed.

‘There’s going to be a war,’ she said quietly, backing off.

‘You’re not really afraid of the stupid fascists, are you, Ida? Come here, come here, you silly thing.’

‘You should turn on the radio.’

‘Just because the Germans are marching into Poland, you’re afraid they’ll come all the way here?’ He laughed and hurried over to give her a kiss on the tip of her nose. ‘They gave us a long talk at the Academy. When I come back tonight I’ll tell you a bit about how cleverly the Generalissimus is dealing with the Germans. Apparently he held a secret meeting at the Politburo on the nineteenth of August. At the Academy they’re saying he told them the Soviet Union would definitely reject the Franco-British alliance against Germany, and would extend its hand to the Germans. Because, they said, it’s impossible to promote communism in Europe in peacetime, but if the Anglo-French declare war on the Germans both sides will quickly overextend themselves, and the Soviet Union can advance the cause of socialism in Europe undisturbed. I think that’s an incredibly far-sighted attitude, don’t you? … Ida, are you even listening to me?’

‘Even if they do start fraternising with the Germans, it doesn’t mean the Germans will be happy to give up territories to the USSR, Kostya. And that’s the whole point. Without this alliance with the Nazis, the Generalissimus doesn’t stand a chance of getting his hands on those areas. Think about it: the Germans are constantly talking about the need for lebensraum.’

Ida fell silent and began to stare at a spot on the wall as if she could already see the future there in front of her.

‘All right, listen. I’ll tell you a secret. You’ve heard about this trade agreement, haven’t you — this Molotov-Ribbentrop thing? The one that was all over the newspapers? Do you know what they told us at the Academy? Behind the trade agreement there’s a secret protocol that’s far more important than the actual agreement itself.’ Kostya lowered his voice. ‘Apparently, it talks about neutrality for the USSR in the event of a European war. There — is my Ida reassured now? The Generalissimus knows how to deal with the fascists. You mustn’t doubt that!’

Suddenly, Ida began to laugh at the top of her voice. She doubled over and slapped her hands on her knees. Kostya stared at her in bewilderment.

She took a copy of Pravda out of her bag and held it under Kostya’s nose.

‘Isn’t it hilarious, my angel, the world we live in? The biggest newspaper in the country calls this agreement, and I quote, “an instrument of peace”. Yet what it really is is two madmen squaring up to each other and misusing the world to benefit themselves and their ideologies; two madmen who will stop at nothing. Isn’t that hysterical, Kostya? Two madmen are never going to allow one to become greater than the other.’

‘What madmen? Ida, calm down! Ida, look at me. I’m here, I’m with you, nothing’s going to happen to you. I won’t let anything happen to you.’

‘The only question is, for how long,’ murmured Ida, going back to the bed.

‘How long what? What do you mean?’

‘Go on, get dressed. I don’t want you to be late.’

*

The news of Christine’s disfigurement, which Stasia had kept from Kostya for almost two years, reached him along with the news that war had indeed broken out in Europe. On the same day that the whole of Leningrad started talking about the German invasion of Poland, Kostya finally learned the real reason Stasia had asked him not to come to Tbilisi these past two summers, but to spend his holidays in Russia. In her letter, Stasia recounted Christine’s tragedy in detail — without naming names, of course, as post office workers might read the letter.

She described the terrible deed, Christine’s time in intensive care, her deep depression, her silence. She told him about Ramas’ funeral, which had taken place anonymously in order to avoid a scandal, and about the sale of his paintings. She ended with news of the death of her stepmother, Lara; Christine’s tragedy had caused her to have a stroke.

Kostya came to Ida’s apartment in the middle of the night, lay down on the bed, and wept for more than three hours without stopping.

Ida asked no questions: she let him grieve, because she knew about grief; for many years it had been her most dependable companion. Ida knew that the world — both her own and, above all, the fragile world of all-encompassing intimacy she shared with Kostya — was doomed, but she faced this doom with her eyes wide open, awaited it, stoic, erect, standing to attention, like a steadfast tin soldier.

War came to Kostya long before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The horrendous news of his aunt’s misfortune unleashed a struggle within him and presented him with the almost impossible task of reconciling his feelings, his duty, and his future.

He tried to imagine Christine’s corroded face, and saw before him Ida’s olive skin, the blackness of her eyes. He felt anger towards his mother, who had kept him in the dark, had kept him far away from Christine and her sorrow, and he tried to fill in for himself the gaps that Stasia’s truth had ripped open. Because in her letter Stasia had not told him who, other than Ramas and Christine, was involved in this jealous drama. In his mind, Kostya laboriously went through all the renowned communists in his homeland who had been guests at Christine’s house. He tried to imagine what man had possessed such power that Ramas hadn’t dared to rebel against him; someone from whom Ramas had believed he could only protect his wife by inflicting this cruel disfigurement upon her.

Kostya’s deliberations left him in no doubt, but even in his thoughts he didn’t dare say the name of the Little Big Man, who the previous year had become the head of the entire Soviet NKVD.

There were many things Stasia had not told him.

She had not told her son that, after the tragic event, his adored aunt was paid a generous pension as the widow of a hero of the Soviet Union, which Ramas was posthumously declared to have been. She had also not written about the scented roses Christine’s lover had sent her every week in hospital, and then later at home, all of which she had thrown away. She had not written that the Little Big Man never again visited the first lady of his harem after her face was burned away, for fear he would be too revolted by her devastated beauty.

*

When Kitty called her brother from the post office in the little town, she noticed that he seemed irritable and distracted, inattentive and demanding.

‘Giorgi, my good friend and roommate, has been granted leave and he’s heading for Georgia. I’ve given him a small parcel for Christine. There are all sorts of things in it that she really likes. I want the parcel to get there quickly, and he’s offered to make a little detour and change trains near you. He’s not going as far as Tbilisi, but you can meet him tomorrow and send the parcel on to Tbilisi. It won’t take as long then.’

Kitty was annoyed that he had paid so little attention to what she had been saying, and hadn’t asked after either herself or Andro. He didn’t even seem surprised that she and Andro had been living in the countryside for months, banished to her grandfather’s house. That they had had to change schools, and now lived far away from Stasia and Christine.

‘Incidentally, I’m sorry Lara died so suddenly. Is Grandfather bearing up?’ was the only thing he wanted to know.

‘He’s trying,’ she answered, reluctantly. She promised to take receipt of the parcel and send it on, although she secretly wished it were a parcel for her, and that she didn’t have to live with the feeling that her big brother had forgotten her.

*

That evening, she walked to the station on her own. An unprepossessing lad in glasses and a sailor’s uniform stood waiting in the little station hall, which was almost completely empty. He introduced himself as Giorgi Alania; he was passing through on his way to Abkhazia to visit his mother; she wasn’t well, which was why he’d asked to go on leave. He had travelled via Vladikavkaz, had got off here to hand over the parcel, and would take the night train for the Black Sea coast later on.

‘Isn’t it very inconvenient for you to make such a detour on account of this silly parcel?’ asked Kitty, still annoyed with her cold, domineering brother.

‘Oh, I don’t mind. Your brother’s really very important to me. Believe me, I would do a great deal for him.’

Kitty marvelled as to how her narcissistic brother had managed this.

The lad asked her whether she would like to have a coffee or tea with him; he still had a while to wait for his train, and he’d be very glad of the company. But Kitty politely declined; she had homework to do.

He seemed disappointed by her refusal, but he remained courteous and immediately handed over the parcel. She wished him all the best for his onward journey, and turned to go. Outside on the street, though, with his disappointed face still before her eyes, she stopped, turned round, and went back into the station.

He was standing in the middle of the empty hall with his little suitcase, waiting for something: it had to be more than just a train. When he saw her coming, he smiled gratefully at her, and she suggested they go for a little walk, perhaps sit in a park; the station café had already closed, and in any case the station concourse wasn’t very inviting. He agreed thankfully, and beamed at her as if she had just accepted his proposal of marriage.

They went out onto the street, and Kitty led him to the little park nearby where she so often met Andro. Giorgi didn’t seem to be all that used to feminine company, and kept thanking Kitty for her time.

They exchanged some small talk. When he started speaking about Kostya she hedged and changed the subject. They chatted about politics, in which Kitty had no interest, about mothers, and about school, where he had apparently done well; they even laughed about this and that, and later Kitty accompanied the lad to his platform and waited until he had boarded his train. She gave him a hug, feeling as she did so that he was trembling slightly. It couldn’t possibly have been from the cold. She waved to him from the platform, and he stuck his head out of the window and waved to her for a long time as darkness settled over them, until it swallowed him completely.

*

In the first week of September, the Wehrmacht advanced eastwards as far as Warsaw. On 17 September, the Red Army entered Poland with 620,000 men. On 22 September, the Germans and the Russians organised a joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk, and on 28 September, Ribbentrop and Molotov signed a further treaty on ‘friendship, cooperation and demarcation’. In November, the USSR then expanded to include regions in western Ukraine and Belarus — Polish territory since 1920.

The Kremlin knew it couldn’t turn its new subjects into model Soviet citizens overnight with laws and dictates alone. Nonetheless, in the new territories they had to fast-forward through the years of ‘re-education’. Here, too, ethnic conflicts were to be intensified — the strategy of playing different ethnicities off against each other had, after all, proved effective in so many other regions. The invasion of Poland was presented as the liberation of the Belarusian and Ukrainian populations. The Soviet press praised the ‘reunification’ of these peoples with the Soviet Union, great friend to and helper of all oppressed nations. The tactics soon had the desired effect. In Novgorod and Łuck, Ukrainian farmers attacked Polish officers; in Pruzhany, Belarusian farmers stoned another officer; the NKVD looked on approvingly. However, when the resistance went too far, they resorted to more direct methods: both commanders and partisans who defied orders were summarily shot without trial.

By the end of September, more than 250,000 Polish soldiers had been imprisoned. Transit camps were set up for them because some of the prisoners were to be packed off to the Germans. Almost 43,000, all of them Jews, were handed over to the Germans in November.

Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia were coerced into providing the USSR with military assistance. With around 60,000 Red Army soldiers stationed in the Baltics, the countries had no choice but to prepare for annexation, which took place in the summer of 1940. That same year, the USSR expanded to include the Socialist Republic of Moldova. Northeastern Romania was occupied, Ukraine extended. The Latvian and Estonian presidents were arrested; one died in prison, the other in a psychiatric institution. Only the Lithuanian president managed to escape. Border fortifications were hastily erected between German and Soviet territories, and all private radios were confiscated: only Party-approved information was to reach the population in the border areas.

*

In March 1940, the Generalissimus received a letter from the Little Big Man in which the latter proposed that the 25,000 Polish officers, officials, landowners, police, spies, constables, and prison guards currently under arrest should be shot then and there. This request was justified as follows: they were ‘all sworn enemies of Soviet authority full of hatred for the Soviet system’. The people in question were 14,700 state officials from the camps and 11,000 spies and counter-revolutionaries from the prisons.

The Generalissimus gave his approval the very same day, and forced another five Politburo members to put their signatures to the document. A troika, made up of close allies of the Little Big Man, was tasked with implementing it, and set to work at the beginning of April. First, rumours were disseminated in the camps and prisons that the prisoners would soon be released; their food rations were increased, they were vaccinated against typhus, and then they were fetched. They were taken by train to Kalinin, to Kharkov, and to the forest of Katyn near Smolensk. A number of NKVD men arrived from the capital especially for the operation with pistols in their suitcases. In the basement of the prison in Kalinin, two men held each prisoner still while a third shot him in the head. A maximum of two minutes was allocated for each execution. In Kharkov prison, they burned all the inmates alive. Afterwards, the bodies were taken away in trucks and buried in mass graves in the surrounding forests.

Regional prison directors and public prosecutors were present during the operation, as was Vasili Blokhin, the Lubyanka commandant who had already proved his loyalty on numerous occasions and was one of the people the Generalissimus trusted with special tasks. A man who liked to wear an apron, gloves, and rubber boots at executions, and who is said personally to have sent more than 15,000 people to their deaths in the course of his ‘career’. It was also Blokhin who got his employees and subordinates to sign a document stating that ‘educational measures’ should be used against those condemned to death to prevent the name of the Generalissimus from passing their lips. ‘Educational measures’ signified blows to the head.

At the Little Big Man’s suggestion, once the operation had successfully been completed, Blokhin’s men were given an extra month’s pay. Just six years later, Roman Rudenko, the deputy public prosecutor from Ukraine who had been summoned to Kharkov to observe the execution of the operation and ensure everything went according to plan, was one of the Soviet Union’s chief prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials. Throughout those trials he accused the fascists of being responsible for this indiscriminate orgy of killing.

Blokhin himself was showered with medals and later made a general. He served the machinery of killing with loyalty and devotion for almost thirty-six years before being forced into retirement in 1953. He was buried in Moscow’s Donskoi Cemetery, where many of his victims had been burned and bucketfuls of their ashes poured into anonymous graves.