The Amber Room Page 5

  When Kuchumov studied a file called 'Letters of the Russian Tsars', which was compiled in 1861 and lodged in the Hermitage library, he found several from Tsar Peter I to his wife. 'Dear Catherine, friend of my heart, hello to you,' Peter wrote from Habelberg on 17 November 1716. 'Concerning my visit: I want to tell you that it was useful. We will leave from here today and with God's help we will see you soon.' There was a postscript: 'The King gave me a rather big present in Potsdam, a yacht which is well decorated and the Amber Room, which I have dreamed of for a long time.'28

  The tsar had nothing to give in return so he presented the Prussian kitchen with thirty-six ducats and gave a sable to the King's commandant. Later, a letter sent to the Prussian King from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, revealed that Peter eventually thought of an appropriate gift:

  The man who will give you the document, valet Tolstoy, will have the honour to present Your Majesty [with] fifty-fivegiants, that is how many I could find in my land up till now. I also want to give Your Majesty a barge built in St Petersburg and a lathe. Without doubt Your Majesty will be glad to have these small presents. PS We also send Your Majesty a goblet made by ourselves.'29

  Kuchumov found the Soldier King's reply, sent in October 1718. Thanking his 'kindest brother and friend', Frederick William I wrote: I want to say that I have got the giants and also a goblet made by your own hands and also the barge built in St P. and the lathe which Your Majesty gave me as a present. It was a wonderful gift to me.'30

  It took a considerable time to locate and dispatch to Prussia enough 'giant' Russian soldiers to adequately reward the Prussians for the gift of the Amber Room. In June 1720 Count Golovkin, now the Russian ambassador at the Prussian court, wrote to his tsar: 'Captain Chernishov came here with ten giant soldiers and passed on your orders, after which these soldiers were given as a present to his Majesty of Prussia.'31 Then, in 1724, yet more giants were sent, twenty-four of them, including one named in the records as Captain Bandemir.

  The crates containing the panels of the Amber Room were delivered to Peter's Summer Palace on the Neva in mid-r 717 and received there by Governor General Alexander Menshikov. From the historical references sought by Kuchumov it is clear that he was pursuing a particular line of thought: whether Peter's court achieved what the Prussians could not. Kuchumov was attempting to discover how the Amber Room fitted together, information he was desperate to acquire in the summer of 1941 so that he could dismantle it before the Wehrmacht arrived.

  Kuchumov would have been disappointed when he read what Governor General Alexander Menshikov wrote in his diary on 2 July 1717: 'Had a dinner for two hours and after dinner stayed in the rooms for an hour to look through the amber boxes that had arrived from Prussia.'32 However, what the governor found appalled him. He records in his diary that pieces were broken. Many were missing. Others crumbled in his hands. Three days later he wrote to Peter, then in Paris, and put a brave face on the disaster.

  I have looked through this Amber Room which was sent for Your Majesty by the King of Prussia and placed it in the same crates in the big hall where the guests gathered and almost all the panels were in good order. Some small pieces fell out but some of them could be repaired with glue and even if some of them could not be, you could insert new pieces. I can honestly say it's the most magnificent thing I have ever seen.33

  Did any assembly instructions accompany the room? Kuchumov searched in the Central State Document Archive and found a section called the 'Cabinet of Peter the Great' and within it 'The inventory of the Amber Room presented by His Majesty of Prussia to His Majesty of Russia'. But the document, dated Berlin, 13 January 1717, contained no advice on how to construct the Amber Room.34 Peter had intended the Amber Room to become his Kunstkammer, a walk-in cabinet of curiosities, an idea he had borrowed from Versailles. But there was no one in Russia who was capable of reassembling Wolfram's puzzle and Peter the Great's dream was stored in pieces at his Summer Palace until his death in 1725.35

  Kedrinsky wipes a winter sweat from his forehead. 'By 24 June 1941 everyone was glued to the radio. Scouring the Leningradskaya Pravda. Reading and rereading Izvestiya. Even the smallest piece of information was better than nothing. But there was no comfort for poor old Leningrad.' As the Russians liked to say, there was no 'truth' in the News and no 'news' in the Truth.36

  But then came some direction from the city authorities. Quoting Trotsky's instructions during the Civil War, citizens were ordered to begin transforming Leningrad into 'an enigma, a threat or a mortal danger'.

  Kedrinsky recalls: 'Posters appealed for help to save the Motherland and work details were issued. Everyone fell in, we all began digging and building. Out in the countryside, even as the fascists neared, women and men built tank traps and trenches with their bare hands. For fifteen hours at a time. Barrage balloons blocked out the sun.'

  Netting obscured monuments and statues. Catherine the Great's bronze horseman beside the River Neva became a pyramid of sandbags. Mountaineers scaled the golden pinnacle of the Peter Paul Cathedral on the opposite bank to throw camouflage over it. 'Instead of defending my diploma, I defended the city,' Kedrinsky says darkly. He was ordered to the far end of Moskovsky Prospekt with a transport of 'steel hedgehogs' that the Red Army hoped would slow the Nazi tank advance. 'On every roof we built anti-aircraft emplacements.'

  And beyond, towards the palaces of Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk, was a strangled strip of deserted dachas and allotments overlooking the city. They had been abandoned by everyone apart from Kuchumov and his hand-picked team, who were still packing the treasures of the tsars. They would be the first to feel the full force of the Nazi invasion whenever it came.

  But what of the Amber Room, we ask?

  Kedrinsky looks irritated to have been snapped back from his past. But he cannot leave the question unanswered. He is, after all, the oracle of the Catherine Palace. And so he slyly slides papers out from under his blotter. 'You must understand that this is material entrusted to me for my book, my history of the Great Task. These are the last words written by Kuchumov before we fought for our lives.'

  He begins to read from Kuchumov's diary: '"An order came from LenGorlsPolKom. About the Amber Room. Instructions are to execute measures to conceal this unique treasure in its place rather than risk damage."'

  Kuchumov's recommendation to abandon the evacuation of the Amber Room had been sanctioned. He was to hide it where it was, constructing another room on top of it. '"Wadding was delivered from the sewing factory along with sheets of gauze."' The amber panels were carefully covered in muslin cloth and then a layer of vatzim [cotton padding]. The entire room was then redecorated with hessian strips. Its inlaid parquet floor made from rare, coloured woods was strewn with sand. Water was placed inside every vase too large to be evacuated so that they might absorb a blast. The windows were criss-crossed with tape and then boarded up from the inside. The wall-mounted bronze candelabras were removed and placed in boxes, as were four Florentine stone mosaics that depicted the senses and were hooked on to the amber panels. Twelve chairs, three card tables, two chests of drawers, a spittoon and an icon were also left behind.

  Kedrinsky looks up from the pages: 'Kuchumov could do no more and anyhow new orders came for him.' He continues reading from the diary.

  Comrade Ladukhin told Kuchumov that he was no longer needed at the palaces. The young curator's thoughts must have turned immediately to the front, where tens of thousands of under-prepared young soldiers were marching almost unarmed towards the long guns of General Wilhelm von Leeb's highly trained Army Group North. But Anna Mikhailovna, Kuchumov's wife, was also ordered to pack her bags. Kuchumov records what happened next in his diary: '"Anatoly Mikhailovich, I am afraid that you are to leave Leningrad," Comrade Ladukhin told me. "You will accompany Leningrad's children, the first shipment of evacuees. You and your wife are to take the treasures with you to their hiding place."'

  Kedrinsky pauses: 'They left that evening - 30 June 1941.'

 
According to his diary, Kuchumov made one last, frantic round of the palace, rushing through the empty halls and rooms, snipping and cutting strips of fabric as he went from the curtains and seat covers, from tablecloths and bedlinen - swatches that nestled in his jacket pocket, preserving in his mind the decorative scheme of the palace to which he was determined to return. And among the things he carried with him were twenty-eight fragments and shards that had dropped off the walls of a priceless, intriguing, infuriating Amber Room that now had the appearance of another, stuffed and packed, wallpapered and pasted.

  Kedrinsky reads on:

  'Commissar Ivanov was waiting for me at the station. We shook hands. I then stepped inside the goods carnage and bound the door shut with wire for our safety, lying down on the boxes, awaiting our departure.

  'The strong shunt of the locomotive woke me. It was now dawn. 5 a.m. The sunlight dazzled. The morning was fine. I took my leave of my city and from the train it looked like an enormous green island in the middle of a plain. Golden domes of the palaces shining above it. When will we ever come home and what will be our future and what of those we leave behind?'

  Locked into seventeen train carriages, 402 crates were bound for the Soviet interior alongside Anatoly Kuchumov and Anna Mikhailovna.

  'And I remained behind,' Kedrinsky says. I climbed up on to a rooftop with my sniper's rifle. I was not allowed to flee Leningrad. Sitting in a steel bucket, I gripped the rim. Waiting. Waiting. Comrade Molotov ordered that the city improvise our defence of the Motherland and we followed his instructions. To. The. Letter. Filling bottles with petrol and a dry rag. Fire-bomb the Hitlerites. Waiting to bury them in our Soviet soil. And then, when my duty was served out on the rooftops, I was called to the front.

  'Inside a bunker I went. Full to the brim with fear. Can you imagine, as the slaughter began, what the orders from Moscow were for me? "Paint," the generals said. I was ordered to be Artist to the Red Army. Comrade Stalin wanted posters for field hospitals and canteens of General Suvorov, the victor at Kinburn in 1787, leader of men across the Alps, to boost the morale of the men at the front. He also wanted paintings of Alexander Nevsky, our canonized Prince of Novgorod, who had halted the first great German invasion, 700 years ago. I painted Russian heroes and made a little history for our exhausted boys on the battle lines.'

  The slamming of a door brings the old man out of his trance. Walking towards us is a wiry figure in a felt jacket whose mouth twitches suspiciously beneath a rusty ginger beard. He mutters into the old comrade's ear. Kedrinsky immediately stands up, swaps the woolly slippers he is wearing for outdoor shoes and throws on a great coat. 'My son says I have told you more than enough and I will get into trouble with Bardovskaya.'

  What of the Great Task? We have come so far and surely we can go a little further, we say. What of Kuchumov? At least take us to Anatoly Kuchumov, the guardian of the Amber Room.

  'That, my friends, is beyond even my considerable powers,' Kedrinsky says, as his son holds open the door. 'Kuchumov is dead.'

  Kedrinsky rattles his desk drawer to check that it is locked. The man who rebuilt Leningrad stubs out a Peter I and shuffles off with his suspicious son. We follow a few paces behind, stepping out into the squall that has thrown a great billowing dustsheet over a frozen Tsarskoye Selo, obscuring all of our exits.

  2

  We have been in Russia for six weeks but our bell never rings. We live like rats in an Empire-style mansion block at the eastern end of St Petersburg's Nevsky Prospekt. The building's cast-iron front door is fastened with a combination lock: 279. Its tumblers grind like teeth and the door opens on to a gloomy stairwell. The hall light bulbs have been stolen but we can feel with our feet a sticky patch on the granite porch slab. A struck match reveals spots of blood carelessly left by the man on the fourth floor, a shipyard foreman who lost his job earlier this year and now comes out only at night to club stray animals on the landing.

  Every day we climb three darkened flights of limestone stairs, reaching a steel shutter, which is the first door to our apartment. Behind it is another padded, wooden inner door. The gap between the two is just large enough for someone to be immured. There is nothing physically restraining us but we feel trapped in our flat around the corner from where the drunks fighting outside Hotel Oktobrsakaya are so blinded by vodka they can hardly see the old sign above them: Leningrad Hero City.

  Occasionally the telephone rings. The socket is at the far end of the hall and we sprint to it, only for the caller to hang up. Outside in the city the libraries are closed. It is the end of January 2002 and the temperatures of minus 35°C have ruptured the pipes. No one seems to know what happened to Anatoly Kuchumov's private papers or (if there are any) the files on the Amber Room. The state, central, history, party and literature archives deny possessing anything connected to either and anyhow will not let us into the building until our applications have been cleared in an opaque process that has no real beginning and possibly no end. The city's chief archivists are said to be at their dachas beside Lake Ladoga, to the east, where housekeepers cheerfully tell us, 'No one's home.' And the director of the Catherine Palace has been trying to find a slot for us in his appointment diary for more than a month. So we sit and wait, trying to suppress the feeling that we are trapped like herrings in a Russian barrel, going over our notes from Kedrinsky, deciding on a strategy to break the deadlock, reading and rereading the history of Leningrad, hoping that we will not wake up on one of these cold mornings to find ourselves accused of a crime we did not commit.

  There are at least nine Sovetskayas in an urban grid and we are renting in the seventh. Private ambulances touting for business in the new frantic free-for-all lurk on our street corner. Dozens of downpipes from the guttering high above randomly disgorge tubes of ice, the frozen projectiles hurtling towards the legs of unsuspecting pedestrians with such velocity that they can shatter bones. The road is buckled after decades of freeze and thaw and quickly becomes bogged down in a slick of brown snow, the detritus left by incontinent pit bull terriers dressed by their owners in canine combat jackets. And every afternoon on Sovetskaya 7, even when the cold becomes acidic, small boys scrub the salt off the new Mercedes parked along the kerb, polishing cars bought with murky wealth until their raw faces shine in the bodywork.

  St Petersburg's residents have a favourite saying: 'Everything is forbidden but all things are possible.' It is an epigram loved by the flat-headed goons who waggle their guns outside the Golden Dolls erotic cabaret. And by the women with all-year-round Black Sea suntans who gorge on the new Japanese buffet at the exorbitant Tinkoff restaurant (a chopstick held in each hand with which to impale the sushi). For the people of Alexei Tolstoy's damned city, the motto describes a Russian confidence trick, the illusion of a transfer of power where one terrifying elite bows out to reformers who prove to be equally vindictive and greedy, people who will do anything for you only if you can name their price.

  We call a friend of a friend, a retired professor from what was Leningrad University. She is said to be something of an expert at identifying potential sources. The archive of a patriot, particularly someone of Anatoly Kuchumov's standing, and a mystery of the calibre of the Amber Room are commodities of immeasurable value. A Soviet hero or legend doesn't die as much as evanesce - partly classified and mostly stolen. Therefore, even before Kuchumov was in the ground, many of those he considered his peers had, no doubt, begun salting away his papers, mementoes of his life and work, in the hope that at some time they could be cashed in.

  Information is hard currency in post-Soviet Russia, a trend bolstered by Russian academics who are able for the first time to comb through the past and Western academics who pay handsomely for exclusive access to history that they crate up and export.

  The professor suggests we meet at Kolobok (The Ginger-Bread Man), a canteen near Sovetskaya 7, where every lunchtime staff pinned into red pinafores serve up thousands of uniform platters of mutton khatlyeta and shuba, small cubes of salty
fish dressed in a coat of beetroot and dill.

  Is there such a thing as a Russian Who's Who, we ask the professor as she munches and we calculate how to reach Kuchumov's contemporaries? 'Very funny,' she says. 'Whose business was it to know who's who? We learned to suppress our curiosity.'

  How should we proceed, we ask?

  'Do nothing,' she says. This weekend our friend will visit her dacha outside St Petersburg, populated by artists and museum curators. She will poke around. See what turns up.

  Do nothing. We walk back to our apartment that straddles the new and old worlds. One half (kitchen and bathroom) has been renovated with pearlescent wallpaper, heated floors and mirror tiles, while the other (bedroom, dining room and living room) is gnarled boards and greasy plaster. A long-forgotten dog leash hangs by the door. A tuneless upright piano with its Empire candelabras stands in the living room. Photographs of another family: children, a picnic, a tryst beside a lake. A cabinet of crystal - belonging to whom? - tinkles as the icy wind in the courtyard plucks at the windows. These are the remnants of people we don't know and yet they live among us, former residents of Sovetskaya 7, spectres that we often sense but never meet, like everything else in our Russian life: Anatoly Kuchumov and his most important charge, the missing Amber Room.

  The phone rings and we rush to it. We have placed it halfway down the hall, stretched to the very end of its cable. This time we manage to whip off the handset. The caller hangs up.

  Lying fitfully in someone else's bed, we wonder if it was the director's office at the Catherine Palace. We will check with them in the morning.

  First light on a winter's day, worn and dreary like hospital laundry. Our fax machine creaks into life: 'Appointment confirmed with Dr Ivan Petrovich Sautov, Director, Catherine Palace, LO a. m. 2 February 2002.' Tomorrow.