The Amber Room Read online

  We are delighted and nervous. There are so many stories about Dr Sautov's flamboyance in this city that it is just conceivable he started some of them himself. One of his former colleagues, forced out of the Catherine Palace, likes to call him the Tsar. It is said that on his fiftieth birthday he lined the long road to Tsarskoye Selo with pageboys bearing cups of vodka. His colleagues may have been flabbergasted but surely they would also have been awed, which we presume would have been the effect that Sautov wanted to achieve.1

  Attached to our invitation to meet the Director are his credentials: Ivan Petrovich, fifty-five, born into a military family in Tallinn, Estonia, graduate of the prestigious Leningrad Institute of Engineering, where Alexander Kedrinsky's studies were brought to an abrupt halt. For thirteen years Sautov served as head of the State Inspection of Landmark Preservation. In 1987 he was promoted after being unanimously proposed to the post of director of Catherine Palace, at the Tsarskoye Selo. The word 'unanimously' is underlined. He took up his position while Kuchumov was still a senior consultant there, which means that he should know what happened to the great curator's personal papers.

  It is an impressive CV: Winner of a gold National Achievement medal in 1984; awarded the Order of Friendship by President Yeltsin in 1997; presented with the Russian State Federation Award and the Order of St Daniel. 'Dr Sautov's innovative work and everyday heroism is [sic] devoted to the eternal purpose of preserving Russia's culture for future generations,' the CV concludes. What do we have to offer the Tsar?2

  We are not good at doing nothing. We need to think and to plan and after all to celebrate away from the gloom of Sovetskaya 7, out in the satin light of the wintering Gulf of Finland. We take the Nevsko-Vasileostrovskaya Metro, the green line, and thirty minutes later emerge at Primorskaya, where apartments pile on top of one another. Navy veterans in ragged blue-and-white-striped sweaters dive into the gutters as if they are swallows at dusk trapping flies. Couples roll in and out of each other's arms, waltzing in Primorskaya's frozen fug of alcohol. Beyond, we can finally smell the wide-open Baltic blasted by gulf winds that are as sharp as cut glass.

  As the last daylight slips away, an umbilicus of lights reaches around the sandy coast inside hundreds of plastic marquees and faux-wood izbas. Outside, the shallows begin to freeze. Some girls beckon us over. 'Come on, drink, our friend is pregnant.' Plastic cups are pressed into our hands at this improvised baby shower, all of us toasting in Baltika beer the good fortune that has brought strangers together to get drunk by the sea. We are pulled into an izba where a boy plays the squeeze-box and we all sing along to songs that we have never heard before. 'Dance, Andre, dance,' the darker-haired girl cries, spinning faster and faster.

  The beer is replaced with Russki Standard vodka so we can seriously celebrate the conception of a child whose parents we have yet to meet. One measure of vodka, the Russians believe, is medicinal. The second is sweet but slightly vulgar, passing the time before the decisive third shot, the no-going-back slug that unlocks lust and buries sobriety in a deep trench. And soon enough we can taste nothing but the air that we are gulping and all we can see is the cabin door opening and all we can smell is the Baltic and all we can feel is the gritty Russian sand.

  The Catherine Palace is muffled by snow as our marshrutki pulls up. We jump down from the shared minibus-taxi and into the soft, white powder, away from our brooding fellow passengers, who have been staring at our drawn faces as if we are the dead. The metro trip to the marshrutki stop at the end of Moskovsky Prospekt was equally appalling, pickled in a gaseous train carriage of early-morning boozers, the whole journey spent crushed against an advertisement for Molotov Cocktails ('a revolutionary new bottled drink') while four pickpockets from Mongolia clumsily fumbled at our bags.

  We cannot face Dr Sautov yet and so at the public entrance to the Catherine Palace, we pay our roubles, slip tapochkis - cobalt-blue plastic-bag slippers - over our snow-damp shoes and follow the crowds up the Monighetti staircase, past Brodzsky's marble Sleeping Cupid and through the gilded doors, salon opening on to salon until we reach what resembles a half-finished stage set, one side alight with candelabras, gilded cherubs and a mosaic of amber lozenges and the other, bare plyboard, stepladders and plastic sheeting. Packs of tour groups file through, gasping - French, German and Russian: 'La chambre d'ambre 'Bernsteinzimmef and 'Yantarny komnata Dr Sautov's craftsmen are constructing a replica of the Amber Room and even though it is difficult to see Andreas Schliiter's vision in this building site yet, it enthrals in any language.

  We feel better and head for the staff department. Outside Dr Sautov's office a group of naval officers is bidding him farewell with bear hugs and cheek kisses, the brims of their hats rising like sails. Ushered into the Director's office, we stand to attention before an expanse of polished wood. Dr Sautov can see that we can see the line of photographs of him taken with Presidents Putin and Clinton and Queen Elizabeth II.

  The Director wears a glossy Italian suit. His fountain pen, with which he now tap-tap-taps on his desk, has an amber clasp. Behind his huge face, with its well-tended salt-and-pepper moustache, is a drawing, the same plan for an imperial Prussian study that we saw in Kedrinsky's office and that we now know is Andreas Schliiter's eighteenth-century blueprint for the original amber chamber. A smiling woman in her sixties sits at the other end of the office with a pansticked face framed by a 'Zsa Zsa' of platinum hair.

  'Welcome to the Catherine Palace,' Dr Sautov intones. 'May I introduce Larissa Bardovskaya, our head curator?'

  Bardovskaya. The woman whom Kedrinsky mentioned. Someone he evidently feared. How much do Bardovskaya and the Director know about our unauthorized meeting with Kedrinsky? The Director tap-tap- taps with his amber-clasped pen on the desk again, calling the room to order.

  We launch our introductory speech - a rickety vessel that takes on a little water: no one is better placed to help us learn about Anatoly Kuchumov and the Amber Room than Dr Sautov, the book we intend to write will be a wonderful platform for his museum. Sautov interrupts with a speech of his own. 'Understanding amber is the key to everything,' he says. Tap-tap-tap with that pen on his pate. His fuggish study is beginning to send us to sleep. 'The prehistoric residue carries a small static charge and that is why in Russia we use amber for therapies. Every year I go to Svetlogorsk and take off all my clothes to roll in Baltic amber.'

  We stifle an urge to laugh at the thought of his fleshy body rolling around in granulated amber and distract ourselves by thinking of dour Svetlogorsk. During Soviet times party officials built palatial dachas here, a seaside town on the Samland Peninsula, at the source of the Gold of the North. They would arrive by the shores of the Baltic in fleets of blacked-out Zil sedans to imbibe tea while their mistresses rubbed them down with amber resin.

  Dr Sautov nods at Bardovskaya and then says to her, 'What is it that they want from me?' We notice for the first time his huge hands, like baseball mitts, clasped upon his desk. 'What experience do they have? What is their specialism?' He turns to us. 'Have you ever worked with museum staff before? Do you understand the nature of archives?'

  All of these are apposite questions although the tone of the meeting is noticeably chilly. We perform a brief resume. Reasonable people. Can take instruction. Will cooperate.

  Tap-tappity-tap with the amber-clasped pen. I don't think we understand each other,' Dr Sautov says, sipping his tea.

  Poached in vodka on the Gulf of Finland, parched in this humid study, we too would love a glass of tea, but we press on with our dry lips cracking, explaining about this book.

  The Director bangs his fists on the table in irritation and Bardovskaya intervenes: 'What information do you require?'

  Has the vodka made us foolish? We don't know what we want until we know what he has.

  Bardovskaya leans towards us: 'What does the Catherine Palace get?'

  Sautov booms, 'Ours is not a charitable enterprise. Why should you make money from what we know? Precious knowledge. Expen
sive knowledge., There will have to be a contract.'

  Bardovskaya has been doodling a clutch of 2s on her notepad and now interrupts: 'The second day of the second month in the second year of a new millennium is a very unlucky day for making deals.'

  The Director ignores her. 'A binding legal document. I am used to dealing with things in a professional manner.'

  Bardovskaya draws closer. 'Everyone has to sign a contract. Steven Spielberg signed and paid half a million to hire the mirrored ballroom. True. Elton John threw a party and he signed for 250,000 dollars. It doesn't have to be money.' She smiles. 'A film crew from Hollywood provided the staff department with air conditioning units. One publisher donated L,OOO free copies of its book. The whole world deals with us. Anyone with information comes here, to Dr Sautov, and so we know better than anyone the cost of trying to find the Amber Room,' Bardovskaya says, pulling a buff envelope out of her handbag.

  She flourishes pages on which are collages of black-bordered memorial cards, photographs, identity cards, all of them with RIP scrawled across. And on one page are grainy photographs of crime scenes, houses recently ripped apart by gas explosions, car crashes, a body lying under fallen beech leaves.

  Are these incidents related to the search for the Amber Room, we ask?

  'It is confidential material,' she snaps, putting the papers back into her handbag. 'It was posted to us from Berlin after we held an exhibition there: Mythos Bernsteinzimmer, and is not for publication.'

  Director Sautov leans over his desk and whispers, I will get forty heads of state here, in May 2003.' He flexes his huge hands and we nod even though we have no idea what he is talking about. 'And I will lead them into my newly restored Amber Room. Have you seen it? It's your last chance.' He stands up to walk an idea around the humid office. 'I intend to cover up the half-built reconstruction until it is ready. Yes, cover it up in, let us say, in a couple of days' time.' Bardovskaya nods vigorously. 'And then in May 2003, on the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of our great city, I will throw back the curtains and show the world the miracle we have re-created. Can you see it?' We are afraid we can, and it doesn't bode well for our book. 'We have a master architect who has studied the old ways, a veteran who has learned how the original chamber was pieced together. But of course you know that as you have talked to Alexander Kedrinsky already.' So they know about our meeting.

  Sautov continues: 'Alexander Kedrinsky is writing a special catalogue about our tragic loss and the Great Task. How we have put the pieces back together again. And obviously you are writing just another book and it should not, cannot, compete with ours.' The Director is now standing at his desk and someone has opened the office door from the outside.

  But just as we fear that Sautov has decided against helping us, the Director changes his tone. 'Fax me today with what you want and Bardovskaya will calculate what what you want is worth.'

  But we still do not know what your archive possesses, we say.

  Bardovskaya grins. 'Make a deal,' she squawks. 'We'll work out a contract. Everybody has to pay. Isn't that so? Only nothing comes from nothing. An old English proverb, I believe.'

  The Director has his 'farewell' smile fixed in place. 'Fax me,' he says. 'A member of staff will have to be appointed to supervise your work.' And the closing door muffles these last words as all the while we have been seamlessly manoeuvred backwards into the antechamber.

  A whistle-stop tour has been arranged for us of the Director's amber workshop and we are pointed at an unmarked iron door, only ten paces through the snow from his office. Inside is a furnace of activity, with fifty-two workmen, former miners, stonecutters and welders, feverishly drilling, sanding and buffing, filling the air with a sweet-tasting powder. 'Dobry.' A podgy hand wiped on an overall is proffered. Boris Igdalov, head of the amber workshop, introduces himself and from the tone of his voice it is evident that we are not the first foreigners to be handed on to him.

  Wearily Igdalov begins his routine. 'Reconstructing the Amber Room is a lifetime's work.' He mops his brow with a rag. 'Almost twenty years and it's still not finished.' He guides us through the workshop. 'We boil the amber in different oils.' Pots bubble and flasks steam. 'The amber can be subtly infused with herbs, grasses and even cherry stones. But,' he says, pulling us into another room, 'all of them are trade secrets.'

  The amber workshop at the Catherine Palace

  He stops beside a man slotting slivers of amber into a tray, who looks up and laughs when he sees that yet more guests have been foisted on to his patient boss. I was a military shipyard foreman before glasnost,' the craftsman chimes, having been coached on foreigners' expectations. 'From party man to artisan.'

  Boris Igdalov marches on and we enter the raw amber store, which is filled with muddy-looking pebbles and barley-sugar hunks. 'All of it comes from Kaliningrad.' The reconstruction will absorb six tons of Baltic amber. 'Most of it was confiscated from foreign traders. We can't afford to buy it. In 1997 Viktor Chernomyrdin [then Russia's Prime Minister] gave us several tons and more recently the customs authority in Kaliningrad gave us more, taken from a Japanese businessman.' Igdalov marches to his office and continues the lecture on the move. 'Still not enough.'

  We are now in a draughty hallway.

  'In 1999 we ground to a halt and if it had not been for a German company, Ruhrgas AG, who agreed to sponsor us, then our new Amber Room would never be finished,' he says, once again offering us his hand after wiping it on his overalls. We have arrived back at the heavy iron door and are once again out in the snow.

  Although barely perceptible, there is a small chink opening at the Catherine Palace. That evening, we fax a comprehensive list detailing the research we are eager to begin. We have hazarded a guess at what might be in the Catherine Palace archive.

  Later, Our Friend the Professor calls, but she is strangely quiet as we regale her with stories of how we charmed Dr Sautov into considering our requests.

  I too am happy,' she says finally, in a clipped voice. Her weekend at the dacha has flushed out one of Kuchumov's contemporaries who knew him intimately but did not achieve his greatness. We have to come now, she says. He is an old man.

  Ozerki - the penultimate stop on the Moskovsko-Petrogradskaya line, on the wafer-thin edge of the city. By the time we emerge from the metro, darkness has once again rolled over St Petersburg. There is fresh snow on the ground and it bathes the suburb in a cool blue light. We soon find the apartment, a concrete block from the 1970S containing small hutches that tenants have humanized with varnished spruce front doors. Up eight flights, we press a bell that tolls 'The Volga Boatmen'. The door opens just enough for a pair of glacial eyes to peep out. A face then creases into a broad smile. 'Welcome, welcome. Please.' He points inside to a large reed mat upon which stand his grey felt snow boots and several pairs of slippers. I am Vladimir Telemakov.' A petrol-blue tie, a navy V-neck, beneath a crumpled nylon suit jacket. He has dressed for the occasion. We wish we had too.

  There is sweet tea and black bread. A large folder sits on his desk. There are herrings and pickled mushrooms. He picked them in the summer from the pine forests beside Lake Ladoga. He places his hands around the pastel-green file. There is small thimble of sweet Georgian wine that he has been saving for many, many months. 'You know, I am a journalist too,' he says, strumming the elastic that binds his papers together. We tell him that we know absolutely nothing.

  Telemakov is lean. Everything about him is spare. His clothing and his sentences. His complexion suggests moderation. He tells us he graduated in journalism from the elite Leningrad University as a star student at the age of twenty-two. The state sent their prodigy to Sakhalin Island. Where's that, we ask? I too had no idea.' He pulls out a map and draws his finger as far to the east as it can go across a great pink atlas of the Soviet Union until we are almost in Sapporo, Japan. Sakhalin was the wild new frontier, a former tsarist penal colony where Anton Chekhov came to research a book on the life of a convict, a distant land between
the Tatar Strait and the Sea of Okhotsk that took ten days to reach by ship, bus and plane. 'For three years I reported in Sakhalin City. Not much news.' It was, though, an evocative location for those who wished to affirm the sheer breadth of their Motherland.

  Vladimir Telemakov

  'And then finally I got a telegram.' Telemakov was recalled to Leningrad. He hoped for a national bureau posting, maybe Pravda or Izvestiya. T was posted to a workers' newspaper published by a factory that made car parts. There I stayed for thirty-three years. It could have been worse. As the Poles are fond of saying, when I sank to the very bottom, someone knocked from below.'

  Telemakov worked diligently, but on Sundays he satisfied his real passion by catching a train from Vitebsk Station to the palaces of Pavlovsk and Pushkin, as Tsarskoye Selo was renamed in 1937. 'One day I caught sight of a man in the carriage. Slightly stout. Round glasses. His jacket frayed. A fountain pen in his breast pocket. He was reading and so I introduced myself. Told him I wanted to write about art. Everyone knew Anatoly Kuchumov. I was afraid that such an important man would not talk to me. But I told him I wanted better things than the car plant and he said I could join him on his journeys . If I could find the time. We would talk about art and the Great Patriotic War.'

  Each Sunday, the journalist for the car workers' daily stole a few hours, hopping on the train to Pushkin at dawn, talking to Kuchumov about the Leningrad palaces. 'And cautiously, Kuchumov began to open up. Eventually, after many months, he talked to me about important things. He was flattered by my interest in him, I think. He started to relax and even lent me documents to study. Some were official reports. Others were letters sent to him during the war. Over eight years he acted as a referee, recommending me to others, museum workers, and I made notes from their diaries and their correspondence too. I made copies of everything. I was meticulous. Kuchumov knew what I was doing. He rather liked the idea of having a biographer... And of course I could be trusted. I was one of them.'