The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [20]
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