The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [26]
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