The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [27]
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.'
One of them? Before we can ask what he means, Telemakov reaches into the green file before him and produces a thick bundle of paper. 'I wanted to publish this as a book, a tribute to Anatoly Mikhailovich. But for three decades I have been unable to.' He opens the folder hesitantly. 'Some of it is in English,' he says. 'The kind of English spoken by spies. The only people who could speak your language were the KGB. Its office at the car factory was curious about my endeavours concerning one of the city's most famous curators. So I took the manuscript to them.' He pushes the papers back into the file.
Can we see it?
Telemakov rises shakily from his seat and begins to pack up. 'It's my work. I want to publish it.' He sees the look of disappointment on our faces. 'But then again you are fellow journalists. Maybe. Can you help me? If you can, I will help you. Take these papers. Go. But come round again when you have got to the end. Please come. And help me.'
We take Telemakov's pages and head for Sovetskaya 7. Doing as the Russians do, we shunt everyone out the way in the scrum that greets the opening metro door, and dash for a space on the turquoise plastic benches. Up the escalator at Ploshchad Vosstania, plucking the elastic binding. Down Grechesky Prospekt and towards the Baltic hot bread shop in the right-angled speed-skating posture that all citizens assume to avoid being upended on the iced pavement.
At last we are at our pine breakfast table, reading. The manuscript begins with a dedication to Telemakov written by Professor Boris Piotrovsky, the director of St Petersburg's State Hermitage museum and today the most powerful cultural figure in Russia. I am sure that anyone taking this manuscript in their hands will read from the beginning to the end with great interest... [Telemakov] uses archives, literature and Kuchumov's own words and truthful diary records to tell a brilliant story about the self-sacrifice of our museum workers who risked their lives to save our treasures.'3
We turn a page and before us is an extract from the great curator's diary that picks up where Alexander Kedrinsky left off: 30 June 1941 - Anatoly Kuchumov is on the treasure train from Leningrad.
We have come to a halt. Hours of waiting in the snow. Exposed to attack from above and each side. But nothing