The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [55]
Kuchumov and Tronchinsky were so on edge on the first night that, rather than resting in the city's only hotel, they walked two miles in the freezing dark to the ruins of the castle. Early the next morning they were back again, taking photographs of locations and masonry, plotting their approach like detectives at the scene of a crime.
They could not resist taking a few pictures for themselves, two men standing like mice before the forbidding hulk of the castle's blasted Albrecht Gate. Kuchumov pasted them into an album of black cartridge paper and wrote captions in chalk. This book, which has found its way into the literature archive, has been opened so infrequently that the tracing paper dividers are still pristine, as if the album had just been bought at the stationery counter of the Dom Knigi bookshop on Nevsky Prospekt. We gently turn the pages but we are not allowed to photograph it.8
Two beaming men in heavy tweed trench coats and worn leather shoes, their socks rolled over their trousers, Tronchinsky in a black beret, Kuchumov wearing a pork pie hat, both of them overshadowed by the mountains of rubble that they would soon have to clear. In another frame they sit by the remains of the Knights' Hall, serious, composed, Kuchumov carrying a small leather attache case. And in a third and a fourth, both men pose awkwardly before unrecognizable heaps of bricks that rise up far above their heads. In all of the pictures the two men wear identical suits, given to them in Moscow to make them inconspicuous. Two grown men in a post-war hell-hole, walking everywhere like shelled peas, their unnaturally pressed suits and white shirts contrasting with their undertaker's ties.
Dear Katya, We are here in Konigsberg for the third day. One and a half days have been taken up with bureaucracy. We found the grave of Immanuel Kant, remaining miraculously intact among absolute ruin, and visited a house where Richard Wagner had once stayed. We have now been allowed into the ruined castle. We begin to search through the rubble.9
Several documents in our file are informal letters like this one, written by Stanislav Tronchinsky, who, despite being on a covert mission, obviously kept no secrets from his wife. Every three days he had sent an extraordinary missive to Katya in Leningrad, a fact that Kuchumov only learned of in the 1960S when Tronchinsky's widow gave the letters to him to assist in the research of his book about the Amber Room. The ambiguity and innuendo in them suggests that Tronchinsky was aware that a censor would read them, but he was presumably senior enough within the party not to be afraid of recriminations.
Kuchumov wrote no such letters to his wife, Anna Mikhailovna. He confided only to his diary. Kuchumov is emerging as dogged and patriotic, putting to one side his personal life, while conducting the business of the state. Everything he typed went straight to the Ministry of Culture in Moscow, pages of reports, the carbon copies of which are here in these files.10
'First, we have made a detailed inspection of the castle cellars and tunnels that lead out of its precincts,' he wrote. We can imagine Kuchumov at his hotel dressing table, squinting in the candlelight as everyone else slumbered. Wearing his Moscow-issue black suit, his fleshy body pressing at its seams, the itchy woollen fabric taking on a sheen having wriggled with the curator over broken beams and masonry. Kuchumov stabbed at the typewriter keys, making frequent mistakes, which he hatched over with Xs.
The underground passageways were numerous and beguiling, Kuchumov noted. 'Many of them were flooded and all of them were dangerous.' Some had even been sabotaged, the water electrified or