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By Root 1812 0

he confided in. But the women and men whom he employed as junior curators, like Bolshoi Albina, were not let into his private world. We need to find someone who was of equal or superior standing. We recall the fond cards sent to him and particularly one containing the question, 'Why, my brother, are you lying in bed?' written by Valeria Bilanina, vice-director of Pavlovsk Palace and Kuchumov's deputy. We call Our Friend the Professor and leave a message.

Later that night, she rings back: 'Valeria Bilanina is alive! But she is a recluse.' Nothing in our Russian life is straightforward. 'And she is unwell, about to go into hospital for surgery. She has never allowed anyone into her apartment, but perhaps you can sip tea together in Tsarskoye Selo.'

Curiosity gets the better of Valeria Bilanina. She agrees to meet at a bus stop on a small lane running through Tsarskoye Selo. When we arrive on a crowded marshrutki, the sun is shining but she does not show. We call and someone picks up straight away, as if they were sitting beside the phone. 'It is far too hot to be practising detente in the open air.' It is Bilanina. 'You had better come to the apartment.'

We climb to the second floor of a post-war red-brick block. 'Come in. Very slowly,' Valeria Bilanina rattles, pushing and pulling us along her small hallway. 'Do. Not. Destroy. Deface. Crumple. Scrumple. Anything. Sit. Stand. I don't care.'

The first thing that strikes us about her apartment is that it is so cluttered no one else can sit or stand. Towers of boxes fill every space. We ask her if she knew Kuchumov back in 1949?

'Of course not,' Valeria Bilanina snorts, flinging open a door and diving into a kitchen, from where drifts the smell of browning butter. On the wall is her graduation portrait from fifty years before, and in it she is slim, studious and beautiful. Either side of the photograph are propped drawings of Landseer lions.

Ten minutes later, Valeria Bilanina reappears to brush the living-room table clean. A bust of Catherine the Great sits on the mantelpiece, along with a collection of broken teapots. Glass flowers are propped into jars surrounded by a forest of ribbon and satin roses, every piece of gift-wrap that she has ever received. The apartment block in which she lives was built for the workers of Pushkin to commemorate the centenary of Lenin's birth and Valeria Bilanina arrived in 1970. Before then, she had shared a room in the Catherine Palace's Central Store. I am still waiting for the memorial plaque to go up,' she says only half jokingly. Now, having retired from Pavlovsk, Valeria Bilanina is busy curating her own lengthy life in this small flat. 'My arkhiv. Every one of these' - she sweeps a hand over the cardboard metropolis - 'has a different theme. This, for example.' She hauls out a bundle of yellowed cards. 'These are the evacuation indexes from 1812 and there are twelve books of them.' We wonder why these things are not in a museum. 'And this painting.' We look up at the wall. 'This was a gift from Anatoly Kuchumov. It is by Ivan Bilibin. He found it under a hedgerow and gave it to me. "Keep it," he said. "To remind you.'" Obviously not everything that was recovered after the war went to the Central Stores. 'And this watercolour of Empress Anna Ivanovna was another gift from Kuchumov.'

Valeria Bilanina produces plates of hard-boiled eggs, hanks of fleshy sausage and a pot of steaming kasha, kernels of steeped buckwheat. Even as she eats she talks. How can she help us if she didn't know Kuchumov back in 1949, we ask? Valeria Bilanina seems stunned. Beads of sweat glisten on her darkening face like bubbles breaking on the surface of a steaming bowl of borscht. Her great frame shivers and twitches and we wonder whether to fetch her some water. I got my job the day I left Leningrad University in 1952. But I knew Kuchumov better than anyone. When I first met him he was still wearing the suit given to him by the commission in Moscow in 1946. He was so embarrassed when he realized that he and Tronchinsky were issued identical clothes: tie,