Russian Winter (16 page)

Now a loud coughing comes from the other side of the plywood door. It is the first time Nina has heard any sound from there, and she realizes that in all the times she has visited this apartment, late
at night, she has managed to forget, in a way, that Viktor’s mother really does live here.

The coughing is violent, a choking sound. Nina puts down her tea. The sound continues, and becomes worse, and then, all of a sudden, stops.

Nina looks slowly, fearfully, toward the plywood door. “Are you all right in there?”

No response.

Nina waits, then stands and walks over to the door, leans her ear against it. She listens, but all she hears is her own heart, pounding. She turns to go find Viktor in the hall—but what if there’s no time for that? She pictures Viktor returning, opening his mother’s door and finding—what? Something awful could have happened.

She knocks on the door.

Nothing.

She remembers, then, with hope, that his mother is hard of hearing.
Willfully deaf
. She knocks as loudly as possible.

“Yes?”

Nina’s heart relaxes slightly, as the coughing sound begins and stops again. When she pushes the door slowly open, an odor escapes. She looks in.

Sitting in an armchair in front of the window, so that the sun lights her from behind, is a woman in a long dark dress. Billow of satin, all the way to her ankles. The sun makes her no more than a dark shadow, but as Nina’s eyes adjust, she sees that the woman’s hair is piled into a thick bun atop her head, and that her dress is a deep blue color, and her shoes of scuffed suede.

And then Nina screams.

Crawling up over the woman’s shoe is a small rat. But no, it isn’t a rat, Nina sees now, as her eyes become accustomed to the sunshine and the dark. It is a bird, squawking back at her scream, with bright green and white feathers, and short wings flecked with blue.

“I wanted to make sure you were all right,” Nina says, loudly. The bird, in what seems very unbirdlike behavior, has begun climbing up onto the billowy skirt. It uses its beak to pull itself up, and the nails of its claws seem to catch, slightly, in the fabric. As Nina’s eyes acclimate, she sees that the dress is covered with pulls.

Now a voice comes, slow, wary. “You’re not Lilya.”

“I’m…Viktor must have told you—”

“Your Excellency!”

“He must have told your…excellency—”

“I am Madame Ekaterina Petrovna Elsin, wife of His Excellency Aleksey Nicolaiovich Elsin.” Her tone is proud, offended. “
S’il vous plaît
.” Nina can hear the phlegm caught in the old woman’s chest. The bird has pulled itself up over her knee, continues toward her chest. And now another fit of coughing begins.

As the old woman struggles, Nina hurries to her, to knock on her back a few times—not too hard, in case her bones are frail. Soon the coughs come more loosely. The sound of phlegm caught there. But as the coughing subsides, the woman takes a deep, rheumy breath and then, more loudly than Nina would have thought her able, says, “You are NOT to touch my hair!”

“I didn’t—”

“
S’il vous plaît!
” squawks the bird, wings flapping, still attached to the woman’s plump satin bosom.

“No one touches my hair!”

Nina steps back. “I only wanted—” But she suspects no explanation will do. “I’m very sorry…Madame. I’ll leave you, then.”

She steps away from this woman sitting mountainlike in her chair, framed by dust-faded curtains. The bird clamors on as the woman coughs again, less violently, and Nina can’t help but take one more look before she closes the door. The bird sits quietly now, on the woman’s shoulder, leaning its head toward her, as if to better hear what she has to say.

Minutes later Viktor is back. When Nina tells him about the incident, he simply says not to worry. “It’s just the way she is. The coughing will go away. I’m sorry your first meeting had to happen like this.”

Nina frowns, raises her eyebrows. “She was disappointed to find that I wasn’t…Lilya.”

“Oh, now, don’t worry about
that
.” Laughing in a fatigued way, he tries to joke: “My mother always falls for those Leningrad girls.”

Nina turns her head away—but she can no longer avoid the more looming question. Her voice is almost a whisper as she tells Viktor, “She said to call her Your Excellency.”

Viktor closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them, he looks at Nina with a seriousness she hasn’t seen before, not even when he asked her to marry him. “Since you’re to be my wife, it’s time you knew the full truth. My father was in the Imperial Guard.”

Nina feels herself giving a small nod, as if she might have known already.

“He was an admiral,” Viktor continues, his voice low, “in the Imperial Fleet. And my mother’s father was a prominent banker. As was her brother. Both of them were shot in the first days of the Revolution. Then my father was killed, not long after my mother learned she was expecting.”

Nina watches Viktor’s face, wondering who else knows all this. Firmly, but just as quietly, she says, “It’s not your fault who your parents were.”

Viktor bows his head before looking up again. “My mother was nearly forty when she found herself pregnant with me. There she was, in a delicate condition, her loved ones either killed or fleeing. Nearly everyone she knew left.”

“Why didn’t she?”

“She’s a stubborn woman, as you’ll no doubt see for yourself. I’m not sure she fully believed what was happening. In a way she
still doesn’t. It’s only because of one of the family servants, in fact, that she survived. This housekeeper had been with her family for decades, and had known my mother since she was born. Such loyalty. She took pity on my mother and hid her—along with my grandmother and my aunt—in an
isba
in the woods. It’s where I was born. That’s why I call the woods my real home. We only spent a year or so there, but that world is in my veins. In part it’s because of my grandmother. She’s the one who raised me. She had to, because my mother didn’t know how. She had always been waited on, you see. The shock of losing her husband, right when she learned she was pregnant—it was too much for her. In a way she never recovered.”

“But your grandmother did?”

“She was very different in constitution. She tried to make the best of things—by caring for me, I suppose.”

“And your aunt?”

“Sonia. She managed the transition as best she could. She found work as a translator, from French and English. Both she and my mother were fluent in both. It was Sonia’s salary we lived off—meagerly, of course, compared to how they had been raised.” Viktor takes a long breath. He looks relieved to be telling the truth, and Nina understands what a burden it must be to have to hide the most basic facts about his family. The same way that Nina knows not to mention her uncle in prison. Only with Viktor it’s everything, all that precedes him. Why, he could be arrested for “concealing social origins.” People are sent to prison for that. It occurs to Nina that perhaps Viktor is hiding his mother, as much as caring for her, by keeping her behind that plywood door.

“What happened after you left the
isba
?”

“At first we were able to go back to the family home. There were other families living there, of course. We were pushed back into what had been the maid’s quarters, and—” He stops, and Nina can see
that the memory pains him. “We lived there until I was twelve. I’ve tried to explain to her—” But he doesn’t continue.

“And when you were twelve, you moved again?”

“We were evicted, to make room for some government workers. But my aunt found us a room in the city.”

“What happened to her? Your aunt.”

A long sigh. “I miss her terribly. She’s the one that put food in our mouths all those years. She died ten years ago, of pneumonia.”

Nina recalls something. “You told me your mother was a teacher. Of languages.”

“She ought to have been. Or she could have worked as a translator, like my aunt. She was raised by a French governess, and was tutored in English from the time she could talk. But she…” Viktor moves his hand slightly as if to indicate that it no longer matters. “You have to understand, she has always seen herself as a member of a superior class; it’s how she was raised. That’s why she asked you to address her that way. It’s still her identity. Even now.”

Nina tries to accept this. “Her dress, it’s…” Nina is about to say ruined, but instead she says, “old.”

“Until the age of forty she was surrounded by wealth,” Viktor says. “It’s hard for us to understand what it must have been like—to go from that to living communally. She’d had such an easy life. When everything was equalized, well…She doesn’t understand why her world had to change.” He takes Nina’s hand, clasps it. “Please have pity on her. She never has adjusted to life as we know it.”

“You’re very protective of her.” Hearing how this sounds, she adds, “It’s good of you.” After all, she too will soon be living with this woman.

But first, she and Her Excellency—or Madame, as Nina decides to call her—have a proper introduction. This time she has changed into a fresh dress, of slightly torn lace, the hem reaching
the floor. She stands regally, if somewhat weakly, as Viktor pulls out a chair for her at the wooden table. “Thank you, dear.” Mouth a frown, eyes sunken, scrutinizing Nina, who bows her head slightly. With Viktor, she and Madame sip tea and eat sticky pastries from a bakery.

“I always hide the silver,” Madame tells her. “Thieves all around—the Armenians especially. Next door. Took every one of our forks. I found them, luckily. Otherwise we would be eating with our hands.”

Viktor gives Nina a covert shake of his head, and Nina looks down at her fork, doubtful that it is of real silver. She focuses on her little tartlet, the pastry crumbling in her mouth.

“I saw their room,” Madame continues. “Full of
our
furniture. The big standing mirror my father gave my mother. Oh, they might tell you it’s all gone, that there’s nothing left. Even the piano.”

Nina doesn’t know how to respond to this. “Do you—did you—play?”

Madame cocks her ear, and Viktor repeats the question for her.

“It was said I could be a concert pianist if I chose,” Madame says. “But the real talent was Sonia. My sister. She sang like a nightingale. That is probably why people thought I played so well. They were fooled by Sonia’s beautiful voice.” A loud squawking comes from her room. “Lola too has a lovely voice—when she wants to.”

“What kind of bird is it?”

“The annoying kind!” Viktor says, laughing.

“A macaw,” Madame tells her. “All the way from South America. A gift from my husband.”

This confuses Nina. “But—then it must be very old.”

“Thirty-two years old,” Viktor says, to Nina’s astonishment. “Older than me. Still goes by the Julian calendar, just like my dear mother.” He makes a joking face. “Don’t ask me how the thing survives.”

“Such birds have a life span of seventy years,” Madame says proudly, and Nina finds herself glancing at Viktor, waiting for another dismissive shake of the head. But he does nothing; apparently it’s the truth. Seventy years. So few people ever live that long.

“Like me,” Madame continues. “
We
are from good lineage, you see.” Her tone implies that Nina isn’t. Well, Viktor did say to try to imagine what it was like for his mother, having to shift from one world to another, practically overnight.

Madame says, “Lola will always be by my side. That is what my dear husband told me when he gave her to me.”

“In that case you’ll have to live to be a hundred and ten,” Viktor says.

“I won’t die until I meet my grandchildren. That is what my dear father used to say to me: I won’t leave this world until I’ve met my grandson.”

Viktor helps himself to a tart, seemingly unhurt by the insinuation—that it was his own fault somehow, that he arrived too late.

“G
RIGORI
S
OLODIN IS
here for you.”

Ellen, the receptionist, made her announcement the moment Drew stepped in the door. “He’s up having a look around the gallery, but he wanted to talk to you.”

“Just give me a sec to thaw out, and you can send him in.” In her office she warmed her fingertips in her palms and curled her toes until the tingly feeling went away.

A soft rap on the wall beside her open door. “Miss Brooks, I hope I’m not interrupting you.”

“I was just on my break, actually. Please have a seat.”

He entered somehow humbly, though he was a striking man, tall and broad-shouldered, with an appealing face. As he fit himself into the chair, he brought with him a faint cigarette scent, not ashy-dirty
but the mellow, almost sweet, aroma of tobacco. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said, slightly awkwardly, “and thought I’d check in. I’m wondering if there’s been any progress in finding out more about the amber.”

“There’s apparently some sort of backlog at the lab,” Drew told him, hoping to hide her frustration at the unnecessary delay. She too wanted to finalize things, for the catalog as well as publicity purposes. And though the entomologist had been able to name nearly all of the inclusions in the amber set, for the pendant he had only a JPEG and couldn’t confirm anything before seeing it in person. All Drew said now, though, was, “Nothing to worry about. We should have the test results by the end of the week. Again, it’s simply pro forma.”

Grigori Solodin did not look convinced.

“But I’ve been meaning to contact you, actually. I’ve started work on the supplemental, and I wonder if you might have any information for it.”

“Supplemental?”

“The supplemental brochure, for the pre-auction dinner. A collector’s edition type of thing, in addition to the photos and biographical notes we’ll include in the catalog. You see, for auctions of note we sometimes hold private events, and I’m creating an additional brochure, with some less official, more personal, information. I’d love to have something about the amber. Well, about all the jewels, but in your case, if you have any supplemental information…” Grigori Solodin looked down at the floor, and Drew felt she had somehow said something wrong. “I’ve already asked Nina Revskaya to provide any background she might have, about the people who gave them to her, or what outfits she wore them with. Even just memories of how they were purchased or passed down.”