Nikolai gave a snort of laughter.
Maxim was almost making it too easy.
An hour later, Leonid texted,He says he’s supposed to meet the girl for dinner.
Nikolai wrote back.Keep him there.
* * *
13
Nadia
Nadia spent the morning working on her translation of the third entry in her mother’s diary. She took a short break around eleven to go down to the kitchen for a makeshift brunch. She was relieved to find that the bread in the pantry seemed relatively fresh, as did the milk in the fridge, and the coffee beans in the grinder. Somebody was bringing in groceries regularly, or else Rashel did occasionally leave the house to do a little shopping.
This morning, Nadia’s aunt was nowhere to be seen—perhaps still sleeping, if she had stayed up in the kitchen even later than Nadia had seen her.
Nadia made herself a little toast with butter and poached a single egg. She had never quite mastered her mother’s trick of swirling the boiling water while dropping in the egg so it could be poached into a near-perfect sphere.
After she had eaten, instead of returning to her room, she made her way to her grandfather’s large library.
It was one of the biggest rooms in the house, lined with ten-foot-tall shelves stuffed with leather-bound books, many of which could only be reached via sliding ladders. It must have been a grand and beautiful space fifty years earlier, when its opulent woodwork wasn’t choked with dust and the leather covers were new and gleaming, instead of cracked and molding.
It took her some time to find the family photo albums, which were tucked away in the back corner of the library—certainly not afforded any pride of place, and almost as if they’d been hidden away.
Some of the albums were extremely old, with pictures from the late 1800s. As Nadia flipped through their pages, she became enthralled by the solemn portraits of long-dead relatives in their elegant clothing.
She saw a lovely young woman with masses of dark curls, wearing a velvet cap with drooping ostrich plumes and an embroidered dress that exposed her round, creamy shoulders. The girl had such a keen and intelligent expression that Nadia was struck by the reality of this person—who had lived in this same city, perhaps even this same house. She had laughed and danced and eaten just as Nadia did every day, only to die and be forgotten as nothing more than an image on a page.
Some of the portraits looked stiff and stern, but others showed rare glimpses of personality, and even intimacy. Nadia saw a picture from 1910 of a young couple seated next to one another on a stone bench, sharing a large illustrated book of birds across both their laps. They smiled as the man pointed to a pheasant.
She hardly recognized any of the names from these early eras, but as she moved into the more recent albums, she found pictures of her great-grandparents, then her grandparents, and finally her mother and aunt.
Nadia noticed that even up through the 1970s, when her mother was a child, most of the photographs were black and white. Maybe in the Soviet era, color film hadn’t been as available as in other places, or maybe the Lebedevs were simply old-fashioned in this, as in so many other things.
She saw her mother riding a pony, probably at the Lebedev country house. Her mother in a little fur coat and matching muff, standing next to a row of stern-looking government personnel in Red Square. Her mother and Aunt Rashel playing with a basket of kittens, in what looked like the kitchen of this very house.
Samara was showing Rashel how to cradle the little kittens gently. Rashel’s face was lit by a joyous expression that seemed hardly imaginable on the aunt of today.
There were so many pictures of the two girls together. As the only two siblings, they must have played together often, even with the five-year age gap. How sad that none of that childhood friendship had endured.
Only in the later albums did all the photographs turn to color. Here Nadia could see her mother become taller, slimmer, and more beautiful by the day. There were fewer pictures of Samara in general, however. And even when she was photographed at family dinners and parties, she often looked away from the camera or stood at the edge of the frame, as if she wanted to be away.
Nadia almost turned right by the next page, until she spotted her mother sitting cross-legged on the floor of what Nadia believed was her grandfather’s study, holding the Faberge eggs.
But Samara was not holding two eggs.
She had three: one in each hand, and another in her lap.
In her hands were the Blue Swan and the Garden of Eden.
And in her lap was the Crimson Heart.
Nadia gave a little gasp of surprise. She picked up the album and held it close to her face to be sure.
There it was, its vivid red and its complicated mechanical clock unmistakable.
Nadia knew her mother had inherited the eggs as a child.
