Unsurprisingly, most of Galina’s decor consisted of potted and hanging plants, which gave the air a fresh, invigorating scent, despite the closeness of the rooms.
The furniture was simple and plain in the extreme. No one would have guessed that Galina had her share of Turgenev wealth. She could have torn down her little house and built a mansion on the spot, if she cared to do it.
Nadia sat down on the low sofa, first moving aside a stack of books to make space for herself.
“Would you like some tea?” Galina asked.
“No, that’s alright,” Nadia said. “Don’t go to any trouble.”
“What about some blackberries? I picked them this morning.”
That, Nadia could not resist.
Galina brought her an earthenware bowl of the deeply hued berries, swimming in cream and granulated sugar. Nadia gulped them down, promising herself she’d go to the gym later.
While she ate, Galina rummaged around in the upper level of the house, presumably looking for the box Nadia’s mother had left behind.
Nadia wondered why Galina had never given it back to Samara, in all the years since she’d lived there. Maybe Galina had offered, and Samara hadn’t bothered to take it. It was probably trash, or old pictures and knick-knacks that Nadia’s unsentimental mother didn’t care to retain.
Galina was gone so long that Nadia wondered if she ought to go help her. She was just on the point of putting down her empty bowl and scaling the narrow staircase when Galina came down at last, carrying a dusty old shoebox.
“I have a photo album too, from that branch of the Turgenevs,” Galina wheezed, out of breath from the stairs.
“Thank you,” Nadia said, trading Galina the shoebox for her empty bowl.
She pulled off the lid, coughing slightly from the thick dust on top of the lid. It was obvious that nobody had opened this box in a very long time. Probably since Samara herself had stowed it in whatever corner of Galina’s house she’d left it.
As Nadia expected, she found a few loose photographs inside: teenaged Samara outside a cinema, with a group of giggling girls. Samara and her sister Rashel sharing an ice-cream sundae. Samara curled up on her bed reading a book. Also, ticket stubs to the ballet—Giselle, October 1985. A couple of pens, their ink long since evaporated. Then a gold signet ring, like the ones the men wore, in Nadia’s family—she slipped it on her right hand, but it was too large for any finger but her thumb. A copy of Chaucer’s verses,in Russian. And then under that, another little book with a plain leather cover.
Nadia opened it up, expecting more poetry.
Instead, she found a notebook full of densely-packed handwriting in Cyrillic. The writing was cramped, tiny, faded. But still she recognized the hand—it was her mother’s.
Galina had come back from the kitchen, having deposited the empty bowl in the sink.
“What’s this?” Nadia asked, holding up the notebook.
“I don’t know,” Galina said, squinting at it. She took it from Nadia’s hands and flipped through the first few pages.
“Looks like a diary,” she said.
“My mother didn’t keep a diary,” Nadia said.
Galina shrugged.
“That’s her box,” she said firmly.
Nadia was quite sure it was her mother’s script, though she’d almost always seen her writing in French, when she wrote by hand at all. But there was something about the firm forward slant of the letters, the shape of certain similar characters, that undoubtedly recalled Samara.
Nadia tried to read the first few sentences. She was so poor at reading the Cyrillic alphabet. She could speak and understand Russian perfectly, but she never wrote or read in anything but French. It would take her a long time to puzzle it out. She’d have to look up some of the words.
She closed the journal and put it back in the box, determined to look at it again later, when she had a dictionary at hand.
“You said you had a photo album too?” Nadia asked.
The box of mementos had sparked her curiosity. It was so unlike her mother to keep ticket stubs. Or at least, the Samara Nadia had known.
“Yes, yes,” Galina said, laboriously getting up from the low sofa so she could rummage around on the bookshelf. She had a number of old albums to choose from. She opened and closed a few, looking for the right one. At last she brought it back to the sofa, handing it to Nadia already opened to a particular spot.
