She turned once more to her parents’ wedding photo, which was actually one of the last in the album. She felt a chill, looking at her mother and father’s stiff, formal expressions. Had they really participated in an arranged marriage?
No one had ever told her that before. And she’d had no hint of it from their interactions with one another. They had never seemed especially affectionate, but they were cordial at least. They worked well together—most of the time.
Looking back on it, however, it was more like a partnership, a business arrangement, than a passionate romance. Nadia had thought that was just their personalities—neither of her parents were very effusive.
But now she was considering it all differently.
Samara Lebedev and Petya Turgenev, the scions of two wealthy and powerful Bratva families. There was every reason in the world for their parents to push them together.
Nadia bit her lip. Rather like herself and Maxim, actually. They had met and developed feelings for each other all on their own, but there was a certain amount of pressure from his family and hers to make the relationship official. It was what everyone wanted, what everyone expected. She knew that in her parents’ generation, that expectation would have been all the more intense.
Nadia flipped backward through the photo album to see if the previous pictures showed her parents courtship, but the wedding photo was the first and only shot of the two of them together. All the others were pictures of Samara in Moscow—a shot of her dressed in a corduroy skirt and knee socks, laughing and talking on a lawn under an oak tree, with a few other girls at her side and their school bags strewn across the grass next to them. That might have been taken on the university campus, when her mother was at school.
There was a picture of her mother posed on the grand staircase at Nadia’s grandparents’ house. Samara was wearing a formal gown, and she seemed about to attend some sort of party or dance, but with no one else in the frame, it was difficult to tell the occasion.
Other pictures preceded this: Samara blowing out sixteen candles on a massive cake. Samara, tall and slim in her striped swimsuit on a beach that looked like Sochi, with her sister Rashel, (much shorter and plumper), laboring away on a sandcastle in the background. Samara riding a bicycle down a narrow alleyway, which was probably also in Moscow.
Many more of the photographs seemed to have been taken by Samara herself, because they concerned mundane subjects like her bedroom, the library of the Lebedev mansion, and a little gray tabby sitting in a patch of sunlight on a balcony.
Sure enough, when Nadia peeled back the plastic covering to pull this photograph out of the album, she found her mother’s writing on the back, in her cramped, slanted hand:Polina, 1980.This, too, was in Cyrillic, but by now Nadia had spent enough time with the diary that she could at least read the cat’s name.
Nadia flipped through all the photos once more, including a few of her grandparents. There was her grandfather, Stanislav Lebedev, with his carefully trimmed brown beard and mustache, sitting poker-straight in a striped armchair, looking a little bit like Tsar Nicholas. There was her grandmother, Anatalya, working on an oil landscape, streaks of paint all over her hands and even running up her arms. Anatalya had died years earlier, but Stanislav was still alive, living in that same mansion in Moscow. He was bedridden and so senile that apparently he had not understood when he was informed that his daughter had died.
Perhaps Nadia should have been the one to tell him. It had been a long time since she’d been back to Moscow. She had always considered it a dull and oppressive place, compared to the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe. It always seemed ten years behind the times in terms of music and fashion, and fifty years behind the times when it came to stuffy old mafia families and their brutal ways of doing business.
Now she felt a strange desire to visit once more. To see in person the rooms her mother had photographed—the place where Samara lived as a child, a teenager, and a young adult.
Nadia looked at her watch. It was almost midnight. She really should go to bed, if she planned to tackle the Sisyphean task of her mother’s house the following day.
But instead, she finished her tea and went back to the dining room table where she had the diary and her dictionary spread out. If she worked a few more hours, she might finish the first entry.
* * *
4
Nadia
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth
September 28th, 1985
God in heaven, I’ve had the strangest night! Dasha convinced me that I ought to go to the party with her, though I thought it would be a complete bore. I don’t like either of the Sokolov twins, not Yefim, who’s always trying to get girls drunk enough to trap them in a closet with him, or Fanya, who thinks she’s some sort of radical socialist, when she lives in a palace like the rest of us.
To give you an idea of their nonsense, it was a costume party, but you couldn’t just dress up like a gorilla or a rockstar, you were supposed to be “an important historical figure.” Fanya came as Trotsky. She drew on the mustache and everything.
I went as Marie Antoinette just to annoy her. I put so much powder in my hair I was leaving little puffs of white dust all over her mother’s carpets and drapes and chairs. If Fanya is a good little socialist, maybe she’ll help the maid clean it up tomorrow.
Nobody else followed the rules either. They dressed as whatever they liked, and it was a lovely mess of drunken knights and musketeers and angels and devils and princesses and acrobats. Someone came as Darth Vader. It was amazing.
Dozens and dozens of people kept showing up, loads more than were actually invited. Fanya was in a tizzy, trying to lock up the silver and keep everybody down on the lower levels of the house. Yefim didn’t care—he already knew they were in trouble, and he was so blitzed that he was playing darts on a portrait of his own grandfather.
I saw this whole pack of boys stroll in, all dressed as skeletons, with these black and white bone suits, and gruesome skull masks. I was a little tipsy myself, and I was bored of everybody there, just the same old crowd, so I strolled up to them bold as brass and I grabbed one of them by the shoulder and said, “Hey, who are you lot?” as if I owned the place.
He kind of jumped, and said, “I’m Ivan. I’m a student at the State University.”
And I said, just teasing him, “I doubt Yefim invited anybody from the university.”
