He laughed and admitted they were just party crashers.
So, I said, “No worries, I’ll show you where they hide all the best liquor.”
We broke into the twins’ father’s cabinet and I passed out the best bottles to all his mates. I thought Ivan would run off with the rest of them, but instead he said, “You want to go have a smoke?”
I said, “I hate smoking.”
But he said, “Come with me anyway,” so I showed him where we could get up on the roof.
We climbed up on the shingles, which was none too easy in my Marie Antoinette dress, but I kicked off the heels and scrambled up alright, just tearing the skirt a little.
Ivan got up beside me, and I started asking him about his classes at the university. He said he was studying economics, and I said I was doing literature, but only so I could get my law degree later.
He laughed and said, “What do you need a law degree for, you’re as rich as the rest of them,” meaning all the kids downstairs.
And I said, “How do you know?”
And he said, “Look at that costume, it probably cost ten thousand rubles and you don’t give a damn what happens to it.”
I laughed and said, “I don’t give a damn what happens to anything.”
Then we started talking about this and that, and before I knew it, we’d been talking for hours, and it was getting freezing cold and windy up on the roof. So he put his arms around my shoulders, and I realized that even though we’d been talking so long, I hadn’t even seen his face, because of the mask.
So I said, “Take that off,” and he sort of hesitated, like he was afraid I wouldn’t like him so much once I saw what he looked like. But he pushed it up on his head. I saw that actually he was very handsome, more than I expected, though I’d guessed it a little bit from how nice his voice was.
I noticed that he hadn’t smoked at all, all the time we’d been up there, so I was pretty sure he wanted me to kiss him.
And sure enough, he leaned forward and kissed me. His mouth seemed so warm, compared to how cold it was outside. He kissed me so long, with his hands pushed into my hair, that his hands came out all powdery, and we laughed at the mess all over his skeleton suit when he tried to wipe them off.
I said, “I better go, or Dasha will think I’m sick somewhere.” He helped me climb down to the study again. I thought he’d ask for my number to ring my house, but he didn’t for some reason.
I was a little disappointed, but I didn’t let him see it, I just said, “Thanks for the smoke!”
And that was the end of it. He left right after, with all his friends.
I had to sneak Dasha back to my place, so her parents wouldn’t see her sick as a dog and vomiting all over the lawn.
Nadia finished reading over what she’d transcribed, both amazed and enthralled.
Who on earth was this wild young woman, who was rude and carefree and utterly disdainful of rules and proper behavior?
And who in the fuck was Ivan?
The date on the journal entry was September 1985, only seven months before Samara and Petya’s wedding date.
Of course, Nadia knew her mother had probably kissed lots of people before she married her father.
But it still gave her a strange feeling, reading about this former life that was so different from anything Nadia had known about her mother.
It was one thing to see pictures of a twenty-year-old Samara, and quite another to hear her youthful, insouciant voice coming off the page.
Nadia closed up the journal for the moment, eager to translate the next entry, but having already committed herself to another task that day.
She found that she no longer had the same sense of dread about driving up to her mother’s house. Somehow, reading the journal had soothed her. It made her feel like Samara was not entirely gone. And instead of dreading seeing her clothes, her books, her belongings, Nadia was almost looking forward to it.
So she got her little Spider out of the garage once more, and drove over to Trocadero, in the 16th arrondissement.
Samara owned a gorgeous old 17th-century townhouse with a view of the Seine, on a quiet street of heavily-sloped roofs, wrought-iron balconies, and high garden walls, protecting the privacy of the wealthy residents.
