“It’s time for us to go.” She stands up from my bed with a twinkle of jewels, and that’s when I see that she isn’t just wearing her prized diamond necklace. Her strand of pearls, another ruby pendant, her St. George medallion, an emerald and gold bracelet, her Swiss watch … Her thick wool coat bulges with several layers of sweaters and blouses, and little round circles along its hem hint at kopecks tucked into the lining.
I struggle to sit up. My muscles aren’t yet working, and my synapses are firing as if through tar. Outside my bedroom window, the night is still thick with indigo. “Where are we going?”
“I’ve already packed your things. Come on, Zhenya’s waiting for us in the car.”
“What about Papa?” I ask. My feet thud against my heavy winter boots at the side of my bed. Mama holds out a woolen dress and tights for me.
“Your father has already left. He won’t be going with us.” Her words catch as she says it, like someone tugs on them with a bit of string. “He’ll be looking elsewhere. Finding us help.”
I stare at her, arm tangled up in the dress’s sleeve. “Finding help,” I echo. I try to reach past the fog in my brain. I’m certain there’s something important here that I should already know, but my thoughts keep glancing off of it.
“There has been a change in our situation at the clinic,” she says, voice flat, like when she transcribes charts into her Dictaphone. “Your father will be looking for a way to change it, but in the meantime, we’re going to go on a little trip.” Her lips twist strangely, though maybe it’s just the moonlight. “Don’t you remember?”
Remember. The word feels like a taunt, like another tendril of fog added to the heavy mist already shrouding a part of my brain. Why can’t I shake off this exhaustion? “No.”
“Good,” she says. “Let’s keep it that way.”
An empty mind is a safe mind, Papa always said. As the dream scatters and fades, I wonder how safe my mind really is.
CHAPTER 15
A GRAY SWEATER APPEARS in my clothing trunk the next day, identical to the one that had gone missing, but where the old one had a moth hole in the left armpit, this one has none. That rules out Masha as the culprit. She’d never have bothered to find me a new one.
It’s late October—I’ve been here five whole weeks—and the snow is growing, mounting, sudsing up like a washbasin about to overflow. It won’t go away till April—possibly May. I’m surprised it came this late. I’ll have to wait for it to pack down and ice over so I leave no tracks. Now I can’t look out the mansion window without shielding my eyes with my hand; everything glares back with a harsh overtone of gold, as if it’s been washed with too much bleach. Nothing in Russia is so headache-inducing as a sunny, snow-filled day, the kind that makes you hate yourself for wishing for clouds.
After Sergei showed me the vault, I’ve taken to walking the mansion at night, while Larissa is distracted by Ivan. I can’t listen to the radio with him anymore; all I feel is the strain on his face as he tries to show me that this is enough for a life, that everything worth living for can be contained in these four walls. So I excuse myself after dinner and start in the left front corner of the attic, working my way down to the back right of the bottom floor, one room at a time. I sweep my hands along the walls, the floor, everything in the room, calling up memories like I’m trying to exorcise them.
Surface memories—of my comrades, going about their lives—are easy enough to sift through. I push past them quickly. I don’t want to see Larissa’s stolen moments with Ivan, or worst of all, Anastasia’s looping madness. I shove it aside and dive further into history. The worker housing, the thirty-some families who shared the mansion with its bourgeois owners after the Party took control. I go deeper. Beyond forty years, it gets hazy, and I’m not sure I can trust what I see. A man who is dead is alive in the next layer of memories. Lives run out of order, interrupted with more recent static bursts.
But I won’t stop looking. Sergei’s tunnel may be a dead end, but there has to be another. There are walls that don’t add up, there are whispers among the memories. There has to be another way.
Sometimes my feet linger in the ballroom doorway just a little too long, like gravity pulling me toward Valentin’s music as he plays. The mathematical etudes ease the knots out of my mind; I like the way his long fingers dance across the keys, and I like the crease that appears between his eyebrows when he comes to the tricky parts. He watches me, but if he knows what I’m doing, he doesn’t mention it to me. It’s just as well. I’ll never trust a psychic like him—a scrubber, just like Rostov, making lacework of peoples’ thoughts.