MY FATHER OWNED AND RAN the bookshop in our tiny village. He was excessively proud of it: it had a green door and a brass knocker and a large shop window with carved wooden shutters. “It’s not a large living,” he always said, “but it’s enough.”
PETER ALKAEV, BOOKSELLER was painted in bold red letters across the window. That was how I first learned to spell my last name.
The summer after the incident with the wolf, my father sold our house, and he, my brother, Rodya, and I moved into the apartments over the shop. I had my own little room with a tiny circle window that looked out over the street, and all the books I could ever want.
My scars whitened as I got older—they didn’t fade. I learned very early that in the old tales of magic the wicked were always ugly and scarred, the good beautiful; I was not beautiful, but I wanted to be good, and after a while I couldn’t bear to read those stories anymore.
The villagers avoided me. My fellow students crossed themselves when I walked by, or openly laughed at me. They said the Devil had claimed my face and would someday come back for the rest of me. They said he wouldn’t have marked me if I didn’t already belong to him. Once, I tried to eat lunch with a girl called Sara. She liked to read, same as me—she was always carrying around thick tomes of history or poetry or science, her nose permanently stuck between the pages. I thought that gave me the right to try and befriend her, but she spat in my face and pelted me with stones.
I was the monster in her story. She was the heroine.
I didn’t try again.
Once, I wandered into the apothecary and bought a jar of cream for two silver pennies because the proprietor swore it would make the scars vanish completely by the end of the month.
It didn’t work, of course. Rodya found me crying in my bedroom and I told him what I’d done. He made jokes at the apothecary’s expense until I finally stopped crying and forced a smile for him, but I still felt like a fool. I buried the empty jar of cream in a little patch of earth behind the bookshop—it had been intended for a garden, but no one had ever planted anything and it remained barren. I couldn’t stand to confess what I’d done to my father.
By the time I turned fifteen, I had read nearly every book in the shop, and my father hired me as his assistant. “Her face might frighten the Devil who formed her,” I overheard one of my father’s patrons say, “but damned if she doesn’t know every word of the classics and can be counted on to point a fellow to the right book, every time.” This was one of the kindest things they said about me. There were many more less kind.
I withdrew more and more, trying to lose myself in running the shop. I organized the shelves and reorganized them. I wrapped books in paper and string for customers, I wrote letters to the booksellers in the city, sending for rare volumes we didn’t have. I kept my father’s account books in order, and when business was slow, I went to our upstairs apartments and scoured the rooms clean, one by one.
I kept busy, attempted to convince myself I was content. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shove away my loneliness, couldn’t bury it in my mind like I’d buried the jar of cream in the dirt where there ought to have been a garden.
CHAPTER TWO
A FEW MONTHS BEFORE MY SIXTEENTH birthday, my world inverted itself again.
It was full winter, snow clinging to the shop window and the stones in the street. My toes had grown numb, even in my felted boots, and I closed the shop a little early and went upstairs to our apartments, an anatomy book tucked under each arm. Anatomy was my latest passion—I spent hours every day pouring over medical notes and diagrams.
I bustled about the living space, closing the shutters, lighting the lamps, coaxing the fire into a nice red roar. I cooked beef and noodles and cabbage, then lit the samovar and started boiling water. Between tasks, I read one of my books, an anatomical study of the heart, careful not to spill anything on the pages.
I expected my father and Rodya at any moment. Rodya had apprenticed himself to the clockmaker in the village six months back, but he still came most nights for supper. My father had been gone on a mysterious errand since the morning. I hoped the snow wasn’t delaying them overmuch, and I strained my ears to catch the sound of their footsteps on the stairs.
It was Rodya who came first, stamping through the door in his thick boots, shaking snow from his hair and shrugging out of his coat. I waved him to his customary chair by the fire as I poured concentrated tea into a cup and added water from the samovar to dilute it, then did the same for myself. I settled down adjacent to him on our threadbare couch. We would wait until our father came home to eat our beef and noodles.
Rodya yawned and sipped his tea. “Don’t think Papa is coming tonight,” he said conversationally, eyeing me over his cup.
“Coming from where? Do you know where he’s been today?”
“At Donia’s.” My brother’s lips quirked.
I stared at him blankly. Donia was the baker’s widow, and had taken over the business when he passed, but I had no idea what that had to do with my father.
“Lord, sister! Don’t you listen to the gossip?”
I met Rodya’s dark eyes and frowned. None of the bookshop customers talked to me long enough to pass on rumors. “Rodya, just tell me.”
“Papa is sweet on her.”
“What?”
I dropped my teacup, yelping as the hot liquid splashed over my bare toes.
Rodya laughed as he laid his own cup down and knelt on the floor to help me clean up the mess. “Mother’s been gone a long time, dearheart. Papa deserves to be happy again. I won’t be here forever, and neither will you. Won’t you feel better knowing there’s someone to take care of Papa when we’ve gone?”
I scooped the shards of the teacup into my apron and bustled from the room to avoid my brother’s question. When I’d emptied the pieces into the dustbin, I turned to find him watching me from his place in front of the fire.
“You won’t be stuck here always,” he said, reading my mind.
My throat tightened. “I haven’t any options, Rodya. I never have.”
“Echo—”
“I’ll get our supper,” I interrupted. “Since Papa’s not coming.”
We ate together in silence, and I stared into the fire and hated myself. The noodles had cooked too long and the beef was dry and the cabbage sour. But Rodya ate every bite.
He picked up one of my books from the end table when he’d finished, the one about the heart. I was nearly three-quarters of the way through it. “You could go away to the university,” he said. “You’re smart enough. Way smarter than me—maybe even smarter than Papa.”
“They don’t take girls at the university,” I snapped.
“They’re starting to,” he objected. “And they’d take you. Why don’t you write to them?”
Anger and hope warred in my mind, but it was the anger that spilled out. “And what then, Rodya? A whole city full of people to curse me as I walk by? To mock me and—and pelt me with stones?”
“No,” he said fiercely. “A whole city full of people who will admire your intellect, who will see you for yourself.”
I didn’t have a chance to reply, because at that moment my father walked in, his beard dusted with flour and smelling of cinnamon, with the news he was to be married come spring.
“I’VE BOUGHT A HOUSE,” MY father announced the next afternoon, beaming at me over his tea while I wrapped up a stack of books to ship off to a customer in the city.
“A house?” I was surprised.