It must be five in the morning. Along the sidewalks the old women are shoveling snow, chipping the ice underneath with heavy spades. In their felt boots and coats of wadded cotton, they do not look up when Nina walks by. She turns back toward her alley, where the snow has collected in thick drifts, and sees the lights shining weakly through her building’s windows; with so many people inside, the windows are always lit, always some kind of activity, no matter the hour.
Glancing back, Nina takes one last look at the glittering street. The streetlights and the snowflakes make everything clean and pure. Behind the whiteness, though, is the endless scraping sound, the determined chip, chip of the old women’s spades. Nina thinks again, as she will from now on: My city looks best in winter, everything hidden under snow.
LOT 20
South Sea Pearl Necklace, composed of 29 white pearls with rose overtones, graduating in size from approx. 10.28 to 14.10 mm, completed by an 18kt white gold and diamond boule, lg. 185/8 in. $30,000–35,000
CHAPTER FOUR
Amber is one of the few organic gems, formed not by the human hand but by nature. Specifically, it is oxygenated, fossilized pine tree resin, often containing remnants of the biological world. In Lithuania it has been called gintras, from a form of the word “protection,” because it was thought to ward off evil; indeed, in the mid-nineteenth century Europeans wore “specimen” pieces (those with fossilized insects or forest life preserved inside) as amulets, to protect them from the perils of life.
Ensconced on her sofa, in the corner closest to the old, hissing radiator, Drew added the word amulet to her notes and underlined it twice, not so much because she thought it might lead anywhere as because the idea—that a simple bead could protect from life’s many dangers—appealed to her. Though she did not think herself superstitious, she knew that she treated her garnet ring that way. While she often removed it to cook or clean and before she went to sleep at night, she always made sure to wear it whenever she left the house, to the extent that when, more than once, rushing out the door, she realized she had forgotten it, she had always made a point of going back to slip it on, even when she was running late. In fact nothing truly terrible had ever happened to her, either before or since she had owned it. But there were so few things one could control in life; the garnet ring on her finger had itself become comforting.
Drew shifted on the cushion and took a sip from her drink, an inch of bourbon in a small, low glass. The bourbon’s color was that of the amber pendant exactly—though without, of course, the surprise inside, that somehow shocking spectacle. Drew thought again of Nina Revskaya’s bracelet and earrings, wondered if perhaps even more pieces had belonged to the original set. If so, and if they were still somewhere out there to be found, it was possible—if unlikely—Drew might somehow track them down and come to the answer from that other direction. The key was to keep her mind open to these other avenues, to gather as much information as she could without overlooking the details. To make sure not to miss some clue, even the smallest idea or suggestion that might be of help.
Sometimes called “Lithuanian gold,” amber is found most prominently in the Baltic regions, south of Finland and Sweden and east or north of Gdansk, and washes up not only along the Baltic shores but also in the forests of Denmark, Norway, and England. Amber can also be mined: open pits of glauconite sand are dug out with steam shovels and dredges and then poured through grates at a washing plant, where streams of water are used to separate the amber boulders from the sand before shaping them with a slow-turning drill. In Ukraine, amber is found in marshy forests near the Volyhn-Polesie border and comes in a variety of colors, as seen in the restored “amber room” of Catherine the Great’s summer palace in Tsarskoye Selo.
“Specific mines—traceable?” Drew liked the scratchy sound the tip of her pen made against the notepaper, the rasping sensation vibrating up into her hand. It was an old refillable cartridge pen she had miraculously managed never to lose, and she found the sound, the feeling, reassuring, confirming something, a concreteness of existence—the reality of Drew and of the pen in the world.
Of all the locales where amber may be found, none yields more than Russia’s Kaliningrad region, where waves in the Baltic Sea dislodge amber from the depths of the ocean floor and carry it shoreward. At low tide, foragers use nets and rakes to dredge the shallow waters and find bits of amber caught in silt and seaweed.
In her mind Drew saw again those rich, smooth beads, and around them—unusual for amber jewelry—gold braiding meant to look like twisting vines. It was a startling combination: delicate human handiwork surrounding tiny globes formed by nature. She wondered who had first commissioned them, or if the jeweler had come up with the design unbidden. Her imagination found horse-drawn carriages on their way to country estates, toboggan rides in winter, men whose bushy hats flapped down over their ears, women with their hands poked into enormous fur muffs. Since beginning the Revskaya project, Drew had been reading Chekhov, short stories in a book she seemed to have always had, with a pen-and-ink nature scene on the cover. Its print, small and dense, was packed tightly onto pages darkened with age. And though she knew that the stories had been written in another time, Drew felt she understood the confused schoolteachers and reluctantly betrothed daughters, the aging widowers and poor farmhands, whose main misfortune was simply to be human—to fall in and out of love, to grow old or die young. She had been reading one or two stories each night before bed and, when she at last closed her eyes, felt she had been there with those people and suffered their small agonies. Sometimes, on the path to sleep, she found an image of her Russian grandfather, his face roughened by life, with thick eyebrows and a mischievous smile framed by a big fur hat. In reality Drew had never seen a photograph of him. Grandma Riitta used to have one, she had said, but it had been lost when she moved to the States.
Containing a high concentration of succinic acid, Baltic amber is distinct from all other types. When newly minted, it is of a yellowish color, but over the centuries oxidation darkens it, giving it an increasingly reddish tint. The many insects that often appear in Baltic amber are proof of swamplands in past eras. The frequent presence of butterflies indicates pieces derived from pines situated near grassy fields.
Butterflies. That would have been perfect for Nina Revskaya, Drew considered. If the amber suite had been purchased for her specifically, it would have been appropriate for one of the beads to contain a butterfly, or some kind of moth, something with wings.
But there were no butterflies in the three auction pieces. Well, after all, what were the odds of finding such a thing, amber with the very specimen that matched the person in mind? What were the chances that it would be not only available but also something one could afford? Before the revolution those wealthy enough might have had access to such things through travel and commerce, but to find and purchase a matching suite like this, in Soviet Russia—or wherever it had been purchased…Where, after all, had Grigori Solodin first been handed that pendant? Why did he too insist on remaining so secretive? Feeling her frustration bubble up, Drew reminded herself to stay focused. But again she found herself wondering—about Nina Revskaya, and what her life must have been like in Russia, as an honored artist, a most prized ballerina. In which case, Drew considered, there would have been no pressing reason for her to leave, despite her nation’s troubles…. And yet, the horrors around her must have been evident. They had reached Nina’s own husband in the end. Drew was still unclear about the exact chronology of what had happened. Had Nina known what was about to occur? Clearly something awful must have already been in motion. Was that why she left? Or was it Nina’s disappearance that caused things to unfold as they did?
A huge leap she had taken. Perhaps it hadn’t even felt like a choice, so much; some of the bravest acts, Drew supposed, were not choices but reflex reactions. Yet Nina’s story made Drew’s own decisions seem piddling. After all, nothing really terrible had happened. She had simply married too young, been
swept up in the idea of a romance that was in fact little more than friendship, and landed in a life that was not so much a conscious choice as one more wedding gift she did not necessarily want.
She took another sip from her glass, glanced at her watch. In an hour she was to meet her friend Stephen at the second-run cinema over in Somerville. He was one of the people she had kept in her life. There had been an awkward period during which he had tried repeatedly, unsuccessfully, to be more than a friend, but Drew had explained to him why it was impossible. For anything more than friendship—for real romance, passionate love—she would have to feel something very strong, strong enough for her to want to try again. And that wasn’t anything she felt about Stephen.
The telephone rang, and Drew gave a start. She considered not answering, then supposed it might be Stephen.
It was her mother. Drew’s heart sank slightly. “Any good news?” her mother always asked, her tone more dubious as time went on. And though Drew knew her mother worried about her—with her poorly paid job and stubbornly unmarried life—she knew too that some of that worry came simply from wanting her to succeed in some clearly measurable way. Drew’s promotion to associate director had taken care of that for a bit. Now, feeling the relief of having something more to offer, she prepared to tell her mother about her progress on the Revskaya project.
Instead her mother said something completely unexpected. “Where did you put it?”
Drew took a long, tense breath, and reminded herself that someone else, someone not directly involved, might find all of this curious and perhaps even amusing. “It” was a photograph, a large, professional—if candid—one, from nine years ago, of Drew on her wedding day.
“It’s just such a beautiful picture of you,” her mother had said, when Drew first noticed it still there on the bookshelf in the family room a year or so after her divorce. The sky behind her a perfect Wedgwood blue, Drew looked even younger than twenty-three, her cheeks full, the bright sun on her face revealing not a wrinkle. Drew’s mother’s face, when she gazed at the portrait, seemed itself to change. Though Drew had asked her once, years ago, to please remove the picture, it remained downstairs, in the big heavy crystal frame that had been a year-end gift from her father’s company.
Funny, really, how people seized on things, things that others might not think twice about. Clearly the photograph meant more to her mother than Drew could understand. Drew had tried to remove herself from the equation, to see simply what that gown and veil represented, something so different from her parents’ brief appointment with a justice of the peace and two friends as witnesses, followed by slices of cake at a tea shop. Even Grandma Riitta had never had a proper wedding; as for her first husband—Drew’s grandfather—Riitta had never legally married him.
But this past Christmas, spending four days with her parents, Drew had decided to put an end to the photograph once and for all. Her decision was nothing premeditated. It had to do with that heavy cloud of guilt that seemed at last to be shifting away. Drew had removed the picture from the frame and, unable, in the end, to discard it, hid it upstairs at the bottom of one of the drawers in her old room. Then she decided that she never wanted to see the big crystal frame again, either, and moved it too upstairs into the drawer.
“You just noticed now?”
“I’m hurt, Drew. You know how much I love that picture.”
“Because you love the person in that photo more than you like me.” It was nothing she had ever thought quite so clearly, but as she said it, she realized it was true.
“That’s a horrible thing to say! Would you say that about your baby photos? I keep those too.” Two of them were on that same bookshelf, next to a photograph of her parents cycling through Lyon.
“My baby photos mean something. But the one of me in my dress—”
“I love it because you look happy!”
“Because you were happy, when you thought you could be proud of me.” If she thought it would make a difference, Drew would have tried to explain that she too still felt that loss, not just of a husband, not just of love, and of a place, a way, to direct that love, but even of her in-laws, whom she had also loved and continued, if in fewer and briefer moments, to miss. Instead she said, “Please let it go.”
Her mother was silent for a moment. “Drew,” she said, her tone adamantly bewildered, “if I had known your thoughts about it were so…fraught!” This was typical of her mother, the switcheroo, as if Drew had created a problem that otherwise would not have existed.
“Look, I have to go,” Drew said tiredly. There were other things she wanted to say, but she knew too well what it might mean to state her thoughts, to act on her feelings. The last time she acted on her feelings, she ended up with an ex-husband and two sets of parents mad at her. “I’m meeting a friend.”
She hung up, and decided to put the conversation out of her head. After all, it was a small thing, and now it was over, and if she managed to think of it that way, as a chapter that had come to a close, then it might at last become nothing much at all.
HIS FIRST MEMORY was of winter.
A Sunday, with his parents after a heavy snowfall, walking past Red Square. Everything snowy; everything snow. The square is vast and quiet. There is just one area where people are allowed to cross, and in the distance they look like black dots—black dots slowly moving across an expanse of white. Grigori is just three years old. He stares at the people-dots, entranced, while his mother urges him to keep moving, to keep warm. He hears the crows cawing as they fly overhead, and looks up. The sky too is white, except for the birds. When one swoops down lower than the others, Grigori says, “Look at the bird,” because it is something he knows.
“Voron,” says his mother. The word for raven, the biggest and blackest of all.
“Voron,” he repeats, but Feodor corrects them, as is his nature. “No, vorona. See, they have a little gray on them.” Looking up, pointing.
“Vorona,” Grigori repeats. Caws in the thick white sky. “Vorona,” and people small as dots filing across the big white square. Not a male voron but a female vorona. Just a touch of gray. That very slim difference between two such similar things.
Making his way along the poorly shoveled sidewalk of St. Mary’s Street, Grigori considered that his vocation—his attention to the smallest details of language and image, slight shifts in words and meaning, the difference that a single letter could make—must have begun there in the square, in that moment, on that other snowy day. Subtle changes in sound and sense, words contained in other, different words…Even now Grigori often found himself noting tiny surprises in written English, that “intimates” contained “inmates,” just as “friend” contained “fiend.”…This was an attention that he had carried first into Norwegian, then into French. And yet it had been a shock to discover, at the lycée, that these interests far outweighed his talents in mathematics and sciences, and that despite the long hours he spent on homework in order to be in the supérieure group, he never excelled in those other subjects. “But aren’t your parents scientists?” a bewildered teacher had asked when Grigori performed poorly on a physics exam, as if the one thing naturally followed the other.
He hunched his shoulders against the thought, shoulders to ears in the frigid air—but still that other memory came slipping back. The way she opened the glass door between them, only slightly, her knuckles protruding as on a much older woman. The door propped in front of her like a shield, the cold finality of her voice.
I’m not the person you want.
With relief Grigori entered the fluorescent-lit Dunkin’ Donuts to meet Zoltan.
There he was, the back of his head, the grizzled thinning hair, hunched over a booth by the window, the tabletop spread with many sheets of paper. Grigori took a seat across from him on the hard scoop of bench and removed his gloves, quietly clearing his throat.
“Ah!” Zoltan looked up as if shocked. “You!”
Grigori said, “You know I’m always punctual.
” To Grigori, Zoltan had said, on the telephone, “Meet me at the new café I’ve found, much better than that other one. Across from the St. Mary’s T stop. With the pink and orange sign.”
Zoltan would spend all morning here, with the business people and shopkeepers and construction workers rushing in and out and the television buzzing from its perch up on the wall and the bag ladies rustling about and the employees gossiping in Portuguese. Grigori unbundled himself from his coat but remained in his hat and scarf; the place was not well heated.
“You know what a woman just said,” Zoltan asked, “a minute ago? She said, ‘Days like this, keeping warm’s a chore.’ Oh, it doesn’t sound the same with my accent. But you hear the poetry, don’t you? ‘Warm’s a chore…’” He wrote it into his notebook. Grigori had to smile; not only was Zoltan able to see cafés where others did not, he found poetry, too, in unexpected places.
As if aware of Grigori’s thoughts, Zoltan said, slightly defensively, “There’s good light here for reading. Not like that ghoulish campus place.” He rippled his shoulders in a theatrical shiver. “The murmuring of so many overactive egos…I hadn’t realized how it was weighing me down, Grigori, the deadening chatter of academics all around me.”
The truth was, Zoltan had been kicked out of the campus coffeehouse. Just the other day; Grigori had heard it from one of the Spanish professors. In a prolonged burst of creativity, Zoltan had spent even longer hours than usual there (which explained why Grigori hadn’t heard from him for over a week). The new café management apparently thought Zoltan some kind of squatter and requested that he no longer spend all day there, at his favorite seat in the front, showcased by the window.
Russian Winter Page 8
