Sasha and Yuri retired to upstairs bedrooms while Vanya and Miri unwrapped their stories in painful strips, under candlelight in the sitting room where they were surrounded by shrouded furniture and empty bookshelves. “I survived,” Vanya said. It was deep in the night and they’d talked for hours, with Vanya taking breaks to rest twice. The fire burned low and they didn’t have kindling to build it back up. Miri pulled another blanket over her brother. His bones jutted out like clothespins holding the wool on his frame. “Baba taught us well.”
“You didn’t just survive. And it’s not over. You could still solve the equations.”
“But without the photographs, Eliot won’t help us.”
“We can find Clay. We can track him down. If he has the plates, maybe one is clear enough to use.”
“Mirele, please. Any good scientist knows when his experiment has run its course.”
“But it’s not an experiment. This eclipse is more than that. Isn’t that what you said?” Miri dropped her head into her hands, and the room went quiet save for a log that collapsed in the grate. She’d told her brother everything—everything except what happened with Sasha in the mail car and on the night of the fire. But Vanya knew her better than anyone. He had to see she was holding back. “Tell me more about Sasha,” he said. When she didn’t answer immediately, he patted his pocket. “Do you have my cigarette case?”
Miri handed it to her brother, and he filled it with a supply he kept in a desk drawer, under a dust cover. Even with his sore fingers he was able to light two cigarettes, hand one to his sister. The tobacco, real tobacco, tasted like Vanya, delicious. “How did you get this?” she asked.
“Dima had his ways. He left plenty behind.” Vanya frowned. “Don’t tell me, Mirele. Whatever it is or was with Sasha, it’s in the past. Yuri is a good man.”
“You didn’t used to think that.” She smiled.
“What I’ve lived through with him. I understand now what you’ve always seen.”
Miri felt the tobacco rush to her head, and she took a closer look at her brother. There was a dullness to him now, one she had never expected to find. He looked as if he was shrinking. She hated seeing him like that, deflated and beaten. And the house seemed so still, so quiet in the middle of war. “Yuri’s lovesick for you. It’s why he’s angry,” Vanya continued. “He’s jealous and I can’t blame him. This whole time, he’s talked about you, his brilliant fiancée. And now the photo. He can’t stand the way Sasha looks at you. I told him he was imagining things, but he wasn’t, was he?”
Miri walked to the fire. “There was no marriage. It was to keep us safe, in Podil.”
“Did you share your bed?”
“How can you ask that?”
“Because I’m your brother.”
“I’ll still marry Yuri.”
Vanya paused. “Then tell him how much you love him. Make him believe it’s true. You changed him, or filled him where he was empty, he said.” Miri tried to imagine Yuri as happy as Vanya had said he’d been with the rabbi and his orchestra. She couldn’t picture him humming. Would he find that in America? “I risked too many lives,” Vanya continued, so quietly Miri almost missed it.
“I did the same. I even took a life.”
“That drunk? It wasn’t your fault, Mirele.”
“Still, I feel the guilt.”
“As do I. The guilt for dragging you here.”
“Vanya, what you’ve done was for science. For progress. And for us. To take us to America. You were right to come.”
“I’ll never be sure, but Mirele, the eclipse, it was like nothing I’d ever seen or felt. Those moments in the dark, those perfect moments. And then it shattered. I shattered. I questioned myself. I questioned it all. After they beat me, I wondered, was something that powerful truly just science?”
“How can you even ask that?”
“Have I cursed us?”
“No. Those men, they had you at your worst, Vanya. There’s no curse.”
“Either way, the photographs won’t do it justice.” He flicked the end of his cigarette into the embers. “I survived because Yuri saved me. Mirele, he’s a man like no other.”
“He may be. And this Dima fellow, too. But you, you survived because of your own strength. Come, we should go to bed. You need your rest so we can run.”
The sitting room, the house felt safe on the surface, but Miri knew that could shatter in an instant—the moment the villagers realized Vanya was alive, or Kir or Zubov came for them. Miri walked Vanya toward the stairs leading to the bedrooms, through a hallway skirting the back side of the house. The floorboards underfoot were bloated with a dampness that pervaded the dacha along with the smell of mildew she hadn’t noticed while they’d sat at the fire. If it were up to Miri, she would have thrown open all the windows and let the walls breathe for a week to get rid of that stale air.
At the bottom of the grand staircase there were windows, and the moonlight was so bright Miri didn’t need a candle to take in the faded grandeur. Scars along the walls showed outlines of a missing sideboard and the trace of a ceiling medallion. The stairs were slanted. The paper on the walls peeled at the edges. Vanya went up first, but one foot trailed the other. Halfway up, he tripped. Miri kept him from falling backward, but he landed hard on his shoulder and screamed. The sinews in his neck bulged, and he squeezed his eyes shut in pain. She leapt to help him, realizing even in the dark that his arm stuck out to the side at an unnatural angle. His shoulder was dislocated.
“Miriam, what happened?” Sasha called from the top of the stairs. Yuri was just steps behind him. Miri felt for a radial pulse and began angling the arm as Yuri pushed his way down the stairs toward them.
“Is he all right? What happened? Is it his rib?” Yuri’s voice sounded too loud in Miri’s ears.
“The pain,” Vanya cried. His legs twitched on the stairs. “No more pain, please.”
“Shhh, Vanya, just another minute,” Miri said, bracing herself against the wall of the stairs. To Yuri and Sasha she said, “It’s his shoulder.”
“I’ve got him,” Yuri said, reaching down to move Vanya.
“No,” Miri said. “I’ve got him.”
“But it’s dark here. You need space and light. Dislocations can be complex.”
“She knows,” Sasha said. Did he bristle?
Miri concentrated on folding the elbow and straightening the bone in line with the socket. “This will be the worst,” she warned.
“Ahhhh.” Vanya let out a yelp, and the shoulder snapped into place.