Thirteen

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Nina put her camera on the coffee table and walked over to her mother, who sat in Dad’s favorite chair, knitting. Even on this warm May evening, a chill hung in the living room, so Nina built a fire.

“Are you ready?” she asked her mother.

Mom looked up. Her face was pale, her cheeks a little drawn, but her eyes were as bright and clear as ever. “Where did we leave off?”

“Come on, Mom. You remember.”

Mom stared at her for a long time, and then said, “Thelights.”

Nina turned off all the lights in the living room and entryway. The fire gave the darkness a blazing heart, and she sat on the floor in front of the sofa. For a moment the house was almost preternaturally silent, as if it, too, were waiting. Then the fire crackled and somewhere a floorboard creaked; the house settled in for the story.

Her mother began slowly. “In the year following her father’s imprisonment in the Red Tower, Vera becomes somebody, and in the Snow Kingdom, in these dark times, that is a dangerous thing to be. She is no longer just an ordinary

 

peasant girl, the daughter of a poor country tutor. She is the eldest daughter of a banned poet, a relative of an enemy of the realm. She must be careful. Always.

The first weeks without Papa are strange. Their neighbors will no longer make eye contact with Vera. When she comes up the stairs at night, doors clap shut in a sound like falling cards.

The black carriages are everywhere these days, as are the whispered stories of arrest, of people being turned to smoke and lost forever. By the time she is seventeen, Vera can recognize other families of criminals. They move like victims, with their shoulders hunched and their eyes cast downward, trying to make themselves smaller, unremarkable. Unnoticeable.

This is how Vera moves now. No more does she spend time in front of a mirror, trying to be pretty for boys.

She just tries to get by. She wakens early every morning and dresses in a black, shapeless dress. Clothes do not matter to her anymore; neither does it matter that her shoes are ugly and her socks do not match. Like this, she makes kasha in the morning for her sister, who has become a pale shadow of Vera, and for her mother, who rarely speaks anymore. The sound of her crying can be heard most nights. For months, Vera tried to comfort her mother, but it was a wasted effort. Her mother cannot be comforted. None of them can.

So they go on, doing what they must to survive. Vera works long days at the castle library. In rooms scented by dust, leather, and stone, she turns in the last of her father’s dreams for her—that she will become a writer—she hands it in like an overdue book and takes joy in the words of others. Whenever she has time, she disappears into a corner and pores through stories and poems, but she cannot do this often or for long. Vera can never forget that she is being watched, always. Lately, even children are being arrested. In this way are parents made to confess. Vera is terrified that one day the black carriages with the three trolls will arrive at her building again and that they will have come for her. Or worse—for Olga or Mama. It is only when she is truly alone—in her bed at night with Olga snoring gently beside her—that she allows herself to even remember the girl she’d once imagined herself to be.

It is then, in the quiet darkness, with cold winter air sweeping through the thin glass of her closed window, that she thinks of Sasha and how his kiss made her cry.

She tries to forget about him, but even as months pass with no word from him, she cannot forget.

“Vera?” her sister whispers in the dark.

“I’m awake,” she answers.

Olga immediately snuggles closer to her. “I’m cold.”

Vera puts her arms around her younger sister and holds her close. She knows she should say something comforting. As the older sister it is her job to lift Olga’s spirits and it is an obligation she takes seriously, but she is so tired. She hasn’t enough of herself left to share.

Finally Vera gets out of bed and dresses quickly. Hiding her long hair beneath a kerchief, she goes into the cold kitchen, where a pot of water-thinned kasha sits on the stove.

Mama is gone already. Earlier than usual, even. She leaves every morning well before dawn for her job at the royal food warehouse; when she finally comes home at night, she is too tired to do more than kiss her girls and go to bed.

Vera reheats the kasha for her sister, sweetening it with a big dollop of honey, and takes it to her. Sitting together on the bed, they eat breakfast in silence.

“Today, again?” Olga finally says, scraping the bowl for the last speck of food.

“Today,” Vera confirms. It is the same thing she has said to her sister every Friday since their papa was taken away. She has no words to add to it; Olga knows this. Hope is a fragile thing, easily broken if handled too much. So, saying no more, they dress for work and leave the building together.

Outside, winter is gnashing its teeth.

Vera lifts her collar upward and walks briskly forward, her body angled into the wind. Snowflakes scald her cheeks. On the frozen river, she sees scores of fishermen hunched around holes in the ice. At the corner, she and Olga go their separate ways.

Moments later, Vera hears the distant roar of a dragon and sees a black carriage turning onto this street, its color vivid amid the falling snow and the white stone of their walled kingdom. She dives into the shadowy snowbank beneath a crystal tree.

Someone is being arrested; someone’s family is being ruined, and all Vera can think is, Thank God it is not my family this time. She waits until the carriage is gone and gets back to her feet. In the slicing snow, she takes the trolley across town to a place that has become as familiar to her as her own arm.

At the entrance to the Great Hall of Justice, she pauses just long enough to square her shoulders. She opens the huge stone door and goes inside. The first thing she sees is a queue of woolen-clad women wearing felt boots and clapping their mittened hands together to keep warm. They move forward, always forward; people in line, waiting for their turn.

The next two hours pass in a gray blur, until at last Vera is at the front of the line. She gathers her courage and straightens as she walks up to the gleaming marble desk where a goblin sits in a tall chair, his face as pale and shapeless as melting wax, his golden eyes opening and closing like those of a serpent.

“Name,” he says.

She answers in as even a voice as she can.

“Your husband?” he says, his voice a hiss in the quiet.

“Father.”

“Give me your papers.”

She slides her papers across the cold desk, watching his slim, hairy hand close over them. It takes courage to stand there while he studies her paperwork. What if he has her name on a list? Or if they’ve been waiting for her? It is dangerous to keep coming here, or so her mother tells her. But Vera cannot stop. Coming here is the only hope she has now.

He hands her papers back to her. “The case is being studied,” he says, and then yells, “Next.”

She stumbles away from the window quickly, hearing an old woman come up beside her and ask about her husband.

It is good news. Her father is alive. He has not been sentenced and sent to the Barrens . . . or worse. Soon, the Black Knight will realize his error. He will learn that her father is no traitor.

She flips her collar up and goes back out into the cold. If she hurries, she can be to work by noon.

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Friday after Friday, Vera goes to see the goblin. Each time the answer is the same. “The case is being studied. Next.”

And then her mother tells her they must move.

“There is nothing to be done about it, Vera,” her mother says, sitting slumped in a chair at the kitchen table. The past year has taken a toll on her, left its mark in wrinkles. She smokes a cheap cigarette and seems hardly to care that ashes flutter to the wood floor. “My wages at the storehouse have been cut. We cannot pay the bills here anymore.”

Vera would like to argue with her mother as she used to, but there is not enough money for firewood at night and they are cold.

“Where will we go?” Vera asks. Beside her she hears Olga whine.

“My mother offered.”

Vera is actually surprised by this. Even Olga looks up.

“We don’t even know her,” Vera says.

Her mother takes another long drag on the cigarette and exhales the thin blue smoke. “My parents did not approve of your father. Now that he is gone . . .”

“He’s not gone,” Vera says, deciding right then that she will never like this grandmother, let alone love her.

Though her mother says nothing, the look in her dark eyes is easy to read: he is gone.

Olga touches Vera, whether for support or in comfort, Vera is unsure. “When do we move?”

“Tonight. Before the landlord comes to collect the rent.”

Once, Vera would have talked back or argued. Now she sighs quietly and goes into her room. There is little enough to pack up. A few clothes, some blankets, a hairbrush, and her old felt boots, which she has almost outgrown.

In no time, they are outside, dressed in layers that represent almost all of their clothing; they trudge through the snow toward their new home.

At last they arrive. The building is small and it looks unkempt. A stone façade on the stoop is crumbling away. Cheap fabric curtains hang at odd angles in several of the windows.

Up the stairs they go, to the last apartment on the second floor.

The woman who answers is heavy and sad-looking, wearing a floral housecoat that has seen better days. Her gray hair is covered by a pale green kerchief. She is smoking a cigarette, and her fingers are discolored where it rests between them.

“Zoya,” the woman says. “And these are my grandchildren. Veronika and Olga. Which is which?”

“I am Vera,” she says, standing tall beneath her new grandmother’s scrutiny.

The woman nods. “There will be no problem with you, yes? We do not need the trouble you have had.”

“There will be no trouble,” Mama says quietly, and they are shown inside.

Vera stops dead. Olga bumps into her and giggles. But her laughter stops abruptly.

The apartment is a single room with a small wood-burning stove and a sink, a wooden table with four mismatched chairs, and a narrow bed pushed against the wall. A curtainless window stares out at the brick wall across the alley. In the corner, a half-open door reveals an empty closet. There is no bathroom; it must be a communal one for the building.

How can they all live here, crammed together like rats in a shoe box?

“Come,” her grandmother says, grinding out the butt of her cigarette in a saucer overflowing with ashes. “I will show you where to put your things.”

Hours later, on this first night in their new home, in the room that smells of boiled cabbage and too many people, Vera makes a bed of blankets on the floor and snuggles close to her sister.

“A man from work will bring our furniture over tomorrow,” Mama says tiredly. Olga begins to cry. They all know that furniture will not matter much.

Vera takes hold of her sister’s hand. Outside, a cart crashes into something, a man yells out a curse, and Vera can’t help thinking that they are the sounds of a dying dream.

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After that, Vera is angry all of the time, and although she tries to hide her displeasure with life, she knows she fails to do so. She is sharp-tempered and quick to criticize. She and her mother and Olga sleep together in their narrow bed, crammed so close that they must turn in unison or not at all.

She works from dawn until dark, and when she gets back to the apartment it is more of the same. She cooks dinner with her mother and grandmother, then carries firewood to the stove for the night and washes the dishes. Working, working, working. Only on Fridays is it different.

“You should quit going there,” her mother says as they leave the apartment. It is five in the morning and dark as jet in the streets.

As they pass a café, a group of drunken young noblemen stumble out, laughing and hugging one another, and Vera feels an ache in her chest at the sight of them. They are so young, so free, and yet they are older than she, who trudges along beside her mother and sister going to work at dawn instead of drinking coffee and arguing politics and writing important words.

Her mother reaches out and takes Vera’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly.

Rarely do they touch on the truth of their lives or the loss. Vera squeezes her mother’s hand. She wants to say, I know, or It’s okay, but she is afraid she’ll cry, so she just nods.

“Well. Good-bye, then,” her mother finally says, turning toward her trolley stop.

“See you tonight.”

The three of them go their separate ways to work.

Alone, Vera walks the last few blocks to the Great Hall of Justice. She enters the long queue and waits her turn.

“Name,” says the goblin at the desk when it is her turn.

At her answer, he takes her papers and reads them. Abruptly, he gets up from his chair and leaves. Down the hall, in a great glassed chamber, she can see him talking to other goblins and then to a man in long black robes.

Finally, the goblin returns, takes his seat, and pushes the papers back to her. “There is no one of that name in our kingdom. You are mistaken. Next.”

“But you do have him, my lord. I have been coming here for more than a year. Please check again.”

“No one of that name is known here.”

“But—”

“He’s not here,” the goblin says, sneering. “Gone. Get it? Now move on.” He cranes his head to look around her. “Next.”

Vera wants to sink to her knees and cry out, but it is not good to draw attention to oneself, so she wipes the tears from her eyes and straightens her shoulders and heads for work.

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Her father is gone.

There one moment and disappeared the next. The truth is that he is dead, that they have killed him; whoever they are. The trolls in their shiny black carriages and the Black Knight, for whom they work. Questions cannot be asked, though, not even the ordinary questions of a grieving family. They cannot beg to bury him or visit his grave site or dress his body for burial. All of that would draw attention to them and to this execution that the Black Knight wants to deny. In the library, she goes about her work and says nothing about her father.

On her walk home—no trolleys for her today; she wants this journey to last—it seems as if winter is rising from the ground itself. Brittle black leaves fall from the trees and hang suspended in the chilly air. From a distance, there are so many of them it looks like a flock of crows flying too low. Beneath a leaden sky, buildings look drab and hunkered down. Even the mint-green castle looks forlorn in this weather.

By the time she gets home, the snow is accumulating on the cobblestoned street and on the bare tree limbs.

At her door, she pauses just long enough to catch her breath. In that instant, she imagines the conversation she will have and exhaustion presses down on her. Still, she straightens her spine and walks inside.

The room is crowded with furniture from their old life. Her grandmother’s bed is pushed up to the wall and stacked with quilts. Their own narrower bed abuts the closet. When they want to open the closet door, they must move the bed. A bureau that her mother has hand-painted and a pair of lamps line the wall beneath the window that won’t open. The only beautiful piece of furniture in the apartment—a gorgeous mahogany writing desk that was her father’s—is covered with jars of pickles and onions.

She finds her mother at the stove. Olga is at the table, peeling potatoes.

Her mother takes one look at her and moves the pot off the stove, then wipes her hands on the apron tied about her waist. Although her dress is baggy and old, and her hair is unkempt after a day at the food storehouse, her eyes are keen and the look in them is knowing. “It is Friday,” she says at last.

Olga rises from her chair. In a dress that is too tight, she looks like a flower sprouting from a seed shell. Vera can’t help thinking that her sister is a child at fifteen, and yet she remembers it as the age when she met Sasha. She had thought she was full-grown then. A woman standing on a bridge with the man she intended to love.

“Did you learn something?” Olga asks.

Vera can feel the color draining from her face.

“Come, Olga,” Mama says briskly. “Put on your coat and your valenki. We are going for a walk.”

“But my boots are too small for me,” Olga whines. “And it is snowing.”

“No argument,” her mother says, walking over to the big rounded wood and leather chest by their bed. “Your grandmother will be home soon from work.”

Vera stands back, saying nothing while her mother and sister dress for the cold. When everyone is ready, they go outside, into the blurry white world. The hush of the falling flakes mutes everything around them. Even the whine and clatter of the trolley sounds distant. In this whispered world, they seem isolated, separate. They are even more alone as they enter the Grand Park. By the time they arrive, streetlamps are lit throughout the square. There are no people out here on this cold early evening, only the gilded row of noble houses in the distance.

They come to the centerpiece of the park: the giant bronze statue of a winged horse. It rises up from the snow in defiance, dwarfing everyone who looks upon it.

“These are dangerous times,” Mama says when they are in front of the statue. “There are things . . . people that cannot be spoken of in the closeness of an apartment or the confines even of a friendship. We will speak of it . . .” She pauses, draws in a breath, and softens her voice. “Him . . . now and not again. Yes?”

Olga stamps her foot in the snow. “What is going on?”

Mama looks to Vera for the answer.

“I went to the Great Hall today, to ask about Papa,” she says, feeling tears sting her eyes. “He is gone.”

“What does that mean?” Olga says. “Gone? Do you think he escaped?”

It is Mama who has the strength to shake her head. “No, he has not escaped.” She glances around again and moves closer, so that the three of them are touching each other, huddled together in the shadow of the statue. “They have killed him.”

Olga makes a terrible sound like she is choking, and Vera and Mama hug her tightly. When they draw back, all are crying.

“You knew,” Vera says, not bothering to wipe her eyes, although her tears are freezing instantly, sticking her eyelashes together until she can hardly see.

Mother nods.

“When they took him away?”

She nods again.

“You let me go every Friday,” Vera says. “If I had known—”

“You had to learn in your way,” her mother says. “And I hoped . . . of course . . .”

“I do not know what to do now,” Vera says. She feels disconnected from herself, from her own life.

“I have been waiting for you to ask me this,” Mama says. “You both have been waiting. Hoping. Now you know: this is our life. Our Petya will not come back. This is who we are now.”

“What does that mean?” asks Olga.

“Live,” Mama says quietly.

And Vera understands. It is time for her to quit marking time and start doing something with it.

“I do not know what to dream about,” Vera says. “It all seems so impossible.”

“Dreams are for men like your father. They are the reason we mourn him now, in private and secretly, as if we are criminals. He planted in your head all kinds of fantasies. Let that go. Quit being his children and become women of this kingdom. There are things to do out there; I promise you this.”

Their mother pulls them into a fierce hug and kisses both their cheeks. When they are close, she whispers, “He loved you two more than his words, more than his own breath. That will never die.”

“I miss him,” Olga says, starting to cry again.

“Yes,” Mama says in a throaty voice. “Forever. That’s how long we’ll have an empty place at the table.” She draws back at last. “But we will not speak of him again. Not ever. Not even to each other.”

“But . . . you cannot just stop your feelings,” Vera says.

“Perhaps,” her mother says, “ but you can refuse to express them, and that is what we will do.” She puts her hand into the big pocket of her wool coat and pulls out a cloissoné butterfly.

Vera has never seen anything so beautiful. This is not the kind of piece their family can own—it is something from the kings or the wizards at least.

“Petyr’s father made this,” her mother says, revealing a family history they knew nothing about. “It was to be for the little princess, but the king thought it shoddy work, so your grandfather was fired and learned to make bricks of clay instead of pieces of art. He gave it to your father on our wedding day. And now it is what we have to remember someone in our family who is lost to us. Sometimes, if I close my eyes when I hold it, I can hear our Petya’s laugh.”

“It’s just a butterfly,” Vera says, thinking it is not so lovely as she’d thought; certainly it is not a substitute for her papa’s laughter.

“It is all we have,” her mother says gently.

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Vera wraps herself in grief as only a teenage girl can, but as the winter wanes and spring blooms across the kingdom, she begins to feel burdened by her melancholy.

“It is not fair that I cannot go to university,” she whines to her mother one warm summer day, many months after their makeshift funeral at the park. They are kneeling in the black earth weeding their small garden. Both have already worked a full day in the city; this is their summertime routine. A day’s labor in the kingdom and then a two-hour cart ride beyond the walled city to the countryside, where they rent a small patch of ground.

“You are too old to be whining about fairness, and obviously you know better,” her mother says.

“I want to study the great writers and artists.”

Her mother sits back on her heels and looks at Vera. In the syrupy golden light that falls at ten o’clock at night, she looks almost pretty again. Only her brown eyes remain stubbornly old. “You live in the Snow Kingdom,” she says.

“I think I know this.”

“Do you? You work in the greatest library in the world—there are three million books at your fingertips each day. The royal museum is on your way home. And your sister works there. Anytime you wish you can see the masters’ paintings. Galina Ulanova is dancing this season, and do not forget the opera.” She makes a tsking sound. “Do not tell me that a young woman of this kingdom needs to go to university to learn. If you believe such a thing, you are not”—her voice lowers—“ his daughter.” It is the first time her mother has mentioned Father and it has the intended effect.

Vera slides sideways off her own heels and sits in the warm dirt, looking down at the fragile green rosette of a baby cabbage beside her.

I am Petyr Andreyevich’s daughter, she thinks, and in that reclamation, she remembers the books her father had read to her at night, and the dreams he’d encouraged her to dream,

For the remainder of that week, Vera contemplates the discussion in the garden. At work she wanders around the library, walking amid the stacks with the ghost of her father beside her. She knows that all she needs is someone to help her understand the words she reads. It is as if she is a seedling, with a tender green strand pushing up through earth that resists her movement. The sun is up there, though, if only one keeps growing upward.

And then one day she is at the counter organizing parchment rolls when a familiar face appears. It is an aged man, walking with a cane across the marble floor, his tattered brown cleric’s robes trailing along behind him. At a table near the wall, he sits down and opens a book.

Vera approaches him slowly, knowing that her mother would not approve of her plan, but a plan it suddenly is.

“Excuse me,” she says softly to the man, who looks up at her through rheumy eyes.

“Veronika?” he says after a long moment.

“Yes,” she says. This man used to come by the house, in older, better days. She does not think to mention her father, but he is here between them, as surely as the dust. “I am sorry to bother you, but I seek a tutor. I haven’t much money.”

The cleric removes his glasses. It takes him a while to speak, and when he does, his voice is barely more than a whisper. “I cannot help you myself. It is the times in which we live. I should stop writing.” He sighs. “As if I could . . . but I know some students perhaps who are not so afraid as an old man. I will ask.”

“Thank you.”

“Be careful, young Veronika,” he says, putting on his glasses. “And tell no one of this conversation.”

“This secret is safe with me.”

The cleric doesn’t smile. “No secret is safe.”