The Nesting Dolls Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of . . .

  Igor Khait (1963–2016)

  He was the best of us all. . . .

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Book I: Daria Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Book II: Natasha Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Book III: Zoe Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  2019

  “Love is not a potato,” Zoe’s great-grandmother Alyssa had been telling her since before Zoe was old enough to know for certain what either word meant.

  Zoe hoped her confusion was merely a language barrier. Her great-grandmother spoke Russian—and some German. Zoe spoke English—and some Russian. Neither spoke Yiddish. Her great-grandmother was very proud of this.

  “Because,” Zoe’s great-grandmother explains, in Russian, “when love goes bad, you cannot throw it out the window.” In Russian, okoshka (window) rhymes with kartoshka (potato).

  “What Balissa means,” Zoe’s mother, Julia, chimes in, using the portmanteau Zoe gave her great-grandmother as a baby. This is what happens when three generations of women—and one so-genial-they-sometimes-forget-he’s-in-the-room man—share a three-bedroom apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. There’s no such thing as a private conversation. For this we left the Soviet Union?

  Then again, this is the neighborhood where a faded metal sign off the elevated subway welcomes you to brighton beach: a whole new world!, while the majority of residents are doing their best to turn it into the old one. Want to buy something in a restaurant or store and don’t speak Russian? Good luck with that! On the other hand—sales tax? What’s that? To paraphrase Leona Helmsley, in Brighton, only the English speakers pay taxes.

  You’d think, with her mother having been born in America, and Zoe having been born in America, they’d speak the same language. You’d be wrong. Mama jokes that she’s stuck between languages; she’s starting to forget Russian but hasn’t learned English yet. Mama communicates in Russian, at home and at work, with a few English words thrown in, like “okay,” “parking” (rather, a hybrid, za-PARK-ovat), and “mobile phone” (aka MOBIL-ney).

  “What Balissa means”—Mama’s lips flatten against each other and purse out. She resembles a platypus in a pink housecoat, needles stuck through the lapel, ready for any sewing emergency—“is there’s nothing more important than choosing the right person to spend your life with.”

  “She is right.” Oh, good, another nation heard from. It’s the first thing Zoe’s grandmother has said since Zoe arrived to help plan her grandparents’ forty-fifth-anniversary party.

  Baba Natasha is in a snit, shuffling from living room to kitchen, silently sliding a stack of cherry pirozhki the size of an open hand onto the lacquered coffee table alongside marmalades of many colors that look like orange slices with sugar shells. Snits should never prevent eating.

  Zoe asked Mama, when they began planning the big day weeks ago, why Baba is so against a party in her honor. She’s usually all about being venerated. It doesn’t take much to get her talking about the academic gold medal she almost earned in school, if a vengeful instructor hadn’t decided to teach Baba a lesson. There was also anti-Semitism involved. In Baba’s stories, anti-Semitism is always involved. She is equally happy to boast about how she’s circumvented the Americans’ tax system, using their own rules against them. “So easy! Why does everyone not to do this?” Problems begin when Baba feels the family isn’t gushing over her enough. At Zoe’s NYU graduation, Baba made a point of telling everyone she wasn’t some ignorant, immigrant grandmother, but, “I hold the degree in mathematics, also!” And God help anyone who forgets to call, email, or send flowers on March 8, International Women’s Day. And then again on American Mother’s Day.

  “I deserve both!” Baba says.

  Zoe lives in terror of Baba discovering Grandparents Day is a thing.

  Baba’s birthdays are major celebrations, necessitating more flowers, a gift (with receipt included; she says it’s so she has the option to exchange it, but Zoe suspects Baba needs to know how much it cost), a dinner in her honor (where she always snatches up the bill; she says it’s so she can make sure they charged the table properly and no one overcalculated the tip, but Zoe thinks it’s so the assembled can chime in about how she can’t be expected to pay, please, let us, it would be an honor), and several toasts that extol the unparalleled wonder that is her.

  So this antipathy toward an anniversary party is not like Zoe’s Baba.

  On the other hand, Zoe doesn’t need to ask Mama why, in the face of Baba’s resistance, Mama is still so adamant about going through with it. When your bickering parents are running the clock out on forty-five years of marriage the same way they entered it, her haranguing and his amicably agreeing, you throw them a shindig in a Russian restaurant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, complete with a house band; a mirrored dance floor; aspic-covered fried foods; a variety of shredded, colored cabbages; and many tipsy toasts, at least 50 percent of which are required to be in rhyme. That’s just what you do.

  Mama claims to have no idea as to the origin of Baba’s negative stance. Neither does Deda. Neither does Balissa.

  They keep claiming this right up until the night of the party.

  Zoe gives up and shows up as mandated, along with maybe a hundred other people who had no choice in the matter. When your bickering friends are running the clock out on forty-five years of marriage, you show up. That’s just what you do.

  Zoe, however, shows up with a date that, on any other occasion, would have been the talk of Brighton Beach, and still might be, provided all live through the scheduled festivities.

  For now, though, Baba is at the center of the tables, and the attention. Baba and her immobile frown. The earsplitting festive music isn’t doing it for her. Mama and Deda’s cajoling also does no good. Mama moves on to hissed threats. Deda throws his hands in the air and pastes on a twice as wide smile, to make up for her lack of one. That’s when the night takes a surreal turn even Zoe’s millennial cynicism couldn’t have predicted. Her grandmother is handed an anniversary gift, some kind of civic license in a fancy frame.

  Baba’s frown fades, melting like a coat of armor dissolved by a stealth acid attack. It’s replaced by an almost punch-drunk bewilderment. Baba, who prides herself on remaining in control and on top no matter what the situation, suddenly looks helpless and lost.

  She turns to Zoe and whispers, “Why would you to do this?”

  Zoe doesn’t kn
ow what to say. Because Zoe has no idea what Baba means. Why would she to do what?

  As Zoe’s confusion deepens, Baba’s passes. She forces it to pass.

  Without waiting for Zoe to answer, right there, in front of all her guests, Baba raises the frame above her head.

  And hurls it to the floor.

  Book I

  Daria

  1931–1941

  Chapter 1

  Odessa, USSR

  Signing the marriage license brisked by so quickly, Daria missed the exact moment when she moved from seventeen-year-old girl to married woman. One minute, she was standing between her mother and her groom at the shabby ZAGS office in front of an official stamping the couples through, the next she was kissing Edward, being kissed by Mama, receiving an embrace from Edward’s papa, and it was over. As Isaak Israelevitch declared how delighted he was to have Daria for a daughter, Mama scrutinized the license she’d snatched from the officiant’s hands, making certain Daria had done as instructed and signed her new legal name as Daria Gordon, not the Dvora Kaganovitch she’d been registered at birth.

  “Come with us back to the house,” Edward urged his new mother-in-law as they were ushered toward the door, past the line of couples waiting their turn to wed. “We have friends dropping by to celebrate.”

  “Neyn, nyet,” Mama stammered, first instinctively in Yiddish, then forcing herself to switch to Russian.

  When laws were changed seven years earlier, mandating all Soviet children were now required to attend secular schools, Daria’s mother had overruled her husband’s edict that girls belonged at home. In their ramshackle shtetl of Valta, old men wept into their beards about all-boy, rabbi-led cheders replaced by a coed Yiddish-language school teaching Communist ideology. But that wasn’t good enough for Mama. She dragged her daughter away from her friends, whom Mama pronounced provincial, to a school in the neighboring village. Let others limit their future by clinging to Yiddish. Mama’s only child would learn Russian, and have the entire world at her feet. Mama lectured it didn’t matter if Daria’s fellow pupils were the same grubby Ukrainian hooligans who came to Valta each Easter to throw rocks and howl how zhidy killed Christian children and used their blood to bake matzoh. They were living in modern times, and Daria would be a modern woman. Stop bawling and do what your mother tells you!

  As soon as Daria had absorbed an acceptable amount of Russian, Mama dictated a letter to Comrade Stalin, which Daria translated and transcribed, thanking him for this opportunity he’d granted them. Mama’s next step was pushing Daria to speak Russian without those back-of-the-tongue-rolled r’s Daria’s teacher had thoughtfully encouraged the other children to laugh at, until Daria exorcised her last telltale bit of Yiddishkeit. The same, however, did not apply to Mama. Her Russian stalled at the level of a child. Nonetheless, she refused to speak Yiddish to the worldly Gordons.

  Mama demurred at their invitation to join the celebratory supper. “I do not wish to cause trouble. I must not embarrass you in front of your friends.” She ducked her head, as if her mere provincial proximity might somehow tarnish them.

  “You wouldn’t embarrass us, Mama!” Daria looked to Edward and his father for support. They dutifully echoed Daria’s denial. Even as their furtive glances told her otherwise.

  “Do what your husband tells you”—Mama severed the reins she’d held tightly over her daughter for seventeen years—“and everything will be well, my Daria.”

  Mama had been so eager for Daria to begin her new life, she’d insisted her daughter bring her solitary travel bag to the ZAGS. Isaak Israelevitch carried it for Daria.

  “Edward must protect his fingers,” he explained unnecessarily as, all around them, placards proclaimed Edward Gordon’s upcoming piano concert series at the Odessa Opera House.

  It had been these posters, still wet from paste, that inspired Mama to effectuate a match between her raven-haired, ebony-eyed, voluptuous girl and the tall, dark, handsome, and accomplished Edward Gordon. They’d come to Odessa from Valta specifically to land a fellow worthy of Mama’s treasure.

  Since the repeal of the New Economic Policy, NEP, allowing individuals to own small businesses, Mama pronounced the shopkeeper a man with no future. She said the same about the clerks and local government administrators who’d expressed interest in Daria. Mama knew a Jewish boy could rise only so far in politics, no matter how shrewd, ambitious, enterprising, or dynamic. Especially if they were shrewd, ambitious, enterprising, and dynamic.

  “Men are to be tortured,” Mama had instructed Daria as they stood outside the opera house late one March evening, at the cross streets of Lastochkina and Lenina, across from the towering arched doorway topped by a golden balcony surrounded by two pairs of Roman columns. There was a decorative level even higher than that, framed by gold statues, the most prominent of which was a topless woman on a half shell, one arm raised in salutation, the other embracing a torch while trying to ride three panthers taking off in different directions. Two more statues, marble this time, flanked the stairs leading up to the front entrance, representing comedy, tragedy, muses, operas, and ballets. While the woman up top was half naked, the figures below were wrapped in flurries of marble cloth. Daria wondered if any of them were cold. Daria certainly was cold. March in Odessa could be windy and inhospitable to standing around this close to midnight, wearing a virginal white dress that demurely draped down to Daria’s ankles and up to her chin, yet was so tightly fitted above the waist that shivering was out of the question. She’d burst right through.

  “We can’t torture Edward Gordon, Mama, if he can’t see us. He’s in there. We’re out here.”

  “On the stage, he doesn’t live. He will need to exit eventually.”

  Music lovers streamed out of the opera house, buttoning coats, wrapping scarves around their necks, and pulling on gloves Daria envied from afar. Mama hooked her elbow through Daria’s and pulled her around the crescent moon shape of the opera house, toward the rear exit along Teatralny Lane.

  And there he was! Edward Gordon! In the flesh!

  He was thinner than Daria had expected. All angles and lines, from the narrow cut of his shoulders to the jut of his elbows. His ebony eyebrows appeared drawn in, as did the two slashes of trimmed mustache below his equally symmetrical nose and cheekbones. He stood chatting with a group of admirers, half turned toward Daria. Their eyes met over the blond head of a woman who somehow managed to keep touching Edward—first on the forearm, then on the shoulder, then on the cheek, brushing off a nonexistent speck. Daria perceived that, unlike his hair, brows, and mustache, Edward’s eyes might be not black but wintergreen, a striking contrast in a face paler than the rest of his coloring. She took a step in his direction.

  Edward noticed her and smiled. Daria started to smile back.

  Which was when her mother gave Daria’s arm a firm tug, redirecting her trajectory away from Edward. Instead of stopping, they walked blithely past him and his entourage, Mama looking straight ahead, making it clear Daria had best do the same. They continued walking until they’d rounded the corner and were back at the front entrance, blending into the crowd of exiting citizens.

  Daria threw both arms out to her sides, dress be damned. “I thought we were here to meet Edward Gordon. What are we supposed to do now?”

  “Now,” her mother said, “we go home.”

  Home was Moldavanka. Part suburb, part ghetto along the city’s northern rim, it was a onetime Moldovan colony that, by the turn of the century, had expanded to house nearly seventy thousand of Odessa’s poorest Jews. They came to work in factories, as laborers, as tailors, and as buyers of secondhand clothes. They stayed because laboring in factories, tailoring, and selling secondhand clothes didn’t pay much. Mama made it clear she and Daria were just passing through. Mama had no intention of settling down amid squalor that looked like a fire had recently crumbled entire blocks. They rented a room on the top floor of a house otherwise occupied by a bearded Jew who still clung to Old World nonsense,
and his wife, who spent her days trying to disguise that. The room was barely large enough for the single bed it came with. They’d dragged it against the wall to give themselves a sliver of space for the chest of drawers, on top of which stood a basin to wash in. The height of the bed made opening the middle drawer impossible. If they wished to reach the one below, they had to wriggle along the floor until they lay face-to-face with the chamber pot. Their landlord asserted there was no space for a coal stove. His concession had been to sell Daria and her mother a pair of threadbare rugs they could hang on the walls to keep out the cold.

  As she and Mama undressed in the dark, scurrying under the blankets, Daria whispered, “If you wanted me to meet Edward Isaakovich, why didn’t you let me speak to him? He wanted to speak to me, I could tell.”

  “Men disdain easy women. We will make him work, so he understands your value.”

  It took several days. Several frustrating, nerve-racking, endless days, during which Daria pestered her mother, suggesting they should try again, walk past the opera house again, slower this time, maybe actually stop and speak to the man.

  “No,” Mama said. “If there is no effort in the chase, there is no triumph in the victory.”

  Not even a week after their stroll, word came from a neighbor, who’d heard from a customer of her husband’s who’d been queried by the friend of the father of the boy who delivered coal to the Gordons, whether anyone might know the identity of a certain girl who fit a certain description. Edward wished to meet her. He’d left a ticket for his evening performance, along with an invitation to visit him in his dressing room, afterward.

  Daria was about to shout, “Tell him yes,” when Mama interrupted. “Please inform Edward Isaakovich that my daughter will be accompanied by a chaperone. We shall require two tickets.”