The Nesting Dolls Read online

Chapter 2

  That night, the pair of them shared box seats, looking down at Edward onstage. To Daria, it appeared the artist glanced more times than was absolutely necessary in their direction. But what did Daria know? She’d never been to a piano concert before. She’d certainly never been inside a place as grand as the opera house. Each seat felt wider than the bed she and Mama shared—softer and warmer, too. And the rugs were on the floors, not the walls. The walls were taken up with gold lining, sparking beneath radiant chandeliers. Daria was so preoccupied manipulating her miniature, secondhand binoculars to look up at the lights and down at the glamorously dressed orchestra audience, she barely found time to pay attention to the music, much less the man making it.

  Edward took his final bows following four encores triggered by enthusiastic applause and bouquets of roses tossed onstage by giggling teens and blushing dowagers. Daria’s mother rolled her eyes. Those poor souls, did they have no one to teach them? Then Mama made Daria wait until every last guest had left the theater.

  Twenty minutes after the hour they’d been invited, Daria raised her hand to knock on Edward’s dressing-room door. Mama slapped it down and stepped in front of Daria so that when Edward opened the door, he saw not Daria but her mother.

  Edward instantly rearranged his features from surprise to welcome. He bade them to come in, expressing how pleased he was to see them . . . both. A table, topped by a silver samovar the length of Daria’s arm, had been set by the window. It made Daria think of a lightbulb that had sprouted potato buds. Based on the way her mother was beaming, Daria guessed it was the latest fashion. Next to it stood a ceramic white plate piled with a dozen slices of rye bread, a small cup of butter, and an equal-sized portion of black caviar.

  “May I offer you some tea?” Edward inquired.

  Daria waited for Mama to speak first. When she didn’t, Daria shot her a queer look and filled in, “Yes. Please. Thank you.”

  Edward poured, offering Daria a close-up look at his hands. She’d noticed how fluidly they moved over the piano keys, but now that she wasn’t sitting multiple meters up, every finger appeared to possess an extra joint, so limber were his movements. Each gesture manifested like a precise piece of a seamless whole, caressing the air and sending an electric current flying through the room, piercing Daria and causing her to shiver for no discernable reason. Edward’s smile suggested he knew precisely the reason.

  He respectfully handed Mama the first cup. “Möchten sie zitrone oder zucker?”

  Daria burst out laughing. “Where did you learn such terrible Yiddish?”

  “Not Yiddish!” If they weren’t in public, Daria didn’t doubt Mama would have slapped her, and not on the hand. “German! Edward Isaakovich speaks beautiful German.” She then awkwardly stammered, “No ya govaru po Russki.” But I speak Russian.

  Only then did Daria understand what Edward already had. Her mother’s uncharacteristic silence was due to embarrassment over her accented, grammatically shaky Russian. Edward had asked if she would like lemon or sugar in German, due to that language’s similarity to Yiddish.

  “Of course,” Edward switched from German to Russian as smoothly as he’d earlier shifted his facial expressions. “Please forgive my error.”

  Mama magnanimously did. She also forgave Edward his subsequent mistake, when he presumed that the next time they saw each other, Edward would be alone with Daria.

  Mama insisted on chaperoning them everywhere. At the cinema, it was all three of them watching Alexander Dovzhenko’s film Earth, about tragedy striking a collective farm in the form of a jealous kulak unwilling to give up his private land for the good of all people. Mama was enthralled by Edward’s scandalous gossip about how he’d seen an earlier version of the film in Moscow, before censors removed a sequence featuring a female nude. Not out of bourgeois prudishness, obviously, that wasn’t the Soviet way. For political reasons. The great Sergei Eisenstein believed a naked body too sensual and individually abstract. It lacked social realism and so was counterrevolutionary. Daria’s mother proved so enthralled by Edward’s tittle-tattle, she failed to notice that, while Edward addressed Mama, sitting in the seat to his left, his right palm was, in the dark, creeping under Daria’s skirt and to the inside of her thigh. In return, Daria slid her fingers beneath his shirtsleeve for a tantalizing burst of skin on skin.

  Later, Mama realized she’d forgotten her glasses inside the theater, leaving Edward and Daria alone long enough for him to steal a kiss in a dim corner, his hand rising from Daria’s waist to graze against her breast for an encore of the electricity that had shot through her the first time she’d glimpsed his sensual fingers.

  As far as Edward was concerned, every brush of his lips against Daria’s, every sweep of his hand across her bodice or along her thigh all happened outside Mama’s vision, knowledge, or even suspicion.

  “Let the boy believe he’s in control,” her mother dismissed. “What does it hurt us?”

  The only thing hurting Edward was his inability to go any further than the furtive kisses and allegedly chance caresses. Daria sensed his frustration, but, as Mama pointed out, the solution was up to Edward. “He knows what he needs to do.”

  “Shouldn’t he have done it by now?”

  After all, Daria had followed Mama’s instructions. For nearly six months, she’d kept Edward waiting; she regularly stood him up. She smiled cryptically as she swore there was no one else in response to his jealous inquiries, and she let his hands wander only so far before teasingly pulling away.

  Mama didn’t appear concerned that their efforts had yet to bear ultimate fruit.

  And yet, one night in September, Daria woke to her mother mumbling something distantly familiar into the slit where their bed met the wall. And the next day, Mama claimed not to be hungry while preparing breakfast for Daria. It wasn’t until their landlord snarled at Daria about daring to eat on this holiest of holy days that Daria confronted her mother. “You’re fasting? For Yom Kippur? Last year, you called it superstitious nonsense. You said we’re all better than that now. Were you praying last night, Mama?”

  “Let the boy believe he is in control,” her mother said. “But just in case someone else is . . .”

  Edward proposed that evening.

  After bidding goodbye to Mama at the train station, Daria, Edward, and Isaak walked to the Gordon apartment on Karl Marx Street, Isaak still carrying Daria’s suitcase, Edward holding Daria’s hand, her wedding ring pressed between their linked fingers. Edward stroked the back of her palm with his thumb. She shivered at the knowledge that they were almost at his home. Their home.

  Isaak apologized for taking Daria in via the courtyard, but it was a more direct entrance than from the street on the other side.

  “Prior to the Revolution, my late wife, Edward, and I lived in the front apartment on the third floor, the one with the large window. Afterward, as a show of their esteem for Edward’s talents and his vital work representing the glories of the Soviet Union to the rest of the world, they allowed us to keep two of the rooms in the back. The ones facing the courtyard. It was the most they could do. How would it have looked if bourgeois exploiters like us had been given the better spaces over a worker’s family? But we were fortunate—don’t mistake my gratitude for complaining. When they partitioned the apartment, instead of the front rooms getting to keep the toilet and kitchen for themselves, we were allowed to share with the new families. Communal living, the way it should be. Fair to everyone. Not like some places with the outhouses and no running water. We have a Primus, too. Runs on kerosene. So if the bathroom or the kitchen is in use, we can still heat water, stay warm.”

  The tunnel entrance to the courtyard was so dim, Daria heard, rather than saw, swarms of pigeons nesting overhead. Splatters of guano dotting the cement walls and floor confirmed her inference. The three of them were just emerging toward the light when a hulking figure loomed in the foreground, blocking the sun and them from going any farther.

  “Adam Se
myonovitch,” Isaak’s voice conveyed heartiness, wariness, exhaustion, and warning. Though Daria couldn’t quite tell whom the latter was for. “Meet my new daughter-in-law.”

  Daria moved obligingly into the path of a man who she realized was not, in fact, a giant. He stood barely taller than Edward. But while Daria’s husband’s slender frame suggested a cultured, poetic delicacy, like a prizewinning stalk of wheat sketched by a sensitive artist, the man in front of them was built more broadly. Daria wondered if the width of his shoulders matched her own height. The muscles of his forearms strained against a shirt a wash or two away from tearing. It had already been patched, surprisingly neatly, along the elbows. Red hair covered his head, drifting south into a matching beard, stray tufts protruding from his collar and on the backs of his hands. Unlike Edward’s, his fingers looked as if they’d been forged out of steel by a blunt hammer.

  “How do you do?” Daria remembered her mother’s edict that you could tell a person’s breeding from how they never lost their manners, no matter the circumstances.

  No reply. No indication he’d even heard.

  “Adam Semyonovitch is our dvornik,” Isaak went on.

  Now the heartiness, wariness, exhaustion, and warning made sense. Although on paper, a dvornik was a combination porter and janitor, over the past decade, it had become a much more important position. A dvornik didn’t just sweep the sidewalk, empty the rubbish bin, mop the hallways, and lock the front gate in the evening. Because he did those things, he also kept track of every resident’s—and their guests’—comings and goings, not to mention made himself familiar with the contents of their refuse, those items they attempted to shred and burn, such as personal letters, newspapers, pamphlets, and books. He saw what rationed foods they ate and made note of those they must have acquired illegally. He could also choose to bolt the gate earlier than scheduled and pretend not to hear their frantic ringing of the bell, thus locking residents out of their homes for the night. And he could, on a whim, share everything he knew with the local authorities.

  No wonder Isaak faked being happy to see Adam, even as his tone betrayed how tired he was of appeasing this domestic tyrant who, theoretically, worked for him. Though, in the USSR, all men were equal. No one worked for anyone. Isaak’s warning, Daria now realized, was for her.

  “I hope you’ll make my wife welcome.” Edward’s tone encompassed the same affableness, with a touch of pleading, and yet a bit of arrogance, too. No matter how powerful Adam may have been, Edward was still Edward Gordon, international musical sensation.

  “Welcome.” Adam’s voice sounded like crushed glass soaked in vodka, then run through the mud and used to coat his throat. Daria felt as if she were being sliced by it.

  Edward took Daria by the elbow and guided her past Adam, into the courtyard. A circle of greenery surrounded by a waist-high, cast-iron fence, dandelions struggling to breathe among the choking weeds, occupied the center. It was dwarfed on three sides by gray, five-story buildings, their patched brick facades crumbling, their balconies trembling. They were used as storage. Most feared setting foot upon the rickety structures. The deeper they entered, the more the air smelled of feline urine, stagnant soapy water, rotting fish, and fermented pickles.

  It wasn’t until they were heading upstairs to the third floor—Isaak apologized again; the elevator was for those who lived in the front—that Edward lowered his voice and, glancing around to make sure no one could overhear, told Daria, “Adam got his position by informing on his own mother. She died in prison. Tortured, they say. Becoming dvornik was his reward.”

  Chapter 3

  Daria and Edward’s first child, a daughter named Alyssa, was born the next year, followed by a second, Anya, two years later, in 1934. Both girls had their mother’s luxurious waves of ebony hair, their father’s glittering green eyes and his slender build, down to those aristocratic fingers. Neither showed signs of having inherited the hooked, incriminating nose Daria’s mother had taken great care to breed out of their bloodline. Mama pronounced the offspring acceptable. Though she did wish Daria had waited longer and spaced them out in more upper-class fashion. Mama accused Daria of dropping litters like a peasant. Genteel women, she insisted, gave birth once.

  “You are not a broodmare,” Mama lectured. “You are a queen, a lioness.”

  Daria bit her tongue to keep from pointing out that lions were cats. Who delivered litters.

  Daria also didn’t feel the need to explain to Mama that it was difficult to space out children when your husband spent every moment he wasn’t at his piano looking at you as if you were the most alluring thing he’d ever seen. When he could barely wait for the door to the room his father had graciously conceded to the newlyweds to close before he was reaching for Daria, stripping off her clothes along with his own, and, from their first night together, taking care to ensure her pleasure matched his own, instructing her in what he liked as well as encouraging her to explore and direct him. Under circumstances like that, having two children in three years was not that prolific.

  Edward did travel a great deal. Daria went with him at first, but it became difficult once Alyssa was born and impossible by the time Anya came along. Comrade Stalin unveiling his battle against enemies wishing to destroy the socialist state via infiltration of foreign elements, and curtailing international travel as a result, proved a relief to Daria, though she expected Edward to be incensed. His father certainly was. As soon as he’d ensured no one could overhear, Isaak defiantly whispered about stupid decisions made by stupid members of stupid committees. Edward declined to throw a tantrum like his father and many of his colleagues. Unable to perform abroad, he displayed an unexpected pragmatism, making no fuss about limiting his appearances to traveling among the Soviet republics.

  “It’s like music, Papa. You have to let it flow where it wants. You can’t force it. All you can do is adjust the key and find your rightful rhythm within it.”

  Edward insisted on seeing the silver lining. He said the limits on traveling left him more time to practice, which he did for hours each day, his delicate, precise fingers caressing the keys in a manner not dissimilar from the one that made Daria sing her own high notes. Rather than tiring, Edward drew energy from his playing. While other musicians might battle their pieces, frequently ending up defeated in the process, Edward followed Bach or Rachmaninoff’s lead to inevitable triumph. Daria watched the familiar electricity charging up his hands into his brain, the resultant light radiating from his eyes like an addiction.

  “He was like this as a youngster,” her father-in-law boasted. “Never had to force him to practice. My burden was to make him stop! If I didn’t, he would forget to eat, to sleep. The foolish boy told me once he thought he could live on music alone!”

  Daria’s mother approved of no third child appearing after Anya turned two and then three. Mama assumed Daria had heeded her sensible advice. But, in fact, it was because both girls were now sharing a bedroom with their parents. While neither Daria’s nor Edward’s ardor or enthusiasm had dimmed, timing became increasingly complicated.

  They forced themselves to wait until the children were asleep, gambling that neither would wake unexpectedly. One night, after pleasuring Edward in the “French” manner he’d introduced her to, the pair struggled to stifle their laughter, imagining a bleary-eyed Alyssa or Anya catching them in the act and turning her parents in for the crime of engaging in cosmopolitan and foreign anti-Soviet activities.

  They were joking, of course; anything else was ridiculous to contemplate. Except that, a few years earlier, a thirteen-year-old boy named Pavlik Morozov had reported his father, chairman of the village soviet, as a criminal who forged documents and sold them to enemies of the state. Pavlik’s father was tried, sent to a labor camp, and later executed. In return, Pavlik’s uncle, grandparents, and cousin killed the heroic child—and his younger brother, too. Now Pavlik was a martyr and a role model for good Soviet children everywhere. In their nursery school, Alyssa and An
ya sang “The Song of the Hero Pioneer,” chirping, “Our comrade is a hero / He did not allow his father / To steal the property of the people . . . To all youngsters, Morozov is our example / We are a squad of heroes / Morozov is dear to us / The Pioneers will not forget him.”

  Daria had lost track of how many times she’d heard the children perform it for parents at holiday concerts on May Day, Red Army Day, even New Year’s Day. It sounded most peculiar when they belted it out, including the gory details of Pavlik’s murder, next to a white-bearded, red-suited, jolly Grandfather Frost, beneath a yolka decorated with ornaments and tinsel. Edward cringed every time he heard it. Daria hoped people would assume it was due to the dreadfully tuned piano on which the nursery-school teacher hammered out her accompaniment, and not something that could be branded political. Because anything could be.

  Just last month, there’d been a disturbance in their own courtyard. In the building across the way, on the fifth floor, two families who shared a communal apartment had gotten into a row. From what Daria could glean via the screaming that screeched out their window and ricocheted against anything within hearing range, one of the wives had stretched her clothesline across their shared kitchen, leaving soiled socks and underpants to drip water into the soup the second wife was preparing for her husband’s midday dinner on the stove. The second wife responded by yanking down the laundry, which she called filthy and disgusting, and flinging it out the window onto the frozen mud. In retaliation, the first wife grabbed the cooking pot and dumped its contents out the window—onto her own laundry. That’s when at least one husband got involved. Arriving home to find either his dinner or his unmentionables in a sodden heap on the steps, and hearing the screaming from above, he chose to join in.

  Throwing his head back, he howled, “Fuck your Comrade Stalin, and your Comrade Lenin, too. Gypsy thieves! Stealing my home, squatting in my kitchen. I worked for it, I earned it, and you just come from your stinking Romania and take it! Moldovan, my ass. Gypsies, that’s what you are!”