Russian Winter

by Daphne Kalotay

  Shepley too telephoned regularly, but anxiously—to make sure she was still alive, Nina guessed. She suspected she was a bane to him. Not that he didn’t truly care for her, but his care, his concern, was itself the bane, a weight on his shoulders, since of course Nina wasn’t well and wasn’t ever going to become well, and there was no avoiding that basic fact. That she continued to live was itself problematic, in a daily, logistical way that had ultimately led Shepley to step in and make arrangements with Cynthia. And yet Nina had no desire to die. She passed her time with interest, listened to the radio and read the papers—she took the Globe and the London Times—and each day chose a different album from her collection. Shepley had set up the sound system for her, and regularly sent new recordings of Nina’s favorite works. Today’s was a recent issue of Brahms’s string sextets. If only the telephone wouldn’t keep interrupting. Nina continued to ignore it.

  No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone. Her early life of always sharing, never a private moment or corner or closet shelf of her own, had left her hungry for this, ever appreciative of solitude’s most basic sensations: rolling her wheelchair from one room to the other with not a soul in her way, and lying in her bed at night hearing only the occasional sidewalk voices or sporadic tire-swish of an automobile in the street.

  This current infiltration (as she considered the newspapers and the auction house and the telephone calls of these recent days) threatened to destroy that peace. And ever since that girl Drew had been over, memories—so vivid, they left Nina feeling weak. Even now she could feel them lurking, and something horrible ready to sidle up to her. She tried to focus on the Brahms, and looked out the window. When the ringing started yet again, she felt the last of her patience crumble.

  She rolled her wheelchair to the marble table to pick up the telephone. “Yes?”

  “Hello, Miz Revskaya, this is Drew Brooks at Beller.”

  Though she would have preferred to simply ignore her, Nina said, “How do you do.”

  “I’m very well, thanks—excited, I should say. There’s been an unexpected development.”

  Nina felt her heart lurch.

  “An individual who wishes to remain anonymous has brought us a piece that appears to match your amber bracelet and earrings. A pendant, Baltic amber with inclusions. The mounting and hallmarks are identical to those of your demi-parure. The owner maintains that the necklace is not only from the same source but that it belongs with your earrings and bracelet. That they’re a full suite.”

  Nina realized she was holding her breath.

  “Miz Revskaya?”

  “Nina.”

  “Nina, yes. We have all three pieces together here, and while we’ll of course have to confirm that the pendant is genuine, our appraisers believe, based on the mountings and maker’s mark, that these may indeed be a set.”

  Slowly Nina said, “Does it not occur to you that the appraisers maybe are wrong?”

  “Well, of course, appraisal is always a matter of judgment, on a sliding scale, we like to say. Not to mention that clasps and chains can be removed—and sometimes even authentic mountings have had their gems replaced. So we’ll be sending this to the lab to make sure it is indeed Baltic amber. But we wanted to call you in case you know anything about it. You see, the pendant’s owner would like to include it in the auction. As a donation. It’s quite incredible, actually.”

  “I do not know about it. I have one amber bracelet, with matching earrings. That is all. They are very rare.”

  “Yes, well, it occurred to us that perhaps you had owned the necklace, too, at some point. Or that you might have known that it was missing.”

  “I did not think anything missing. I have owned this bracelet and earrings since 1952. They came with me when I left Russia.”

  “The appraisers thought they might have been a gift, or something handed down in the family. And that perhaps they were divided up at some time.”

  Her voice tight, Nina said, “Then the appraisers I suppose will know.”

  “Well, that’s the trouble with amber. Since the beads are formed naturally, rather than by a jeweler, it’s nearly impossible to confirm which items began as part of the same collection. Some pieces—particularly the more exquisite ones—might be listed in the maker’s archives, but without that data or a serial number, we can’t be one hundred percent certain.”

  Nina’s breathing relaxed slightly. “I have nothing to say of this.”

  “That’s fine.” Drew’s voice was unexpectedly firm. “I simply needed to ask you, in case you might have…forgotten.”

  Nina felt the blood in her cheeks. “I am old, but I am not senile.”

  “No, no, of course, I didn’t mean—”

  “You must understand, Miss Brooks, that dancers remember. We must remember everything.” Physical memory was what she meant, muscle memory, quite different from what Drew Brooks was intimating—but Nina wanted to put her in her place. “I have in me, still, entire ballets. I recall clearly where my jewels come from.”

  “Yes, of course.” A sharp breath. “All right, then. I just wanted to see if you might happen to recall anything. If you do, please let us know.”

  “Of course.”

  “In the meantime, our appraisers are going to do their best to confirm the provenance of this additional piece and make sure to corroborate what the owner has suggested. It seems likely, with such atypical mountings. And if the appraisal is sound, we’d like to include the pendant in the catalog. With a note, of course, that this is a last-minute addition that appears to belong to, but was not part of, your personal collection.”

  Nina remained silent.

  “Our appraisers are really very good.”

  “I do not doubt they are well trained. But I know also that people make”—she paused to formulate—“innocent mistakes.”

  For a moment Drew said nothing. But then her voice was suddenly bright. “It’s a remarkable piece, you know. As uncommon as your bracelet and earrings, to be set that way. And with a particularly stunning inclusion. It’s sure to draw not only jewel enthusiasts but specimen collectors as well. Which broadens our bidding pool significantly. Not to mention that something this rare could bring in quite a bit more money. For the foundation, I mean.” She waited for Nina’s reaction. “And I don’t need to tell you that the fact that the donor wishes to remain anonymous…well, it’s just the sort of thing the public finds intriguing. It’s certain to bring more attention to the auction. And more bidders, of course. Which, again, means more money for the foundation.”

  Nina understood what this girl was doing. “Yes, of course,” she said weakly, and then, as quickly as she could, “Good-bye.”

  HEARING THE DIAL tone rude in her ear, Drew replaced the receiver, took a long slow breath, and wiped a drop of coffee from the lip of her mug in a small, instinctual motion. She knew better than to take any of this personally.

  Yet it was difficult not to. The Revskaya project meant more to her than most, not only because of how she loved the ballet. There was also that one haphazard branch of her lineage that to this day remained something of a question mark. And so it did not bother her so much that as usual all of the work (yes, all of it) would fall into her lap, while Lenore floated along unburdened. Drew rarely complained of it; such things weren’t worth risking her job for. And as long as she continued to love her work, she found she was able to step back and, from that slight distance, view the job’s more irritating aspects as simply amusing. In fact, she found this technique worked well in many of life’s circumstances.

  Now she looked down at her checklist for the day, the hastily penciled objectives, deceptively brief. Really some of those items might take weeks. As for confirming the provenance of the amber suite, Drew knew that such things moved incrementally, step by
step. And of course the directory of Russian goldmarks was temporarily “lost” somewhere in the auction house; Drew had had to order another copy from a special library. Though Lenore had said that an approximate date of manufacture was perfectly fine, Drew hoped the marks might be traced back to a specific production batch. Perhaps then she might be able to say with certainty that the pendant was part of that same set. There was nothing quite like the satisfaction of uncovering a difficult answer, proving something concrete. So much else in the world was vague and impossible to pin down.

  As if aware of Drew’s thoughts, Lenore poked her head in. Hair in a loose, wispy chignon, a few faded strands framing her face. “How’s my lieutenant?” She still called her that, though nearly a year had passed since Drew’s promotion to associate director.

  “I just notified Nina Revskaya about the amber pendant.”

  “Good, good.” Already Lenore was turning away, a dreamy, distracted expression as she caught her reflection in the glass. Who knew if she had even heard Drew’s reply? And yet Drew had to admire—had in fact, in her time here, absorbed—Lenore’s poise, her effortless aplomb. She liked watching her at the auction block, her gentle command and easy, swift delivery, her slight accent as if from an overseas boarding school, and the way she nearly flirted with bidders, teasing out their interest, their paddles nervously raised past their avowed limits. “Whenever you’re able to start getting some text together for the supplemental, I’d love to see what you come up with.”

  “I’m on it.” Drew had in fact already begun drafting an introduction to the brochure that they would be producing in addition to the biographical notes in the catalog. She gave a small ironic salute, as Lenore drifted out the door like a breeze.

  When she first took the job, four years ago, and Lenore called her “my lieutenant,” Drew had still been in her twenties. But she was now thirty-two, had little lines at the outer edges of her eyes when she smiled. In the past month something had even happened to her voice: a distinct, if subtle, breaking sound at the back of her throat, that biological shift to some horrible new maturity. The other day the girl behind the counter at the Dunkin’ Donuts had called her ma’am. Drew had gone straight to Neiman Marcus and purchased a minuscule tube of the face lotion her best friend, Jen, swore by, some clear, sticky substance that had ended up costing twenty-five dollars. Jen was knowledgeable about that kind of thing. A few months ago she had rubbed some cream that smelled like bubble gum through Drew’s hair “to soften your look,” taken a photograph, and, without asking Drew’s permission, opened a subscription in her name on a dating Web site.

  Drew mostly found the ruse humorous—after all, Jen meant well, and had found her own fiancé that way—and had even gone on a few dates, though really she wasn’t looking for a husband. The one love she had known had been ephemeral and naïve, perhaps even a trick of self-delusion. And though four years had passed since her divorce, only in recent months had Drew’s guilt finally begun to lift. Not that she felt any better about having hurt Eric. But she was growing impatient—with her family, who even from a distance continued to treat her with faintly spiteful pity, and with herself, for continuing even now to feel shame at having made a mistake and hurt someone, when really lots of people made such mistakes, and found themselves exiting relationships they had sworn to remain in forever.

  It helped, too, that Eric had finally moved on. After two years of angry silence, and a brief spate of resentful letters, he had written an e-mail to say that he had fallen in love. In yet another reference to the notion he had clung to, that only some sort of insanity could have caused Drew to forgo their marriage, he described his new woman as “a solid person” who had “her head on straight” and “all of her ducks in a row.” Then last month Drew’s mother—who through sentimentality as much as love remained in touch with her former son-in-law and every so often accidentally released some tidbit of information—let slip that Eric had changed jobs and was moving to Seattle, and that the woman with the ducks was going with him.

  And so Drew was all the more aware of time having passed, of having completed, without quite noticing, the passage from “girl” to “woman”—if without any great improvements or new wisdom to show for it. Since her move to Boston she had lived in a diminutive Beacon Hill apartment whose rent continued to rise in small increments, like a slow bleed, despite there being each year a few more splintered floorboards, and smudges on the walls, and cracks in the ceiling. When she first moved in, the ancient building had felt like a fresh start, so different from the sparkling Hoboken unit filled with wedding gifts: 1,200-thread-count sheets, thick towels of Egyptian cotton, Laguiole knives, a cappuccino machine she and Eric never used. Drew’s “new” furnishings were secondhand and giddily sub-standard: stocky chairs of nicked wood, a table with one of its edges faintly splattered with gray paint, an assortment of mismatched cutlery she had found bundled together in a rubber band at a garage sale. She no longer possessed a television, an automobile. This pared-down life suited her, was proof to Eric and the others that there really was no one else, Drew had not left her marriage for some other, better draw. Proof to herself, too, that she had been right to leave; she did not need anyone else, did not need much at all. She was proud of her self-sufficiency, of being able to replace the fuses herself, just as she was proud of her spartan crockery, her found-on-the-sidewalk bookshelf, her yard-sale tea towels and wineglasses.

  Jen called it self-punishment. But Drew liked the simplicity of her downsized life, this quieter existence. One needed, she saw now, only a few belongings, just as one needed only a few close friends, and a single passion—it need not be a person, necessarily. Though when she moved in she had purchased a thick cotton bedspread in a deep shade of violet, really she had little hope in that realm. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in love; but she no longer believed in it for herself. And while she had, in her first years here, shared her bed with some perfectly nice men, she had gradually come to view her room as a place of solitude and silence. The bedspread had faded to a dusty purple. Every time Drew changed the linens, she told herself she should buy a new one.

  The truth was, she always felt a bit separate from most people. Even in her marriage she had never felt, as she had yearned to, that she was part of a team, that she and Eric were partners. Though they had shared many friends from college, after the breakup Drew had given most of them up. Even now, at certain moments—nudging herself onto a seat on the T, or eating lunch at the narrow counter in the sandwich shop, or taking her leisurely twice-weekly (except in winter) run along the Charles—she looked at the people around her and felt not just that she was surrounded by strangers, but that she herself was strange, somehow, that something kept her from ever fully bridging the gap between who she was and who all these other people, making their way through the very same day, were.

  According to Jen, this was due to Drew’s being an only child, independent and accustomed to doing things on her own. She had not grown up with the closeness of siblings, of secrets and shared genetics. And though she and her mother had once been close, her father was a quiet man who had never been terribly communicative; only when Drew graduated from college and became a member of the workforce did he seem comfortable conducting in-depth conversations with her, asking lots of detailed professional questions, as he might of a lunch companion or someone sitting next to him on an airplane. For all these reasons—Jen put forth in her matter-of-fact way—Drew possessed, or revealed, little need for companionship. Well, Drew thought to herself, perhaps that was so. She turned back to her computer screen.

  Backdrop: History and Circumstance

  behind the Jewels

  By Drew Brooks, Associate Director of Fine Jewelry

  During the years that Nina Revskaya danced with the Bolshoi Ballet, her government kept files on a full two-thirds of the population. By the time she left the USSR, that same government had killed nearly five million citizens. To anyone, these numbers can be shocking. And yet
along with Revskaya, upon her escape, came objects of startling beauty whose

  Drew waited for the next words to come to her. The problem was that she did not know where to start. She suspected there was much to say—despite the fact that Nina Revskaya insisted she had no more information to offer. It was laughable, really. Especially when she herself said that dancers had such good memories, that she could remember entire ballets…In her mind, Drew could hear the rising intonation of her voice, the hard rolled r’s and nasal vowels—though her accent was really not so strong, and her English nearly perfect. For that reason too her unwillingness to talk, paired with the sudden appearance of Grigori Solodin’s matching amber pendant, made Drew suppose that there was something more to Nina Revskaya’s story.

  Not to mention that Grigori Solodin, too, was a bit of a mystery. A big man, tall and slim yet weighty somehow, with a wide thoughtful brow and pensive eyes. Thick hair slightly messy like a boy’s. Even now Drew could picture his firm, even tense, jaw, the definition in his face and around his mouth. He had an odd, light accent, not Russian so much as something else Drew didn’t recognize. When she asked if he had any documentation to support his assertion that the pendant had belonged to Nina Revskaya, Grigori Solodin had pursed his lips almost as if he were biting them, so that his jaw tightened toward the back of his cheeks, where he had something like dimples. “I am sorry to say that I have no documentation.”

  But Drew was accustomed to this sort of tricky situation. It was part of what she loved about the auction house, the mysteries and dramas, who originally made that piano, who really painted that portrait, the conflicting versions of family histories from sisters selling their dead aunt’s collection of perfume bottles, or a father’s humidor full of sought-after cigars. What was it, though, that prevented Grigori Solodin from explaining anything more about how the necklace had come into his possession? When Drew tried to ask him, gently and without insinuation, as they sat in one of the little one-on-one meeting rooms, he said only that the pendant had been handed down to him. “I’ve owned this necklace my entire life. But for various reasons, and particularly after seeing Nina Revskaya’s amber earrings and bracelet, I’m convinced that it too once belonged to her. Or, rather, to that same amber set.”