Mama died on the way. It was winter and so they couldnt dig a grave but when the men in charge seen she was No More they made them leave her on the side of the track like she was a sack of rotten turnips. My brothers sent the letter saying so.
The trip up north was my first train ride. Weeks and weeks and then I was put in a Labor Camp with a bunch of other so called criminals. Shared a cell with a guy named Lev not a bad guy but its how I learned that just cause you get to know someone dont mean you get to like him. The only way we even knowed we was close to Finland was some of the men we worked with spoke that language (your language Elli).
Grigori was aware of his heartbeat having quickened, and of that other, rare and startling, sensation: the certainty that he was on the brink of something. He glanced at his watch. The meeting would have to wait.
In the camp we was put to work in the mine. An amber mine. Spent my days in a pit a hundred feet deep and so wide it might of been a village. My work was digging up the so called blue earth but really it was grayish green. Crusty clay like the roads at home right when the rainy seasons over. All inside the greenish gray like currants in Mama’s dough was pieces of amber.
Spent most days shoveling. For a time I got to work in the washing plant where you get the amber out of the crust and that wernt too bad. Even tho we was mostly sick and always hungry I made up songs and told jokes to keep us on our feet.
Maybe its bragging but you know what they called me? The Happy Forced Laborer. They said I was crazy to laugh even tho they laughed too when I got things going. But really I dont like to remember life in that place so let me just tell you I spent 12 and a half years of my time on this earth there.
Elli theres something else I skipped from this story. Its that before we was taken away from the farm I had a wife Masha and a daughter Liza and they both was still there in the village when I left. Then one winter they both got diphtheria and was No More. Even if I hadnt seen them for five years I still saw them in my head. So you see you really are a gift to me who had nothing to go home to cause he lost everyone even his first daughter your sister who youll never know but through this Diary I write for you.
My brothers died too of colds gone to their chests the letter said. Anyways when my time at the camp was up I had nothing to go home for. Hopped a train with one of the Finns and rode it long as we could. Got off and found our way. He helped me get across and then well I just wandered. Thats when I seen your lovely mama walking along the muddy road.
I want to tell you about all that. But I been sick a lot on account of breathing in the dust from the amber mines. So I will take a break now and next time tell you all about making a new life here with your mama.
This worlds given me nine lives
First as a babe at my ma’s sweet tit
Then as a boy in a house full of flies
Then a big brother and then a young man
By the lake where the bullfrogs saw my first kiss.
Next I farmed 25 desyatinas.
The land took orders not from me but the sky.
Been husband to a girl with braid on her head
And Pa to a daughter with cornflower eyes.
Then came the prison. A lot of winters shivering
And watching time crawl by like a slug.
This lifes the Ninth. This family my sweet nest.
Each days a place to hang my new warm coat.
A verse for Elli. Wrote by your Pa
The rest of the book was blank. At first Grigori just sat there gazing at the old dried ink. It’s true, was his thought: we are all connected. And it took fifty years for me to understand this…. He realized that his eyes were teary, and wiped them with his handkerchief. It must be the abruptness, he told himself, that is making me cry: another life cut short. Turning back to the opening page, he looked to see when that first entry had been written. There was no date.
Grigori began to read again from the beginning. Amazing how just a few brief pages revealed so much about the person who had composed them: his outlook, his good nature, and, despite his lack of schooling, his ear for language. Those empty pages at the end were no longer simply blank but painful in their blankness. The curiosity Grigori felt was as strong as what he had felt for Elsin’s poems, yet less needy—simply eager. This other man’s words, pure and unaltered, the man himself pared down to what little language he had…His words were concerned not with art but simply truth, and therefore contained, in their own way, the beauty of art.
This man, Drew’s grandfather. Her mother’s father, an un-schooled man, a farmer, a prisoner. A man with a sense of humor, a man who understood the worth of taking the time to write down one’s thoughts, one’s life. How many other men like this, unknown and uneducated, had left such documents behind? Grigori thought now of the KGB archives that had recently been opened, the many confiscated diaries and letters it must contain, records as important as any of Viktor Elsin’s poems. How many other people’s stories must be lodged there, unread but waiting. Waiting for someone like Grigori to take a look, and to let the world know.
Full of a new energy, Grigori set to work typing out his translation of the little journal’s pages. It would be his gift (the phrase that went through his head was “my first gift”) to Drew.
AT THE AUCTION house, the seats were already filling by three o’clock that afternoon. People kept peering about as if they might get a glimpse of Nina Revskaya herself, though surely they knew better. Drew recognized a few of the regulars, trades people and private buyers: the handsome dealer from D.C. who specialized in diamonds; the middle-aged woman who always bid on about twenty necklaces but rarely ended up buying any; the young millionaire who brought a new girlfriend to every auction, whether it was jewelry or furniture or wine; and the skinny bald guy who never bid on anything, just stood around at the buffet table eating the free hors d’oeuvres. Today the caterers had put out crudités, very thin cinnamon cookies, and big percolators of coffee. One of the water pitchers already needed refilling. Drew notified the intern.
She had not spoken to Lenore since the morning. But as the auction start time approached, it seemed the day’s excitement and stresses (the assistants at first hadn’t been able to find the extra chairs, and there was some small mix-up with the catering) appeared to have at last gotten to her. The lines of her forehead were suddenly prominent, deep worry marks between her eyebrows.
Now, though, as the clock prepared to strike four, Lenore straightened her shoulders and walked confidently to the shiny wooden auction block, where a laptop computer and two full glasses of water awaited her. And though she still held her mouth tight, the worry lines seemed to magically recede. Everyone else took their places: Mark, the stocky young gallery guard, at the top of the stairs, and Drew, along with a dozen other women and two men, all of them employees like herself, at one of the long banks of telephones at the front of the room. With such heavy interest, they needed everyone on. Drew had been assigned to a bidder in Florida, paddle number 201. He was an Argentinean who lived in Miami Beach—was, in fact, this very minute, lying on a towel on the beach, smoking a cigarette; even through the cell phone Drew could hear him taking a drag. “What’s the weather like there?” he asked, and Drew could tell from his tone that he knew about the freak snowstorm—one last brief dumping that quickly melted away—earlier this week.
“Not bad,” she said, defensively, thinking of her walk to the T with Grigori that morning, the pleasant breeze and open coats, Grigori’s hair curling from the humidity. “Spring’s almost here. Some afternoons it’s almost warm.”
As she spoke she glimpsed Grigori walking in, with an older, somewhat disheveled-looking man.
“Here it’s gorgeous,” the man in Florida was saying, taking another loud drag on his cigarette. “Lately it’s been too windy for my taste, but today, perfect.”
Drew could see Grigori looking for her. Leaning forward just slightly, so as not to call too much attention to herself, she reached a hand up above
her head. It worked; he saw her, as she gave just the slightest twist of her wrist before running her hand through her hair. Grigori cocked his head at her, smiling, so that she glimpsed his dimple lines. Then she heard the small clicking sound of the microphone coming on and looked up to where Lenore was adjusting the laptop computer. Behind her, the big projection screen lit up, a bright blue light.
SITTING NEXT TO Zoltan, Grigori had to stop himself from looking back at Drew every minute or so. He had only a partial view of her, since she was seated all the way at the front wall, but he kept finding himself looking her way, perhaps to convince himself that she really did exist. With Zoltan he surveyed the rest of the room, the many people milling about, open catalogs in hand. Standing at one of the high round tables was a well-dressed young man with his arm around a woman in a tight sweater dress that stopped just below her buttocks. The way she clung to the young man’s arm, Grigori wondered if the two were there to bid for an engagement ring. Behind them, at the top of the stairs, a gallery guard—a young man looking very serious and yet somehow pathetic—stood stiffly, stockily, the sleeves of his suit jacket just a tad too long.
At the podium, the auctioneer was shuffling some papers. An attractive woman wearing a tight dark lacy knit sweater, she appeared to be in her forties, slender and French-looking, her hair pulled back in an easy knot. The room quieted down when, in a cool, smooth voice, she welcomed everyone and instructed them to turn off their cell phones. “Unless of course you are using them for bidding.” A faint, ambiguous accent—or rather, affect, like the announcers on the classical music station.
Grigori watched as the screen above her displayed a photograph of the first item: a pair of sparkly gold bangles. “Lot number one. Two twenty-four-karat gold bracelets inlaid with diamonds. I have a bid here now”—she was looking at her computer—“of ten thousand, looking for eleven.” She spoke quickly but smoothly, her vowels wide open, nothing slack about her. “Is there any advance over the ten thousand?” A woman in the front row raised her paddle. “I have eleven to my right now, looking for twelve. Who will go to twelve?”
A young man at one of the telephones gestured, and when the auctioneer called out again, a very fat and somehow sloppy-looking man leaning on a table in a corner lifted his paddle. “Thirteen,” the auctioneer announced. “Are you all in all done at thirteen?” Grigori found himself leaning forward through the pause, until the woman in the front row raised her paddle. “Fourteen—in time….” The fat sloppy man kept coming back in immediately after the woman, nodding as the price quickly increased, until finally he just shook his head at the auctioneer. “Are you all in all done at eighteen?” the auctioneer briskly asked the woman in the front. “So it is. Sold to paddle 310.”
“So, that’s how fast it goes,” Zoltan whispered, and Grigori thought to himself, Yes, that’s how easily these things will be dispensed of, even that necklace that I thought meant something. That I treated as if it had some sort of power. When really it is just an object, to be picked up with a mere nod of the head. Gone at last, to anyone in this room.
“It is yours,” the auctioneer was saying into the microphone, already finished with the second item.
As the next few images appeared on the big color screen, people wandered in and out, and helped themselves to coffee, and stood around reading the addendum or flipping through the catalog. The man in the seat in front of Grigori kept track of every winning bid, writing the price in pen next to each item in the catalog. Next to him was a woman who seemed intent on a number of things, but each time bid just once before chickening out. At the bank of telephones, “Samantha’s bidder” kept gobbling things up, while “Brian’s bidder” popped in only now and then. Drew had not done any bidding yet, but Grigori kept looking over, to see if he might catch her eye.
She looked contemplative as she watched the auctioneer. Grigori felt again, as he had throughout the day, an almost physical awareness of having been lifted past grief, and past so much other heaviness, by surprising and generous forces: the passage of time, of course, but also Drew and the auction, and Zoltan here, and, why, Evelyn too. He would have to tell Evelyn, of course, where his heart had led him. Already he sensed that she herself understood the truth of it—that the two of them were not meant to be anything more, together, than what they already were to each other.
It took close to an hour for the auction woman to come to the amber set. But at lot number 71, the amber bracelet, the projections overhead went blank. Just the empty blue void of a computer screen. “This item,” the auctioneer said, her voice calm and easy, “has been withdrawn.”
A disappointed sound came from some of the crowd. Grigori looked over to Drew, to see if she had known about this. The expression on her face told him no. “I assure you,” the auctioneer was saying, as a man in the front row stood up noisily and made his way out of the room, “that this was a last-minute occurrence. Otherwise we would have done our best to inform you in advance.” She took a long gulp from her water glass, and Grigori was impressed to see that her hands did not shake. He could imagine what it might feel like, to be in her position. Replacing the glass on the console, she said, “I’m sorry to report that the same goes for the next lot, number 72, the Baltic amber ear pendants. Those too have been withdrawn.”
A woman in Grigori’s row sighed loudly and stood up to leave, as Grigori wondered what these two withdrawals could mean. The auctioneer shushed some people who were whispering, and said that lot number 72A, the Baltic amber pendant, was still available. Projected onto the wall was that big reddish-brown bead in its wreath of gold. The trapped spider and its puffy white pouch looked enormous, and somehow enormously lonely, up there like that. Grigori felt his heart rush as the auctioneer opened the bidding.
Right away paddle number 99 went up—a white-haired man in a baggy sweater, standing near the first bank of telephones. When paddle number 176 immediately followed, number 99 popped right back up. This back-and-forth continued until the price had reached twenty-six thousand.
“Do I hear twenty-seven?”
From the bank of telephones, a bid came in. When the auctioneer asked for twenty-eight, more employees at the phones joined in, as if members of some club. This flurry continued until the price was at thirty-five thousand. The auctioneer called out for thirty-six.
For a moment there was nothing. But then, not far from where Grigori and Zoltan sat, in the group of seats to their left, a new paddle was raised. “Paddle 102.”
When the auctioneer asked for thirty-seven thousand, paddle 176 made a more tentative reach. But 102 held firm, even when 99 came back in and forced the figure up to thirty-nine thousand. When 102 went to forty, everyone turned to see who this headstrong person was.
She was, Grigori noted, the only black person in the room, middle-aged and skinny, her mouth set firmly yet somehow serenely. Grigori was mortified by the thought that swept through him—that she did not look like the sort of person to have the money to bid like this, or even to be at this auction. A racist thought, horrible. Just because she was black, could she not bid at a jewelry auction? But no, that wasn’t it at all, Grigori realized with a strange, perplexed relief. It was not her skin color but her clothes. Most of the people here wore silk scarves and fitted blazers, stylish heels and clean, unscuffed boots, but this woman was wearing nursing shoes. Those bright white fake leather ones with the thick laces. And her coat was a shiny pink rain jacket sort of thing. Nor did she have paddle 99’s scientist-type look. Even the auctioneer’s smooth, calm expression became slightly skeptical, or perhaps just surprised, as the woman steadfastly raised her paddle.
AT FIRST DREW wondered if she might be a shill. Not that such things took place at Beller—at least, not that Drew had ever known of. But the way the woman in the pink vinyl coat suddenly jumped in, and kept raising her paddle, so adamantly, while the man near the telephones briefly fought back, a look of shock on his face, made Drew wonder. From her seat at the bank of telephones, all Dr
ew could see was the raised arm, a thin dark female hand and a bright pink sleeve. No, this was no shill; this person was in it to win.
Other than that, there was not much drama for the rest of the auction. The man sunbathing on Miami Beach did not win any of his bids, and his tone through his cell phone when he said good-bye seemed to blame Drew. By six o’clock all of the snacks had been eaten up and some of the women who had come together in groups, just to have a look, had left to go shopping at Prudential Center. Drew kept glancing over to see if Grigori was still here or if he and his friend had left. And then at last the auction was finished, and everyone stood and stretched and prepared to make their purchases.
Drew wanted to say a quick hello to Grigori, just shake his hand, feel his palm on hers. She stood and looked for him, momentarily losing him in the crowd. And then she heard her name, and Lenore saying “Yes, just one moment, she’s right over here.”
Drew turned to see the woman in the shiny pink coat approaching her, her hand outstretched. Only then did Drew see and recognize her face.
“Miss Brooks, nice to see you again.” That slight accent, as Drew reached out to shake her hand.
That was when Cynthia explained Nina Revskaya’s request, about whom the amber was to go to, and that she had with her here a guarantee from the bank, and a letter for Drew—as well as a second letter, for Drew to pass along to Grigori Solodin.
SINCE DREW HAD said it might take an hour or two for her to finish up, Grigori decided in the meantime to accompany Zoltan back home. A leisurely but energizing walk to Kenmore Square, the air refreshingly mild, and though Grigori wished he might have said something to Drew before heading out, he had seen for himself how busy she was, knew she would understand why he had not hung about trying to get in a quick word or two.
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