I took a little step backward, dizzy at the sound of it. A fortune! I could resign my job at the brothel and spend all my time searching for Max. Eat a real meal. But I had never cut my hair, only trimmed it. What would it be like without it?
The peddler seemed as surprised as I was at the offer. “Well, madame, what do you say?”
The man removed his hat, leaned toward me, cognac on his breath, and whispered, “I’ve seen you at Rue Chabanais.”
I stepped away. “No, monsieur.”
He followed. “Are you a princess? Seems like every Russian woman in this town claims to be royalty.”
I assessed his toupee, the deep brown color of a robin’s wing, flecked with gray. But despite René’s obvious skill, the hair splayed atop the man’s head like a dead animal.
The peddler untied his shears. “Shall we?”
The man sent me an unpleasant glance. “Just make sure it’s not lousey.”
I turned. “Lousey?” My face burned.
“From the smell of it you’ve not changed your clothes in a month.” The man came closer and ran his hand along the hair down my back. “But I prefer a ripe scent, really.”
“Monsieur—” the peddler said.
“Quiet, René. I’m making a transaction.”
I pushed the man’s chest with both hands and sent him backward, his toupee the tiniest bit askew. “Vile man. I would walk to the cemetery and die rather than sell my hair to you.”
I stepped out of the tent onto the street, pulling my dog fur coat close, loose hair streaming behind me.
The man called after me. “Russian whore.”
“Bald pig,” I called back to him over my shoulder. Even to my own ear the words sounded pathetic.
Vibrating with anger, I hurried off toward Rue Daru. Why had I let my temper get the best of me? Such a fortune I’d let slip through my fingers. I’d just have to work hard and find cheaper ways to find my son.
* * *
—
SOON, I SMELLED THE SCENTS of Rue Daru. Beef and cabbage and dill. Warm black bread, my mother’s favorite. My stomach contracted at the yeasty smell of it. I turned onto Rue Daru, a short street, and all at once, so many people I passed spoke not French but Russian.
As the golden-domed spires of Saint Alexandre Nevsky Cathedral appeared above me, I stopped on the sidewalk overcome with a heavy sense of home. I pinned my hair back up, searching the faces of those coming and going on the street. Russian faces.
I rushed toward the soaring cathedral, its three towers topped with gold onion domes shining in the sun. Tsar Alexander, Nicholas II’s grandfather, had helped build it. My blood.
I hurried up the steps and through the open cathedral doors, warm and safe and at home. The scent of incense particular to the Russian churches met me, flowery and sweet, and the great altar rose up below a six-tiered chandelier hung from the magnificent painted dome above. I listened for sounds of the doll factory below. If there was an operation going on down there it was a quiet one.
I stepped outside and down the steps to the basement of the cathedral, the crypt, and knocked on the door.
A woman opened the door a crack. “Yes?”
“My name is Sofya—”
“Who sent you?”
“A girl named Oxana.”
She pushed the door. “Come back another time.”
I thrust my boot across the jamb to keep it from closing. “I’m a friend.”
“All right for Father’s sake.” The woman waved me in. “Come. Quickly.”
My eyes adjusted to the darkness to find a crypt with a central pillar, fanning out with vaults, all painted with the muted scenes of saints. Rows of tables filled every part of the room and women sat crowded in at benches, each working at tasks. Their faces glowed in candlelight as they sewed and dabbed at wood with their paintbrushes. Some bent over mats pinned to masses of wooden bobbins making lace. It smelled of candle wax and turpentine and perspiration.
We walked the room and passed a young boy of no older than six, sitting barefoot at a bench, holding a simpler version of the wooden bobbins, attached to cotton threads, a woman bent over him.
“I am Mrs. Zaronova. Are you here to work? We only pay a few centimes.” She was a tall, dark-haired woman with an abrupt way about her.
“Such a large operation,” I said.
Mrs. Zaronova puffed out her chest. “We now have over one hundred workers.”
“And so quiet.”
“No talking allowed. Hurts productivity.”
I stepped toward the benches. Women sat, busy at their work, most terribly thin and dressed in dirty coats.
“It is freezing in here.”
“A fire costs money.”
“Do you feed them?”
“When I can find food they eat once they make their quota. Fifty dolls. Three pillowcases of lace.”
“Fifty dolls? For five centimes? That will not buy a piece of bread. You have children working here?”
“Who are you to question me? Here, at least they stay dry and have a place where they can be productive. With so many French men killed in the war, Russian men can find work, but for women it is harder.”
We walked along the tables, past a row of lace makers, juggling their wooden bobbins, barely stopping to insert a silver pin every now and then. Here and there women slept on their benches.
“Can you not afford to install electric lights? Take the black paper off the windows? Their eyes will be ruined working by candlelight.”
“You don’t get it, do you? We cannot turn on the lights for fear of discovery. The Reds monitor any home or workplace carpentry and improvements. They have infiltrated every organization that helps us White Russians. Could be spies here right now. We’re all afraid.”
“Of what?”
She ran her fingers through her hair. “Don’t you read the papers? Just last week another Russian woman was found in the park. Throat slit. At least now we have the money to bury the victims, at night, in secret. Always we are targets for them.”
“But you’re just making crafts.”
“Crafts that provide money and help for us from America. The Reds want us gone, no matter where we are. Afraid we’ll come back and restore the monarchy.”
“But this place is inhumane, madame. The restaurant across the street. Could they provide food?”
“Make yourself useful and ask. I have begged so much everywhere they close the doors when they see me coming.”
* * *
—
I HURRIED TO THE RESTAURANT across the street from the cathedral. Such a rustic-looking place right in the middle of Paris, A la Ville de Petrograd, lettered in red on black over the heavily curtained windows. The siding on the outside was made of real logs to look like a country izba, the outside painted with gay pictures of Russian countryside. My stomach groaned as I read the menu posted in the window in French: Blinis. Pirozhki. Stroganoff.
I entered and found one large, low-ceilinged room, the air thick with the scent of cooked beets and Sappho cigarettes. Groups of people sat at small tables and a cherry-red piano stood in one corner. I stepped to the kerchiefed older woman at the hostess table. “I am Sofya Streshnayva. My father worked for the Ministry.”
“In Petrograd? Hold on.”
She stepped through a door and came back with a gentleman dressed in a white apron holding a glass, wiping it with a striped cloth.
“Dr. Abushkin?”
“Sofya.” He came around the bar and kissed me on both cheeks. “What a happy surprise. I cannot talk long. I need to get back to my duties.” He leaned in. “I am a very important part of this operation—dishwasher. It’s terrible getting jobs here. To continue as a physician they want me to go back to medical school. Start all over. Countess Pechesky is a washroom attendant now,
dressed in her old gown, passing hand towels to the same women who once curtsied to her.”
I smiled. “You’re still the same.”
“Just sitting on my suitcases here, waiting to go back as soon as this whole mess is ironed out. I heard about your family.” He wrapped his arms around me and kissed the top of my head.
How good his arms felt. For all his old-fashioned thinking, he was still the man who’d birthed me.
“To think such fine people died that way. Thank God your mother was not here to witness.”
“It’s like medicine to see this place.”
“Just don’t breathe.”
“I was across the street and in the crypt—”
“Be careful.” He leaned in. “Checka guards are infiltrating such places.”
Could I trust the doctor with the news of my son? No matter how well intentioned he was, a word to the wrong person would no doubt spread like disease here in this community.
“Don’t tell people your name so freely, Sofya. You must stay aware at all times. As a woman you are more prone to spilling secrets. They could be in this room right now.”
“Men spill secrets as often as women, Doctor. I can take care of myself.”
“Take it seriously. They are using all tricks to lure aristocrats out of the safety of the community. To be kidnapped and sent back to hard labor or worse. A count was poisoned here, right there at that table.”
“I will be careful. In the meantime can you spare some food for the women across the street? They’re starving—children with bowed legs.”
“Rickets. There is so little food now in Paris—farmers want a fortune for a cabbage. But as dishwasher, I can save scraps and see about some soup.”
All at once a rousing piano chorus began, as it so often did in Russia, and the doctor nodded toward the pianist. “Your cousin.”
The breath caught in my throat. “Karina?” I craned my neck above the crowd to see her back to me at the piano bench.
“I will send some pirozhki out for you two,” he said as he hurried off to the kitchen.
I could barely stop smiling as I drew closer and saw Karina dressed in a white satin gown and playing the upright piano; atop it was a glass jar with a few coins at the bottom. She played the Tarantella finale of Brahms’s first piano concerto, his greatest compositional triumph. It was one of the first I’d watched her learn as a child, as she sat on a stack of encyclopedias at the Dowager Empress Marie’s.
Water filled my eyes. How did she end up here in a room of émigrés without the basic manners to listen to such greatness? How good it would be to see my cousin, have a friend with whom to talk over everything.
I waited for the song to end and touched her arm, trembling a bit with the anticipation of her reaction upon seeing me. “Good to hear you play again, Karina.”
She stood, clapped her hands in front of her, kissed me on both cheeks and held me tight. “I prayed I would see you here.”
We moved to a small table and a waiter set two pirozhki and a bottle of vodka with glasses down between us. The scent of the little buns, their brown, egg-washed tops toasted dark, made me realize how hungry I was.
“I heard about your family, Sofya. It hurts every time I think of it.”
“They are with God now.” It was a pat statement but was at least something to say to help others feel better about such a horrible tragedy. “But Max is still alive and I think I know where he’s living.”
“Here in Paris? Just go take him.”
“It’s not that easy. I haven’t seen him there.”
“Why not visit the schools in that area? Talk to the headmistresses and inquire.”
“You’re a genius, Karina.” Why had I not thought of that?
“Let me help. I’m not working on Tuesday, I’ll come with you.” She covered my hand with hers. “You’ll find him, I know it, but now you must eat.”
I took one pirozhki from the plate and bit into the cabbage center, perfectly salty and warm. “Why are you so dressed up, wearing your golden party shoes? Isn’t this a dress you wore to play for the tsar?”
“I’m saving my more practical clothes for my next life. I sewed some underwear from the bags in which they deliver the liver to the kitchen here. So now I attract only dogs.”
I smiled. “How did you get so funny, Karina?”
“I’ve only a few minutes to talk—the owner doesn’t like me taking breaks.”
“Know where I can find a bed close by?”
“It’s close to impossible right now, but I can get you on a list. I would invite you to sleep with me but I share my bed with two nasty sisters and one snores like something out of the zoo.”
A young blond man came in the door and walked through the crowd with a stack of newspapers on his shoulder, selling them as he went. He stopped near us and handed a paper to Karina with a smile. “No charge.”
With no comment to the young man, Karina grabbed the paper, LATEST NEWS printed across the front page, and opened it.
As the man wandered off I leaned in to Karina. “I think he likes you.”
Karina kept her gaze on the paper. “They’re talking about holding a beauty pageant. Miss Russia. Should we enter?”
“You should. They might not look kindly on my dirty fingernails.”
Karina drew me closer. “Ilya sent me a letter. We’ll finally be together after all this time, can you believe it?”
“Be careful. Dr. Abushkin says—”
Karina spread open the paper. “The doctor sees conspiracy in everything. Ilya is smart. He’s going to leave me a message in the Letters from Home section—just here. Have you seen it? It comes out every day and it’s how Russian people reconnect now.”
“Those letters may be traps.”
“I understand, Sofya. But my life without him is so hard. I have to take a chance.”
“Just let me come with you to meet him.”
“Of course,” she said, running one finger down the column. “No word from Ilya. But look, a letter for you. Can you believe it? The very last one here. It says: Sofya Streshnayva, You have a sum of money wired to your name. Please collect at this address. It gives an address in the third arrondissement. With tender affection, your loving family.”
Karina turned to me, her face drained of color. “But you have no family.”
A chill went through me.
Someone knew I was in Paris.
CHAPTER
43
Eliza
1919
I stepped closer to Merrill’s bedside and blinked to change the image before me. He lay on his side, the length of his leg exposed, his skin a deep shade of purple, covered with hideous, shiny, blue-black bubbles.
A young man in a white smock stepped toward me. “Visiting time is over.”
“Please, Doctor.”
“I’m sorry, but we have much to do here. I have no time for transfer requests.”
“I’ve come all the way from New York to see him. Could you just share your prognosis? I promise I’ll let you get to your work.”
He looked at me for a long moment and then down at Merrill. “Two serious issues. The first is gas blindness. Mustard gas most likely. He landed through a cloud of it. Lucky to be here.”
Merrill stirred and turned toward me, thick strips of lace wound around his head, covering his eyes. Had they run out of bandages?
“Will he regain his sight?”
“Most likely, but there’s no guarantee. The second issue is gas gangrene. He went down in farm country, where the soil contains a large amount of horse manure, which harbors bacillus bacteria. Once he crash-landed his clothing became saturated with the bacteria, it lodged in his wounds, and this is the result.”
“Should you not cover them with gauze?”
“Best to
leave them open to the air. There was a time when we covered these wounds up, left them alone, but now know they can infect major organs. So we’ve been watching that leg.”
“Oh no, Doctor. Amputate?”
“I’ve seen the infection spread quickly to systemwide sepsis. But, believe it or not, he’s on the mend now. Fever’s gone, blister size reduced. We’ve actually had a few conversations and he’s aware of what’s happened. Has one bang-up headache and blistering in the lungs.”
“At risk for pneumonia?”
“Yes, madame. Ten percent die and the others resume their lives, though can’t say they’re all what you’d call normal.”
“Where was his gas mask?”
“Not issued to fliers. Odds of them successfully crash-landing are so low they don’t waste a gas mask on a pilot. But he got it worse than most, flying right through the cloud.”
“So much necrotic damage. Will he walk?”
“Pardon me, madame, but are you a nurse? We could use the help here.”
I smiled. “No, just nurses in my family, but I’m happy to help.”
“Well, I can tell you have the gift.” He smoothed the sheet, which covered Merrill’s unaffected leg. “It’s hard to predict the extent of the muscle damage. May be a long recuperation.”
“I know just the place for him to recover. And I have experience with pneumonia, Doctor. We’re old friends.”
I looked down at Merrill lying there in such terrible shape. The man who never wanted to travel. The man I’d shamed into battle.
He stirred and I bent to whisper in his ear. “With any luck you’re going home soon, dearest.”
“Eliza.” He felt for my hand and I took his in mine.
“Once you land, you’ll stay up in Bethlehem to recover.”
“No. It’s too much—”
“They do need a general store up there very badly. I know it may seem far-fetched to you right now but you’re going to be well again one day and you could do us all a favor and run it.”
Merrill smiled.
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