“And we’ll start a baseball league. In the back meadow. We’ll pass the hat for the umpire. Call them the Bethlehem Farmers.”
“Ploughboys,” Merrill said.
“Yes, that’s better, dear. See? You’re adapting quite well to country life already.”
Dr. Martin felt for Merrill’s pulse. “There is a troop ship leaving next week for New York. No promises but we can try.”
Merrill held fast to my hand.
“Consider it done, Merrill. You’re going home.”
CHAPTER
44
Varinka
1919
One cold, rainy morning, while Mamka sewed, I tried to teach Max his letters by reading him the newspaper. He paid little attention as I ran one finger under the headline and read it aloud: OUSTED KAISER ENJOYS HOLLAND.
Max just looked to his lap with longing at his two thumbs, which I had covered in pepper and petroleum jelly to stop his thumb-sucking.
Since the war had ended and Germany’s kaiser had fled in disgrace, he was often in the news. But the front-page photo that day was not of the kaiser. It was of the former tsar and tsarina and their children, for nothing kept the public’s attention like that family, even months after they were rumored dead. The photo showed the tsar’s daughters aboard the royal yacht in better times, the eldest, Olga, closest to the camera, squinting in the sun.
Max leaned over and looked closer at the picture. “Maman,” he said, pointing to Olga.
I gasped a little breath and Mamka’s gaze met mine.
“I am your Maman, Max.” I flipped the newspaper over. “Does he still remember what she looked like?” I whispered to Mamka. “He was so little last time he saw her.”
Mamka tied a thread and clipped it with tiny, silver scissors, a far cry from when she used to use her teeth to cut threads. “My first memory, I was two. My mother going to a dance. She died soon after but I remember her face.”
I pulled my shawl closer. After everything I’d done for Max he’d still not forgotten her. Would he ever think of me as his mother?
* * *
—
MAX NAPPED ON THE FLOOR of my bedroom and I read a stack of French magazines Mamka had brought home from Lanvin. Hems were shorter and white kid shoes with patent leather toes seemed to be the newest footwear to have. Perhaps I would take more money from Taras’s boot and buy some.
Rain hit the windows making me drowsy there under the blankets. Where was Radimir on that messy day? We were supposed to see Luna Park together.
“Varinka, come quickly,” Mamka called from the front of the house.
I ran to the vestibule to find Mamka there with a French policeman, a tall woman shaking off her umbrella, and little Max between them, dripping water on the marble floor.
“You the mother?” the policeman asked, brushing rain from his navy blue cape.
I nodded.
“Madame LaBlanc here found this child, wet to the skin, in the middle of the street.”
“I had no idea—”
Madame LaBlanc brushed rain from her coat. “What kind of a parent doesn’t know her own child is missing?”
“I was just reading—”
“Ran away from home.” The policeman handed Mamka a lumpy pillowcase. “Wouldn’t get far with a stuffed owl and a towel.”
He tossed the newspaper we’d read earlier, now soaked through, on the front table. “Young man had this newspaper with him. Headed for the docks to find that ship. Says he’s looking for his mother.”
Madame LaBlanc turned to face Mamka. “Don’t I know you?”
“Yes, madame. I work for Madame Lanvin.”
“I thought so. If your daughter cannot keep constant watch on this boy, maybe keep him on a leash? He will end up crushed by a horse or worse.”
“Of course, madame,” Mamka said.
The policeman held the door open for Madame LaBlanc and the two hurried off.
I pulled Max by the hand, in from the vestibule. “You were a very bad boy.”
Mamka pulled the towel from the pillowcase and dried Max’s hair.
“Do you hear me?” I asked.
Max picked up his pillowcase and headed back to his room, sucking his thumb as he walked.
* * *
—
RADIMIR COULD BARELY CONTAIN himself the day he was to show me Luna Park, an amusement park in Porte Maillot, on the western edge of Paris. We came by metro to the park gates, French flags fluttering above us atop the stone crowns. How pretty the entrance looked, strung with foil bells and spiky tinsel. I smiled as Radimir paid my one-franc admission. This was a date, far from anywhere Taras would see us, and Mamka had agreed to watch Max. And best of all, my lips itched, which everyone knows is a sign a person is about to be kissed.
Radimir hurried us into the park, under the great arch, through the crowd.
“Come along,” he said. “We need to get to Shoot-the-Chutes before the line forms.”
It was half-price day since the park was closing for the winter and, as a result, much of Paris was there. Well-dressed people from all walks of life lined up for the rides. Women in their good coats and muffs, men in dark coats and bowler hats. Since admission was free to those in the military, men in uniform peppered the crowd.
Radimir had dressed up, too, in a dark blue coat, and his tie matched the color of his pond-bottom eyes. He had left his hat at home so his auburn hair shone in the little sun struggling through the clouds.
“This is the Theater of Flames,” he said as we passed a tall, white stucco building. I arched back my head to read Theatre de Flamme spelled out in bamboo letters across the facade.
“They eat fire there,” Radimir said. “We’ll come back later.”
Why would someone eat flames?
I didn’t want to go on the Shoot-the-Chutes ride in which brave people rode in boats down a steep chute and splashed into the water below, but I did it for Radimir. We rode in a boat with the name Gaston painted on its rear and I hid my face in his coat as we hit the water and great plumes shot into the air.
We rode the romantic, scenic railway in little connected train cars, high above Paris, and could see much of the city. Radimir wrapped his arm around me as we went higher and watched the lights of Paris coming on, the Tour Eiffel in the distance.
Radimir looked about to kiss me at the very top but just brushed something off my face.
I gathered my courage and whispered, “I have not been completely truthful with you. You may hate me.”
“I could never.”
“Max is not a child Mamka and I were watching. He’s mine.”
Radimir turned to face me. “Yours?”
“I mean I have sole care of him. The mother fell under unfortunate circumstances and I ended up with him. Mamka and I protected him. He would have died without me.”
“Well, certainly she wants her child back.”
I turned my gaze to Paris in the distance. “Perhaps. She is a cousin to the tsar. I am afraid she may come here to Paris for him.”
“Then, of course, you should return him to her, Varinka.”
“But I’m the only mother he knows.”
Radimir took my hand. “You were good to help him, but it’s wrong to keep them apart. I grew up without my own parents. You cannot rob the boy of his mother.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Come back to Russia with me, Varinka, and have all the babies you like.”
“It’s hard to explain how much I love him. He is so smart. I am teaching him to read. He sits on my lap when I read to him and burrows in close….”
“If you loved him you would put his happiness first. Come back to Petrograd with me, Varinka. We’ll travel. To Italy. Bring your Mamka. I’ve looked into that guardian of yours. He’s a dangerous man, Varinka. All the more
reason to send the child away.”
“You could protect Max.”
“Not only should he be with his mother, he has imperial blood. I would be kicked out of the party or worse if that became known. Come back with me to Petrograd. I leave in two days.”
“So soon?”
Radimir pulled me close. “Have a child with me, Varinka. Of our own.”
“Max is my own. Besides, what could I do with him at this point?”
Radimir looked out toward the city, lights coming on here and there as darkness came. “You’d solve this problem if you wanted to. Find the mother. There are Red Cross services….”
“I’m not giving him up.”
I shivered as night settled upon us, tired of the amusements.
Radimir took me home by the metro and we rode in silence.
It was clear a second kiss would not happen.
Not that night. Maybe never.
CHAPTER
45
Sofya
1919
The day after meeting Karina, around the time Max might be returning from school, I waited down the street from Taras’s townhouse on Rue de Serene, alert for any sign of my son. I walked the sidewalk in front of the house, pretending to be headed somewhere, head tilted against the winter wind. What if I saw Varinka? Would she recognize me? Would Max? What if they had not enrolled him in school? Varinka was a peasant after all and perhaps didn’t believe in formal education.
All at once the front door opened and Taras stepped out. Walking toward him at that point, I could scarcely turn on my heel. My heart beat faster as he passed me and I turned to watch him walk on. Off to his brothel so early in the day? Or maybe attack another innocent family as he had mine?
My breath caught in my throat as he turned as well and with a pointed look watched me go. How could he not recognize me as the one who’d escaped? Before he was a Cheka agent, he’d been a woodsman. And everyone knows a Russian woodsman will hunt their prey until they die themselves.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, back at Les Chabanais I woke to the sound of crying. I rose and stepped to a group huddled near the window. Blue ice covered the windows and gave them the look of stained glass as the young Russian women knelt, crying as they prayed. A newspaper lay on the bed and I drew closer. Some part of me already knew what was printed there. The front page held a black border, a sign of mourning, of course, and the photo of a body facedown in water, a woman’s white satin dress cinched up above her garters, long hair fanned out in the water.
“When?” I asked one of the girls.
She turned to me with a tear-swollen face. “Just yesterday.”
I leaned closer and read the caption: Petrograd émigré Karina Shoumatoff found slain Monday night, afloat in the Seine.
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY AFTER I turned in my work receipts I ran most of the way to Rue Daru for Karina’s funeral mass, through the sleet, hoping to somehow make peace with her death. How was it possible? Perhaps it was a mistake? Why was everything I loved taken from me?
There was a great crowd at the cathedral that day. Mourners circled the casket, stopping to lay flowers at her feet or kiss her lying there. Sweet incense filled the air, just as it had at my mother’s service. That was the last funeral I’d been to and standing by Mother’s casket I could barely look at her there.
Is that why I had such an unshakable fear of the dead? Father had never spoken of Mother’s death, just kept a glass of water and a towel on his bedroom windowsill for forty days, a Russian tradition, since the dead were thought to travel the earth for forty days before they left this world.
Terrible images flashed before me. Mother laid out in our zala, paper crown on her head. The dead peasant girl in the snow and her frozen grimace. Father’s charred body. I pushed my hands into my pockets, they shook so. But didn’t I owe it to Karina to stay strong and say goodbye?
My throat closed off as I arrived at the casket, Karina lying there dressed in her white dress, roses and other hothouse flowers arranged in bunches at her feet. I avoided looking at Karina’s face and bent to kiss her cheek, cold against my lips through smooth cloth.
She held a long, golden cross in her clasped hands and someone had stitched the slash at her throat with coarse, black thread, a piece of sheer black cloth placed over her face to hide it. Mrs. Zaronova stood at the foot of the casket. Had the doll factory paid for the funeral?
I forced myself to look at Karina’s face. Even through the cloth I saw the gray pallor of her cheek, the paper crown across her forehead. It was Karina, of course. There was no mistake. It had been a bad death.
Those in line pressed me along and I left my cousin lying there, rage growing in my chest. No church could keep us safe. We’d lost our homeland and now no one was safe. God was not going to save us. Nor the French police.
I left the cathedral, ran down the steps and through the gates. There was only one way to keep us all safe.
* * *
—
“YOU’RE BACK,” RENÉ SAID as I entered the tent.
I walked toward the stool and pulled the pins from my hair. “I want four hundred francs or I will go elsewhere. Do it quickly.”
René waved toward the stool. “Sit, madame.”
I tucked the pins in his smock pocket. “And more for the pins. I won’t be needing them anymore.”
“Of course.” René untied the scissors from his belt and I held my breath.
I flinched as he tied my hair tight at the nape with a blue ribbon.
“Some wine to make it easier?” he asked.
“No. Just do it, please.”
“No husband to object?”
“If you don’t hurry up, sir—”
The sound of the cutting was the worst part, the brass of his shears cold against my neck. But in ten seconds it was over and I was left with a sudden lightness. I touched the back of my head, the stub of short hair.
I turned, but René had already secured my hair in a paper bag and whisked it to his desk drawer. Perhaps to avoid a scene? Little did he know how good it felt.
I stood. “My payment?”
René pulled a leather pouch from his smock pocket, slid out a few bills, shook out silver coins, and slid it all into my cupped hands.
“Half now and half on—”
“I want it all now or I will shout to the rooftop that you are a fake and a—”
He stepped back. “Keep your voice down, madame. This is a quality establishment. Fine then, four hundred francs.”
“And more for the pins.”
He slid the extra francs into my coat pocket. I counted it and then stepped to the door.
“In three years your hair will have grown long enough for another visit.”
“Au revoir, monsieur. I won’t be back.”
* * *
—
I LEFT THE HAIR merchant’s tent and, on my way back to Rue Daru, had the impression I was flying, so light after the surrender of my hair. Perhaps it was more the happy jangle of silver in my pocket, but I felt I could do anything. What to do first? Send word to Eliza? Hire a private detective to find Max? First I had a mission to accomplish.
I’d never handled so much money before, since no one in my family carried it and at boarding school we had no need for it. My first stop was to the sweetshop I’d been thrown out of, la Mère de Famille. This time they were more than happy to sell me my tin of candies and a box of their prettiest chocolates when I produced a palmful of silver francs. I then walked on to a merchant who dealt in knives and hatchets of every kind, then hurried to an open-air market. Though the selection was limited, I found a fat cabbage, good-looking carrots, and some lavender-colored beets to stuff into my net bag. I’d never shopped for food before and how satisfying it wa
s, seeking out the best produce and bargaining for the lowest price.
I bought firewood and a few more things and hurried to the restaurant at Rue Daru, feeling invincible, bags bulging with food, a bundle of kindling under one arm. I called for Dr. Abushkin and handed him my bags.
I handed him a handful of francs. “This is to make soup for those working across the street.”
“Where did you get such money?”
I turned my head.
“You sold your hair? How could you? A woman’s femininity. Are you deranged or just hysterical?”
“After Karina—”
“You are suffering from a weak nervous system as a result of the terrible news, Sofya. Being on your own, without your husband, has affected your decision-making. Single women—”
“I will hear nothing more about my weaknesses, Doctor. I have many and I catalog them myself. Being a single woman suits me well and I’m suffering from nothing but a great deal of sadness. I know cooking that much soup is a great commitment but I will arrange help for you. I will come as well.”
“You cook?”
“Yes. Twice daily. This should get us through the winter.”
“Why spend all this money on soup for a bunch of women? Use it to get yourself a nice room in a good part of Paris.”
“When you arrange to have weekly firewood sent here to the restaurant, can you add a bundle for the doll factory? And I would like to hire escorts for the women, can you recommend those you know and trust—to see them to and from their work? I have purchased a box of small knives I will distribute to each worker.”
“Women with knives? Karina’s murder was a fluke, Sofya.”
“We are targets, you said so yourself, and I won’t let it happen again.”
“You’re hysterical, completely understandable, Sofya. A woman of your gentle birth—”
“If you wish to help us, I welcome it. If not, please tell me so I can make other arrangements.”
Lost Roses Page 36