1
The Sisters of the House of Golitev
Late August 1921
Moscow
If someone from their past should catch a glimpse of the formerly aristocratic Goliteva sisters, they would find two wraiths instead of countesses.
That is what Irina thinks as she trudges down the empty Moscow street with her sister Lili to barter their priceless family heirlooms for food at the bazaar. Their stomachs are empty, their pockets even more so, their coats shabby and stripped of most finery since the Revolution. Between them, they clutch a large oil painting of Grand-père Sergei Sherbatsky in its gilt frame. They should call him Dedushka. French might have been denounced as a bourgeois language, but their family still speaks it in secret. Their lives are sustained by secrets. That and memories, though those, too, are best kept hidden.
The awkward frame digs into the flesh of Irina's palm, her other hand gripping the handle of a battered old leather valise. From time to time, she stumbles on the uneven pavement with its potholes and cracked stones, shooting her sister an apologetic half smile, even as Lili swears under her breath about the Bolsheviks' fine efforts at city repair and reconstruction.
The street is wide and broad but dirty and deserted, no longer busy with finely dressed people or magnificent carriages. Aside from a few ragged children with empty eyes, pausing their half-hearted play to watch them, or the distant rumble of a tram or horse-drawn droshky cab, it is unnaturally still. So Irina talks to Lili as nowhere else. Lili is eighteen to her twenty-eight years, and Irina doesn't always understand her younger sister. But on the streets, the long years between them blur, and all they have is each other.
The clouds hang low and stubby in a bone-white sky, the cold against Irina's skin biting, entirely unreasonable for August. There is no sun. She thinks it may have burnt itself out during the heat and drought of that summer, when the crops failed and famine came for Russia, like the Revolution four years before, like the Great War three years before that. But Russia is synonymous with tragedy. So Irina isn't surprised.
When they stop for a rest, she props the painting against the valise and burrows into her coat, feeling for the cameo brooch with the silhouette of their mother that she has sewn into the lining. While Lili cannot abide such trinkets, as they remind her of a past she'd rather ignore, Irina finds comfort in them. She supposes it's because she's had more of it. She runs her fingers over Maman's worn hair and face-recalling her rare, perfumed embraces; her slight nod of approval at a particularly fine ball gown, significant due to Maman's position as a maid of honor at court. Irina hastily pushes the trinket back into hiding. The thought of a ball triggers one of her dead fiancé. The brooch resides out of sight for a reason. So do the memories.
Being former people, they have lost the privilege of fine things-that is, except for their names. To the new Soviet republic, the Bolsheviks, and the Cheka secret police, they are still countesses Irina and Liliya Goliteva, the people's class enemy as descendants of one of the greatest and most ancient aristocratic clans of an imperial Russia dead and buried. Like most of their family. But unlike many former people, Irina's family didn't flee Russia. They stayed in hope of a return to normalcy. Now it is too late. Even if they could obtain papers, how could a household of women and children brave the danger of travel and exile?
So here they are, surviving as best they can, living as quietly as is possible for Golitevs. In fairy tales, paupers became princesses, not the other way around. But Soviet Russia is a warped Wonderland, where all is topsy-turvy and not what it should be.
Irina tries not to look at the neglected buildings as they continue on. Also topsy-turvy, with holes from artillery and machine-gun fire, some gutted and burned, others mere craters, black and cavernous like missing teeth. Shops are boarded up and wreathed thickly in cobwebs, most missing windowpanes. Fragments of glass crunch under their booted feet. Irina feels as if they shouldn't be here. And what will Aunt Marie say when she discovers the painting missing?
"Oh, no, I know what that face means, Irishka. Your conscience is rearing its ugly head," Lili needles, her specialty from the days when she would sneak into Irina's rooms and play pranks on her, down to the same elfish smile and naughty glimmer. "Don't look so glum! If we trade enough, we'll fill our stomachs for once, fueling us to wage our battles with Auntie."
"She will not like it," Irina says, though it is safer to disregard their promise to Auntie not to sell their family's possessions. But Irina cannot ignore her guilt; their aunt may be a force to be reckoned with, at times controlling and manipulative, but she is their matriarch and adoptive mother. Despite losing her son and husband three years earlier on top of her precious position also as a maid of honor, Auntie took on their dead mother's role without complaint. For this reason, whenever Lili starts to complain about her, Irina is the first to defend their aunt.
"Let her notice." Lili doesn't smile fully-no one does-but there is Papa's mischievous glint in her hazel eyes. "Besides, will the damn thing feed you? Grand-mère? Natasha and Seryozha? No. Besides, the Bolsheviks will take it from us sooner or later."
Irina's mind is instantly on Seryozha, her cousin for all intents and purposes. Only Auntie knows the truth-that he is Irina's son with the dead fiancé. Since he was born out of wedlock during the Revolution, when such a predicament still spelled social downfall, Auntie had saved Irina by arranging for her brother, Pavel-nicknamed Pasha-to adopt the boy. Irina feels the usual pang at this. Even in a topsy-turvy world, with their uncle and his wife dead, Irina remains the boy's mother in all but name. Only tradition cloaked in secrets dies hard.
Now, at nearly five years old, Seryozha is small and scrawny. His adoptive sister, fourteen-year-old Natasha, is so thin she has taken to rewearing her old dresses. And Lili has had to cut her wonderfully long honey-brown hair to her shoulders because of how lank it has become, her diminutive frame more boyish than ever. How absurdly sentimental she has been, Irina berates herself. She, who takes such pride in her sensible and practical nature.
"You're right. I only wish your art could sustain us." She nods at Lili's coat pocket, the edges of her sketch pad pressing faintly through the threadbare wool. Lili sketches portraits, scenes of Moscow, even former people. Alas, it brings in a pittance.
"I wish it, too. Do you think I like selling off what's left of our inheritance?" Lili's fingers tighten on the gilt frame, knuckles whitening, as if loath to part with it. "I learned everything I know about art from paintings like this one at Moscow House, thanks to Uncle Pasha. But I won't allow Auntie's backwardness to let us starve. I do not fear her." Lili swaggers a little at that.
Irina doesn't believe her bravado. Though impulsive and outspoken, Lili is just as hesitant to incur Auntie's displeasure. Irina tries not to think about the house.
Moscow House, built during the reign of Catherine the Great, was one of their family's many homes. Yet it was the house Irina and her family escaped to following the February Revolution in St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd during the Great War. And they've managed to keep it all these years, their one remaining White oasis in the sea of Bolshevik Red. Dread blooms in Irina's chest at the thought of the house. Once a place of light, of talk and laughter, it now stands dark and sullen, empty except for the memories and what is left of her family.
"Be thankful for the roof over your head," she reminds Lili, slipping all too easily into her elder sister role, thinking about the homeless, all those crammed into communal housing. "Most are not so fortunate."
Lili slips into her own role of needling, impish sister. "Oh, Irishka, so serious. I forgive you. As long as you don't frighten away the entire bazaar. I wish to trade for some tea, maybe a tin of coffee. I swear Grand-mère's boiled water is laced with metal."
Irina draws in an exasperated breath. With it, the filthy smell of the streets. Piss and several years' worth of waste. The ground floors of the abandoned buildings were turned into public toilets long ago. She remembers they used to laugh and pinch their noses. Now they breathe deeply of the air, and they don't laugh. That is the smell of their new Russia. One must get used to it-or die.
2
The Americans
Not far from the bazaar, Irina suddenly hears the violent screeching of tires. Her body tenses-a pair of black motorcars is barreling toward them, their white headlamps stabbing through the gray day.
Lili's face pales, all lightness gone. "Is it . . . ?"
Them, the Cheka. Or the head of the Soviet government, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, motoring in the automobiles he stole from families like theirs. But at second glance, the motorcars are bulky, freshly painted, foreign looking. Irina sharply veers toward the sidewalk, pushing herself and Lili out of the way of the speeding automobiles.
Just in time-the cars brake to a halt in a cloud of noxious black exhaust.
Irina takes one inhale of the engine fumes and dissolves into coughing. Her chest heats with outrage. Children live and play in the streets, their reflexes slow from lack of food.
Through the smoke, she sees three or four men slide out of each car and crowd the street with their tall, elegantly suited figures, their trunks and luggage. Irina steps toward them, about to air her thoughts, and not at all politely. She stops short upon hearing their words. Not Russian, but those of the dead last tsar and his wife, Nicholas and Alexandra; of the imperial family and the court-English, with hard American rs.
What are Americans doing in Moscow?
Copyright © 2024 by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
