8

Morning arrived with a steamy blast from the engine that frightened the rooks from their perches. A cloud of dizzying blue-black wings met us as the train pulled into the station. Bad luck, if you were the sort to fear such things.

Not me, of course.

I'd left Stary but my grief had followed like a kind of glamour. That was clear right away from the face of the civil servant who had been called upon to usher me into my new life.

"I trust your journey was well?" he asked politely but his eyes lingered, searching, scrutinizing, attempting to suss out whatever it was that made me shine so.

Orphan, orphan, orphan I wanted to shriek, but the travel had cast a spell of silence on me. I nodded imperiously. He was a functionary-and that was enough for both of us. He took his place behind the wheel of a black armored sedan and slid shut the privacy partition. I suppose he was used to driving around a different class of passenger-the Deeps, perhaps. The Department for the People's Protection. Even in Stary I'd heard stories about them. How they were human lie detectors, how they didn't need to sleep.

In any case it didn't matter. I had nothing to say and was happy for him to drive in silence.

The outskirts of Hraná City were sprawling and the sprawl was both ugly and bleakly impressive. A shivering afternoon light slid between ashlar facades twenty stories tall. From time to time a bridge would cross us and in its blue shadow handkerchiefed women hawked mushrooms the size of lamb hearts.

The engine bled gasoline and the driver took his time. There were no sights to point out. Victory Square lay further west as did the fabled Fountain of the Princes, the Winter Palace with its thousand rooms and courtyards, its sea-green copper spires, the Capitol Buildings, the seat of the senate, of General Cvetko himself-but those weren't for me. I was the daughter of heroes but we were no longer in Stary. Already my mother's time was passing, she was passing, out of the realm of living and into.

Somewhere else.

As we drove along the magistrale, I set about making my own plan to join her. A rope would be best to end my life. Braided from my bedsheets, perhaps, if nothing better could be found. Poison would be hard to come by and painful if maladministered. Drowning would be difficult and fire more terrible than poison. Falling would be acceptable though the building must be high enough to guarantee certainty. At least there were enough of those around.

Thinking this way made me calmer so I dozed as the car carried me into my new life. My almost certain death. The light was weak and yielding. The asphalt whispered its secret song as it sped into the distance.

*   *   *

Then:

"Who's this one? Speak up, girl, at my age I don't hear so well. What are you? A lump? A parcel? What's your name? What are you doing on my doorstep?"

"Well now, Granddaughter. I suppose you'll say that old crone is me," demands Sara Sidorova.

"What can I tell you, Baba? The years are seldom kind." A trace of a smile on her lips.

"But how old is that one down there? A hundred? A hundred and two? Her face looks like a pickled onion! I swear to you, my own mother was beautiful, even in old age she was beautiful! But her. her."

"Oh, I confess my first impressions weren't good either."

You clutched the doorframe as if I'd woken you from a deep sleep. Rheumy eyes, a shapeless black frock and a briny aroma that followed you out into the hallway. One long severe braid hung like a noose from your scalp. But still you held yourself like a boyar-wife-mad perhaps, but your back was straight, your gaze fierce.

"The girl's name is." my driver started but you yanked up my hand and held it an inch from your face as if you might read my fortune quicker than he could tell it.

"Sara Irenda Lubchen. Yes, yes, of course, I'm not a soft skull. Consider her safely delivered. Tell whoever you need to she's with family." With that you hauled me inside and slammed the door.

The smell was worse here. It hung like a sweat in the air. Thick preserving jars balanced on unsteady shelves: eggs and walnuts, beets swimming in magenta vinegar, cucumbers, cabbage, and tiny sour green apples. But I didn't have time to take it in.

"Did you do as I asked? Did you burn my daughter's things?" You were stamping your feet on a shapeless saffron-colored rug. "Come now. Irenda-" you tasted my name in your mouth "-you must answer me quickly."

I shook my head.

"Foolish girl."

You snatched up my suitcase and set about unlocking it. Out came a strip of bed linen as long as my arm. A few scraps of poetry fluttered to the ground.

"This was my Else's, wasn't it? It tastes of her. Like lemons and apple blossom," you said as the ribbon traveled from your fingers to your cracked coral lips. "You should have consigned these to the fire, girl. You should have let her find her rest. Did no one teach you anything of value in that stinking place she raised you?"

I kept my silence.

"Answer when I ask you a question. I won't live with a mute."

"In Stary, I had excellent scores," I told you stiffly, "in geometry and history. I know how the seven princes died and the name of every man who fought at Cheyory Bridge."

"Trivia, trivia, trivia, just as I expected," you shot back with a scowl. "What a bad start you are off to, Granddaughter. But I'll do what I can. I'll have to, won't I?"

*   *   *

Your apartment was five stories up, made of red brick balanced on rusted steel struts. Its spatial features were peculiar, the partitioned remnants of a communal style of living long since abandoned: narrow hallways and jigsaw rooms. The balcony held a glassed-in bathroom along with strings of dried red peppers.

"This is yours now," you told me as you pushed me toward a cramped room behind the kitchen. Inside it was a mattress. The rest of the furniture was modular: a standing mirror that doubled as an ironing board, a stack of four boxes I was told could be anything I wanted: a stool, a sofa, a bed, a table for the old sewing machine that took up half the closet. Immediately I hated it.

"It's make-believe," you snapped. "Just make-believe the furniture."

"Yes, Baba," I whispered. Imagine dull lead softening. Impossible? Well, your face did. Not much, but I swore I saw it. You thought I knew nothing but Stary had made me a careful observer.

"Well, girl, do you want tea? Do you need to pass water?"

I shook my head.

"You must be hungry at least, with all the miles you've traveled. Eat when you have the chance or starve later."

"No," I intoned. A hunger strike would do as well as anything else. I wanted to deny my body.

But then my stomach rumbled gassily and you were pulling me into the kitchen before I could refuse you again, saying, "Good, good. Only shadows don't eat."

Well, so what if I was hungry? It had been three days on the train and I dearly missed my mother's cooking. But in your kitchen were only more preserving jars stuffed with mummified cranberries, horseradish, and thick-skinned tomatoes. Did you live on these? It seemed intolerable. I'd have to kill myself soon and spare myself a horrid breakfast.

While you set about collecting specimens to fatten me up, I was left in an airless living room where a masonry heater piped warmth through a maze of black pipes. The bottom third of each of the walls had been painted moss-green, the work abandoned evidently. Above the divide, dusty cupboards hid an assortment of worn crockery and knick-knacks.

In Stary, snooping on one's neighbors was a time-honored tradition. When I opened one drawer, I found a blown-glass bulb that launched a snow-swirl of confetti as I shook it. Next was a fading picture of a girl. She stood barefoot in the flooding gutter, her knees splayed, gripping a pair of dancing shoes while a soldier with a black umbrella stood some paces behind. Seventeen or eighteen, rail-thin with a wild elation in her eyes. She had my mother's delicate, heart-shaped mouth. I pried the picture from its frame to search for some hint of when it had been taken. 'Mirko, after the war' was all I could find written there.

"I married that one," you said from behind me.

Who knew you could move like a panther when you wanted? I spun around to find you holding a board with buttered rye bread toward me. "Your deda was kind in his own way. You won't remember him, I expect. You grew up too far away. Put the picture back, child. The light will spoil it."

It was you then. Not my mother at all.

"But that can't be right," says Sara Sidorova. "My husband was Feliks."

"It hasn't come yet, Sara. The girl in the picture is still ahead of you."

"Why did you send me that letter?" I demanded. In truth, I suppose what I really meant was, what's to become of me now? I had no one in the world but you and by that point it was becoming clear to me you were a grotesque, a witch woman, a fossil gone grotty in the head. I had seen war widows like you in Stary. The state madhouse was full of them.

"You look like my daughter," you murmured as you sank into the wing-backed chair near the stove, balancing the board on your knee. "Else was so skinny when she was your age, like a little boy."

Oh, but just hearing Mama's name was a...