Russian Winter Read online

  Drew wondered how old he was—late forties, early fifties? Not of Nina Revskaya’s generation. She found it intriguing, perhaps even somehow suspect, that besides having a Russian name and living here in Boston, Grigori Solodin, like Nina Revskaya, was reticent, holding something back.

  If Lenore sensed that there was anything to all this, it was nothing she would make time for. Her priority was not the hidden details but outward appearance: putting on a successful auction, running a solid business and a good show. Drew, though, loved the stories behind the objects, gossip she heard from clients auctioning off a relative’s estate, or of a little-known muse to one of the Group of Eight painters, or the jazz musician who owned a trumpet Miles Davis once played.

  The fact was, she hadn’t at first had much interest in jewelry. As an art history major she loved paintings and drawings and once had dreams of becoming a museum curator; after graduation she had worked in a gallery in Chelsea and interned at Sotheby’s before finding a better-paid position. The job at Beller was simply the first one she found when her marriage ended and she wanted to leave New York. She had revised her professional fantasies accordingly, into a new vision of herself as one of the experts on Antiques Roadshow, cheerily informing people that the watercolor they had found in their attic was a rare one worth thousands. Her first opportunity for advancement, five months later, had been as Lenore’s associate. And so Drew had refashioned her dream once again, and begun studying for her gemologist certificate through a correspondence course.

  In fact the only jewelry she wore she had purchased just three years ago, her very first auction win: a garnet ring that, due to a minor flaw in the stone, had found no bidders. Drew was able to purchase it afterward with a bit of money left her by her grandmother. It remained her only ring, the garnet small and round-cut, propped up by short prongs on a band of white gold. Drew wore it on her right ring finger, as a reminder of Grandma Riitta, whom she still spoke to in her mind sometimes. She was the only one who had not been accusatory when Drew decided to leave her marriage. “You kept growing, didn’t you? You grew up,” was all she had said, one of the last things she said to Drew, so that Drew knew she understood.

  In her mind she still heard her grandmother’s voice sometimes. Though she recalled her accent clearly, the few Finnish words Drew knew were already fading. Drew’s mother, having come to America as a toddler, had always insisted on responding to her own mother in English. And so in these past years not only Grandma Riitta but an entire language had been lost to Drew.

  Looking up from the garnet ring, Drew again read to herself. “Backdrop: History and Circumstance behind the Jewels.” That at least had a nice ring to it.

  The way Nina Revskaya had denied, so vehemently, that the amber pendant might be hers, not to mention the fact that she and Grigori Solodin apparently did not speak to each other. Or acted as if they did not. Drew wondered what the connection between them might be—or rather, between those three amber pieces. With enough research, and some luck, she supposed, she might be able to figure it out.

  Buoyed by the thought, Drew placed her fingers on the keyboard and began to type. “Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but in the case of Nina Revskaya”

  Drew paused, waiting for inspiration…and pressed delete.

  IT HAD SNOWED again, five more inches. That morning’s radio played a clip of Mayor Menino saying that though it was not yet February, Boston’s entire annual snow-removal budget had already been spent. As for today’s weather—the newscaster announced oddly gleefully—the high would be just two degrees, with a wind-chill factor of ten below.

  Americans, always needing to know the exact temperature before deciding how hot or cold to feel. Grigori would have said it aloud; entering the kitchen he felt—ridiculously, embarrassingly—the familiar disappointment of not finding Christine there sipping her decaffeinated coffee, simultaneously grading a batch of ESL exams and eating a portion of yogurt. She had been one of those people who woke easily and immediately, never needed time to warm to morning, to rub sleep from her eyes.

  He poured himself a glass of tomato juice, took a cold gulp, and went to fetch the paper from the front step. Atop a narrow sidebar on the front page was a headline: “Intrigue at Auction House,” and in smaller print, “Mystery Donor Brings Rare Gem, Increased Interest.”

  In his mind he heard Christine, so clearly: I can’t help but dislike her.

  “Well, now,” Grigori had always said, whenever the topic of Nina Revskaya came up, “let’s not be too hard on her.” His instinct was always one of defense. He knew it took restraint for Christine not to simply do something about it herself. That was the main reason he had hesitated, all those years ago, when he first chose to confide in her about Nina Revskaya. Not lack of trust, or shyness, or embarrassment, so much as the knowledge that a woman like Christine would never be able to sit back and let things continue unresolved. A can-do, glass-half-full optimist, she had majored in education—that most idealistic of professions—and was considering a master’s in social work. At first Grigori told Christine only the substantiated facts, about his parents, about being an only child, adopted, growing up in Russia, then Norway, then France, and the final leap, in his late teens, to America. When he finally told her, back when he was twenty-five, after they had been together for a full six months, about the ballerina Revskaya, he first made Christine swear to him that she would not intervene, would not take any action, would let Grigori deal with things on his own, in his own way.

  Not to mention the fact that you’re the only person who ever took the time to translate Elsin’s poems into English. And got them published. I don’t see how she could be so apathetic about her own husband’s legacy.

  Ah, Chrissie—my advocate, I miss you.

  Not so much as a thank-you…

  That his curiosity about Nina Revskaya’s life with her husband had transmutated into Grigori’s topic of scholarly expertise—the poetry of Viktor Elsin—was one of those rare happy outcomes born of personal obsession. Whenever the topic of Nina Revskaya’s reticence arose (not just with Christine, who knew the full story, but with anyone who inquired about Grigori’s translations and scholarship), Grigori had been able to say, without emotion, “It was a harsh time for her. You can imagine how she might not want to be reminded of…certain things. It could be like opening Pandora’s box, for her to look back at it all the way a scholar likes to. That kind of scrutiny.”

  Asked if he had requested Nina Revskaya’s help in his studies of her husband’s poetry, the phrase Grigori used was always, “Not in any detailed way.” If pressed he would add, “She knows that I’ve translated his work, yes, but…she hasn’t played any active role as the holder of Elsin’s literary archive.” In fact she claimed not to possess any of Viktor Elsin’s papers or personal matter. Grigori had decided to believe this to be the truth. After all, plenty of scholars faced such challenges. Not just biographers; any researcher with someone standing between him and his subject. It was part of the job description. And anyway, the poems themselves, and the truths they held, meant more to Grigori than any book he might produce about them or their author, more than any of the finicky papers he had published or the lectures he had presented at various conferences. And so Nina’s refusal to help when he approached her, years ago, as a scholar and professor—rather than as that young, innocent college student—he had not taken nearly so personally. Not like the first time. Standing there in the vestibule, waiting for her to come down…

  As for the translations, they were enough, they would suffice. The poems themselves were enough to maintain his continued interest. At some point they might yield their own secrets, with or without the help of Nina Revskaya. In the meantime, Grigori was perfectly aware of how he came across: nothing atypical, just one of those petty, unbrilliant academics worrying away at some esoteric and ultimately meaningless subject.

  The way it felt to press the bell on the intercom, like detonating a bomb…

&n
bsp; Grigori closed his eyes. If only he knew the truth. Impossible ever to be fully himself until he knew his own history.

  He sighed. The pendant was being sent to a lab. “To make sure it’s not copal or, you know, a reconstitution,” the young woman at Beller had said at their meeting. She had a pleasant, businesslike manner Grigori found calming. “This is really just pro forma,” she had assured him. “With rare mountings like these, we have little doubt it’s genuine amber. But Lenore always says that if two decades in the business have taught her anything, it’s that even the best collections can have something wrong with them.”

  “Something wrong?” Grigori had felt a kind of panic.

  “Something fake, or falsified. Anyone can be duped.”

  Duped. Just recalling her words, Grigori couldn’t help wondering if he himself had somehow, for all these years, been fooled.

  “Especially something of this era,” the woman had explained. “The Victorians loved remembrance jewelry, and amber with specimens was the ultimate. Demand really spiked—which is of course when imitations start to crop up. Again, though, it’s not that we’re doubtful the pendant is genuine amber. We just want to be able to state in the catalog that it’s been verified. With luck, the lab should even be able to confirm where the amber is from. The chemical makeup of Baltic amber is pretty specific.”

  It was during that conversation that Grigori had for the first time consciously viewed the pendant as a jewel with its very own private and organic past. A gemological creation of the natural world, nothing to do with human travails. Until that moment, he had simply considered it a clue.

  In a way it had always tinged him with the shame of a fetishist—not necessarily because it was a woman’s jewelry, but for the significance he had placed on it, and the nearly unbearable weight of what he suspected yet could not prove. Only Christine had known all about it. Sitting beside her on the floor of the room he rented, years and years ago, in the big rickety house just over the river in Cambridge, Grigori had told her all he had managed to piece together, and showed her the few bits of evidence. When she first touched the amber, it was with a small stroking motion, almost as if the thing were alive. “It’s sort of eerie, isn’t it?” She took the pendant in her palm, felt the weight of it. And then: “Can I try it on?”

  Why had this surprised him? It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone might ever actually wear it. Uneasily he said, “Sure,” sounding calm enough that Christine hadn’t noticed his hesitation. Leaning forward, she reached behind her head to lift her hair as Grigori draped the necklace and fiddled with the clasp, his hands grazing her neck. He could smell the soap she always used, rose-scented, from Chinatown. “Okay,” he said, and she turned around so that he could see the necklace.

  It didn’t look right on her. Christine said so herself. “That’s why I only wear silver,” she had explained as she stood to examine herself in the long mirror attached to the bedroom door. “Gold doesn’t work with my coloring. Neither does amber, I guess.”

  Grigori had gone to stand behind her, drawing his arms around her—already, somehow, not quite so jarred by the girl he loved wearing this old and mysterious object. Relief was what he felt, that Christine was so separate from that fraction of his world. In the long mirror he saw, with surprise, a young couple in love.

  From that moment the questions that had once seemed to him so central became less urgent; life with Christine overtook those other mysteries, grew larger than the past, created a new past, a new history—with Christine, who knew him as no one else had, Christine, the place where his search had finally ended.

  Ah, Chrissie.

  Grigori gulped down the rest of the tomato juice. These past two years had been that much worse for the way that hole had reopened. Larger every day, it seemed, the wanting, the needing to find his way back, somehow.

  He placed the empty glass in the sink. This was the moment when Christine would have looked at the clock, said Yikes, gotta go, and kissed him so that he tasted the coffee flavor of her tongue.

  Fighting the thought, Grigori went to fetch his coat and gloves from the closet, and braced himself for the cold, cold day.

  LOT 16

  Antique 14kt Gold and Lava Brooch, depicting St. Basil’s Cathedral. Russian hallmark of 56 zolotniks, in original fitted box with Cyrillic label. $1,500–3,000

  CHAPTER THREE

  Again the phone was ringing. First it had been the Herald and the Globe, but now came the piggybackers: the TAB, the Phoenix, not to mention the local television and radio stations. All because of that second press release from Beller. You would think there was nothing else happening in all of Massachusetts. But of course that was Boston, its essence, everyone excited about what was really not much at all. Local reporters sniffing around for news…At first Nina simply applied that universal yet somehow disingenuous phrase: “No comment.” But it felt weak, wrong, and each time she said it, she felt less in control.

  “Do you have any idea who the anonymous donor might be?”

  “No comment.”

  “Were you surprised to learn that someone else owned amber jewelry that matched your own?”

  “No comment.”

  After nearly a full day of this, Nina realized what a fool she had been not to turn the ringer off. When she found the little switch, she felt as she imagined a scientist might upon making a simple yet brilliant discovery. And so she had a day and a half of quiet—until Cynthia discovered the switch and made that sucking noise through her teeth that she always used to show disapproval, and turned it back on. Then she scolded Nina with a long spiel about safety and the rules of her job at Senior Services. When the ringing started up, she scolded Nina again, for not having an answering machine.

  It was the next day that Cynthia said, “You know, sugar, if you just give them one interview, I bet they’ll stop calling.”

  “I have given quite sufficient interviews in my life.” The problem was, Nina knew, that she was “theirs.” Other once-famous dancers resided in New York, Paris, Majorca, but Nina was Boston’s very own grande dame of ballet. Yet she had no desire to speak to anyone, least of all some poor scribe from the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. These days she sometimes found herself talking too much, saying things she hadn’t even wanted to say. It was those tablets. They made her not just groggy but loose-tongued, caused her to chat with Cynthia for much longer than she had meant to. One day last week she had found herself in the middle of a detailed story about her studio in London before realizing that it was Cynthia, and not a friend, she was talking with.

  “I’m just saying,” Cynthia went on, “as long as you don’t talk, they’ll keep calling. But you give them what they want, they’ll quiet down.” She must have seen that Nina was considering. “An exclusive,” Cynthia added, as if she worked in the industry and used such terms all the time.

  That was how Nina came to talk to Channel 4 News. It was arranged in no time, simply by returning their call. When Cynthia heard that June Hennessey and her crew would be taping at the apartment the next evening, she assessed Nina with new appreciation and said, “Wait till Billy hears!” Apparently June Hennessey had been the News 4 New England entertainment reporter for decades and was something of a celebrity herself; Cynthia said she was the last person to have interviewed Rose Kennedy before she died. Nina would have raised an eyebrow, had her face not been so painfully stiff. “I suppose she plans to kill me off too.”

  To her credit, Cynthia didn’t bother laughing. “Something tells me it would take more than that to do you in.”

  The afternoon of the taping, Cynthia showed up wearing not her usual nurse-pajamas but sleek black pants, a form-fitting purple sweater, and lipstick of a cheery mauve color. Nina chose not to acknowledge her efforts, and to treat June Hennessey, the two cameramen, the slim, frowning producer, and the sound technician with similar indifference. Microphones and large freestanding lights were set up with some sort of reflective panel, and Nina’s face powdered and rouged,
while the producer stood with his arms crossed, bossing everyone around. But all that mattered to Nina—seated on the divan where Cynthia had insisted on arranging her among a cluster of firm little velvet pillows—was that she had her answers ready. When June Hennessey, sitting next to her, asked, “Isn’t it surprising that the amber necklace that matches your set should also happen to be here in the U.S., and not back in Russia?” Nina barely paused.

  “It is mysterious. But I am sure there are many instances of this. Matching sets of jewels—or anything, why not?—become separated, because of theft, or perhaps they ended up to be sold at commission shops, or…desperation, bribery…who knows?” The bright light from above the first cameraman hurt her eyes.

  “Bribery,” June Hennessey said in a dramatic voice, and Nina knew she wanted more of that.

  “In the Soviet Union, it was how much was done.”

  June Hennessey gave a deliberate, knowing nod so that the second cameraman could be sure to catch her reaction. “You mentioned theft. Do you think the pendant was stolen?”

  “It is very probable. The bracelet and earrings were handed down, you see, to me through my husband. They belonged to his family, but in the civil war many of their valuables were lost.” That very last bit, at least, was true.

  “Such a tragic history.” June Hennessey arranged her face to look stricken, and the second cameraman did something with his lens to zoom in. “Your husband lost his life, didn’t he—not in the revolution, but—”