As she and Mama undressed in the dark, scurrying under the blankets, Daria whispered, “If you wanted me to meet Edward Isaakovich, why didn’t you let me speak to him? He wanted to speak to me, I could tell.”
“Men disdain easy women. We will make him work, so he understands your value.”
It took several days. Several frustrating, nerve-racking, endless days, during which Daria pestered her mother, suggesting they should try again, walk past the opera house again, slower this time, maybe actually stop and speak to the man.
“No,” Mama said. “If there is no effort in the chase, there is no triumph in the victory.”
Not even a week after their stroll, word came from a neighbor, who’d heard from a customer of her husband’s who’d been queried by the friend of the father of the boy who delivered coal to the Gordons, whether anyone might know the identity of a certain girl who fit a certain description. Edward wished to meet her. He’d left a ticket for his evening performance, along with an invitation to visit him in his dressing room, afterward.
Daria was about to shout, “Tell him yes,” when Mama interrupted. “Please inform Edward Isaakovich that my daughter will be accompanied by a chaperone. We shall require two tickets.”
Chapter 2
That night, the pair of them shared box seats, looking down at Edward onstage. To Daria, it appeared the artist glanced more times than was absolutely necessary in their direction. But what did Daria know? She’d never been to a piano concert before. She’d certainly never been inside a place as grand as the opera house. Each seat felt wider than the bed she and Mama shared—softer and warmer, too. And the rugs were on the floors, not the walls. The walls were taken up with gold lining, sparking beneath radiant chandeliers. Daria was so preoccupied manipulating her miniature, secondhand binoculars to look up at the lights and down at the glamorously dressed orchestra audience, she barely found time to pay attention to the music, much less the man making it.
Edward took his final bows following four encores triggered by enthusiastic applause and bouquets of roses tossed onstage by giggling teens and blushing dowagers. Daria’s mother rolled her eyes. Those poor souls, did they have no one to teach them? Then Mama made Daria wait until every last guest had left the theater.
Twenty minutes after the hour they’d been invited, Daria raised her hand to knock on Edward’s dressing-room door. Mama slapped it down and stepped in front of Daria so that when Edward opened the door, he saw not Daria but her mother.
Edward instantly rearranged his features from surprise to welcome. He bade them to come in, expressing how pleased he was to see them . . . both. A table, topped by a silver samovar the length of Daria’s arm, had been set by the window. It made Daria think of a lightbulb that had sprouted potato buds. Based on the way her mother was beaming, Daria guessed it was the latest fashion. Next to it stood a ceramic white plate piled with a dozen slices of rye bread, a small cup of butter, and an equal-sized portion of black caviar.
“May I offer you some tea?” Edward inquired.
Daria waited for Mama to speak first. When she didn’t, Daria shot her a queer look and filled in, “Yes. Please. Thank you.”
Edward poured, offering Daria a close-up look at his hands. She’d noticed how fluidly they moved over the piano keys, but now that she wasn’t sitting multiple meters up, every finger appeared to possess an extra joint, so limber were his movements. Each gesture manifested like a precise piece of a seamless whole, caressing the air and sending an electric current flying through the room, piercing Daria and causing her to shiver for no discernable reason. Edward’s smile suggested he knew precisely the reason.
He respectfully handed Mama the first cup. “Möchten sie zitrone oder zucker?”
Daria burst out laughing. “Where did you learn such terrible Yiddish?”
“Not Yiddish!” If they weren’t in public, Daria didn’t doubt Mama would have slapped her, and not on the hand. “German! Edward Isaakovich speaks beautiful German.” She then awkwardly stammered, “No ya govaru po Russki.” But I speak Russian.
Only then did Daria understand what Edward already had. Her mother’s uncharacteristic silence was due to embarrassment over her accented, grammatically shaky Russian. Edward had asked if she would like lemon or sugar in German, due to that language’s similarity to Yiddish.
“Of course,” Edward switched from German to Russian as smoothly as he’d earlier shifted his facial expressions. “Please forgive my error.”
Mama magnanimously did. She also forgave Edward his subsequent mistake, when he presumed that the next time they saw each other, Edward would be alone with Daria.
Mama insisted on chaperoning them everywhere. At the cinema, it was all three of them watching Alexander Dovzhenko’s film Earth, about tragedy striking a collective farm in the form of a jealous kulak unwilling to give up his private land for the good of all people. Mama was enthralled by Edward’s scandalous gossip about how he’d seen an earlier version of the film in Moscow, before censors removed a sequence featuring a female nude. Not out of bourgeois prudishness, obviously, that wasn’t the Soviet way. For political reasons. The great Sergei Eisenstein believed a naked body too sensual and individually abstract. It lacked social realism and so was counterrevolutionary. Daria’s mother proved so enthralled by Edward’s tittle-tattle, she failed to notice that, while Edward addressed Mama, sitting in the seat to his left, his right palm was, in the dark, creeping under Daria’s skirt and to the inside of her thigh. In return, Daria slid her fingers beneath his shirtsleeve for a tantalizing burst of skin on skin.
Later, Mama realized she’d forgotten her glasses inside the theater, leaving Edward and Daria alone long enough for him to steal a kiss in a dim corner, his hand rising from Daria’s waist to graze against her breast for an encore of the electricity that had shot through her the first time she’d glimpsed his sensual fingers.
As far as Edward was concerned, every brush of his lips against Daria’s, every sweep of his hand across her bodice or along her thigh all happened outside Mama’s vision, knowledge, or even suspicion.
“Let the boy believe he’s in control,” her mother dismissed. “What does it hurt us?”
The only thing hurting Edward was his inability to go any further than the furtive kisses and allegedly chance caresses. Daria sensed his frustration, but, as Mama pointed out, the solution was up to Edward. “He knows what he needs to do.”
“Shouldn’t he have done it by now?”
After all, Daria had followed Mama’s instructions. For nearly six months, she’d kept Edward waiting; she regularly stood him up. She smiled cryptically as she swore there was no one else in response to his jealous inquiries, and she let his hands wander only so far before teasingly pulling away.
Mama didn’t appear concerned that their efforts had yet to bear ultimate fruit.
And yet, one night in September, Daria woke to her mother mumbling something distantly familiar into the slit where their bed met the wall. And the next day, Mama claimed not to be hungry while preparing breakfast for Daria. It wasn’t until their landlord snarled at Daria about daring to eat on this holiest of holy days that Daria confronted her mother. “You’re fasting? For Yom Kippur? Last year, you called it superstitious nonsense. You said we’re all better than that now. Were you praying last night, Mama?”