“Let the boy believe he is in control,” her mother said. “But just in case someone else is . . .”
Edward proposed that evening.
After bidding goodbye to Mama at the train station, Daria, Edward, and Isaak walked to the Gordon apartment on Karl Marx Street, Isaak still carrying Daria’s suitcase, Edward holding Daria’s hand, her wedding ring pressed between their linked fingers. Edward stroked the back of her palm with his thumb. She shivered at the knowledge that they were almost at his home. Their home.
Isaak apologized for taking Daria in via the courtyard, but it was a more direct entrance than from the street on the other side.
“Prior to the Revolution, my late wife, Edward, and I lived in the front apartment on the third floor, the one with the large window. Afterward, as a show of their esteem for Edward’s talents and his vital work representing the glories of the Soviet Union to the rest of the world, they allowed us to keep two of the rooms in the back. The ones facing the courtyard. It was the most they could do. How would it have looked if bourgeois exploiters like us had been given the better spaces over a worker’s family? But we were fortunate—don’t mistake my gratitude for complaining. When they partitioned the apartment, instead of the front rooms getting to keep the toilet and kitchen for themselves, we were allowed to share with the new families. Communal living, the way it should be. Fair to everyone. Not like some places with the outhouses and no running water. We have a Primus, too. Runs on kerosene. So if the bathroom or the kitchen is in use, we can still heat water, stay warm.”
The tunnel entrance to the courtyard was so dim, Daria heard, rather than saw, swarms of pigeons nesting overhead. Splatters of guano dotting the cement walls and floor confirmed her inference. The three of them were just emerging toward the light when a hulking figure loomed in the foreground, blocking the sun and them from going any farther.
“Adam Semyonovitch,” Isaak’s voice conveyed heartiness, wariness, exhaustion, and warning. Though Daria couldn’t quite tell whom the latter was for. “Meet my new daughter-in-law.”
Daria moved obligingly into the path of a man who she realized was not, in fact, a giant. He stood barely taller than Edward. But while Daria’s husband’s slender frame suggested a cultured, poetic delicacy, like a prizewinning stalk of wheat sketched by a sensitive artist, the man in front of them was built more broadly. Daria wondered if the width of his shoulders matched her own height. The muscles of his forearms strained against a shirt a wash or two away from tearing. It had already been patched, surprisingly neatly, along the elbows. Red hair covered his head, drifting south into a matching beard, stray tufts protruding from his collar and on the backs of his hands. Unlike Edward’s, his fingers looked as if they’d been forged out of steel by a blunt hammer.
“How do you do?” Daria remembered her mother’s edict that you could tell a person’s breeding from how they never lost their manners, no matter the circumstances.
No reply. No indication he’d even heard.
“Adam Semyonovitch is our dvornik,” Isaak went on.
Now the heartiness, wariness, exhaustion, and warning made sense. Although on paper, a dvornik was a combination porter and janitor, over the past decade, it had become a much more important position. A dvornik didn’t just sweep the sidewalk, empty the rubbish bin, mop the hallways, and lock the front gate in the evening. Because he did those things, he also kept track of every resident’s—and their guests’—comings and goings, not to mention made himself familiar with the contents of their refuse, those items they attempted to shred and burn, such as personal letters, newspapers, pamphlets, and books. He saw what rationed foods they ate and made note of those they must have acquired illegally. He could also choose to bolt the gate earlier than scheduled and pretend not to hear their frantic ringing of the bell, thus locking residents out of their homes for the night. And he could, on a whim, share everything he knew with the local authorities.
No wonder Isaak faked being happy to see Adam, even as his tone betrayed how tired he was of appeasing this domestic tyrant who, theoretically, worked for him. Though, in the USSR, all men were equal. No one worked for anyone. Isaak’s warning, Daria now realized, was for her.
“I hope you’ll make my wife welcome.” Edward’s tone encompassed the same affableness, with a touch of pleading, and yet a bit of arrogance, too. No matter how powerful Adam may have been, Edward was still Edward Gordon, international musical sensation.
“Welcome.” Adam’s voice sounded like crushed glass soaked in vodka, then run through the mud and used to coat his throat. Daria felt as if she were being sliced by it.
Edward took Daria by the elbow and guided her past Adam, into the courtyard. A circle of greenery surrounded by a waist-high, cast-iron fence, dandelions struggling to breathe among the choking weeds, occupied the center. It was dwarfed on three sides by gray, five-story buildings, their patched brick facades crumbling, their balconies trembling. They were used as storage. Most feared setting foot upon the rickety structures. The deeper they entered, the more the air smelled of feline urine, stagnant soapy water, rotting fish, and fermented pickles.
It wasn’t until they were heading upstairs to the third floor—Isaak apologized again; the elevator was for those who lived in the front—that Edward lowered his voice and, glancing around to make sure no one could overhear, told Daria, “Adam got his position by informing on his own mother. She died in prison. Tortured, they say. Becoming dvornik was his reward.”
Chapter 3
Daria and Edward’s first child, a daughter named Alyssa, was born the next year, followed by a second, Anya, two years later, in 1934. Both girls had their mother’s luxurious waves of ebony hair, their father’s glittering green eyes and his slender build, down to those aristocratic fingers. Neither showed signs of having inherited the hooked, incriminating nose Daria’s mother had taken great care to breed out of their bloodline. Mama pronounced the offspring acceptable. Though she did wish Daria had waited longer and spaced them out in more upper-class fashion. Mama accused Daria of dropping litters like a peasant. Genteel women, she insisted, gave birth once.
“You are not a broodmare,” Mama lectured. “You are a queen, a lioness.”
Daria bit her tongue to keep from pointing out that lions were cats. Who delivered litters.
Daria also didn’t feel the need to explain to Mama that it was difficult to space out children when your husband spent every moment he wasn’t at his piano looking at you as if you were the most alluring thing he’d ever seen. When he could barely wait for the door to the room his father had graciously conceded to the newlyweds to close before he was reaching for Daria, stripping off her clothes along with his own, and, from their first night together, taking care to ensure her pleasure matched his own, instructing her in what he liked as well as encouraging her to explore and direct him. Under circumstances like that, having two children in three years was not that prolific.
Edward did travel a great deal. Daria went with him at first, but it became difficult once Alyssa was born and impossible by the time Anya came along. Comrade Stalin unveiling his battle against enemies wishing to destroy the socialist state via infiltration of foreign elements, and curtailing international travel as a result, proved a relief to Daria, though she expected Edward to be incensed. His father certainly was. As soon as he’d ensured no one could overhear, Isaak defiantly whispered about stupid decisions made by stupid members of stupid committees. Edward declined to throw a tantrum like his father and many of his colleagues. Unable to perform abroad, he displayed an unexpected pragmatism, making no fuss about limiting his appearances to traveling among the Soviet republics.