“The girl doesn’t know her own age?” Sergei questioned quietly the moment the girl had disappeared into the kitchen.
“I guess not,” Ivan said absently. The fact was intriguing, but Ivan couldn’t focus on it at the moment. He was concentrating on a more compelling idea forming in his mind. “You’re going to think I’m crazy,” Ivan said to Sergei, leaning across the table with thinly suppressed excitement, “but that girl could be our Anastasia.”
Sergei threw his head back and rocked with laughter. “The skinny chicken-girl there? You’ve got to be kidding! When she came out, I swear I expected her to cluck. And not only because of the feathers either. Did you see her legs? Chicken legs! And those manners. Hold your horses! Please! Very imperial, indeed.”
“No, but listen to me. There’s something about her.”
“You’re just panicking because of that news article.”
“No, I’m not,” Ivan protested, then paused. “Well, maybe a little. But she looks about the right age—whatever age she actually is doesn’t matter—and she seems to be…you know…all alone.”
“You don’t know that,” Sergei disagreed.
“Her eyes are blue.”
“This is Russia!” Sergei cried. “It’s the land of Slavic blue eyes. That’s not enough.”
“I’m telling you, she could do it,” Ivan insisted.
A few minutes later, the girl returned with two plates laden with sausages, boiled potatoes, and cabbage. Ivan plied her with questions. What was her name? Where was she from? Did her family approve of her working in such a place as this? Did she have a boyfriend?
To every question she replied, “That’s my business.” Finally she was fed up. “You don’t look like a secret-police agent but that’s what you sound like,” she scolded. “If you are, I haven’t committed any crime.”
“You’re an orphan, aren’t you?” Ivan said.
“Why would you think that? And besides, that’s no crime.”
“No, it’s not a crime, but if you had a family or a home or a boyfriend, you would have said so.”
The door flew open and Mrs. Zolokov bustled in, her arms wrapped around a brown bag stuffed with groceries. “Nadya, help me with these!” she shouted before realizing they had customers.
Ivan glanced up at the girl, pleased. “Ah, we have a name. Nadya.” He abruptly rose from his seat and rushed to assist Mrs. Zolokov with her heavy bag. “Allow me,” he said, taking it from her. The bag ripped as she transferred it to his arms, but Ivan was quick to secure the bag under his right arm, catching the contents with his left hand before they could crash to the floor.
When Ivan had settled everything on a table, he turned to Mrs. Zolokov, engaging her with his most disarming smile. “We were just talking to your delightful waitress.”
“Who? Nadya? Delightful?” Mrs. Zolokov scoffed.
“In her way,” Ivan insisted. “We have been asking her questions about herself, but she’s very private. Wherever did you find this unique girl?”
Mrs. Zolokov cackled shrilly. “I picked her up off the street after she escaped from a mental asylum!”
CHAPTER FOUR
An Insane Offer
Mortified, Nadya fled through the kitchen and out the back door. The voracious geese cried out to her, but she ran past them and settled on a broken stone wall that wound down a slope leading to the Islet River. She shivered and wrapped her arms tightly around her slim frame as tears poured down her cheeks.
What did she care what those men thought of her? But Mrs. Zolokov’s words had been so embarrassing! Every time the horrible woman joked around about her being from the asylum, she wanted to die! It was humiliating.
If ever any young man seemed interested in her—and occasionally one who seemed nice paid her special attention—Mrs. Zolokov would say in a thundering voice, “Leave her alone. You don’t want to be mixed up with a mental patient.” And that would be the end of that!
But sometimes Nadya really did feel that she was going insane. Crazy nightmares plagued her, keeping her in a sleepless fog for many days.
Of her past, all she knew from her own experience was that she’d spent time in the Yekaterinburg Mental Asylum. Shortly before the Bolsheviks took over the asylum, there was a fire and all the asylum’s records were lost. Anyone with a known relative was sent home. Others like her who had untraceable families were simply turned out.
At the asylum, no one could quite recall how or when Nadya had arrived, because there was such a high turnover of personnel. Some said the police had left her there because she had been found wandering the streets alone and confused. Others thought they remembered that her parents had brought her in over a year earlier. The fact that Nadya couldn’t remember any of her life before the asylum was simply a manifestation of her mental illness; hysterical amnesia, the bald psychiatrist had pronounced. He was one of many doctors that had come and gone from the asylum.
When the asylum closed, Nadya had roamed the streets, begging for food, sleeping in barns and old sheds. Finally, she’d collapsed on the street here in Yekaterinburg where Mrs. Zolokov had found her. She’d recognized a source of nearly free labor when she saw one.
Nadya rubbed her forehead and shivered. Mostly she tried to pay attention to her chores and keep her mind as clear as possible. She didn’t need someone like that man to come stir things up with intrusive questions about her life. His probing had been as upsetting as Mrs. Zolokov’s remark.
Something warm enfolded her from behind. It was a velvet jacket, and she looked up to see the blond customer from inside—the nice one, not his probing, arrogant friend with the over-intense dark eyes. “You were shivering,” he said, sitting on the wall beside her.
Nadya wiped her eyes, embarrassed by her tears. “It’s all right. I’m all right,” she insisted. “Take back your jacket, please.”
“No, no, you keep it. It’s the least I can do after we have all been so boorish to you. Nadya, let me introduce myself. My name is Sergei. My friend Ivan and I are from Moscow.”
Nadya nodded. “Why was your friend asking so many questions?” she asked, feeling soothed by the man’s gentle tone.
“Here is the thing. My friend Ivan and I are private detectives. Do you know what that is?” She shook her head. She’d never heard the words. “We are like the secret police, only we work privately for individual clients,” he explained.
“What do you want with me? I told you—I haven’t done anything wrong.”
Nadya listened in amazement to the explanation he gave her. He and Ivan had been contacted by an elderly woman, a minor countess living in exile in Paris. She was a White Russian—a name given to the many members of the aristocracy who had fled Russia during the revolution rather than be killed by the Bolsheviks. She’d wanted to pick up her granddaughter from a mental asylum in Yekaterinburg, but the urgency of her leaving made it impossible. So she had asked Ivan and Sergei to come find her.
“She offered you money to do this?” Nadya asked.
Sergei shrugged. “The old woman hinted at some payment, but we’re not interested in that. We only want to help. We loyalists must stick together.”
Nadya studied him. He was in his mid-twenties, probably several years older than the other one. He had a somewhat bland, flat, but pleasant face with pale eyes. He appeared trustworthy, almost brotherly.
“Mrs. Zolokov told you the truth. I was in a mental asylum before I came to work for her,” she told him plainly, without emotion. That was how it was and he should know it.
“How are you feeling these days?” Sergei asked her.
“A little shaky sometimes,” she admitted.
“Maybe you will feel better when you get out of here,” he suggested with equanimity. “You simply might need to go home.”
Tears sprang to her eyes.
You simply might need to go home.
Home. Was there such a place for her? It sounded too good to be true.
“Please don’t cr
y,” Sergei said with a note of male panic at the threat of tears. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
It was too late even to attempt to hold back. Great surges flooded Nadya’s eyes. She drew in gulps of cold air that shook her slim shoulders and rushed out in great sobs. Nadya wanted to explain to him why she was so overcome, but how could she even begin to put into words the awful loneliness she lived with every day? The idea that she had a grandmother somewhere, one who was searching for her—it was too much, too wonderful to be real.
“There, there.” Sergei comforted her, wrapping an arm soothingly around Nadya’s heaving shoulders. “I can see it’s been hard.”
Those rare words of compassion were enough to set her off crying even more violently.
No one ever saw how difficult Nadya’s life was, because her pride didn’t allow it. What if others saw and didn’t care? What if she let them in to her pain and they took advantage? She joked and acted tough because it seemed more dignified than being pitiful and needy. Even now she felt an impulse, one born of habit, to shrug away Sergei’s arm and say she was fine, he needn’t bother, she’d manage—but she didn’t do it. This release of pent-up, driven-down sorrow was so long overdue that she couldn’t stop it.
“Are you crying because you want to meet your grandmother or because you don’t?” Sergei asked cautiously.
“I want to, but I’m scared,” she admitted.
“Scared of what?”
“Lots of things. I don’t know you, and your friend is unpleasant. I didn’t like the way he looked at me; it was like he was picking me apart.”
“Ivan’s all right, just intense. He had a hard time during The Revolution. If you come with us, I swear we’ll treat you like a little sister. You have my word.”
“You swear on your mother?”
“I swear on my mother.”
“Look at me,” she said, wiping her swollen eyes again and rubbing her running nose with her sleeve. “I’m no prize! What if my grandmother hates me?”
“You’re her granddaughter. How can she hate you?”
“My parents obviously hated me. They abandoned me at a lunatic asylum!”
“That’s probably not so! Perhaps it was for your own good. Maybe they did it to protect you from the Bolsheviks,” Sergei suggested.
Nadya had never thought of that before. “You mean I might not be crazy?”
“You don’t look crazy to me,” Sergei allowed. “I suppose we’ll find out,” he added with just a touch of worry in his voice. “But even if it’s so, your grandmother has the means to get you to competent doctors who can help you if you need. And besides, we’re all feeling a little nuts these days. Since The Revolution all our lives have been turned upside down. The old stability has been swept away. Maybe it will be for the better—who knows?—but for now, it feels as though the whole world’s gone mad.”
“It does seem that way,” Nadya said, a small smile playing at the corners of her lips. “If I’m crazy, I do have a lot of company.”
Sergei’s shoulders shook with laughter. “Absolutely.” He gazed at her warmly. “Then you’re up for the trip?”
Nadya stood and nodded.
“Excellent!” Sergei cried. “A most excellent decision!”
Nadya handed Sergei back his velvet jacket and said she would meet him and Ivan behind the tavern after she’d gathered her things. Then she hurried up the back steps to her room so she wouldn’t encounter Mrs. Zolokov.
The moment she was out of Sergei’s comforting presence, though, Nadya’s confidence in this plan leaked away. She was running off with two strangers. If these two turned out to be unsavory characters, she would have no one to blame but herself.
Nadya paced the tiny room. What to do? What to do?
She instinctively trusted Sergei, but if he were so wonderful, then what was he doing keeping company with the other one, Ivan? Ivan put her on guard. He was wolfish, too alert and harsh. He asked questions in a way she didn’t appreciate, like an interrogator.
Nadya sat on the corner of her bed, which creaked under the weight of her slim body. She gazed at the worn and sagging floor, the splintered beams, the frayed rug and grimy, cracked window. Look how she was living! Was hers even a life worth protecting? Before Sergei and Ivan, she had had not a clue how to escape it. She might marry the first oaf who offered. Maybe he would be such a miserable dunce of a man that he wouldn’t care that she couldn’t remember most of her life story.
Nadya laughed bleakly. Some high aspirations she had, hoping to marry some dope too dense to care if he was marrying a lunatic.
Nadya dumped the straw stuffing from her pillowcase, pulling out the last bits with her hand. She could make it work as a satchel for her things.
“Okay, here we go,” she muttered aloud. From under the bed, she began gathering her few possessions: the peasant blouse, the black flounced skirt, an old ripped petticoat, and her black shoes, which were slightly better than the ones she wore now. Onto the center of the bed went a hairbrush and some underwear she’d bought with her meager pay.
Was there anything else?
Nadya picked up a small cloth doll that sat on her windowsill. The smiling toy had a merry expression stitched on his face. Its vivid blue eyes were two buttons. It had been in the pocket of her skirt when she’d awakened at the asylum. The doll had been badly tattered; she recalled that its head was nearly off until a kind nurse at the asylum had repaired it for her.
She had no need for the worn plaything now. Her new companions would think it childish if they saw her with a doll, and she didn’t want that. “Here’s where we part company,” she told the doll tenderly. “I’m too old for dolls.”
Nadya would need a coat—too bad she didn’t own one. Mrs. Zolokov also owed her over a week’s pay. Nadya pulled her blanket from the bed and threw it around her shoulders like a big cape. The pay she was not going to collect was worth more than this moth-eaten wool.
“Okay. Okay,” she muttered. “Are you really going through with this, you crazy girl?” There could be no doubt—if she left with them it would mean she really was insane.
Maybe not insane, but certainly reckless!
But who cared? No one!
And that was the whole point. If somewhere in the world there was a grandmother who did care, it was worth any chance, every chance.
Nadya tied the ends of the pillowcase together, then used the knotted middle as a handle. With her blanket over her shoulders and clutching her homemade satchel, Nadya stepped outside her room. Below, at the bottom of the stairs, Sergei and Ivan waited. Sergei waved and Ivan peered up the stairs, scowling, as though still studying her like some kind of specimen.
Nadya ducked back inside, heart pounding, scared. Was she really going to go through with this?
She turned to the doll on the windowsill. “What do you think, my little friend?” Nadya asked it. “Is what I’m about to do insane?”
Nadya had developed the habit of bouncing her ideas, concerns, and worries off of the doll. The smiling face had offered her comfort and companionship through many lonely, frightening times—unfortunately, though, it could not really offer her advice and she knew it.
“You’re right,” Nadya said, addressing the doll as though it had answered her. “Staying here will get me nowhere. I might as well take this chance and hope for the best.”
Nadya snapped the doll off the windowsill. “What was I thinking?” she said. “I could never leave you behind, my little friend.” Maybe her attachment to the doll was childish, but she didn’t care. She loved it too much to leave it behind. Nadya stuffed the doll into the pillowcase satchel—an old friend to bring along for luck!
She pushed the door open again. Here we go.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Spy at the Station
As they walked along at a brisk pace toward the Trans-Siberian Railroad station, Ivan stole darting glances at Nadya. He did not dare to stare at her as long as he would have liked. Ivan wanted to ex
amine every inch of her again and again to assure himself that his first impression had been correct. He suspected that, under all her messiness, Nadya might be pretty. He hoped so. Anastasia had been very pretty, as he recalled.
Everything was riding on this now.
But whenever Nadya caught Ivan gazing at her for overlong, she glared at him fiercely and hunched her shoulders defensively. It made her appear less like a grand duchess than anyone on earth and shook his confidence about their choice. Did Nadya really resemble Anastasia as strongly as he’d thought at first sight?
Had Sergei been right in saying that Ivan was panicking and jumping at the nearest girl he found to present as Anastasia?
Possibly.
Ivan and Sergei were stuck with her now, though, and he had to make the best of it. Once they got that filthy hair washed and put her in some decent clothing, he’d have a better idea of what he was working with.
Ivan was relying on such brief snaps of memory for all this: the blithe spirit in a white sailor-style frock seen at a distance dancing down the garden paths of The House of Special Purpose, a note of melodic laughter carried on a summer breeze, a half-dead adolescent dragging herself from a grave site, the nightmares—surely he saw her again and again in the nightmares.
The large sign for the railroad station came into view. The sidewalks grew more crowded the closer they got, and it suddenly made Ivan conscious of Nadya’s ragged appearance. Passersby cast furtive, disapproving glances her way. Ivan shrugged off his woolen jacket and offered it to her. “Put this on.”
“I’m not cold,” she declined.
“You look like a beggar in that blanket,” Ivan argued.
Nadya reared back, insulted. “You’re no prize either. I don’t want your smelly jacket.”
Sergei took the coat from Ivan, and then gently unwrapped the blanket from Nadya’s shoulders. “Take his old thing for now,” he insisted in a voice that apparently soothed her. “I’ll carry the blanket and you can use it again when you sleep on the train.”