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Page 8.

You think about Papa?

No, baby, Auntie Dora was always angry with Uncle Vadim. She helps us out a lot. Auntie Dora loves you too, my little Umnitsa.

Marianne had few real memories—just jumbled images and short mental film clips. In some of them, she stood on the shore with her mother, looking east toward America. In others, she stood on the wood-plank floor behind the bar in Auntie Dora’s rough and tumble tavern for sailors and fishermen on the docks of Anadyr. There was always rough tobacco smoke, night time, chiaroscuro light, men’s booming laughter, the clinking of glasses and tang of raw vodka in the air. Occasionally the fight or the whiff of puke. There was always a washing machine-tumble of voices and gloom and laughter, but Auntie Dora was like a tugboat, an iceberg, an indomitable force moving through wild and dangerous seas of life. She would give Anechka a sweet, or sit her on a stool so the roughest of men could coo at her and think of their daughters far away—some actually cried—and then came the accordion and the shouting, the dancing so the wooden floor boards shook, and grown men crying and singing together. Some would not come home from the Arctic seas. Death looked in every window.

Then, one day, mama was very ill. A doctor with a black bag, wearing a militia colonel’s uniform, came and sat by her bedside. An Orthodox priest brought last rites. Auntie Dora and her surviving relatives sheltered Anechka through all of it. Soon after, mama lay in a cemetery on a slight hill near the hook of the great sandbar that stretches south across the mouth of Anadyr Estuary. The wind was always so raw and cruel. The galaxy was always so magnificent—it was like looking toward America and lost Papa—Timofey, the American.

The man Stalin had sent to kill Timofey came to Anechka’s rescue. Uncle Victor Mutsev had no desire to kill a man he had known in London, whom he admired for his decency and goodness. By then, the tools of Stalin were turning against the man of steel. Auntie Dora was already old, and having a hard time raising her niece. Her drowned, drunken sailor brother, Vadim, had been penalized posthumously by having his pension denied because he died drunk—falling into a fishing net and being dragged a hundred nautical miles behind the trawler before anyone realized he was missing. That meant Anna Timofeyevna would receive nothing from the state. Auntie Dora’s family were decent, hard working people, and they struggled to raise the little Umnitsa as one of their own. She was like a little blue-gray-eyed monkey, the towheaded child, everyone’s pet at the bar or at this uncle or that aunt’s house. Finally, seeing their difficulty, Stalin’s man had come forth. Wealthy Europeans were traveling around the U.S.S.R. adopting orphans. One such family from Paris had come, expecting to adopt a bright young boy of Anechka’s age, but the boy turned out to be feeble because of his mother’s drinking during her pregnancy—she’d died in childbirth at the local hospital after being rushed there in a police cruiser from the drunk tank. So, instead, with limited time, and enormous disappointment, the wealthy French husband and wife were about to board their plane bound for Moscow, when Auntie Dora and Uncle Viktor approached them at the airport and informed them of a beautiful, precocious little orphan of mixed European-American parentage who might just fit the bill for them. She would not be a son to whom they could pass their aristocratic titles, but she would be splendid and regal when she came of age. Uncle Viktor had a golden tongue, and spun great fairy tales for them. During his long stay in the Arctic winter of Anadyr, waiting to assassinate the little girl’s father if he finally showed up as Stalin had planned, Viktor had become fond of Auntie Dora—and more so, carnally, knowing her sister Lyudmila, a local beauty—and he was more aware than anyone else of Anechka’s precarious situation. She really was a good and clever girl, a true umnitsa, and he did not want to see her waste away in a state orphanage, maybe to die young, or to be married to another drunken, cruel idiot like Vadim, or spend her life in a vodka or fish processing factory with krill for brains.

“Was Auntie Dora your mother?” she asked Nayden.

“She was,” he said simply. There was nothing more to be gotten out of him. They left the table and walked together to the elevator, each en route to their own hotel room and life.

“Have you met Viktor Mutsev?” Nayden asked as they headed to the heliport. The day was bright, though a cold and blustery dry wind kicked up little devils of dust and grit on the flaky concrete runway with its sheets of fine ice.

“Yes, finally. I may have met him as a child, but I don’t remember. He looked after me, though. So did Auntie Dora.”

“He looked after many people,” Nayden said. “I’m told he lived her for a time, waiting for your father so he could assassinate him.”

“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked, confronting him by the elevator.

“All in due time.” The door rumbled open, letting out a family of European tourists in fur caps and heavy parkas, who looked well-fed and relaxed. “This is as far as I go.”

“What about tomorrow?” She did not feel like riding in the elevator with him.

“Before you leave, we may talk again. I have to think about some things.” So saying, he left her standing alone and baffled in the lobby while the elevator door closed on his pale face and haunted eyes.