Chapter 24 Valya #2
The table turns. Dmitri's eyes lift. For a moment, they catch mine, then pass.
He doesn't save me. He doesn't ask me to save him.
He addresses the question like a man who knows that clarity can sound like a threat to people who worship fog.
"Language doesn't invite theft," he says.
"Thieves invite themselves. We will light our candles and hold our Vigil as we were taught.
We will also build a perimeter that doesn't care whether a man prays in Latin, Russian, or in zeros.
If a man hides his greed behind church talk, the roof he tried to sell will end up covering his coffin. "
He sits back. The room rearranges a fraction toward him and then back to its own center.
Chicago's elder smiles with all his teeth. His eyes don't change. "Boston," he says as if the city were a person he owes money to. "Your poetry remains persuasive."
My father lifts his glass again. This time, it almost slips.
Dmitri's hand moves an inch, then stops because I'm already there with my own, straightening the stem, making the gesture look like a daughter fussing with presentation, not a daughter guarding a man's dignity.
Our fingers brush. Dmitri pulls back immediately. I keep mine steady.
Servants bring second plates. The roast is carved and served with a relish that gleams. I take one bite.
It tastes of rosemary and effort. Voices descend into small caucuses.
Chicago's elder speaks to the steward. The Montreal cousins tilt a wrist to the light, admiring a thin, old-gold watch while their free hands hover over the sturgeon and dill.
Under the talk, I hear my father's breathing roughen.
He sets down his fork and slips his ring around his finger, once, twice, as if testing its balance. He never plays with that ring.
I start to panic in the place of my body that used to be a child.
The room narrows around my father's pallor and around Dmitri's stillness, which feels less like anger and more like a wall a man builds because he believes walls are safer than truth.
The chair is suddenly a throne and a hospital bed.
I have the ridiculous urge to knock over the candelabra and yell at the elders to stop pretending we have not all seen an empire limp.
Instead, I turn my head the tiniest bit and study Dmitri's profile.
The scar near his jaw that another woman might have romanticized looks like survival carved into bone.
His cross rests under his shirt, the chain line faint through white cotton.
He swallows once, then sets his napkin in precise square folds on his lap.
I try to remember the last time he laughed.
Was it in the North End with arancini in paper boats?
Dessert is served. Poppyseed roll with raisins, honey plums, a tower of meringues that look like snow shaped by careful hands.
Someone begins a toast to Saint Basil for the new year.
I raise my glass of water. I press my fingers to the scar on my palm from lighting vigil candles like my grandmother.
Chicago's elder lays his hand on the table, fingers spread, and speaks into the room.
"Legacy must learn the languages of the living," he says.
He glances at my father as if he is offering him a bench, not a chair.
"Anatoly, your house is strong. If you bless a transition in January, markets will read confidence. "
My father smiles. He looks older than he did at the start of this meal.
"Markets don't read Russian," he says. "They read money.
And Boston's money prefers its saints standing.
" He sets his glass down and presses his index finger to the stem to still the tremor.
The silver of his cross flashes at his throat when he tips his head back.
I feel something in me tip toward prayer.
Dmitri speaks once more. He says Sergei looks large because he spends money like it grows in the pockets of men he will later betray. By spring, the accounts will be empty. Men like that are always shocked when Easter comes. The line is a warning, not a joke.
The dinner thins into aftertalk and the small courtesies of coats and cars.
In the corridor, the staff gather plates and scrape bones into deep pans.
Someone in the vestibule has come in with snow on their shoulders.
It drips as if the building has begun to cry.
I stand with my hands folded and feel like a relic waiting to be placed in a reliquary or smashed.
Dmitri passes me once as he escorts Chicago's elder toward the foyer.
He gives me a short look that says I'm not a stranger and that he is not ready to speak.
I take the look like bread. I don't ask for more.
By the time I reach my corridor, my head rings like the tower in winter.
The carpet muffles the steps behind me. I count doors.
I smell lamp oil and beeswax and roast, all commingling into a perfume that smells like a family pretending it is not a company and a company pretending it is not a family.
I rest my hand on my doorknob and stand there for a moment.
I don't want to open a room that will be only mine again.
The lamps are low. The bed is turned down.
I sit on the edge and untie the ribbon from my hair.
The red looks almost black in the lamplight.
I hold it in my palm and think of the thread Father Gavril looped around our wrists.
I whisper the vow line out of order as if I can rearrange fate by rearranging clauses. To bind my fate to his.
I wash the paint from my face and watch a woman emerge who looks like a girl in photographs from a winter long ago when her father still threw her into drifts and her mother still wore lipstick.
I look at myself hard. Pride keeps my spine.
Love unsettles everything I thought discipline could hold.
I don't know how to reconcile a man who can make a chapel feel like a country and a room where he could not look at me because pain had taken his face hostage.
A soft knock lands on my door. Not a servant's double tap. Not Dmitri's single firm call. A rhythm I know from a childhood when knocks were codes and warmth was a prize.
"Come," I say and rise.
Anatoly enters. He has shed the jacket that carried him through dinner.
Without it, he looks thinner, proportions slightly off, like a statue moved to a different plinth.
He closes the door behind him with the care of a man who doesn't want to startle the room.
He pauses as if parsing what posture will hurt least, then crosses to me and sits in the chair that has my grandmother's needlework in a pattern of vines and crosses.
He doesn't look at the mirror. He looks only at me.
"You must finish the vows, Valya," he says, voice low and precise, the kind of tone he uses when there is no room for argument. "The moment I fall, they will come for you."