set the table, and then went down the hallway with the intention of lying down. But without quite thinking about it, he passed their bedroom door and went into the next room.
Many years before, Andrey had visited Pushkin’s apartment in St. Petersburg—the one where he’d lived in his final years. The rooms of the apartment had been preserved just as they’d been on the day the poet died. There was even an unfinished poem and pen sitting on the desk. At the time, standing behind the little rope and gazing at the poet’s desk, Andrey had thought the whole venture rather preposterous—as if by keeping a few belongings in place, one might actually protect a moment from the relentless onslaught of time.
But when Ilya, their only child, was killed in the Battle of Berlin—just months before the end of the war—he and his wife had done the same thing: leaving every blanket, every book, every piece of clothing exactly where it had been on the day that they’d received the news.
Initially, Andrey had to admit, this had been a great comfort. When he was alone in the apartment, he would find himself visiting the room; and when he did so, he could see from the depression on the bed where his wife must have been sitting while he was at work. Now, though, he worried that this carefully preserved room had begun to sustain rather than alleviate their grief; and he knew the time had come for them to rid themselves of their son’s belongings.
Though he knew this, he didn’t raise the matter with his wife. For he also knew that soon enough, someone in the building would draw the attention of the housing authorities to their son’s death; then they would be moved to an even smaller apartment or required to take in a stranger, and life would reclaim the room as its own.
But even as he had this thought, Andrey walked over to the bed and smoothed out the blankets where his wife had been sitting; and only then, did he turn out the light.
BOOK FOUR
1950
Adagio, Andante, Allegro
In the blink of an eye.”
That was how, on the twenty-first of June, Count Alexander Rostov summed up his daughter’s journey from thirteen to seventeen, when Vasily remarked on how much she had grown.
“One moment she is scampering up and down the stairwells—a veritable gadabout, a gadfly, a ne’er-do-well—and the next, she is a young woman of intelligence and refinement.”
And this was largely true. For if the Count had been premature in characterizing Sofia as demure when she was thirteen, he had perfectly anticipated her persona on the cusp of adulthood. With fair skin and long black hair (but for the white stripe that fell from the spot of her old injury), Sofia could sit for hours listening to music in their study. She could stitch for hours with Marina in the stitching room, or chat for hours with Emile in the kitchen without shifting once in her chair.
When Sofia was just five, the Count had assumed, naively perhaps, that she would grow up to be a dark-haired version of her mother. But while Sofia shared Nina’s clarity of perception and confidence of opinion, she was entirely different in demeanor. Where her mother was prone to express her impatience with the slightest of the world’s imperfections, Sofia seemed to presume that if the earth spun awry upon occasion, it was generally a well-intentioned planet. And where Nina would not hesitate to cut someone off in midassertion in order to make a contrary point and then declare the matter decided once and for all, Sofia would listen so attentively and with such a sympathetic smile that her interlocutor, having been given free rein to express his views at considerable length, often found his voice petering out as he began to question his own premises. . . .
Demure. That was the only word for it. And the transition had occurred in the blink of an eye.
“When you reach our age, Vasily, it all goes by so quickly. Whole seasons seem to pass without leaving the slightest mark on our memory.”
“How true . . . ,” agreed the concierge (as he sorted through an allotment of tickets).
“But surely, there is a comfort to be taken from that,” continued the Count. “For even as the weeks begin racing by in a blur for us, they are making the greatest of impressions upon our children. When one turns seventeen and begins to experience that first period