It was all I could do not to shoot through the roof with happiness. How could one person be so lucky? What a picture that trip conjured—Mother, Caroline, all of us, trunks loaded, traveling the world together, Sofya and family, too.
We all piled back into the car that afternoon as darkness descended on The Hay, a new lightness to us all, the feeling one gets when embarking on a momentous purchase, no matter how impractical—the feeling your life is about to be enlarged, profoundly changed, with no going back.
“Well it looks like we’ve found another house,” I said.
“Let’s put the top down,” Henry said. “Celebrate.”
“But—”
He turned and smiled at me in the backseat and lit his cigar, the blue flame turning the tip of his cigar the color of molten lava. “Let’s live a little.”
“Yes, let’s,” Mother said. “It isn’t every day you find a house that needs you this badly.”
Thomas stepped out of the driver’s seat and wrestled the canvas top down, and as we turned out of the gravel driveway the top of the windscreen knocked the branch of a chestnut tree and smooth white blossoms rained into the car.
Mother tilted her face up to meet them. “What a wonderful omen that is,” she said as we headed off toward Manhattan.
CHAPTER
5
Sofya
1916
More than two years after Eliza left us and made her way home to New York, we shuttered our townhouse and fled the city. Once Germany had declared war on Russia, France, and Belgium, things had gradually worsened. At first Russia greeted the news of war with joy, sending soldiers off to cheers and marching bands on Nevsky Prospekt. But after our huge defeat and retreat from Galicia things spiraled downward.
There were no lavish dances those winters. The young men who enjoyed the balls two seasons before never returned and lay fallen in far-off forests. The war ruined our economy and gobbled up precious food. Soldiers deserted and joined sailors and other hungry Russians in the streets shouting for an end to the fighting.
By the autumn of 1916, a rash of terrorist robberies of the treasurer’s carriages had the Finance Ministry worried and Father’s colleagues tapped him to take important documents to the country for safekeeping. Father judged it safer there for the family as well, so we returned to our country house an hour south, near the village of Malinov, two carriages of luggage and attendants in tow. How I yearned for the shelter of that sweet house.
We left at daybreak to attract less attention, but the rabble quickly recognized our escape since we traveled by showy carriage, the Ministry’s motorcars having been requisitioned for the war effort. Agnessa, Father, Luba, two-year-old Max, and I sat in the first carriage, the gaudiest, its gilded doors painted with naked cherubs and dancing nobility, the tsar’s imperial crest painted on every panel. A line of people waiting for cigarettes outside a tobacco shop wound into the street and slowed us, causing unfortunates to swarm the carriage.
There was a chill in the air as the sun rose.
A coatless mother held a wasted infant up to our window. “She’s starving.”
Our eyes met and I looked away, feeling the shame of my own well-fed child on my lap.
Men in ragged military uniforms converged upon our convoy and brought us to a crawl. They craned their necks to see into the carriage and hoisted a red banner: Land and Freedom! How many German spies were there in that crowd spreading propaganda of unrest? A cold wave ran through me. It seemed a vast, hideous dam was about to break.
On leave from military school, where he trained cadets, my husband Afon rode next to us as best he could, his horse skittish as he held his crop above the reach of grasping hands.
A pebble struck Agnessa’s window, causing us all to jump, and a starburst crack spidered through the glass. My son cried out and buried his face in my skirt.
“Ivan,” Agnessa said. “Tell the coachman to turn back. We’ll try another day.”
To Agnessa’s window, someone lifted a brightly kerchiefed old woman no bigger than a child, and the crone waved and smiled to reveal toothless gums. Expecting a kind gesture, Agnessa waved back, whereupon the old woman spat upon the window.
Agnessa turned to me, tight-lipped. “I can’t do this.”
Father adjusted his spectacles, held Luba close with one arm and hugged his green, metal box with the other, gaze fixed on the crowd. “There’s no turning back now, my darling. But