cared for diamonds on men, but he clearly prized it.
Luba pulled her book of constellations from her lap and began to read.
“Manners, Luba,” Agnessa said. “Put that away this instant. Stars. Such an empty pursuit.”
Luba slid the book back to her lap. “Damnant quod non intellegunt,” she muttered.
Agnessa looked to Father. “What is she saying?”
“ ‘They condemn what they do not understand,’ ” he said.
Agnessa brushed a phantom crumb from the tablecloth. “I understand stars perfectly. I just wish they’d stay in one place. All that moving around. It’s unsettling.”
Luba looked to me, eyes heavy-lidded, as if to say, “Why argue with a person so happy in their ignorance?”
Raisa, one of our estate laundresses, a kind, big-boned girl who wore her hair in scrawny, strawberry-blond braids, stood behind Agnessa flapping a dingy gray ostrich-feather fan, keeping air moving through the rooms.
That house was an imposter of sorts, a commercial laundry turned country estate, in no way elegant, but the high ceilings made it appear so. While my mother was alive she’d put away the French dining room chairs and ancestral portraits and decorated it in a casual, Russian way. She arranged pillows on the floor for seating, Russian folk paintings on the walls, and filled every receptacle in the house—teapots, drinking glasses, and pitchers—with wild roses she picked herself, the sweet scent perfuming the air.
Once Agnessa came to live with us, she had the French furniture dragged out of hiding and sent the pillows to the attic, probably hoping to wipe away any trace of Russia. And Mother.
Though Luba and I protested, Agnessa brought back the gold dining room furniture and dusted off the ancestral portraits, some most frightening, and hung them in the zala, the equivalent of an English drawing room, which ran along the front of the house.
Upstairs, Father’s and Agnessa’s rooms, Afon’s and mine, and Luba’s converged around the grand staircase. Mother’s room had always been our favorite place to congregate, and we often arranged the featherbeds on the floor and stayed up late talking and reading poetry.
She allowed us full range of her closets, free to play there, slipping into her Worth sable coat, the lining cool as water against our sunburned arms. We ran our hands down the dresses of orange and emerald silk and held her velvet kimonos soft against our cheeks. Mother rarely wore the exquisite things and chose instead more comfortable clothes she could easily move in, peasant clothes and gardening trousers, black canvas Chinese slippers.
After Mother died the terrible finality of it set in, so quiet and unbending. Father kept her room locked, with a key kept on his person at all times. When Agnessa arrived, she had the room opened, Mother’s coat cleaned and put away for herself, the linens and laces split between Luba and me. Thankfully, we had our holiday trip to Paris with Eliza to help dispel the sadness, but when we returned to Russia Agnessa did everything she could to erase Mother’s memory.
Agnessa redecorated Mother’s bedroom in the French style, the bed made with fine linen, Father’s crest embroidered on every piece, the closet filled with new French couture, in grays and lavenders. Luba and I barely recognized our house once Agnessa whitewashed the brick, replaced the brightly painted Russian shutters with gray pairs in the French style, and had English ivy planted to grow up the facade.
I held Max on my lap, one arm around his belly as he ate kasha from a bowl with a spoon, the satin bow of his silver foil party hat tied near one ear. Afon made faces at him from across the table and Max’s blond curls shook as he let out deep belly laughs.
The servants brought in baby Volga sturgeon and ironstone tureens filled with Father’s favorite dishes, like the salty-sour rassolnik, cucumber soup with beef kidneys, which Luba refused to eat. Afon ate with great relish, perhaps thinking he would not see such food for a while, since the long-dreaded telegram had arrived and he was due to report soon at regimental headquarters in Petrograd.
Father sat straight in his chair, head to toe in country-wear: fawn-colored loose trousers and rubaha, the linen shirt peasant men wore, the placket unbuttoned at the neck, hanging down like a sow’s ear. The headline on the newspaper in his hands read: BIG ADVANCE BY BRITISH. GERMAN LINES DRIVEN BACK. The news that day cheered us all. On top of a decisive Russian victory by General Brusilov on the southwestern front, the Allies were