The Porcelain Doll by Kristen Loesch

Author:Kristen Loesch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Antonina

Leningrad (St Petersburg), spring 1924

The trams run slowly, the streets have few cars or carriages, and there is a hush over the city. Where there were once bustling basement shops, a grocer’s, a baker’s, a watchmaker’s, there are only darkened windows, empty railings. It feels late, even though it’s only midday, as if the city is already asleep.

Tonya turns onto a smaller boulevard and checks the address that Natalya gave her. Yes, it’s this one, four storeys high, charcoal-grey granite, adorned with balconies. The gate to the courtyard hangs open. Her pulse is galloping. Many of the homes of the Imperial elite have been butchered since the Revolution and turned into communal apartments; she knows this, yet she still can’t fathom that Valentin would live in a building that looks like a palace.

‘You there,’ someone calls out from a low balcony, ‘who are you for? The bell’s broken!’

‘Valentin Andreyev,’ she says, squinting.

‘Be right down!’

He must live here after all. Tonya paces as she waits. She is plagued by the suspicion that all this is Natalya Burzinova’s trick: that of course Valentin doesn’t live here, of course he isn’t dying. She hopes it’s so. Natalya and her games. The Countess must be bored, everyone thinking she’s dead, no one calling her by her title any more—

There is little light inside and no way to tell where this stranger will take her. They climb the formal staircase. The man talks as they go, saying that the whole top floor formally belongs to the playwright-poet-writer Pavel Katenin, but he has moved to Moscow. It is now being inhabited by Comrade Andreyev and his limpid-eyed wife. Comrade Andreyeva plays piano like a goddess, he enthuses.

Tonya had forgotten about Viktoria, about the famous father. She keeps trudging upward, step after step, the marble banister icy beneath her hand, wondering how high the Katenins have risen by now. Above all these other families. Above all the darkness.

The woman who opens Valentin’s door has the narrow face of a borzoi. ‘Can I help?’ she says briskly. Hands on hips. You can always tell a servant by the hands, Mama used to say. So coarse they cannot feel a feather in the palm.

But Valentin would never employ a servant.

‘Does Valentin Andreyev live here?’ Tonya stutters.

The woman clomps away. She returns quickly, says that Valentin is in. Tonya is guided to a sitting room. There is a chaise longue in the middle, surrounded by other decorative chairs. Shelves line the wall above the fireplace, each one studded with porcelain pieces. The wall hangings are spring-green silk, and the carpet is woven with wreaths.

It’s a room that belongs in the house on the Fontanka.

Tonya’s hands begin to shake: the old nervous habit. She sits on them. When she looks up at the doorway, she feels her face go rosy.

Valentin is standing there.

‘Tonya,’ he says, like he’s pulling her name through a loom. ‘It’s really you.’

Her mouth goes dry. She stands too, unevenly, wringing her hands behind her back. She prepared for this moment, rehearsed, just as he used to.

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