Ruby by Nina Allan

Author:Nina Allan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

STARDUST

In my country, 10 July 2029 is remembered by everyone as the date of the Anastasia space disaster. For me it has a double significance, because it was also the day my grandmother Sofie Pepusch was killed by her ex-husband on the Lunacharsky estate. These two events are not connected, although it has always seemed to me as if they were. Whenever they replay the film footage of the Anastasia, images so familiar and so much a part of our history they are invariably referred to as iconic, what I remember is the smell of burnt pancakes, my brother Nicky accusing the government of murder, my grandfather Marius standing in the doorway looking dishevelled like a character in a movie by Ingmar Bergman. These are the random snapshots of memory, relentless in their stark depiction of terrible things yet strangely consoling also because they are so familiar. This is how it was, they say. Make of it what you can.

I had already started to write, but it was the aftermath of that day that made me a writer. I felt the change happen, a discernible click, as if a key had been twisted inside me. Free choice had little to do with it. The day marked me out for its own purposes, throwing me off my feet and igniting me in its backdraft of misaligned passion and burning rocket fuel. You could say it scarred me for life.

* * *

Sofie Pepusch was Marius’s second wife. She was forty-seven when she died, just five years older than my mother, Nadia. My real grandmother’s name was Hillary Belova Dussek. She was an industrial chemist. After her divorce from Marius she emigrated to the West, cutting off her ties from all of us, including my mother.

Sofie was delicate, with spidery, colourless lashes and very fair hair. She was once a dancer with the city ballet, but was forced to give up her career because of illness. She went over to teaching instead. Even that was too much for her in the end, and at the time of her death she was working two or three days a week giving music and movement classes at the local primary school. On her days off she liked to wander around the city picking up junk, bits and pieces she found in waste skips and hoarded in cardboard boxes in Marius’s flat. For my mother, as for most people, Sofie’s rubbish-collecting was a mystery and an annoyance, but for Sofie it was obviously important, as if the objects she brought back with her were imbued with talismanic properties. I myself found the whole business fascinating. I occasionally tried following her on one of her foraging expeditions but she invariably gave me the slip.

Sofie was twenty years younger than Marius, although her frail constitution and peculiar behaviour made her seem even younger. Nadia referred to her as the Princess Baglady, though she never repeated the nickname in front of Marius. My brother Nicky kept a photograph of Sofie in his desk drawer.

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