I know there will be no more visits, that this is the last time we will see each other. What will the world hold for this tiny creature after I am gone? What ties her to me? What will she take from her mother, and what has her mother taken from me? All of the wrong things, I am afraid, but it is too late to do anything about it. Oh, what difference does it make? Dust is a must. I have reached the edge of my grave and am gazing into the abyss with longing. The infant will have to fend for herself, just as I did. I stroke her delicate hair and take the necklace away, and then I sneak out of the room and prepare to rest.
As I climb under my covers on the couch, next to Sharik, I picture Natasha onstage as my grandmother, feeling the silliness of seeing my life play out before my eyes. It was fine that she had changed the story, mind you, that she had simplified it, which is something I wish someone had done to my actual life. Though the story was even more complicated than I had let on—I had not told Natasha everything. She would not have known what to do with it. I did not want to overwhelm my poor granddaughter, or to make her think less of me.
I see myself onstage again, before the gullible audience, except this time it is truly me, a young Lara, and instead of Babushka Natasha, I see long-dead Babushka Tonya, the genuine article. The audience fades, and so does the auditorium, the stage. We are back in the mountains.
I have been seething ever since my grandmother not only failed to praise my father during his funeral but also had the gall to say that going to the orphanage was the best thing that ever happened to him. My anger reaches a fever pitch when she begins speaking to him during her mad rants, telling him he once had the rosiest cheeks. How could she dare to address my poor dead father as a boy—a boy she had treated so poorly? No, no—she had taken things too far. Once I hear her speak to him, I decide she needs to be punished.
That night, I wait until my sister’s restless body settles above me, and I confirm that my grandmother is sound asleep as well. Then I slither out of bed. I hover over my grandmother, take a deep breath, and reach under her filthy boa to unclasp her necklace. Her thick, snakelike skin brushes against mine and nearly makes me leap—I have never truly touched her before. I stuff her necklace into my underwear. And then I sleep the sleep of the dead.
In the morning, I wake up to my grandmother’s cries.
“Where is it? Where is it?”
I watch her go on with her wild accusations, watch her mind completely dissolve, watch Polya and Bogdan become as fused as the welded components of a steel bridge, watch Mama become even more immobilized by heartache. I keep the necklace in my underwear during the first day of the search and the next night, once everyone is asleep once again, I go outside to dig up the portrait of Papa and Mama and bury the necklace underneath it.
“I know you never cared for riches, Papachka,” I say. “But I hope you can keep this safe.”
I did not and do not believe in God or an afterlife, did not think Papa was prancing around with the angels while waving the ruby necklace in the air, or using it to buy himself endless Champagne and caviar, or that it made a lick of a difference, as if dead wasn’t dead. As if putting a portrait in the ground meant any speck of my father resided there. No, he was but a corpse in the mountains in a place I would never see, a mean wind whistling above his cold bones. Still, taking the necklace away from my grandmother and giving it to Papa makes me feel better for a while.
I do not feel sorry for my grandmother, not even when she starts wandering outside and babbling to her long-dead relatives, it only fills me with a sharp joy.
But after a few weeks, even this pleasure fades, and I want to dig my claws in even more.
I hear a rustling in the middle of the night and watch my grandmother rise in her nightgown and wander outside to where Papa is buried. I follow her, while Polya sleeps on. For a moment, I worry that she has discovered the location of the necklace, but once I hear her mad babbling addressed at her daughter, I realize the jewels are safe.
“Shura,” she mutters under her breath when she reaches the grave, calling to her long-dead daughter. “Dear Shura. Why aren’t you here to save me?”
This old, tired woman in a boa, babbling in her nightgown—I almost pity her, but I do not lose my resolve.
“Maybe Papa could have saved you,” I say.
“How’s that, my dear?” she says. She wipes her forehead with her coal-black boa. It takes a moment for her eyes to settle on me, for me to be certain she knows I am not Shura.
“Papa could have saved you, maybe,” I say. “But you killed him.”
“How’s that?” she says again, genuine confusion furrowing her ancient face.
“You killed him slowly when you trucked him off to that orphanage, when you made him a caretaker of Uncle Pasha and all those lost, lonely boys. Then you killed him again, last month, when he saw another crowd of helpless boys and could not help but save them over himself. You exiled him from his own family and made him think his life was worth nothing—even at his funeral, you couldn’t be bothered to say a single kind word about him! You’re the most selfish woman I’ve ever met, but Papa was utterly selfless because of you, don’t you see? Just like Polya is utterly spoiled because of you! You are hideous and vile and have never done anybody a lick of good!” I say.
She tilts her head back and lets out a long, maniacal laugh. I can see a sliver of her white throat, bare without its necklace.
“Selfish?” she says. “You think I am selfish?”
And then she gives me a hard, cold slap. She had not hit me since she mocked me for wanting to touch her necklace when I was a child. I enjoyed the familiar bitterness of the sting.
“Who are you?” she says then. “Who are you to understand the decisions I have made? To know what I have suffered? You don’t know anything about the world. I am not selfish in the least—if I were selfish, I would have fled to Odessa with my children and set foot in the free world, but I did not know what life would be like there. So what did I do for them, instead? I married a monster!”
“A monster?”
“A man whose monstrosity I did not understand until my boys had been living under the same roof with him for a few months. It was too late to take my choice back, but not too late to send them away! What else could I do—leave him and my daughter and go back out on the streets? I couldn’t do that on my own.”
“So you’re the one. You’re the one who sent them away.”
“It was best for everybody.”
“You’re crazy,” I say, stepping back. “You’re a crazy old lady. You’re the monster!”
I could not believe what she was telling me. I searched her face for hints that she was crazy, that she was the same person who was babbling to her dead sister just moments ago. No, her story was reasonable. It made sense of her comment that entering the orphanage was the best thing that ever happened to my father. I recalled how Papa always stood an arm’s length away from Dimitrev senior any time we visited his lavish apartment, his body stiff like he was bracing against an icy wind, his knuckles white against his sides. How could I have misread his hatred of him—I assumed it was because the man had him sent away, not because he had degraded him. My poor Papa! All those evenings spent enduring this bawdy man with his vodka as he flirted recklessly with Polina and Baba Tonya. Twisting his silver mustache around his dirty finger. The more he twisted it, the longer—