Since she had to go to her bedroom for suitable clothes, she put on a heavy coat and gloves. She and the children had been living in the kitchen all winter because she couldn’t afford to heat the rest of the house; now, whenever she had to go out to the other rooms, she had to bundle up as if she were going outside. She pulled on gloves as she walked through the butler’s pantry to the dining room, where the table and chairs sat huddled together under sheets. All the furniture in the house had been covered in white sheets and now the interior seemed to merge with the white snow outside, as if the house had turned itself inside out.
Later that morning, Mendel Levy met her in the reception area of his office and took her hand in greeting. He ushered her down the hall to his private office, all the time chattering about how lucky they were that they lived in Cherkast and not in Moscow, where the shortages were bad and the lines were impossible. “I hear they have to be up before dawn just to get a can of kerosene. They’re even burning the fences,” he said, showing her into his office. It was an overheated affair stuffed with leather furniture and the Matisses he was fond of collecting.
After they were settled and tea had been offered and declined, he told her the bad news: The bank was repossessing her house. She stared at him and for a moment didn’t know what to say. Even though she knew the mortgage hadn’t been paid in months, she still couldn’t quite believe it. Staring vaguely at a bronze bear on his desk, she said, “I thought you were going to say you found a way out of Russia for us.”
“Berta, we’ve been through all that,” he said, with a note of impatience. “There is no way out.”
“Not even through Finland?”
“I told you about Finland. It’s impossible. It’s all impossible. Now it’s time to put away these ridiculous notions and start thinking about how you’re going to make it through the war. It won’t be easy and there’s no telling how long it will last. That’s why the first thing we must do is sell your furniture.”
She looked up in alarm. “All of it?”
“I don’t think you understand your circumstances. Your accounts have been wiped out. You have no more money. That ’s why it’s important to start living within your means. Fortunately, I know a little apartment not far from the Berezina. You and the children will be quite comfortable there. It’s a nice apartment. A friend of mine had it for years.”
With the mention of friends she thought of her own and how, in a few weeks, everyone would know that she had been thrown out of her own home. She thought of poor Pavla, whose husband had been sent to Verkhoyansk. Soon everyone would be feeling sorry for her, giving her advice, and calling her poor Berta behind her back. It would be intolerable. “Does everyone have to know?”
“They’ll be a notice in the paper.”
She closed her eyes.
“It’s the law. But don’t worry, I’ll handle it. It won’t be nearly as bad as you think.”
Mendel Levy was able to convince the bank to post the foreclosure notice on a Friday, in the late afternoon paper, where it wouldn’t draw much attention. After that he saw to an auction house to oversee the sale of the furniture. Of course there had to be advertising to bring in a crowd. Berta stayed home that day and received no one. Alix came by the house afterward to tell her all about it, not that Berta particularly wanted to know. This didn’t stop Alix, however. She eagerly relayed all that had happened at the auction: who was there, what they had bought, and how much they paid for it. She even admitted to buying a few things herself and hoped that Berta wouldn’t think she was being disloyal or callous.
Berta was glad when Alix left so she could mourn the loss of her home in solitude. She spent the afternoon wandering through the empty rooms, cold as ice caves. That night she made a fire in the stove in her bedroom and spent one last night on a mattress on the floor. She lay down under the quilts and listened to the wind rattling the windows. She watched the firelight cast long shadows over the walls as she tried to remember the name of the cellist who had come to play a few years back. The Bach cello suites. A small girl from the academy with long, beautiful fingers. Berta remembered that she had trouble lugging her cello around. Anna Vasilevna, that was it. Good, now she could sleep.
The apartment that Mendel Levy rented for her was on a tree-lined street not far from the shops on the corner of Sretensky and Kiyevs-kaya. It wasn’t what she was used to, but it was a pleasant place full of light in a respectable neighborhood and her neighbors were quiet and well-mannered. There was a professor of languages, or maybe it was literature, living in the apartment above her. He wasn’t old, but his body was bent and he walked with two canes. She talked to him on several occasions because Masha didn’t get along with his cat. The two felines even fought once or twice on the steps outside the building. They agreed over a cup of tea in Berta’s apartment that there wasn’t much they could do about it.
During the winter of 1915 the news was encouraging. The army had achieved stunning successes against the Austrians in Galicia and in the Carpathians and even the impregnable fortress of Peremyshl had been taken. With money in her account from the sale of her furniture and the good news from the front, she and the children settled into their little apartment. Now that there were only four rooms to heat, the apartment was warm and comfortable. She even managed to save some of her furniture, two settees from the parlor and a carved oak library table that she put in the bay window in the front room and covered with masses of ferns and orchids that she had kept alive in the kitchen while the rest of the house froze.
Samuil was enjoying spying on the tenants. Vera stayed on at a reduced salary, as well as Zina, the scullery maid, who was cheap and said she could cook. That part was a lie. But Berta gave her a cookbook and encouraged her to learn on the job. Since Zina had been born in Moscow to a pair of textile factory workers and spoke Russian, not Surzhyk like the other domestics, she had the kind of self-confidence that it took to reach beyond her station. She could read and write and thought herself too good for the boys in Cherkast. For all these reasons, Berta got the idea that she could learn how to cook. And she did. In fact she got so good at it that she began to take on airs. Vera complained that she was becoming temperamental, telling the other servants in the building that she was an artist with food.
By early spring, speculation and the resulting inflationary prices had absorbed most of the furniture money. The war was going badly again. The Germans had swept into Russian Poland and occupied most of Lithuania and there was even talk of losing Riga and maybe even Petrograd. Berta cut back on kerosene. The house grew colder because the price of wood began to climb and now they could only afford to heat one room at a time. To save money Berta made a point of shopping for the food herself. Zina often complained about the quality and even threatened to quit on a few occasions.
On this particular night Berta had taken a candle to her room and was sitting at the ebony Chinese table, the one she salvaged from the telephone alcove. She ran a finger over the spot where she had scraped the paint away and for a moment she took time away from her account book to remember that night when the pianist had canceled at the last minute and she had to hire Madame Gorbunova to take her place. It was hard to imagine that there had ever been a time in her life when her greatest worry was finding someone to play at her salon. Now everything had changed. Hershel had been gone for nearly a year and a half, and she doubted whether she would ever see him again. She was trapped in Little Russia and running out of money and no amount of cutting back was going to change that fact. If they were going to make it through the war, she would have to earn more.