Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay Read Free Book Online Page A

just as she was proud of her spartan crockery, her found-on-the-sidewalk bookshelf, her yard-sale tea towels and wineglasses.
    Jen called it self-punishment. But Drew liked the simplicity of her downsized life, this quieter existence. One needed, she saw now, only a few belongings, just as one needed only a few close friends, and a single passion—it need not be a person, necessarily. Though when she moved in she had purchased a thick cotton bedspread in a deep shade of violet, really she had little hope in that realm. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in love; but she no longer believed in it for herself. And while she had, in her first years here, shared her bed with some perfectly nice men, she had gradually come to view her room as a place of solitude and silence. The bedspread had faded to a dusty purple. Every time Drew changed the linens, she told herself she should buy a new one.
    The truth was, she always felt a bit separate from most people. Even in her marriage she had never felt, as she had yearned to, that she was part of a team, that she and Eric were partners. Though they had shared many friends from college, after the breakup Drew had given most of them up. Even now, at certain moments—nudging herself onto a seat on the T, or eating lunch at the narrow counter in the sandwich shop, or taking her leisurely twice-weekly (except in winter) run along the Charles—she looked at the people around her and felt not just that she was surrounded by strangers, but that she herself was strange, somehow, that something kept her from ever fully bridging the gap between who she was and who all these other people, making their way through the very same day, were.
    According to Jen, this was due to Drew’s being an only child,independent and accustomed to doing things on her own. She had not grown up with the closeness of siblings, of secrets and shared genetics. And though she and her mother had once been close, her father was a quiet man who had never been terribly communicative; only when Drew graduated from college and became a member of the workforce did he seem comfortable conducting in-depth conversations with her, asking lots of detailed professional questions, as he might of a lunch companion or someone sitting next to him on an airplane. For all these reasons—Jen put forth in her matter-of-fact way—Drew possessed, or revealed, little need for companionship. Well, Drew thought to herself, perhaps that was so. She turned back to her computer screen.
     
    Backdrop: History and Circumstance
behind the Jewels
    By Drew Brooks, Associate Director of Fine Jewelry
    During the years that Nina Revskaya danced with the Bolshoi Ballet, her government kept files on a full two-thirds of the population. By the time she left the USSR, that same government had killed nearly five million citizens. To anyone, these numbers can be shocking. And yet along with Revskaya, upon her escape, came objects of startling beauty whose
    Drew waited for the next words to come to her. The problem was that she did not know where to start. She suspected there was much to say—despite the fact that Nina Revskaya insisted she had no more information to offer. It was laughable, really. Especially when she herself said that dancers had such good memories, that she could remember entire ballets…In her mind, Drew could hear the rising intonation of her voice, the hard rolled r ’s and nasal vowels—though her accent was really not so strong, and her Englishnearly perfect. For that reason too her unwillingness to talk, paired with the sudden appearance of Grigori Solodin’s matching amber pendant, made Drew suppose that there was something more to Nina Revskaya’s story.
    Not to mention that Grigori Solodin, too, was a bit of a mystery. A big man, tall and slim yet weighty somehow, with a wide thoughtful brow and pensive eyes. Thick hair slightly messy like a boy’s. Even now Drew could picture his firm, even tense, jaw, the definition in