Maybe that, too, was why she’d never been interested in a courtship with any of the young men Daddy brought home. None of them had ever made her think they were worth the change from what she knew and loved. “Family is the most important thing,” she said quietly.
“It is.” Something moved over his face, so fleeting she barely caught it. Something a bit sad, a bit angry, a bit resigned. “My people—at least the ones in control now—are trying to make us forget this. There are groups of women saying it is time to liberate them from the confines of family and children. They wish to make child-rearing a matter for the state instead of the family. To abolish marriage. To outlaw elements of faith. They say these are archaic.”
They paused to wait for a rattletrap motorcar to clatter by, which gave her time enough to find the words for the reaction that had gripped her stomach. “Isn’t that a bit like saying we don’t need stone anymore, now that we have concrete and steel, and so let’s dig out the bedrock? New structures are all well and good, but we must take care not to destroy our very foundations.”
“Exactly so.” For the first time, a bit of fervor entered his voice. “This is what I have tried to say to my people. That yes, it is important women have chance to chase dreams. It is important peasants in villages do not starve. But care must be taken not to throw out good with bad.” He paused, sucked in a breath. “Apologies. I have forgotten my articles in my excitement.”
She chuckled. “I knew perfectly well what you meant. And I do agree.”
The glance he sent her said he appreciated that. But then it sobered. “My reward for such talk in Moscow, and for the work I did for my country during the war, was to be hunted. Flee or die—these were the options the Bolsheviks left me.”
He said Bolsheviks like it was a curse word. She wanted to reach over, to touch his arm, but she didn’t know if he’d appreciate such a gesture. So she settled for a small smile. “I’m glad you chose the option you did, Mr. Marin.”
He faced forward again. Seeing, she suspected, something far beyond the row of houses so familiar to her. “Many will think I chose the coward’s way. That I have abandoned my post, my country. That I have defected.”
“And being killed for your beliefs would have been better?” She shook her head and then lifted a hand to smooth back a strand of hair the wind tossed into her eyes. “I can’t think so. Denying who you are for the sake of safety would have been cowardly. And dying for it would have been a bigger abandonment, don’t you think? Now you live to fight another day. To pray for those you’ve left behind. For Russia. To do what you can for them from here.”
They drifted to a halt a few feet from her front steps, and he gave her the most interesting smile. Small, still tinged with sorrow, but somehow all the deeper and more meaningful for it. A man’s smile had never made her pulse increase before, but her heart took a strange little tumble now.
He bowed a bit at the waist, somehow making it look elegant and formal despite being dressed in athletic wear. “Thank you, Miss Blackwell, for seeing that perspective. And thank you, also, for the pleasure of walking you home.”
She suddenly wished she was in a pretty dress, her hair done up properly. Such a bow deserved something more appealing as its recipient. But she had only her uniform, and tendrils pulling free of her chignon, and a camera in her pocket weighing heavily, begging for a chance to capture him just so.
What an intriguing mass of contradictions he was. The still and the active. The formal and the informal. The studied and the earnest.
Her fingers slid into her pocket and extracted the camera as a grin stole over her lips. “May I?”
He blinked, first at her face and then at her camera. “I . . . why?”
“Because I like to keep a visual record of my days. And I don’t want to forget this conversation.”
She saw the softening in his eyes and responded to it before he nodded. Already had the camera up, open, and was adjusting the focus. Perhaps it was the quickness of her actions that made him laugh. She couldn’t be sure, but she didn’t let it slip by her. She managed to get the pin pushed while light still danced in his eyes and the smile had full possession of his lips.
Ivy and Clarke soon caught up with them, and the men said their farewells amid promises to see them tomorrow.
“See there? Aren’t you glad I insisted?” Ivy chuckled as they made their way inside.
Lily granted her a grin. But then, rather than trail her sister up the stairs to their rooms, she aimed for the small chamber—once a room for a live-in maid—that Mama had let her turn into her darkroom.
Once inside, she pulled out a box of photographs she kept for repurposing—many of which she had taken, others donated by Admiral Hall—and sorted through them until she found the one she was looking for, with Moscow’s magnificent onion-domed horizon. Smiling, she reached for her camera and the film inside it.
She couldn’t give Zivon Marin his home back or find his brother for him. But she could give him a souvenir, anyway. A matryoshka doll. Not a memory itself, but something to open them up.
As she worked, she prayed. That the memories would be good ones. That he would find a way to hold tight to that which he couldn’t afford to lose of his past and easily relinquish that which would catch him in a snare.
And that somehow, somewhere, he’d find his brother.
7
EASTER SUNDAY, 31 MARCH 1918
Outside, the voices of a million raindrops sang upon cobbles and pavement and brick. Zivon had the window cracked open enough to hear them, to let the symphony of splashes and patters serenade him. Once upon a time, such music would have soothed.
He wasn’t sure soothing was even possible these days.
On the table before him, he’d spread a newspaper that contained a thorough article about the Paris church shelling on Friday. Ninety-one dead. Sixty-eight injured. Was Evgeni one of those? If he had even survived the train derailment, could he have been in the neighborhood? Zivon didn’t know, but that urgency that hovered always at the cloudy edges of his memory felt suspiciously like guilt when he considered the possibility. If Evgeni had been there, it was because of him. Because he had chosen that neighborhood as their rendezvous. Why hadn’t he simply chosen something like the Eiffel Tower?
He pinched the bridge of his nose where his eyeglasses rested, then repositioned them with a sigh and sent his gaze to the other paper on his table. A sheet with his own handwriting upon it—his best recollection of what that telegram about the Prussian had said. But even as he reviewed the words, trying to remember if each phrase was right, he knew it didn’t matter.
Hall wouldn’t be able to do anything with this. Zivon certainly wouldn’t have put any stock in a page created solely from the memory of a man he wasn’t even certain he could trust. Only a fool would take this as anything but a rumor.
His new superior was no fool.
But logic aside, the telegram was real. Or the original had been. It was the last thing he’d decrypted before they got word that Lenin and his troops were coming and they’d better clear everything out of their offices that gave away what they were doing.
Was that the only reason he thought it so important?
No. No, he’d known the moment he decrypted it, before he knew it would be his last, that this was vital. That the war could hinge on what happened with the common German soldiers.