Winter Garden

Very calmly, Nina poured her mother a shot and handed it to her.

Mom drank the vodka. “I will do it my way,” she said, setting the empty glass aside. “If you interrupt me, I will stop. I will tell it in pieces and only at night. We will not speak of it during the day. Do you understand?”

“Yes. ”

“In the dark. ”

“Why always—”

The look Mom gave her was so sharp Nina stopped abruptly. “Sorry. ” She went to the light switch and turned it off.

It was a moonless night, so no silver-blue glow came through the glass. The only light was from the crack of the open door.

Nina sat on the floor, waiting.

A rustling sound filled the room: her mother getting comfortable in the bed. “Where should I begin?”

“In December, you ended when Vera was going to sneak out to meet the prince. ”

A sigh.

And then came her mother’s story voice, sweet and mellifluous: “After she comes home from the park, Vera spends the rest of that day in the kitchen with her mother, but her mind is not on the task at hand. She knows her mama knows this, that she is watching her carefully, but how can a girl concentrate

on straining goose fat into jars when her heart is full of love?

“Veronika, pay attention,” her mama says.

Vera sees that she has spilled a big blob of fat on the table. She wipes it up with her hand and throws it into the sink. She hates goose fat anyway. She prefers rich, homemade butter any day.

“And you throw it away? What is wrong with you?”

Her sister giggles. “Maybe she is thinking of boys. Of a boy. ”

“Of course she is thinking of boys,” Mama says, wiping the moisture from her brow as she stands at the stove, stirring the simmering lingonberries. “She is fifteen. ”

“Almost sixteen. ”

Her mama pauses in her stirring and turns around.

They are in the kitchen, in the last days of summer, preserving food for winter. The tables are full of berries to be turned into jam; onions, mushrooms, potatoes, and garlic to be put in the cellar; cucumbers to be pickled; and beans to be canned in brine. Later, Mama has promised to teach them how to make blini with a sweet cherry filling.

“You are almost sixteen,” Mama says, as if it had not occurred to her before. “Two years younger than I was when I met Petyr. ”

Vera puts down the slippery pot of goose fat. “What did you feel when you first saw him?”

Mama smiles. “I have told this story many times. ”

“You always say he swept you away. But how?”

Mama wipes her brow again and reaches out for the wooden chair in front of her. Pulling it back a little, she sits down.

Vera almost makes a sound; that’s how shocked she is by this. Her mother is not a woman who stops working to talk. Vera and Olga have grown up on stories of responsibility and duty. As peasants beholden to the imprisoned king, they have been taught their place. They must keep their heads down and their hands working, for the shadow of the Black Knight falls with the swiftness of a steel blade. It is best never to draw attention to oneself.

Still, her mother is sitting down now. “He was a tutor then, and so good-looking he took my breath away. When I told your baba this, she tsked and said, ‘Zoya, be careful. You will need your breath. ’ ”

“Was it love at first sight?” Vera asks.

“I knew when he looked at me that I would take his hand, that I would follow him. I say it was the mead we drank, but it wasn’t. It was just . . . Petyr. My Petya. His passion for knowledge and life swept me away and before I knew it, we were married. My parents were horrified, for the kingdom was in turmoil. The king was in exile then, and we were afraid. Your father’s ambition scared them. He was a poor country tutor, but he dreamed of being a poet. ”