The envelope from the professor stuck out from underneath her pad. She picked up the letter and read it again, studying it word by word. Leningrad. Participation. Study. Understand.
Her mother knew something, had seen or experienced something important enough to have been the subject of a professorial research project.
But what?
The Great Terror? Stalin’s repression? Or maybe she’d been a prima ballerina. . . .
“Stop it,” Nina said aloud, turning her attention to the dusty green file folder marked Bepa?eTpoBHa. Then she stared at the letter. “What did you want to know from her, Vasily Adamovich?”
That was when she saw it, when she said his name out loud.
Nina sat upright.
It was in his signature.
When he signed his name, Vasily, the first letter looked like a B.
Nina’s heart was pounding as she reached for the file. Was there a space after the a? Could it be a first and last name? She broke the word at the second capital letter and was left with Bepa.
Vepa.
She ran an Internet search for the Russian alphabet and compared the letters.
Bepa was Vera.
Vera.
Then she translated the rest of the letters. ?eTpoBHa.
Petrovna.
A little more research, and she understood Russian names. First was the given name, then the patronymic—a male or female identification of the father—and then the surname. So this file contained two of three names—-ovna was the suffix for a daughter. Vera Petrovna meant Vera, Petyr’s daughter.
Nina sat back in her chair, feeling the adrenaline rush that always came with nailing a key part of a story. Vera was a real person. Real enough to put her name on a file, and important enough to keep that file for twenty years.
It wasn’t a complete answer; it didn’t answer the big question about Mom’s identity, and unfortunately, without a surname, she couldn’t locate anything more online. The research study could be about Vera, and Mom could have known her or something about her. Or, of course, she could be Vera. Or Olga. Those answers Nina would have to find somewhere else.
This Vasily Adamovich—Vasily, Adam’s son—knew the connection between Mom and Vera, and that connection was important enough to include in a research study.
And with that, Nina came up with a plan.
Seventeen
At 5:47 Meredith went for her run. The dogs raced along with her, eagerly vying for attention.
By seven o’clock, she was out in the orchard and walking the rows with her foreman, checking on the new fruit’s early progress, noting frost damage, and assessing the workers’ careful hand-wrapping of the apples, and by ten she was at her desk, reading crop projections.
But all she could really think about was the fairy tale.
I’m just going to ask it: Is she Vera?
The idea of that was like a budding apple; it flowered, grew, and gained mass. It seemed impossible that something you’d heard all your life and deemed irrelevant could actually be of value; it was like finding out that the painting above your fireplace was an early Van Gogh.
But it was true; she’d heard the words for years and simply accepted them at face value, never questioning, never looking deeper. Maybe all kids did that with family stories. The more you heard something, the less you questioned the veracity of it.
She put aside the crop reports and turned to her computer. For the next hour she ran random searches. Leningrad, Stalin, Vera, Olga (if she had been looking for Russian mail-order brides, the names would have been pay dirt), Fontanka Bridge, Great Terror. Bronze Horseman statue. Nothing of real value came up, just more and more evidence that the backdrop of the fairy tale was largely real.
She found a long list of Vasily Adamovich’s published works. He’d written about almost every facet of Russian and Soviet life, from the earliest days of the Bolshevik revolution, through the murder of the Romanovs and the rise of Stalin and the terrors of his regime, to Hitler’s attack during World War II, to the tragedy at Chernobyl. Whatever had happened to Russians in the twentieth century, he’d studied it.