Forty Rooms Read online

  ALSO BY OLGA GRUSHIN

  The Line

  The Dream Life of Sukhanov

  A MARIAN WOOD BOOK

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Olga Grushin

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote excerpts from Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem,” from Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder. Copyright © 1989, 1992, 1997 by Judith Hemschemeyer. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Zephyr Press, www.zephyrpress.org.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-98309-6

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  TO ALEX AND TASHA

  Contents

  Also by Olga Grushin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One | Mythology 1. Bathroom

  2. Mother’s Bedroom

  3. Father’s Study

  4. Kitchen

  5. Dacha Bedroom

  6. My Bedroom

  Part Two | Past Perfect 7. Library Cubicle

  8. Boyfriend’s Bedroom

  9. My Dorm Room

  10. Studio Room

  11. Bathroom

  Part Three | The Past 12. Kitchen

  13. Guest Bedroom

  14. Living Room

  15. Bedroom

  16. Covered Veranda

  17. Kitchen

  18. Nursery

  19. Living Room

  20. Bedroom

  Part Four | The Present 21. Ballroom

  22. Dining Room

  23. Master Bathroom

  24. Wine Cellar

  25. Nursery

  26. Guest Bedroom

  27. Master Closet

  28. Exercise Room

  29. Laundry

  30. Master Bedroom

  31. Girls’ Room

  32. Kitchen

  33. Son’s Room

  34. Living Room

  35. Bar

  36. Garage

  37. Deck

  38. Library

  39. Home Theater

  40. Entrance Hall

  Part Five | The Future

  Acknowledgments

  And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made.

  Genesis 8:6

  Be thine own palace, or the world thy jail.

  John Donne, “To Sir Henry Wotton”

  Part One

  Mythology

  1. Bathroom

  The Tree at the Heart of the World

  The bathroom is the first place to emerge from the haze of nonbeing. It is cramped and smells sweet and changes from time to time. When the world outside hardens with dark and cold, the sky-blue tiles grow icy and sting my naked soles, but the pipes vibrate in a low, comforting hum and the water is hot and delightful; I dive into it with a heedless splash, rushing to slide into soapsuds up to my chin before the prickle of goose bumps overtakes me. Then the world swells stuffy and bright, and now the coolness of the floor feels nice, but the pipes lie chilled and inert; I watch the stream from a just-boiled teakettle hit the cold water inside the plastic bucket before I climb gingerly into the empty tub and wait for the sponge to dribble lukewarm rivulets down my back.

  Most evenings the hands that touch me are the ones I know best, light and gentle, with a delicate ring on one finger and fingernails lovely and pink like flower petals. With the hands comes a voice, a soft, quiet voice that sings to me—though the songs themselves sound sad. Other times, the hands are harder, their fingers thick and blunt, the fingernails cut short, almost to the quick, one finger squeezed tight by a plain golden band that seems far too small for it; but these hands are never rough, and I like them just as much, not least because I am less used to them and I feel curious, and also because the voice of the blunter hands does not sing but tells jokes. The voice is firm at the edges, and the jokes are loud, large with mooing roosters and oinking cats, and a naughty gnome who comes only on Sundays to talk of messy meals and chamber pots and other things equally funny and gross, and I laugh and laugh until bubbles spurt out of my nose.

  But sometimes, rarely, the hands are different—large, loose-skinned, and bony, smelling of smoke, their long fingers stiff, their joints like the bark of the old tree by the swing set in the courtyard. These hands move with an odd, crablike grace, barely touching the sponge, forgetting why they are there, emitting a faint clatter and jingle as they alight on the side of the tub; openmouthed with amazement, I watch a bracelet of pink oval stones slide up and down the withered wrist, each stone carved with a pale woman’s face, thin and elegant, glowing from within. And the voice, like the hands, is withered and straying; and it does not sing, and it does not laugh—it tells stories instead.

  The passing of seasons, another winter giving way, another summer cresting, brings with it Grandmother’s yearly visit. I find myself waiting for the stories above all else.

  They never have the same beginnings—no matter how much I beg for some half-remembered tale, Grandmother will not repeat herself—but they all lead to the same place, a hidden kingdom of manifold marvels. The kingdom is reached in a hundred different ways, though few ever gain entrance to it. Some stumble upon it after a lifelong search, having wandered through treacherous forests and climbed snowy mountains, while others are plunged there headlong, without any warning, without expectation, having tasted of a strange drink or chased a chance shadow around the corner or stared for a moment too long into the mirror. (One little girl with the same name as mine arrives in the kingdom wet and wrapped in a towel: she is taking a bath when she gets swept down the drain.) The kingdom is home to amazing creatures and things—candle flames that have run away from their candles, warring armies of spoons and forks, flocks of traveling belfry bells, a beautiful blind fairy, a mouse who dreams only of dragons, a knight who has lost his horse—and all the creatures ceaselessly travel along the kingdom’s many paths, some straight and simple, others twisted and full of dark adventure, all winding their way toward the kingdom’s secret heart. There, at the center of the world, where all the paths converge, grows a wondrous tree whose branches touch the skies, and there, by its vast ancient roots, the creatures halt and wait—wait for the leaves to fall.

  “And why do they want those leaves so much?” I ask, as I always do. “Are they made of gold?”

  “They aren’t gold,” my grandmother answers, “but they are precious all the same. One side of each leaf bears a name, and only the person whose name it is can read the words on the leaf’s other side. And only one leaf on the tree has your name on it, so if you aren’t there waiting fo
r it when it falls, you miss it forever.”

  “And what words are they, Grandmother?”

  “The most important words in the world,” she replies.

  “Yes, but what do they say?”

  Her fingers click with impatience against the tub’s edge.

  “They are different for every person, so I can’t tell you.”

  I sink back in the bath. No matter how her tales begin, they always end this way: she will add nothing more. Whenever she starts, I hope that tonight will be different, that tonight she will tell me the rest. But she never does. She is a hundred years old, I think angrily to myself, and she is more stubborn than anyone I know; she likes to hoard her secrets. I sit in the bath willing myself not to cry, the skin of my fingers and toes puckered from being too long in the water. My grandmother has forgotten the sponge yet again; she is staring at the tiles above my head, and her pale red-rimmed eyes have that unseeing look I catch from time to time, like the blank eyes of the carved women on her old bracelet. And suddenly I think: Maybe she doesn’t even know how the story ends, maybe she arrived there too late to catch her own leaf.

  All at once I feel terribly excited. I look at the drain. Suds are being sucked into its whirlpool, and I glimpse a slice of my pink scrubbed cheek, a corner of my brown eye reflected in its silver curve, and something else too, a tiny elfin face grinning at me, beckoning me closer with a hand like a twig before vanishing in a splash of foam. I decide that right away, without losing another minute, I too will slip down the drain, and ride the soapy waters to the mysterious depths of the hidden kingdom, and brave its crooked paths alongside dragons and spoons, and reach the tree at the heart of the world—and when my leaf falls, I will be there to read the words and tell everyone about it. But immediately I grow sad as I remember that I’m only four years old—four years and three quarters—and I don’t yet know how to read.

  My mother sticks her head in the door. I feel a draft of cold air.

  “Time for her milk,” she says. “Mama, you’re sitting on her towel.”

  My grandmother stands up with slow, injured dignity and sails out of the bathroom.

  2. Mother’s Bedroom

  The Jewelry Box

  One evening in December, I enter my mother’s bedroom to wish her good night, but my mother is not there. A mermaid is sitting on her bed instead. I know she is a mermaid right away, even though I am unable to make out the tail under the folds of her narrow skirt of the faintest gray color, the color of morning mist above the waters of our dacha pond. She is bending, her tresses long and pale, over my mother’s jewelry box, which she holds open in her lap; I can see the silky fabric of her strange skirt stretched tight over her knees beneath the lacquered edge of the box.

  I feel enchanted by the presence of the mermaid, but also deeply grieved. I love my mother’s jewelry box. It is made of shiny black wood, and on its lid two pearly girls with wide belts and sticks in their hair fan a third girl, while all around them tiny trees twinkle with rosy blossoms in a walled-in garden. It is the one object in this room filled with wonders that I long to possess, but I am never allowed to touch it. On my last birthday, when I turned six, I begged and begged until, with a small, patient sigh, my mother pulled open a drawer, maneuvered the box from under the layers of folded nightgowns and stockings, and let me marvel at the princesslike sparkling for a brief minute; but she did not show me anything closely. It makes me sad to find a stranger—even if she is beautiful, even if she is a mermaid—handling that box as though she owns it.

  I am about to tiptoe out when the mermaid looks up and beckons me toward her.

  “Do you want me to show you?” she asks.

  Her voice is like my mother’s, but her eyes are not: they too are green, but their shifting depths lack the familiar misty softness; they glitter instead with joyous, hard brilliance, just like the brilliance I can already see trapped inside the jewelry box.

  Now and then there are strange creatures to be stumbled upon in my mother’s bedroom—it is my parents’ bedroom, really, but I have always thought of it as my mother’s alone—yet the mermaid makes me uneasy. She seems almost dangerous, more unpredictable than any of the others, not in the least like the kindly plump woman in the oval painting above the armchair who rambles about Brussels lace and satin slippers at teatime, or the two yellow-winged fairies who every spring morning slide down the sunbeams onto the dresser to splash in my mother’s perfume bottles, or the man smiling with bright white teeth under a wiry mustache who used to pay afternoon calls the summer I was five. (I liked him best of all, because once or twice, just before he gently pushed me out into the hallway and locked the door behind me, he gave me a chocolate bar in a crinkly wrapper with unfamiliar letters on the side, and also because he possessed magic powers and was invisible to everyone but me. “That child has such a wild imagination,” my mother said, laughing gaily, after I mentioned the visitor with the mustache one night at supper, and my father laughed too, though not as gaily, and ruffled my hair. I felt offended at not being believed, but more than that, I regretted letting go of something that had been mine and mine alone: I found that I liked having secrets all my own. After that, I never said anything to anyone about the things I saw in my mother’s bedroom.)

  The mermaid has already forgotten about me. She is staring into the box, moving her fingers over the velvet insides, as if remembering some tune she once played on a piano. I sit down on the edge of the bed, elated but wary. The mermaid begins to speak, but she is not speaking to me; she caresses this or that ring, this or that pendant, and tells long, winding tales I cannot follow.

  “These cupid earrings,” she says, “have been in the family for four generations. Your great-grandmother received them as a sign of special favor from the tsar’s youngest uncle. He had them presented to her the night she premiered as Dulcinea. She had gifts from many men, of course, but this was the only thing she held on to when forced to sell off all her possessions in the civil war. One wonders why she kept them. She struggled so to feed her children, and the earrings would have brought in bread enough to last a month. But women in this family have always had their mysteries . . .” She pauses to take a sip from a nearly empty glass of dark red liquid on my mother’s nightstand. “Of course, it was well after her Dulcinea days that she married your great-grandfather and had your grandfather and the twins. But could there have been more to the Grand Duke anecdote? No one to ask about it now—all that’s left are two enamel cupids, half a rumor, and maybe, just maybe, a thimble of royal blood.”

  “Is this my great-grandmother the ballet dancer?” I ask, confused. “And who is Dulcinea? And why is there blood in a thimble?” But she does not answer, only lightly trails her fingers over the golden fire imprisoned in the box, and goes on talking.

  “And see this ring? See how the emerald is uncut, rough and enormous, like some green, misshapen bird’s egg? This came from an ancient icon, from one of those priceless frames set with precious stones big as rocks. So many were vandalized in the revolution, hacked apart, hidden by drunks in rotting village coffers. Your grandfather got the emerald at the end of the war, traded it from another soldier for a length of smoked sausage and a box of German sweets, then kept it for years in an empty saltshaker. Eventually he had it set for Elena, your grandmother—a simple pewter setting, he could afford nothing more.”

  “What does ‘vandalized’ mean?” I ask. “When was the revolution?”

  In the circle of soft yellow lamplight the jewels inside their dark nests shift with hidden, treacherous fire. The mermaid takes another sip of the red liquid, tipping the glass into her mouth so abruptly that some drops spill onto the blanket. In profile she seems just like my mother, but every time she moves, every time she speaks, every time she looks past me, not hearing my questions, I am filled anew with the knowledge that she is not.

  “And this bracelet I’ve had since I was a child. It remind
s me of all the mornings spent searching for bits of amber in the sand after the tide.”

  I am pleased to hear something I understand at last. My mother’s family came from the Baltics; she grew up spending summers on the Latvian coast. It must have been there that she met the mermaid. I was wrong to ever find the mermaid dangerous, I think with relief. As I shift closer to her gleaming gray flanks, I am startled into pity by a sudden thought. “But isn’t the Baltic Sea too cold in winter? What do you do if it turns to ice?”

  She drops the bracelet back into the box and glances down at me, her metallic green gaze slipping over my face with a swift, cold touch I can almost feel on my skin.

  “But that’s enough, you are too little to care about the past,” she says, and while her tone seems light, the chill of the faraway sea is there, underneath.

  My pity abandons me, as does my relief. Once again I am nervous.

  She stands up, balancing the box in one hand and the glass in the other.

  “Come to the mirror with me.”

  Together we leave the reassuring circle of light and move into the graying dusk. The oval mirror over the dresser is curly and gilded. On evenings such as this, wintry and still, I like to come and look at my mother’s room nestled into its quiet pool. The mirror room is smaller than the real one and has no angles, filled instead with a fuzzy, muted, familiar warmth, so much like my mother’s soft presence. But now the two of us are reflected in it, me in my short white nightgown with green parrots, the mermaid a slim undulation of shadow behind my shoulder, and the mirror room seems different, cold and sharp-edged and mysterious, exciting in a new way, like something marvelous yet harmful, something forbidden, like—like a lollipop I once stole from the kitchen and devoured in crunching, glistening half licks, half bites in bed at night, under the covers, without brushing my teeth afterward.