“Please, Masha, stop!” Sophie gasped. “I feel dizzy …”
Masha skidded up to a door covered in green felt. She turned around to Sophie, her face suddenly apprehensive. She reached out and pushed a strand of Sophie’s hair out of her face, then spat in her hand and wiped what must have been a smear of jam from Sophie’s chin. Then she nodded her approval, turned, and knocked twice on the door.
The sound was muffled by the felt, and Sophie wondered if anyone had heard. But a second later, a high, wavery voice answered. Masha opened the door slowly, talking to someone inside. A smell of smoke and vinegar made Sophie’s nostrils itch.
Just as they were about to step through the doorway, Sophie having to bend her head slightly because it was so low, Masha turned and stared hard at Sophie’s face. She grasped Sophie’s hand tightly.
“My family waiting …” she whispered. “They wait to see you.”
A candle burned on a small wooden table, the pale light licking at rough wooden walls. No furniture to speak of; no possessions, either. It was as if Masha’s family lived in a forgotten waiting room. Sophie tried not to sneeze as the smell of vinegar, herbs, and wood smoke clutched tighter at her throat.
A middle-aged woman with bright, round eyes and high, broad cheekbones put down her sewing and looked up. She put her hand to the headscarf, which was tied tightly under her chin, as if to check that it was in place. She pushed back her stool and stood up to greet her guest.
“This my mother,” Masha said.
The woman dipped her head in greeting.
“How do you do?” Sophie said.
Masha’s mother picked up an embroidered hand towel. On top of the neatly folded linen was a loaf of dark bread and, balanced precariously on this, a saltcellar. She held it toward Sophie.
“I’m not very hungry,” Sophie said. And then, not wanting to cause offense, she added, “Although it’s very kind of you to offer.”
The woman looked taken aback. She turned her face eagerly to Masha, nodding rapidly as if wanting Masha to translate Sophie’s words quickly.
Masha shook her head as if she, too, was surprised. “Not food,” she said to Sophie. “This bread, this salt … We greet with blessing.”
“Oh. Sorry! It’s not how we do things in London,” said Sophie. She watched as the woman poured out some salt and indicated that Sophie should dip the bread into it. Sophie felt that her ignorance had disappointed them somehow, but she did her best to tear off a little piece of bread without knocking over the saltcellar, and dipped it into the mound of tiny crystals. A few of them stuck to the black bread, and when she put it in her mouth, it tasted strange, but delicious, too. “In London we just shake hands,” Sophie explained. She swallowed the dark, salted morsel. “Although this seems a much nicer thing to do.”
The woman came closer. Because of the way her headscarf was tied, low over her forehead, tight under her chin, her face was a perfect disc. Sophie had the unnerving impression that the woman’s face was floating toward her on a column of embroidered fabric. Two hands came out of sleeves, picked up a lock of Sophie’s hair, and stroked it. She showed it to Masha.
“My mother say: ‘A maiden’s beauty is in her hair.’”
Then the woman held up Sophie’s hand and held it toward the candle.
“My mother say: ‘Trust your own eyes more than others’ words.’”
The woman turned Sophie’s hand over and traced the lines on her palm. Her fingers were slightly rough but her touch was light. She returned Sophie’s hand to her as if it were a present. Then she placed her outstretched index finger under Sophie’s chin and, calling Masha to bring the candle closer, turned Sophie’s face gently to the right and the left, inspecting every detail.
Masha nodded as her mother whispered to her. “It is true what my mother says,” she explained gravely. “‘Eyebrows may be pretty, but firewood is more useful.’”
“Your family is very friendly,” Sophie gasped, trying hard not to pull her face away from the candle. “Is this how you greet all your guests in this part of Russia?”
“We have been waiting long time to greet person like you. No one ever comes to palace.” She frowned. “Until woman upstairs.” She smiled. “Now you come to palace. And now we so happy!”
A door on the far side of the kitchen banged open. Dmitri, holding one hand in the other, stumbled in, crying out for something in Russian. He collapsed onto a stool. Sophie gasped as she saw that his hand was bleeding.
Masha shrieked and leaped up, grabbing a piece of linen from the top of her mother’s sewing pile. Her mother quickly pulled a bowl down from a shelf and poured water into it, which splashed onto the floor.
Dmitri kept saying the same word over and over again.“Pamada! Pamada!”
His mother, speaking calmly, set a small bowl of fat — thepamada? — in front of him. She washed the cut, which looked deep, as if he’d been bitten: The flaps of skin around the edge of the cut were ragged. Dmitri winced as she put her fingers into the fat and smoothed it onto the cut. She then wrapped the hand tightly in clean linen.
Dmitri, throughout this ordeal, had chewed his lip and not made a single sound. He cradled the bandaged hand in the other and, for the first time, seemed to notice his surroundings. Seeing Sophie, he started.
“You?” he said. “Here?”
He looked up at Masha, who stood next to him, her arm around him protectively. Sophie saw the little scar on his cheek jump.
