Page 16 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“I’m in a dress I didn’t buy, going to a party I didn’t RSVP to. Biting’s the only self-expression left.”

“Then bite. Not Yefim, the beard with the bad hip. Thirty years loyal, and he’ll cry.”

“That is the least reassuring sentence anyone has ever said to me.”

“You’ll upgrade it before the night’s out.”

I transfer, set my brakes, put my hands on my sunflower rims, and go in under my own steam through a door two men hold open like I’m cargo they’ve been warned about.

The noise stops.

I’ve been in a lot of rooms since the accident. I know the sound a room makes when it decides what to do about me, that little wobble in the conversation, the half second where the mouths keep going, and the eyes handle the update. This isn’t that. Forty men and a dozen women go quiet in a restaurant that smells like dill and smoke and roasting meat, and every face turns, and not one of them drops to the chair first. They go to my face, and they stay there.

Then the old ones start standing.

There’s a man at the back, gold tooth, neck like a fire hydrant, cane hooked on the table edge. He gets himself up in three separate painful stages so he can be on his feet when I come through. Down the length of the room they’re all doing it, the ones with ink up their throats, the ones with stars on their knuckles, chairs scraping the tile in a wave rolling toward me.

Nobody stands up for me. People tend to sit down for me or even crouch.

“Vasilisa Gavrilovna,” the man with the cane says, and he says it like it’s liturgy, and I go cold inside a beautiful dress I didn’t pick.

They come one at a time. That’s the horror, it’s orderly, there’s a sequence, and everyone knows it except me. An old woman in black with a face like a dried apple takes my hand in both of hers and says something in Russian I half get, and the half I get is my mother’s name. A man with a scar splitting his lip to the chin bows from the waist. Actually bows. At me. In a wheelchair. In Brooklyn. The next one kisses the back of my hand, and his mouth is dry, and his eyes, coming up, belong to a man who’s done things I couldn’t name with that same mouth.

Every one of them says it. Filatova. Not Plaksin. They put my mother’s maiden name into the air over my head like they’re returning property.

Lev sits at my right and lets it happen. Four minutes in, I understand he told them already that the whole room knew before my car pulled up.

Vodka arrives next. A plate lands in front of me with herring, beets, and a boiled egg cut into a flower, my glass gets refilled before I’ve touched it, and the toasts start.

Cane man goes first. Three stages to get up again. Nobody helps him.

“Za Milyenu Ustinovnu.” He holds the glass toward me. “God rest her. I carried her on my shoulders at her father’s dacha when she was five years old. She pulled my hair, and I let her.” Forty glasses go up. “Now her daughter is here. Ustin went in the ground thinking his blood was finished. He was wrong. I’d give the years I’ve got left to have told him he was wrong.”

They drink. I drink, because forty men are watching my hand.

The vodka goes down like a lit match.

My mother is a scarf, a bad photograph, a red tin with a rooster on it, and a headstone in Queens I’ve visited maybe eleven times. My mother is an absence with a name on it. I built her out of four objects, and my father’s unreliable sentences, and what I built was gentle and ordinary and unlucky, a woman who married badly, died young in Coney Island, and left me her eyes as an apology.

A man with a gold tooth just told me he carried her on his shoulders at her father’s dacha.

She had a country house in Russia. She had a father who had a dacha. She was Milyena Ustinovna, and she pulled this killer’s hair at five years old.

Lev told me the gist of it when he came to inform me of my father’s debt. I heard it, but it’s different hearing it than actually living it.

My mother ran. That’s what I keep coming back to while the second toast starts. My mother stood in a house full of these men at nineteen, and she went out a window or a door or however it happened, and she married Gavril Plaksin, who couldn’t hold a job or a promise or a hand of cards. She traded a kingdom for a man who’d eventually sell her daughter across a table.

Everyone here thinks that’s the tragedy of the Filatov line. I’m sitting in her eyes, wondering if it’s the only smart move anybody in this bloodline ever made.

“You’re not eating,” Lev says.

“I’m being toasted. I don’t know the etiquette. Is chewing during a toast a capital offense, because half these men look like they’d handle it personally.”

“Eat, Vasilisa.”

“Order or suggestion?”

“It’s the fourth glass they’ve poured you, and you weigh what you weigh.” He puts the bread basket within reach of my hand. Not in my hand, but in reach, and the difference is so exact I want to throw it at his head. “Yefim’s about to tell a story about your grandfather and the horse. It runs eleven minutes.”