Page 56 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

I set the cane. I get my right hand on the brass and my left on the arm of the chair, and I stand up out of it in one piece in front of two hundred people.

Nobody in this room makes a sound.

The first step is the worst one, it’s always the worst one, and today it’s worse than that, because the floor is marble and marble takes nothing back. The pain arrives on schedule, the wire pulled hot out of the fused place, and I breathe into it instead of away, because the pain is my body sending word that it’s still here and still mine and still in this.

Four steps. Five. There’s a rushing in my ears that isn’t fear.

At six, a chair scrapes.

It’s Yefim, front of the table, first on the left, hauling himself up off a hip made of gravel with both hands on the wood, and once he’s up the man next to him goes, and then three more down the row, and then it’s a wave rolling away from me down two hundred feet of table, chairs going back, men rising, the ones with stars on their knuckles and the ones who came to bury me. The noise of it goes up into the chandeliers.

Ten steps. My right leg comes through late, and the cane takes what the leg won’t. Yefim’s fifty-year groove in the brass fits my palm like it was waiting.

I don’t look at the men. I look at the chair at the head of the table, green leather, brass caps on the arms, empty. I keep it in my eye the whole way, and I understand somewhere around fifteen that I’m not walking toward my grandfather at all. I’m walking the last thirty feet of a distance my mother started at nineteen out a bedroom window, and I’m doing it in the opposite direction, on my feet, in her face, with her name in my mouth.

Twenty-two. The number where I threw up in Natasha’s sink.

Twenty-three, and the leg is a strut with nothing in it. My whole spine is one live coal, and my hand on the brass has gone white to the bone.

At twenty-eight, Krutov starts clapping.

He does it grandfatherly, slow, warm, standing at the head of the table in his cardigan with his glass down. Half the room takes it as permission, and the applause comes up around me like weather. He’s beaming. Ten years of tidy funerals and a truck on Vandeveer and a gray van in a bus lane, and the man is applauding my legs.

I get to thirty. Danil has the chair behind me, and I lower into it on my own arms. My hands do not shake, my hands lie like professionals, and I set Yefim’s cane across my knees and take the whole room in with the smile I use on a parent who’s just told me their child would never.

“Semyon Ivanovich,” I say. “Don’t stop on my account. You were doing so well.”

“Vasilisa Gavrilovna.” He comes around the table with both hands out. “Or is it Filatova today? I’ve heard it argued in three restaurants this month.”

“It’s whatever my mother would say it is, and she isn’t here to ask, which I understand was a whole project of yours.”

Two hundred men hear it. Nobody breathes.

Krutov laughs, delighted, monstrous, and turns it out to the room like we’re doing a bit together. “She’s funny. I told you, Lev, didn’t I tell you? The funny ones are never boring.” He picks his glass back up. “But we have business, and business is dull, and there’s an order to it. Yefim Pavlovich, you’re the oldest man in this house. Open it properly.”

Yefim doesn’t open anything. He stays on his feet with his hands on the table.

“There’s a Filatov in the room,” he says. “Nobody’s confirming anybody today until this house hears her.”

The noise that goes around the hall isn’t agreement, and it isn’t refusal; it’s two hundred men working out very fast who they came in with. Down the left side, the old ones are still standing and haven’t sat since I passed them. Down the right there are eleven, twelve, fifteen men who haven’t stood at all.

Lev takes one step and puts himself at my right shoulder. He doesn’t say a word, because a man who says little at a table like this gets reported as dangerous, and because he told me in a car in December that dangerous is cheaper than liked.

“Of course we hear her,” Krutov says. “God forbid. She’s Milyena’s girl, may that woman rest. Let’s hear her.” He sets the glass down on the table with a small click that carries. “Although I’ll say this to the room first, because someone has to be the adult. Sentiment is a beautiful thing. It is not a succession. This organization has buried a great many people it was sentimental about.”

“That’s true,” I say. “You’ve done a lot of the digging.”

“Nine funerals,” Yefim says from down the table, and his voice does something I’ve never heard in it. “I carried four of them.”

I put my hand into the front of my dress, and I take out the page.

Ruled paper gone the color of weak tea, small dead handwriting, a column of numbers down the right. I hold it up between two fingers so the whole room can see its shape. Semyon Krutov’s face does not move one millimeter, which is how I know he knows exactly which page it is, because a man with a clear conscience asks what you’re holding.

“Grigori Sudets kept your books for twelve years,” I say. “He’s got beautiful handwriting. Very small. Would anybody in this house like to hear what my father was paid for my mother’s name ten years ago in March, and then what a man in Ozone Park was paid the spring my car went off Vandeveer Place?”

The room goes off like a struck pan, two hundred voices at once, and Krutov lifts one hand, but it isn’t for quiet.

It’s for the doors.