Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 63465 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 317(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63465 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 317(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
‘What did you call me?’ he asked, so softly I felt goosebumps rise on my hands. Anyone would have thought I’d used the f or the c word.
I thought he must have had misheard. ‘Daddy,’ I repeated.
‘I’m not your daddy. I’m your Papa. Don’t ever try to be like those miserable creatures you go to school with. You can mix with them and pretend to be one of them, but never forget you are Russian and only Russian. You have my blood in your veins. Never let me hear you exchange your culture and your Russian ways for theirs again.’
He had totally discounted my English heritage. The blood of my mother. Of course I never said anything. My mother tells me. Let sleeping dogs lie. Wake them up and they will bite you.
‘Yes, Papa,’ I said immediately, and since then I have never done anything that has earned that soft, menacing tone from him again.
The kitchen falls suddenly silent.
‘It’s been a long night. I’m going to bed,’ Papa says into the strained silence.
‘Sleep well, Papa,’ I say, and step forward to kiss his cheek again. My father reaches out a hand and plucks a one-inch-long twig from the elbow of my cardigan and drops it to the ground. I freeze with fear, but he doesn’t realize the significance, and turns towards the door. I watch him go out of the door with relief and hear the sound of his shoes on the marble floors echo through the empty house.
‘I suppose I better go to my room as well. Sergei will be waiting,’ I tell my grandmother.
She nods.
I bend to pick up the black bag and she grasps my hand suddenly in hers. The steely strength of her grip surprises me and my eyes fly to meet hers. Something strange and dark lurks in them.
‘Solnyshko, if you ignore your dreams they will limp away from you to die a sad death,’ she warns urgently.
Twelve
Tasha Evanoff
Moving through the high-ceilinged, gilded, pillared excesses of my father’s home, my heels clicking on the marble, and the relief of not being discovered gone, I feel oddly hollow, as if I have left an important part of me back in Noah’s home.
I go up to my room, open the door, and immediately my beloved four-year-old blue Doberman, Sergei, rushes over to me and throws his sleek body at me. I crouch down to have my face and neck thoroughly washed, but he suddenly stops and sniffs me curiously.
‘I know,’ I whisper. ‘I’ve been with a man, a beautiful, strong, powerful man.’
Sergei stops sniffing me and licks my face gently, as if he understands that I am sad and lost. I hug him tightly.
‘Oh, Sergei, Sergei, what am I going to do? I never thought it would be like that. I thought I had built it all up in my mind and it would fall flat. He would be a selfish brute, but he was just beautiful. Just beautiful. Indescribably beautiful.’
I lie on my bed, Sergei’s head on my stomach, while my mind replays last night. I think of Baba’s expression when she grasped my hand and told me ignored dreams die sad deaths. I think of my father’s chilling eyes and then I think of Mama.
When I was five years old my parents separated, no, that would be giving the wrong impression, that the decision was in some way mutual or amicable. Nothing could be further from the truth. My father kicked my mother out. Literarily opened the front door and kicked her out so she fell sprawled on the front door steps. He spat on her and forbade her to ever see me again. He did all this with me watching and screaming with fear while Baba held me in her arms. I still remember Mama, getting up to her feet, her knees were bleeding, but she was staring at me, desperately memorizing my face, when the door shut on her.
He did all that because he suspected her of being unfaithful to him. Of course it was not true, but my father was, is, and will probably always be highly paranoid. Every shadow is a Judas waiting to betray him, steal from him, plot his murder. He even did a paternity test to confirm that I really was his child. And since then Papa has been married three times. None of them could bear him any children. He divorced the first one. I think she went back to Russia. She hated me and I didn’t like her. The second one was more cunning. She made a huge pretense of liking me, but disappeared one day. I don’t know whether she ran away because she was so afraid of my father, or my father did away with her. Papa’s third wife died in a car accident. Brake failure. When he was informed of it, he nodded slowly, then put another forkful of calves’ liver into his mouth. We went to her funeral dressed in black. Nobody shed a tear.