Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [1]
I was born seven years after the serfs were freed, but ten years later the adults were still talking about the families who had lost their fortunes. The serfs of the Trubetskoye estate were freed with the rest, but quite a few had remained as renters; the rest of the estate was worked by hired labor and, as Aunt Eugenia used to say, the raising of the downtrodden necessitated some sacrifice. Both she and my papa, when he was still alive, had foresight enough to send a few especially bright newly liberated young men to a vocational school. As a result the Trubetskoye now enjoyed its own engineering staff, enough to modify the machinery to do something Aunt Eugenia tried to explain to me on many occasions, but my mind invariably started to drift the moment she mentioned the dreaded word “efficiency.”
My education was also Aunt Eugenia’s concern—at least she was the one to interview the applicants for the enviable position of my governess, and she dealt with a long procession of French, German, and English noble-but-destitute maidens with her habitual ruthlessness. The winner who emerged from what I imagined as a gladiatorial pit was a long-nosed Englishwoman with closely set eyes who reminded me of a herring. Her name was Miss Chartwell, and from the day I was eight to the day I was eighteen she taught me English, cursive writing, natural history, and calculus.
Perhaps it is worth mentioning that my youth was not just a jumble of family strife and nation-wide reformism—there were also long summers spent playing in the fields, fishing, and befriending the children of the renters, and reading James Fenimore Cooper; there were equally long winters when frost painted the windows with fantastical white flowers while the coal fire blazed in the copper stove, and my mother and her sister sat amiably side by side: one knitting, the other checking over the accounts. They still live like this in my mind’s eye, the two aspects of contented domesticity—caring and wisdom, twin guardians of my childhood happiness.
I remember the second winter after Aunt Eugenia took over the household’s reins. I played with my mother’s cat Murka in front of the roaring fireplace. My mother looked up from her knitting, her dark-hooded eyes smiling at me, the skin around them folding into unfamiliar happy creases. “You’re getting so big,” she said, wistful. “Soon, I’ll be escorting you to the balls in St. Petersburg.”
I smiled, happy to see her thinking and talking of me instead of my dead papa. “Am I pretty, Mama?” I asked, coquettish.
She smiled still, but remained silent, and I could see that her eyes were troubled. She stopped rocking in her rocking chair.
Aunt Eugenia interfered with her usual bluntness. “There are better things to be than pretty, Sasha,” she told me. “Don’t you let anyone tell you otherwise.”
“What is better than beauty?” I asked, breathing deeply to stave off the impending heartbreak.
“Not being a fool,” Aunt Eugenia said. She was not a great beauty, with her long narrow chin and small beady eyes, her thin hair slicked into a paltry bun. But when she said it, I could see that she would have felt the same way if she were a golden-haired full-lipped nymph. “And if I were you, I would start paying attention to your lessons.”
“I am paying attention,” I said, indignant as only a ten-year-old child can be in the face of a just accusation.
Aunt Eugenia smiled then, her chin growing even pointier, and turned to my mother. “What do you think, Irina?”
My mother resumed her knitting and rocking; it was difficult to believe that this dark-haired, fragile beauty was related to Eugenia. “I think women in our family are late bloomers,” she said. “You watch and see—the girls who are pretty now will be sows in a few years, and my little frogling will become a pretty young lady. Remember the story of the Ugly Duckling?”
Aunt Eugenia and I nodded in unison. Eugenia smiled impishly and said, “Then again, some