Read Online The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia - Free Book Online Page A

sawdust.
    There were wooden tables and stools, and a few people drinking and talking in low voices. She thought that the place looked just like an English pub imagined from an occasional bootlegged movie and Dickens’ novels.
    The low bar, covered in round traces of glasses forming a complex fractal pattern, held up an impressive battery of variously shaped and sized bottles, bearing homemade labels with careful handwriting and simple but expressive ink drawings.
    The man behind the bar looked young-no more than thirty-five; his muscular forearms shone with droplets of water from recent dishwashing. He wiped his hands on the towel tucked into his belt, and smiled at Galina. He had a thin face, and his eyes looked at the new guests attentively through a pair of wire-rimmed round spectacles perched on a long arched nose. He nodded at Galina and smiled wider, showing white uneven teeth. “New recruit,” he said in strongly accented Russian. “Welcome home, dear. Can I get you anything to drink?"
    "Stop flirting with the broad,” said Sovin, and pulled Yakov, suddenly shy and blushing, in front of the bar. “That's your relative, or so he claims. I'll leave you to your tender reunion as soon as you get me a beer on the house."
    David watched Yakov over the rim of his spectacles as he poured Sovin a generous glass of amber beer from one of the bottles. “All right,” he said after Sovin shuffled off in the direction of one of the tables, where two old men played checkers. “And who exactly are you?"
    5: David
    "I am your grandson,” Yakov said. “I think.” He couldn't quite accept that this man, barely older than Yakov, was removed from him by two generations.
    David's eyebrows steepled sharply and his face paled. “Oh no,” he whispered. “Tanya was pregnant?"
    "Grandma Tanya.” Saying these words brought to memory a tall stout woman with the strong voice of a schoolteacher and long-held suffering in her eyes. “She was pregnant with my mom. When you didn't come home, she thought that the NKVD got you. She packed a bag the same night and caught a train to Serpuhov; she had relatives there."
    David nodded. “Smart. How is she?"
    Yakov was not very good at telling people that someone they cared about died. No matter how much practice in bearing bad news his line of work threw at him, he still stammered and averted his eyes. “Dead,” he said, studying the patterns on the surface of the bar. “Twenty years. I remember her
    though."
    "So do I,” his grandfather said. “I am so sorry."
    "She thought you were dead. She wrote to the NKVD, but they wouldn't tell her anything. In the sixties, they finally sent her a letter of apology-the standard form they sent to all families of those repressed.” Yakov chewed his lip, remembering the letter his grandmother kept in a small cigar box with happy Cuban women on the lid. Photographs and letters, some yellowed, some new. Photographs of baby Yakov and his mom, passport photographs of his grandmother looking resolutely into the black eye of the camera as if it were a gun. One photograph of his grandfather, making a silly face, smiling. So yellow and brittle, she didn't let Yakov touch it, especially since his fingers were usually covered with sticky goo of one origin or another. But she let him look. And letters from her grateful students, birthday cards from relatives in Serpuhov, diplomas, dry flowers, and that one letter on government letterhead. Posthumously cleared of all charges, it said. Rehabilitated. Even now, Yakov tasted the bitterness of the word on his tongue, doubly now, when the man exonerated in the letter stood before him, absentmindedly wiping a beer glass.
    David nodded. The glass clanked out of his hands and rolled across the rough surface of the bar, obviously whittled from the trunk of a glowtree. He caught the glass and straightened it. “All right,” he said. “Let's sit down and talk."
    Yakov made an apologetic wave to Galina and Fyodor, who