The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia Page B

for the ashtray and stubbed out her cigarette, still exhaling long twin snakes of smoke through her narrow nostrils, exquisite like the rest of her. The black strap of her dress slid off her too-white shoulder, and her black curls seemed too black, almost blue. Galina felt intimidated by this woman-not just the aristocratic roots or her beauty, but the way she carried herself. The air around her grew cold and clear, studded with tiny ice crystals, and Galina's breath caught, as if in the middle of a January night. “You've heard about me, of course,” the woman said.
    "No,” Galina admitted in a quiet guilty voice. “But I'm sure that-"
    "Of course you have,” the woman said. “The Decembrists’ wives. I was one of them."
    Galina nodded. “I hadn't realized."
    "Neither had I,” the woman said mysteriously. And added, noting Galina's perplexed look, “How difficult it is to be an icon."
    Galina thought of the story. The Decembrists’ Revolt left her cold in high school, when they covered that part of Russian history; the Byronic appeal and the misguided liberalism of their useless gesture never quite did it for her. But now she supposed she had a reluctant admiration for the young officers who rode into the Senate Square of St Petersburg to challenge Czar Nicholas and the absolute monarchy, and were greeted by cannon fire. On the back of her mind she always wondered what happened to the soldiers under their command-dead, she supposed, cannon fodder. Only the officers were important enough to secure a place in the history books. They were exiled to Siberia except the five executed outright. Galina dimly remembered something about ropes that gave and broke, and the unprecedented second hanging.
    And this is where their wives came in-she imagined them often, those beautiful rich ladies who abandoned everything to follow their husbands into the frozen woods and summers ringing with mosquitoes, to the place away from civilization and any semblance of everything they knew.
    It occurred to her only later in life that the women were held up as an example of selfless devotion and obedience-at first, she could not realize why they went. She had been too young for the notions of love and tragedy inextricably linked to it then. Now she was too skeptical of both. In that she differed from her classmates who usually listened to the stories of the revolt and the Decembrists’
    wives with an expression of almost religious fervor.
    "Did you ever regret going to Siberia?” Galina asked.
    The woman lit a new cigarette and breathed a slow bitter laugh. “Me? I never went. That is, I went to Moscow. The shame was too much.” The gaze of her large dark blue eyes lingered on Galina's face. “But you wouldn't know shame, would you?"
    "I do,” Galina started. “I-"
    "Guilt is not the same thing,” the Decembrist's Wife interrupted her again. “Shame is something that is done to you from the outside."
    "Why didn't you go then?"
    The woman shrugged her shoulder. Voluptuous, Galina thought, that's the word they used to describe women like her. “Because they expected me to, I suppose. Because I was just an appendage. Because it didn't matter what I wanted. The men always ask me, ‘Didn't you love your husband?’ Women never do-fancy that."
    Her languid eyes fixed on Galina for a moment before looking away, at the burning tip of her cigarette. “What do you think?"
    "It's not about love,” Galina tried to explain and stopped, short of words.
    "Those who went abandoned everything,” the woman said. “Those who stayed abandoned their husbands. I had abandoned both. A friend of mine went, and she could never write to her family. She left her children behind, and her family loathed her for it. Mine loathed me because I didn't."
    * * * *
    Her name was Elena, and she ran away from her home in St Petersburg suddenly filled with empty echoes after her husband was put in stocks and shipped somewhere unimaginable. She realized that she