Grigori’s translations and scholarship), Grigori had been able to say, without emotion, “It was a harsh time for her. You can imagine how she might not want to be reminded of…certain things. It could be like opening Pandora’s box, for her to look back at it all the way a scholar likes to. That kind of scrutiny.”
Asked if he had requested Nina Revskaya’s help in his studies of her husband’s poetry, the phrase Grigori used was always, “Not in any detailed way.” If pressed he would add, “She knows that I’ve translated his work, yes, but…she hasn’t played any active role as the holder of Elsin’s literary archive.” In fact she claimed not to possess any of Viktor Elsin’s papers or personal matter. Grigori had decided to believe this to be the truth. After all, plenty of scholars faced such challenges. Not just biographers; any researcher with someone standing between him and his subject. It was part of the job description. And anyway, the poems themselves, and the truths they held, meant more to Grigori than any book he might produce about them or their author, more than any of the finicky papers he had published or the lectures he had presented at various conferences. And so Nina’s refusal to help when he approached her, years ago, as a scholar and professor—rather than as that young, innocent college student—he had not taken nearly so personally. Not like the first time. Standing there in the vestibule, waiting for her to come down…
As for the translations, they were enough, they would suffice. The poems themselves were enough to maintain his continued interest. At some point they might yield their own secrets, with or without the help of Nina Revskaya. In the meantime, Grigori was perfectly aware of how he came across: nothing atypical, just one of those petty, unbrilliant academics worrying away at some esoteric and ultimately meaningless subject.
The way it felt to press the bell on the intercom, like detonating a bomb…
Grigori closed his eyes. If only he knew the truth. Impossible ever to be fully himself until he knew his own history.
He sighed. The pendant was being sent to a lab. “To make sure it’s not copal or, you know, a reconstitution,” the young woman at Beller had said at their meeting. She had a pleasant, businesslike manner Grigori found calming. “This is really just pro forma,” she had assured him. “With rare mountings like these, we have little doubt it’s genuine amber. But Lenore always says that if two decades in the business have taught her anything, it’s that even the best collections can have something wrong with them.”
“Something wrong?” Grigori had felt a kind of panic.
“Something fake, or falsified. Anyone can be duped.”
Duped. Just recalling her words, Grigori couldn’t help wondering if he himself had somehow, for all these years, been fooled.
“Especially something of this era,” the woman had explained. “The Victorians loved remembrance jewelry, and amber with specimens was the ultimate. Demand really spiked—which is of course when imitations start to crop up. Again, though, it’s not that we’re doubtful the pendant is genuine amber. We just want to be able to state in the catalog that it’s been verified. With luck, the lab should even be able to confirm where the amber is from. The chemical makeup of Baltic amber is pretty specific.”
It was during that conversation that Grigori had for the first timeconsciously viewed the pendant as a jewel with its very own private and organic past. A gemological creation of the natural world, nothing to do with human travails. Until that moment, he had simply considered it a clue.
In a way it had always tinged him with the shame of a fetishist—not necessarily because it was a woman’s jewelry, but for the significance he had placed on it, and the nearly unbearable weight of what he suspected yet could not prove. Only Christine had known all about it. Sitting beside her
Asked if he had requested Nina Revskaya’s help in his studies of her husband’s poetry, the phrase Grigori used was always, “Not in any detailed way.” If pressed he would add, “She knows that I’ve translated his work, yes, but…she hasn’t played any active role as the holder of Elsin’s literary archive.” In fact she claimed not to possess any of Viktor Elsin’s papers or personal matter. Grigori had decided to believe this to be the truth. After all, plenty of scholars faced such challenges. Not just biographers; any researcher with someone standing between him and his subject. It was part of the job description. And anyway, the poems themselves, and the truths they held, meant more to Grigori than any book he might produce about them or their author, more than any of the finicky papers he had published or the lectures he had presented at various conferences. And so Nina’s refusal to help when he approached her, years ago, as a scholar and professor—rather than as that young, innocent college student—he had not taken nearly so personally. Not like the first time. Standing there in the vestibule, waiting for her to come down…
As for the translations, they were enough, they would suffice. The poems themselves were enough to maintain his continued interest. At some point they might yield their own secrets, with or without the help of Nina Revskaya. In the meantime, Grigori was perfectly aware of how he came across: nothing atypical, just one of those petty, unbrilliant academics worrying away at some esoteric and ultimately meaningless subject.
The way it felt to press the bell on the intercom, like detonating a bomb…
Grigori closed his eyes. If only he knew the truth. Impossible ever to be fully himself until he knew his own history.
He sighed. The pendant was being sent to a lab. “To make sure it’s not copal or, you know, a reconstitution,” the young woman at Beller had said at their meeting. She had a pleasant, businesslike manner Grigori found calming. “This is really just pro forma,” she had assured him. “With rare mountings like these, we have little doubt it’s genuine amber. But Lenore always says that if two decades in the business have taught her anything, it’s that even the best collections can have something wrong with them.”
“Something wrong?” Grigori had felt a kind of panic.
“Something fake, or falsified. Anyone can be duped.”
Duped. Just recalling her words, Grigori couldn’t help wondering if he himself had somehow, for all these years, been fooled.
“Especially something of this era,” the woman had explained. “The Victorians loved remembrance jewelry, and amber with specimens was the ultimate. Demand really spiked—which is of course when imitations start to crop up. Again, though, it’s not that we’re doubtful the pendant is genuine amber. We just want to be able to state in the catalog that it’s been verified. With luck, the lab should even be able to confirm where the amber is from. The chemical makeup of Baltic amber is pretty specific.”
It was during that conversation that Grigori had for the first timeconsciously viewed the pendant as a jewel with its very own private and organic past. A gemological creation of the natural world, nothing to do with human travails. Until that moment, he had simply considered it a clue.
In a way it had always tinged him with the shame of a fetishist—not necessarily because it was a woman’s jewelry, but for the significance he had placed on it, and the nearly unbearable weight of what he suspected yet could not prove. Only Christine had known all about it. Sitting beside her
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