Бесплатный фрагмент - The Seventh Student

THE SEVENTH STUDENT

A Novel
ELINA VALE

Some names are struck from the archives not because anyone wants them forgotten, but because someone is afraid they might be remembered.

PROLOGUE

There were seven people in the photograph.

I counted them twice, then a third time, more slowly, touching each face with the edge of my fingernail. Six students stood on the broad steps of Arsenyev Academy: men in dark coats, two women in long skirts, white columns behind them, the season’s first wet snow clinging to the stone balustrade. The photograph had faded around the edges and smelled of dust, cardboard, and something faintly sour, like an old school album.

The seventh girl stood a little apart.

Thin, dark-haired, wearing a coat too light for the weather. Everyone else was looking into the camera. She was looking just to the photographer’s left, as if someone stood there whom no one else could see.

Her face had been crossed out in black ink.

Not neatly. Not in a single stroke. Someone had dragged a pen across it again and again, almost furiously, and still failed to erase her completely. Beneath the dried lines I could make out cheekbones, dark brows, a stubborn chin.

And a small mole beneath her left eyebrow.

Without thinking, I touched my own.

Rain rattled against the metal sill of the archive’s narrow window. It was nearly nine at night. The overhead lights had been switched off long ago, and beyond the circle of my desk lamp the shelving disappeared into darkness like streets in an unfamiliar city.

I turned the photograph over.

On the back, in faded blue ink, someone had written:

Professor Vetrovsky’s Seminar. Autumn 2003.

Below it were six names.

Konstantin Vorontsov.

Inna Serebryakova.

Pavel Roshchin.

Maxim Kornev.

Natalia Zotova.

Maria Lebedeva.

The space where the seventh name should have been had been scraped away with something sharp, taking the top layer of photographic paper with it.

“Vera, have you decided to spend another night with the dead?”

I jumped.

Kirill Orlov stood in the doorway, an archive intern, a second-year master’s student, and the only person at the Academy who spoke to me as though my admission had not been an administrative error.

He was holding an apple.

“If you’ve found another bill for Prince Arsenyev’s French wine,” he said, “I refuse to be impressed by our cultural heritage.”

I handed him the photograph without a word.

Kirill came closer, still chewing. He gave the picture a casual glance, then looked back at it and stopped chewing altogether.

“Where?”

“Vetrovsky’s seminar files.”

“What year?”

“Two thousand three.”

He set the apple on the edge of the desk.

“Show me the box.”

I nodded toward the shelves. Kirill did not move. First he turned the photograph over again, read the names, then studied the crossed-out girl. His usually expressive face went very still.

“That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve been cataloging Vetrovsky’s personal archive for three weeks. In 2003, the seminar had six students.”

“The photograph has seven.”

“I noticed.”

He tilted it toward the light.

“Do you know her?”

“No.”

“Then why are you making that face?”

I didn’t answer. Under his gaze, the resemblance I had first dismissed as coincidence began to feel almost indecent.

“Look at her properly,” I said.

Kirill did. First at the girl. Then at me.

“Shit.”

“Thank you for the expert assessment.”

He wasn’t listening anymore. He went to the door, checked the corridor, and slipped the hook into place.

“Who else has seen this?”

“No one.”

“Good.”

“Why is that good?”

Kirill ran a hand through his hair.

“Because archives don’t make mistakes this neatly. They can be incomplete. Burned. Flooded. Badly cataloged. But when there’s a photograph of a person and that person is missing from every other record, that’s not a mistake.”

“Then what is it?”

“Editing.”

The word sounded almost ridiculous. As though someone had edited not a life, but a manuscript.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor.

We both fell silent.

Someone stopped outside the door.

The handle slowly moved down.

Once.

Then again.

“The archive is closed,” Kirill called loudly.

No answer.

The footsteps retreated.

Kirill waited, then came back to the desk.

“Take the photograph.”

“It’s archive property.”

“Tonight I’m authorizing you to commit a crime against historical scholarship.”

“What an honor.”

“I’m serious, Vera.”

I slipped the photograph between the pages of my notebook.

By morning, the box containing the 2003 seminar records was gone from the archive.

CHAPTER 1. THE INVITATION

Three weeks earlier, I saw Arsenyev Academy through the window of a bus and decided the photographs on its website had been flattering.

Online, the estate looked almost Italian: white facade, colonnade, lawns sloping toward a lake. In person, October made everything smaller and more honest. The plaster on the north wall had darkened with rain. A statue by the gates was missing two fingers. Wind drove wet leaves along the road, where they stuck to the wheels of suitcases.

I liked it immediately.

Maybe because I had arrived with no polish of my own.

One suitcase, an old laptop, a mass-market coat, and a letter granting me a full scholarship that I had reread at least twenty times on the train from Pskov. My name looked more convincing in that letter than it did in my own head.

Arsenyev Academy admitted twenty-four master’s students a year to its History of Ideas and Cultural Memory program. During my interview, they asked me three times why I had chosen this place. I talked about the archives, the faculty, my undergraduate thesis on private memory in family correspondence.

The real answer was simpler: because this was the sort of place people like me did not usually get into.

A girl in a yellow raincoat was smoking beneath the awning outside the residence hall and arguing into her phone.

“No, Dad,” she was saying. “I’m not living in Petersburg and commuting every day. No. Because that’s two hours. Yes, I have a driver’s license. No, I don’t want a car either.”

She glanced at me, noticed the suitcase, and covered the phone with one hand.

“First year?”

“Yes.”

“Third floor. The elevator died under Brezhnev.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet. You still have to get up there.”

That was how I met Alisa Kareva.

Within five minutes I learned that she lived two doors down from me, her father owned a chain of private clinics, and Alisa could make someone understand, in a single sentence, that she knew more about the world than they did and was growing slightly tired of waiting for them to catch up.

“Morozova?” she said, seeing my surname on the list taped to my door. “Vorontsov Foundation scholarship?”

I stiffened.

“Yes.”

“Congratulations, then. They don’t usually give those to people without recommendations.”

“I didn’t have one.”

“Then you’re either very smart or very lucky.”

“I’d like to think it’s the first one.”

“Everyone would.”

She smiled and walked away, leaving me with the vague feeling that I had just sat an exam no one had warned me about.

My room was small, but it had a tall window overlooking the park. On the desk lay a folder of residence rules, a library card, and a map of the grounds. Main Building. North Library. Archives. Chapel. Orangery. West Wing — closed for restoration.

I ran a finger over the map.

It looked like the sort of place where getting lost might not be only a matter of geography.

We barely slept the first week. Lectures in the morning, archive practicum in the afternoon, compulsory reading at night. The professors spoke as if each of us kept at least a modest private Latin library at home. The dining hall served buckwheat and, for reasons no one could explain, spectacular cardamom buns. The radiators in the residence hall seemed to work only on odd-numbered days.

Or maybe that was just my room.

I quickly learned to tell the people who had come for the Academy’s name from the people who genuinely loved what they studied. The first group talked louder in seminars. The second stayed later in the library.

Kirill belonged to a third category: people who loved the Academy but felt absolutely no reverence for it.

He found me in the archive on the second day of practicum.

“You’re holding Arsenyev’s letter upside down.”

I turned the page around.

“Better?”

“Now you can at least misread it properly.”

“Do you work here?”

“That sounds too official. Intern. Basically, I’m the person they give boxes to when everyone else develops a dust allergy.”

He sat across from me.

“Kirill.”

“Vera.”

“Vorontsov Foundation scholarship?”

I sighed.

“Is it written on my forehead?”

“No. I just know all twenty-four students already. You’re the only new surname without a family legend attached.”

“Wonderful. What’s yours?”

“I don’t have one. I’m a social error in the system.”

That was how we became friends.

By the end of the second week, the Academy had stopped feeling like a stage set. I knew where Tamara Pavlovna, the librarian, hid her electric kettle, which chair squeaked in Room 214, and which door not to use in the rain because the gutter poured directly onto your head.

I also learned to recognize Gleb Vorontsov before he entered a room.

Not by his footsteps. By the slight shift in the atmosphere around him.

His surname appeared on half the plaques in the Academy. Restoration supported by the Vorontsov Foundation. The Vorontsov Reading Room. Vorontsov Foundation Scholarship Program. He could have behaved like a hereditary prince. Instead, he preferred to look mildly irritated by all of it.

At our first general seminar, the professor asked whether memoirs could be considered reliable sources.

“No,” Gleb said.

“Why so categorical?” the lecturer asked.

“Because people rarely remember what happened. Usually they remember the most recent version of what they’ve been telling themselves happened.”

I wrote that down, then got annoyed with myself for writing it down.

A week later, he lent me a pencil and asked for it back.

“Is it a family heirloom?” I asked.

“No. Just a good pencil.”

“Now I understand how fortunes are preserved.”

He looked at me a second longer than necessary.

“Morozova, right?”

“Already impressed by my economic theory?”

“I’m still gathering evidence.”

We weren’t friends.

We were barely acquaintances.

And yet, when I found a cream-colored envelope in my mailbox on Thursday evening, his was the first surname that came to mind.

My name was written on the front by hand.

Vera Morozova.

Inside was a card made of heavy paper.

Thursday. 9:00 p.m. North Library.

At the bottom, a single V had been pressed into dark red wax.

I showed the invitation to Kirill.

He stopped sorting catalog cards.

“Where did you get that?”

“My mailbox.”

“Have you told anyone?”

“About what?”

“The seminar.”

“I didn’t even know it existed.”

Kirill studied the wax seal for several seconds.

“Go.”

“You agreed far too quickly.”

“Because I’m curious.”

“What if it’s a cult?”

“Then definitely go. Tell me afterward.”

“Thank you for caring.”

“Always.”

At five minutes to nine, I stood outside the North Library wondering whether a normal person would simply go back to the residence hall.

I had never been especially good at being normal at the right moment.

The door stood slightly open.

Candles burned inside.

Real ones. Not electric.

My first thought was: How did anyone get this past fire safety?

My second was: Why did I come?

Six people sat around a long oak table.

Alisa Kareva.

Timur Safin, the philosophy student — quiet and extremely tall.

Liza Sokolova from art history, whom I had previously noticed only because she always chose the chair at the very end of the row.

Denis Lanskoy, son of a famous publisher and gifted with the ability to look bored even while he was speaking.

Kirill.

And Gleb Vorontsov.

He saw me first.

His expression sharpened at once.

“Wrong door.”

“How nice. At least somebody’s happy to see me.”

“This is closed.”

I held up the invitation.

“Apparently not very.”

Gleb stood.

“Let me see.”

“There’s a magic word.”

“Morozova.”

“That’s my surname, not a magic word.”

Alisa gave a quiet snort.

A door opened at the far end of the room.

Professor Lev Andreevich Vetrovsky walked in.

Until then, I had seen him only in a large lecture hall. He was in his mid-fifties, with gray hair, a calm low voice, and a dark suit without a single accidental crease. He taught textual history and was widely considered the reason half the applicants wanted to study at the Academy in the first place.

Vetrovsky looked at the table, then at me.

For one second, he stopped moving.

“Your name?”

“Vera Morozova.”

His eyes dropped to the card in my hand.

“May I?”

I gave him the invitation.

He ran a finger over the wax.

“Did you send it?” I asked.

“No.”

The room went very quiet.

Denis stopped twirling his pen.

“Then I should probably leave.”

Vetrovsky looked up at me. Something changed in his face, though I couldn’t tell what.

“No,” he said. “Stay.”

Gleb frowned.

“Lev Andreevich, there are six places.”

“I remember the rules of my own seminar, Vorontsov.”

The professor set my invitation beside his folder.

“Tonight there will be seven of you.”

Then he extinguished the nearest candle.

CHAPTER 2. SEVEN CHAIRS

Vetrovsky’s first question was so simple that no one wanted to answer it first.

“Which matters more: an event, or the account of it?”

He did not hand out a text, open a book, or even sit down. He stood by the fireplace, where two lamps glowed in place of flames, and waited.

Alisa gave in first.

“The event exists independently of any account of it.”

“For whom?” Vetrovsky asked.

“For the people who took part.”

“And if every participant is dead?”

“That doesn’t make it stop being an event.”

“No. But it does make it inaccessible to us.”

Alisa pressed her lips together.

Denis said that, historically speaking, an event without testimony barely existed. Timur began talking about collective memory. Liza used the example of restoring a painting: sometimes we see only the upper layer even though the lower one still exists physically beneath it.

Vetrovsky gave a small, approving nod.

“Vorontsov?”

Gleb rolled that same good pencil between his fingers.

“History belongs to whoever outlives the others and gets access to the archive.”

“Cynical.”

“You didn’t ask about morality.”

The professor turned to me.

“Morozova?”

I was still thinking about the invitation he claimed not to have sent.

“The account matters more.”

“Why?”

“Because an event happens once. An account can be rewritten as many times as necessary.”

“And if every account is destroyed?”

“Then someone is very afraid of the event itself.”

Vetrovsky held my gaze.

“Good.”

For the next two hours we discussed a letter by an eighteenth-century French diplomat describing a man’s death without ever naming him. I kept waiting for something theatrical — secret vows, masks, at least another wax-sealed envelope.

Nothing happened.

It was simply a brutally difficult seminar that left me with the feeling that I had spent the previous two years learning how to read incorrectly.

Gleb caught up with me in the corridor.

“Where did you get the invitation?”

“My mailbox.”

“Who could have put it there?”

“The mailman? A secret order? You choose.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. I have no idea.”

Before I could object, he took the card from me and held it closer to the window.

“The seal is genuine.”

“You’re an expert on wax seals now?”

“Vetrovsky keeps this one in his office. The invitations are always identical.”

“Then he’s lying.”

“Maybe.”

“And if he’s not?”

Gleb handed the card back.

“Then someone has access to his office.”

We walked through the glassed-in gallery. Outside, rain had turned to wet snow, and the park was disappearing into a gray blur.

“How long have you been in the seminar?” I asked.

“Third year.”

“The master’s program is two.”

“He sometimes takes senior undergraduates.”

“Why the six of you?”

“Because Vetrovsky chose us.”

“Extremely informative.”

“No one has a better answer.”

He stopped at the stairs.

“Have you been to the Academy before?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m twenty-two, not eighty-two. I think I’d remember.”

“I’m not joking.”

“Neither am I.”

He looked as if he wanted to ask something else, then changed his mind.

“Until next Thursday, Morozova.”

“Already made peace with the seventh chair?”

“No.”

“Excellent.”

The next day, Vetrovsky lectured the whole year. The subject was palimpsests — manuscripts from which an earlier text had been scraped away so that something new could be written over it.

A photograph of parchment appeared on the screen: dark letters laid over the faint ghost of older lines.

“Destruction is rarely complete,” the professor said. “More often, what we call disappearance is only another layer. The old text remains beneath the new one. Sooner or later, it shows through.”

Someone was typing. Someone else was scrolling through a phone. I watched Vetrovsky and thought about my invitation.

Kirill was waiting in the corridor after the lecture.

“Well?”

“The cult was disappointing. No human sacrifice.”

“Give them time.”

“You were sitting right beside me.”

“I’m an intern. We usually get sacrificed first.”

We went to the dining hall. Kirill took soup, two pirozhki, and a coffee that smelled worse than it looked.

“What do you know about the seminar?” I asked.

“More rumors than facts.”

“Give me the rumors.”

“It’s been around for about twenty-five years. Vetrovsky doesn’t take a group every year. Almost always six people. A lot of them go on to impressive careers.”

“Because of the seminar?”

“Or because he picks people who would have impressive careers anyway.”

“Why did he pick you?”

Kirill gave me a wounded look.

“Now that’s genuinely insulting.”

“You were the one who called yourself a social error in the system.”

“Maybe Vetrovsky values diversity.”

He bit into a pirozhok, then added around the mouthful:

“There’s another strange thing.”

“What?”

“The seminar doesn’t have an official syllabus.”

“So?”

“Everything at this place has a syllabus. Even the optional walk through the park. But a seminar that’s existed for a quarter of a century? Nothing.”

“Maybe the professor just hates bureaucracy.”

“Vetrovsky? He dates his own bookmarks.”

I laughed.

“You made that up.”

“I wish.”

Kirill pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of a book in the professor’s office. A narrow strip of paper protruded between the pages: 12.10.26, p. 146.

“Psychopath.”

“Exactly what I said.”

That evening I found a sheet of paper folded in half on the windowsill outside my room.

No envelope.

One line inside:

The seventh place is never empty.

I took the note to Kirill.

He read it without making a joke.

“Show Vetrovsky.”

“You’re the one who told me to go to the seminar.”

“I told you that when it was interesting. Now somebody is playing with you personally.”

“Maybe Alisa.”

“Alisa would use better grammar and more expensive paper.”

“Gleb?”

“Too lazy for anonymous notes.”

“Thank you, Sherlock.”

Kirill handed the paper back.

“Just don’t go wandering through the West Wing alone at night.”

“I don’t go there at all.”

“Good habit. Keep it.”

Behind him, an old staff photograph hung on the archive door. Vetrovsky stood at the center, twenty years younger. My eyes lingered on it, and Kirill noticed.

“Want to look at the seminar’s early records?”

“There are records?”

He smiled.

“Vera, this is an archive. Everything is here. The only question is what name someone filed it under.”

CHAPTER 3. SEVEN OF US

No one wanted to go home after the first seminar.

That was probably part of Vetrovsky’s design. He made us spend two hours arguing about other people’s letters, testimony, and lies, then simply said, “Until next Thursday,” and left us in a state where ordinary conversation felt too quiet.

We went to the dining hall even though it officially closed at ten. Kirill knew the woman at the counter and talked her into giving us a kettle, seven mugs, and a plate of yesterday’s buns.

“Budget secret society,” Alisa said, examining one of the buns.

“Rich cults get private rooms,” Kirill said. “We get kompot.”

“You just sat at a table with two heirs to major fortunes.”

Denis looked up.

“Why two?”

Alisa pointed at him and Gleb.

“Oh,” Denis said. “I thought you were counting yourself.”

“My parents work. That’s different.”

“Elegant class theory.”

I sat between Timur and Liza and finally had a chance to look at the seminar members as people rather than surnames arranged around a mysterious table.

Timur was from Kazan. He had studied philosophy and spoke slowly, not because he was shy, but because he actually finished forming a thought before opening his mouth. It set him apart from most people at the Academy.

Denis had been born in Moscow, changed undergraduate programs three times, and eventually landed in book history because, as he put it, “It’s the only part of the family business where my mother hasn’t figured out how to boss me around yet.”

Liza had trained in restoration before moving into the master’s program. She did not talk much, but she knew more about the Academy’s buildings than anyone else.

“Is it true there’s a bricked-up staircase in the West Wing?” Kirill asked.

“True.”

“Where does it go?”

“Nowhere. They sealed it after a fire in the sixties.”

“Disappointing.”

“Were you hoping for a secret tunnel?”

“Always.”

Alisa, I learned, had grown up between Moscow and Geneva and hated when people called that “an interesting childhood.”

“It was a childhood in airports,” she said. “The romance wears off after your tenth missed birthday.”

Gleb volunteered almost nothing about himself.

“His biography is written on the walls,” Denis observed.

“Which is exactly why I don’t talk about it,” Gleb said.

Kirill turned to me.

“Morozova?”

“What?”

“Your turn. Why the Academy?”

“I like studying.”

“Lie,” Denis said.

“Why?”

“Nobody moves into a former country estate in the middle of a damp forest just because they like studying.”

“What about you?”

“I’m running away from my mother.”

“You already said that.”

“Exactly. See how easy honesty is?”

Everyone was looking at me, and an old irritation rose up without warning. At school, questions about my plans had always sounded like tests of whether my ambitions were big enough. Here, it felt as though a simple answer was unacceptable unless there was a beautiful private mythology behind it.

“Because they gave me a full scholarship,” I said. “And because I couldn’t afford to turn down a place I’d wanted badly enough to earn.”

Alisa nodded as if the answer satisfied her.

Gleb asked, “Vorontsov scholarship?”

“Yes.”

“You applied yourself?”

“Who else would have?”

“Nothing.”

He looked down into his mug.

I noticed.

“What?”

“I said nothing.”

“You said it with a suspicious amount of meaning.”

“My father sometimes reviews the finalists personally.”

“And?”

“And your surname sounds familiar.”

“Have we met before?”

“No.”

“Then where from?”

He shrugged.

“Maybe I saw it on a list.”

I decided Gleb suffered from a hereditary inability to explain a thought all the way to the end.

Kirill poured the tea.

“I have a proposal.”

“Terrifying already,” Alisa said.

“If the seminar is secret, we should at least agree that personal things stay inside it.”

“What counts as personal?” Timur asked.

“Family. Relationships. Things like that. If someone talks about them in the room, we don’t discuss them outside.”

Denis smirked.

“So far we’ve spent two hours talking about a French diplomat.”

“Vetrovsky likes turning arguments into questions about people. He’ll get there.”

“And phones?” Liza asked.

“What about them?”

“During the seminar. Maybe we shouldn’t record anything.”

Gleb looked at her.

“Why?”

“Because a private conversation stops being private the moment seven people have microphones in their pockets.”

It sounded reasonable.

At the next meeting, we really did begin leaving our phones in a wooden box by the door.

The suggestion had been Liza’s. That night, none of us thought it mattered.

We ate yesterday’s buns, laughed about Vetrovsky, and had no idea that within a few months two of those seven chairs would be empty.

CHAPTER 4. WHAT REMAINS IN THE ARCHIVE

It took us four days to find anything.

We could hardly submit a request for “Professor Vetrovsky’s secret materials,” so Kirill started with the department’s collection inventories while I worked through annual reports. Between classes, we compared names, dates, and box numbers. Sometimes we managed to pull an entire file. Sometimes all we found was an index card proving that a file had once existed.

I quickly understood why Kirill loved archives.

A book, at least, admits that it wants to be read. An archive promises you nothing. You can spend three hours untying gray ribbons only to discover an invoice for curtains. Or you can open a random folder and find a letter from a man who wrote to his mistress a century ago: I can no longer bear to live among these people.

“This,” Kirill said when I showed him, “is why I’m here. Relatability across the centuries.”

“Maybe he just worked at the Academy.”

“Then especially.”

On Wednesday evening we found the first official mention of the seminar.

A report from 2006.

Closed Research Seminar, Professor L. A. Vetrovsky. Six participants.

2005: six again.

There was no entry for 2004.

For 2003, the catalog pointed to a separate box transferred to Vetrovsky’s personal collection.

“Why is 2004 missing?” I asked.

“Maybe there was no seminar that year.”

“After what?”

Kirill looked at me over the monitor.

“You are starting to sound like someone who shouldn’t be allowed into an archive after eight p.m.”

“You brought me here.”

“I make a lot of mistakes.”

The collection card gave us the shelf number.

The box was exactly where it should have been.

On the lid, in neat handwriting: Vetrovsky, L. A. Seminar. 2003.

Inside were attendance sheets, paper abstracts, old printouts, several letters, and a roll of photographic film in a paper sleeve. We divided the contents between us.

Twenty minutes later, I found the photograph.

The same one I would carry out of the archive that night.

First I saw seven figures.

Then the crossed-out face.

Then the mole.

“Kirill.”

He did not answer at once.

“Mm?”

“Come here.”

A minute later, he was no longer smiling.

We went through everything in the box.

The same six official names appeared everywhere.

There was no seventh.

Not on the attendance sheet.

Not in the list of paper topics.

Not in the visitors’ log.

Not in the department report.

“We’ll find her through the photograph,” Kirill said.

There had been 183 students in the department in 2003. Roughly half of them were dark-haired women. We compared group photographs, student files, lists of academic leaves.

Nothing.

There wasn’t even an obvious candidate: no student who had dropped out midyear, no transfer from another program.

By ten that night, I was sitting on the floor between boxes, eating stale crackers from the vending machine and hating every person in history who had created a paper document without a search bar.

Kirill was leafing through bound issues of the Academy newspaper.

“Here’s November.”

“And?”

“The page was cut out.”

I got to my feet.

Not torn by accident. Cut out in a clean rectangle.

Half the chronicle section was missing from the December issue too.

“This isn’t funny anymore,” I said.

“Was it funny before?”

“A little.”

Kirill closed the volume.

“Come on.”

“Where?”

“Access logs.”

“From 2003?”

“They keep the old security books in the basement. If nobody threw them out.”

The Academy basement was exactly what the basement of an old estate is required to look like in a bad novel: low vaults, exposed pipes, bare bulbs, doors with no labels. The only thing ruining the atmosphere was a bright blue plastic basin catching water from a leaking pipe.

We found the security books in a metal cabinet.

We checked November.

November 17 stood out because of the number of late-night entries.

10:10 p.m. — Konstantin Vorontsov.

10:18 p.m. — Inna Serebryakova.

10:31 p.m. — L. A. Vetrovsky.

11:46 p.m. — doctor called, surname illegible.

12:12 a.m. — vehicle, registration number entered in pencil.

“What was going on here?” I asked.

Kirill photographed the page with his phone.

“I don’t know.”

On the inside of the back cover, someone had written in pencil:

A.B. 17.11.03

Two initials.

I ran my finger over them.

“Anna Belova,” I said at random.

“Why Belova?”

“I don’t know. First thing that came to mind.”

Kirill photographed that too.

It was after eleven when we finally went upstairs.

That was when someone tried the archive door.

Kirill insisted that I take the photograph.

The next morning, the box was gone.

Not moved to another collection. Not checked out to a staff member. Not recorded in the log.

Tamara Pavlovna, the head archivist, stared at the empty space and frowned.

“You’re sure the number was 4/17?”

“I took it off this shelf myself.”

“Maybe someone put it back in the wrong place.”

Kirill said nothing while she was there.

Only after we stepped into the corridor did he pull out his phone.

“Look.”

He opened the electronic catalog.

The record Vetrovsky, L. A. Seminar. 2003 no longer existed.

“It was there yesterday,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Who can delete a record?”

“Four people.”

“You?”

“No. I can catalog, not delete.”

“Tamara Pavlovna?”

“Yes.”

“Vetrovsky?”

“Through the head of department, effectively yes.”

“The rector?”

Kirill nodded.

We went back to the computer and spent another forty minutes checking the system logs. The catalog did not preserve the deleted record itself, only the time of the operation and the administrator account used to make it.

The record had been deleted at 7:14 a.m.

“Were you here then?” I asked.

“I got in at eight forty.”

“Tamara Pavlovna?”

“She comes at nine.”

“So someone logged in remotely?”

“Or used an administrator workstation.”

Kirill enlarged the log entry and swore under his breath. The workstation field read R-1.

“What’s that?”

“Rector’s office. First floor.”

For one second, I felt the satisfaction of someone who had finally been handed a beautiful clue.

Kirill closed the window.

“Don’t look so pleased.”

“Why not?”

“Because the log shows a computer, not a person. The rector’s secretary has access. So does IT. Tamara Pavlovna sometimes works from there when she signs disposal records. Even I’ve used the catalog from the rector’s office twice when our network went down.”

“You are making my investigation very inconvenient.”

“I’m trying to stop it turning into a bad television series.”

At that moment, the door opened.

Liza came in carrying a large gray folder under one arm and stopped when she saw us.

“Do you two live here?”

“Kirill does,” I said. “I’m subletting.”

“Very funny.”

She placed the folder on the issue desk.

“I need the restoration reports for the West Wing. Nineties through early two-thousands.”

Kirill looked at her over the monitor.

“For class?”

“For Melnikova’s project. She’s decided I can work out in one week what they used on the frames in the Mirror Gallery before the last restoration.”

“She clearly believes in you.”

“Or hates me.”

While Kirill processed the request, Liza noticed the access-log printout in my hand.

“What are you looking for?”

I folded the sheet in half.

“We don’t know yet.”

She did not take offense.

“Best possible answer in an archive.”

Kirill returned with a box.

“Sokolova, table only. Some of the photographs are on tracing paper. Bend one and Tamara Pavlovna will bury you in the same collection.”

“She’ll file the paperwork first.”

“Obviously.”

Liza settled beneath a lamp at the far end of the room and genuinely stopped paying attention to us. Ten minutes later, I had almost forgotten she was there.

At the time, Liza had simply come for documents. Kirill had issued her a box. We had happened to be in the same room.

After a crime, ordinary coincidences become difficult to leave alone.

Inna Serebryakova.

One of the six names in the photograph.

CHAPTER 5. SOMEONE ELSE’S HANDWRITING

After the 2003 box disappeared, Kirill stopped keeping everything we found in one place.

“I have three backups now,” he announced. “One at home, one with a person who doesn’t know what they’re storing, and one in the cloud under a name no self-respecting criminal would ever open.”

“Which is?”

“Tax Documents 2018.”

“Genius.”

“Thank you.”

He made me carry Anna’s photograph with me.

“Why me?”

“Because nobody thinks of you as an archive person yet.”

“Comforting.”

“Judging by the missing box, somebody already thinks of me as one.”

We stopped searching for Anna’s name and started searching for traces of her instead.

If someone had been removed from official lists, she could still survive in other people’s records: a bibliography, a note in the margin of a shared paper, an inscription inside a book.

Our first real discovery came from the collection of student essays.

The best papers from each year were stored there without individual student files. In the 2002 folder, I found an essay with no title page.

Its subject was: Who Owns a Manuscript After the Author Dies?

At the end were the initials A.B.

“Could be any A.B.,” Kirill said.

“Could be.”

I started reading.

The author challenged the idea that an archivist should be an “invisible intermediary.” In the margin, Vetrovsky had written in red ink: Too categorical. An archive is not a court.

Below it, the student had answered in green:

Then why does it pass judgment every time it decides what to preserve?

“It’s her,” I said.

“Because of the green pen?”

“Because of the personality.”

“You’ve known her for four days through one photograph.”

“And I already recognize her.”

Kirill scanned the pages.

Farther down was another note from Vetrovsky:

You are confusing exclusion with destruction.

Her reply:

What is excluded disappears too, for anyone who doesn’t know where to look.

I ran a finger beneath the line.

“It’s like she wrote instructions for her own story.”

Kirill did not answer.

On the back of the final sheet was a reading list and a short note:

P. hid my green pen again. Petty man.

“Pasha?” I asked.

“Roshchin.”

“They were close.”

“Looks like it.”

In the next folder, we found a photograph from a student conference. Anna was sitting in the second row beside Pavel. He leaned toward her, saying something. She was laughing.

Not immortal love. Just two people caught in a moment.

I felt uncomfortable with my own desire to stare.

“I feel like I’m reading somebody else’s private messages,” I said.

“You are reading somebody else’s private messages. Welcome to archival work.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“It’s not supposed to. If it stops feeling awkward, change careers.”

Kirill took the photographs away to scan them.

We left the archive after eight.

On the stairs, we ran into Liza carrying a stack of catalogs.

“You live here now?”

“Almost,” Kirill said.

Liza noticed the folder under his arm.

“Find anything?”

“Student essays.”

“For the seminar?”

Kirill answered too quickly.

“No.”

Liza looked at him for a second, then at me.

“All right.”

She went downstairs.

“Why did you lie?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Very scholarly.”

“Instinct.”

Two steps later, he stopped.

“Yesterday she asked Tamara Pavlovna for old financial reports from the Sokolov Foundation.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Just an odd choice for art history.”

“Could be connected to restoration.”

“Could be.”

We kept walking.

It didn’t seem important then.

CHAPTER 6. THE SEVENTH FACE

I decided to start with the person who might have seen the photograph before I did.

Gleb was sitting by the dining-hall window, reading something on a tablet and eating cottage cheese with the expression of a man serving a disciplinary sentence.

I placed the photograph beside his cup.

He looked at it and stopped scrolling.

There was no What is this?

“Where did you get it?”

“Wrong first question.”

“Put it back in the archive.”

“Nowhere to put it. The box disappeared.”

He looked up.

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.”

Gleb picked up the photograph. He barely looked at the crossed-out girl; his eyes went straight to the other faces.

“You’ve seen it before.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

He hesitated.

“My father’s.”

“The same photograph?”

“Almost.”

“What’s ‘almost’?”

“Her face isn’t crossed out in his copy.”

I pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down.

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re a bad liar.”

“I’m usually told the opposite.”

“Usually people probably want you to like them.”

One corner of his mouth twitched.

“I only know her first name. Anna.”

I had the strange sensation of hearing a word I’d already heard in a dream.

“Last name?”

“My father never said.”

“You asked?”

“When I was fifteen.”

“And ‘Anna’ was enough for you?”

“At fifteen, I was more interested in why my father kept a twenty-year-old photograph of students in a locked drawer.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m interested in why you have it.”

I told him about the box, the security log, and the initials A.B.

Gleb listened without interrupting. When I finished, he asked for the photograph again.

“Can you take a picture of your father’s copy?”

“He keeps it at home.”

“So take a picture at home.”

“Are you assuming I regularly search his office?”

“You’re in a secret seminar. You’ve already surrendered the moral high ground.”

“Fair point.”

He handed the photograph back.

“Don’t show it to Serebryakova.”

“Why?”

“Not until we know what happened.”

“That almost sounded like an offer to help.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

I had already stood up when he said:

“Vera.”

“What?”

“You really don’t see it?”

I knew what he meant.

“See what?”

“You look alike.”

“Two brunettes. Shocking.”

“Not the hair.”

He pointed to my left eyebrow.

I touched the mole beneath it.

“That means nothing.”

“Maybe.”

I meant to leave. Instead I asked, “Why did you ask, that first night, whether I’d been here before?”

Gleb looked toward the window.

“Because when you walked into the library, Vetrovsky looked at you like he’d seen you before.”

“Maybe at my admissions interview.”

“He wasn’t on the panel.”

“Then he mistook me for someone else.”

“Maybe.”

He did not sound convinced.

That evening, I called my mother.

We usually spoke on Sundays, so the first thing she asked was:

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“Are you eating properly?”

“Mom.”

“What? It’s an important question.”

I looked at the photograph under the lamp on my desk.

“Did you ever know someone named Anna?”

The pause was less than a second.

But I heard it.

“What Anna?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a relative. A girl around your age who studied at Arsenyev Academy in 2003.”

“Why are you asking?”

“I found a photograph.”

“Vera, don’t go digging around in other people’s stories.”

That was not at all the answer I had expected.

“Why other people’s?”

“I’m just saying you have your studies.”

“Mom, did you have a sister?”

This silence lasted longer.

“No.”

Too fast.

“You’re sure?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“A normal one.”

“No, it isn’t. I did not have a sister.”

She changed the subject — asked whether the residence hall was cold, whether the scholarship money had come through, whether I’d bought winter boots. I let her.

After the call, I sat for a long time with the phone in my hand.

Then I opened the folder where I kept old family photographs.

Mom hated being photographed. I had only a few pictures of her when she was young. In one, she was eighteen, standing beside my grandmother at their dacha, squinting into the sun, her hair pulled into a high ponytail.

I zoomed in.

There was no mole beneath her left eyebrow.

Of course that proved nothing.

I knew that.

And still, that night, an odd childhood memory surfaced after years of lying dormant.

In elementary school, I once brought home an assignment to make a family tree. Mom helped me write down my grandparents’ names, then quickly gathered up the photographs and said we didn’t need to dig any further.

When I asked why there were no childhood pictures of her before the age of ten, she said, “We moved a lot. Everything got lost.”

I was eight. I believed her.

Now I wondered whether nothing had been lost at all.

CHAPTER 7. FOUNDERS” DAY

Every autumn, the Academy held Founders’ Day, an event everyone publicly called ridiculous and then spent three days discussing what to wear.

Alisa lent me a black dress.

“Bring it back without red wine on it.”

“White wine is fine?”

“White you may spill on yourself.”

“Your generosity is astonishing.”

“I just want the people standing next to me in photographs to look respectable.”

By seven, the Main Building no longer felt like an academic building. The old chandeliers were lit in the entrance hall, candles in glass cylinders lined the staircase, and the professors had suddenly become people who knew how to hold a wineglass and discuss subjects other than bibliographies.

Portraits of the Arsenyev family hung on the walls. A small orchestra of conservatory students played something light. Beyond the windows, the first proper snow was falling — large, wet flakes that melted as soon as they touched the paths.

I had no intention of looking for Vetrovsky.

Naturally, I spotted him almost at once.

He was speaking with Rector Serebryakova.

In the 2003 photograph, Inna Serebryakova had been around twenty. Now she was a little over forty. She had kept the same straight posture and the habit of tilting her head slightly when she looked at someone, as if granting them an opportunity to phrase their thought better.

Vetrovsky said something quietly.

Serebryakova turned sharply in my direction.

Our eyes met across the hall.

She knew who I was.

Not in the way a rector knows a student. Differently.

I felt it so clearly that the music seemed to drop out of the room.

“If you’re going to bore holes through the rector with your eyes, try to be less obvious about it.”

Gleb stepped up beside me.

He wore a dark suit with no tie, an unfairly effective combination of money and deliberate carelessness.

“She’s the one staring at me.”

“Rectors occasionally look at students. It’s part of the job.”

“She knew Anna.”

Gleb took a sip from his glass.

“Of course she did. They studied together.”

I turned to him.

“You’re telling me that now?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I asked who Anna was.”

“I told you everything I knew.”

“No. You told me exactly as much as you decided to tell me.”

“Welcome to adulthood.”

“You are unbearable.”

“I hear that a lot.”

I walked away before I could come up with a more accurate insult.

Liza intercepted me near the stairs. She was carrying two plates of tartlets.

“Take one or I’ll look like I’m eating for two.”

“Thanks.”

We moved toward a window.

Liza was one of those people whose presence you barely noticed until they said something precise.

“You’re in Vetrovsky’s seminar now,” she said.

“Sounds like a diagnosis.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“How long have you been in it?”

“Second year.”

“Do you know why he chose you?”

She shrugged.

“I wrote a paper on the restoration of the Arsenyev Codex.”

“The Codex?”

The Arsenyev Codex was the Academy’s great relic — a seventeenth-century manuscript discovered here in the early 2000s. I had seen it behind glass in the small museum room.

“That one. Vetrovsky was one of the experts who authenticated it.”

“Have you studied the original?”

“Only through glass. They almost never let anyone handle it.”

She glanced toward Serebryakova.

“Some things hold up an institution’s entire reputation. People prefer not to touch them unless they have to.”

I did not like the way that sounded.

“And if you do have to?”

Liza smiled.

“Then you’d better be very sure of yourself.”

By midnight, Founders’ Day had migrated from the official entrance hall into several unofficial rooms in the residence building. Alisa found a bottle of wine. Denis brought cheese that clearly cost more than my weekly groceries. Timur sat on the floor by the radiator arguing with Kirill about whether a historian was obligated to publish the truth if that truth would destroy the life of someone still living.

“Of course he is,” Kirill said.

“That’s an easy position when the life isn’t yours,” Timur replied.

“Then we might as well abolish honesty. There’s always somebody’s life at stake.”

“Silence isn’t always cowardice.”

“Sometimes it isn’t. But cowardice loves dressing up as responsibility.”

I sat on the windowsill listening and thinking how precisely the argument fit our own story.

Gleb arrived last.

Alisa raised an eyebrow.

“The heir descends among the common people.”

“My father kept me.”

“Teaching you to manage the empire?”

“Teaching me not to speak to journalists after my second drink.”

He sat beside me.

“Are you angry?”

“No.”

“So yes.”

“Because you hid obviously important information? Why would I be?”

Gleb took out his phone.

“I did what you asked.”

On the screen was a photograph of a photograph.

The same staircase. The same seven people.

Anna’s face untouched.

I enlarged it.

The air seemed to thicken.

There was nothing supernatural about her. She was an ordinary young woman: hair disturbed by the wind, the collar of her coat slightly crooked, the suggestion of a smile at her mouth. That was what made it worse.

She wasn’t a ghost from somebody else’s story.

She had been alive.

And she really did look like me.

“Is there a surname on the back?” I asked.

Gleb opened the second photograph.

Anna Belova.

Belova.

My grandmother’s maiden name.

It took me a moment to realize I was no longer breathing properly.

“Vera?”

“I need to go outside.”

Gleb followed me.

We went down into the courtyard. Snow melted instantly against my bare shoulders.

“Here.”

He put his jacket around me.

“I don’t need it.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Not from the cold.”

“Still.”

I leaned against a stone column.

“Belova is my grandmother’s maiden name.”

Gleb said nothing.

“My mother told me she never had a sister.”

“Could be a coincidence.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No.”

The door flew open behind us. Vetrovsky stepped onto the portico.

He saw us.

Saw the phone in my hand.

And understood exactly what I was looking at.

He approached slowly.

“Where did you get that photograph?”

“Gleb’s father.”

Vetrovsky closed his eyes for a second.

“What was her name?” I asked.

“You already know.”

“Who was she to me?”

He looked at me the way people look at someone before giving bad news, while there is still time to postpone it by a few seconds.

“You should speak to your mother.”

“I did.”

“Again.”

“She’s lying.”

Vetrovsky did not contradict me.

“What happened on November seventeenth, 2003?”

His face changed.

Now I was certain: the date had struck home.

“Who told you about the seventeenth?”

“The archive.”

“Which document?”

“So something did happen.”

Vetrovsky looked at Gleb.

“And you should ask your father.”

“About what?”

“The same thing.”

He went back inside.

Gleb watched him go.

“Do you have plans tomorrow?”

“Not anymore.”

“We’ll go see my father.”

“Will he agree to talk?”

“No.”

“Then why go?”

Gleb took the empty glass I had, for some reason, been carrying this entire time.

“Because he has one weakness.”

“Which is?”

“He believes he controls everything inside his own house.”

CHAPTER 8. THE SECOND THURSDAY

At the second seminar, Vetrovsky placed a wooden box in front of us.

“Phones.”

I looked at Liza.

She shrugged: suggestion accepted.

Denis put his phone in first.

“If my parents lose track of me for two hours, will the stock market survive?”

“We’ll find out,” Gleb said.

Once the box was closed, Vetrovsky handed out seven identical envelopes.

“Each of you has a document. Six are genuine. One was forged by me this morning. You have forty minutes to decide which one.”

“One document each?” Alisa asked.

“Yes.”

“Then we can’t compare them.”

“You can talk.”

“Can we show each other?”

“No.”

Kirill smiled.

“So you’ve designed a trust experiment.”

“I’ve designed an assignment.”

“Of course.”

Mine was a late nineteenth-century note written by the estate manager. The paper looked old, the ink faded. The text concerned money missing from the household accounts.

We began questioning one another.

Denis had a newspaper clipping.

Timur, a diary page.

Alisa, an official report.

Liza, a letter.

Gleb, a captioned photograph.

Kirill, a telegram.

Gradually it became clear that the exercise was barely about the objects themselves. To identify the forgery, we had to decide who was describing their document accurately and who might — deliberately or accidentally — be misleading the rest of us.

“My paper is modern,” Kirill said twenty minutes in.

“Why?” Alisa asked.

“The fibers are too uniform.”

“You can see fibers from four inches away?”

“I work in an archive.”

“He just wants you to trust him because he has professional authority,” Gleb said.

Kirill gave him the finger.

“There’s my professional authority.”

Liza said, “My letter is strange. The writer asks his sister to destroy an earlier note, but explains the reason in so much detail that it makes no sense if she already knows the context.”

I remembered the previous seminar.

“He’s writing for a future reader.”

Vetrovsky did not interfere.

“What if the letter is fake precisely because it imitates the theme of the last seminar too well?” Timur asked.

“Then Vetrovsky is lazy,” Denis said.

“Entirely possible,” the professor replied.

In the end, we chose Gleb’s photograph.

We were wrong.

The forged document was Liza’s letter.

“Why?” she asked.

Vetrovsky slit open the envelope and showed us the inner layer of paper.

“Modern stock, artificially aged. I wrote the text this morning.”

“But the content…”

“Was constructed to make you trust Morozova’s reasoning from last week.”

I felt slightly stupid.

“So you used our previous conclusion against us.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Vetrovsky sat down.

“Because experience doesn’t only help us recognize lies. Sometimes it creates a pattern through which we begin to see lies where none exist.”

Gleb looked at me.

“Hear that, Morozova? Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.”

“Don’t get excited.”

When Vetrovsky dismissed us, no one stood up immediately.

Denis turned Liza’s forged letter over in his hands.

“Can I keep it?”

“Why?” Vetrovsky asked.

“When you become a famous criminal, I’ll sell it.”

“I’m afraid the market for my forgeries is already oversaturated.”

He said it so calmly that only Kirill looked up. I noticed too and assumed the professor was joking.

We moved to the small kitchen beside the library. It contained a kettle, four mugs, and a jar of instant coffee on which someone had written in marker: NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

“Vetrovsky?” I asked.

“Tamara Pavlovna,” Kirill said. “The professor has prettier handwriting.”

Liza found a box of tea.

“Whose jasmine?”

“Mine,” Timur said.

“Ours now.”

“Communism has arrived from an unexpected direction.”

While the kettle boiled, Denis suggested we each name the person we had trusted least during the exercise.

“You,” Alisa said.

“Why me immediately?”

“You were smiling before you opened your envelope.”

“I always smile.”

“Exactly.”

Timur had distrusted Kirill because “professional confidence is especially dangerous when the professional is wrong.” Kirill chose Vetrovsky.

“He was the only one who knew the answer.”

“That’s against the rules,” Liza said.

“I’m an archivist. I’m trained to suspect whoever wrote the catalog.”

When it was my turn, I said:

“Gleb.”

“Predictable,” he said.

“You were extremely convincing when you argued that your photograph was real.”

“It was real.”

“Exactly. You sounded like you were lying.”

“It’s a talent.”

“Runs in the family?” Denis asked.

The room went quiet for a second.

Gleb looked at him, then smiled.

“Possibly.”

Liza changed the subject first. She told us that in first-year restoration, students were required to copy an old page so accurately that the instructor had to identify every mistake.

“And if they can’t?”

“Then you’re either a genius or the instructor is tired.”

“What happens to the copies?” I asked.

“We stamp TRAINING COPY across them in enormous letters. So a hundred years from now some overconfident researcher doesn’t build a dissertation around one.”

Kirill laughed.

“Finally, an ethical person among us.”

“Don’t rush to conclusions.”

She threw a sugar packet at him. Kirill caught it one-handed and gave a theatrical bow.

Alisa watched them a little longer than necessary.

I noticed, but attached no importance to it.

Almost everything that evening was like that: noticeable and unimportant.

Then Denis started arguing that a forgery might qualify as art if it was better than the original. Timur said the question was badly framed. Alisa insisted aesthetic value and authenticity existed on entirely different planes. Kirill opened the coffee with the warning on it and, after one sip, admitted Tamara Pavlovna had been right.

Gleb stood beside me at the window.

“Do you write everything down?” he asked.

I looked at my notebook.

“Habit.”

“Even our nonsense?”

“Especially your nonsense.”

“Then I’ll be more careful.”

“Too late. I already have enough material.”

He leaned in as if to read over my shoulder. I snapped the notebook shut.

“Private property.”

“You just stole an archival photograph.”

“That’s different.”

“Naturally.”

The kitchen smelled of cheap coffee, wet coats, and old book dust. The park beyond the window had gone dark. None of us looked like members of a secret society. We were just seven students lingering after class, unable to make ourselves leave.

I remembered that evening often afterward.

Not because I thought it held a clue.

To remember the time when we still had nothing to forgive one another for.

Afterward, we walked out through the park.

The first snow lay in a thin layer across the benches. Denis went off to call his mother. Timur and Kirill were arguing about the assignment ahead. Alisa walked with Liza.

Gleb and I fell a few steps behind.

“Does my surname really sound familiar to you?” I asked.

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“And?”

“I saw it on the Foundation candidate list. My father had written something beside it by hand.”

“What?”

“I don’t remember. It was summer.”

“Why were you looking at his papers in the first place?”

“I was trying to find the car keys.”

“Your family has an impressive talent for accidentally discovering compromising information.”

“Yes.”

“Will you ask him?”

“He won’t answer over the phone.”

“Why?”

“Because my father discusses anything important only in rooms where he believes nobody is recording.”

“Paranoid.”

“Or experienced.”

Gleb stopped where the path forked.

“Vera, don’t you think it’s strange that my father’s foundation chose you, then someone forged an invitation from Vetrovsky, and now you’ve found a woman who looks like you?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re still going to keep going.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I thought about it.

“Because before the photograph, I thought I’d simply come here to study. Now somebody else knows something about me that I don’t know. I hate that.”

Gleb nodded.

“I understand.”

“Is that how it is with your father?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“My whole life.”

That was the first conversation after which I stopped thinking of him as nothing more than a rich, arrogant asshole.

Not entirely.

But by maybe twenty percent.

CHAPTER 9. THE VORONTSOV HOUSE

Konstantin Vorontsov’s home turned out not to be a house but an apartment in an old mansion on Kamenny Island, where even the entrance hall looked as though raising your voice would be considered vulgar.

I met Gleb at the Academy gates on Saturday morning. He arrived in the gray car I’d seen in the parking lot a few times and tossed a packet of coffee at me from the passenger seat.

“Is this a bribe?”

“Breakfast.”

“A very sad one.”

“There’s a protein bar in the glove compartment.”

“Better.”

The drive took a little over an hour. Gleb put on music and barely spoke. Neither did I. The car was warm, dirty snow lay along the roads outside, and sometimes the whole thing felt so absurd that I wanted to ask him to drop me at the nearest station so I could go back to normal life — term papers, the dining hall, arguments over who had occupied a washing machine for three hours.

Then I’d look at Anna’s photograph on my phone and the impulse would pass.

“Your father’s definitely away?” I asked as we turned into the courtyard.

“Foundation board meeting in Moscow. He’ll be back tonight.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“Then we’ll pretend we’re children who came home for a textbook.”

“You live here.”

“Makes it more convincing.”

The apartment smelled of wood and coffee. It wasn’t museum-like, as I’d expected. It was plainly lived in: keys scattered on a console table, two pairs of men’s sneakers in the hall, an open newspaper on the kitchen table.

“Disappointed?” Gleb asked.

“By what?”

“The lack of an ancestor on horseback.”

“I haven’t finished looking around.”

Konstantin’s study was locked.

Gleb took out a ring of keys.

“You carry a key to your father’s office?”

“This used to be my home. I grew up here.”

“You have a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything. It’s annoying.”

“Sorry.”

The key did not fit.

Neither did the second.

“He changed the lock,” Gleb said.

“After you found the photograph at fifteen?”

“Not immediately.”

“So you did search his office on a regular basis.”

“I prefer the word researched.”

We were still standing at the door when the coffee machine hissed in the kitchen.

Gleb turned to me.

“He’s home.”

“Excellent intelligence work.”

“I checked his calendar.”

“Maybe he has a secret Saturday seminar.”

Footsteps approached.

Konstantin Vorontsov appeared in the corridor wearing dark trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back. He looked surprised when he saw his son.

When he saw me, he did not.

That was worse.

“Gleb.”

“Dad.”

“You didn’t call.”

“I thought I’d preserve the family tradition.”

Konstantin’s gaze shifted to me.

“Vera Morozova.”

It was not a question.

“Have we met?”

“No. But I know the list of my foundation’s scholarship recipients.”

The lie was perfectly plausible.

Maybe that was why I didn’t believe it.

“We need to talk about 2003,” Gleb said.

His father slowly set his cup on the console.

“No.”

“Then November seventeenth.”

Konstantin studied his son for a long moment.

“Who gave you that date?”

“Why does everyone ask that?” I said before I could stop myself. “Nobody says, ‘Nothing happened.’ Everyone wants to know where we heard about it.”

“Because you’re forcing your way into the history of people you don’t know.”

“Then introduce us.”

“Vera,” he said, more gently now, “if you’ve earned a place at the Academy, you have a rare opportunity to get on with your own life. Take it.”

“I earned the place myself.”

“I didn’t mean otherwise.”

“What about the scholarship?”

This time the pause was visible.

Gleb turned to him.

“What about her scholarship?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you know Vera’s surname before she was admitted?”

Konstantin picked up his cup.

“The Foundation receives a great many applications.”

“Did you know it?”

“Yes.”

Something cold seemed to drop through me.

“Why?”

“Because I knew your family.”

“Anna Belova?”

The cup stayed near his mouth, but he did not drink.

“Where did you hear that name?”

I showed him the photograph on my phone.

Konstantin sat on the arm of a chair.

“Do you still have the original?” Gleb asked.

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“Watch your tone.”

“Amazing. We’re talking about a woman who was erased from the archives and you’re worried about my tone.”

Konstantin closed his eyes briefly.

“Anna studied with me.”

“And?”

“She left the Academy.”

“Where did she go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why is she missing from the records?”

“That’s not a question for me.”

“You were here on the night of November seventeenth.”

Konstantin’s face hardened.

“This conversation is over.”

“No,” Gleb said.

“Yes.”

He stood.

“And Gleb, I suggest you don’t confuse curiosity with principle. Curiosity passes. Consequences remain.”

I stood too.

“Kirill Orlov found the security book. The box disappeared the next morning.”

Konstantin turned sharply toward me.

“Who is Kirill Orlov?”

“A student. He works in the archive.”

“He saw the material?”

“Yes.”

Fear crossed Konstantin’s face too quickly to be mistaken for anything else.

“Tell him to stop.”

“Why?”

“Just tell him.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No.”

He walked to the study door, took a key from his pocket, and unlocked it.

“It’s advice from a man who once failed to stop in time.”

He returned with a leather folder.

The photograph was inside.

The real one, not an image on a screen.

He handed it to me.

On the back, beneath Anna’s name, another sentence had been added.

Don’t let them pretend I was never here.

The handwriting was a woman’s.

“Did she write this?” I asked.

Konstantin nodded.

“When?”

“Two days before she disappeared.”

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

“Exactly that.”

“Was she dead?”

“We didn’t know then.”

“And later?”

He looked at me without either authority or irritation in his face.

Only exhaustion.

“Later we were told she was.”

“By whom?”

Konstantin did not answer.

But I already knew the name he was refusing to say.

Inna Serebryakova.

CHAPTER 10. ANNA

On Monday, Kirill came into the dining hall with red-rimmed eyes and two folders under his arm.

“Did you sleep?”

“I’m young. I don’t have to.”

“Lie.”

“Obviously.”

He spread several printouts across the table.

Over the weekend, he had found two things.

First: in an old admissions catalog there was an entry for Anna Viktorovna Belova, born in 1982, Pskov Region. Admitted in 2000.

Second: her digital student file was missing, and the paper copy had been officially listed as lost in a leak in 2010.

“Was there a leak?” I asked.

“Yes. Wrong shelf.”

“How do you know?”

“I cataloged the damage report.”

He produced a copy.

“Anna’s file should have been in a section that never got wet.”

I stared at the year of birth.

If Anna really was related to me, my grandmother might know.

“I’m going home.”

“Now?”

“Friday. Saturday’s free.”

Kirill leaned back in his chair.

“There’s an easier option.”

“Call and get lied to again?”

“Yes, but cheaper.”

“I need to see my grandmother.”

“Fair enough.”

He took a sip of coffee and grimaced.

“There’s something else.”

“Do you save the worst for last on purpose?”

“I’m learning from Vetrovsky.”

He handed me a sheet.

A photocopy from the residence telephone directory for 2003.

Belova, Anna — Room 317.

Beside it, written in pencil: P. Roshchin and a phone number.

“The Pavel Roshchin in the photograph?”

“Looks like it.”

“Did you find him?”

“Only an old dissertation so far. He left the Academy in December 2003.”

“Right after Anna disappeared.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And no one thought that was strange?”

“Vera, people leave universities all the time. Things only become strange in retrospect.”

Liza came up to our table just then.

“You two look like you’re selling state secrets.”

Kirill covered the papers with one hand.

“We’re discussing the dining hall.”

“Then the expressions make sense.”

She sat down beside us.

“Vetrovsky moved the seminar to tonight.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Didn’t say. Eight o’clock.”

That evening, the North Library greeted us without candles.

Vetrovsky had switched on the ordinary lights. Seven identical folders lay on the table.

“Today we’re going to discuss trust in sources,” he said.

He gave each of us a single page.

Mine was a letter from a woman to her husband. She claimed she had not seen his brother on the night of a murder.

“Twenty minutes,” the professor said. “Decide whether the writer is lying.”

We began to read.

Ten minutes later, Alisa raised a hand.

“There isn’t enough information.”

“Why?”

“No context. We don’t know the relationships, the circumstances, not even the exact date.”

“And yet historians make conclusions from worse material every day.”

Timur said, “She’s lying.”

“On what grounds?”

“Too many unnecessary details surrounding the only direct answer.”

“Vorontsov?”

“She’s telling the truth about not seeing the brother. But she’s hiding something else.”

Vetrovsky looked at me.

“Morozova?”

I read the final sentence again.

“She’s not writing to her husband.”

Vetrovsky tilted his head slightly.

“Go on.”

“She’s writing to whoever will read the letter later. There are too many explanations for someone close to her. She’s creating a document.”

Vetrovsky finally smiled.

“Exactly.”

He collected the pages.

“Remember this: a witness is not always speaking to the person named in the address. Sometimes a witness is speaking to the future.”

I could feel Anna’s photograph inside my bag, the sentence on the back almost physical against my side.

Don’t let them pretend I was never here.

I stayed behind after the others left.

“Did you know Anna Belova?”

Vetrovsky did not ask where I had learned the name.

“Yes.”

“Well?”

He slowly closed the folder in front of him.

“Well enough.”

“Was she in your seminar?”

“Yes.”

The first direct confirmation sounded almost ordinary.

“Why was she removed from every list?”

“I didn’t remove her.”

“But you knew.”

“Later.”

“Who did it?”

“Vera, some answers are not mine to give.”

“Convenient.”

“I’m not avoiding the question.”

“That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

He took off his glasses.

“Have you contacted your family?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“They lied to me.”

Vetrovsky rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Then don’t ask your mother.”

“Who should I ask?”

“Your grandmother.”

I froze.

“You know my grandmother?”

“I met her once.”

“Where?”

“After Anna’s death.”

The room suddenly felt too warm.

“You said after her death.”

Vetrovsky realized what he had let slip.

“How did she die?”

He put his glasses back on.

“I can’t answer that.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“In this case, there’s no difference.”

I left, slamming the door harder than I intended.

Gleb was waiting by the stairs.

“Well?”

“He met my grandmother after Anna died.”

Gleb frowned.

“So there is definitely a connection to your family.”

“I’m calling Grandma tomorrow.”

“I thought you were going home.”

“I can’t wait until Friday.”

We went outside. Wind came off the lake carrying the smell of snow and smoke from the boiler house.

“You can still stop,” Gleb said.

“Is that a family motto?”

“No. I just think that after certain answers, you can’t go back to the life you had before them.”

I looked at him.

“Would you go back?”

He shoved his hands into his pockets.

“No.”

“Then why are you telling me to?”

“Because one of us ought to make an effort to be reasonable.”

“You’re failing.”

“I’ve noticed.”

Another note was waiting for me at the residence hall.

This one had no riddle.

Don’t call your family.

Underneath, someone had drawn a small number seven by hand.

CHAPTER 11. AN ORDINARY EVENING

Two days before Kirill disappeared, the seven of us got together without Vetrovsky being the reason.

Denis had been paid for a review and announced that he was willing to spend the money on “the socialization of humanities students.” We went into Petersburg, to a bar on a street where Friday nights meant too many people and nowhere to put your coat.

At the Academy, each of us existed inside a role. Here, the roles loosened a little.

Timur turned out to know the lyrics to every old pop song and feel absolutely no shame about it. After her second glass of wine, Alisa stopped pronouncing every ending with quite such precision. Denis made friends in the bathroom line and knew what everyone did for a living within five minutes.

Liza danced.

That surprised me most of all.

“Why are you staring?” she asked when she came back to the table.

“Didn’t expect it.”

“What, restorers aren’t supposed to move?”

“I didn’t think you liked loud places.”

“I don’t. Sometimes I like dancing.”

She drank some water.

“You have the look of someone who’s always doing things because she has to, not because she wants to.”

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“I gathered.”

“Can you ever just spend an evening without analyzing people?”

I looked at her.

“You’re analyzing me right now.”

“Exactly. I’m asking from experience.”

We laughed.

Kirill was sitting beside Alisa. Their knees touched under the table, and neither of them moved away.

I leaned toward Liza.

“Are they together?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why am I always the last to know things?”

“Because you’re busy with a dead girl.”

The words came out harsher than she intended. Liza winced immediately.

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

She looked at Kirill.

“He’s a good person.”

“I know.”

“He just thinks being right means he doesn’t have to be careful.”

“Did you two argue?”

Liza looked surprised.

“Why?”

“That sounded personal.”