She moves the opera glasses in time with the orchestra, raising or lowering them in time with the strings, woodwinds, and percussion. Her predilection is for people who don’t come from a novel, and of these, she prefers the least significant, the ones who focus their energy and concentration on experiencing every last detail. Anya’s opera glasses linger on the tsar’s doctor or his personal secretary, their wives, the hangers-on who hold unimportant government posts, the progeny of wealthy merchants, or the dilettantes who chase trends, or the visiting travelers. Over the years she’s also learned to discern the ones who, like her brother, her mother, her father by blood, and her father by law, were born as characters, imagined by their authors, partly stolen from reality or flights of fancy as the pen flew across the page, but she’s much more interested in the people born of a womb.

The opera glasses are an ideal tool; she feels closer without being close enough to hear what they’re saying. Unlike her mother, she doesn’t read anything but bodice rippers; she has no thirst for knowledge, no intellectual curiosity. But though she’s frivolous and canny, she’s not deaf, and she has a dark side that affords her a deep appreciation of certain composers.

When the orchestra begins its second piece, Claudia ceases following two or three different scores in her head, as is her habit. Wagner succeeds where her husband never does. Perhaps if she’d had a child, it would play the role Wagner does, but the child would have had to be troubled, because Wagner troubles her. He disrupts her natural calm, but instead of resisting, she gives herself over to the feeling entirely, teary and submissive as she never would be otherwise. She doesn’t often cry, but with Wagner she has a hard time holding back her tears. If she had known they were going to play one of his pieces, perhaps she wouldn’t have come to the concert, but she didn’t look at the program, she was going to the concert. She was there to make Sergei happy (he adores music) and to keep Anya company, to get her out of the house. The arrival of the tsar’s letter made the occasion even more appealing.

Claudia is not as beautiful as Anya and lacks that something special (or “exotic”) that would make her a true beauty—something her sister-in-law has in spades—but she is hardly ugly; she has fair skin and thin, straight hair. Anya is lively, but her happiness is always tinged with bitterness, whereas Claudia is naturally happy, and she wears her happiness with beauty and grace.