Her next husband, Maria’s father, was a mechanical engineer at a design institute, where she was the head of a department. But he left too. He got mixed up with some other woman and abandoned his daughter and left behind only a folder of inventions in her name. Olga was livid, and yet proud of what was in this thick folder: a blade for an axial flow turbomachine, an impeller for an axial fan, an improved air conditioner. The entire design institute was abuzz. He really had achieved a lot for a puny child from a perennially starving peasant family. Later she learned he had died of cancer. May he rest in peace.

A third husband at forty-five was a bid to quash the loneliness as Maria grew up and pushed back against her mother’s all-consuming care. That attempt too ended in failure—he died of diabetes after five years. The fourth . . . A good man, like all the others. And like all the others, he died.

A woman of steel, they called her.

She was respected, loved, envied. And pitied by those who knew her better. Because she was as unhappy as she was self-sufficient. In her selflessness and her surfeit of unrequited love, she soured the lives of those near her, those weaker than her, multiplied her own sadness by pushing them away. Their dismal fates unfurled even faster than they might have done.

Olga Konstantinovna lived and imprinted herself in the memory not for her beauty, but for the desperate impression that it would be impossible to make her happy, no matter how hard one tried, no matter how much love one threw at her feet. The feeling one cannot make one’s beloved happy is no less deadly than poison.

Fortunately or otherwise, not all aspects of Olga Konstantinovna’s complicated personality were passed on to Maria. They instead lay dormant in her, poised to reawaken after generations, open their predatory brown eyes in a great-great-granddaughter and ripen again with stormy passions and misfortunes.

Olga Konstantinovna straightened her spine and walked down the street, trying for the benefit of passersby not to limp.

Chapter 24

Maria took a valerian before going to church. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one bitter drops into the glass of water and she knocked it back in one gulp, washing it down with coffee.

She looked at her watch. Autumn time.

Yes, damn it, she’s going to church. How does Tykhon feel when his grandmother drags him there without her knowing?

As she entered the courtyard of the Cathedral of the Dormition, Maria dropped a banknote in front of the beggars at the gate, like her mother used to do (“give them money, because they lay a curse on anybody who doesn’t.”) Dormition? Seriously? Meaning sleep? Most of the cathedral was under constant renovation. Maria recalled the dust-covered icons and the dull, warm gold of the altar.