WeWriWa—A surprising gift

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. This week’s snippet comes right after last week’s, from Chapter 55, “The Streets of the Future,” of my WIP A Dream Deferred: Lyuba and Ivan at University. This chapter, which closes Part I (to be published as Volume I), is mostly set over Orthodox Christmas 1950.

Twenty-year-old Bogdana Sheltsova, who survived two horrific, life-altering events six weeks apart, is now living with her aunt Fyodora in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. She didn’t expect her friend Achilles to visit with roses and a gift bag after their last encounter in the underground clinic where Achilles assists.

Achilles insists he sees Bogdana as a beautiful soul who’s just barely begun to breathe, but Bogdana can’t bring herself to share those sentiments. Her aunt just stepped in to invite Achilles to go skating with them at Prospect Park.

This has been tweaked to fit ten lines.

“Sure, that’ll be fun, and perhaps Bogusya would like a skating partner.” Achilles smiles at her again. “Please, Bogusya, open the bag; I want you to see what I got you.”

Bogdana reaches into the bag and pulls out a blue velvet box. When she opens that, she finds a flat, heart-shaped rose quartz on a silver chain.

“You’re getting a patient jewelry? That really violates the doctor-patient relationship! At least I made the request I did in a purely medical context, and didn’t see it as sexual at all!”

Fyodora raises her eyebrows. “What in the world did you ask for yesterday, or don’t I want to know?”

WeWriWa—A soul who’s just begun breathing

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. This week’s snippet comes right after last week’s, from Chapter 55, “The Streets of the Future,” of my WIP A Dream Deferred: Lyuba and Ivan at University. This chapter, which closes Part I (to be published as Volume I), is mostly set over Orthodox Christmas 1950.

Twenty-year-old Bogdana Sheltsova, who survived two horrific, life-altering events six weeks apart, is now living with her aunt Fyodora in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. She didn’t expect her friend Achilles to visit with roses and a gift bag after their last encounter in the underground clinic where Achilles assists.

Achilles, so named because his heel was torn up by forceps at birth, has just told Bogdana there’s no such thing as getting a lady too many flowers.

“I’m no lady, and you damn well know it. I’m a cheap slut who disgraced herself, not once, but many times.”

“I’ve never seen you like that at all.” Achilles smiles at her. “I’ve always seen you as a beautiful soul who’s just barely begun to breathe.”

“I’m a damaged slut.” Bogdana takes the flowers into the kitchen and fills a vase with water.

“Mr. Medved, we’re going skating in Prospect Park,” Fyodora says. “Would you like to accompany us? They can rent you skates if you don’t have your own.”

WeWriWa—Bogdana’s Christmas surprise

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. For my Orthodox Christmas-themed snippet this year, I’m sharing something from Chapter 55, “The Streets of the Future,” of my WIP A Dream Deferred: Lyuba and Ivan at University. This chapter, which closes Part I (to be published as Volume I), is mostly set over Orthodox Christmas 1950.

Twenty-year-old Bogdana Sheltsova, who survived two horrific, life-altering events six weeks apart, is now living with her aunt Fyodora in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. Bogdana mostly lives in the guesthouse, but she’s been prevailed upon to join her aunt’s family in the main estate for Christmas. Her discussion with her aunt about wearing old-fashioned skating boots to Prospect Park was interrupted by the doorbell.

This has been slightly altered to fit ten lines.

Bogdana goes back to the Christmas tree in the sitting room when Fyodora goes to answer the door. She has no intention of trading her ankle-length grey wool dress for a skating outfit she can comfortably move in, and doesn’t care if she’s the most unfashionable person on the rink. Those people ought to be more concerned with their own affairs instead of gossiping about someone else’s.

“Bogusya, Dyed Moroz has a surprise present for you!” Fyodora calls.

Bogdana clenches her fists. “Don’t tell me you paid some old man to dress up like Dyed Moroz and come to deliver a gift. I’m too old for that silliness, and even if I still believed in Dyed Moroz, nothing could change my melancholic mood. The die was cast that disgusting night, and nothing can ever change it.”

“Please, come take a look at your present before you decide it’s worthless; something tells me you’ll really, really like it.”

Bogdana returns to the front entryway, and immediately looks away when she sees Achilles standing there, holding a large bouquet of red roses in his right hand and a small gift bag in his left hand.

Unexpected Reunion at Church

This was originally one of a batch of twenty posts I put together on 24 June 2012, as future installments of the now-permanently shelved Sweet Saturday Samples hop. It differs slightly from the published version in The Twelfth Time. E.g., I no longer pedantically use accent marks, and the infodumpy dialogue has been cleaned up quite a bit.

***

For the remainder of the service, they walk around looking at the paintings and ikons, feeling slightly embarrassed they don’t remember enough to know who most of these saints are or what many of the scenes depict. They can’t even figure out the Old Church Slavonic script on most of the paintings. If their reaction time is quick enough, they copy the congregation when they see people kneeling or crossing themselves. At least they remember the correct way to cross oneself and don’t do it backwards like the Catholics. They remember Zofia crossing herself sometimes, and she always did it in the opposite direction from the way they were taught.

After services, while most of the people are standing around socializing, they notice a very pretty young woman in a wheelchair, her leg elevated and in some type of metal brace, thick gauze wrapped around the flesh inside the confines of the brace. A handsome man with very light brown hair stands on one side of her, and a woman with green eyes and the same russet hair stands on the other side. The woman in the wheelchair looks vaguely familiar to them.

“What happened to you?” Naína asks.

“Some jerk driving a Bugatti ran me over in April when I was rescuing my baby niece from the oncoming car. I was burnt very badly and might’ve lost my leg to amputation had I not had one young doctor among the team assigned to me. He argued for a radical new bone surgery instead of the old method. My fiancé here is busy looking for a house or apartment I can easily access, and that means no stairs. I hope our home hunt isn’t delayed too much longer, since my twenty-seventh birthday is coming up in September, and that’s awfully old for a woman to be unmarried.”

“You look kind of familiar,” Kátya says. “Is it possible we met you back in the motherland? We spent the last seven years in the Ukraine, and before that we lived in Russia.”

“My name is Álla Ilyínichna Lebedeva. I’ve been here since May of ’21.”

Kátya smiles at her. “Of course we remember you! You used to work at our orphanage in Kiyev, until you snuck out with three of your sisters and a brother and sister pair in early ’21! Mrs. Brézhneva was going crazy for a long time trying to figure out what’d happened to you all!”

“There were so many girls there, and it’s been over six years since I left. You’ll have to tell me your names to refresh my memory.”

“I’m Yekaterína Kárlovna Chernomyrdina, and she’s Naína Antónovna Yezhova. Naína’s cousin Kárla disappeared on our train to freedom.”

“Now I remember you! From what I heard, you were rabble-rousers right till the very end of your stay at that place. My sisters Véra and Natálya are penpals with Inéssa Zyuganova in Minsk, and Inéssa’s penpals with Ínna. Sometimes Inéssa tells them what Ínna tells her, so we heard the sad news about Kárla. This is my older sister Svetlána, by the way. She’s an infant nurse, but she’s also been my nurse since I got injured. I live with her and our oldest sister Gálya. We were also living with our next-oldest sister Matryona till she got married yesterday. And this handsome fellow is my fiancé Daniíl Karmov.”

Véra, Natálya, and Fyodora make their way to Álla and Svetlána and look curiously at Naína and Kátya. Anastásiya is already on her way out of the church, taking off her hair covering as Mrs. Whitmore trails forty feet behind with Dmítriy.

“You girls can follow me out to the bus stop, unless you have an invitation to someone’s house for lunch. I wish someone would invite me to Sunday lunch once in awhile. They’ve known me for ten years now, and they’ve just met you.”

“You never get invites because you’re an insufferable pain,” Véra laughs. “I take it these are the girls Sándros sponsored?”

“They’re old friends of yours too,” Álla smiles. “Do you recognize Naína Yezhova and Kátya Chernomyrdina after over six years?”

“Are you kidding?” Natálya asks. “They’re one and the same as the girls Sándros sponsored?”

“This is incredible!” Véra says. “We thought we’d probably never see any of our orphanage friends ever again!”

“Look how tall you got! You were so young last time we saw you!”

“Are you staying in the city, or going right to Toronto?”

“What’s in Toronto?” Naína asks. “We were looking forward to having a nice vacation at the beach and amusement parks. We’ve never had a vacation before.”

“If your aunt and Kárla’s mother is the same Sófya Mitrofanovna Gorbachëva we’re acquainted with, she lives in Toronto,” Véra says. “She lives with the younger two daughters of the woman whose hotel was suggested to you as a hub of Russian immigrants. She also lives with the best friend, husband, and son of the older of those two girls. They come down to visit us every so often, and we’ve been up there a few times, time and finances permitting. This woman doesn’t talk about her pre-Revolution life too often, but we know she had two daughters named Mikhaíla and Kárla. She knows Mikhaíla is dead. One of the ladies she lives with was a witness, and broke the news to her on their ship to Canada.”

“My aunt really is alive, and you know her? I’d love to see her! But after eight years, I guess a few more months won’t make a big deal. Would it still be okay to go on vacation with you? I don’t know anything about Toronto, but I’m pretty sure Canada isn’t known for its beaches and warm climate. We might not get another chance to have a long beach vacation for awhile if we have to move there.”

“I was looking forward to going on the long vacation too, since I haven’t had much of a break from schoolwork, my job, and my family since I came here. Now that I know who our companions are going to be, I want to go even more. I think your aunt will understand. Katrin probably will pay for you to make a long-distance call when you get back to her penthouse. In the meantime, we’d love to have you for lunch.”

“We’ve got a cute baby halfbrother now,” Natálya says. “Fyodora is his godmother. Besides Svéta here, we’ll also be having our other three sisters, and our stepsister’s family.”

Meet Naina, Katya, and Karla

I’m returning to moving out old posts indefinitely stored in my drafts folder. Originally one of a batch of 20 posts I put together and stored in my drafts folder for the now-long-defunct Sweet Saturday Samples bloghop on 24 June 2012, this comes from my first Russian historical and has been changed a fair bit. The published version doesn’t use the pedantic accent marks used here, for starts, and some things have been fleshed out while others (like the pointless roll-calling) have been removed. In the published version, sadistic Mrs. Zyuganova also pushes Klara into the snow, not the mud, seeing as it’s December in Minsk.

***

Possibly my favorite subplots in my Russian novels revolve around my orphanage girls. I’d read about how children of “enemies of the people” were treated in orphanages during the Civil War in Felice Holman’s The Wild Children, which I read shortly before beginning the first book in early 1993, but I wasn’t inspired to create a whole series of subplots set in orphanages and playing out over three books till my second major period of working on the first novel.

When I was introduced to what became my favoritest movie, The Inner Circle, in the summer of ’96, and then resumed work on the novel that November [actually September], I knew I had to have orphanage characters too. They include Vera, Natalya, and Fyodora, some of Lyuba’s future stepsisters, and Anya and Leontiy, the children of the couple who took Lyuba and her friends into hiding. Some of the other important orphanage girls include Belarusian Inessa and trio Katya, Naina, and Karla. Naina is the niece of Sonya Gorbachëva, an important secondary character.

Naina and Inessa have always been my favorite of the orphanage girls. Inessa is a very intelligent, headstrong young girl who’s only there because her parents were arrested for an honest, petty mistake, and Naina is as sharp as nails in spite of her young age. Naina first appears in December of 1919, and at barely eight years old is toting a gun.

***

“These three will stay in this bunk to make up for the three who departed.” Mrs. Zyuganova leads three new girls into the quarters. “Names, ages, and nationalities?”

“Naína Antónovna Yezhova, age eight, from Pétrograd.”

“Nice necklace. It’s mine now.” She grabs a citrine necklace hanging around Naína’s neck.

Naína slaps her hands away, reaches under her dress, and pulls a gun on Mrs. Zyuganova. “No it’s not. My mátushka gave it to me when I was four. Steal it and I shoot you. My papa gave me one of his handguns before I was taken away, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

Mrs. Zyuganova struggles to collect herself. “Next?”

“Yekaterína Kárlovna Chernomyrdina, age twelve, from L’viv.”

“L’vov,” Mrs. Zyuganova growls.

“No, it’s really L’viv!”

“Kárla.”

“Last name and patronymic?”

“I’m two and from Yaroslavl.”

“Last name and patronymic?”

“I don’t know!”

Mrs. Zyuganova picks Kárla up and throws her into a wall. Then she begins beating her.

“Stop beating her!” Naína bites Mrs. Zyuganova. “She’s only two years old! She is Kárla Maksímovna Gorbachëva. She’s my cousin, and if you hurt her again I will kill you. Remember, I’ve got a gun, and I know how to shoot. It’s not just for show.”

“Quiet that tiny one down!” Mrs. Zyuganova screams.

Naína takes Kárla into another room.

“No, you can’t leave the room you’re assigned to!”

“I am well accustomed to the rules of orphanages by now. I don’t like you. In fact, I don’t think we’ll be sticking around much longer. Just try to stop us. You know you can always get three fresh victims where you found us.”

Mrs. Zyuganova spits in disgust. “We’re ready to round people up to cars. Boys first. Leontiy Ryudolfovich Godimov, Andréy Samuelovich Bródskiy, Ósip Yuriyevich Khrushchëv, Iósif Vasíliyevich Klykachëv, Maksím…”

They go into the car obediently.

“Girls next. Natálya and Fyodora Ilyínichna Lebedeva, Yeléna Vasíliyevna Klykachëva, Svetlána Yuriyevna Khrushchëva, Valentína L’vóvna Kuchma, Irína Samuelovna Bródskaya, Ínna Aleksándrovna Zhirínovskaya, and Ólga Leonídovna Kérenskaya.”

“My brother is on that transport!” Klára howls.

“Tough luck. If you sneak on I’ll beat you. Oh. I would love to get rid of Inéssa my traitor niece. Off you go!”

“Fédya!  Fédya!” Klára screams.

Mrs. Zyuganova pushes Klára into the mud. “Would anybody like to sell his or her place to little Klára Mikháylovna Nadleshina?”

“I would!  I would!” Inéssa screams.

“Stay on that train, Inéssa! I want to get rid of you!”

Inéssa runs to the man approaching and flings herself into his arms. “Dyadya Díma! Take me away and adopt me! I’ve been in this orphanage since my parents got arrested, and Tyotya Dásha beats me sometimes! Adopt me!”

Mr. Zyuganov’s forehead is thrust forward, like a ram’s. He has red-brown hair and gray eyes. “Dásha, is this true?”

“Yes it’s true, now adopt me, Dyadya Díma!”

“Dásha, I saw him! The Leader! He’s promised to bring fair work conditions to the mines in Belarus! Soon you won’t have to work in this hospital anymore!”

“This isn’t a hospital! It’s a phony orphanage! Adopt me!”

“Of course, I’ll adopt my niece if her parents are jailed enemies of the people—”

Mrs. Zyuganova yanks Inéssa from her uncle’s arms and throws her into the girls’ cattlecar. “Goodbye, my traitor niece. I hope they treat you even worse at the new place.”

Klára runs with the train and boosts herself up into the window. Ánya, Véra, and Natálya run with her and boost themselves up next. They all tumble on top of the three newest arrivals.

“We hid under the baggage holds,” Naína says. “We’re very sneaky. After seeing how she treated Kárla, I had to say no and move onto another orphanage!”