Creating stresses in the social fabric was one of Fräulein Agata’s great joys, so when the general’s friend, a society lady, asked her to bring the school’s top students, my German teacher brought us instead. None of us marriageable by real standards—me, basically a penniless orphan, Hanna, not a student and Jewish enough not to mix her milk and her meat, and Olga, with a pince-nez and stern expression that Freud would have described as castrating. It’s possible Elsie was with us too. I keep forgetting about her.

We arrived sweating from the bike ride. The house was quite grand and beautiful. Girls from my school lived in houses like this, but I had never been invited inside of one. The servants wheeled away our bikes and took our coats, leaving me self-consciously crossing my arms. I was in one of Hanna’s old dresses and the silk pattern hung loosely where it had been filled out by my cousin’s ampler breasts. We had arrived fashionably late and were led through the halls past paintings of the hostess depicting her as she had been in the previous century. I remember thinking that the house must have been designed by the architect to build anticipation, the echoes of the party bouncing toward us as we approached. It took everything in me not to be overcome with excitement, break into a trot, and rush the dining room at full tilt.

Fräulein Agata could feel the excitement too. She was blushing, readying herself for trouble. We passed a room full of wicker birdcages; the tiny colorful canaries inside flitted about and sang nervously. Our teacher made us stand and look at the birds for a moment, let us smooth down each other’s hair and regain our composure, as the servants waited, holding open the doors to the dining room. The guests were seated at a long table with a dark green tablecloth. It was a beautiful room, with silk walls, exquisite wood, a chandelier fitted with little electric bulbs, an enormous fireplace in full flame. Outside, it was already starting to get dark because the days were getting shorter and the clouds were hanging low over the river.

The general wasn’t there, but there were other inbred aristocrats. Lots of golden epaulets and wives with heavily powdered faces. Scattered among them were guests like us, meant to evoke “exotic color”—a political prisoner recently returned from Siberia, a French perfumer with a bell-shaped nose. Seated next to the hostess was her brother, who wasn’t all there. He had a napkin tucked into his collar. He gave the impression of being slovenly, though there was nothing specific that I could point to as being out of place. He was focused monomaniacally on the arrival of the food, a fork and a knife in his hands, like an illustration in a children’s book.

“He’s a very talented mathematician,” Fräulein Agata whispered to Olga, and maneuvered her to the empty chair beside him.

The perfumer was already holding Hanna’s hand and kissing it up to the elbow in the French fashion, so she was stuck sitting by him.

The hostess introduced me without getting up from her seat to the man who had just returned from Siberia. He was dressed strangely, with a yellow silk scarf tied in a bow around his neck, a splotch of blood on the lapel of his jacket, an aloof look that Fräulein Agata and I both found quite intriguing. Fräulein Agata seated me beside him so I could be her little puppet.

She arranged my arms and tilted my head at a becoming angle. It was a game we called “Doll.”

“Isn’t she a beauty,” she said to the man. She used me often in this way. The attention was ostensibly on me, but the interesting stuff was happening between them.

“Beauty,” I said to the man, “is, in my opinion, entirely overrated. My mother was beautiful, and it got her absolutely nowhere.”

Fräulein Agata nodded. She’d heard me talk about my mother like this many times. She rearranged my hands and squinted at the results.

A man across the table tried to join our conversation. “Isn’t beauty enough for its own sake?”

Fräulein Agata ignored this idiotic sentiment.

“She wasn’t using her beauty toward good,” Fräulein Agata said. “We all are given talents, and it is a crime”—she tilted my head—“a sin, to waste them.”

This got the man next to us to crack a smile. “A sin,” he whispered dramatically, and crossed himself.

“You laugh, but you don’t agree?” Fräulein Agata said, turning the force of her charm on him like a hose.

She took my hand under the table and squeezed it. I could imagine that in her sleep she might appear quite ugly. But awake, her face was full of such cleverness and animation, I didn’t know how it was possible for any man to resist her.

On the other side of her was the empty chair at the head of the table reserved for the guest of honor.

“Who is the guest of honor, I wonder.”

“Probably Elijah,” Fräulein Agata said to me, but for the benefit of the man, perhaps to show him I was Jewish, or merely to show off her knowledge of these things.

The hostess was seated far down the table on the opposite end, looking at each of us through her lorgnette with disappointment. Marriageable or not, Fräulein Agata reminded us on our way there, we had the commodity of youth. And it was true! The powdered women tensed and exchanged looks when their husbands tried to engage us in conversation.

One man with whiskers who was in charge of something in the customs office told us a story that was meant to be amusing, about someone who had tried to smuggle fabric without paying the necessary tariffs on it.

“How did he smuggle it?” my teacher asked, trying to rush him along to what must have been the good part.

“He had hidden it under another bolt of fabric!” the man said.

Nothing about his story was proving to be interesting. “I thought you were going to say he tried to smuggle it in a horse,” my teacher said.

“Like a true Trojan,” I giggled.

“How would that work?” Olga said, squinting at us across the table.

“In a carved-out compartment!” We were laughing, though it was very stupid.

“Gibberish,” Olga scolded us, though she was laughing a little too.

Hanna tried to join in our fun, but the French perfumer was using her fingers to stroke his own nose.

The shape of it, I heard him tell her, amplified smell. Then he began to list the flowers that did and did not keep well in suspensions.

“Unsurprisingly,” he said, “night blossoms work best.”

Fräulein Agata leaned over me to talk to the man with the yellow scarf. There’s no reason to be coy here. I might as well tell you who he was. Osip Valeiravich. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He was a figure of some significance. To me, certainly, because I married him, but to the larger movement as well.

Osip was back after being sent away for two years to Eastern Siberia for organizing against the imperial government. He was at the party to gather money for striking factory workers. It was fashionable to give money to liberal causes. Everybody in these aristocratic circles liked to act as though they were sympathetic to the workers and the peasants. Up to a point, of course!

“What was it like in Siberia?” Fräulein Agata asked Osip in a voice that to me did not sound entirely natural.

“Cold,” he answered, and looked at me, as though I were the one who’d asked.

“How cold?” she asked breathily.

He got up and scraped his nails along the frost on the window, then stood behind my chair and pressed his icy fingertips against my neck.

I gasped.

“I see,” Fräulein Agata said. “Very cold.” She took his hand off my neck and rubbed it to warm it up.

The hostess called down the table and asked whether she was giving palm readings, and if so, to do her.

But then, suddenly, it was I who was up and kneeling before the hostess. It felt like Fräulein Agata had an ability to bend things around to her will, so no matter what you did you always ended up where she wanted.

I took the hostess’s skeleton hand, loose glove of skin held in place with many large and heavy rings. All eyes were upon us. Hanna looked on hopefully. Olga pulled her pince-nez out of her sleeve and scowled.