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From the 'Antique Square'

© Anna Gruverman

A few summers ago, I was rummaging through piles and piles of old newspapers, almanacs, books in calfskin covers with gold lettering, letters on yellowing paper. The antique store -- known by the unoriginal title of “Antique Square” -- had become my refuge from the heat that had so suddenly settled on Petersburg. As I glanced out of the window, the sky above was no longer its usual vast blue, but a tender, fragile lavender; a veil of night descending upon the city not as a natural phenomenon but as a gift of God, two precious hours when, in the violet twilight, dew would settle on the grass and the sun would cease to glare.

Evening -- it was almost time to go. I had become very friendly with the store keeper, a veteran of the Second World War with one malfunctioning hand, and so I was seated comfortably on the soft carpeted floor, a heap of documents in my lap. Of course, I couldn’t overextend the privileges already granted me. But at the same time, I had no idea as to how I could possibly get out from under the aging paper without destroying it.

I began to gather it into separate stacks -- one for letters, one for diaries, one for books and several for magazines. 1860, 1899, 1910 -- the dates jumped before my eyes.

And then suddenly, I came upon a folder; brown, worn at the edges, tied at the top with soft black string just ready to come apart and spill the contents. On the cover, the lettering read: CNE.

I froze because I wasn’t sure which stack the folder belonged to. Carefully, I untied the string to see if it was, perhaps, a very old newspaper -- these were put in folders sometimes due to an inability to hold themselves together otherwise. But as I peaked in through the top, the bottom gave way and onto the floor slid the most eerie package I might ever see: Just a few crumpled papers and a stamped envelope, a thin notebook, a mother-of-pearl hairpin, and something made of crumpled lace, all tied together by a pink bow. A lock of chestnut hair curled luxuriously on each side of the silk knot that bound it.

To be honest, my first reaction was fear as I had read far too many stories of revolutionary victims, their belongings and their ghosts coming back to claim them. And the hair -- too much like the hair the House of Romanov had been fighting over since around the 1920’s. Too much like a certain box of hair that had been brought from the Urals together with crushed jewelry and a terrifying piece of news: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/Russ...

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