Orest Stelmach - The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls

After a sip of my artificially flavored soft drink, I put the matryoshka and a box of chocolates on my bed and propped myself up with a pillow. Then I took apart Simmy’s gift and assembled each of the seven nesting dolls individually. Afterwards, I arranged them in a row by size.

I popped a caramel into my mouth and studied them. Simmy was a thoughtful man who enjoyed musing philosophically, but his observations about the nesting dolls sounded scripted. A wooden object didn’t have a conscience. And once you coupled the proper tops and bottoms and assembled the seven figurines, the dolls held no remaining mysteries. Or did they?

It was Simmy’s choice of words that made me think there was more to the dolls than met the eye. Why did he tell me to weigh their individual consciences? Was that his way to suggest that the relative weights of the individual dolls offered a clue to the supposed knowledge they contained? Or was I thinking too much?

I held each pair of dolls of successive heights in my hands. The weights seemed proportionate to the dolls’ sizes. If there were something hidden inside the wood that comprised one of the figurines, surely I would have sensed the extra weight in my hands. Unless the object in question was very light, I thought.

There was only one way to find out for certain.

I called room service and ordered some herbal tea. I also asked the staff to send up a food scale. I told them I’d bought some snacks and needed to be precise with my food consumption. I doubt it was the strangest request they’d ever encountered.

Half an hour later, the food and the scale arrived. I tipped the delivery man ten euro to show my appreciation for the scale and he seemed thrilled. After he left, I put the scale and the nesting dolls on my desk.

I assigned each doll a number from one to seven, starting with the largest and ending with the smallest. I used the paper-thin measuring tape in my travel-size sewing kit to estimate the length, width and depth of each doll. Then I weighed them individually, and calculated a weight per cubic inch ratio for each one. When I was finished, I had my answer.

Six of the dolls produced ratios close to the average. One of them, however, was an outlier. Doll number two, the second largest nesting doll, weighed more for its size than the others. I’d been unable to detect this manually because doll number one was so much larger than number two that the smaller one still felt light in my hands. But my statistical analysis had proven that number two should have weighed even less.

There were only two possible explanations for this. Either the craftsman had used a different kind of wood for the second doll, or there was a foreign object inside it. I doubted the craftsman had used different wood for one of the dolls. I suspected the raw material was machine-cut from one batch. The craft was in the painting.

That suggested there really was something else inside doll number two. I picked it up and caressed it the way Simmy had suggested.

As I studied its construction, I reflected on how much Simmy trusted me. I couldn’t shake the notion that such trust was the manifestation of grand affection. He’d shared information with me about his relationship with Valery Putler. These were the type of intimate details that could get a man in serious trouble. Had a man ever displayed such faith in me and my discretion? Had I ever mattered that much to any person? My parents had given me life and raised me, but I was their child and that was different. Beyond the parental link, my mother and father had remained emotionally detached with me. I’d never felt as though I’d truly known them. I’d known my brother when I was a child and he was my hero, but we’d grown apart as we’d matured. And as for my ex-husband…

I opened doll number two and ran my fingers along the interior of the top and bottom pieces. The sides appeared too thin to hide any object. The rounded top was equally fine, but the base had a little extra wood to it, probably for ballast. If I were an artist instructed to hide something within the doll, I would focus on its lower half. The bottom was painted pink—the color of borsch preferred by Russians as opposed to Ukrainians, with sour cream added. Meticulous sanding, some fine glue, and the bold-colored paint could hide an opening created to sneak a foreign object inside.

My next course of action displeased me, for although the doll was an inanimate thing, I didn’t relish the surgery I needed to perform. The matryoshka was a gift from Simmy and I hated the thought of destroying it. But even more than that, Simmy’s comment had imbued the damn thing with a certain mysticism. I hoped I wasn’t provoking some sort of curse by damaging it. Not that I believed in curses per say, but as a policy, I avoided encouraging negative superstitions on the off-chance there was actually some substance to them.

I picked up the hotel phone again. This time I called housekeeping and requested a small handsaw. Anything that could cut wood with some precision, I said. I told them one of the handles on my luggage had come undone and rather than leave it dangling during my trip I wanted to cut it off. Did they have a Swiss army knife, preferably one of the Huntsman variety, that came with a saw and a knife? My years as Ukrainian girl scout had informed me on the subject.

This time I suspected my request was a bit more eccentric. Nevertheless, fifteen minutes later a man in plain clothes arrived with a vintage Dutch army knife. It had an olive handle and looked as though it had survived a war. I tipped him ten euro, too, and promised to call housekeeping as soon as I was done.

Then I sawed through the bottom of doll number two. The tool’s saw was a crude device, built to rip and cut with certainty, not precision. It had some rust but the blade tore through the balsa wood with a modest amount of pressure. Half an inch in, I hit something solid. I pulled the blade out. Whatever I’d hit was black in color and resistant to sawing. I cut around it until the bottom of the doll fell off. Then I plucked the black object from within.

It was rectangular in shape, one inch by one and half inches in length and width, and no more than a quarter inch in thickness. The saw had left a few scrapes. I suspected it was a box built to protect something but there was no hinge or indication of how one might open it. The box seemed a little heavier than the plastic warranted. I shook it and listened, but didn’t hear anything move inside.

I reached for my box of caramels. Mouth full of chocolate, I tried to think of other plastic devices. The remote control to some of the latest gizmos came to mind. They were relatively small and simple in design. The backs came off for battery replacement but they weren’t always easy to remove. One had to press down in the appropriate place and then push to slide the cover off…

I succeeded on my third try.

One side of the box slid out lengthwise.

A silver key shimmered inside.

I pulled it out. It had notches on both sides and looked brand new. There was no lettering on it. No indication whatsoever of what it might open.

Simmy’s words echoed in my head.

“To understand the Russian nesting doll is to the key to understanding a Russian man, which is the key to understanding life.”

I’d laughed when I’d heard it but I wasn’t laughing now. Perhaps what Simmy really meant was that there was a key inside one of the nesting dolls, and only with that key would I, Nadia Tesla, understand him, Simeon Simeonovich. And only if I understood him would I understand my life and the truth about myself.

I didn’t know how a key could possibly help me understand him, or how understanding him would help me comprehend my own life, but I was certain that I had to find out, no matter what the risk to life and limb, just as surely as I knew that finding Iskra’s killer was the prerequisite to discovering the answer.