angelology, when Dr. Seraphina Valko sent me to locate my errant classmate, Gabriella, and bring her
to the Athenaeum. Gabriella was late for our tutorial, a habit she’d developed over the summer
months and had continued, to our professor’s dismay, into the cooler days of September. She was
nowhere to be found in the school—not in the courtyard where she often went to be alone during
breaks, nor in any of the classrooms where she often studied—and so I guessed her to be in her bed,
sleeping. My bedroom being next to hers, I knew that she had not come in until well after three
o’clock that morning, when she put a record on the phonograph and listened to a recording of Manon
Lescaut, her favorite opera, until dawn.
I walked through the narrow streets off the cemetery, passing a café filled with men listening to
news of the war on a radio, and cut through an alleyway to our shared apartment on the rue Gassendi.
We lived on the third floor, our windows opening over the tops of the chestnut trees, a height that
removed us from the noise of the street and filled the rooms with light. I climbed the wide staircase,
unlocked the door, and stepped into a quiet, sunny apartment. We had an abundance of space—two
large bedrooms, a narrow dining room, a servant’s chamber with an entrance to the kitchen, and a
grand bathroom with a porcelain bathtub. The apartment was far too luxurious for schoolgirls, this I
knew from the moment I set foot upon its polished parquet. Gabriella’s family connections had
assured her the best of everything our school could offer. How I had been assigned to live with
Gabriella in such quarters was a mystery to me.
Our Montparnasse apartment was a great change in my circumstances. In the months after I had
moved in, I basked in its luxury, taking care to keep everything in perfect order. Before I’d come to
Paris, I had never seen such an apartment, while Gabriella had lived well all her life. We were
opposites in many ways, and even our appearance seemed to confirm our differences. I was tall and
pale, with big hazel eyes, thin lips, and the foreshortened chin I had always considered the hallmark
of my northern heritage. Gabriella, by contrast, was dark and classically beautiful. She had a way
about her that caused others to take her seriously, despite her weakness for fashion and the Claudine
novels. Whereas I came to Paris on scholarship, my fees and board paid entirely through donations,
Gabriella came from one of the oldest and most prestigious of the Parisian angelological families.
Whereas I felt lucky to be allowed to study with the best minds of our field, Gabriella had grown up
in their presence, absorbing their brilliance as if it were sunlight. Whereas I plodded through texts,
memorizing and categorizing in the meticulous manner of an ox plowing a field, Gabriella had an
elegant, dazzling, effortless intellect. I systemized each piece of minutia into notebooks, making charts
and graphs to better retain information, while to my knowledge Gabriella never took notes. And yet
she could answer a theological question or elaborate upon a mythological or historical point with an
ease that escaped me. Together we were at the top of our class, and yet I always felt that I had stolen
my way into the elite circles that were Gabriella’s birthright.
Walking through our apartment, I found it much as I had left it that morning. A thick, leather-bound
book written by St. Augustine lay open upon the dining table alongside a plate with the remains of my
breakfast, a crust of bread and strawberry preserves. I cleared the table, bringing my book to my
room and placing it amid the mess of loose papers on my desk. There were books waiting to be read,
jars of ink, and any number of my half-filled notebooks. A yellowed photograph of my parents—two
sturdy, weatherworn farmers surrounded by the rising hills of our vineyard—sat next to a faded
photograph of my grandmother, Baba Slavka, her hair tied in a head scarf in the way of her foreign
village. My studies had occupied me so completely that I’d not been home in over a year.
I was the daughter of winemakers, a sheltered, shy girl from the countryside, with academic talent
and strong, unwavering religious beliefs. My mother came from a line of vignerons whose ancestors
had quietly survived through hard work and tenacity, harvesting auxerrois blanc and pinot gris all the
while bricking the family savings in the walls of the farmhouse, preparing for the days when war
would return. My father was a foreigner. He had immigrated to France from eastern Europe after the
First World War, married my mother, and took her family name before assuming responsibility of
managing the vineyard.
While my father was no scholar, he recognized the gift in me. From the time I was old enough to