The Haunting of Moscow House Quotes

“The house is cursed. Do you know, I got up to piss in the night, and I heard noises in the library. Two men, crying out, Take cover! The Reds are coming! Then rapid footsteps, as if they are really taking cover. Two White soldiers…ghosts.” When the men see Irina, they don’t joke, tease, or playfully call her Countess. They go perfectly still. One clutches a cross at his chest. Reasonable Soviet men, wearing superstitious bourgeois trappings from the past. They must be spooked. But then, so is she. She suspects the singing is Luba’s, to the child that would never be born. The two White soldiers, her cousin and fiancé, both having died in the Civil War.”
― Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, The Haunting of Moscow House

“IF SOMEONE FROM their past should catch a glimpse of the formerly aristocratic Goliteva sisters, they would find two wraiths instead of countesses. That is what Irina thinks as she trudges down the empty Moscow street with her sister Lili to barter their priceless family heirlooms for food at the bazaar. Their stomachs are empty, their pockets even more so, their coats shabby and stripped of most finery since the Revolution. Between them, they clutch a large oil painting of Grand-père Sergei Sherbatsky in its gilt frame. They should call him Dedushka. French might have been denounced as a bourgeois language, but their family still speaks it in secret. Their lives are sustained by secrets. That and memories, though those, too, are best kept hidden.”
― Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, The Haunting of Moscow House