Russian Treasures

1. THE PRODIGAL SON

When Klim Rogov ran away from home, he took what his father cherished most—his dreams of Klim’s bright future. At the time, it felt gratifying. Did you seriously think I would want to follow in your footsteps and become a Public Prosecutor, a man who preys and profits on others people’s misfortunes? Klim had thought. No way, Father. No way.

Ten years had passed, and Klim found himself once again standing indecisively on the threshold of his family house on a balmy summer’s night. It was shabby and overgrown with lilac and ivy but still luxurious with two marble bears guarding the entrance and a white balcony protruding like the open drawer of a dresser.

There had been a time when Klim had dreamed of his triumphant return to his hometown as a successful foreign journalist whose writing had made him famous all over Argentina. But in the summer of 1917, this would not have been the safest guise to assume in Russia. Klim’s home country had been at war with Germany for three years now, its economy had collapsed, and the railroads were packed with armed deserters. Foreigners with their fancy suitcases were easy pickings for them, and Klim decided it would be wiser to melt in with the local population. He grew a layer of dark stubble, acquired a soldier’s uniform and a shabby trunk for his belongings, and arrived in Nizhny Novgorod looking more like an opera villain than an heir to a fortune.

He felt uneasy in the knowledge that the moment he knocked on the door and reentered the once forbidden family home, the life that he had cultivated for himself would become irrelevant and meaningless. Cousin Lubochka, who was renting the second floor in his father’s house, would come running to greet him, and the sleepy servants would gather at the doorway, oohing and aahing at him. The renowned traveler and journalist would once again be regarded as no more than his father’s son, and he had no idea where that was going to lead him.

Klim took a key out of his pocket, the only thing from home that had survived his extensive travels around the world.

I wonder if Father ordered the lock to be changed?

But the key turned, and the door opened noiselessly. With his heart pounding, Klim found the switch on the wall—a familiar gesture that had never faded from his memory.

Nothing had changed in the hallway. There was the same big mirror in the silver frame in patina and shoe horns and brushes on the carved shoe rack. A set of knight’s armor complete with a lance and shield was still standing in the corner. Klim lifted the visor on the helmet and peered inside. When he was a child, he had convinced himself that there would be the body of a tiny knight inside that had become shrunken and mummified over time.

There was a patter of footsteps, and a young maid with loose dark curly hair ran into the hallway.

“How did you get in here?” she asked in a frightened voice.

“I just walked through the door,” he replied with a smile. “I’m Klim Rogov, the heir.”

The girl was lovely, slim, big-eyed, and graceful, and even her dull black outfit looked good on her.

“How long have you been working here?” Klim asked.

“Oh…” She looked confused as if she didn’t know what to say. “Not that long.”

Klim walked around the hallway and examined the familiar things that had not changed at all: the hall stand with legs chewed by one of his puppies, and the carpet still bearing the traces of a “chemistry experiment” that had gone wrong.

He patted the maid on the shoulder. “Would you take care of my trunk, please?”

That’s the type of a girl that should be cuddled and tempted with sweets, he thought.

His gaze went from the open door to the library, and Klim forgot about everything else around him. He entered the room and froze, touched and overwhelmed by his memories. The light from the electric lamp was reflected in the glass doors of the bookcases and gilt spines of the books. Once, this room had been both a treasure trove and torture chamber for Klim. He remembered himself sitting in a red armchair and taking delight in the humor of Mark Twain, but it was also here, at the desk covered with ink-stained leather, that he had repeatedly copied out Latin phrases under the strict supervision of his father. Dura lex sed lex—“The law is harsh, but it is the law.”

There was still an inkwell in the form of a compass on the desk, and the map of the world still hung on the wall. The colored pins dotted all over it indicated the cities Klim had visited. Before he had escaped from home, it had been just Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Berlin where his mother had taken him shortly before her death, but now, pins were scattered all over Persia, China, and Argentina.

It seemed Lubochka had shown Klim’s father all the letters she had received from his “prodigal son” after all.

Klim noticed his own framed photograph on the desk—goodness me! He had sent it two years ago when he had been invited to Casa Rosada, the pink presidential palace, for the first time. What emotions had been going through Father’s head when he looked at this picture? Had he remembered yelling at Klim, “You’ll end up serving hard labor! Stand up straight when I’m talking to you, you dunce.”

Klim heard the lock click softly, and he raised his head. Had he been locked in?

“Hey! Stop fooling around!” he raised his voice, but the maid didn’t answer.

Klim pulled the heavy oak door. “What if I’m the type of man to bear a grudge?” he asked even louder. “Are you not afraid that you might lose your job?”

He heard women’s voices behind the door.

“I have no idea how he got into the house!” the maid said. “Someone probably told him that you’re waiting for Mr. Rogov and that Dr. Sablin is on the night shift.”

“We must call someone,” the other woman replied.

“Do you have any weapons?”

“Well… only the knight’s lance, I think.”

Klim pounded the door with his fist. “Lubochka, open up! It is really me.”

The women behind the door gasped, the lock was opened, and a delicate lady with a porcelain complexion and a mass of wild and frizzy hair threw herself on Klim’s neck.

“I’ve missed you so much!” Lubochka said, laughing and crying and kissing him on the cheeks.

They stared at each other, hardly able to believe their eyes.

“Look at you!” Lubochka exclaimed. “A beard, a soldier’s tunic… you look like a deserter!”

Klim also couldn’t believe that the little girl he had teased as a child, calling her a “dandelion clock,” was now an elegant young lady with a wedding ring on her finger.

The vigilant maid looked at them, confused. “I’d better be going,” she said, taking a step backward.

It was well after midnight, but Klim and Lubochka were still sitting in the library and talking in much the same way they had in their childhood.

“Do you remember our parents had put us to bed,” said Klim, “and we tiptoed to the drawing-room door to eavesdrop on the adults playing the piano?”

Lubochka nodded. “Do you remember my father taking us to dance classes? You wore white knitted gloves, and you were always the very best student. And the instructor told me, ‘Mam’selle, you have perspired so much that your clothes are wringing wet. Go and change.’ I could have died of shame.”

There was so much to share! And it was so nice to see each other again and talk as if they had never been separated for the past decade.

“I wish you’d never run away,” Lubochka said. “We all loved you so much… especially your father.”

“I find that difficult to imagine,” Klim said, smiling wryly.

Father had felt he had the right to lash out at Klim whenever he pleased, either with sharp words or with his fists. At work, his father had been strict but fair, and at home, he had been polite—albeit aloof—in dealing with the servants. But with his son, it had been different.

“He regarded me as his own property—” Klim began, but Lubochka interrupted him.

“That’s not true! Why do you think he left you the fortune?”

“Out of revenge to force me to come back all the way across the Pacific Ocean and Siberia. While I was on the train, deserters tried to rob me five times.”

“But they didn’t, did they?”

“I’m good at boxing,” Klim said, rising. “Remember, you asked me to bring you phonograph needles? I’ve got you some. Has your maid already taken care of my luggage?”

Lubochka frowned. “What maid?”

“The one who locked me in the library.”

“That’s my friend, Countess Nina Odintzova. My husband is working tonight at the hospital, and I asked her to stay with me. I’m afraid of being on my own in such a big house. And there are no servants besides the cook.”

Klim was at a loss for words.

“And why does this countess of yours wear a maid’s uniform?”

“It’s not a uniform; it’s her mourning dress. Her husband was killed in action.”

Klim was mortified. As far as he remembered, he had addressed the countess in the most familiar terms and threatened to fire her.

“I’ll bring her round, and you’ll make it up,” Lubochka said and went after her friend.

But it turned out that Nina had already gone home. Alone in the middle of the night.

Two years earlier, Lubochka had been flattered to be the wife of a brilliant surgeon, but her marriage had resulted in bitter disappointment.

Dr. Sablin was mild mannered and polite, but just as the color-blind are incapable of perceiving certain shades, so he was incapable of feeling delight in a woman. He had no idea how to pay a compliment, never made any physical show of affection, and had only confessed his love for Lubochka once—on the day he had proposed marriage. His passion for his wife consisted of occasional inquiries after her health and regular contributions to the housekeeping money.

For a long time, Lubochka refused to admit that she was bored to death with Sablin and his eternal conversations about the war and medicine. In order to prove to herself that her life still had some meaning and that at least some people needed her, she started throwing parties. The guests danced, talked, and proposed toasts “to our beautiful hostess,” and Lubochka felt pleasantly flattered by these gatherings. They warmed her soul and provided temporary relief like a mustard plaster to the chest.

Then Klim came and destroyed her fragile equilibrium. Lubochka had never told him that she had been madly in love with him as a child. As God was her witness, she had desperately hoped that he had changed and become unworthy of her feelings, but she realized immediately that this was not the case.

She couldn’t stop marveling at his tanned face and smiling brown eyes while he was reading his thick book in Spanish or drinking his Argentinean mate tea through a silver straw called a bombilla, not from a cup but from a calabash gourd with a silver rim and stand.

Klim took little interest in the news about the war and the impotent Provisional Government that was attempting to rule the country after the Tsar’s abdication. He didn’t want to hear about ration cards and asked the cook to buy the best products even if they were the most expensive. To Lubochka this seemed both shocking and delightful—it was as though the affairs of the world simply didn’t apply to Klim.

She tactfully asked him what he was going to do now that he was so rich. He told her jokingly that he was thinking about taking up a career as Tsar Koschei, the famous Russian folk villain who spent his whole time counting his hoard of gold and entertaining himself by kidnapping fair maidens.

Many of Lubochka’s girlfriends would have been over the moon if he were to kidnap them and take them away to the wonderful country that he would describe to them at her soirees. According to Klim, there were sea lions in Argentina, meat was cheaper than bread, and palm trees and cypresses grew right in the streets.

However, Lubochka was not destined to see these miracles. It did not occur to Klim to even think of treating her as a woman. She constantly noticed the unflattering difference between her casual, elegant cousin and her shy husband who looked out at everyone from under lowered brows and tried to walk as little as possible to hide his lameness. He had been shot in the leg during the Russo-Japanese War and had had a limp ever since, which kept him away from the front now.

Lubochka always accompanied Klim around the city and did her best to shield him from seeing the “wrong people.” She felt jealous even of his childhood friends whenever he expressed a desire to visit them. But there was no one to visit anyway. All Klim’s former classmates were in the army.

“When I knock on their doors,” he told Lubochka with a sigh, “I try to guess whether they have been killed, maimed, or taken prisoner. It’s hard to imagine, but half of our class is dead.”

But Lubochka did not want to think about such ugly things. Klim provided her with what she valued most, the beauty of life, and she was determined that nothing would stop her enjoying his company. She took her cousin to theaters and restaurants, and he taught her how to dance the Argentine tango and showed her his old “hunting grounds.” He liked to take her to the islands where he used to go fishing as a child or the ruins of the ancient Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin full of memories of playing and fighting with the other boys.

Lubochka would have given anything for her cousin to remain with her forever, and sometimes it seemed to her that this was a distinct possibility. She could tell right away that he hadn’t just returned to Russia to claim his inheritance but also to reconcile himself with his past and his notion of himself. She diligently tended the seed in his mind that he should stay in Nizhny Novgorod and occupy his appropriate place among the good and the great of the city.

The cab took Lubochka and Klim along the promenade. Breathless, Klim gazed at the green slopes of the shoreline cut through with deep red clay ravines. The Oka River was bustling with fishing boats, wooden barges, and small, quick paddle steamers with black funnels. On the right side, there were storage sheds and the wharfs used for the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, and on the left, the high river bank was dotted with the colorful domes of churches and fancy office buildings. There were palaces, chapels, taverns, and the fearsome Millionka—a neighborhood in which every house hid a den of thieves and every day brought either a fistfight or a fire.

The cab stopped at the entrance to the hilltop restaurant, the Oriental Bazaar. There was a red carpet on the porch, and the liveried doorman greeted patrons with a bow. The guards were dressed in the traditional chokha coats with bandoliers on both sides of their chests and black leather belts inlaid with silver.

Klim and Lubochka followed the head waiter across the dimly lit restaurant hall onto a terrace wreathed in ivy. The orchestra played behind a screen of tropical plants, and the view was breathtaking.

“Not bad, huh?” Lubochka asked as they sat at the table covered with a white starched tablecloth.

While waiting for their order, Klim told Lubochka about the San Telmo district of Buenos Aires where he lived. It used to be a prestigious neighborhood, but after the yellow fever epidemic, all the rich people had moved away and rented their houses to émigrés.

“It’s also beautiful there,” said Klim. “High windows with shutters, and every door is a work of art. But there’s nothing fancy about the locals.”

“Will you move out of your apartment there now?” Lubochka asked.

“I don’t think so. My building has a restaurant on the ground floor, and above that, there’s an Italian family with six marriageable daughters. I’m on the floor above, and I have a beautiful balcony with an ornamental railing and some ancient aristocratic family’s coat of arms. By default, I have come to think of it as my own. How could I give up such delights?”

“I’m sure you can,” said Lubochka.

The waiters brought them some thinly sliced cured fish, golden roast quail, foie gras with prunes in tiny porcelain cups, and champagne in ice buckets. Here, in the Oriental Bazaar, it seemed that no one had heard of the alcohol ban that had been imposed since the beginning of the war and the empty food stores that were being besieged like fortresses.

“What do have to go back to in Argentina?” asked Lubochka, taking a sip of her champagne. “No matter how hard you try, you’ll never be fully accepted there. And neither will your children. Here you have a name, you are the scion of a noble family, but there you’ll always be looked upon as a stranger. You can’t come from nowhere and become someone important.”

Klim smiled and nodded toward the patrons at the neighboring tables: the young ladies in silks and gentlemen in evening dress or military uniforms.

Lubochka lowered her head, embarrassed. She had repeatedly told Klim that the world had been turned upside down by the war and that now everything was run by nameless upstarts. Alas, she had got so used to these new surroundings that she had often fallen victim to her own wishful thinking and failed to notice the alarm signals all around her.

The old ways didn’t work anymore, and Nizhny Novgorod was not what it used to be. Its fair, which had once hosted up to two million visitors per season, was now half boarded up. There were no goods to sell and no customers to buy them. Prices were rising every day, factories were closing, and thousands of soldiers were dying at the front—every single day. Sure, Klim’s inheritance might be able to buy him a semblance of civilized life, but he wouldn’t be able to enjoy it knowing that there were hungry women looting the food store next door.

The more Klim thought about it, the more he wanted to leave Nizhny Novgorod as soon as possible, but he did not dare mention this to Lubochka and her guests. If something bad were to happen, he would be able to escape to safety, but they had nowhere to go.

Suddenly, Lubochka’s expression changed as if she had spotted something strange behind him. He turned and noticed Countess Odintzova standing next to the terrace railing.

This time, she wasn’t dressed in mourning. The evening sun was reflected in the exquisite blue beading of her dress. Her dark hair fell loosely from her parting in waves and was swept into an extravagant chignon on the back of her head. She fanned herself with a large black fan, the delicate ostrich feather fronds waving to and fro like seaweed.

And I took her for a maid, Klim thought. What a fool!

Should he apologize for his stupid mistake? Invite her to his table and then summon the waiters and order whatever dish might take her fancy?

The orchestra struck up a tango, and a singer in a beautiful dress embroidered with red roses started to sing.

Klim rose.

“I’ll be right back,” he told Lubochka and headed across the terrace to the countess.

What is she doing here? he wondered. Is she waiting for someone? Or maybe she came with someone else?

Nina turned her head, and her black fan fell out of her hand and hung limply from her wrist on its thin velvet ribbon.

“Good evening,” Klim said and bowed.

His pulse beat faster. Will she slap me across the face? Or will she laugh at me, recalling my threats to fire her?

“Good evening,” said the countess.

Her gray-green eyes looked calm and impenetrable. If she were angry or annoyed at him, Klim was confident that he would know what to say. He would come up with some joke or droll phrase. But Nina was looking at him as if she had never seen him before. Maybe she did not recognize him?

“Are you dancing tonight?” asked Klim.

To his joy and amazement, she silently gave him her hand, and he led her to the dance floor.

“It’s an Argentine tango,” said Klim. “You should stand closer to me.”

“Like this?” Nina looked into his eyes for a moment, moved closer, and Klim felt her light breath on his neck.

“Yes, that’s right.” He placed her hand on his shoulder and took her gently by the waist.

“So, what do I have to do?” she asked.

“Just follow me.”

They danced, and he felt the hard touch of the rings on her slender hand, the warmth of her thigh through the silk of her skirts, the tense muscles of her back, and something else: the intimate seam of a shift beneath her dress under his shameless, tingling fingers.

The singer sang about impossible happiness. Klim looked at the woman in his arms, and his heart froze with the inspiration and foreboding of something huge and inevitable.

When the tango was over, Klim stepped back and bowed. “¡Gracias, señora!”

What now? Should he invite Nina to his table?

But she did not answer. Next to them, there was a tall, sturdy man with a shaved head, about forty-five years old.

“Nina Vasilievna,” he called to her respectfully, using her patronymic. “We need to talk.”

“Sure.” She turned to Klim. “Excuse me.”

They left, and Klim returned to Lubochka.

“Do you know who that gentleman was?” he asked.

“Everyone knows him,” she snapped. “It’s Mr. Fomin, the chairman of the city’s Provisions Committee.”

The plate in front of Lubochka was full of grapes, torn off from the bunch but not eaten. She took one of them and squeezed it with her manicured fingers. Slipping from her grasp, the grape rolled under the table next to them.

Lubochka waved to the waiter. “The check, please.”

Klim looked around the terrace for Nina, but she was nowhere to be seen.

“We’re going home,” Lubochka said. “I have a headache.”

All the way home, Lubochka lectured Klim.

“You do realize that Nina is trying to hook you, don’t you? She’s been wearing nothing but mourning dress for three years, and now, suddenly, she’s out at a restaurant, dressed from top to toe in her finest finery. I told her yesterday that we were planning to go to the Oriental Bazaar, and there she was.”

“Why are you so angry with her?” Klim asked in surprise. “It was me who invited her. I just wanted to make amends, and your friend was happy to accept it.”

The melody of the tango was still spinning in Klim’s head. His whole arm from his elbow to his fingertips still retained the vivid and treasured memory of what it had been like to hold Nina.

Lubochka narrowed her eyes, and her lower lip trembled as it used to do in her childhood when she was about to cry.

“Don’t be fooled by Nina. She owes you money.”

The cab turned to Ilinskaya Street and stopped by the mansion with its marble bears. Klim jumped into the dust warmed by the heat of the day.

“Why are you back so early?” Marisha, the cook, asked as she opened the front door.

Ignoring her, Klim walked past into his father’s office. Up to now, he hadn’t bothered looking too closely at the papers he had inherited. Everything related to finance was a bore as far as he was concerned.

He deftly twisted the dials of the vintage American safe and took out a black binder filled with bonds, promissory notes, and contracts. A familiar name caught his eye—Vladimir Alekseevich Odintzov.

Five years earlier, Nina’s husband had borrowed twenty thousand rubles from Klim’s father at seven percent interest. Count Odintzov had mortgaged his flax-spinning mill, and there were all the necessary proofs of the validity of the transaction—a notary’s signature, a seal, and the stamp duty. The payment was due on October 1, 1917.

So, it was true: Nina was interested in Klim not for his personal qualities but for his inheritance. He had let his imagination run wild and had now been brought back to earth with a bump.