Russian Treasures

12. MOBILIZATION

Nina was overjoyed when she received Klim’s telegram, but out of fear of Fomin, she kept it a secret from everyone and celebrated the good news on her own.

In the evenings, she would dance around her bedroom barefoot, rushing up to the mirror every now and then to inspect her reflection. Was she still pretty? Had she changed very much since Klim had left? Like a child, she jumped onto the bed, fell onto the pillows, and hugged them tightly to her.

Recently, she, her brother, and Elena had become as thick as thieves. They liked to sit together on the small sofa in the library and read aloud to each other in turns. They went to the cinema where they watched the audience rather than the screen and giggled together at the most dramatic moments. They pottered around in the garden they had planted on the slope behind the house, proud of their homegrown cucumbers and radishes.

Nina bit the bullet and allowed Zhora to hold parties at the house for his fellow poets. They came to Crest Hill in the evenings to read their poetry, sing to the guitar, and share news in excited whispers. After the Czechs’ rebellion, fighting had flared up all over the country. There were countless peasant uprisings, the Cossacks and Whites had launched attacks on the Red Army in the south, and the Czechs and Slovaks were fighting the Bolsheviks in the Volga region and along the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Nina touched Klim’s key. She didn’t care about anything in this country anymore and least of all her mill and store. She just wanted Klim back.

The really good thing was that Nina wouldn’t have to come up with any schemes to keep Klim and Fomin apart. Everything had turned out perfectly. The conspirators in Nizhny Novgorod were planning to stage a coup in late August. Fomin was one of the ringleaders, and he would be too busy to give Nina much thought.

Sablin had been genuinely amazed when Zhora had announced that he wanted to become a medic, but the boy had studied hard in the dissecting room and pretended to mind neither the heavy smell of the formaldehyde nor the dissected corpses lying on the tables. He had watched Sablin perform operations several times and managed not only to take everything on board but also chat to the nurses about the price of butter and millet.

He’ll do, thought Sablin, smiling to himself. He’s a born medic.

One day, Zhora approached Sablin. “I’d like to have a word with you, Doctor, if I may?” And this had marked the beginning of a clandestine alliance between the two men.

Sablin took the most direct part in the preparations for the uprising. He had trained up medical teams and organized secret locations where the wounded would be treated.

When Sablin came in to work at the hospital, he went straight to find Zhora.

“What’s the latest news?” he asked.

“The White Army and the Czechs have occupied Simbirsk city,” Zhora answered in an excited whisper, “and they are on their way up the Volga.”

The Bolsheviks, fearing that their fragile grasp of power might be slipping, were resorting to ever more brutal measures. Sablin gaped dumbstruck as Zhora told him the news from Yekaterinburg that the Bolsheviks had just shot the entire Russian royal family, including the young grand duchesses and the thirteen-year-old Tsarevich.

Soon, the news had spread throughout the hospital, but few people expressed much pity or compassion. Most of the staff and patients confined themselves to obscure phrases such as, “Well, the Tsar has come to a bad end.” Others openly reveled in his death, saying that it had served him right.

The city was in a state of feverish activity. Huge posters were plastered all over the fences calling on river transport workers to join the Red Volga Flotilla. In the Kunavino district and around the fair, sailors’ hats bearing the names of ships no one on the Volga had ever heard of became a common sight. The Bolsheviks had destroyed the Russian Black Sea Fleet near the port of Novorossiysk so that their battleships would not fall into German hands. Now, their crews were traveling overland to Nizhny Novgorod to set off down the Volga on merchant boats that had been fitted out as gunships in the Sormovo factories.

On the morning of July 27, 1918, two Red Army soldiers came to visit Dr. Sablin.

“Get ready to leave, Doctor,” they said. “We have orders to take you as a member of the Red Volga Flotilla staff.”

At the headquarters, Sablin was told that he had been appointed head of a field hospital and that the next day, he was to leave for the front on a new gunboat called the Lady that had been converted out of a tugboat. Sablin tried to argue that he didn’t want to enlist and wasn’t even fit to fight on account of his bad leg, but the Flotilla commissar—a strapping, clear-eyed giant of a man—replied that this was no time for arguing and that Sablin would be shot if he didn’t report first thing the next morning.

Another party for the young poets was in full swing at Nina’s house. Zhora was reading a comic epitaph he had composed for Lubochka:

The poets stayed up until late at night, playing cards using their own autographed poems as the stakes. Every one of them was convinced that one day their manuscripts would be worth their weight in gold.

The candles were lit, ragged shadows flickered on the walls, and the crystal drops of the chandelier swayed gently in the draught.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the front door. Everyone froze and stared at one another. Nina hurriedly blew out the candles.

There was another bang at the door.

“Go!” Zhora told his friends. “I’ll go and see who it is.”

One by one, the poets leaped through the window and ran down the slope across Nina’s vegetable garden. Nina and Elena wrapped the remnants of their food in the tablecloth, shoved it under the sofa, and pulled the cover down to the floor. Within seconds, there wasn’t the slightest sign that the drawing room had just been filled with guests.

Any kind of gathering in a bourgeois house was seen as tantamount to a political meeting, and it was the host’s responsibility to prove that their guests had been doing nothing but chatting, singing harmless songs, and reciting romantic poems.

There were steps in the hallway and then the squeak of the door handle. Nina and Elena held hands as though they were about to face the imminent impact of a storm. Then Zhora and Dr. Sablin entered the moonlit room.

“What happened?” whispered Nina.

Elena lit a candle, and the flame illuminated Sablin’s bloodless face.

“I’ve been drafted into the Red Army,” he said. “Did you know that the Bolsheviks have found the Lady?”

“Our Lady?” gasped Zhora. It was the best riverboat owned by Elena’s father.

“Yes,” Sablin nodded.

“Where are they sending you?” Nina asked anxiously.

“To the city of Kazan. They’re setting up a field hospital there, and their commissar said he would shoot me if I refused.”

“I won’t let them take my Lady,” Elena whispered to Zhora.

The Lady had only been built three years earlier and was fitted with a diesel engine instead of a steam one, which made her one of the fastest boats on the Volga.

While Nina questioned Sablin about the details, Zhora and Elena quietly slipped out of the house. They went through the bushes down to the Oka Waterfront to the house of Postromkin, a pilot who had once worked for Elena’s father.

The dark street was empty. Zhora and Elena darted through the gate and knocked at the window.

“Who’s there?” asked an alarmed male voice.

“Postromkin, it’s me!” Elena whispered. “Let us in.”

The pilot’s family lived in a small two-bedroom apartment.

“Come into the kitchen,” Postromkin said, giving Zhora the oil lamp. “My family is sleeping, so try not to make too much noise.”

They sat down at a table that had been scored with deep knife cuts.

“What’s happened?” asked Postromkin. He was wearing nothing but a pair of drawers and a small copper cross that gleamed in the thick hair on his chest. Confronted with his fat, half-naked body, Elena was so embarrassed that she didn’t know where to look.

Zhora told him what he had just found out from Dr. Sablin.

“I know,” Postromkin said gloomily. “The Bolsheviks have mobilized everyone—from the captains and chief engineers to the dock hands. I’ve been called up too.”

Elena gasped. “So, will you go?”

“They said they’d shoot my wife if I didn’t.”

“We must burn the Lady,” Zhora said firmly. “Where is she?”

“Not far from here. Right next to the cabstand.”

“Is there anyone on guard?”

“What do you think? Of course, there is.”

Zhora fell silent, thinking.

“We need a rowing boat and some paraffin,” he said finally. “We’ll approach the Lady from the water. That way it will be easier to pass unnoticed.”

Postromkin stared at him thunderstruck. “Are you completely crazy?”

Elena took Zhora’s hand and squeezed it. “Postromkin, we’ll do everything ourselves. Please just give us a little help!”

He left the kitchen and returned several minutes later, dressed to go out. “Stay here. I’ll be back soon.”

He was away for more than an hour.

“Do you think we can trust him?” asked Zhora.

Elena raised an eyebrow. “When he and my father were young, they used to be barge haulers pulling boats upstream. When people work as hard as that in a team, they become like brothers. It’s impossible to survive otherwise.”

Zhora put his arms around Elena, kissed her soft hair, and whispered in her ear:

Elena laughed but stopped suddenly, seeing an old woman barefoot in her nightgown in the doorway.

“You’re nothing but children!” she lamented. “My husband has run off to the Cheka. He’s going to turn you in. You need to get out of here now!”