Russian Treasures

18. THE PROLETARIAN POETS

Zhora knew that whatever they did, he and Elena must not go home. Postromkin would have passed their names to the Cheka as “enemies of the people,” and now, it would only be a matter of minutes before they would run them to earth.

They hid behind the sheds at the power station until morning, and it was only then that Zhora realized that the Bolsheviks might arrest Nina and the old countess instead of them.

How could he have been so stupid? Like some intrepid freedom fighter, he had planned to set fire to the Lady, but all he had done was put his own family in danger.

Now, the Cheka will shut down the cooperative, Zhora thought, terrified. Mr. Fomin will arrive at Crest Hill and walk into an ambush.

Elena was thinking the same thing. “We have to warn Nina,” she said firmly.

They crept up to the house from the river side and almost ran straight into a patrol sweeping the thickets on the slope.

“Run!” Zhora whispered to Elena.

They wandered the city all day. They had nowhere to go. All of their friends were involved in the anti-Bolshevik conspiracy, and Zhora and Elena didn’t want to compromise them. One deft pull on the thread, and the Cheka could unravel the entire plot.

As they were walking past the Bubnov Hotel, Elena had an idea. “Why don’t we spend the night here?” she asked. “We can say we’re young proletarian poets from Moscow who have been attacked and had all their belongings stolen.”

The ancient former doorman who had now become the manager of the recently nationalized hotel told them to go to the Housing Department of the Regional Executive Committee. “You need a permit from them. Then we can talk.”

“But it’s already too late, and everything is closed,” Zhora said. “If you won’t let us in, we’ll just spend the night right here on the porch.”

“I’ll call the Cheka!” the old man retorted.

After much swearing and grumbling, he said he would let the proletarian poets in if they brought him a bottle of vodka. “Go to Nikolaevna. She sells tobacco at the corner. She always has booze for sale.”

Nikolaevna—an unkempt, toothless old woman—took Zhora into a dark doorway and handed him a large vial.

“Just the right strength,” she said. “Can you smell the alcohol? I’m not out to swindle you unlike some I could mention. There’re plenty of people these days who palm their customers off with water or worse.”

After he had taken Zhora’s bribe, the old man took a lantern and led Zhora and Elena up the dirty stairs to the second floor.

“As though I had nothing better to do than traipse around after the likes of you,” he grumbled. “Nowadays, guests don’t pay for their rooms anymore. They just bring me permits from the Housing Department. They don’t even tip me for service either. And folk don’t want to work for nothing, so the staff has all left. I’m the only one left here.”

The old man opened the door and put down the lantern. “Here you are.”

Elena looked in and gasped. Inside the dimly lit room, dozens of soldiers lay snoring side by side on rows of tightly packed trestle beds.

“But there’s no room for us in here,” Zhora protested.

“Aristocrats, are you?” the old man grinned. “Tell me, what’s wrong with sharing a room with the delegates of the Red Army Congress? They’re leaving tomorrow anyway. You can sleep right here,” he said pointing to a cramped couch with a curved back.

Somehow, Elena squeezed herself onto it while Zhora settled himself below her on a dirty rug on the floor.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Nina. Had she been arrested? Had she had a chance to escape?

Zhora didn’t sleep a wink. He spent all night composing epitaphs in his head.

The first one was for the hotel manager:

Another was for Zhora himself:

Where should he and Elena go in the morning? To Osinki without documents? Or should they try to find a place for themselves in Nizhny Novgorod? But how would they manage to get ahold of food? Zhora had only twenty rubles left.

Oh, what an idiot he was! He had tried to save the Lady and ended up destroying them all.

Zhora woke Elena at dawn, and they went downstairs. During the night, Zhora had decided that he would try to persuade the old man to take them on as staff in return for permission to live in some cubbyhole, but the hotel manager was nowhere to be seen.

They waited in the dim lobby, fingering the keys of a broken pianola in the corner.

“Oh, for goodness sake, where has the old fellow gotten to?” Zhora puffed impatiently, jumping up to sit sideways on the counter. “Elena… the old man…” he whispered, his eyes wide with horror.

Zhora jumped down onto the other side of the counter. The manager was lying on the floor under the leaf of the writing desk, which was why they hadn’t noticed him at first. Next to him lay an empty vial.

Elena looked behind the counter. “My goodness, what happened? Has he taken poison?”

“To think that I wrote an epitaph for him yesterday,” Zhora said in a trembling voice.

He could see what had happened at a single glance. The manager’s face was bluish, there were signs of bruising on his skin, and a sickly sweet odor could be smelled coming from his mouth.

Zhora had seen plenty of victims of methanol poisoning in the morgue of the Martynov Hospital. It was virtually indistinguishable from alcohol in appearance and smell, and cunning traders often peddled it to unsuspecting customers. Some drunks died immediately, some slowly in agony, and anyone who survived would be sure to go blind.

Thunderous footsteps echoed on the staircase. Zhora gave a start, but it was too late to run. The next minute, the lobby was swarming with Red Army delegates.

“We’re leaving,” one of them said and threw his key to Zhora. “I’ll be damned if I ever stay in your hotel again. It’s crawling with lice.”

“As if any of the other hotels are any better,” his friends laughed.

“I don’t give a damn. I want to check out.”

While Zhora stood staring dumbly at the soldiers, Elena opened the drawer, took out the inkwell, and began to write in the registry book.

“Your signature, please,” she said, handing the book to the delegates. “If you can’t write your name, then put a cross just here.”

She smiled brightly, as though she had no idea there was a dead man lying under the desk.

Finally, the delegates left.

“Zhora, we have to hide the old man,” Elena whispered, pointing to the back room.

They found the key on the counter, opened the door, and laid the old man’s body on the sagging couch.

“This must be where he lived,” Elena said, glancing at the spirit lamp on the table and the sheepskin coat hanging up behind a cloth curtain.

“We have to go,” said Zhora.

“Where?”

“I don’t know—anywhere. Just as far away from here as possible before they catch us.”

Elena shook her head. “If we become vagrants, we’ll be picked up by the Cheka in no time. Let’s stay here. If anyone asks who we are, we can tell them we’re employed to service the rooms.”

“What about the body?”

“We’ll just leave it somewhere. Do you think the police will care who the old man is and where he came from? There are lots of old people dying on the streets these days.”

Zhora covered his face with his hands. He couldn’t believe that any of this was actually happening.

They found a wheelbarrow in the shed. Zhora took the old man to the Peter and Paul Cemetery, and while nobody was looking, he dumped the body beside the fence.

The days passed, but nobody noticed the manager was missing. Zhora and Elena did his work, and it never occurred to any of the hotel guests that they were impostors. However, they had no money, so they began to sell off the old man’s belongings, from the sofa to the sheepskin coat.

Zhora was horrified by his descent to this brutal, cold-blooded pragmatism, but what could he do? Should he run into the street shouting that they had killed a man and were now selling off his possessions?

They were so hungry and desperate that they felt as though their bodies had been partially abandoned by their spirits. They had forfeited their right to live and had severed all ties to their families and friends. At night, Elena wept because she couldn’t even go to prison to take food to her parents.

But for the time being, nobody bothered them.

Only the lice made their lives unbearable.

After speaking to some women at the market, Zhora prepared a foul-smelling ointment to rub on his skin, and Elena began to wear a magic charm on her wrist. They tried everything they could from naphthalene to camphor oil and spent all of the money they got from selling the old man’s skirting boards in the battle with the lice. Both science and witchcraft proved powerless.

Zhora wrote a poem and submitted it to the local newspaper.

The editor bought Zhora’s poem but rewrote the first line as “It seems the Whites have now connived.”

Zhora and Elena split the money and went to the public bathhouse.

The dark, steamy room smelled of soap and soaked birch switches. Naked, swearing men fought for a place beside the hot tap. Zhora gazed horrified at their swollen feet and scrofulous backs raked with scratch marks.

Then he saw Fomin’s bearded face looming out of the steam.

“Just look who it is!” Fomin roared. “I thought you’d left the city long ago.”

Zhora was beside himself with joy. Fomin told him that Nina had managed to escape. The neighbors had heard that the Cheka men had been furious about it, but nobody knew what had happened to the old countess.

“The Bolsheviks have nationalized our mill,” Fomin said as he soaked and wrung out a back-scrubber made from a piece of bast fiber. “I can’t go to Osinki now,” he added in a quiet voice. “I don’t know how my workers are coping.”

“Where are you living then?” asked Zhora.

“At Mitya’s.”

At that moment, the door swung open. A crowd of uniformed soldiers was standing on the threshold.

“There he is!” shouted one of the men, pointing at Fomin.

The soldiers took them outside in their underclothes without allowing them to get dressed. People queuing at the ticket box stared at them nervously.

Elena ran out of the bathhouse with her face flushed and her wet hair hanging down her back. She dashed over to the Cheka truck. “Wait!” she cried.

“Take this one as well,” a Cheka officer with a hooked nose ordered.

The soldiers pushed Elena and Zhora into the back of the truck, open to the heat of the blazing sun.

“What have you done?” Zhora shouted at Elena. “Why did you have to give yourself away?”

She buried her face in his shoulder. “If you’re going, I’m going with you.”

Zhora had shown his naivety again. When he had put his arms around Elena, he had shown the Cheka officers exactly where to find the chink in his armor. When he refused to identify himself or to testify against Fomin, who was accused of illegal trade and counter-revolutionary activities, the guards brought the weeping Elena into the interrogation room.

“So, this is your fiancée, is it?” the investigator sneered. “Then, Mr. No-Name, let us start from the beginning. What’s your name, and what exactly is your relationship with Fomin?”

The investigator stepped up to Elena and hit her hard in the face. Zhora rushed at him, but the guards held him back, pinning him by the arms.

“Have you had enough?” the investigator asked in a quiet voice. “Or do you want to see some more?”

He aimed another blow at Elena.

“Don’t!” yelped Zhora. “I’ll tell you whatever you want! Don’t touch her—please!”

Afterward, he couldn’t remember what he had said. They kept banging his head against the wall and the windowsill until he saw stars and felt as though he were about to black out.

“Shoot him,” the investigator said, and the guards dragged Zhora into the courtyard, leaving Elena in the room.

There were about twenty prisoners in the backyard. Zhora stood frozen, staring blankly at them. His throat was swollen from crying, his twisted joints ached, and his knees shook.

He barely recognized Fomin sitting against the wall with his face and beard a bloody mess.

“Come here, kid,” he called.

Zhora approached, sat down, and rested his head against the cold stones of the wall.

What are they doing to Elena?

“We weren’t very good conspirators, it seems,” Fomin said. He spoke with a thick lisp as he had had his teeth knocked out during interrogation. “I suppose we did what we could.”

In a state of near delirium, Zhora heard one guard say to another that for several days, the Cheka had been carrying out mass arrests in the city. Somebody had noticed that the commander of the garrison had been sending almost all his soldiers to distant villages as a preventative measure to control rebels, and almost none had been left in Nizhny Novgorod. It had looked suspicious, and it turned out that the commander had actually been a White underground leader. He had named several accomplices under torture, and three days before the rebellion had been due to happen, it had been foiled.

The sun hung motionless over the tops of the apple trees in what had once been the merchant’s garden.

Is this it? Zhora thought in a daze. Are they really going to kill us? He covered his face with his hands and wept.

“There, there…” Fomin whispered and stroked his hair. But Zhora sobbed hopelessly, the sound of Elena’s desperate scream still reverberating in his head.

The guards kept bringing new prisoners into the yard, all of them mauled and torn, near hysterical, and utterly broken. But Elena wasn’t among them.

Whispers went through the crowd of prisoners like the wind in the dry grass.

“The Allies have promised to stand up for us. The Red Cross won’t allow such an outrage—”

“I heard of a case where they sentenced a colonel to death but forgot to shoot him—”

At sunset, the guards brought Zhora and several other prisoners to the edge of the Pochaina Ravine. Instead, of a verdict, a Cheka man read them an article from a newspaper:

The last thing Zhora saw before he was shot was two guards dragging along the body of a girl with long, blond hair. They took her to the mass grave that had been prepared for the rest of the prisoners and threw her in.