Russian Treasures

19. THE NIZHNY NOVGOROD FAIR

Even from a distance, Klim could see that Nizhny Novgorod was in a bad way. Its buildings looked as though they had sunk into the ground, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere. Even the river bank was deserted.

One of the deck hands told Klim that the Bolsheviks had tried to organize a “socialist trading center” there in the hope that the peasants would exchange their crops for industrial products. But the peasants had refused to bring food into the city for fear of being robbed by the policemen or bandits who were virtually indistinguishable from each other. In any case, there were no industrial goods for exchange since all of the factories were at a standstill.

The fair’s pavilions had been turned into barracks for troops arriving in Nizhny Novgorod for mobilization. There had been a general breakdown in discipline with soldiers going absent without leave, drinking, and picking up prostitutes, and a number of fires had broken out. Soon after this, the Regional Executive Committee had moved the soldiers out of harm’s way and quartered them in the city.

Then the locals had moved in and stripped the fair down to its bones. Many of the houses in the surrounding villages now boasted metal roofs made from shop signs emblazoned with surreal expressions such as “Crystalware” and “Poultry and Wildfowl.”

The Death to the Bourgeoisie docked at the pier. A group of young Soviet officers in clean new military tunics and smart boots greeted them at the gangway.

“All passengers must present their identification cards,” they shouted. “As of the twenty-second of August, anyone entering or leaving Nizhny Novgorod must have a pass.”

Nobody paid any attention to them.

“Go on then,” said the captain angrily. “I’ve got five hundred wounded and sick people on board. Why don’t you arrest them all? But you’ll have to carry all those who can’t walk by themselves.”

As Nina and Klim walked onto Safronovskaya Square, a woman wearing a muslin mask to protect against disease ran up to them.

“Do you have any flour?” she asked.

Klim shook his head.

“I’ll give you twenty-two rubles for a pound,” said the woman, looking at the heavy bundle in his hands.

Nina gasped. “How much?”

“Fine—” the woman corrected herself hurriedly. “Thirty then.”

The Bolsheviks had decked the square with red flags to celebrate the capture of Kazan. The cab drivers had vanished. Street children were now selling matches not by the box but singly.

While the nurses were loading their patients onto carts, Nina and Klim walked onto Rozhdestvenskaya Street and boarded a half-empty tram.

The city was a mass of blue and gold with the leaves of the trees glistering against the clear, brilliant sky, but there were very few passers-by. Everyone they met was wearing a mask.

“We should do the same,” Nina whispered. “Then nobody will know who we are.” She took out her handkerchief and began to tear it into pieces.

Klim nodded. Once people’s faces are covered, he thought, they are no longer people. They become ghosts.

All of the houses in Ilinskaya Street had been hung with new signs: “Headquarters of the Commander of the Red Volga Flotilla,” “Maritime Investigative Commission,” “Red Army Supply Office,” and so on. The Rogovs’ house had now become the “Board of the Nizhny Novgorod Naval Dockyard.” The marble bears were gone, and the blunt muzzle of a machine gun protruded from the open window on the second floor.

Klim felt as though he had been witness to a rape. He told Nina to wait for him by the newspaper stand.

“You look after the satyr. I’ll try and find out what’s going on.”

The front porch was boarded up, and Klim had to enter through the back door. Immediately, he was hit by the smell peculiar to all government offices: a mixture of ink, molten sealing wax, and wet felt boots.

The corridor was empty. In the kitchen, Klim found five hunched figures sitting over desks, wearing masks.

“Do you know where I can find Dr. Sablin?” Klim asked. “He was at the front, but he got sick and was sent home.”

“Are you here on official business?” one of the figures asked. “No? Then go away and don’t bother us.”

Perhaps Sablin is dead, Klim thought. If so, where can we go? How can we find Zhora and the others?

As he went back outside, he saw Nina sitting on the ground with her face buried in her hands, sobbing.

He ran up to her. “What is it?”

She pointed to a newspaper stuck up on a display stand. The headline on the front page read, “Rightful Vengeance for the Attempt on Lenin’s Life,” followed by a list of murdered hostages. On the list, printed alongside the names of the former city governor, merchants, officials, Tsarist army officers, and priests, were the names of Elena, her parents, Zhora, and Fomin.

Klim stared at Nina, who sat crushed with grief. Then he turned to read the newspaper again.

“We have to go,” Klim urged Nina. “We can’t stay here.”

She nodded and tried to gather the strength to get to her feet, but her body wouldn’t obey her. Eventually, Klim helped her up and clasped her tightly to him.

“I have no one left but you,” Nina sobbed.

We should never have come back to Nizhny Novgorod, Klim thought, holding the satyr tightly. We have no friends or allies here.

There were plenty of Nina’s old acquaintances who would have liked nothing better than to see her arrested. As for the others—who could Klim trust? He was unlikely to find anyone willing to risk their lives for a relative of a counter-revolutionary.

They had to find a place for the night before it got dark. If they were on the street after the nine o’clock curfew, they could end up being arrested or shot, depending on the revolutionary convictions of the patrol that stopped them.

Before the revolution, homeowners had advertised rooms for rent in the windows of their houses, but now, that private ownership was forbidden, all such notices had disappeared. It was futile to try and ask around—people shied away from strangers, fearful that they might be carrying disease or even that they might be Cheka spies.

“We’ll have to go to the fair,” Klim said to Nina. “I hope we’ll find something there.”

The Nizhny Novgorod Fair used to be the heart of the city with its streets, shopping malls, churches, theaters, and underground galleries. Now, it lay in ruins with all of its windows broken and its roofs dismantled. Ashes and brittle, dry leaves blew around the deserted streets.

Klim felt as though his childhood fantasy had come true.

“What would happen,” he had asked his mother as a child, “if everybody disappeared and there was no one left except you and me?”

A stray dog passed with its head drooping, not even stopping to look up at them. A startled mob of crows flew up from the dry basin of the fountain in front of the Fair House.

Klim took Nina to the Figner Theater. As a child, he used to come here to watch almost every show. Every single pane of glass in the building had been broken, and the wide stairs were covered with debris.

Klim opened the door to the auditorium. Columns of light came in through holes in the ceiling, full of circling specks of dust. The chairs had gone, and a huge broken chandelier lay in a heap on the floor. All that remained of the theater’s former opulence was a crimson curtain hanging so high above the stage that the looters had been unable to reach it.

“Let’s take up residence in the royal box,” Klim said. “We might be homeless, but we can at least try to live in style.”

Nina nodded silently.

After they had shared the last of the bread they had brought from the boat, Klim went backstage, fiddled with the levers and cables, and managed to lower the dusty bullet-ridden curtain.

“My friends and I used to hang out with the stagehands when we were little boys,” said Klim. “We’d bring them beer and dried salted fish, and they’d let us watch the show for free.”

He made a bed out of the curtain, laid Nina in it, and lay down beside her.

“You go to sleep. We’ll think of something tomorrow.”

She closed her eyes. “When I was a little girl, I read Dracula by Bram Stoker, and I told Zhora the story. He made up a special prayer. ‘Dear Lord, have mercy on my parents, on Nina, on me, and on all Christians. Let me be a better person and deliver us from the bloodsuckers.’ I told him that the bloodsuckers didn’t exist and would never come to Russia, so he stopped saying the prayer. And now the bloodsuckers have killed him and drained the life out of the rest of us.”

Klim felt hopeless. How could he comfort her? What could he do to try to heal this new wound?

Thankfully, Nina fell asleep quickly. She was exhausted and did not even have the strength for tears.

The silence was so intense that Klim felt he had gone deaf. The fair was normally a noisy place with loud, bustling crowds, orchestras, and shopkeepers praising their wares—lambskins, apricots, and rice, which they called “Saracen grain.”

Klim sank into fitful, sun-filled dreams, waking up with a start to total darkness and a sepulchral silence.

Life in the city had become impossible, yet Klim and Nina couldn’t leave without documents. And soon winter would set in. They might be able to hide from the Cheka, but there would be no way of evading the cold.

The following day, Klim and Nina went to the train station to find out if there were any railroad tickets for sale, although they had no idea where they might go. Where did the land of the Soviets begin and end? What was going on in the rest of the world? All the international headlines on the newsstands were about strikes and anti-government demonstrations. “World revolution is coming!” they claimed.

As Klim had feared, it proved impossible to buy a rail ticket without a permit from the Cheka.

He spoke to the bagmen and found that it was still possible to get into one of the boxcars without a ticket if you were quick and cunning. But typhoid spread by lice was rife inside the heated boxcars. The bugs would crawl from one person to another, and all of the train’s passengers might end up getting infected. The only safe way to travel was in the cars reserved for the Bolshevik officials.

Had Klim been alone, he would have tried jumping on a train, but he didn’t want to put Nina at risk. If there was a crush to get on, her stitches might burst open, and there would be no one to provide her with medical care.

They decided to cut up the satyr and sell the pieces of silver one by one to make it last. Klim spent all of the money he had earned from his propaganda work on a hacksaw, cut off the satyr’s beard, and sold it to a jeweler trading in precious metals (evidently under the patronage either of the police or the Cheka).

They had to sort out a place to live and find a source of income urgently, but it was almost impossible to find a room to rent. Nina had no documents and, therefore, couldn’t get an official registration permit—and without this, she was liable to be arrested on the spot.

Nina was amazed at Klim’s ability to adapt to any circumstance. He found a rusty flatiron, took off the handle, and made it into a tiny hotplate that they could use to cook food by heating it from beneath by burning old theater posters and wood chips.

Klim had the vital ability to laugh at misfortune rather than complain about it. What did it matter if they had no spoons or forks? Real gauchos ate with their knives.

“If you eat with a fork,” Klim told Nina with a wink, “then you’ll need a plate. Before you know it, you’ll be wanting tables and chairs, and your problems will never end. You can’t carry all that with you when you’re out on the pampas. A gaucho should be as free as the wind.”

They made a tent out of the theater curtain—luckily, there were needles, thread, and scissors in Klim’s toiletry bag. One day, he found a potted palm tree in a bucket that somebody had thrown out, and he brought it back to the theater. Once they had cleaned up the bucket, they had something to carry water in, and they kept the palm tree for decoration.

Klim sat beneath it and told Nina stories about his adventures in faraway countries.

She liked to admire the fine shape of his hairline, which pleasingly circumscribed his high forehead. She liked the way his stubble grew too, forming handsome curves at his cheeks with a narrow strip under his lower lip.

“Kiss me,” Nina said.

Klim recoiled in feigned horror. “Don’t you know, ma’am, that kissing is a source of infection? I read that on a notice at the Babushkin Hospital.”

He kissed her anyway, and quickly becoming dizzy with passion, he held her tightly to him.

“Easy… easy… it’s too early now,” he whispered.

Reluctantly she obeyed, delighted that although she was thin and only wearing a faded, second-hand dress, Klim still found her desirable.

“Thank you,” she whispered—spasibo.

He laughed. “According to the new regulations, you should now say ‘merci’ instead of ‘spasibo’ because in old Russian, spasibo means ‘God save you,’ and it would appear there is no longer a God—at least not in this country.”

Klim didn’t allow Nina to leave the theater. The danger that she might run into a patrol was too great. Every now and then, military units marched along the bank of the Oka River a stone’s throw away from the theater. Besides, it was likely that criminals and street children were hiding in the ruins of the fair. Klim shuddered to think what they might do if they saw a woman out walking alone.

“I’ll see to everything,” Klim promised Nina. “Your job is to get better as soon as possible.”

But it was hard for Nina to spend all day by herself. Every morning, Klim covered his face with an improvised flu mask and went to look for food while Nina wandered around the theater or made up and performed her own plays on the stage. By turns, she pretended to be an unfortunate heroine and played the roles of her suitors and oppressors. Sometimes she imagined herself dancing the tango with Klim. Sometimes she shed bitter tears thinking of her family.

If someone had told her a year ago that soon she would be a homeless pauper living in a ruin, she would never have believed them. How long was this all going to last?

One day, Klim told Nina that he would have to be out all that night. “Trust me, sweetheart. It’s something I have to do. Please don’t ask me why.”

She panicked and flared up in anger. “Have you gone out of your mind, leaving me alone all night?” she shouted. “What if—”

He winced as though her words had physically wounded him.

“I’m sorry, but I have to go now. Be careful and take care of yourself.”

Nina had a terrible night. First, she sobbed, imagining that Klim would never come back and she would be left all alone. Then she remembered what she had said to him in her fit of anger. He’ll never forgive me, she thought. In a moment of weakness, she screamed and wailed like a desperate child, her cries echoing all around the theater. She stopped as suddenly as she had started, shocked at the sound of her own voice in the silence.

As he had promised, Klim came back in the morning, tired and smelling of tobacco smoke. He crawled into the tent and took Nina in his arms. The sun was shining through the old theater curtain and bathed everything inside with a reddish light.

Nina stroked Klim’s hair. “Where have you been? Why don’t you want to tell me? Are you mixed up in something bad?”

“I’ve brought us some bread,” he said without opening his eyes.

“So, you won’t tell me?”

Klim took a deep breath. “I’ve been gambling. I know how you feel about it, but we’ve got to treat it as if it’s a new job. I’m sorry, but I can’t think of any other way of surviving.”

Nina viewed gambling with horror as a kind of incurable disease. Her father had been an addictive gambler and quite capable of blowing the family’s entire savings in a single night, forcing Nina’s mother to borrow money to feed the children.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Nina said to Klim. Her heart sank at the thought that he might gamble away the money from the satyr at the card table.

Now, Klim slept during the day. Nina took his binoculars and went upstairs. From the top floor, she could look out over the grounds of the fair, the Oka River, and the opposite bank. In the distance, the military trucks would drive by, their sides daubed with propaganda slogans:

One day, Nina saw a banner demanding that the town’s citizens surrender their binoculars.

You won’t be getting these, thought Nina. She needed her binoculars to watch what was going on at her house on Crest Hill on the other side of the river.

Klim had tried to find out what had happened to Sofia Karlovna but without success. He had found out, however, that the Bolsheviks had converted Nina’s mansion into a telephone exchange and telegraph station. They had cut down the trees in the orchard and put up radio masts all around the house. Everything Nina had once had was now lost—her books, her paintings, and even a reminder of the beauty that had once surrounded her.

By mid-October, the satyr had lost half its head, but the money from the silver together with Klim’s occasional winnings was barely enough to buy food that was now being sold at outrageous prices. The nights became colder, but they had no stove and couldn’t make a fire in their tent. Their only tool was a hacksaw, so they couldn’t build a better shelter for themselves.

Nina crept around stealthily, talked in whispers, and imagined Cheka operatives lurking in every shadow. One night, she had a dream: it had snowed, and the Cheka had tracked Klim down by following his footprints. She woke up in a cold sweat.

I can’t live like this anymore, Nina thought. We have to do something. We have to change things.

But now she shrank instinctively from the thought of resistance. Memories of that hard blow to her stomach and of her brother being shot were fresh in her mind. Her instinct for self-preservation told her not to stick her neck out, to lay low, and to let no one know of her existence.

In any case, except for Klim, I have no one to live for anymore, thought Nina. Not even myself.