Russian Treasures

2. THE GENTLEWOMAN

Klim stopped going to theaters and restaurants and now spent all his time at his bank and lawyer’s office. His father had left him a little under three hundred thousand rubles, and to tie up his affairs in Nizhny Novgorod, Klim needed to sell his securities, exchange his rubles for foreign currency, renew his leasing contracts, and arrange for payments to be wired straight to Buenos Aires.

When Klim got home at night, he would go to the servants’ quarters to ask who had visited Lubochka during the day. He hoped against hope that Nina might have tried to make contact with him—after all, she needed to sort out the money she owed him. But Nina never came.

Occasionally, Klim took out the promissory note written by her husband and examined it. Maybe he should go and ask her how she was planning to pay? It was a large sum, and the due date was close.

He found out where she lived, and several times he passed by Nina’s house at Crest Hill and peered through the stucco-framed windows. He returned none the wiser, fretful and full of self-doubt—a sensation that was quite unusual for him.

How had this young woman managed to get under his skin in this way? Klim knew nothing about her. One emotion would follow another: first rapture, then morose bewilderment, and then outpourings of wounded self-esteem. Can it really be that she doesn’t care about me at all?

At night, vivid fantasies kept him awake. He imagined Nina in the same glittering dark blue dress with the low neckline that attracted his lascivious gaze. The more Klim put things off, the less confident he became of having any success. And in any case, he asked himself, what possible success could he be thinking of? He would be leaving soon, and Nina would remain in Nizhny Novgorod. He should stop tormenting himself and leave it to the lawyers to deal with Nina’s promissory note.

Klim was in his father’s office, flipping through the documents filed in the binder. A fly buzzed against the window. The church bells called the local parishioners to mass.

“You have a visitor,” said Marisha, knocking at the door. She gave Klim a business card that read “Countess Odintzova.”

All thoughts about bonds and promissory notes flew out of Klim’s head.

“Please, let her in,” he said, dropping the binder into the drawer.

However, it was not Nina who entered the office but a burly elderly lady in a black lace dress.

“Please call me Sofia Karlovna,” she said, offering Klim her hand.

He shook it, trying not to reveal his disappointment, and then collected himself. This isn’t all bad, he thought. This lady must be a relative of Nina’s, and she might provide me with some very valuable information.

Sofia Karlovna sank into the armchair and fixed her blue eyes on Klim for what seemed a long time.

“You inherited a promissory note signed by my son,” she said finally, “but my daughter-in-law, who is responsible for the payment now, has got herself into a very bad situation.”

“What’s happened?” asked Klim, alarmed.

Sofia Karlovna took a deep breath. “Since the start of the war, we have been impoverished. Our workers and horses were commandeered by the army, and there is nobody to work our fields. My daughter-in-law met the chairman of the city’s Provisions Committee, and he convinced her that she should restore our old flax spinning mill in Osinki.”

Klim remembered the man who had accompanied Nina out of the restaurant and the deep fold in the nape of his neck like the slot in a piggy bank.

“So, what can I do for you?” Klim asked.

“Nina does not have the cash,” said Sofia Karlovna, “and she wants to ask you to delay the repayment of her loan. Mr. Fomin went to the capital to get her a state contract for tarpaulin goods for the army, and Nina hopes that she’ll soon be able to sort things out.”

“What kind of deferment is she looking for?” Klim asked gloomily.

“Oh no!” Sofia Karlovna exclaimed. “You’ve misunderstood me. I want you to take Nina’s mill.”

Klim looked at her in bewilderment. “I need liquidity and cash, not a mill around my neck.”

“If you defer her loan payment and leave for Argentina, you can forget about ever getting your money back. I know exactly what Fomin is after. He is hoping to persuade Nina to marry him in order to get his hands on the mill and the lucrative contracts it is set to sign. What are you going to do if he refuses to pay you? Send him a threatening letter?”

“What will happen to your daughter-in-law if I take over her mill?”

“You will be saving her from making a terrible mistake. Mr. Fomin is a most unsuitable match! He has Nina completely hoodwinked, and she doesn’t have the sense to figure out what he’s really like. As soon as Mr. Fomin finds out that she is penniless, he will drop her immediately. The heartless barbarian clearly doesn’t care a fig about our house, library, or Nina. For him, they are all just unnecessary expenses.”

Sofia Karlovna was silent for a while.

“I am terrified that I will end up on the street. If Nina marries Mr. Fomin, there’s no way we’d ever be able to live together. Mr. Rogov, please, go to Osinki and talk to Nina. Mr. Fomin is currently in Petrograd, so there’ll be no one to oppose you.”

The deck of the little steamboat was crowded with monks in their dark robes, peasant women with sacks, and carpenters with saws wrapped in old rags. Some were dozing while others were talking to their fellow travelers.

You and your wild schemes! Klim thought to himself. Here he was sailing upriver on a rust-bucket steamer, guarding his trunk against thieves—fretting, wondering, and cursing himself for his presumption and ridiculous daydreams.

What if Nina was perfectly happy with Fomin? What if Sofia Karlovna had been overexaggerating the whole situation? She was clearly much more worried about her own future than Nina’s.

But here Klim was, breathing in the steamer’s acrid smoke and cinders, sweating in the roasting heat, and pulling his hat down low over his forehead so that nobody would see the anxiety in his eyes.

They sailed under the clear vault of the sky between thickly forested river banks. Stray, blackened, semi-submerged logs that had been left behind after the timber harvest had been floated downstream peered out of the water like prehistoric animals. A heron stood hunched on the sandbank, its reflection zigzagging across the water.

“The next stop is Osinki, sir,” said a sailor pointing toward an old manor house on the top of a nearby hill.

The deckhands moored the steamboat to a half-rotten pontoon, and the wave from under its paddle wheel almost capsized a rowboat carrying two girls wearing wide-brimmed hats.

The only passengers to get off at Osinki were Klim and a blond boy of about sixteen called Zhora Kupin. All the way from Nizhny Novgorod, he had entertained his fellow travelers with his poems and stories about his father who was a tailor, famous throughout the entire Nizhny Novgorod Fair.

The deckhands pulled the gangway back on board, and the steamer continued its way upriver.

It was hot and quiet; the breeze stirred the leaves of the hundred-year-old trees, and the dragonflies hovered over the water lilies.

Shielding his eyes from the sun, Klim looked up at the manor house. It seemed very respectable from a distance, but on closer inspection, its peeling light blue paint and cracked stucco betrayed its owners’ straitened circumstances.

Klim picked up his trunk and walked up the wooden stairs.

“Elena, I’m back!” he heard Zhora’s voice and stopped.

Should I ask him how to find Countess Odintzova? Klim thought. Zhora had mentioned that he knew everybody in Osinki.

Klim turned back to the shore and froze. Nina, barefoot, her dress soaked to the knee, was wading out from the boat to the moss-covered pontoon. While she held the stern steady, Zhora and Elena carried a large votive candle stand out of the boat. The three of them hauled it up to the sandy beach.

“Arkhip sneaked into our chapel last night,” Nina said, breathing heavily, “and took everything he could carry. I went straight over to his hut to sort him out, and Elena went with me.”

“I wouldn’t let you go on your own,” said her friend, a tall girl with two thick braids of fair hair that fell down to her waist.

Nina bent down to grasp the candle stand again, and a small revolver fell out from the pocket of her skirt.

“Where did you get that?” Zhora asked in amazement.

“It’s my husband’s. Do you think Arkhip would have just let me take the family candle stand back if I had turned up empty-handed?” She put the revolver back in her pocket. “Let’s go. This thing must weigh at least one hundred pounds… I don’t know how we’ll manage to get it up the hill.”

Nina looked up and met Klim’s gaze.

“Have you come to see me?” she asked, her face turning pale.

“I know Klim,” Zhora exclaimed. “We met on the steamer. Mr. Rogov, let me introduce my sister Nina and my bride Elena.”

Klim put his trunk on the ground and raised his hat. “Nice to meet you.”

He couldn’t keep his eyes off Nina’s crestfallen face. If she was Zhora’s sister, then her father was a tailor. Hardly the lineage of a bona fide countess! Klim could now clearly see why there was little love lost between Sofia Karlovna and her daughter-in-law.

An explosion roared out from the opposite side of the river, and a column of water shot up into the air. Elena and Zhora jumped back in fright.

“Honestly, you’re like a couple of babies, the pair of you,” Nina grumbled. “It’s only deserters stunning fish with grenades they’ve brought back from the front.”

“Nothing to write home about,” Klim said in wry amusement.

“There’s always something exploding around here,” Nina shrugged.

Like Lubochka, Nina had become so used to anarchy and war that the sound of a grenade exploding was nothing out of the ordinary.

Klim picked up the candle stand. “Let me carry it up for you,” he said. “Zhora, would you mind taking my trunk?”

Nina asked Klim to put the candle stand in the empty stillroom that was lit by the lengthening sun. Zhora and Elena went to the kitchen to give orders regarding dinner and left Klim and Nina alone.

“I think you’d be better off returning to the city,” Klim told her. “It’ll be safer there.”

“Country or city—it makes little difference these days,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

The evening sunlight slanted through the window, leaving Nina’s face in shadow but illuminating her low-necked dress.

She was an impossible and unthinkable mélange of opposites: her girlish charm and hard-nosed feistiness, her noble title and her lowly tailor’s origins, not to mention her less than salubrious admirer from the Provisions Committee.

Nina was also observing Klim, distractedly twirling her engagement ring, which was too big for her finger. It was obviously very expensive, most likely an heirloom, and it didn’t fit her very well.

“How did you know that I was here?” she asked.

“Sofia Karlovna wanted me to take control of your mill—” Klim began, but Nina interrupted him.

“Sofia Karlovna has no idea where our money comes from. How are we going to live if you take over the mill?”

“She said that Mr. Fomin—”

“He’s the only one here who can help me. He knows all about accounting and engineering, the machines, the procurement…. If it weren’t for him, we would have been out of business long ago.”

She dropped her ring and bent down to pick it up, and her revolver fell out of her pocket again. She squatted down and looked up at Klim.

“Can we write you a new promissory note? I understand you need the money, but I have no way of paying you back until spring. If you want, I can give you my furniture and silverware as an additional deposit. In March—no, let’s say May—I’ll be able to send you the money.”

Frightened and determined, Nina was ready to fight the creditor who threatened her business plans as fiercely as she had fought with the thieves who threatened her property. Klim already knew that he would never have the heart to take her mill away from her.

“We can sign the new papers as soon as you get back to Nizhny Novgorod,” he relented.

“That’s wonderful!” Nina exclaimed and then fell silent, embarrassed. “But I can’t go just now.”

“Why?”

“I have business here.”

Still with the revolver in her hand, Nina drew herself up to her full height and began to explain hastily that the tarpaulin production process was extremely complex and she needed to keep an eye on it.

“Perhaps you’d like to stay with us?” she asked. “And then we can go to the city together to sign the papers. I’m afraid that if you go back to your lawyers on your own, you’ll have a change of heart.”

Klim sighed but, unable to resist her, laughed. “You end up doing a lot of crazy things when someone is pointing a gun at you, you know.”

“It’s not loaded anyway,” Nina said and put the revolver back in her pocket.

Klim continued to do nothing to settle his affairs and lived like a lazy schoolboy skipping classes. Initially, it was just a week, but that soon changed into two and then three. Nina always seemed to have something important to attend to at her mill, but Klim didn’t mind a jot. He informed Lubochka and his lawyers that he was in Osinki for his holidays and convinced himself that there was no way he could leave a damsel in distress all alone in the middle of nowhere surrounded by deserters and votive candle stand thieves.

Nina’s multifaceted nature fascinated him. For Zhora and Elena, she was the wise elder sister. When she talked to her foreman and vendors, she played the role of the defenseless and unlucky young lady, convincing them that it would be a sin to do anything that might harm her. However, if someone dared to encroach on her possessions or show a lack of respect, she would be transformed into a fury. On one occasion, before Klim and Zhora could raise a finger, she personally threw a drunken deserter down the porch and out of the house, telling him in no uncertain terms that she would “bust his head open” if he ever showed his face again.

She was always polite and hospitable to Klim and graciously accepted his well-meaning offerings—a hedgehog that he had brought home in his hat, some dark purple plums, or a string of perch from the river. But she always seemed to keep herself at a distance when she felt that he was trying to get too close. He couldn’t work out if this was because she was afraid of upsetting Mr. Fomin or whether a lingering affection for her dead husband still existed. Count Odintzov’s portraits littered the house, and she was constantly glancing at them in a sad reverie.

The villagers regarded Nina as a feisty businesswoman. Zhora told Klim that after her husband had died, she had sold off an oak wood on the estate to a timber merchant. The merchant had offered her five thousand rubles, and she had signed the contract on the spot. Much later, she had found out that it had been worth six times the price she had gotten for it. Now, she haggled over everything and made no concessions, not even to the nuns who came to buy currant leaves for their pickled cucumbers.

“We’re fast learners,” Zhora told Klim with pride. “By birthright, we shouldn’t have any of these privileges or a high level of education, but Nina has now earned herself a mill of her own, and I’m going to finish university, become a diplomat, and marry Elena Bagrova. She’s the daughter of a prominent merchant and the owner of a steamboat line. He said he wouldn’t have any objections.”

Every morning, they would all wander out to the village: Nina to the factory, Elena to the market, and Klim and Zhora as their bodyguards. Klim fashioned a bolas, an Argentinean hunting weapon, out of a couple stones and some rope and taught Zhora how to throw it like the gaucho cowboys of Argentina. Zhora soon learned how to knock a pair of old boots from the top of a log and promised Nina that if any deserter were to attack her, he would knock their boots off too.

Klim was surprised at the energy and passion that Nina invested in her small mill. It clearly wasn’t worth twenty-seven thousand rubles. The squat stone building contained two flax combing machines and eight spinners. In the dusty, noisy shop next door, soldiers’ wives wove tarpaulin while in the outbuildings, women cut and sewed mittens and rifle straps, their babies crawling around half-naked under their mothers’ feet.

Nina frowned at the sight of the dirty-faced, sickly children and promised to set up a kindergarten for her workers. But where was she going to find the money?

“My first priority is to replace the tension gear,” she told Klim as if justifying herself to his silent reproaches. “It keeps breaking the fiber.”

It seemed so strange to Klim to hear Nina talking knowledgeably with the foremen at the mill or bargaining with vendors over the vats for the retting solution. How could she combine such delicate femininity with such fierce strength and willpower?

Klim called her “my filigree girl”; to him, she was as strong as metal yet as delicate and fine as lace. She was mysterious, incomprehensible, and utterly adorable.

Sometimes, they would go out foraging for mushrooms in the forest, following unknown paths that were as dark as tunnels. The moss-covered earth was light and springy after the previous day’s rain, and the scent of the autumn leaves, mushrooms, and the nearby river permeated the air that blew in on the breeze.

Zhora and Elena forged on ahead, and Nina followed them in her felt hat and hunting jacket, an alder cone tangled in the braid of her hair. Wandering in a daze behind her, Klim dreamed of catching up with her, pulling her toward him, and kissing her full on the lips.

Nina glanced back at him mischievously. “I deliberately left you a very good mushroom on the side of the path back there. Didn’t you notice it?”

“I didn’t see a thing.”

“Great mushroom hunter you are,” she said, laughing.

They came back to the manor house—exhausted not so much by the walk as by all the intoxicating smells and sights of autumn. They sat together companionably on the sunlit terrace, Nina and Elena cleaning the mushrooms that stained their hands dark while Zhora and Klim threaded the caps and stalks onto thin switches to dry in the sun.

Sometimes Zhora would invent an excuse, and he and Elena would go off “on a very important errand.” Although it was clear that the true mission of their “errand” was to kiss in the gazebo at the far end of the garden.

Klim would stay behind with Nina, and these were the moments he enjoyed the most.

He minutely observed the light brown birthmark on her scalp right at the parting, the pattern of the veins on the back of her hand, and the topography of her dress with all its pleats, valleys, plains, and hills.

Nina asked Klim about his adventures, but not in the way that Lubochka and her friends did. They all wanted to hear about his romantic and heroic exploits, but Nina asked different sorts of questions: “What did you live on? How did you learn the languages? What was the most difficult thing you had to do?”

“The most difficult thing was to run across the roofs of Tehran after a thief who had stolen my only shirt,” Klim answered, jokingly. “If I hadn’t caught him, I’d have had to go to work wrapped in a prayer mat.”

“I’m being serious!” Nina protested.

So, Klim confided to her what had been the most difficult part of living abroad. “When you live in your own country, you are valued by your friends and relatives, your entire clan. But in a foreign land, you very soon realize that no one needs you. If you are an immigrant, you have to be a hundred times smarter and more ingenious to get people to notice you.”

“I feel like I’ve been an immigrant from birth,” Nina said, smiling. “But I’ve only ever been abroad once. My husband took me to Paris for our honeymoon.”

I don’t care if your husband is constantly on your mind, Klim thought. I don’t even mind about that Chairman of the Provisions Committee or whoever he is. Just as long as you’re by my side.

Klim was gripped by a sharp and unbearable feeling of impermanence. He might be allowed to spend the next day with Nina and perhaps the day after that, and then everything would be over.

Klim woke up early, but the house was already empty. He paced the dusty rooms and met Zhora dressed in a city-style suit in the entryway.

“Are you leaving?” Klim asked.

“Mr. Fomin sent a telegram,” Zhora said, excitedly. “He’s managed to get a state loan for us.”

Nina entered the house, a happy smile lighting up her face. “Thank goodness! Now, we’ll have the money, and I’ll be able to pay you back.”

She tried to walk past Klim, but he grabbed her hand—an unpardonable gesture. “We need to talk.”

She glanced at him in surprise but followed him to the billiard room with its huge semi-circular window and billiard table spread with yellowing newspapers.

Looking at her against the light in her mourning dress, Klim suppressed a painful shudder.

“Nina, come with me to Buenos Aires!” he burst out suddenly. “This place is only full of sad memories for you. There is nothing to keep you here in Russia.”

She frowned. “How could I go? I have my family and the mill.”

“Nina, listen to me—let Sofia Karlovna live in your house. I’ll give Zhora money—let him finish school and go to university. Don’t sell yourself to Fomin!”

Nina blushed.

“What do you mean by ‘selling myself?’ First, you see me as a housemaid and then as a woman for sale?”

“You’ve got me wrong—”

“I’ve got you quite right!”

Klim felt as if the blood had drained from his heart. “What will happen to you if you go back to your Mr. Fomin?” he asked, his voice broken.

“And what will happen to me in that Buenos Aires of yours? You yourself said how terrible it is to be a stranger in a strange land.”

“I’ll take care of everything. I have money and proper connections—”

“And what if we have a fight? What would I do then? Walk the streets?”

Nina left the room, brushing against one of the newspapers as she went out. It slipped from the table to the floor with a quiet rustle. Its headline read, “Offensive becomes bogged down, resulting in heavy losses.”

“Zhora, did you take the butter?” Klim heard Nina’s voice in the hall. “I left it on the kitchen windowsill.”

She spoke in a perfectly even and ordinary voice as if nothing had happened at all.