Russian Treasures

20. LUCK OF THE DRAW

The underground gambling den, where card players and crooks of every stripe would meet to try their luck or ply their trade, was at the Lukin Tavern next to Kunavino Market. Klim entered the semi-dark room full of drunk people roaring with laughter and found himself a place at the bar.

The waiters hauled up buckets of raw vodka from the basement, and the punters drank it with soaked dried peas and bread sprinkled with salt. Underage prostitutes with hungry eyes did their best to lure crippled bagmen. War invalids always had money because they were allowed to carry more baggage than others.

A pawnbroker sitting next to Klim complained to the chief of police that the cold weather was coming, but the authorities weren’t allowing citizens to stock up on firewood. In return, the chief of police complained about the sailors of the Red Volga Flotilla, who had moved into their winter quarters in Nizhny Novgorod and were raising hell.

“Don’t issue them with warm overcoats,” the pawnbroker advised. “Then they’ll stay quiet until spring.”

The police chief nodded. A moment later, he showed his new friend a handful of ladies’ rings under the table. “How much will you give me for these?”

Klim recognized the jeweler who had bought pieces of silver from him. The man put on his dark glasses and gestured to Klim, inviting him to take a seat at his table.

“Ladies and gentlemen, let us start the game,” he pronounced.

He was playing alongside a blue-eyed woman with a yellowing ermine flung over her bony shoulders. Klim was paired up with a red-faced army man whom everybody addressed by his patronymic, Petrovich. The man held a briefcase in his lap, a sign of state authority. Apparently, he was some kind of a local bigwig.

Klim quickly realized that the jeweler and his blue-eyed girlfriend were cardsharps. They might play into his and Petrovich’s hand for a while, but in the long run, they always won. Klim’s red-faced partner cursed under his breath and chain-smoked.

The great Don Fernando, the chief gambler of the Shanghai underworld, had taught Klim that with a few exceptions, all cardsharps use three basic strategies:

Card tricks, when a cheat pulls a card from out of his sleeve.

Signaling, when a partner or a specially placed spy passes information to the cheat about his opponents’ cards using secret signs.

Marked cards, when cheats would make tiny marks on the cards with a piece of graphite hidden under a fingernail or with a needle.

But no matter how hard Klim tried, he was unable to figure out how the sharpers were managing to swindle him and Petrovich.

The jeweler had begun to shuffle the deck once again when suddenly, the electricity went out.

“I need light!” he shouted. “Quick! Bring me some candles!”

His girlfriend lit a match, and Klim noticed that the jeweler covered the deck with his hand.

Finally, a servant brought in a large candelabra. Klim squinted at the matchbox with its clumsy printed cover. It was crude work, probably made in a basement in the Millionka district.

“Could I have a few matches?” asked Klim.

Just as he had thought, the matches were tipped with phosphorus—a method that had been out of use in Europe and America for at least twenty years.

Well, gentlemen, thought Klim. You’re about to see a magic trick.

He went to the lavatory, sprinkled the lining of his pocket with water, and put the matches in it. Then he returned to the card table.

Soon, the faces of both the jeweler and his girlfriend had turned sour.

“Let’s tally up,” grumbled the jeweler, taking his dark glasses off.

Klim took his winnings and went outside. The street was full of drunkards loitering and singing dirty songs, ignoring the curfew.

“Wait!” Petrovich called, running to catching up with Klim. “How did you do it?” His face looked strained in the moonlight.

“Our opponents were playing with marked cards,” Klim said quietly.

“Surely not!”

“They were using phosphorus. It’s how people make the mysterious symbols that appear on the walls of churches at nighttime. Phosphorous glows in the dark, so as long as the light was on, only someone wearing dark glasses could see the signs. That’s why our cardsharp panicked when the power went off.”

Klim explained to Petrovich that once he had gotten wise to the ruse, he had put the wet matches in his pocket and dipped into it repeatedly to touch the matches and leave smears of phosphorous all over the deck. Soon, the jeweler could no longer see his marks and had to give up.

“Why didn’t you expose the rotten scoundrels?” Petrovich asked.

“At the moment, I’m more interested in money than justice.”

“And how did you manage to win anyway? Were you cheating too?”

Klim shook his head. “If you want to cheat, you have to be well-prepared. I didn’t have time today.”

“I say, will you teach me how to play cards?”

“If you pay me, I will.”

The next evening, Klim was told not to try to be smart. If he moved in on other people’s targets, he would get his neck wrung. Now, he had no choice but to play with occasional penniless visitors and from time to time with Petrovich. Klim’s new partner would stake his own money, keeping the winnings to himself, but giving Klim food in return for his instructions in gambling.

Petrovich treated Klim with wary curiosity.

“I see those casino people for what they are,” he said, looking at the other card players. “I come here to beat these bastards down, at least at cards, but I can’t figure you out. Are you a former bourgeois? You don’t look like one.” He eyed Klim’s frayed outfit doubtfully. “The devil only knows who you are. But one thing’s for sure—you’re a cheat and a son of a bitch.”

Petrovich was a fanatic of the first water who believed absolutely in the infallibility of the Bolshevik Party. He was completely disinterested in money. When he had been younger, he had never had a penny to his name, and now, everything came his way without any effort from him because of his position. He toiled away morning and night, taking everything on himself, jumpy and crotchety, yelling at his subordinates, forgetting to eat, and chain-smoking lethally strong, hand-rolled cigarettes. He was a man equally capable of signing a death sentence and giving away all of his possessions to the poor.

Petrovich never spoke of worldly matters. He always steered the conversation around to his favorite subject: preaching Bolshevik ideology even when he was sitting at the card table.

“The revolution was a historical necessity,” he said. “The vast majority of the population lived in poverty with neither the right nor the ability to alleviate their fate. There, take that! King of clubs. The Tsarist police arrested the mechanic from our factory shop. Why? His only fault was that he gave shelter to revolutionaries who had escaped from exile in Siberia. He was locked up for his kindness.”

“Nothing much has changed since then,” the pawnbroker grinned. “Except that now the Cheka arrests those who give shelter to Whites.”

“And rightly so,” Petrovich barked. “Those who oppose the people deserve to be punished. What’s this—are you bidding misère now?”

Playing cards was Petrovich’s only weakness—and an understandable one. When everything inside a man is going at full blast, he needs to let off steam once in a while. Petrovich had asked many times if he could be sent to fight at the front, but his superiors didn’t allow him to go because there was no one who could replace him in his present civilian post.

Klim noted rather sadly the new signs of the times. The revolution had replaced one aristocracy with another, but the essence of Russian despotism remained unchanged. In the past, people could be threatened with the words, “Are you against the Tsar?” Now, they heard, “Are you against the people?” In reality, both phrases meant more or less the same: “Woe betide you if you encroach on the privileges of the ruling class.”

Things were much the same as they had been for centuries. The population still had no civil rights and retained a medieval sense of servility, believing that the people should serve the rulers and not the other way around, no matter what the propaganda posters proclaimed about the dominance of the working class.

One night, the Cheka raided the tavern. They took the card players out onto the street and began to load them onto a truck, but Petrovich stopped them taking Klim with them.

“This man is with me,” he told the Cheka officers.

When they left, Petrovich got into his car. “It’s a shame they’ve shut down the tavern,” he said. “But it’s for the best. These crooks aren’t our people.”

Klim said nothing. His last source of income was now gone.

“I’m leaving for Moscow,” Petrovich said. “I’ll be away for a month or so. Maybe we’ll meet again when I get back.”

Klim crawled out of the tent and shivered. God, how cold it was outside! Overnight, the theater had turned into an ice palace with its walls covered with frost.

Nina followed him out. “One of these days, we won’t wake up.”

There was a sound of chopping and splintering wood outside. They ran into the corridor and looked out the window. A group of Red Army soldiers cut down the wooden pillars holding up the awning of a shop on the other side of the road. Another brigade armed with saws and axes came from the riverbank.

“Get to work!” the brigade leader shouted through his megaphone. “The more wood you chop, the warmer your barracks will be in the winter. Smash the fair!”

The soldiers spread out around the square. Some began to tear the panels off boarded up windows, and others hacked at doors and broke down doorframes.

“We must go,” Klim whispered to Nina.

The only thing they managed to take with them were the remnants of the satyr. As they left by the back door of the theater, they found themselves facing a crowd of young people wearing red ribbons on their chests. Luckily, nobody paid much attention to Nina and Klim.

“Celebrate Revolution Day with shock work!” the leaders urged them on.

Wood chips flew in the air, and clouds of dust blotted out the weak November sun. Someone started singing the famous ditty “Dubinushka”—“The Cudgel”—and dozens of voices picked up the song.

A tramcar decorated with red flags stopped opposite the Fair House, and another group of workers swarmed onto the street—some with wheelbarrows and some with fire hooks.

“Down with the fair!” they yelled. “Destroy the cesspit of capitalism!”

“We’ll take it to pieces and burn it in our stoves!”

Klim and Nina got into the empty tramcar.

“Once, Comrade Trotsky let me have a look through his book on the history of the Roman Empire,” Klim said, trying to act tongue-in-cheek. “The book told the story of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. According to him, everything can be divided into two categories: things we can control and things we can’t control. A person should do his duty no matter what and not bother himself with things he has no power to change anyway. This is the only way to be truly free, whether in poverty or in wealth. What do you think? Perhaps we should have a go at being Stoics.”

Nina nodded slowly, looking straight ahead. She was shivering with cold.

They huddled close together, sharing the only overcoat they had between them. Klim clenched his teeth, seething with helpless rage at himself, his unhappy fate, and the city of his childhood now mutilated and rotten to the core.

Perhaps they should try to find Lubochka? Surely she wouldn’t give them away to the Cheka. But then, who knew? Anyway, he had no idea where she lived now.

If Petrovich hadn’t left Nizhny Novgorod, Klim would have gone to him for help. Now, even that path wasn’t open to him.

He looked sideways at Nina. Her lips were blue, and her worn dress was too thin to protect her from the bitter cold. If I don’t find us shelter tonight, Klim thought, she’ll come down with pneumonia or worse.

The tramcar rattled over the pontoon bridge. The gray river water had a gelid look, and mist swirled over the waves, a sure sign that the river would freeze over early.

Fresh flags had been put up on Rozhdestvenskaya Street, and there were huge portraits of Bolshevik leaders in the shop windows. The ancient Ivan Tower was decorated with fir branches and a huge banner: “Glory to the Great Anniversary of the Revolution!” It was hard to believe that a whole year had passed.

The tramcar went uphill to the kremlin and stopped. The driver told the passengers that a demonstration was about to begin, and the police had blocked off Blagoveschenskaya Square and Pokrovskaya Street.

“I wonder for whose benefit this demonstration is being staged?” Nina muttered. “For the benefit of the demonstrators themselves?”

“I think it’s for our benefit,” Klim said. “To scare us.”

“Then let’s go and watch the performance. It would be sad for the actors to put on a show without an audience.”

Klim frowned. “What if somebody recognizes you in the crowd?”

“I don’t care,” Nina said, looking into his eyes. “I can’t hide anymore.”

At twelve o’clock, a chorus of all the whistles, sirens, and signals of Nizhny Novgorod split the air. Marching bands struck up the “Internationale,” planes showered the city with propaganda leaflets, and a procession of delegates from the Regional Party Committee, the Executive Committee, the city Soviet, and other organizations started to make its way along Pokrovskaya Street.

To Klim, this Bolshevik parade looked very like a religious procession only with rifles instead of crosses and banners instead of icons.

“Those who oppose the grain monopoly are the enemies of the proletariat,” they chanted. “Kill the parasites! Distribute food according to class!”

Then came several carts that had been converted into floats. Klim noticed one with a papier-mâché spider under the sign that read “Capital.” Another carried a huge dustbin in which sat a group of gloomy actors in greasepaint decked out as a priest, a member of the Tsarist police, and the Tsar himself—this costume clearly from the opera Boris Godunov. In the third cart were several effigies of White officers tied to a pillory under a sign that read, “Death to the White Scoundrels.”

The crowd gazed at all of this splendor in silence like the citizens of a conquered country watching a parade staged by the conquerors. They could be sure that plenty of Cheka agents were nosing around among them just in case anyone was watching the Bolshevik demonstration without a properly joyful look on their faces.

The event ended with the ceremonial burning of the effigies of the White officers and the spider named Capital.

For some time now, Lubochka had been standing in the crowd observing Nina and Klim from a distance. Good Lord, she thought, how thin they are!

Not long ago, a cat had started to visit the canteen where Lubochka worked. The cat was so skinny that its ribs could be seen through his gray marbled fur. It was wild and nervous, and it had never tried to ingratiate itself with Lubochka or beg for food. It had just sat on the doorstep for hours looking at the meat on the chopping board.

The cook had chased the cat away, but it had been too weak to jump the fence and had fallen. The cook had picked it up by the scruff of its neck so that the cat had hung from her hand pitifully, its ears flattened, and its long body stretched out.

“We should kill this damn creature,” the cook had said, grabbing a piece of a brick. “One of these days, it’ll steal our meat.”

But Lubochka had snatched the cat away. She had taken it back to her house and fed it. Still, it refused to acknowledge her and hissed and raised its paw to her if she tried to pet it.

To Lubochka, her cousin Klim now looked like that feral cat. And Nina, clearly half-starved, was all but unrecognizable.

Should I go up to speak to them? Lubochka thought. But what if they shrank away from her? She too had changed but in quite a different way.

Lubochka now lived in her father’s house with all of her beloved men around her: Sablin, Osip, and Anton Emilievich.

Lubochka’s father had come back to Nizhny Novgorod early in the August of 1918. He had gone quite gray, and what was left of his hair stood out in clumps. His left ear had been torn and failed to heal properly. He had never reached Finland but had been arrested on the border and imprisoned, his money taken away. Whenever his daughter tried to quiz him about what had happened, he either tried to laugh it off with feeble jokes or fell into a sudden rage and demanded that she leave him alone.

In early September, Lubochka had run into the head doctor of the Martynov Hospital.

“Sablin is dying,” he had said disdainfully. “Haven’t you even gone to see him?”

She had found her former husband in a terrible state, lying on the floor in the hospital corridor. She had presented her father and Osip with a fait accompli: she would bring Sablin into the house and nurse him until he was fully recovered.

“I’m not going to go back to him,” she had told Osip, who was seething with jealousy. “Sablin will get better, and then he’ll go. What opinion can you have of me, thinking that I could give up on someone so close to me?”

“But Sablin’s not close to you,” Osip protested.

“I would never give up on any of my family members, including you. Under no circumstances.”

Osip looked at her sullenly, unable to find the words to convince her.

Sablin had indeed recovered and returned to work at the Martynov Hospital after being pronounced unfit for military service. But he had had nowhere to go since the house on Ilinskaya Street had been requisitioned, so, he had stayed on in Anton Emilievich’s former library.

In her heart of hearts, Lubochka didn’t want Sablin to move out. Every now and again, Osip went on a business trip, and sometimes he was away from home for weeks. Then Lubochka whiled away the time with her ex-husband.

She still admired him for his education and impressive intellect. She could talk to him on topics that Osip knew nothing about, such as history, science, and culture. This was something she missed terribly in her present marriage.

Lubochka realized that she needed both of them at once: Comrade Drugov and Dr. Sablin.

“You, my daughter, are playing with fire,” Anton Emilievich had said, shaking his head.

During the first year of Soviet rule, Lubochka had believed in miracles and hadn’t refused herself anything. She had realized that everything was possible if you have something to exchange and know how to trade it.

By November 1918, a web of invisible but strong threads had grown up throughout the city, linking all of those who received privileges of one sort or another. It covered all industries and sectors from the newly established University of Nizhny Novgorod to cobbler’s workshops and dental surgeries, and the center of this elaborate network was the Regional Provisions Committee. Those who knew on which side their bread was buttered had lost interest in the dangerous trade of the bagmen and joined the ranks of bureaucrats, trying to get work that allowed them access to consumer goods, communications, or valuable information, all of which were worth a lot more than money.

Lubochka had access to food supplies and high-ranking military officials in the Red Army, and she set up her business in such a way that her family members had been spared mandatory public work and civil defense work. Thanks to her efforts, Sablin had received the position of head of the surgical department, and her father had become executive editor of a newspaper, the Nizhny Novgorod Commune.

Lubochka’s new partners and friends were all people who had adapted to the new regime, something which, in itself, required quick wits and intelligence. And now she found herself staring at her former idol, Klim Rogov. He had stayed on in Russia with his precious girlfriend, sunk right to the bottom, and Nina—of whom she had been so jealous—had ended up with a gaunt, unshaven beggar with haunted eyes.

Congratulations, Lubochka thought. Now, you have one overcoat between the two of you. Quite romantic, I suppose.

Klim turned his head just as though he had felt Lubochka’s gaze on them.

She set off purposefully toward them. “Come with me.”

Now was no time to bear a grudge. Klim and Nina needed to be saved.