Russian Treasures

7. THE CONSPIRATORS

Three weeks passed, and there was still no letter from Klim. The post office had started working again. Nina went there every day, but the assistant behind the wooden counter always met her inquiries with an indifferent shake of the head.

There was no news from Osinki either, and Nina suspected that the mill was no longer in her possession. Most likely, the workers who hadn’t received their wages had stolen and sold the equipment and looted Nina’s house.

If she had listened to Klim back in September, they would have safely been in Buenos Aires by now. She had chosen the wrong path by refusing him and trying to save her business, and the hopeless position she found herself in now was what she had got in return.

The only memento Nina had of Klim was the “key from his heart,” and she carried it on a chain around her neck like a talisman.

In the evenings, she loosened her braid and ran her fingers through her hair just as Klim had done. She buried her face in the pillow on which his head had rested. Walking the streets, she stopped at the places that still bore the invisible traces of his presence: the spot where he had dropped his glove in the snow, and the ice run where he had held her hand and had slid together.

She remembered the mixed colors of his stubble—black, fair, and red, his eyes the color of strong black tea, and the imperceptible little scar on the lobe of his left ear, the mark of an earring he had worn at nineteen on his travels in Shanghai.

Zhora told Nina that he was not going to pin all his hopes on Klim. He had only one thing on his mind: “We can’t abandon Russia in her hour of need. It is the duty of every able man to go south and join the White Army volunteers to fight the Bolsheviks.”

Listening to him nearly broke Nina’s heart. Zhora was no more than a boy, skinny and awkward, with a great cowlick of hair covering his forehead. What kind of a soldier would he make?

Sofia Karlovna spent her days praying, visiting her friends, remembering the good old times, and cursing the Bolsheviks. Occasionally, she would come to Nina and demand money, favors, and explanations of what was going on in a world that had gone crazy.

“The Bolsheviks have ordered Princess Anna Evgenievna to bring three members of her household to clean a latrine,” the old countess said. “They’re doing it on purpose just to humiliate her. What if they order us to do the same?”

“I won’t go,” Nina said firmly. “They may shoot me—let them do whatever they please.”

To cap everything else, the Bolsheviks had arrested Elena’s parents. The Regional Executive Committee had come up with a new idea for inveigling more money out of the rich by demanding an “indemnity” from the city’s wealthiest citizens—fifty million rubles in total.

“They’re no better than kidnapping criminals,” Elena wept on Nina’s shoulder. “They take control of the cities, bleeding the people dry and blackmailing the wealthy merchants.”

The Bolsheviks could see little difference between five thousand and fifty million rubles. For them, it was just a pile of cash, and they didn’t care where the merchants got these extortionate sums just so long as they paid.

Nina told Elena to move into her house.

Now, there’s nowhere for us to escape even if we wanted to, she thought. Nina and Zhora would never have left Elena on her own, and there was no way Elena was going to leave her parents.

One day, Nina went to visit Lubochka to see how she was doing, but her friend wasn’t at home.

“You’ll never catch her here these days,” Marisha grumbled. “The mistress is playing around behind her husband’s back. She and her Bolshevik friend brazenly walk the streets, and he gives her presents. Yesterday, she brought home a gilt-backed hairbrush—with someone else’s hair in it.”

Shocked and dispirited, Nina went home.

How could her friend—so smart and so high-minded—keep company with a man who was little more than a bandit? It was an act of utter treachery.

Zhora confirmed what Marisha had told Nina: he had seen the incongruous couple out and about a number of times—elegant Lubochka arm in arm with a soldier in a burned and tattered greatcoat. They had been so engrossed in each other that they hadn’t noticed anyone else.

The frost held until mid-March, and then a rapid thaw set in. During the day, avalanches of snow slid heavily from the sun-warmed roofs, but every night a new palisade of icicles as thick as a man’s arm bristled from the eaves again. The city stewed and began to smell as all the rubbish dumps that had been buried under the snow began to thaw out.

Usually, Nina went to the market with Zhora, afraid that she might be attacked and her basket of food stolen. But today, she had to leave her brother at home. The day before, he had declared that now that it was spring, he had no intention of wearing his scarf. He had caught a cold almost as soon as he had stepped outside the door and lost his voice.

Officially, the market was shut, but in fact, a huge crowd gathered on the central square every day. Private trade had initially been prohibited and then briefly permitted only to be banned again. Things had gone on in this way for several months, and the policemen were never quite sure whether they were meant to drive the “criminal capitalist profiteers” away from the market or not. Consequently, they implemented a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as and when the fancy took them, robbing the villagers of whatever goods they wanted for themselves or their friends and family.

The market boiled with life like a giant cauldron. Every imaginable product was on sale there: foot wrappings, Christmas ornaments, poppy cakes, and cocaine.

An old general in cracked glasses was trying to sell a gramophone horn. He stood timidly among the crowds, eyes averted, chewing on the ends of his gray mustache. An old woman with her head wrapped in a shawl was peddling two dirty frying pans. Boys hawked Swedish matches and local “Java” cigarettes and thrust a shivering puppy out toward passers-by. “Do you want a barker to guard your house?”

Nina approached one of the traders she knew, Mitya, a thin man with eyelids that twitched with a nervous tic. He was standing by the fence with his goods laid out on a torn cloth: old doorknobs, soldiers’ belts, and a vintage Bible in a velvet binding.

She nodded to him, and Mitya beckoned to a man idling nearby. “Keep an eye on all this, will you?” Then he set off through the crowd with Nina at his heels.

Mitya went into an empty cobbler’s shop smelling of glue and old leather. The dim light from the small dusty window lit up piles of broken wooden boxes and old cloths on the floor.

“Can you pay me in money today?” asked Mitya.

Nina pulled out some bank notes from the inside pocket of her coat.

“Give me two pounds of barley and half a pound of honey and fill up this matchbox with salt,” she said. “I need tea as usual and bread. Last time I asked you for bread made with unadulterated flour, and you ended up giving me God knows what.”

“That’s the baker’s fault, not mine,” Mitya said, blinking fitfully.

She gave him her food basket, and he disappeared behind the door.

Nina stood and waited, beating a tattoo on the doorframe with the rings on her fingers.

She could hear the noise of the market grow louder and looked out the window nervously. The black crowd was churning like a shoal of fish in a trap, but there seemed to be nothing amiss.

Mitya came back at last, and Nina checked her goods. The heavenly smell of freshly baked bread rose from the basket.

“Do you know anyone who buys expensive liquors?” she asked.

“What sort of liquors?” Mitya inquired, his face twitching.

Nina pulled a strangely curved bottle from her pocket. It was filled with an amber colored liquid.

“It’s a real Scotch whiskey,” Nina said. “It was served in private clubs as a joke. See, the bottle looks as if it’s drunk. This kind of whiskey used to cost more than three hundred rubles before the war.”

Mitya hesitated. “Well… I don’t know… I’ll have to ask. Follow me.”

They walked into a small backyard. A black guard dog with matted hair dashed toward them but began to wag its tail as soon as it recognized Mitya.

Nina glanced around uneasily. He could take me off anywhere and just kill me, she thought.

“Come over here,” said Mitya, pointing to a lopsided gatehouse.

Nina went inside a dim room that smelled strongly of fried fish. A bearded man was sitting next to the window, having his lunch.

Nina gasped. “Mr. Fomin? You of all people!”

He sprang to his feet and opened his arms to embrace her. “Nina, darling! Sorry, my hands are covered in fish oil. I haven’t seen you for so long! How is life treating you?”

After Mitya returned to the market, Fomin pushed his plate of cold fried fish toward Nina.

“Help yourself. I’m glad you’ve found me—I need to talk to you.” He gestured at a box in the corner of the room. “You see, I haven’t forgotten you, and I’ve already procured some supplies.”

“Where have you been all this time?” Nina asked.

Fomin wiped his hands on an old newspaper. “I was in hiding in Osinki.”

“How’s the mill?” Nina asked, her heart ready to sink.

Fomin grinned. “A local Bolshevik called Utkin arranged a meeting at the village elder’s house and told the men to establish a Soviet rural council and confiscate your mill together with the mansion. I had a word with them too. ‘If you do that,’ I said, ‘who will provide you with supplies? Who will fix the machinery? Utkin? Appoint him as a manager and just see how he fares.’”

“Did you manage to save the mill?” asked Nina hopefully.

“They haven’t touched the mill shops, but they burned down the house.”

“Good Lord!”

“The women told me Utkin was responsible. They chased him away from the village after that. They were worried that he might decide to burn down their houses too.”

To be on the safe side, Fomin had established a workers’ Soviet administration in Osinki and hung a red banner from the mill gates. But when some of the youngsters began talking about the workers taking control of the mill, Fomin had made his terms clear.

“It’s them or me,” he had said. “If they take charge, I go.” So far, nobody had challenged his authority.

Fomin put the most capable foreman in charge of production and appointed himself in charge of sales. Inflation was rising daily, so he was always on the lookout for goods that could be used for barter. He brought leather shoe soles from Bogorodsk, fishhooks from Gorbatov, and wooden spoons from Semenov. Initially, he had carried all these goods on his own back, but later, he had begun to hire teams of unemployed workers to do the job for him.

“The Bolsheviks put troops at every crossroad,” Fomin told Nina, “but we always manage to get through one way or another.”

“Do you think the Bolsheviks will nationalize my mill?” she asked.

Fomin frowned. “If the Bolsheviks stay in power, they’ll take away the mill sooner or later. According to the peace treaty, the Germans have the right to hang onto their property in Russia. That means the owners of private enterprises will try to sell their shares to German agents to turn at least some of their assets into cash. Naturally, the Bolsheviks won’t want all that property to slip through their fingers, so they’ll try to nationalize the factories and mills before the Germans can get their hands on everything.”

“Get out!” someone shouted from the direction of the market. “There’s a raid!”

The sound of frenzied barking came from the yard. Fomin jumped to his feet and snatched the box he had been planning to give to Nina. “Run!”

They darted behind the sheds and clambered up the log pile and over the fence. As they ran down Pryadilnaya Street, peasants drove by in sled with runners scraping the bare cobblestones. Women ran by at full tilt, clasping their unsold goods to their chests.

Nina was panting, and very soon her skirt was soaked and her feet freezing after running through the puddles that littered the road.

Gunshots could be heard. Nina flinched.

“Don’t cower like that!” Fomin said angrily. “If they catch us, we’ll slip them some money. The only reason they’re raiding the markets is because the Red Guards have nothing to eat, so their commanders have sent them to ‘fight the profiteers.’ They confiscate food from the peasant women, and that’s what they live on. The market will be back to normal in no time. Don’t you worry. The only thing that will change is that the prices will go up again.”

Nina sensed that she had brought a dangerous man back home with her. Fomin had turned into a big criminal and was just the sort of men the new political police, the Cheka, were after. It was rumored that terrible things were going on in the basement of their headquarters.

Nina quietly thanked her lucky stars that there was no one in the house when they came in. Sofia Karlovna was in church, and Zhora and Elena had gone off somewhere, but the slightest noise made Nina flinch. Nevertheless, she tried her best to be a good host, inviting Fomin to the dinner table and offering him all of the good things they had brought home that day.

Fomin scrutinized Nina’s ransacked dining room with its broken cabinets and dark spots on the wallpaper where a painting had previously hung.

“I see they’ve robbed you but let you keep the house,” he said thoughtfully.

“My house is located far away from the main road,” Nina said. “There are few locals among the Bolsheviks, and they don’t know the city well. I guess they just forgot about us.”

“So, how are you managing to live?”

Nina told him about the wine cellar. He nodded, smiling, and Nina couldn’t tell if he was approving or, on the contrary, laughing up his sleeve at her pitiful attempts at commerce.

“Let me make a proposal,” Fomin said finally. “You have an opportunity to earn a lot of money very quickly. When summer comes, the sacks we make at the mill will be worth their weight in gold at the depots and quays.

“You have a basement that would be perfect for storage, and you can keep a lookout for anyone coming up toward the house from the side of the hill.

“All you need is to set up one of these so-called ‘cooperative societies’ and pretend that a group of you are clubbing together to buy groceries and soft goods. Then you’ll get all the necessary licenses from the Soviets, and we’ll be able to bring in goods of our own.”

“You won’t be allowed to bring sacks into the city,” Nina protested. “Do you think the Bolsheviks are too stupid to realize that you’re supplying packaging material to profiteers?”

“But we won’t be bringing in sacks. We’ll be bringing in—let’s say—birch switches for the steam baths. How will people massage their backs in the steam room without good switches of birch twigs? Or if that doesn’t suit you, we could bring in straw or fallen leaves. Our sacks will just be the packaging material like you said.”

Nina noticed that Fomin said “we” as though there were others involved in his scheme.

“Do you have other partners?” Nina asked. “Who are they?”

Fomin frowned. “I can’t say.”

“But I have to know who I’m dealing with. You have to tell me about all the risks, who knows about this business, and how are we going to share the profits.”

He glowered at her. “Well—as for risks are concerned, you’ll be risking your life. And you won’t see a good deal of the profits.”

“What do you mean?”

“Believe me, you don’t need to know more. This is no business for a woman. Your job is to help us with the cooperative. We’ll do the rest.”

Finally, Nina realized what he was talking about. “Are you preparing a rebellion?”

“I never said as much, and it would be better for you if you didn’t know. Whatever we plan to do, the first thing we need is money. Everyone is contributing what they can or helping to raise funds, but naturally, nobody will blame you if you choose to refuse. You are perfectly within your rights to forbid me to sell the sacks from your mill—after all, it is your private property. But remember, if we don’t take action ourselves, we can’t expect anyone else to do it for us.”

Fomin gave her detailed instructions about what she needed to do to open a cooperative. Nina tried to listen to him carefully, but her thoughts kept wandering off.

What if the Bolsheviks arrested her? Would she betray Fomin right away? Would she tell them everything she knew in the hope that the Bolsheviks would have mercy on her and not rape her or beat her to death?

True, she could refuse to do her bit and sit around waiting for a miracle to happen. For some gallant knight like Klim to save her? Or some “force for good” such as the White Army that was rumored to be mobilizing somewhere in the south? But if that was what she chose to do, then she would have no right to complain. After all, if she did nothing, what else did she deserve?

Nina excused herself from the table and brought in the “drunken bottle.”

“I will help you with your cooperative,” she told Fomin. “And here’s our family’s contribution—the most expensive whiskey from my cellar. You might be able to use it as a bribe for some important Bolshevik official.”

Zhora and Elena had spent the whole day standing in line in front of the jail, hoping to pass their parcel to Elena’s parents. Visits were prohibited. The only food for both inmates and guards was provided by the prisoners’ relatives.

Standing in queues in front of the jail was a torment for Zhora and drained him of all his energy, but he couldn’t leave Elena on her own.

When they got home, Nina scolded Zhora for going out with a temperature and then told him that Mr. Fomin was here to see them. Zhora was thrilled with the news. Finally, a serious man had arrived who would be able to give him some sound advice on what he should do next with his life.

He had lost his voice completely, and Nina told him to go to bed. As soon as she and Elena went to the kitchen to make him some lime tea, Fomin quietly went up to see Zhora in his bedroom. With his huge peasant beard, shirt, vest, and pants tucked into his worn-out boots, he was barely recognizable.

“How’s life?” he asked, sitting himself down on Zhora’s bed.

Zhora shook his hand and showed him the books on his bedside table.

“I’m studying for my university entrance exams,” he croaked in a barely audible whisper.

“The Bolsheviks are about to bring in forced conscription for the Red Army,” Fomin said, “and most likely, you’ll end up a soldier.”

Zhora said nothing.

“Diplomats might be in demand in countries where there is the rule of law,” Fomin continued. “But to be frank, you’d be better off signing up for medical classes at the Martynov Hospital. I hope you don’t mind me speaking to you like this, but you’re a grown man now. As soon as the roads become passable, there will be a war. Our people are not going to sit around and do nothing while Russia is being destroyed. The Bolsheviks have realized they can’t survive without a standing army, so they’ve mobilized thousands of former Tsarist officers. They’re keeping them on a very tight leash, giving them extra food on the one hand while threatening to put them in prison on the other.”

“But how could they possibly agree?” Zhora whispered in indignation.

“Everybody has a family to provide for. The military is used to following orders, no matter who is giving them. I’ve talked to a lot of them. They would be happy to see the back of the Bolsheviks, but they don’t see anyone capable of getting rid of them at the moment. Once the Bolsheviks have real armed forces, not just these Red Guard riffraff, it’ll be much more difficult to fight them. We need to take action now.”

Zhora’s heart was pounding. “I wish I could go south—”

“The pivotal battles will take place here and in the other big cities.” Fomin rose to his feet. “So, you see what I mean about medical classes?” he asked. “We’ll be needing medics, and we’ll be needing them soon.”