Russian Treasures

9. THE BAGMEN’S ROUTE

As soon as the ice on the Volga River melted, a network of trade routes opened up along its sandy banks. Two streams of bagmen converged at the great river’s villages, bringing grain, salt, and dried fish from the south and the last of the manufactured goods stolen from the industrial warehouses in the north.

Fomin’s men had documents for all occasions. Some passed themselves off as employees of the Commissariat for Agriculture while others pretended to be procuring animal fodder. They hid their cargo in the false bottoms of boats and covered it with the hay intended for cavalry horses or nailed it up in coffins. Some stuffed mattresses with flour, and others swaddled sacks of grain and passed them off as babies. It took less than half a year to turn this disparate, wary cohort of bagmen into a well-organized secret army with commanders, guards, spies, and quartermasters. Dozens of drinking dens appeared, offering places where bagmen could rest, eat, and hide from the Cheka.

Nina was now the manager of a consumer cooperative. The city officials eyed her with suspicion but had nevertheless granted her permission to open a shop in the former grocery—again in return for a bribe. From the outside, everything looked quite aboveboard: a group of people from the local neighborhood put up some money to send buyers out to the grain-producing regions. Nina provided these buyers with an official paper sealed with the stamps of the cooperative and the Provisions Committee to keep them safe from the attention of the local Bolsheviks. On their return, she sold the food they brought back from these trips but only to members of the cooperative.

“The most important thing is to get the formalities right,” Fomin told Nina. “If the Bolsheviks ask for records of the proceedings at general meetings, you have to provide them with all the paperwork. Let them have your charter, your accounts, even the cleaner’s rota if they ask for it. Nobody’s going to read them in any case. You just have to make sure they have them. It’s a ritual of submission, and we have to play along with it for a while.”

Nevertheless, one day the police burst into Nina’s shop, and she almost turned gray, convinced that they had come to arrest her. However, they only turned out to be more bribe-seeking criminals in uniform.

Nina had to employ all of her feminine charms to persuade them not to ruin her. She also gave them her own “tribute”: a bottle of home-distilled vodka, a pound of tobacco, and a round loaf of pure rye bread.

“Please make sure your bosses never send anyone else but you to inspect my shop,” she said. “If they raid it, there’ll be nothing left for you either.”

After that day, there was a policeman on permanent duty next to her shop. He would not only chase away the local hooligans but also the indignant housewives who resented the fact that Nina’s prices were higher than those in the state stores (where, in any case, there was nothing for sale except piles of out of date government newspapers).

Nina spent her days in the store checking membership and ration cards, counting change, and weighing grain on her rusty scales.

Meanwhile, Elena stood on the back porch handing piles of sacks to quiet, unexceptional men who were their most valuable customers.

However, deep inside, Nina felt like a machine trying to run with a broken drive belt. The smaller cogs and wheels might appear to be turning, but the main drive was at a standstill.

Klim had disappeared from her life.

Naturally, Fomin learned that she had found herself another man, but he was too wise and experienced to make a scene. He never reproached Nina and referred to Klim as her “friend.” He even expressed his “sincere condolences.”

“Anything might have happened to Mr. Rogov,” Fomin told Nina. “A train crash, assault and robbery, or a raid by the Cheka. But we must hope for the best.”

What does he really mean by that? Nina wondered. What is “the best” for him? Fomin now positioned himself in her life not so much as her former lover but as a kindly uncle, and that perplexed Nina.

Fomin was the only man she considered much smarter and stronger than herself, and she knew he could be dangerous. There were many occasions when he had done away with inconvenient soldiers manning roadblocks who had got in his way.

Every now and then, he would spend the night in Nina’s former husband’s study, and each time, she was terrified. What if the Cheka were to come after him? What if he started making advances toward her? What if Klim were to come back and find him in her house? But the truth was, Nina couldn’t stop Fomin from visiting her.

Her brother and Elena adored him. Thanks to Fomin, Zhora had got a job as a medical assistant at the Martynov Hospital, and that had saved him from conscription. As for Elena, he helped her to get the papers to visit her parents in prison. Even the old countess was inclined to pardon him for his past sins. Her elderly friends had started falling sick from malnutrition, and one after the other had died. There was no one to bury them, and Fomin would send his men to take the deceased to the cemetery and dig graves for them.

Nina knew that when Klim came back (if he ever came back), he would think that she had just switched from one admirer to another. He would probably doubt that she was worthy of the sacrifices he had made for her, and that was possibly what Fomin was hoping for.

But with each day, her own hopes for Klim’s safe return faded. When Nina thought about it, she felt as if her entire world was disintegrating. Stop thinking about that! she ordered herself. Come up with something to distract yourself.

How Nina begrudged giving away those worn, faded banknotes to Fomin! It was easy enough to give money away to charity when you can see the results then and there, but Nina’s donations disappeared without a trace. Sometimes she would keep herself awake at night with thoughts of raiding her own cash till, getting herself some false papers, and setting out to Petrograd in search of Klim.

As soon as the Volga flooded the grounds of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, Fomin and Zhora sailed out there looking for abandoned goods. The most valuable of these were sewing materials. In the countryside, the local peasants would give as much as five pounds of flour for a good needle and even more for a pair of scissors.

A lot of the goods had not even been removed out of the fair for safekeeping. It was less risky and cheaper to take them to the upper floors of the warehouses and hide them there until the next season. At one time, the merchants had hired watchmen to keep thieves away, but now—since all the owners were either in prison or on the run—the fair was completely defenseless.

At first, Nina had objected. “That’s just breaking and entering!”

“No,” Fomin had said. “We’re just being ‘self-sufficient,’ which is precisely what the Bolsheviks are urging us to be.”

Looting and petty thievery had become rampant in Russia. People were cutting off the seals of shop doors and drilling holes into the bottoms and sides of boxcars. Sales assistants would add water to the flour to increase its weight. There were constant fires in the warehouses started by employees to hide their tracks after stealing the very supplies they were meant to be protecting. But the worst looters of all were the Bolshevik “food brigades,” armed groups of workers who came to villages to requisition grain and other “surplus supplies.” They declared anything and everything they could their hands on to be “surplus,” from the bread baking in the peasants’ ovens to seeds set aside for next year’s harvest.

Nina was shocked at how quickly people’s attitudes and behavior changed. Now, even the old countess wasn’t above petty thievery. She had picked up and brought home a plank that had fallen off the back of a Red Army truck and even boasted about her crime.

That day, Fomin and Zhora had brought back two sacks filled with boxes of needles.

“We were sailing down Teatralnaya Street,” Zhora told Nina excitedly, “and then we saw another boat. They wanted to rob us, but Mr. Fomin took a pistol from his bag and splintered one of their oars to matchwood.”

Nina gasped. “Did they shoot at you?”

Fomin waved his hand dismissively. “If they did shoot at us, they didn’t make any impression on us or the boat.”

Elena knocked on the door. “Nina, the old countess would like to see you.”

When Nina entered the room, the old countess was busy writing at her desk.

“Good evening,” Nina said. “Elena said that you wanted to speak to me?”

Sofia Karlovna nodded. “Yesterday, I noticed from my window that Mr. Fomin was walking down the street between you and Elena. Could you tell him that a gentleman should always keep to the roadside when he is escorting ladies?”

“I will,” Nina said with a sigh. “Is that all?”

The old countess looked at her through her lorgnette, her eyes flashing scornfully. “I suppose you think good manners are only relevant in peacetime? If so, you are very much mistaken.”

She took a stained envelope from the drawer and gave it to Nina. “I was at the post office this morning, and they gave me this letter for you from Mr. Rogov. I do apologize. I forgot all about it.”

Nina felt as though every sight and sound around her had suddenly receded into the distance, and she stood transfixed to the spot, unable to breathe or move. It took some time before she came to her senses, and when she did, she found herself in an armchair, not sure how she had gotten there.

She stared at the envelope in her hand with the torn mail stamps along its sides.

“Are you all right?” she heard her mother-in-law’s voice. “I noticed that the letter had been opened, but the clerk at the post office told me that that’s how they receive them these days.”

Nina nodded and pulled out a sheet of lined paper. It was a letter from a woman she didn’t know asking for a pair of canvas shoes and a set of drawing instruments to be sent to her.

Nina looked at the envelope. The address was in Klim’s handwriting.

“It would appear that the letter has gone astray,” said Sofia Karlovna, taking it from Nina’s shaking hand. “Princess Anna Evgenievna told me that the Cheka censors are opening and inspecting all correspondences before they get to their recipients. The censors have probably made a mistake and put Mr. Rogov’s letter in the wrong envelope.”

“His letter has gone astray,” Nina repeated in despair.

“You’re lucky to get at least something from Mr. Rogov,” said Sofia Karlovna. “I’ve heard that the Cheka destroy all letters that look like they’ve been written by anyone who is half-educated, assuming that they must be counter-revolutionaries. At least you know that Mr. Rogov has reached Petrograd safely. According to the stamp, this letter was sent a month and a half ago.”

Nina snatched the envelope out of the old countess’s hand. “What’s the return address?”

But it was impossible to read. Someone had placed a sticky cup of tea on the corner of the envelope and torn off the top layer of paper. Nina could make out nothing but the word “Petrograd” and the apartment number.

“Please don’t mention this to Mr. Fomin,” Nina whispered.

The old countess gave her a reproachful look. “Why do you think I summoned you here instead of bringing you the letter in the dining room?”

“Thank you!” Nina found herself breaking down in tears. “I’m so afraid that if Klim comes back, Mr. Fomin will—”

Suddenly, the old countess did something unthinkable: she patted Nina on the shoulder.

“To be honest with you, I didn’t expect Mr. Rogov to stay in Russia,” Sofia Karlovna said. “Since he hasn’t betrayed you, he deserves to be treated with the same respect as he has evidently shown us. As for Mr. Fomin, don’t worry too much about him. Right now, there is nothing you can do about your situation, but later, who knows how things will turn out? As you grow older, you start to notice that most of the alarms in our lives turn out to be false ones.”