The Prince of the Soviets

15. A KINGDOM OF BOOKS

For a few days, Nina was reduced to a painful state of near-paralysis, trying to work out what to do. She had nothing left: no love, no child, no home, and no aim in life. Soon, Oscar would be back with her papers, and then what? Should she go with him to New York?

I’ll get Klim back, she decided. He still has feelings for me, so it isn’t hopeless yet. And I’ll deal with that lover of his too. She can’t just come along and take what’s mine.

To start with, Nina had to do some detective work. She had to find out about Klim’s way of life, his friends, and his new love interest. Then she would have a better idea what to do.

Nina dug out Elkin’s business card and rang him. “I’d like to have a look at the car you’re selling,” she said. “Could that be arranged?”

Elkin was overjoyed. “Why, of course! Come any time!”

They agreed on a time to meet, but no sooner had Nina hung up than she was gripped by fear. What if it all went wrong? What if she went to see Elkin and ran into Klim? How shameful if he thought she was chasing him! And what if Kitty were there?

I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, thought Nina gloomily. In any case, I’ve got nothing to lose.

Nina arrived at the bookstore, and Elkin gave her a tour of his domain.

She looked around with interest at the motley shelves filled with information and cookery books, horoscopes, dream almanacs, miscellanies, and guide books.

Elkin kept his most valuable treasures—novels on the subject of love and war—in ancient metal-bound chests. Children’s books lay strewn over on the rug, and handsome editions of encyclopedias and religious tomes stood in elegant rows on the shelves.

“It’s like traveling back in time,” said Nina, running her hands over the spines, which shone with gold leaf. “Don’t you sell any modern books?”

Elkin showed her a stand in the corner of the shop, which contained the new Soviet books he was obliged to sell: propaganda leaflets and works of fiction with titles like The Red Daredevils and Young Communists in Africa.

Elkin gave a wry laugh when he saw Nina’s bewildered expression. “A few years ago, the Party sent out a summons,” he said. “‘We need to have Soviet adventure stories of our own!’ It annoyed them to see that young people only cared about ‘bourgeois writers,’ so they invested money in the scheme and got the wheels turning. Hungry young writers who arrive in Moscow from some far-off places are always happy to try their hand at writing something for a bit of money.”

Nina picked up Young Communists in Africa and leafed through it. “Does anybody read this stuff?” she asked. “It’s utter nonsense! It’s quite obvious the author hasn’t any idea what he’s writing about.”

“Well, what of it?” Elkin shrugged. “There’s a whole generation of children in this country who have barely had any schooling. The Great War put a stop to decent education—all the teachers went off to the front, and after that, things went from bad to worse. Our young people have never traveled, they don’t speak any foreign languages, they’ve never read any good books, and they have only the vaguest idea of what’s what.”

A customer asked for assistance, and Elkin ran off to serve him. Nina stood for some time looking at the illustrations in a large multi-volume edition of Pictorial Russia. She wondered how all these books had survived the war and revolution. Back then, books had been ruthlessly stripped of their leather bindings to make patches for boots.

At last, Elkin shut the door of the store and hung up the “Closed” sign in the window.

“These days, I have to do everything myself,” he sighed. “I used to have three assistants, but I had to let them go. The labor inspection office was threatening to close me down for ‘exploitation of the working classes.’”

“Why would they bother?” Nina asked, amazed. “There are no jobs in the country as it is. Why prevent people from earning a living?”

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. In the Kremlin, they think the economic crisis is caused by the Nepmen cheating and swindling and not paying their taxes. But worst of all, we private traders create competition and take away customers from state businesses, thus getting in the way of the construction of socialism. We provide a better service. That’s all. But the government thinks we’re saboteurs and does everything possible to stifle us.”

There was a burst of laughter and a clatter of feet from the apartment upstairs. Nina looked up: the silk giraffe-spotted lampshade hanging from the ceiling was jigging up and down. It looked as if Klim was having a party.

“Those foreigners are up to something every day,” said Elkin. “Recently, they had a competition to see who could lose weight the fastest, Heinrich Seibert or Magda Thompson. But Seibert had a trick up his sleeve. The first time they weighed him, he wore his jacket and boots, and today, he came for the weigh-in with a haircut and without his glasses.”

It was extraordinary how all the foreigners in Moscow knew one another, thought Nina. It was like a big village—even Magda, who had once shared a hotel room with Nina, was visiting Klim now.

“Would you like to go up and join them?” asked Elkin. “I expect Galina has made some pies.”

Nina shivered. Galina—was that the name of Klim’s lover?

“I’d rather have a look at your car,” Nina said.

The car was in an old woodshed. Elkin flicked a switch, and the bulb on the ceiling lit up a smallish black car unlike any Nina had seen before. A figurine of a winged giraffe gleamed dully on the hood.

“Allow me to introduce you to Mashka,” said Elkin with pride. “My own design. The challenge was to create an inexpensive model for use on Russian roads. But the authorities refused to back me, and I had to give up the whole idea.”

“Why didn’t they like Mashka?” asked Nina.

“Well, a car gives you personal freedom, you see. You can just jump behind the wheel and go wherever you like. Our leaders go everywhere by car, but they want the rest of us to travel by railroad—so we don’t go off the beaten path. Nobody wants to invest money in private cars here. All they can think about is the metro. And in any case, I’m a Nepman, a private entrepreneur. What fool would go risking his career for my sake? Support an ‘enemy class element,’ and you’re likely to share his fate.”

Nina walked about the car, inspecting the wide-tired wheels and the engine with its tangle of wires.

Elkin waved his hands excitedly as he told her how he had invented the new boosting device and what he had done to alter the suspension.

“Please, buy my Mashka!” he said, putting his hand to his heart. “Perhaps your husband will take her out of the country and show somebody? Of course, I’d prefer to start production here in Russia, but I know that won’t happen.”

“Why did you decide to call her Mashka?” asked Nina.

“The Germans have their Mercedes, so why can’t I have my Mashka?” replied Elkin.

He looked down at the floor. “Mashka was the name of my daughter. She loved giraffes, and we dreamed of going to Africa together one day to see them in real life. She was killed for her rabbit-fur hat. She was on the way to school, and somebody put a knife in her back.”

Nina gasped. “My god!”

“Perhaps it was even for the best,” said Elkin. “She died in an instant, and she won’t have to put up with any bullying or harassment now. Her childhood was almost happy.”

Nina felt that he was repeating something he had said many times before, both to himself and to others.

“You’ll get along well with my Mashka,” said Elkin warmly. “She’s a bit like you—otherworldly—but in a good way.”

“I’ll have a word with Oscar when he comes back,” Nina promised.

Elkin showed Nina out. Just after they had left the yard, a crowd of laughing people came running out and began a snowball fight.

Nina had a good view of the merrymakers. She saw Klim brushing the snow from the coat of a woman in a gray headscarf and then helping her to slide down the icy mound in the yard.

Elkin followed Nina’s gaze. “Mr. Rogov is a lucky man,” he said. “Galina’s a good woman, and she’s madly in love with him.”

Nina pressed her lips together. So, now she knew.

“What do you say if I do some work in your store as a saleswoman?” she asked Elkin. “I’ll work for free so that you don’t get in trouble with any inspectors.”

“But… I couldn’t imagine…” Elkin was at a loss.

“I have nothing to do, anyway,” said Nina. “And if I worked here, I could come to your store every day.”

“Well… what can I say? I’d be delighted!”

“Good. We can start tomorrow.”

Nina needed a good look-out post and some room for maneuver. Working as a saleswoman in the Moscow Savannah would be just what she needed.

It turned out that the Moscow Savannah was not only a store but a labor exchange for the Moscow intelligentsia. Elkin knew a great many people and helped skilled professionals find work—translating, writing articles, typing documents, and so on.

“Some people have workmates; I have bookmates,” he said proudly to Nina. “And they’re the best sort in the world.”

Most of Elkin’s customers were simple office workers, though occasionally professors or senior engineers would come into the store. Some venerable old man would unbutton his heavy overcoat and settle himself in an armchair, and Nina would bring him Jäger’s Universal History or Brehm’s Life of Animals. She would treat her guests to books like a diligent hostess. The cash register rang merrily, churning out receipt after receipt, and patrons would leave the store happy, clutching their precious haul.

Klim never came in to Elkin’s store. Probably, somebody had told him that Nina was working there, and now, he was trying to avoid her.

At least Elkin enjoyed sharing stories about his tenants. Nina found out that Kitty would eat nothing but bread and cheese and candy, and Kapitolina was afraid of mice and would jump onto a stool at the slightest suspicious noise. She also heard that Galina had made a mobile in Kitty’s room out of a child’s bicycle wheel painted white and hung with paper airplanes on strings. According to Elkin, Kitty would spin the wheel and shout out at the top of her voice, “Airplane, airplane, take me there and back again!”

Nina was slowly boiling over with frustration and jealousy.

“What does Klim think about Galina?” she asked Elkin.

“It’s not Galina he should think about,” he said with a chuckle. “He needs to think about his sums. He wrote in one of his articles that a million people came out to take part in a parade to mark the Red Army anniversary. That was the figure the foreign journalists had been given in the press briefing. But there are only two million people in Moscow! Does Klim seriously believe that every second person went to that parade, including the elderly, the disabled, and the babies? He might be an American, but he doesn’t care about getting his numbers right as Americans are supposed to do.”

One day, a small, thin man in an old officer’s greatcoat appeared in Elkin’s store.

“I’ve just been dismissed from Gosizdat,” he announced in a trembling voice.

Elkin took him into the back room and sat him down in an armchair.

“This is Count Belov, an exceptional translator who specializes in medical books,” Elkin told Nina.

Gosizdat was the largest publishing house in the country, and apart from fiction, it published textbooks and scientific and technical literature. Belov’s knowledge of the field was unique, but at a general meeting, a representative of the Party had announced that “former aristocrats” had no right to employment when so many Red Army soldiers who had fought bravely at the front in the civil war were without work.

Belov’s supervisor tried in vain to explain that his team was working on a very important book on the prevention of epidemics. But the meeting decided to dismiss Belov and all his colleagues who had been hired through “class nepotism.” Their place would be taken by brave Red Army soldiers.

Elkin groaned. “I’ve told you not to write on the application form that you were a count!”

Belov blushed to the roots of his hair. “Only a scoundrel could deny his own family history! My great-grandfather died on the battlefield during the Napoleonic Wars; my grandfather took part in the defense of Crimea, and my father was the commander of a battleship. How can I disown them?”

Elkin scratched his chin. “I suppose they’ve evicted you from your apartment too?”

Belov nodded mournfully. “We were given twenty-four hours to vacate the room. What do they care if six children end up on the street?”

Elkin spent some time making telephone calls, cursing, shouting, and cajoling.

“Go out to Saltykovka,” at last he said to Belov. “It’s a little place to the east of Moscow, a dacha settlement. My friend has a dacha there, though it’s unheated and a bit of a mess. I’ll look for some translation work for you to keep you and your family going.”

When the count left, Elkin took an open bottle of cognac from his desk drawer and took a large gulp.

“Bastards!” he swore. “They’ll be the end of Russia. They take everything of worth in the country and cut it off at the root! I don’t know what the Belovs will live on when I leave.”

“Are you planning to close down the Savannah?” asked Nina, alarmed.

“It’s not me that wants to close it. It’s the housing commission. They’ve already sent someone out to tell me I have no right to occupy an entire house like this one. The Bolsheviks may not have any specific plans for the development of the country, but they feel in their bones that if people’s only source of income is the state, then nobody will want to smash the system. So, they’re stifling everyone who has the desire or the ability to make money independently. They’re not taking everything at once, but just cutting off a piece at a time, bleeding us slowly, so that we get used to the pain. And then they can do what they like.”

Nina looked at Elkin in a daze. If Moscow Savannah closed, she would never have the chance to meet Klim and try to make it up with him.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Back home to Crimea,” Elkin said. “It’s nice there, mountains and sunshine. You walk along the beach, and the waves hiss and foam like champagne.”

“But maybe you should oppose the housing committee? After all, there are people who speak up for you. They need you!”

Elkin shook his head. “Nobody will fight for me. My bookmates are out-and-out individualists…. Oh, we’re all clever, worthwhile people, at least for ourselves, but we’re not prepared to put our heads on the block for anyone. We’re not lions; we’re giraffes—outlandish, conspicuous, but capable of reaching certain heights, for all that.”

Fate is clearly having a joke at my expense. For months I was doing all I could to find out something, anything, about Nina. Now, almost every day, somebody gives me news of her.

She has begun working in the Moscow Savannah, and Elkin is in raptures over my ex-wife.

“How could a creature like that have survived in Soviet Russia?” he keeps saying.

Elkin is touched by the fact that Nina is elegant and well-dressed like the young ladies in Moscow before the revolution, and that she doesn’t mangle her Russian with fashionable abbreviations.

“Brains, Mr. Rogov! Brains—that’s the most important thing in a woman! Well, apart from all the rest.”

I try to interrupt his enthusiastic outpourings, but he is unstoppable.

“I don’t mean to say I’m making a play for her,” Elkin says. “I’m no match for her millionaire husband. All the same, a healthy man can’t stop thinking about these things. And don’t come over all ‘holier than thou’ with me! You’re just a hypocrite, whereas I tell it like it is. You know her, don’t you?”

“No,” I say. “And I have no intention of getting to know her.”

“But I saw her go into your apartment that day. Sour grapes, is that it? Easy on the eye, but not so easy to catch?”

I am doing my best to ensure that Nina catches neither my eye nor Kitty’s. I have ordered Afrikan to make a new gate in the fence in the yard behind the house, and now, we go out by this exit. I’ve also asked him to keep the gates locked so that unauthorized people (Nina that is) cannot come in to our stairwell.

I don’t know what she is thinking. Is she bored without her husband perhaps? Is that why she’s decided to play games with me? Or is it Kitty she’s interested in? Maybe she’s waiting for a good moment to take her away?

Galina is also puzzled. She asked me, “Did you know that that woman who visited you is working in Elkin’s store?”

I told her I wasn’t interested in gossip about the neighbors. However, this did nothing to reassure her. In fact, Galina has now begun to suspect me of being “unfaithful” to her. Every day, she asks Kapitolina where I’ve been while Galina was out and listens at the door when I’m on the telephone.

This has been going on for a few weeks now, and I’m living in a permanent state of tension. I pray that Nina will leave me alone, although this request to the heavenly powers seems utterly ridiculous since we never see one another and she doesn’t interfere in my life.

The problem is me. I know Nina is somewhere nearby, and this thought is enough to drive me out of my senses.

What should I do? I can’t leave Elkin’s house any more than I can forbid Nina to come to the Moscow Savannah. The only thing I can do is to ask Galina to take my child when I go out to meetings. At least then, Kitty will not see Nina.

Tata is a bad influence on Kitty, of course, but at least it’s the lesser of two evils.