She wrote down Klim’s recipe and added his name to her register. “Come over this evening,” she said. “I’ll treat you to some of your tortillas.”
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.