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?”