The small concert hall was packed. People were sitting in the aisles and on the floor in front of the stage. A beautiful girl was singing, her wrists and neck covered in chaste lace. Her pure voice sounded like something from a past that was now lost and forever out of reach.
A storm of applause swept through the auditorium. People sprang to their feet in a standing ovation. The singer smiled, blushing, unsure how to react to this sudden outburst of rapture.
“Bravo!” cried Khitruk, pulling Klim’s sleeve. “What about that, eh? What do you say to that?”
“It’s beautiful,” Klim said.
It took some time for the audience to calm down, and the concert-goers only began to disperse when the lights were dimmed. But as they made their way down the marble staircase in the semi-darkness, a male voice began to sing, “It seemed that everything was over,” and soon, the whole crowd joined in. The chorus of voices rang out deep and rich beneath the painted ceiling.
“We’re not finished yet,” said Khitruk, deeply moved. “See? The Bolsheviks can deprive us of many things, but they can’t take away our spirit.”
Back at Khitruk’s apartment, Klim entered his room flooded with a dusky twilight and sat down on his sofa. He could still hear that song in his head as pure as a sparkling stream.
He took out his notebook, and by the light of the Petrograd white night, he wrote across the page:
Tomorrow morning, I’ll burn my boats. I do have something worth fighting for, and I’m not about to give it up. No matter what.
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.