“So I hear,” Klim said, smiling bitterly.
“Now, we have to organize the Chinese,” Pukhov said. “There are about five thousand of them in Petrograd. They live in ramshackle, overcrowded huts in unimaginable filth. Almost none of them have a permanent job. The police have received a number of reports about them being involved in robbery and rape. There are only nine Chinese women per five hundred men living in one barrack. These men are young, and they have—well, you know—perfectly natural instincts. But if a man has no money to take a girl to the pictures, let alone start a family, something is eventually going to give.”
“Yes, obviously rape is the inevitable consequence,” Klim said through gritted teeth. “You’ll have to excuse me, but I have to go.”
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Pukhov said. “I owe you your wages.”
He took Klim into a small office piled high with boxes labeled “Red Cross.”
“These are the rations for our Chinese recruits,” Pukhov said. “So, tell me, why were you in the queue at the Bureau for Registration? Do you need documents?”
Klim described his situation.
“What nonsense!” Pukhov cried. “The Cheka has no right to cancel your visa. It’s not their business but ours—the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. I’ll take you to Comrade Zalkind. He’ll fix things.”
“What if he doesn’t agree to help me?” Klim asked.
“He will. If need be, I’ll send a messenger to Gorokhovaya Street. You have to stay in Petrograd. Otherwise, how will I be able to speak to my Chinese recruits tomorrow?”
His words set Klim’s heart pounding.
“Could you help get my fiancée permission to come to Petrograd?” he asked. “The authorities in Nizhny Novgorod have forbidden her to leave the city.”
“Well—you know,” Pukhov grimaced, “the local executive committees do pretty well what they please. At the moment, we don’t have any control over them.”
“I could go to Nizhny Novgorod myself and bring her back.”
Pukhov shook his head. “I need you here. We’ll be training the Chinese for a couple of months, and then we’ll send them to Moscow as reinforcements for the Cheka. After that, I can organize your trip to Novgorod or wherever it is. But you have to make a good showing.”
Pukhov was offering Klim a position as an interpreter for a Cheka hit squad.
“I accept,” Klim nodded slowly. “But may I ask you a favor? I need to send a telegram to Nizhny Novgorod, and I want it to be handed directly to the addressee. And I need a response.”
“That’s easy. We’ll send the telegram immediately. We have a telegraph operator on duty around the clock.”
Pukhov advised Klim not to give up his Argentine passport. “They’ve just begun a general mobilization of the population. As soon as you become a Russian citizen, they’ll have you in the army like a shot. It will be much harder for me to get you out of there. No, I have a better idea—we’ll just extend your visa.”
Khitruk had done nothing but anxiously mope around his apartment since losing his paper. His editorial staff had gradually gone their separate ways to the countryside, Ukraine, or Finland. The days of fearless journalistic scoops had been consigned to history.
Khitruk correctly surmised that Klim had made a deal with the Bolsheviks to let him stay in Russia without changing his citizenship. He didn’t ask Klim to play chess anymore and looked at him suspiciously. The two men could no longer find anything to talk about, but this was not the most important thing on Klim’s mind at the moment. He had finally had word from Nina. It turned out that she had never received any of his letters, but she assured him she was alive and well.
Klim telegraphed that he would come to Nizhny Novgorod in early September. Pukhov had promised to provide him with the necessary documents, from train tickets to a travel pass from the Cheka. Klim had no idea what to do next, but that mattered little either.
Every morning, he went out to meet Pukhov at the commissar’s luxurious lodgings in the Astoria Hotel. A shiny-black, chauffeur-driven car would arrive at the entrance, and they would speed along the grassy, deserted streets to the barracks of the Grenadier Regiment where the Chinese recruits were billeted.
Klim kept himself aloof from Pukhov and his assistants, former Imperial Army officers who had offered their services to the Bolsheviks in exchange for rations. These men quickly began to look down on Klim after it became clear that only about twenty out of the three hundred Chinese recruits understood Klim’s Shanghainese. Klim talked, and then Ho had to interpret to the rest of the men. To make matters worse, neither Klim nor Ho knew any military terms, so almost everything had to be explained using gestures.
“There are no other interpreters!” Pukhov shouted in a rage. “We’ve been everywhere from the university to the Academy of Sciences. Even when we do find someone who knows Chinese, they refuse to cooperate.”
He looked gloomily at his warriors kitted out in a motley array of oriental robes, striped sailor’s vests, and tattered trousers. “The ill-fated soldiers of the revolution,” he sighed.
Gradually, the Chinese learned how to understand “fall in” and “forward, march” and “hurrah” in Russian. But they failed to recognize their commanders because all white people looked alike to them. The guards often even prevented Lyosha Pukhov from entering the barracks. “Halt!” they yelled in broken Russian, and only after they realized that it was Commissar Le Sha, as they called him, did they let him through. The sound of Pukhov’s first name made them snigger. Klim guessed that sha meant something like “stupid” in their language.
The instructors worked their recruits into the ground from dawn to dusk, making them run, aim, and fire.
Klim got back home at around nine in the evening, tired and hoarse from shouting pointless commands. Durga usually waited for him on the stairs, and he would greet her gloomily.
“Don’t you want to write another book?” she asked. “I have a marvelous idea. What about Pest Control for the Home and Workplace?”
Klim shook his head. “These days, the censors wouldn’t allow it. They’d suspect some political subtext or other.”
As he made his way upstairs, Durga’s voice floated up from the darkness below, “What about Official Claims and Complaints for All Occasions?”
As soon as Klim got into the apartment, he gave his groceries to the cook and retreated to the guest room. He had pinned a calendar out of a newspaper onto the wall, and every day, he crossed out another day—not the current day but the day ahead. That way he could fool himself into thinking that he had a little less time to wait.
Finally, the day came for Klim to say goodbye to Khitruk.
“War has broken out,” he said. “The Czechs have rebelled on the Volga, and my Chinese are being sent to defend Kazan. We’ll go on the troop ship Nakhimovets through the Mariinsk Canal System.”
“Well, good luck to you,” said Khitruk, giving him a mocking look.
Klim made a curious sight in his new guise as a Russo-Argentine Chinese interpreter for the Bolsheviks. His haute couture gray overcoat sewn by the best tailor in Florida Street in downtown Buenos Aires hung incongruously over his brand-new Red Army uniform.