Another party for the young poets was in full swing at Nina’s house. Zhora was reading a comic epitaph he had composed for Lubochka:
The poets stayed up until late at night, playing cards using their own autographed poems as the stakes. Every one of them was convinced that one day their manuscripts would be worth their weight in gold.
The candles were lit, ragged shadows flickered on the walls, and the crystal drops of the chandelier swayed gently in the draught.
Suddenly, there was a knock at the front door. Everyone froze and stared at one another. Nina hurriedly blew out the candles.
There was another bang at the door.
“Go!” Zhora told his friends. “I’ll go and see who it is.”
One by one, the poets leaped through the window and ran down the slope across Nina’s vegetable garden. Nina and Elena wrapped the remnants of their food in the tablecloth, shoved it under the sofa, and pulled the cover down to the floor. Within seconds, there wasn’t the slightest sign that the drawing room had just been filled with guests.
Any kind of gathering in a bourgeois house was seen as tantamount to a political meeting, and it was the host’s responsibility to prove that their guests had been doing nothing but chatting, singing harmless songs, and reciting romantic poems.
There were steps in the hallway and then the squeak of the door handle. Nina and Elena held hands as though they were about to face the imminent impact of a storm. Then Zhora and Dr. Sablin entered the moonlit room.
“What happened?” whispered Nina.
Elena lit a candle, and the flame illuminated Sablin’s bloodless face.
“I’ve been drafted into the Red Army,” he said. “Did you know that the Bolsheviks have found the Lady?”
“Our Lady?” gasped Zhora. It was the best riverboat owned by Elena’s father.
“Yes,” Sablin nodded.
“Where are they sending you?” Nina asked anxiously.
“To the city of Kazan. They’re setting up a field hospital there, and their commissar said he would shoot me if I refused.”
“I won’t let them take my Lady,” Elena whispered to Zhora.
The Lady had only been built three years earlier and was fitted with a diesel engine instead of a steam one, which made her one of the fastest boats on the Volga.
While Nina questioned Sablin about the details, Zhora and Elena quietly slipped out of the house. They went through the bushes down to the Oka Waterfront to the house of Postromkin, a pilot who had once worked for Elena’s father.
The dark street was empty. Zhora and Elena darted through the gate and knocked at the window.
“Who’s there?” asked an alarmed male voice.
“Postromkin, it’s me!” Elena whispered. “Let us in.”
The pilot’s family lived in a small two-bedroom apartment.
“Come into the kitchen,” Postromkin said, giving Zhora the oil lamp. “My family is sleeping, so try not to make too much noise.”
They sat down at a table that had been scored with deep knife cuts.
“What’s happened?” asked Postromkin. He was wearing nothing but a pair of drawers and a small copper cross that gleamed in the thick hair on his chest. Confronted with his fat, half-naked body, Elena was so embarrassed that she didn’t know where to look.
Zhora told him what he had just found out from Dr. Sablin.
“I know,” Postromkin said gloomily. “The Bolsheviks have mobilized everyone—from the captains and chief engineers to the dock hands. I’ve been called up too.”
Elena gasped. “So, will you go?”
“They said they’d shoot my wife if I didn’t.”
“We must burn the Lady,” Zhora said firmly. “Where is she?”
“Not far from here. Right next to the cabstand.”
“Is there anyone on guard?”
“What do you think? Of course, there is.”
Zhora fell silent, thinking.
“We need a rowing boat and some paraffin,” he said finally. “We’ll approach the Lady from the water. That way it will be easier to pass unnoticed.”
Postromkin stared at him thunderstruck. “Are you completely crazy?”
Elena took Zhora’s hand and squeezed it. “Postromkin, we’ll do everything ourselves. Please just give us a little help!”
He left the kitchen and returned several minutes later, dressed to go out. “Stay here. I’ll be back soon.”
He was away for more than an hour.
“Do you think we can trust him?” asked Zhora.
Elena raised an eyebrow. “When he and my father were young, they used to be barge haulers pulling boats upstream. When people work as hard as that in a team, they become like brothers. It’s impossible to survive otherwise.”
Zhora put his arms around Elena, kissed her soft hair, and whispered in her ear:
Elena laughed but stopped suddenly, seeing an old woman barefoot in her nightgown in the doorway.
“You’re nothing but children!” she lamented. “My husband has run off to the Cheka. He’s going to turn you in. You need to get out of here now!”
13. THE RED VOLGA FLOTILLA
The captain announced that the Nakhimovetz would be anchored in Nizhny Novgorod for no more than a couple of hours, and Pukhov forbade the Chinese to go ashore.
“I know you, you devils. If I let you go, you’ll wander off, and we won’t be able to find you.”
He didn’t want his interpreter to leave the ship either, but Klim, enraged, grasped him by the lapels. “I need to go into the city!”
Pukhov tried to escape Klim’s grip. “Stop that! I can’t let you go. What if you don’t get back?”
“If you don’t, then—you mark my words—you’ll have an interpreter who’ll be worse than an enemy for you.”
“Are you threatening a commissar?”
“You promised to help me!”
In the end, Pukhov agreed to let Klim go for an hour but sent two Chinese soldiers to escort him.
“Watch him closely,” Pukhov said to Ho, who had already picked up some Russian. “And don’t even think about coming back without him, or you’ll be brought before a tribunal.”
Nizhny Novgorod had been transformed into one enormous army camp. No longer were there any soldiers to be seen idling in the streets. From time to time, military units, field kitchens, and rattling carts loaded with ammunition came driving by.
Klim could barely bring himself to wait for a cable car to take him uphill and was on the point of setting off on foot when a car finally arrived.
“Where are we going?” Ho asked, studying the green ravines and the houses with elaborately carved wooden window frames.