The cab turned to Ilinskaya Street and stopped by the mansion with its marble bears. Klim jumped into the dust warmed by the heat of the day.
“Why are you back so early?” Marisha, the cook, asked as she opened the front door.
Ignoring her, Klim walked past into his father’s office. Up to now, he hadn’t bothered looking too closely at the papers he had inherited. Everything related to finance was a bore as far as he was concerned.
He deftly twisted the dials of the vintage American safe and took out a black binder filled with bonds, promissory notes, and contracts. A familiar name caught his eye—Vladimir Alekseevich Odintzov.
Five years earlier, Nina’s husband had borrowed twenty thousand rubles from Klim’s father at seven percent interest. Count Odintzov had mortgaged his flax-spinning mill, and there were all the necessary proofs of the validity of the transaction—a notary’s signature, a seal, and the stamp duty. The payment was due on October 1, 1917.
So, it was true: Nina was interested in Klim not for his personal qualities but for his inheritance. He had let his imagination run wild and had now been brought back to earth with a bump.
2. THE GENTLEWOMAN
Klim stopped going to theaters and restaurants and now spent all his time at his bank and lawyer’s office. His father had left him a little under three hundred thousand rubles, and to tie up his affairs in Nizhny Novgorod, Klim needed to sell his securities, exchange his rubles for foreign currency, renew his leasing contracts, and arrange for payments to be wired straight to Buenos Aires.
When Klim got home at night, he would go to the servants’ quarters to ask who had visited Lubochka during the day. He hoped against hope that Nina might have tried to make contact with him—after all, she needed to sort out the money she owed him. But Nina never came.
Occasionally, Klim took out the promissory note written by her husband and examined it. Maybe he should go and ask her how she was planning to pay? It was a large sum, and the due date was close.
He found out where she lived, and several times he passed by Nina’s house at Crest Hill and peered through the stucco-framed windows. He returned none the wiser, fretful and full of self-doubt—a sensation that was quite unusual for him.
How had this young woman managed to get under his skin in this way? Klim knew nothing about her. One emotion would follow another: first rapture, then morose bewilderment, and then outpourings of wounded self-esteem. Can it really be that she doesn’t care about me at all?
At night, vivid fantasies kept him awake. He imagined Nina in the same glittering dark blue dress with the low neckline that attracted his lascivious gaze. The more Klim put things off, the less confident he became of having any success. And in any case, he asked himself, what possible success could he be thinking of? He would be leaving soon, and Nina would remain in Nizhny Novgorod. He should stop tormenting himself and leave it to the lawyers to deal with Nina’s promissory note.
Klim was in his father’s office, flipping through the documents filed in the binder. A fly buzzed against the window. The church bells called the local parishioners to mass.
“You have a visitor,” said Marisha, knocking at the door. She gave Klim a business card that read “Countess Odintzova.”
All thoughts about bonds and promissory notes flew out of Klim’s head.
“Please, let her in,” he said, dropping the binder into the drawer.
However, it was not Nina who entered the office but a burly elderly lady in a black lace dress.
“Please call me Sofia Karlovna,” she said, offering Klim her hand.
He shook it, trying not to reveal his disappointment, and then collected himself. This isn’t all bad, he thought. This lady must be a relative of Nina’s, and she might provide me with some very valuable information.
Sofia Karlovna sank into the armchair and fixed her blue eyes on Klim for what seemed a long time.
“You inherited a promissory note signed by my son,” she said finally, “but my daughter-in-law, who is responsible for the payment now, has got herself into a very bad situation.”
“What’s happened?” asked Klim, alarmed.
Sofia Karlovna took a deep breath. “Since the start of the war, we have been impoverished. Our workers and horses were commandeered by the army, and there is nobody to work our fields. My daughter-in-law met the chairman of the city’s Provisions Committee, and he convinced her that she should restore our old flax spinning mill in Osinki.”
Klim remembered the man who had accompanied Nina out of the restaurant and the deep fold in the nape of his neck like the slot in a piggy bank.
“So, what can I do for you?” Klim asked.
“Nina does not have the cash,” said Sofia Karlovna, “and she wants to ask you to delay the repayment of her loan. Mr. Fomin went to the capital to get her a state contract for tarpaulin goods for the army, and Nina hopes that she’ll soon be able to sort things out.”
“What kind of deferment is she looking for?” Klim asked gloomily.
“Oh no!” Sofia Karlovna exclaimed. “You’ve misunderstood me. I want you to take Nina’s mill.”
Klim looked at her in bewilderment. “I need liquidity and cash, not a mill around my neck.”
“If you defer her loan payment and leave for Argentina, you can forget about ever getting your money back. I know exactly what Fomin is after. He is hoping to persuade Nina to marry him in order to get his hands on the mill and the lucrative contracts it is set to sign. What are you going to do if he refuses to pay you? Send him a threatening letter?”
“What will happen to your daughter-in-law if I take over her mill?”
“You will be saving her from making a terrible mistake. Mr. Fomin is a most unsuitable match! He has Nina completely hoodwinked, and she doesn’t have the sense to figure out what he’s really like. As soon as Mr. Fomin finds out that she is penniless, he will drop her immediately. The heartless barbarian clearly doesn’t care a fig about our house, library, or Nina. For him, they are all just unnecessary expenses.”
Sofia Karlovna was silent for a while.
“I am terrified that I will end up on the street. If Nina marries Mr. Fomin, there’s no way we’d ever be able to live together. Mr. Rogov, please, go to Osinki and talk to Nina. Mr. Fomin is currently in Petrograd, so there’ll be no one to oppose you.”
The deck of the little steamboat was crowded with monks in their dark robes, peasant women with sacks, and carpenters with saws wrapped in old rags. Some were dozing while others were talking to their fellow travelers.
You and your wild schemes! Klim thought to himself. Here he was sailing upriver on a rust-bucket steamer, guarding his trunk against thieves—fretting, wondering, and cursing himself for his presumption and ridiculous daydreams.
What if Nina was perfectly happy with Fomin? What if Sofia Karlovna had been overexaggerating the whole situation? She was clearly much more worried about her own future than Nina’s.
But here Klim was, breathing in the steamer’s acrid smoke and cinders, sweating in the roasting heat, and pulling his hat down low over his forehead so that nobody would see the anxiety in his eyes.
They sailed under the clear vault of the sky between thickly forested river banks. Stray, blackened, semi-submerged logs that had been left behind after the timber harvest had been floated downstream peered out of the water like prehistoric animals. A heron stood hunched on the sandbank, its reflection zigzagging across the water.
“The next stop is Osinki, sir,” said a sailor pointing toward an old manor house on the top of a nearby hill.