As Nina and Klim walked onto Safronovskaya Square, a woman wearing a muslin mask to protect against disease ran up to them.
“Do you have any flour?” she asked.
Klim shook his head.
“I’ll give you twenty-two rubles for a pound,” said the woman, looking at the heavy bundle in his hands.
Nina gasped. “How much?”
“Fine—” the woman corrected herself hurriedly. “Thirty then.”
The Bolsheviks had decked the square with red flags to celebrate the capture of Kazan. The cab drivers had vanished. Street children were now selling matches not by the box but singly.
While the nurses were loading their patients onto carts, Nina and Klim walked onto Rozhdestvenskaya Street and boarded a half-empty tram.
The city was a mass of blue and gold with the leaves of the trees glistering against the clear, brilliant sky, but there were very few passers-by. Everyone they met was wearing a mask.
“We should do the same,” Nina whispered. “Then nobody will know who we are.” She took out her handkerchief and began to tear it into pieces.
Klim nodded. Once people’s faces are covered, he thought, they are no longer people. They become ghosts.
All of the houses in Ilinskaya Street had been hung with new signs: “Headquarters of the Commander of the Red Volga Flotilla,” “Maritime Investigative Commission,” “Red Army Supply Office,” and so on. The Rogovs’ house had now become the “Board of the Nizhny Novgorod Naval Dockyard.” The marble bears were gone, and the blunt muzzle of a machine gun protruded from the open window on the second floor.
Klim felt as though he had been witness to a rape. He told Nina to wait for him by the newspaper stand.
“You look after the satyr. I’ll try and find out what’s going on.”
The front porch was boarded up, and Klim had to enter through the back door. Immediately, he was hit by the smell peculiar to all government offices: a mixture of ink, molten sealing wax, and wet felt boots.
The corridor was empty. In the kitchen, Klim found five hunched figures sitting over desks, wearing masks.
“Do you know where I can find Dr. Sablin?” Klim asked. “He was at the front, but he got sick and was sent home.”
“Are you here on official business?” one of the figures asked. “No? Then go away and don’t bother us.”
Perhaps Sablin is dead, Klim thought. If so, where can we go? How can we find Zhora and the others?
As he went back outside, he saw Nina sitting on the ground with her face buried in her hands, sobbing.
He ran up to her. “What is it?”
She pointed to a newspaper stuck up on a display stand. The headline on the front page read, “Rightful Vengeance for the Attempt on Lenin’s Life,” followed by a list of murdered hostages. On the list, printed alongside the names of the former city governor, merchants, officials, Tsarist army officers, and priests, were the names of Elena, her parents, Zhora, and Fomin.
Klim stared at Nina, who sat crushed with grief. Then he turned to read the newspaper again.
Anyone contributing to the counter-revolution, including those who harbor counter-revolutionaries, will be summarily executed.
“We have to go,” Klim urged Nina. “We can’t stay here.”
She nodded and tried to gather the strength to get to her feet, but her body wouldn’t obey her. Eventually, Klim helped her up and clasped her tightly to him.
“I have no one left but you,” Nina sobbed.
We should never have come back to Nizhny Novgorod, Klim thought, holding the satyr tightly. We have no friends or allies here.
There were plenty of Nina’s old acquaintances who would have liked nothing better than to see her arrested. As for the others—who could Klim trust? He was unlikely to find anyone willing to risk their lives for a relative of a counter-revolutionary.
They had to find a place for the night before it got dark. If they were on the street after the nine o’clock curfew, they could end up being arrested or shot, depending on the revolutionary convictions of the patrol that stopped them.
Before the revolution, homeowners had advertised rooms for rent in the windows of their houses, but now, that private ownership was forbidden, all such notices had disappeared. It was futile to try and ask around—people shied away from strangers, fearful that they might be carrying disease or even that they might be Cheka spies.
“We’ll have to go to the fair,” Klim said to Nina. “I hope we’ll find something there.”
The Nizhny Novgorod Fair used to be the heart of the city with its streets, shopping malls, churches, theaters, and underground galleries. Now, it lay in ruins with all of its windows broken and its roofs dismantled. Ashes and brittle, dry leaves blew around the deserted streets.
Klim felt as though his childhood fantasy had come true.
“What would happen,” he had asked his mother as a child, “if everybody disappeared and there was no one left except you and me?”
A stray dog passed with its head drooping, not even stopping to look up at them. A startled mob of crows flew up from the dry basin of the fountain in front of the Fair House.
Klim took Nina to the Figner Theater. As a child, he used to come here to watch almost every show. Every single pane of glass in the building had been broken, and the wide stairs were covered with debris.
Klim opened the door to the auditorium. Columns of light came in through holes in the ceiling, full of circling specks of dust. The chairs had gone, and a huge broken chandelier lay in a heap on the floor. All that remained of the theater’s former opulence was a crimson curtain hanging so high above the stage that the looters had been unable to reach it.
“Let’s take up residence in the royal box,” Klim said. “We might be homeless, but we can at least try to live in style.”
Nina nodded silently.
After they had shared the last of the bread they had brought from the boat, Klim went backstage, fiddled with the levers and cables, and managed to lower the dusty bullet-ridden curtain.
“My friends and I used to hang out with the stagehands when we were little boys,” said Klim. “We’d bring them beer and dried salted fish, and they’d let us watch the show for free.”
He made a bed out of the curtain, laid Nina in it, and lay down beside her.
“You go to sleep. We’ll think of something tomorrow.”
She closed her eyes. “When I was a little girl, I read Dracula by Bram Stoker, and I told Zhora the story. He made up a special prayer. ‘Dear Lord, have mercy on my parents, on Nina, on me, and on all Christians. Let me be a better person and deliver us from the bloodsuckers.’ I told him that the bloodsuckers didn’t exist and would never come to Russia, so he stopped saying the prayer. And now the bloodsuckers have killed him and drained the life out of the rest of us.”
Klim felt hopeless. How could he comfort her? What could he do to try to heal this new wound?
Thankfully, Nina fell asleep quickly. She was exhausted and did not even have the strength for tears.
The silence was so intense that Klim felt he had gone deaf. The fair was normally a noisy place with loud, bustling crowds, orchestras, and shopkeepers praising their wares—lambskins, apricots, and rice, which they called “Saracen grain.”
Klim sank into fitful, sun-filled dreams, waking up with a start to total darkness and a sepulchral silence.
Life in the city had become impossible, yet Klim and Nina couldn’t leave without documents. And soon winter would set in. They might be able to hide from the Cheka, but there would be no way of evading the cold.