Petrovich never spoke of worldly matters. He always steered the conversation around to his favorite subject: preaching Bolshevik ideology even when he was sitting at the card table.
“The revolution was a historical necessity,” he said. “The vast majority of the population lived in poverty with neither the right nor the ability to alleviate their fate. There, take that! King of clubs. The Tsarist police arrested the mechanic from our factory shop. Why? His only fault was that he gave shelter to revolutionaries who had escaped from exile in Siberia. He was locked up for his kindness.”
“Nothing much has changed since then,” the pawnbroker grinned. “Except that now the Cheka arrests those who give shelter to Whites.”
“And rightly so,” Petrovich barked. “Those who oppose the people deserve to be punished. What’s this—are you bidding misère now?”
Playing cards was Petrovich’s only weakness—and an understandable one. When everything inside a man is going at full blast, he needs to let off steam once in a while. Petrovich had asked many times if he could be sent to fight at the front, but his superiors didn’t allow him to go because there was no one who could replace him in his present civilian post.
Klim noted rather sadly the new signs of the times. The revolution had replaced one aristocracy with another, but the essence of Russian despotism remained unchanged. In the past, people could be threatened with the words, “Are you against the Tsar?” Now, they heard, “Are you against the people?” In reality, both phrases meant more or less the same: “Woe betide you if you encroach on the privileges of the ruling class.”
Things were much the same as they had been for centuries. The population still had no civil rights and retained a medieval sense of servility, believing that the people should serve the rulers and not the other way around, no matter what the propaganda posters proclaimed about the dominance of the working class.
One night, the Cheka raided the tavern. They took the card players out onto the street and began to load them onto a truck, but Petrovich stopped them taking Klim with them.
“This man is with me,” he told the Cheka officers.
When they left, Petrovich got into his car. “It’s a shame they’ve shut down the tavern,” he said. “But it’s for the best. These crooks aren’t our people.”
Klim said nothing. His last source of income was now gone.
“I’m leaving for Moscow,” Petrovich said. “I’ll be away for a month or so. Maybe we’ll meet again when I get back.”
Klim crawled out of the tent and shivered. God, how cold it was outside! Overnight, the theater had turned into an ice palace with its walls covered with frost.
Nina followed him out. “One of these days, we won’t wake up.”
There was a sound of chopping and splintering wood outside. They ran into the corridor and looked out the window. A group of Red Army soldiers cut down the wooden pillars holding up the awning of a shop on the other side of the road. Another brigade armed with saws and axes came from the riverbank.
“Get to work!” the brigade leader shouted through his megaphone. “The more wood you chop, the warmer your barracks will be in the winter. Smash the fair!”
The soldiers spread out around the square. Some began to tear the panels off boarded up windows, and others hacked at doors and broke down doorframes.
“We must go,” Klim whispered to Nina.
The only thing they managed to take with them were the remnants of the satyr. As they left by the back door of the theater, they found themselves facing a crowd of young people wearing red ribbons on their chests. Luckily, nobody paid much attention to Nina and Klim.
“Celebrate Revolution Day with shock work!” the leaders urged them on.
Wood chips flew in the air, and clouds of dust blotted out the weak November sun. Someone started singing the famous ditty “Dubinushka”—“The Cudgel”—and dozens of voices picked up the song.
A tramcar decorated with red flags stopped opposite the Fair House, and another group of workers swarmed onto the street—some with wheelbarrows and some with fire hooks.
“Down with the fair!” they yelled. “Destroy the cesspit of capitalism!”
“We’ll take it to pieces and burn it in our stoves!”
Klim and Nina got into the empty tramcar.
“Once, Comrade Trotsky let me have a look through his book on the history of the Roman Empire,” Klim said, trying to act tongue-in-cheek. “The book told the story of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. According to him, everything can be divided into two categories: things we can control and things we can’t control. A person should do his duty no matter what and not bother himself with things he has no power to change anyway. This is the only way to be truly free, whether in poverty or in wealth. What do you think? Perhaps we should have a go at being Stoics.”
Nina nodded slowly, looking straight ahead. She was shivering with cold.
They huddled close together, sharing the only overcoat they had between them. Klim clenched his teeth, seething with helpless rage at himself, his unhappy fate, and the city of his childhood now mutilated and rotten to the core.
Perhaps they should try to find Lubochka? Surely she wouldn’t give them away to the Cheka. But then, who knew? Anyway, he had no idea where she lived now.
If Petrovich hadn’t left Nizhny Novgorod, Klim would have gone to him for help. Now, even that path wasn’t open to him.
He looked sideways at Nina. Her lips were blue, and her worn dress was too thin to protect her from the bitter cold. If I don’t find us shelter tonight, Klim thought, she’ll come down with pneumonia or worse.
The tramcar rattled over the pontoon bridge. The gray river water had a gelid look, and mist swirled over the waves, a sure sign that the river would freeze over early.
Fresh flags had been put up on Rozhdestvenskaya Street, and there were huge portraits of Bolshevik leaders in the shop windows. The ancient Ivan Tower was decorated with fir branches and a huge banner: “Glory to the Great Anniversary of the Revolution!” It was hard to believe that a whole year had passed.
The tramcar went uphill to the kremlin and stopped. The driver told the passengers that a demonstration was about to begin, and the police had blocked off Blagoveschenskaya Square and Pokrovskaya Street.
“I wonder for whose benefit this demonstration is being staged?” Nina muttered. “For the benefit of the demonstrators themselves?”
“I think it’s for our benefit,” Klim said. “To scare us.”
“Then let’s go and watch the performance. It would be sad for the actors to put on a show without an audience.”
Klim frowned. “What if somebody recognizes you in the crowd?”
“I don’t care,” Nina said, looking into his eyes. “I can’t hide anymore.”
At twelve o’clock, a chorus of all the whistles, sirens, and signals of Nizhny Novgorod split the air. Marching bands struck up the “Internationale,” planes showered the city with propaganda leaflets, and a procession of delegates from the Regional Party Committee, the Executive Committee, the city Soviet, and other organizations started to make its way along Pokrovskaya Street.
To Klim, this Bolshevik parade looked very like a religious procession only with rifles instead of crosses and banners instead of icons.
“Those who oppose the grain monopoly are the enemies of the proletariat,” they chanted. “Kill the parasites! Distribute food according to class!”