The deckhands moored the steamboat to a half-rotten pontoon, and the wave from under its paddle wheel almost capsized a rowboat carrying two girls wearing wide-brimmed hats.
The only passengers to get off at Osinki were Klim and a blond boy of about sixteen called Zhora Kupin. All the way from Nizhny Novgorod, he had entertained his fellow travelers with his poems and stories about his father who was a tailor, famous throughout the entire Nizhny Novgorod Fair.
The deckhands pulled the gangway back on board, and the steamer continued its way upriver.
It was hot and quiet; the breeze stirred the leaves of the hundred-year-old trees, and the dragonflies hovered over the water lilies.
Shielding his eyes from the sun, Klim looked up at the manor house. It seemed very respectable from a distance, but on closer inspection, its peeling light blue paint and cracked stucco betrayed its owners’ straitened circumstances.
Klim picked up his trunk and walked up the wooden stairs.
“Elena, I’m back!” he heard Zhora’s voice and stopped.
Should I ask him how to find Countess Odintzova? Klim thought. Zhora had mentioned that he knew everybody in Osinki.
Klim turned back to the shore and froze. Nina, barefoot, her dress soaked to the knee, was wading out from the boat to the moss-covered pontoon. While she held the stern steady, Zhora and Elena carried a large votive candle stand out of the boat. The three of them hauled it up to the sandy beach.
“Arkhip sneaked into our chapel last night,” Nina said, breathing heavily, “and took everything he could carry. I went straight over to his hut to sort him out, and Elena went with me.”
“I wouldn’t let you go on your own,” said her friend, a tall girl with two thick braids of fair hair that fell down to her waist.
Nina bent down to grasp the candle stand again, and a small revolver fell out from the pocket of her skirt.
“Where did you get that?” Zhora asked in amazement.
“It’s my husband’s. Do you think Arkhip would have just let me take the family candle stand back if I had turned up empty-handed?” She put the revolver back in her pocket. “Let’s go. This thing must weigh at least one hundred pounds… I don’t know how we’ll manage to get it up the hill.”
Nina looked up and met Klim’s gaze.
“Have you come to see me?” she asked, her face turning pale.
“I know Klim,” Zhora exclaimed. “We met on the steamer. Mr. Rogov, let me introduce my sister Nina and my bride Elena.”
Klim put his trunk on the ground and raised his hat. “Nice to meet you.”
He couldn’t keep his eyes off Nina’s crestfallen face. If she was Zhora’s sister, then her father was a tailor. Hardly the lineage of a bona fide countess! Klim could now clearly see why there was little love lost between Sofia Karlovna and her daughter-in-law.
An explosion roared out from the opposite side of the river, and a column of water shot up into the air. Elena and Zhora jumped back in fright.
“Honestly, you’re like a couple of babies, the pair of you,” Nina grumbled. “It’s only deserters stunning fish with grenades they’ve brought back from the front.”
“Nothing to write home about,” Klim said in wry amusement.
“There’s always something exploding around here,” Nina shrugged.
Like Lubochka, Nina had become so used to anarchy and war that the sound of a grenade exploding was nothing out of the ordinary.
Klim picked up the candle stand. “Let me carry it up for you,” he said. “Zhora, would you mind taking my trunk?”
Nina asked Klim to put the candle stand in the empty stillroom that was lit by the lengthening sun. Zhora and Elena went to the kitchen to give orders regarding dinner and left Klim and Nina alone.
“I think you’d be better off returning to the city,” Klim told her. “It’ll be safer there.”
“Country or city—it makes little difference these days,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
The evening sunlight slanted through the window, leaving Nina’s face in shadow but illuminating her low-necked dress.
She was an impossible and unthinkable mélange of opposites: her girlish charm and hard-nosed feistiness, her noble title and her lowly tailor’s origins, not to mention her less than salubrious admirer from the Provisions Committee.
Nina was also observing Klim, distractedly twirling her engagement ring, which was too big for her finger. It was obviously very expensive, most likely an heirloom, and it didn’t fit her very well.
“How did you know that I was here?” she asked.
“Sofia Karlovna wanted me to take control of your mill—” Klim began, but Nina interrupted him.
“Sofia Karlovna has no idea where our money comes from. How are we going to live if you take over the mill?”
“She said that Mr. Fomin—”
“He’s the only one here who can help me. He knows all about accounting and engineering, the machines, the procurement…. If it weren’t for him, we would have been out of business long ago.”
She dropped her ring and bent down to pick it up, and her revolver fell out of her pocket again. She squatted down and looked up at Klim.
“Can we write you a new promissory note? I understand you need the money, but I have no way of paying you back until spring. If you want, I can give you my furniture and silverware as an additional deposit. In March—no, let’s say May—I’ll be able to send you the money.”
Frightened and determined, Nina was ready to fight the creditor who threatened her business plans as fiercely as she had fought with the thieves who threatened her property. Klim already knew that he would never have the heart to take her mill away from her.
“We can sign the new papers as soon as you get back to Nizhny Novgorod,” he relented.
“That’s wonderful!” Nina exclaimed and then fell silent, embarrassed. “But I can’t go just now.”
“Why?”
“I have business here.”
Still with the revolver in her hand, Nina drew herself up to her full height and began to explain hastily that the tarpaulin production process was extremely complex and she needed to keep an eye on it.
“Perhaps you’d like to stay with us?” she asked. “And then we can go to the city together to sign the papers. I’m afraid that if you go back to your lawyers on your own, you’ll have a change of heart.”
Klim sighed but, unable to resist her, laughed. “You end up doing a lot of crazy things when someone is pointing a gun at you, you know.”
“It’s not loaded anyway,” Nina said and put the revolver back in her pocket.
Klim continued to do nothing to settle his affairs and lived like a lazy schoolboy skipping classes. Initially, it was just a week, but that soon changed into two and then three. Nina always seemed to have something important to attend to at her mill, but Klim didn’t mind a jot. He informed Lubochka and his lawyers that he was in Osinki for his holidays and convinced himself that there was no way he could leave a damsel in distress all alone in the middle of nowhere surrounded by deserters and votive candle stand thieves.
Nina’s multifaceted nature fascinated him. For Zhora and Elena, she was the wise elder sister. When she talked to her foreman and vendors, she played the role of the defenseless and unlucky young lady, convincing them that it would be a sin to do anything that might harm her. However, if someone dared to encroach on her possessions or show a lack of respect, she would be transformed into a fury. On one occasion, before Klim and Zhora could raise a finger, she personally threw a drunken deserter down the porch and out of the house, telling him in no uncertain terms that she would “bust his head open” if he ever showed his face again.
She was always polite and hospitable to Klim and graciously accepted his well-meaning offerings—a hedgehog that he had brought home in his hat, some dark purple plums, or a string of perch from the river. But she always seemed to keep herself at a distance when she felt that he was trying to get too close. He couldn’t work out if this was because she was afraid of upsetting Mr. Fomin or whether a lingering affection for her dead husband still existed. Count Odintzov’s portraits littered the house, and she was constantly glancing at them in a sad reverie.