“And how will you tell who are the working people and who are the freeloaders?” asked Anton Emilievich politely.
“It’ll be easy. Those people who are of some use to society may live. And as for the freeloaders, we’ll string ‘em up from the lampposts. Now, you, Anton Emilievich, have a very useful profession—”
“Wait a minute,” Lubochka interrupted. “So, you think I should be strung up from a lamppost? I don’t work for a living, after all.”
Osip wasn’t in the least embarrassed. “That’s only because bourgeois society sets restrictions on what you can do. A woman Bolshevik came to our hospital and talked to us about women’s rights. Think how useful women could be if they had the chance to work like men! What would you like to do, for instance?”
Lubochka looked around the room and the dining table. “I suppose I’d like to open a restaurant.”
“I’m afraid that’s out of the question. We intend to ban all private property. But we’re going to need people in public catering who know what they’re doing.”
“Visit us again,” Anton Emilievich told Osip as they said goodbye. “Lubochka is having a birthday party soon.”
Osip turned toward her and looked at her with a piercing gaze, showing such frank and obvious sexual interest that she felt slightly weak at the knees.
“What would you like me to get you as a birthday present?” he asked.
“What kind of thing can a Bolshevik get?”
“Everything. The whole world.”
“Then I’ll have that.”
“Right. It’s yours.”
Mr. Fomin, the chairman of the city’s Provisions Committee, sat at his table in the Oriental Bazaar sweating, his broad shoulders bowed by worldly cares, his throat tightened with anger and jealousy as he stared at the dancing couples.
He had asked Nina to come to the restaurant on purpose. There would be people around him, and they wouldn’t allow him to do what he wanted to do most of all.
Nina ran into the half-empty room, blushing with anticipation. She put her wet umbrella on a chair and sat across the table from Fomin. “Tell me all the details! Whom did you meet in Petrograd?”
Nina was uncommonly smart, quick, and self-assured and looked nothing like Fomin’s own sturdy girls who had been living in Geneva with their mother, safely in neutral Switzerland since the beginning of the war.
Fomin tried to be calm and sober while telling Nina the news, and she was so excited that she didn’t notice his mood at all. She gasped, wrinkled her nose, and, like a little girl, bit her lower lip, trying to stop herself from laughing in sheer delight. “Oh, I knew you’d make it happen!”
Fomin could barely hold his emotions in check. Why has all this happened to me? he thought. However, he had no one to blame but himself. It had been he who had invaded Nina’s life, a big balding man whose belly hung over his belt. But how could he stop himself when he had seen her perishing, crushed by her grief and tormented by her mother-in-law? Apart from him, Nina had no one else to rely on except her younger brother.
Fomin had no illusions—he was well aware that she thought of him as no more than her patron. She listened attentively when he gave her advice and was grateful for all the help he gave her. Fomin’s office was full of little gifts that she had given him—tiny jars of jam, knitted mittens, and the like. Nina was under no obligation to pay him back for what he had done, but she had decided in her own naïve way to show her gratitude: You gave me something, so I’ll give you something in return. If you don’t want my jam, well, there’s nothing I can offer you besides myself.
Fomin knew that they had no future and that their little adventure could only end tragically.
Nina took a notebook from her bag and began to calculate something.
“Do you think the current ruble exchange rate will last until winter?” she asked him, meeting his stare. And only then did she realize that Fomin was about to explode.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, worried.
The walls were shaking around him; his whole world was crumbling to dust. Should he kill himself in front of her? Or smother her and then shoot himself?
“Sofia Karlovna told me everything,” he said colorlessly. “While I was away, solving your problem, you had an affair with the prosecutor’s heir.”
Nina put her pencil down. It rolled across the table and fell on her lap.
“Don’t you understand that Sofia Karlovna wants us to fall out?” Nina asked quietly. “She was the one who sent Mr. Rogov to Osinki.”
“He stayed there for three weeks!”
“So what? I owe him twenty-seven thousand. I had to work something out.”
People started looking at them, but Fomin didn’t care. What could Nina possibly “work out” with Rogov? The same arrangement that she had worked out with him?
“Will you at least let me explain to you how we spent those three weeks in Osinki?” Nina asked and began to describe how they had visited her mill and gone mushrooming and how she had refused to go to Argentina with Klim.
“If you don’t believe me, ask Zhora and Elena,” Nina added. “They’ll confirm everything I’ve told you.”
Suddenly, Fomin felt exhausted. His jaw was trembling, and a cold drop of sweat trickled down his temple.
“Why did you refuse to go with Mr. Rogov?” he asked.
Nina opened her notebook in the middle and moved it toward Fomin. “Here’s my balance sheet. As you can see, we’ve had very good results even before we won that state contract.”
She leaned back and crossed her arms. “I had my workers sewing canvas sacks. That is exactly what is in high demand among people who carry flour from the grain-producing regions.”
Fomin looked at her with a wry respectful smile. “You are a crazy woman. Mr. Rogov has offered you beaches and palm trees, and you have turned them down for a pile of canvas sacks.”
“I don’t need someone else’s achievements,” Nina said. “I want mine. Something that I have earned and that no one will take away from me.”
The church was full of people. The flickering reflections of the candles shone in the gilded robes of the priests and the silver frames of the icons. The voices of the choir singing “I Call to You, Lord” flew high up into the dark vault above.
Nina was crossing herself without grasping the meaning of the service. She looked around at the anxious faces—at a young woman kneeling with a black lace veil over her head and an old man trying to light a candle with a shaking hand. Next to him, a portly merchant’s wife dipped her finger into the oil of a sanctuary lamp and anointed her eyelids and the eyelids of her little son.
Nina had got exactly what she wanted: she and Klim had signed all the requisite papers, and her bank account had just received funds from her state loan. And yet she somehow felt deflated and unhappy.
In the past, Nina had always known exactly what she needed to do and diligently pursued her goals in order to never again experience the shameful poverty that had been a permanent feature of her childhood.
Her father had been a skillful tailor and charged up to thirty rubles for a fine dress, but he had also been a gambler, capable of blowing the family’s entire savings in a single night and forcing Nina’s mother to borrow money to feed her children.
If it hadn’t been for a casual acquaintance with Count Vladimir Odintzov, who for some inexplicable reason had fallen in love with her, Nina would have been condemned to the same grinding poverty that had marked her mother’s life. Nina owed Vladimir everything and felt guilty at even thinking about another man. Fomin didn’t count, really—at least that was what she told herself—but after Nina had met Klim, the revered remembrance of her dead husband seemed to have lost all its meaning like an old theater ticket. Nina believed that one day she would answer for this at the seat of judgment, and it struck superstitious fear into her. After all, she had already received much more than a girl of her background could ever dare hope for.