After dinner, Oscar told Theresa to light a fire in the library and to bring in a bottle of wine and two glasses.
Nina was delighted. This was a good sign!
In the library, she went straight to the window. As Shilo had said, under the windowsill was a tiny hiding place covered with a small piece of wood. Nina moved the wood to one side, reached into the crack, and took some sweets in silver wrappers, hardened with age.
“Help yourself,” she said, holding one out to Oscar.
He laughed. “Antique sweets! Whatever next.”
He had unnaturally white teeth that looked as if they were made of porcelain. How much do crowns like that cost? Nina wondered. They had to be more expensive than gold ones.
“Will you join me in a drink?” asked Oscar, opening the bottle. “Wine isn’t like sweets—it gets better with time.”
They chinked glasses and drunk to Nina’s health.
Encouraged, she could not resist asking a question. “Tell me, who are you? What do you do?”
“I’m a Red capitalist,” answered Oscar. “When there was famine in Russia, I brought a fully equipped field hospital over from the States and sixty thousand dollars’ worth of canned goods. After that, the Soviet government gave me a concession, and now I have my own pencil factory at the Dorogomilovskaya Gate.”
Nina was bewildered. The fight against capitalism was the mainstay of Bolshevik ideology. Why was an American allowed to own a factory in Moscow?
Seeing her confusion, Oscar laughed. “The Bolsheviks want to build a new kind of society, but they don’t have the technical specialists they need: they’ve all either run away or died during the war. Currently, eighty-five percent of the population of the USSR live in rural areas, and half of them can’t read and write. The first thing the country needs is to fight against illiteracy, and there’s a huge demand for pencils and pens. So, they made an exception for me.”
“Aren’t you afraid that the Soviet government could just take away your factory?” Nina asked.
“You shouldn’t confuse politics with the propaganda aimed at the man in the street. You may have noticed that the Bolshevik press likes to attack the English, the French, the Poles, and the Chinese, but they hold up the USA as an example—a model of modernization and business acumen. They’re no fools in the Kremlin; they know very well that to get industry back on its feet, they need close ties with the United States. Europe is still recovering from the Great War, and America is the only country that will provide technology and long-term loans. The success of my business is like a pledge—a guarantee that one day Washington will acknowledge the USSR and create an embassy here. And as soon as that happens, foreign investors will start to move in.”
“You’re a brilliant diplomatist, it seems,” Nina said, delighted.
Oscar shrugged. “I guess I just have a feel for business. I earned my first million when I was nineteen years old.”
They sat on the divan and talked. Nina now felt completely relaxed, perhaps from the warmth and comfort or the excellent Italian wine. When all was said and done, she thought that had to be one of the greatest pleasures in life: to sit and chat with an intelligent man who clearly showed an interest in her.
She did not want to think about the future at all, not even the immediate future. But still, she glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece above the fire. It was already long after midnight. She hoped Oscar would let her stay the night in his house. Surely, he would not throw her out—Nina hinted several times that she had nowhere to go.
Oscar took a last sip of wine, put his glass down on the floor, and, without a word, pushed Nina down on the divan.
“What are you doing?” she cried out in a muffled voice.
He put his hand over her mouth and began fumbling hastily at the buttons of his trousers.
Yefim, his cigarette in his mouth, took aim at a ball with his cue and sent it rattling into the far pocket.
“You’ll get yourself a dose of syphilis one of these days,” he said, sullenly, as Oscar came whistling into the billiard room.
Oscar waved him away impatiently. “Skip it. Turns out this one was a nice little lady. Just a little shy for my liking.”
Yefim put his billiard cue back in the rack. “I wanted to show you something.”
He brought in one of the large gray envelopes belonging to Baron Bremer and tipped out its contents onto the green baize of the billiard table. It was a bundle of securities in German and Swedish firms along with a will registered with a solicitor, stating that all the baron’s property was to pass to his children on his death.
Oscar looked at Yefim with amazement. “Do you think these papers are genuine?” he asked. “Is our baroness a millionairess?”
“It’s possible.”
Oscar scratched his head. “Well, it’s impossible to get ahold of this fortune in the USSR, anyway.”
“You need to think how to go about it,” said Yefim. “We need all the money we can get.”
Oscar liked to tell everyone that his business was going well, but in fact, things were getting worse every day. According to the original plan, he was to become a model concession-holder and attract foreign investors into the USSR, but nothing had come of it mainly because in the Bolshevik camp, the right hand did not know what the left was doing. One government department would hand out guarantees of private capital while another would threaten to destroy every last capitalist on earth. Who would start up a business in Moscow under such conditions?
But worst of all was the fact that the Bolsheviks kept altering the rules in their own favor. When Oscar had come to Russia, he had been promised that he could change Soviet money into foreign currency at the greatly reduced official rate and transfer the profit from his business into foreign bank accounts. But now there was a foreign currency crisis in the country, and the State Bank was doing all it could to prevent Oscar from taking a single cent out of the country.
Besides all this, Oscar was constantly hounded by various commissions connected with the trade unions or the police or the Chief Committee for Concessions. All these officials pretended to be concerned about the conditions of his workers when their real mission was simply to extort bribes.
Yefim had been the first to suggest to Oscar that they needed to get out of the USSR, and the sooner the better. He had never had any illusions about the Bolsheviks. Before the revolution, he had been the owner of a luxury bathhouse with private suites and had been through all the cycles of nationalization. He had had his accounts and property confiscated and eventually lost his house. If Oscar had not taken him on as his assistant, Yefim would have taken to drink long ago.
Oscar too understood that it was time to fold up his business and get out. But he had put everything he owned into his factory, and it was impossible to sell. He felt like a foolish child who has been warned countless times not to play with fire. Oscar had never heeded such warnings—he was a business genius after all. But now the genius had lost.
The securities belonging to Baroness Bremer could be just what Oscar needed to save him, but he had ruined everything.
A week of courtship, flowers, and chocolates, and Nina would have fallen for him hook, line, and sinker. Instead, he had treated her as just another victim of the revolution—a lishenets girl with whom he could do whatever he wanted.
Lishentsy was the name given in the USSR to former aristocrats, priests, and other “socially hostile elements” who had been stripped of their electoral rights. They could not find a job or receive credit, so in order to survive, young and attractive women in this position often resorted to working as escorts or sometimes even prostitutes. This was something of which Oscar took full advantage. Deep down, he was engaged in his own class struggle. He was Jewish, and once upon a time, princes and barons would not have let him past their thresholds. Now, their daughters were submitting themselves willingly to his embraces.