The man turned around. “No,” he answered. “I’m a journalist.” He handed Seibert a card on which was written “Klim Rogov.”
“Oh, you’re Russian, are you?” asked Seibert, still more surprised.
“By birth, yes. But I have American citizenship, and Kitty and I live in Shanghai. I work at an English-language radio station there.”
“And I work at the Wolffs Telegrafische Bureau news agency,” said Seibert. “So, how do you find Moscow?”
Klim gave a shrug. “I came here to find people who took part in the civil war in China, but everywhere I’m told that the Soviet Union sent no agents out there.”
Seibert gave a knowing smile. “What do you expect? Politics is nothing but a collection of myths and legends we are told we must believe.”
“Somehow I’m not convinced,” said Klim. “A friend of mine left for the USSR together with a group of political advisers who had been working in China, and they all seem to have vanished into thin air. I’ve been trying to find them for a month but with no luck.”
“You should come to my house tomorrow,” said Seibert. “I’m having a bit of a gathering at five o’clock, and there will be an English lady there, Magda Thomson. She knows some people who used to work in China.”
“Thank you! You’ve been a great help!” Klim turned to his daughter. “You see, Kitty? Didn’t I tell you everything would be all right?”
Seibert felt like some kind of magician who could grant the wishes of ordinary mortals with one click of his fingers.
Keeping a secret diary is like putting a notice on your door saying, “Keep out!” and then deliberately leaving it slightly open.
It’s a bad habit, and I’ve tried to give it up many times, but what can I do? I’m a scribbler by nature, one of that writerly tribe whose chief pleasure in life lies in hunting out words and collecting meanings. Without this pleasure, I don’t think I could survive. Anyway, I’ve promised to give a detailed account of my adventures in Soviet Russia to Fernando, so let that be my excuse.
I caught sight of this notebook in a kiosk in Vladivostok. It was only after I’d bought it that I noticed it included a note of “memorable events” for every date: executions of revolutionaries, forcible dispersal of demonstrations, assassination attempts on the Tsars, etc. This diary could quite easily be called the “Book of the Dead,” but I hope for me it will tell a story of survival, not of disaster.
My wife has disappeared without a trace. The only clue I have to her whereabouts is an article in Pravda newspaper announcing that the “Chinese group” with which she was traveling has arrived in Moscow.
When my friends in Shanghai heard I was coming to Russia, they thought I had lost my mind. As the Bolsheviks see it, any foreigner with a Russian name is a White émigré, and a White émigré is, by definition, an enemy.
But nobody stopped me at the border. My American passport and respectable coat were enough to mark me out as a VIP. Clearly, the petty Soviet officials were afraid to stick their necks out. Who knows who I might be—a famous engineer or a foreign scientist invited to attend the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution?
It took Kitty and me sixteen days to reach Moscow, and what sights we saw on the way! The train was accompanied as far as Khabarovsk by a convoy of Red Army soldiers who stood on duty on the platforms between the railcars and on the locomotive. They were there to protect us from the gangs of armed bandits that often attack passenger trains in the Far East just like the Indians in films about the Wild West.
There were still several rusty, derailed trains lying about from the time of the civil war. A number of bridges had been blown up, and the Bolsheviks had replaced them with temporary wooden structures. It is quite terrifying crossing these makeshift bridges; the train inches across, the beams groaning and cracking from the weight, and all the passengers hold their breath, praying it will hold out till they reach the other side. Once, the bridge did actually start to break up under us, and the locomotive only just succeeded in dragging the last car across to the opposite bank. It was the strangest feeling as if we had crossed the Rubicon.
I don’t know how long my search will last and how long my money will hold out. I never had access to Nina’s bank account, so Kitty and I are living off my own modest savings.
My friends are right, of course. It is madness to stake everything you own on one card and to set off of your own accord to this bogeyman of a country, which émigré mommies use to frighten their naughty children. Even if I do find Nina, the chances are that we’ll only break up again. Even before she left, we both realized that our life together wasn’t working out, and we were only heading for some inevitable catastrophe.
So, why am I chasing after the ghost of this long-lost love?
I have always admired Nina’s energy, her dignity, and her ability to rise up out of the ashes like a phoenix, but there’s more to it than that. She has her own distinctive feminine charm, which I find quite irresistible. And I’m not the only one by any means. I’ve seen how other men look at her. Where will I find another woman like her? If I hadn’t come to Moscow, I’d be doomed to loneliness or a pointless search for someone exactly like her, and I don’t even want to think about that.
I am like a passenger on the Titanic after the shipwreck, freezing in the icy water, refusing to believe that the ship is doomed, convinced that the whole thing was just some emergency drill. Any minute now, the ship will rise up from the depths, the holes in its hull will close up, and the captain will steer it off on its original course.
Klim could not wait for the meeting with Magda.
He hailed a cab at the hotel and helped Kitty into an old-fashioned sleigh.
“Pray that everything works out for us,” he whispered in Kitty’s ear. “God will hear your prayers, I’m sure.”
“Please let everything work out for us!” shouted Kitty at the top of her voice. Then she turned to Klim. “Do you think he heard that? Or should I say it louder?”
The cab driver laughed into his frost-covered beard and took up the reins. “Giddy up now, girl, as fast as a motorcar!”
The evening sky over Moscow blazed with a crimson sunset. The sleigh rushed on, its runners squeaking in the snow. Wind blew in their faces and clumps of dirty snow flew up from under the horse’s hooves.
As they came out onto Lubyanka Square, the cab driver turned to his passengers and pointed at a high building with a clock on its facade. “Have a look at that, comrade foreigner. That building used to be the central office for the Rossia Insurance Company, but now it’s the headquarters of the OGPU, the political police.”
The clock face reflected the scarlet of the setting sun, and Klim found himself wincing. He felt as if he were being closely watched by some fiery eye, all-seeing and dispassionate.
Kitty fell asleep on the way to the party.
The driver stopped at a single-story house with high windows. On the walls of the house was a frieze showing blue sea, rose bushes, and dancing girls with tambourines. Meanwhile, a palisade of enormous Moscow icicles hung from the roof.
Klim lifted Kitty in his arms and walked up the porch steps. He knocked at the door, which bore an inscription in Gothic script: “Aufgang nur für Herrschaften”—“Only the noble may enter here.”
“Look who’s here!” cried Seibert as he threw open the door, and lowering his voice to a whisper, added quickly, “Come with me into my bedroom. You can put your daughter down there.”
Klim looked around. The hall was hung from the floor to the ceiling with gilt-framed paintings. Seibert collected them, apparently.