Borisov, the party instructor, came out onto the porch, and Nina shuddered. Whenever the swine had a drink inside him, he would pound at her door, slurring, “How about some class war tonight? Just you and me.” She had had to barricade herself in her room with furniture to keep him out.
Now, Nina watched two men come running up to Borisov with a map. They spread it out on the bonnet of a car and began to argue about something, pointing at different locations.
Please, let them forget about me! she prayed silently.
Six months earlier, she had, as ill luck would have it, ended up on a steamer together with a number of Soviet agents who had been arrested too. The Chinese authorities had not bothered to find out which of the passengers were communists and which were White Russians, those who had fled the country for China after the Bolshevik’s had seized power. The prisoners had been spared from execution only because Moscow had paid an enormous bribe to the judge, who had let them out of custody.
But Nina had fallen straight from one prison into another. The ruler of Peking announced a manhunt for the conspirators, and they had been forced to go into hiding in an old mansion on the edge of the city. One after the other, Nina’s “partners in crime” had been sent back to the USSR, the house’s inhabitants kept changing, and still, Nina sat in her room waiting for her invisible superiors to decide her fate.
She had been to Borisov more times than she could count, pleading him to let her go home. She had told him that she had left behind a husband and a small child in Shanghai, but Borisov would not be moved. He knew that Nina had adopted a Chinese orphan girl and refused to believe that she might really have grown attached to Kitty. As for her husband, he simply laughed at Nina’s face at the first mention of him. “I know you White whores—you sell yourselves to the first capitalist pig you can find.”
Had Borisov known Nina was in charge of a large security organization consisting of several hundred armed White Army men, he would have been the first to put her up against the wall to be shot. It was only in the eyes of the Russian émigrés that Nina had made a brilliant career for herself.
The Bolsheviks saw things differently. In their opinion, if some young lady who had run off to China after the revolution suddenly became rich, it could mean only one thing. After all, it was a well-known fact that nobody could achieve success through their own brains and hard work in a capitalist country.
Things were made worse by the fact that Nina had managed to get American passports for herself and Klim, as an exceptional case, without having set foot in the country. Clearly, she was a spy and an enemy of the workers.
Borisov raised his head and looked in at Nina’s window. Then, with a decisive air, he set off inside the house toward her.
Nina’s heart lurched. What should she do now? Make another barricade? What if Borisov started shooting, or, worse still, set the building on fire? Just a few days ago, the Bolsheviks had been saying that the house would have to be burned after they left because it would be impossible to take all their secret documents with them.
Borisov burst into the room and seized Nina by the arm. “You’re coming with us.”
“Where to?” Nina gasped.
“To the Soviet Union. We’ll hammer all the bourgeois nonsense out of you.”
She tried to make a dash for it, but two guards came running to help Borisov. They pulled Nina from the house and pushed her into the back seat of one of the waiting cars.
Borisov thrust a large, blue-tattooed fist up close to her face. “Just one sound out of you, you bitch, and you’re dead.”
The small procession left Peking in mid-August, and for some weeks, they traveled a circuitous route along country roads, trying to throw the police off the scent.
All this time, the Bolsheviks continued to keep a close eye on Nina. They were tired, their nerves frayed, and they took out their anger on whoever happened to be on hand. For them, letting Nina go would have meant giving the “White bitch” a chance. This was something, in their eyes, she did not deserve.
When they had got as far as Inner Mongolia, they were joined by more cars carrying Chinese communists and their Russian advisers. These newcomers frightened the fleeing Soviet agents by telling them of the in-fighting that had begun among top party officials in Moscow.
Joseph Stalin had unexpectedly begun to build up authority. In casting around for someone to blame for the foreign policy debacle, he had singled out none other than Leon Trotsky—one of the main organizers of the Bolshevik Revolution and the founder of the Red Army. Those who supported Trotsky were now openly referred to as counter-revolutionaries and were being hounded by the press. This was a bad sign. The agents who had worked in Peking had, almost to a man, been supporters of Trotsky.
Nina shuddered to hear the news. If loyal Bolsheviks were seriously concerned about their own fate, what might lie in store for her? Though, truth be told, she was not at all sure she would even reach Soviet Russia. Borisov made no secret of the fact that he was planning to teach her a lesson. He had recently bought himself a chain metal whip at a village market, and he had promised Nina that he would soon be trying out his new acquisition on her.
Once the convoy had crossed the low mountains, they saw the great Gobi Desert stretching to the horizon, but they were not able to travel far across the stony, trackless waste. One of the cars broke down, and as they tried to mend it, night fell.
For the first time since they had left Peking, the fugitives allowed themselves to relax a little. Borisov had some rice vodka in his luggage, and he passed his flask around the circle.
Nina realized that this was her last chance to make a run for it. They had still not gone too far from the last Chinese village.
As the revolutionaries, warmed by the drink, sat around the fire reminiscing about their life in China, Nina hurriedly gathered her possessions. She took only a compass, a blanket, some bread rusks, and a water flask. There was no point in taking more—if she got lost, she would never survive in any case.
Nina tried not to think about what would happen if she managed to make it to a Chinese settlement. She did not know any Chinese, she had no documents, and it would be impossible to send a message to Shanghai—the nearest telegraph office was more than a hundred miles away. But it would be better to rot in remote Chinese backwater than to fall into Borisov’s clutches.
A little the worse for the drink, the Bolsheviks went off to their tents one by one, and when the first light appeared in the sky above the mountains, Nina quietly stole away from the camp.
Hardly a thing could be seen in the gray half-light. Nina made her way across the flat, stony plain by looking at the stars. All around, it was deathly quiet. Twisting an ankle, stepping on a scorpion, or simply grazing a heel—any of these would be enough to spell death.
“Just wait for me—that’s all I ask,” whispered Nina.
For several months now, she had been keeping up a constant conversation with her husband as if Klim could hear every word she said. When the Chinese had arrested her, Klim had rushed to Peking to make all possible efforts to get her released, and this despite all their quarrels and offenses of the past. No matter what happened between them, he never deserted her when she was in trouble.
The Bolsheviks had almost certainly not told Klim where they had taken Nina after the trial, and she could only guess what he had done after that. Had he gone back to Shanghai? Or had he perhaps stayed in Peking?
“Just you wait. I’ll come back to you,” Nina kept saying. “I’ll make everything right again. Just give me a chance.”
When a huge, red sun rose over the desert, Nina was so tired that she felt a constant ringing in her ears and a sharp pain in her side. But she could not stop trudging uphill—she had to walk as far as she could before the heat of the day set in.