Belov’s supervisor tried in vain to explain that his team was working on a very important book on the prevention of epidemics. But the meeting decided to dismiss Belov and all his colleagues who had been hired through “class nepotism.” Their place would be taken by brave Red Army soldiers.
Elkin groaned. “I’ve told you not to write on the application form that you were a count!”
Belov blushed to the roots of his hair. “Only a scoundrel could deny his own family history! My great-grandfather died on the battlefield during the Napoleonic Wars; my grandfather took part in the defense of Crimea, and my father was the commander of a battleship. How can I disown them?”
Elkin scratched his chin. “I suppose they’ve evicted you from your apartment too?”
Belov nodded mournfully. “We were given twenty-four hours to vacate the room. What do they care if six children end up on the street?”
Elkin spent some time making telephone calls, cursing, shouting, and cajoling.
“Go out to Saltykovka,” at last he said to Belov. “It’s a little place to the east of Moscow, a dacha settlement. My friend has a dacha there, though it’s unheated and a bit of a mess. I’ll look for some translation work for you to keep you and your family going.”
When the count left, Elkin took an open bottle of cognac from his desk drawer and took a large gulp.
“Bastards!” he swore. “They’ll be the end of Russia. They take everything of worth in the country and cut it off at the root! I don’t know what the Belovs will live on when I leave.”
“Are you planning to close down the Savannah?” asked Nina, alarmed.
“It’s not me that wants to close it. It’s the housing commission. They’ve already sent someone out to tell me I have no right to occupy an entire house like this one. The Bolsheviks may not have any specific plans for the development of the country, but they feel in their bones that if people’s only source of income is the state, then nobody will want to smash the system. So, they’re stifling everyone who has the desire or the ability to make money independently. They’re not taking everything at once, but just cutting off a piece at a time, bleeding us slowly, so that we get used to the pain. And then they can do what they like.”
Nina looked at Elkin in a daze. If Moscow Savannah closed, she would never have the chance to meet Klim and try to make it up with him.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Back home to Crimea,” Elkin said. “It’s nice there, mountains and sunshine. You walk along the beach, and the waves hiss and foam like champagne.”
“But maybe you should oppose the housing committee? After all, there are people who speak up for you. They need you!”
Elkin shook his head. “Nobody will fight for me. My bookmates are out-and-out individualists…. Oh, we’re all clever, worthwhile people, at least for ourselves, but we’re not prepared to put our heads on the block for anyone. We’re not lions; we’re giraffes—outlandish, conspicuous, but capable of reaching certain heights, for all that.”
Fate is clearly having a joke at my expense. For months I was doing all I could to find out something, anything, about Nina. Now, almost every day, somebody gives me news of her.
She has begun working in the Moscow Savannah, and Elkin is in raptures over my ex-wife.
“How could a creature like that have survived in Soviet Russia?” he keeps saying.
Elkin is touched by the fact that Nina is elegant and well-dressed like the young ladies in Moscow before the revolution, and that she doesn’t mangle her Russian with fashionable abbreviations.
“Brains, Mr. Rogov! Brains—that’s the most important thing in a woman! Well, apart from all the rest.”
I try to interrupt his enthusiastic outpourings, but he is unstoppable.
“I don’t mean to say I’m making a play for her,” Elkin says. “I’m no match for her millionaire husband. All the same, a healthy man can’t stop thinking about these things. And don’t come over all ‘holier than thou’ with me! You’re just a hypocrite, whereas I tell it like it is. You know her, don’t you?”
“No,” I say. “And I have no intention of getting to know her.”
“But I saw her go into your apartment that day. Sour grapes, is that it? Easy on the eye, but not so easy to catch?”
I am doing my best to ensure that Nina catches neither my eye nor Kitty’s. I have ordered Afrikan to make a new gate in the fence in the yard behind the house, and now, we go out by this exit. I’ve also asked him to keep the gates locked so that unauthorized people (Nina that is) cannot come in to our stairwell.
I don’t know what she is thinking. Is she bored without her husband perhaps? Is that why she’s decided to play games with me? Or is it Kitty she’s interested in? Maybe she’s waiting for a good moment to take her away?
Galina is also puzzled. She asked me, “Did you know that that woman who visited you is working in Elkin’s store?”
I told her I wasn’t interested in gossip about the neighbors. However, this did nothing to reassure her. In fact, Galina has now begun to suspect me of being “unfaithful” to her. Every day, she asks Kapitolina where I’ve been while Galina was out and listens at the door when I’m on the telephone.
This has been going on for a few weeks now, and I’m living in a permanent state of tension. I pray that Nina will leave me alone, although this request to the heavenly powers seems utterly ridiculous since we never see one another and she doesn’t interfere in my life.
The problem is me. I know Nina is somewhere nearby, and this thought is enough to drive me out of my senses.
What should I do? I can’t leave Elkin’s house any more than I can forbid Nina to come to the Moscow Savannah. The only thing I can do is to ask Galina to take my child when I go out to meetings. At least then, Kitty will not see Nina.
Tata is a bad influence on Kitty, of course, but at least it’s the lesser of two evils.
16. THE RAID
Vadik, the Pioneer leader, promised Tata that if she took an active part in public service, she would be able to join the Pioneers that summer and go on a camping expedition.
Tata had never been anywhere in her life except Moscow and only to places within walking distance of her home. Her mother never gave her any money for the tram.
But a Pioneer camping expedition was a real adventure! The children would pile into an open truck, drive through the streets singing songs, and then set off with their backpacks far away into the unknown—perhaps even as far as the Moscow suburbs.
Tata was already in agonies of joy and suspense.
She registered on a three-person team or troika on a state-wide project to stamp out illiteracy, taking the place of a boy who had recently come down with tuberculosis. The members of the troika were to go around the neighborhood recruiting adults who could not read and write for literacy classes.
The thought of knocking on strangers’ doors terrified Tata, but she told Julia and Inessa, the other members of the troika, that she was shivering from cold rather than fear and embarrassment. It was twenty degrees below outside.
Tata had a warm hat knitted with yarn from an unraveled old sweater, but her coat was a pitiful sight. It had been made from a plush mat decorated with squirrels. These squirrels were the cause of merciless taunting from her classmates.
The troika expedition was a disaster from the start. In the first building they went to, they were met with crude insults. In the next, they were stopped by a fierce dog in the yard. In the third, a maid told them to wait while she went to the store for kerosene, and they sat for two hours on the stairs for nothing. When the maid came back, she was visited by a fireman, and the shameless couple began kissing in front of the children.