There was a knock at the door. Nina pressed her hand to her lips. That was it. They were done for.
But it was only Friedrich.
“What are you doing sitting around in here?” he said. “Go to the Second House of Soviets. They’re expecting you there.”
“And what about you?” fretted Magda. “Where are you going?”
“To the Comintern Hostel.”
Friedrich called a porter, who tied Marga’s suitcases with a leather strap and hoisted them onto his shoulder.
“Where to?” the porter asked.
“To the exit,” ordered Friedrich as he led Magda and Nina through the crowds of passengers.
Nina wondered whether she ought to make a run for it before it was too late. Or would it be better to stay close to Magda? If she were to run away, where could she hide, and how could she survive when she knew no one in the city? And then there was Magda’s influential father who could mobilize the British Parliament if anything were to happen—or so she claimed.
“Friedrich?” said Nina. “What’s the Second House of the Soviets?”
“You’ll see in a minute,” he answered.
Nina assumed it was the place foreigners were taken for interrogation.
Nina had been expecting Moscow to be like some abandoned citadel ransacked by the enemy, but it was quite different. The smart station building had been recently refurbished, and there were lots of people on the streets, although nobody here was dressed in the European manner.
Moscow had its own distinctive style of dress. The men wore trousers of woolen cloth, Russian shirts, and peaked hats while the women were all in calico dresses and headscarves tied low over their foreheads.
Friedrich took Nina and Magda out into the square outside the station and pointed to a small Renault parked close by.
“Get yourselves a cab,” he said.
“When will I see you again?” asked Magda with a pleading note in her voice.
“I’ll come and find you.”
Once they were in the car, Magda began her ruminations about love again, but Nina wasn’t listening; she was watching the twilight city as it rushed by outside the window of the cab. So, here it was, the city that was talked of the world over as the embodiment of all evil.
There were crowds of people streaming along the narrow pavements and into open shop doorways. But every minute, it was harder for Nina to make out the shop signs, which were not illuminated as they had been in Shanghai.
There were far fewer cars in Moscow than there had been in China. People got around using horse-cabs or trams, which were full to overflowing. The windows in the buildings were lit up from top to bottom, and even the basement windows below pavement level threw out yellow rectangles of light.
“Why are all the lights on?” Nina asked their driver.
“There are tenants in every room,” he said. “Before you might have had some gentleman taking up a whole apartment by himself. But things are different now. Every family gets a room, and there’s no waste.”
Nina translated his words to Magda.
“Could you imagine if you had to share your house with strangers?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t mind if one of them was Friedrich,” answered Magda
The magic charms of the medicine man in South America had done more than protect Magda from violent death, it seemed. They had also cured her of common sense.
The Second House of Soviets turned out to be the former Hotel Metropol. Before, it had been used by members of the government. Now, they had been given private apartments, and the hotel rooms were being rented out to foreigners once again.
Magda’s spirits lifted immediately when she saw the lobby, which was more than respectable with its marble floors and glittering chandeliers.
“There. You see?” she said to Nina. “Things are looking up.”
On the downside, the prices at the Metropol were extortionate. They had to pay as much to stay a night as they would have paid for a whole month in a Peking hotel.
“The country needs hard currency,” explained the receptionist bluntly.
When he asked for their documents, Magda gave him her passport with a five-pound-note inside it.
“This woman is my guest,” she said, indicating Nina.
“I see,” said the receptionist quietly, dropping the note into a desk drawer.
As it was elsewhere, so it was in the land of the Soviets: money might not buy you everything, but it certainly helped solve most problems.
Nobody thought to arrest Nina and Magda. They stayed in the Metropol, dining in the restaurant on the ground floor and getting to know the foreigners who had come to the capital to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Magda kept asking after Friedrich, hoping that some foreign communists might know where to find him, but the days passed without a word or sign of him. Friedrich clearly had no intention of resuming relations with his old sweetheart.
“He’s just very busy,” Magda kept saying. “He needs time to sort out his affairs, and he knows where to find me.”
Nina had also had bad news. She had sent a telegram to Klim at home and at his workplace, but they had come back marked “Addressee not known here.” She was beside herself now at the thought that something might have happened to Klim and Kitty.
The telegrams she had sent to her friends had also gone unanswered. There was unrest in Shanghai, and a many of the white settlers had decided to leave, to be on the safe side.
There was nobody to help her out, and Nina would have to find the money for her journey home herself. It would take months to save up the sum needed on the salary she was getting from Magda, and then she had to get the necessary documents to get across the border—a seemingly impossible task.
Magda could not increase Nina’s pay. She did not have enough money herself as her father had refused to pay her bills.
“Come back to England immediately,” he sent back a cable in reply to her request. He did not want to invest a single penny in Bolshevik Russia.
For days on end, Nina and Magda would walk about Moscow looking at the sights, from the wooden mausoleum in which Lenin’s embalmed body lay on show to the Anti-Religious Museum, which had been set up in the old Strastnoy Monastery.
The whole of the city was preparing for the 7th of November when the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution would be celebrated. Buildings were being repaired and refurbished right and left, and columns of workers armed with training rifles or wearing gas masks were marching the streets—in a rehearsal of the coming military parade.
The Soviet Union was living in expectation of imminent war. It could be felt everywhere, in the headlines of the papers and the conversations at the markets.
Posters had been put up all around the town:
“Who are the Bolsheviks preparing to fight?” asked Magda, puzzled.
“Why, the English, of course. Who else?” Nina said with a smile. “After all, you’re planning to attack the USSR—all the newspapers are talking about it.”
Magda was terribly upset when she found out that the USSR was seriously expecting English warplanes to appear in the skies at any moment.
“But that’s absolute nonsense!” she argued. “The Soviet government knows that it’s physically impossible. Why are they deliberately misleading the population?”