Klim shook his head. “As soon as the Shakhty Trial is over, I’m taking a holiday. My daughter is sick, so I’m taking her down south.”
The door swung open again, and Nina appeared in the doorway. “Oscar, everybody is looking for you. You promised to play bridge.”
“I’m coming.” He finished his brandy and left the balcony.
Nina and Klim looked at one another, for all the world like hostile neighbors who had met by chance on the dividing line between their properties.
“What’s the matter with Kitty?” asked Nina at last. “Is she sick?”
“Every day is different,” answered Klim reluctantly. “Sometimes her arms and legs swell up, and she gets headaches.”
“Have you taken her to the doctor?” asked Nina. “What did he say?”
She kept showering Klim with questions, and he began to feel a nagging sense of irritation. Why was Nina suddenly acting the part of the anxious mother?
“Where do you want to take Kitty?” she asked.
“It depends what tickets I find.”
“So, you haven’t got your rail tickets yet?”
Nina was about to add something, but at that moment, Oscar came back out onto the balcony.
“You came out to tell me to hurry up,” he told Nina, “and you’re still out here talking to my friend.” He threw a meaningful glance at Klim. “I’m starting to get jealous.”
“See you again soon,” said Nina and left, leaving Klim in the company of the stone chimera.
He squinted at the monster crouched on its pedestal. It had the head of a lion and a crest along its back, and its body was like that of no creature on earth. A chimera was nothing but a chimera, a bad dream, a blend of incongruous parts. And that was exactly what Klim’s love had become.
Almost every one of the foreign journalists came to the next session of the Shakhty Trial. They all wanted to see the conclusion of the cross-examination of Scorutto.
The judge called the engineer to the microphone, and in quiet, calm tones, Scorutto announced that he fully accepted his guilt.
“I only withdrew my testimony because of my wife,” he told the court.
A barely audible sigh of disappointment was heard in the courtroom.
“His wife should never have shouted out to him,” whispered Seibert in Klim’s ear. “She let the OGPU know that she and her husband loved each other. That was just one more tool in their hands. I expect he was told that his wife would be arrested if he didn’t confess.”
Klim nodded gloomily. The trial was beginning to resemble the medieval allegory of the “Dance Macabre” in which a grinning skeleton leads people of all ranks and all walks of life into a dance, showing that no matter what a man might do, the force of fate still leads him into the grave.
It was utterly hopeless to resist the Bolsheviks.
As soon as Klim came out of the House of Unions, he caught sight of Nina. She came toward him, looking light and elegant in a little straw hat and a white flowered dress.
“Hello,” she said. “How’s Kitty?”
“She’s fine,” said Klim without meeting her eye.
Without exchanging a word, they set off in the direction of Okhotny Ryad Street. A stream of people was coming the other way, and as they let them pass, Klim and Nina touched shoulders and then moved apart from one another.
“I know just the place to take Kitty,” said Nina. “Elkin wrote to me that he’s in Koktebel now; it’s a small Bulgarian village in Crimea. His aunt has a house there, and she rents out rooms to holidaymakers. Elkin invited me to go and stay there.”
“I can just picture your playboy of a husband in a Crimean village,” snorted Klim.
“I’d go to Koktebel without Oscar. He’s gone to Germany—he left yesterday.”
There was a crash from above the street, and a cloud of lime dust rose into the air. Klim looked around. Behind a fence plastered with theater posters, a group of workmen was demolishing the Church of St. Parascheva. Already, the golden cupolas had gone, and huge holes gaped in the walls, through which could be glimpsed the heads of the workers.
“I know someone who works for the People’s Commissariat for Railroads,” Nina went on, “and he’s booked a rail compartment for me. You and Kitty can come with me to the town of Feodosia, and from there we can take a bus straight to Koktebel.”
Klim looked at her in amazement. What was all this about a compartment? She didn’t really believe for a moment that he would agree to travel with her?
“My dear girl, you must realize that everything is over between us,” he said.
Nina’s face contorted as if in pain. “But you said yourself that Kitty needs to go to the south!”
“I refuse to take any charity from you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re sharing Reich’s bed!” retorted Klim angrily.
Nina hung her head. “What about you and that Galina?” she whispered. “I don’t imagine you’re just sitting around playing solitaire.”
“Watch out!” came a shout from behind the fence as a beam crashed down from the roof of the church.
“If you’d only listened to me at the start—” said Nina with a catch in her voice. “But I don’t know why I’m even interfering. If you want to kill our child out of sheer stupidity—”
“Don’t use Kitty to blackmail me!” snapped Klim, but Nina interrupted him.
“I’ll be at the Kursk Station on Friday at two o’clock. The train to Feodosia, Car Two, Compartment Four. If you want to come, come.”
Then she turned and walked away.
Klim arrived home in a state of turmoil. What sort of plan was this of Nina’s? It was madness for the two of them to travel together, not to mention in a single compartment. Kitty would realize that her mother had been found, and then what?
But what if I don’t manage to find rail tickets in time? Klim thought. His period of leave from work would pass, the summer would be over, and perhaps Kitty would still be sick.
He opened the door to his apartment, and Galina came rushing to meet him. “How was the Shakhty Trial?”
“Fine,” he answered, his mind elsewhere.
What if he did decide to go to Koktebel after all? What would he do about Galina? When he had told her he wanted to go south, she had immediately assumed he was taking her, although he had promised nothing.
Klim stared gloomily at Galina’s thin legs in their short socks, shrunk from constant washing, and at her coarse cloth dress, creased from long hours of sitting at a typewriter.
Why had he got involved with Galina? For months now, he had been justifying himself by reasoning that it was what she wanted, but this charm no longer worked. He had a crime on his conscience: he had allowed Galina to hope for something. Now he faced a choice of either crushing her completely or carrying this pointless and heavy burden around for the rest of his life.
Galina put her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Why were you so long? I missed you!”
Any failure to respond to her affectionate advances was to risk bringing forth a torrent of alarmed questions. But to respond was only to wrap a noose tighter around his own neck.
Galina could already see from his face that something had happened. “What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously.
Klim blurted out the first thing that came into his mind. “I just saw them demolishing the Church of St. Parascheva. What a shame! That church is more than two hundred years old, you know. It’s the same all over the country. I read in the paper that in my hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, the city council has ordered the demolition of the churches on the main square so that they don’t get in the way of military parades.”