Unfortunately, I cannot forget Mr. Reich. I go down to the river to watch the huge rafts of logs traveling seawards, hundreds of thousands of them to be sorted, dried, and stacked. As I gaze at all this, all I am thinking is that these are the railroad sleepers that Oscar Reich is sending to Germany.
Back in the hotel, I sit down at the piano in the lobby, open the lid, and run my fingers over the keys. And then I find myself thinking of Mr. Reich’s teeth, which are equally white, even, and false.
It’s silly of me, but what can I do?
Nina received a telegram by Klim telling that he had sent a package with a conductor and asking her to collect it.
Although the bus to Feodosia did not come through Koktebel until twelve o’clock, Nina woke at dawn and wandered aimlessly about the house for some time, too agitated to settle on anything. All her thoughts were of one thing only: Klim would probably have written a letter to go with the parcel. What would it say?
Nina decided to go and have a swim. Taking a towel, she stepped out into the yard, which was bathed in the rays of the early morning sun. Gloria was sitting at her potter’s wheel under a canopy. Softie and Oink lay beside her, watching attentively as their owner shaped a pot-bellied vase.
The cockatoo was muttering sleepily on her shoulder, “Sir, we need to bring in the missiles. What are we going to fight with?”
Gloria slapped down some clay with her hand and stared at Nina. “Sit down!” she ordered, rising heavily to her feet from the rickety bench. “I want to have a look at you.”
“What for?” Nina asked.
“That’s my business. You just shut your eyes and model something with the clay. Whatever you like.”
Nina shrugged and sat down at the potter’s wheel. Closing her eyes, she took a piece of clay in her fingers and began to shape it.
“Stop!” Gloria said.
She looked at what Nina had made as if it was something extraordinary.
“A man trap!” Gloria muttered. “That’s your past…. It’s got a tight grip on you. I can feel it.”
Nina looked down at the clay in front of her: a flat circle with uneven, jagged edges. Actually, she thought it looked more like a beer-bottle top.
Gloria took out another piece of clay from the barrel. “Shut your eyes and have another go.”
It was clear that Gloria was trying to work out what was on Nina’s mind. This time, Nina attempted to make the shape of a heart, but she ended up with a strange shape pitted with holes left by her fingers.
“That’s a piece of cheese!” exclaimed Gloria. “‘At the top of the tree sat Mr. Crow, clutching a piece of cheese in his beak…’ Have you heard this fable? You hold onto your prize tight, or a fox might come running past and take it away.”
Nina was puzzled. “Are you talking about Galina?” she asked, warily.
Frowning, Gloria squashed the “man-trap” and the “cheese” together in her fist to make a single lump.
“Get up!” she ordered, and sitting back down in Nina’s place, she set the wheel turning again with the pedal.
“Daft girl!” she muttered. “Do you have a brain at all behind those curls?”
Nina stood, wiping her fingers with a cloth, waiting for some sort of explanation, but Gloria did not say a word. The wheel turned with a soft hiss, and a new pot began to take shape under the old woman’s gnarled fingers.
“I don’t know what to do,” said Nina timidly. “I don’t know if he still loves me or if he still wants—”
The cockatoo bent its head toward Gloria’s ear and began to jabber something.
“Mm-hm,” nodded the old woman, raising her at Nina.
“You should think about making him feel good with you rather than bad without you. And now, off with you. I have work to do.”
All the way to Feodosia, Nina thought about what Gloria had told her.
When was the last time she and Klim had felt good together? It had been several years ago. Their love had become like opium—it gave a short illusion of happiness but was actually destroying them both. Klim had been the first to realize this and decided to put an end to the torment.
Kitty took her spillikins out of Nina’s bag. Elkin had made her a whole set of tiny models, each no larger than a child’s fingernail. There was a pail with a handle, a samovar, a saw, and a carpenter’s plane, a hundred different items in all. The idea of the game was to tip them into a pile and then take them out one by one with a little hook, making sure not to touch anything else.
Kitty had no luck with the spillikins—the bus bounced too much as it drove over the potholes.
Klim and I have no luck sorting our relationship out either, thought Nina gloomily. But nobody is to blame. It just happened that we have had a rough ride.
The train had arrived early for a change.
Taking Kitty in her arms, Nina ran through the dim station building and onto the sun-drenched platform. Cheerful passengers hurried past them, carrying suitcases, baskets, and butterfly nets.
Nina saw a crowd gathered at the last car and ran toward the back of the train.
“Stop pushing!” the conductor shouted as he handed out parcels and letters. “You’ll all get your turn.”
He sorted deftly through the packages and envelopes with his wrinkled hands. “Not, this one’s not yours, nor this one either.”
At last, he handed over a plywood box to Nina.
Kitty jumped up and down beside her impatiently. “Mommy! Open it quickly!”
Having settle down on the bench under a poplar tree, Nina cut open the package with a knife borrowed from a vendor selling watermelons nearby.
“What’s inside?” fussed Kitty “Are there any toys?”
There were biscuits, sugar, and chocolate wrapped in paper. At the very bottom, under Norwegian canned goods, there was a letter. Klim wrote that the Krasin icebreaker had saved all the crew members of Nobile’s expedition and that the foreign journalists had not been allowed anywhere. He promised that he would soon be coming to Feodosia to bring Elkin his money and to collect Kitty from Nina. It seemed that it was a lot easier to buy long-distance train tickets up in Archangelsk.
“Thank you for helping me out in a tight spot,” wrote Klim at the end of the letter. “I hope Kitty didn’t make too much of a nuisance of herself.”
Nina felt as if the wind had been taken out of her sails. She had been eagerly awaiting Klim’s arrival, but now, she was dreading it. He was planning to take Kitty away and leave her alone.
Elkin saw that Nina was suffering and tried to raise her spirits.
“You and I must definitely go on a tour of the ancient world,” he told her. “I’ll show you such beautiful sights they’ll take your breath away.”
Nina agreed to go. She had to take her mind off her gloomy thoughts in some way.
They spent a day wandering through the rocky spurs of the Kara Dag and staring into the mouths of chasms.
“You and I are standing on an extinct volcano,” Elkin told Nina. “Can you imagine what it would have been like here in prehistoric times? Boiling lava, and the earth shuddering with earthquakes…. But now, everything is quiet and peaceful.”
They climbed a steep cliff and looked down on a breathtaking view.
“It’s so beautiful!” Nina said, almost in tears with emotion. “When you can’t tell where the sea joins the sky, it feels as if you’re on a huge ship floating through the air.”
Elkin took a deep breath. “Nina, I’ve been wanting to say something to you for a while now, and I think now is a good time—”
Nina looked at him in alarm. Had he made up his mind to propose to her? Please, anything but that!