A breakthrough in Nina’s relations with Klara Fedorovna occurred when the secretary once took a seat next to Nina’s in the cafeteria. The director’s floor had its own cafeteria which was used by the top management. When Nina was told that now it was available to her, too, her first impulse was to refuse as she would rather stick to the common canteen on the third floor. But Sinitsin insisted: “Sorry, Nina Yevgenievna, you don’t have a voice in that matter. Security considerations, you understand.”
Forced to use the directorate cafeteria, Nina always tried to arrive there towards the closing time, when the bosses had already had their lunch and dispersed, leaving the cafeteria empty. Once, as she was sitting there alone, just starting on a mushroom julienne baked in smetana (the cafeteria served excellent dishes for symbolic prices), Klara Fedorovna suddenly came running in.
“Open yet? Thank God. With all this rush work, one will go hungry.”
In the recent weeks, Gradbank had been swept by some kind of rush every day.
Klara Fedorovna filled her tray and headed for Nina’s table.
“Do you mind, Nina?”
It was Nina’s impression that the director’s assistant was not exactly happy about the prospect of joining her for the meal but the woman had no choice – it would be impolite to take another table in the empty cafeteria, and Klara Fedorovna clearly tried to be polite to the analyst girl who was being singled out so by the director.
At first, their conversation was limited to idle comments about weather, but then, little by little, Klara Fedorovna warmed up to it. Apparently, she had long lacked someone to chat with like a woman, and now, finding a good listener in Nina, she thawed.
Since then, the secretary, too, often came to the cafeteria when it was already empty, not hiding her desire to have a chat with Nina. There was no stopping her now; she would go on about anything, telling stories from her life, gossiping about Gradbank’s managers, or sharing the local rumors. Nina had no taste for gossip, and at her former jobs, she rarely indulged in the favorite pastime of all employees – tittle-tattling about their superiors – but she would not stop Klara Fedorovna. As an excuse, Nina told herself that in that way, she could occasionally hear something useful for her work, but she knew deep inside that it was self-deception; the simple truth was that she wanted to know more about the world of her man. And about himself.
Klara Fedorovna came from Alushta.
“It’s a town down South, by the sea – you’ve heard of it, Nina? For five months each year, it’s season there – every hole is crammed with holiday-makers, it’s all beach life, night life, and all that… The locals work in the service industry or sell fruit. For the remaining seven months, there is nothing – no life at all, just unemployment and boredom.”
After finishing school, the young Klara was taken on as a typist for the town hall. She worked for peanuts, but at least it was a permanent job.
“But I also sang,” Klara Fedorovna said with a smile. “We had an amateur choir. We were giving performances at the holiday homes and we were received well, too.”
She looked around to make sure that they were alone in the cafeteria.
“Here, listen.”
In a deep, rich voice, she sang, “Hey you, dashing Cossack – hey you, eagle of the steppe…”
“How beautiful!” Nina exclaimed in sincere admiration.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” sighed Klara Fedorovna.
Klara left her Alushta for the capital which she was determined to conquer. She dreamed of receiving professional singer training in the conservatoire.
“What happened?” asked Nina. “Don’t you tell me you weren’t admitted. With such a voice!”
“Admitted? Not a chance! Ninochka, do you have any idea how many talented, young provincial fools flood this city every year? And the local folks have their own children to fix up…”
Klara from Alushta never made a career as a singer. Instead, she revealed a real talent for the secretarial profession. She quickly learned how to use personal computers which were the coming thing at the time. A typing virtuoso and a meticulous, industrious worker, she was a dream of any manager. After changing several secretarial positions, she came to work, for a good salary, in one of the start-up financial firms which, in those times, were springing up all around like mushrooms.
Then something happened. More than once, as she approached that point, Klara stopped short and changed the subject. The subject that she changed to was invariably her son Stas. A young man of twenty, he was a student at the architectural academy. Klara Fedorovna had raised him alone, and understandably, he was the apple of her eye. Apart from her son and Gradbank, Klara Fedorovna had no life at all.
“Stasik is such a gifted boy, you have no idea!” Klara Fedorovna beamed rapturous maternal love. “In his second year already, he took part in an international contest. Everybody – I mean, everybody could see that his project was way better than all the rest of them, but you understand, those contests are all about backstairs pull and intrigues…”
Finally, little by little, Nina learned what had happened to her lunch companion twenty years before. Nina was not really trying to fish out Klara Fedorovna’s secrets; the woman herself clearly had the need to make a clean breast of it.
In those days, the ephemeral firms that called themselves financial companies did not usually last long. Typically, they ‘circulated’ – successfully or not – their money for some time, and then burst like bubbles on the water pools after a May shower. Before long, Klara’s company, too, started showing symptoms of a near demise.
It was mainly the fault of one of the two young co-owners of the company. He was a nice, likeable guy who had made some bad choices and had run the company into debt as a result. He was in for a prison term or a more immediate and brutal punishment by some creditors of the sort that wore crimson jackets and close-cropped skulls according to the fashion of the day.
At some point, he fell on his knees before Klara and begged her to forge a certain document that was in her keeping. And Klara complied.
“Excuse me, why did you do that?” Nina wondered.
“Don’t you understand?” Klara uttered with an anguished look on her face. – “I loved him. He was the father of Stas who I was carrying then.”
Nina was embarrassed. She did not mean to pry into other people’s painful secrets – she had enough secrets of her own.
“We do insane things for people we love, don’t we?” remarked Klara Fedorovna.
Nina made no reply. Moved by the story of Klara Fedorovna, she had an impulse to tell the woman what she herself had done for someone she had loved, but she bit her tongue.
“How did it end?” she asked.
Even now, after twenty years, it was clearly a painful subject for Klara Fedorovna.
“It all came out. My lover got killed. But the firm survived – it was saved by the other owner. Do you know who it was?”
Nina shrugged in bewilderment.
“It was Pavel Mikhailovich, Ninochka. Yes, none other. Not that anybody used his full name at that time; he was only twenty something and everyone called him Pasha. But he was a big man even then. I mean… Well, you understand.”
It took Nina some time to digest what she had heard.
“And what happened to you?” she asked.
“Pasha saved me, too. I would’ve thought he would be the first to finish me off, but no, he covered up for me instead – told everyone that I’d been kept in the dark, used as a dummy. Then he gave me a good scolding, of course, and demoted me to cleaner for three months. But what kind of punishment is that? I was ready to cut off my own hand for what I’d done… I’ve been with him ever since,” Klara Fedorovna concluded. “I’m telling you all that just so you know – he is a noble man, if ever there was one.”