Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

Klim told him briefly about his situation.

“That’s not good,” Khitruk muttered. “But we’ll figure something out.”

He led Klim and Anton Emilievich to a freezing-cold guest room and gave them two logs for the stove.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t heat this room properly,” Khitruk said. “I just can’t afford enough firewood at current prices.”

Khitruk turned to Anton Emilievich. “Are you sure you won’t change your mind about leaving? We are badly in need of educated people, and your encyclopedic knowledge would be invaluable.”

Anton Emilievich sighed. “You have so much energy that you don’t notice how cold it is in Petrograd. But I couldn’t live without hot water. My back aches in the cold.”

Khitruk sat down next to Klim on the sofa. “What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know.” Klim shook his head. “I was at the railroad station and heard someone saying that people are managing to get out of the city on foot or by sleigh.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,.” Khitruk said angrily. “It’s freezing out there, and you have neither felt boots nor a sheepskin coat. You’d freeze to death in three hours. But with your bourgeois appearance, you wouldn’t even last that long before the Red Guards got you.”

Klim said nothing.

“Listen, you need to find a place to stay while you try to get a return ticket,” Khitruk said. “Why don’t you live here for a while? Otherwise, I’m afraid that the Bolsheviks will force me to give over all my rooms to the proletariat. Workers with nowhere to go are being given so-called ‘class mandates’ so that they can confiscate spare rooms in a rich person’s apartment. They’ve already been to see me three times and told me that I can’t live here all by myself. It makes me sick to think of some bumpkin cooking on my stove or using my bathroom. Plus, as you can see, I often have company. We won’t be able to talk about serious things with ignorant strangers around.”

“Why don’t you ask your friends to live with you?” Klim asked.

“All my friends are looking for tenants too. And most decent people have already left the city. Please stay with me! It’s true that ration cards are a problem. The ‘bourgeoisie’ are in the lowest category and only get an eighth of a pound of bread a day. I have no idea if you have any right to a ration as a foreigner, but we can find out. So, what do you say?”

“All right,” Klim nodded.

“Excellent! Tomorrow, you can go to the house manager’s office and register yourself as a tenant. The lady who works there is a little strange though. You’ll see what I mean when you meet her.”

7

The house manager’s office was in the former porter’s lodge. Klim noticed a sign attached to the door. It said that Petrograd was now in a state of martial law, and all visitors to the city must be registered without delay.

Klim knocked on the door and entered a dimly lit office adorned by two portraits—one of Lenin and the other of the many-armed Hindu god Shiva. A woman in a crimson knitted cap was sitting beneath them.

“Peace be with you,” she said in a disinterested voice and lit a copper incense burner that hung above her desk. A trickle of bluish smoke drifted up toward the grimy ceiling.

“I’d like to register myself,” Klim said.

She stared at him with her round, crystal clear gray eyes. “Thank the gods you’re not proposing to marry me,” she muttered. “I recently had a visitor from Apartment Thirteen who was determined to win my hand in marriage. I’m in charge of the ration cards and accommodations, and that alone is dowry enough to tempt a great many men. Durga!” she said suddenly and thrust out a hand to Klim.

He shook her thin fingers. As far as he could remember, Durga was the Hindu warrior goddess who ensured order in the world.

“Have you heard the news?” the woman said. “The Bolsheviks have paid off the Germans. They’ve signed a peace treaty agreeing to the Kaiser’s terms. The war is over, but the Germans have taken all our western provinces. But he,” Durga pointed at the Lenin’s portrait, “couldn’t care less. If he’s still in power, that means the gods must be on his side.”

The woman made Klim sit on a small oriental drum and focused all her attention on Klim’s Argentinean passport and Khitruk’s petition for a temporary registration.

“So, Mr. Rogov, Kliment Alexandrovich, born 1889,” she said slowly, “you’ve stated that your occupation is ‘writer.’ What exactly do you write?”

“Recently, the only writing I’ve been doing is filling in forms.”

“You too!” Durga cried and gazed sadly at Shiva. “Khitruk writes proclamations that nobody cares about, the man from Number Five writes poetry, and a tenant from Number Ten writes pieces for the violin and divine revelations when he has the money for his cocaine habit. Why doesn’t anyone write anything useful, like how to survive all this madness?”

She stared at Klim disapprovingly.

“My friend sold me a pound of American corn flour and a jar of French margarine,” Durga said. “My pantry is empty. I have nothing but salt and baking soda. So, I have a question for you, sir: What can I do with this latest acquisition of mine? I looked in the cookbook, and all the recipes sound as though they have been made up to taunt me. ‘Take three pounds of veal,’ they begin, but they don’t say where this veal is to be found. I need to know about corn flour, not about veal that can’t be obtained for love nor money.”

“You could make a tortilla,” Klim suggested. “It’s a type of soft flatbread. At one time, it was all I ate.”

“Then why don’t you write about something useful like that?” exclaimed Durga. “Perhaps you have a recipe for potato peelings or fish heads as well? You could write a pamphlet entitled ‘Dinner on a Shoestring.’ That is what people need now! Tell Mr. Khitruk to stop churning out inflammatory nonsense and write something worthwhile.”

Klim shrugged. “He’s just unable to stand by and watch dispassionately—”

“Dispassionately means not being misled by passion,” Durga barked. “If you keep a cool head and act the same way toward everything and everyone, you have no expectations and, therefore, won’t suffer disappointment or disillusionment. Tell Mr. Khitruk to put that in his pipe and smoke it.”

She wrote down Klim’s recipe and added his name to her register. “Come over this evening,” she said. “I’ll treat you to some of your tortillas.”

1

Three weeks passed, and there was still no letter from Klim. The post office had started working again. Nina went there every day, but the assistant behind the wooden counter always met her inquiries with an indifferent shake of the head.

There was no news from Osinki either, and Nina suspected that the mill was no longer in her possession. Most likely, the workers who hadn’t received their wages had stolen and sold the equipment and looted Nina’s house.

If she had listened to Klim back in September, they would have safely been in Buenos Aires by now. She had chosen the wrong path by refusing him and trying to save her business, and the hopeless position she found herself in now was what she had got in return.

The only memento Nina had of Klim was the “key from his heart,” and she carried it on a chain around her neck like a talisman.

In the evenings, she loosened her braid and ran her fingers through her hair just as Klim had done. She buried her face in the pillow on which his head had rested. Walking the streets, she stopped at the places that still bore the invisible traces of his presence: the spot where he had dropped his glove in the snow, and the ice run where he had held her hand and had slid together.

She remembered the mixed colors of his stubble—black, fair, and red, his eyes the color of strong black tea, and the imperceptible little scar on the lobe of his left ear, the mark of an earring he had worn at nineteen on his travels in Shanghai.

Zhora told Nina that he was not going to pin all his hopes on Klim. He had only one thing on his mind: “We can’t abandon Russia in her hour of need. It is the duty of every able man to go south and join the White Army volunteers to fight the Bolsheviks.”

Listening to him nearly broke Nina’s heart. Zhora was no more than a boy, skinny and awkward, with a great cowlick of hair covering his forehead. What kind of a soldier would he make?

Sofia Karlovna spent her days praying, visiting her friends, remembering the good old times, and cursing the Bolsheviks. Occasionally, she would come to Nina and demand money, favors, and explanations of what was going on in a world that had gone crazy.

“The Bolsheviks have ordered Princess Anna Evgenievna to bring three members of her household to clean a latrine,” the old countess said. “They’re doing it on purpose just to humiliate her. What if they order us to do the same?”

“I won’t go,” Nina said firmly. “They may shoot me—let them do whatever they please.”

To cap everything else, the Bolsheviks had arrested Elena’s parents. The Regional Executive Committee had come up with a new idea for inveigling more money out of the rich by demanding an “indemnity” from the city’s wealthiest citizens—fifty million rubles in total.

“They’re no better than kidnapping criminals,” Elena wept on Nina’s shoulder. “They take control of the cities, bleeding the people dry and blackmailing the wealthy merchants.”

The Bolsheviks could see little difference between five thousand and fifty million rubles. For them, it was just a pile of cash, and they didn’t care where the merchants got these extortionate sums just so long as they paid.

Nina told Elena to move into her house.

Now, there’s nowhere for us to escape even if we wanted to, she thought. Nina and Zhora would never have left Elena on her own, and there was no way Elena was going to leave her parents.

One day, Nina went to visit Lubochka to see how she was doing, but her friend wasn’t at home.

“You’ll never catch her here these days,” Marisha grumbled. “The mistress is playing around behind her husband’s back. She and her Bolshevik friend brazenly walk the streets, and he gives her presents. Yesterday, she brought home a gilt-backed hairbrush—with someone else’s hair in it.”

Shocked and dispirited, Nina went home.

How could her friend—so smart and so high-minded—keep company with a man who was little more than a bandit? It was an act of utter treachery.

Zhora confirmed what Marisha had told Nina: he had seen the incongruous couple out and about a number of times—elegant Lubochka arm in arm with a soldier in a burned and tattered greatcoat. They had been so engrossed in each other that they hadn’t noticed anyone else.

2

The frost held until mid-March, and then a rapid thaw set in. During the day, avalanches of snow slid heavily from the sun-warmed roofs, but every night a new palisade of icicles as thick as a man’s arm bristled from the eaves again. The city stewed and began to smell as all the rubbish dumps that had been buried under the snow began to thaw out.

Usually, Nina went to the market with Zhora, afraid that she might be attacked and her basket of food stolen. But today, she had to leave her brother at home. The day before, he had declared that now that it was spring, he had no intention of wearing his scarf. He had caught a cold almost as soon as he had stepped outside the door and lost his voice.

Officially, the market was shut, but in fact, a huge crowd gathered on the central square every day. Private trade had initially been prohibited and then briefly permitted only to be banned again. Things had gone on in this way for several months, and the policemen were never quite sure whether they were meant to drive the “criminal capitalist profiteers” away from the market or not. Consequently, they implemented a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as and when the fancy took them, robbing the villagers of whatever goods they wanted for themselves or their friends and family.

The market boiled with life like a giant cauldron. Every imaginable product was on sale there: foot wrappings, Christmas ornaments, poppy cakes, and cocaine.

An old general in cracked glasses was trying to sell a gramophone horn. He stood timidly among the crowds, eyes averted, chewing on the ends of his gray mustache. An old woman with her head wrapped in a shawl was peddling two dirty frying pans. Boys hawked Swedish matches and local “Java” cigarettes and thrust a shivering puppy out toward passers-by. “Do you want a barker to guard your house?”