Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

He winced as though her words had physically wounded him.

“I’m sorry, but I have to go now. Be careful and take care of yourself.”

Nina had a terrible night. First, she sobbed, imagining that Klim would never come back and she would be left all alone. Then she remembered what she had said to him in her fit of anger. He’ll never forgive me, she thought. In a moment of weakness, she screamed and wailed like a desperate child, her cries echoing all around the theater. She stopped as suddenly as she had started, shocked at the sound of her own voice in the silence.

As he had promised, Klim came back in the morning, tired and smelling of tobacco smoke. He crawled into the tent and took Nina in his arms. The sun was shining through the old theater curtain and bathed everything inside with a reddish light.

Nina stroked Klim’s hair. “Where have you been? Why don’t you want to tell me? Are you mixed up in something bad?”

“I’ve brought us some bread,” he said without opening his eyes.

“So, you won’t tell me?”

Klim took a deep breath. “I’ve been gambling. I know how you feel about it, but we’ve got to treat it as if it’s a new job. I’m sorry, but I can’t think of any other way of surviving.”

5

Nina viewed gambling with horror as a kind of incurable disease. Her father had been an addictive gambler and quite capable of blowing the family’s entire savings in a single night, forcing Nina’s mother to borrow money to feed the children.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Nina said to Klim. Her heart sank at the thought that he might gamble away the money from the satyr at the card table.

Now, Klim slept during the day. Nina took his binoculars and went upstairs. From the top floor, she could look out over the grounds of the fair, the Oka River, and the opposite bank. In the distance, the military trucks would drive by, their sides daubed with propaganda slogans:

We welcome the donation of mattresses to the hospitals.

Tailors! Lend your services to make uniforms for the Red Army!

One day, Nina saw a banner demanding that the town’s citizens surrender their binoculars.

You won’t be getting these, thought Nina. She needed her binoculars to watch what was going on at her house on Crest Hill on the other side of the river.

Klim had tried to find out what had happened to Sofia Karlovna but without success. He had found out, however, that the Bolsheviks had converted Nina’s mansion into a telephone exchange and telegraph station. They had cut down the trees in the orchard and put up radio masts all around the house. Everything Nina had once had was now lost—her books, her paintings, and even a reminder of the beauty that had once surrounded her.

By mid-October, the satyr had lost half its head, but the money from the silver together with Klim’s occasional winnings was barely enough to buy food that was now being sold at outrageous prices. The nights became colder, but they had no stove and couldn’t make a fire in their tent. Their only tool was a hacksaw, so they couldn’t build a better shelter for themselves.

Nina crept around stealthily, talked in whispers, and imagined Cheka operatives lurking in every shadow. One night, she had a dream: it had snowed, and the Cheka had tracked Klim down by following his footprints. She woke up in a cold sweat.

I can’t live like this anymore, Nina thought. We have to do something. We have to change things.

But now she shrank instinctively from the thought of resistance. Memories of that hard blow to her stomach and of her brother being shot were fresh in her mind. Her instinct for self-preservation told her not to stick her neck out, to lay low, and to let no one know of her existence.

In any case, except for Klim, I have no one to live for anymore, thought Nina. Not even myself.

1

The underground gambling den, where card players and crooks of every stripe would meet to try their luck or ply their trade, was at the Lukin Tavern next to Kunavino Market. Klim entered the semi-dark room full of drunk people roaring with laughter and found himself a place at the bar.

The waiters hauled up buckets of raw vodka from the basement, and the punters drank it with soaked dried peas and bread sprinkled with salt. Underage prostitutes with hungry eyes did their best to lure crippled bagmen. War invalids always had money because they were allowed to carry more baggage than others.

A pawnbroker sitting next to Klim complained to the chief of police that the cold weather was coming, but the authorities weren’t allowing citizens to stock up on firewood. In return, the chief of police complained about the sailors of the Red Volga Flotilla, who had moved into their winter quarters in Nizhny Novgorod and were raising hell.

“Don’t issue them with warm overcoats,” the pawnbroker advised. “Then they’ll stay quiet until spring.”

The police chief nodded. A moment later, he showed his new friend a handful of ladies’ rings under the table. “How much will you give me for these?”

Klim recognized the jeweler who had bought pieces of silver from him. The man put on his dark glasses and gestured to Klim, inviting him to take a seat at his table.

“Ladies and gentlemen, let us start the game,” he pronounced.

He was playing alongside a blue-eyed woman with a yellowing ermine flung over her bony shoulders. Klim was paired up with a red-faced army man whom everybody addressed by his patronymic, Petrovich. The man held a briefcase in his lap, a sign of state authority. Apparently, he was some kind of a local bigwig.

Klim quickly realized that the jeweler and his blue-eyed girlfriend were cardsharps. They might play into his and Petrovich’s hand for a while, but in the long run, they always won. Klim’s red-faced partner cursed under his breath and chain-smoked.

The great Don Fernando, the chief gambler of the Shanghai underworld, had taught Klim that with a few exceptions, all cardsharps use three basic strategies:

Card tricks, when a cheat pulls a card from out of his sleeve.

Signaling, when a partner or a specially placed spy passes information to the cheat about his opponents’ cards using secret signs.

Marked cards, when cheats would make tiny marks on the cards with a piece of graphite hidden under a fingernail or with a needle.

But no matter how hard Klim tried, he was unable to figure out how the sharpers were managing to swindle him and Petrovich.

The jeweler had begun to shuffle the deck once again when suddenly, the electricity went out.

“I need light!” he shouted. “Quick! Bring me some candles!”

His girlfriend lit a match, and Klim noticed that the jeweler covered the deck with his hand.

Finally, a servant brought in a large candelabra. Klim squinted at the matchbox with its clumsy printed cover. It was crude work, probably made in a basement in the Millionka district.

“Could I have a few matches?” asked Klim.

Just as he had thought, the matches were tipped with phosphorus—a method that had been out of use in Europe and America for at least twenty years.

Well, gentlemen, thought Klim. You’re about to see a magic trick.

He went to the lavatory, sprinkled the lining of his pocket with water, and put the matches in it. Then he returned to the card table.

Soon, the faces of both the jeweler and his girlfriend had turned sour.

“Let’s tally up,” grumbled the jeweler, taking his dark glasses off.

Klim took his winnings and went outside. The street was full of drunkards loitering and singing dirty songs, ignoring the curfew.

“Wait!” Petrovich called, running to catching up with Klim. “How did you do it?” His face looked strained in the moonlight.

“Our opponents were playing with marked cards,” Klim said quietly.

“Surely not!”

“They were using phosphorus. It’s how people make the mysterious symbols that appear on the walls of churches at nighttime. Phosphorous glows in the dark, so as long as the light was on, only someone wearing dark glasses could see the signs. That’s why our cardsharp panicked when the power went off.”

Klim explained to Petrovich that once he had gotten wise to the ruse, he had put the wet matches in his pocket and dipped into it repeatedly to touch the matches and leave smears of phosphorous all over the deck. Soon, the jeweler could no longer see his marks and had to give up.

“Why didn’t you expose the rotten scoundrels?” Petrovich asked.

“At the moment, I’m more interested in money than justice.”

“And how did you manage to win anyway? Were you cheating too?”

Klim shook his head. “If you want to cheat, you have to be well-prepared. I didn’t have time today.”

“I say, will you teach me how to play cards?”

“If you pay me, I will.”

2

The next evening, Klim was told not to try to be smart. If he moved in on other people’s targets, he would get his neck wrung. Now, he had no choice but to play with occasional penniless visitors and from time to time with Petrovich. Klim’s new partner would stake his own money, keeping the winnings to himself, but giving Klim food in return for his instructions in gambling.

Petrovich treated Klim with wary curiosity.

“I see those casino people for what they are,” he said, looking at the other card players. “I come here to beat these bastards down, at least at cards, but I can’t figure you out. Are you a former bourgeois? You don’t look like one.” He eyed Klim’s frayed outfit doubtfully. “The devil only knows who you are. But one thing’s for sure—you’re a cheat and a son of a bitch.”

Petrovich was a fanatic of the first water who believed absolutely in the infallibility of the Bolshevik Party. He was completely disinterested in money. When he had been younger, he had never had a penny to his name, and now, everything came his way without any effort from him because of his position. He toiled away morning and night, taking everything on himself, jumpy and crotchety, yelling at his subordinates, forgetting to eat, and chain-smoking lethally strong, hand-rolled cigarettes. He was a man equally capable of signing a death sentence and giving away all of his possessions to the poor.

Petrovich never spoke of worldly matters. He always steered the conversation around to his favorite subject: preaching Bolshevik ideology even when he was sitting at the card table.

“The revolution was a historical necessity,” he said. “The vast majority of the population lived in poverty with neither the right nor the ability to alleviate their fate. There, take that! King of clubs. The Tsarist police arrested the mechanic from our factory shop. Why? His only fault was that he gave shelter to revolutionaries who had escaped from exile in Siberia. He was locked up for his kindness.”

“Nothing much has changed since then,” the pawnbroker grinned. “Except that now the Cheka arrests those who give shelter to Whites.”

“And rightly so,” Petrovich barked. “Those who oppose the people deserve to be punished. What’s this—are you bidding misère now?”

Playing cards was Petrovich’s only weakness—and an understandable one. When everything inside a man is going at full blast, he needs to let off steam once in a while. Petrovich had asked many times if he could be sent to fight at the front, but his superiors didn’t allow him to go because there was no one who could replace him in his present civilian post.

Klim noted rather sadly the new signs of the times. The revolution had replaced one aristocracy with another, but the essence of Russian despotism remained unchanged. In the past, people could be threatened with the words, “Are you against the Tsar?” Now, they heard, “Are you against the people?” In reality, both phrases meant more or less the same: “Woe betide you if you encroach on the privileges of the ruling class.”

Things were much the same as they had been for centuries. The population still had no civil rights and retained a medieval sense of servility, believing that the people should serve the rulers and not the other way around, no matter what the propaganda posters proclaimed about the dominance of the working class.

One night, the Cheka raided the tavern. They took the card players out onto the street and began to load them onto a truck, but Petrovich stopped them taking Klim with them.