Occasionally, Klim took out the promissory note written by her husband and examined it. Maybe he should go and ask her how she was planning to pay? It was a large sum, and the due date was close.

He found out where she lived, and several times he passed by Nina’s house at Crest Hill and peered through the stucco-framed windows. He returned none the wiser, fretful and full of self-doubt—a sensation that was quite unusual for him.

How had this young woman managed to get under his skin in this way? Klim knew nothing about her. One emotion would follow another: first rapture, then morose bewilderment, and then outpourings of wounded self-esteem. Can it really be that she doesn’t care about me at all?

At night, vivid fantasies kept him awake. He imagined Nina in the same glittering dark blue dress with the low neckline that attracted his lascivious gaze. The more Klim put things off, the less confident he became of having any success. And in any case, he asked himself, what possible success could he be thinking of? He would be leaving soon, and Nina would remain in Nizhny Novgorod. He should stop tormenting himself and leave it to the lawyers to deal with Nina’s promissory note.

2

Klim was in his father’s office, flipping through the documents filed in the binder. A fly buzzed against the window. The church bells called the local parishioners to mass.

“You have a visitor,” said Marisha, knocking at the door. She gave Klim a business card that read “Countess Odintzova.”

All thoughts about bonds and promissory notes flew out of Klim’s head.

“Please, let her in,” he said, dropping the binder into the drawer.

However, it was not Nina who entered the office but a burly elderly lady in a black lace dress.

“Please call me Sofia Karlovna,” she said, offering Klim her hand.

He shook it, trying not to reveal his disappointment, and then collected himself. This isn’t all bad, he thought. This lady must be a relative of Nina’s, and she might provide me with some very valuable information.

Sofia Karlovna sank into the armchair and fixed her blue eyes on Klim for what seemed a long time.

“You inherited a promissory note signed by my son,” she said finally, “but my daughter-in-law, who is responsible for the payment now, has got herself into a very bad situation.”

“What’s happened?” asked Klim, alarmed.

Sofia Karlovna took a deep breath. “Since the start of the war, we have been impoverished. Our workers and horses were commandeered by the army, and there is nobody to work our fields. My daughter-in-law met the chairman of the city’s Provisions Committee, and he convinced her that she should restore our old flax spinning mill in Osinki.”

Klim remembered the man who had accompanied Nina out of the restaurant and the deep fold in the nape of his neck like the slot in a piggy bank.

“So, what can I do for you?” Klim asked.

“Nina does not have the cash,” said Sofia Karlovna, “and she wants to ask you to delay the repayment of her loan. Mr. Fomin went to the capital to get her a state contract for tarpaulin goods for the army, and Nina hopes that she’ll soon be able to sort things out.”

“What kind of deferment is she looking for?” Klim asked gloomily.

“Oh no!” Sofia Karlovna exclaimed. “You’ve misunderstood me. I want you to take Nina’s mill.”

Klim looked at her in bewilderment. “I need liquidity and cash, not a mill around my neck.”

“If you defer her loan payment and leave for Argentina, you can forget about ever getting your money back. I know exactly what Fomin is after. He is hoping to persuade Nina to marry him in order to get his hands on the mill and the lucrative contracts it is set to sign. What are you going to do if he refuses to pay you? Send him a threatening letter?”

“What will happen to your daughter-in-law if I take over her mill?”

“You will be saving her from making a terrible mistake. Mr. Fomin is a most unsuitable match! He has Nina completely hoodwinked, and she doesn’t have the sense to figure out what he’s really like. As soon as Mr. Fomin finds out that she is penniless, he will drop her immediately. The heartless barbarian clearly doesn’t care a fig about our house, library, or Nina. For him, they are all just unnecessary expenses.”

Sofia Karlovna was silent for a while.

“I am terrified that I will end up on the street. If Nina marries Mr. Fomin, there’s no way we’d ever be able to live together. Mr. Rogov, please, go to Osinki and talk to Nina. Mr. Fomin is currently in Petrograd, so there’ll be no one to oppose you.”

3

The deck of the little steamboat was crowded with monks in their dark robes, peasant women with sacks, and carpenters with saws wrapped in old rags. Some were dozing while others were talking to their fellow travelers.

You and your wild schemes! Klim thought to himself. Here he was sailing upriver on a rust-bucket steamer, guarding his trunk against thieves—fretting, wondering, and cursing himself for his presumption and ridiculous daydreams.

What if Nina was perfectly happy with Fomin? What if Sofia Karlovna had been overexaggerating the whole situation? She was clearly much more worried about her own future than Nina’s.

But here Klim was, breathing in the steamer’s acrid smoke and cinders, sweating in the roasting heat, and pulling his hat down low over his forehead so that nobody would see the anxiety in his eyes.

They sailed under the clear vault of the sky between thickly forested river banks. Stray, blackened, semi-submerged logs that had been left behind after the timber harvest had been floated downstream peered out of the water like prehistoric animals. A heron stood hunched on the sandbank, its reflection zigzagging across the water.

“The next stop is Osinki, sir,” said a sailor pointing toward an old manor house on the top of a nearby hill.

The deckhands moored the steamboat to a half-rotten pontoon, and the wave from under its paddle wheel almost capsized a rowboat carrying two girls wearing wide-brimmed hats.

The only passengers to get off at Osinki were Klim and a blond boy of about sixteen called Zhora Kupin. All the way from Nizhny Novgorod, he had entertained his fellow travelers with his poems and stories about his father who was a tailor, famous throughout the entire Nizhny Novgorod Fair.

The deckhands pulled the gangway back on board, and the steamer continued its way upriver.

It was hot and quiet; the breeze stirred the leaves of the hundred-year-old trees, and the dragonflies hovered over the water lilies.

Shielding his eyes from the sun, Klim looked up at the manor house. It seemed very respectable from a distance, but on closer inspection, its peeling light blue paint and cracked stucco betrayed its owners’ straitened circumstances.

Klim picked up his trunk and walked up the wooden stairs.

“Elena, I’m back!” he heard Zhora’s voice and stopped.

Should I ask him how to find Countess Odintzova? Klim thought. Zhora had mentioned that he knew everybody in Osinki.

Klim turned back to the shore and froze. Nina, barefoot, her dress soaked to the knee, was wading out from the boat to the moss-covered pontoon. While she held the stern steady, Zhora and Elena carried a large votive candle stand out of the boat. The three of them hauled it up to the sandy beach.

“Arkhip sneaked into our chapel last night,” Nina said, breathing heavily, “and took everything he could carry. I went straight over to his hut to sort him out, and Elena went with me.”

“I wouldn’t let you go on your own,” said her friend, a tall girl with two thick braids of fair hair that fell down to her waist.

Nina bent down to grasp the candle stand again, and a small revolver fell out from the pocket of her skirt.

“Where did you get that?” Zhora asked in amazement.

“It’s my husband’s. Do you think Arkhip would have just let me take the family candle stand back if I had turned up empty-handed?” She put the revolver back in her pocket. “Let’s go. This thing must weigh at least one hundred pounds… I don’t know how we’ll manage to get it up the hill.”

Nina looked up and met Klim’s gaze.

“Have you come to see me?” she asked, her face turning pale.

“I know Klim,” Zhora exclaimed. “We met on the steamer. Mr. Rogov, let me introduce my sister Nina and my bride Elena.”

Klim put his trunk on the ground and raised his hat. “Nice to meet you.”

He couldn’t keep his eyes off Nina’s crestfallen face. If she was Zhora’s sister, then her father was a tailor. Hardly the lineage of a bona fide countess! Klim could now clearly see why there was little love lost between Sofia Karlovna and her daughter-in-law.

An explosion roared out from the opposite side of the river, and a column of water shot up into the air. Elena and Zhora jumped back in fright.

“Honestly, you’re like a couple of babies, the pair of you,” Nina grumbled. “It’s only deserters stunning fish with grenades they’ve brought back from the front.”

“Nothing to write home about,” Klim said in wry amusement.

“There’s always something exploding around here,” Nina shrugged.

Like Lubochka, Nina had become so used to anarchy and war that the sound of a grenade exploding was nothing out of the ordinary.

Klim picked up the candle stand. “Let me carry it up for you,” he said. “Zhora, would you mind taking my trunk?”

4

Nina asked Klim to put the candle stand in the empty stillroom that was lit by the lengthening sun. Zhora and Elena went to the kitchen to give orders regarding dinner and left Klim and Nina alone.

“I think you’d be better off returning to the city,” Klim told her. “It’ll be safer there.”

“Country or city—it makes little difference these days,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

The evening sunlight slanted through the window, leaving Nina’s face in shadow but illuminating her low-necked dress.

She was an impossible and unthinkable mélange of opposites: her girlish charm and hard-nosed feistiness, her noble title and her lowly tailor’s origins, not to mention her less than salubrious admirer from the Provisions Committee.

Nina was also observing Klim, distractedly twirling her engagement ring, which was too big for her finger. It was obviously very expensive, most likely an heirloom, and it didn’t fit her very well.

“How did you know that I was here?” she asked.

“Sofia Karlovna wanted me to take control of your mill—” Klim began, but Nina interrupted him.

“Sofia Karlovna has no idea where our money comes from. How are we going to live if you take over the mill?”

“She said that Mr. Fomin—”

“He’s the only one here who can help me. He knows all about accounting and engineering, the machines, the procurement…. If it weren’t for him, we would have been out of business long ago.”

She dropped her ring and bent down to pick it up, and her revolver fell out of her pocket again. She squatted down and looked up at Klim.

“Can we write you a new promissory note? I understand you need the money, but I have no way of paying you back until spring. If you want, I can give you my furniture and silverware as an additional deposit. In March—no, let’s say May—I’ll be able to send you the money.”

Frightened and determined, Nina was ready to fight the creditor who threatened her business plans as fiercely as she had fought with the thieves who threatened her property. Klim already knew that he would never have the heart to take her mill away from her.

“We can sign the new papers as soon as you get back to Nizhny Novgorod,” he relented.

“That’s wonderful!” Nina exclaimed and then fell silent, embarrassed. “But I can’t go just now.”

“Why?”

“I have business here.”

Still with the revolver in her hand, Nina drew herself up to her full height and began to explain hastily that the tarpaulin production process was extremely complex and she needed to keep an eye on it.

“Perhaps you’d like to stay with us?” she asked. “And then we can go to the city together to sign the papers. I’m afraid that if you go back to your lawyers on your own, you’ll have a change of heart.”

Klim sighed but, unable to resist her, laughed. “You end up doing a lot of crazy things when someone is pointing a gun at you, you know.”

“It’s not loaded anyway,” Nina said and put the revolver back in her pocket.