Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

“There are millions of people living in New York.”

“We have to try,” Zyama insisted. “We asked a Russian translator to help before, but that young man didn’t like Jews. He even insisted that the Red Cross stop giving us powdered milk—although we have four children to feed. The boys have been left without their mother. She was murdered for ‘espionage.’ Whenever they arrest a ‘Bolshevik,’ the counterintelligence agents get half of the money in his pockets.”

“For some people, it’s just a way of earning money,” Jacob said in a trembling voice. “They find out who has been paid that day, slip communist leaflets into their pockets, and then shoot them, and no one had ever been punished for it.”

Zyama had everything ready—a sheet of white paper and a sharp pencil.

“Please be extremely careful,” he said nervously. “No smudges, please. Americans are very particular people. Our petition must look like a real official document.”

Klim felt uneasy providing the family with false hope. The Froimans stood around him dictating in a whisper what he should write in their petition: their previous achievements, an account of their New York cousin’s wealth, and a note of Solomon’s address to which the head of the Red Cross should send a cable.

There is simply no way that the Red Cross is going to bother with healthy people when the town is full of sick and wounded in much direr straits, Klim thought. But there was no point trying to dissuade the Froimans.

Jacob put the precious petition in his pocket. “How can we repay you?” he asked Klim.

“I’ll be glad of anything you can offer,” Klim said with a sigh. “At the moment, I’ve nowhere to live and no job.”

“This young man wanted to ask if he could get a job at your newspaper,” Zyama prompted.

Jacob frowned. “It won’t work. We already have a crowd of authors—all of them famous—who’ve come here from the capital. Everyone wants to publish their writing, everyone’s looking for money, but we have only four pages in our newspaper.”

Klim had an idea. “You’re in charge of ads, aren’t you? My wife is missing. She was trying to get to Novorossiysk. Maybe someone knows where she is?”

“I can put an ad under Missing Persons,” Jacob said. “And we can print it in the largest type to make it more noticeable. I won’t take any money. I’m sure the Red Army will take Novorossiysk before our books are checked. And when the Bolsheviks come, we’re doomed anyway.”

1

Nina hoped to escape with the help of the French government, and now, all she needed was confirmation that she and Sofia Karlovna would get visas. Their case had been delayed for several months because they didn’t have passports, and it had taken a long time for the consulate to send a request to Paris and get a positive response.

Fomin had also applied for a French visa.

“You’re so anxious about it,” Nina teased him, “it’s almost as though you think we’ll live happily ever after once we’re in exile.”

“But perhaps there’s still time for one final fling?” Fomin replied.

Nina shook her head. “Admit it—we’ve already had our fill of life’s luxuries, and now, it’s time to pay for our pleasures.”

One day, she overheard the cook talking to a friend.

“The mistress won’t be going anywhere,” the cook said. “She’ll act coy for a while, but eventually, she’ll marry Mr. Fomin. He’s old enough to be her father, but what choice does she have? He’ll give her children, and in five or ten years, he’ll keel over with a stroke.”

It’s true, thought Nina. This was probably what would happen if they ever escaped from Novorossiysk.

Fomin wasn’t putting a foot wrong. He never laid a hand on her and just smiled calmly when she talked of her love for Klim. Nina took a grim pleasure in teasing Fomin, deliberately turning the knife in both his and her own wounds. She was like a condemned criminal provoking her jailers before her execution, refusing to accept any favors, and encouraging them to fresh torments as though the worse things were, the better for her.

Nina and Fomin sat up long after Sofia Karlovna had gone to bed, restless night owls drinking champagne requisitioned from the Abrau Durso vineyard. They laughed at themselves and the White cause, sang Russian folk songs, and talked about politics.

Fomin kept claiming that the British were to blame for the Whites’ defeat since they were always on the lookout for a chance to bring Russia to its knees.

“You have too high an opinion of yourself,” Nina said. “People everywhere tend to mind their own business. They don’t concern themselves with the tragedies of strangers. If there’s a conflict of interest, there’ll be war. If not, no one will bother themselves about us. Here in Novorossiysk, the British and Russian interests don’t clash—in fact, they don’t even overlap, so no one wants to help us. It’s not the fault of the British that the Whites are losing the war. It’s because the local people don’t support us.”

“The devil only knows whom those locals support,” Fomin said angrily. “Who even asks them? Who checks the statistics?”

When dawn came, Nina brewed coffee for them, and Fomin started getting ready for work. At the moment, he was busy trying to decide what part of the huge stock of military supplies in Novorossiysk should be taken to Crimea and which part should be destroyed before the evacuation.

2

Cynicism is the best medicine, thought Nina.

Early every morning, she would step onto her balcony, a cup of coffee in hand, to admire the sunrise and watch the panic below.

Once, she recalled, Klim had told her that one day they would drink coffee together on the balcony of his house in Buenos Aires.

As the low clouds above the mountains blushed pink, a blue searchlight from a British dreadnought scoured the slopes and went out. Then came the resounding boom of a gun—the Allies trying to scare away the Green partisans now roaming the town openly. Three days earlier, they had stormed the jail and released all of the prisoners.

There was a biting wind, but Nina stayed on the balcony watching the endless stream of people moving along Vorontzovskaya Street. Exhausted Cossacks led weary horses, automobiles sounded a chorus of horns, and ladies pushed baby carriages loaded with household items.

Nina wrapped her shawl tightly around her and rested her coffee cup on the railing as she watched a handsome man with a fine mustache walk by on the road beneath. The man was dressed in brand-new civilian clothes and held a burlap sack in each hand. A pair of chicken’s legs protruded from the top of one of the sacks, and the tops of army boots from the other. Nina was quite sure the poor wretch would have nothing in his pockets but a fake identity card and nothing in his head but the thought, “Every man for himself.”

You shouldn’t be in such a hurry, Your Honor in Disguise, Nina thought. You won’t get a place on a ship anyway. The Russian ships have no coal, and those who can still sail are stuck in Constantinople and the Greek ports. The foreign governments know about the typhoid epidemic in Novorossiysk, so they’re keeping all the refugees quarantined for weeks on the ships. And you can’t count on the steamers the Allies have promised to send either. The British squadron has just been hit by a storm—they cabled about it yesterday.

Nina went back inside and closed the balcony door. Sofia Karlovna was combing her hair in front of the mirror.

“Colonel Guyomard asked me to come to his office at eight o’clock,” the old countess said. “Our visas are ready.”

“I’ll tell Fomin to get you an escort,” Nina said. “Have you seen what’s going on outside?”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear—” Sofia Karlovna sighed.

They heard the front door slam as the newsboy brought the morning newspapers. Nina went downstairs to the lobby where the bodyguards stood waiting for the master of the house.

“Where’s Mr. Fomin?” she asked.

Shushunov, a huge, grim-looking Cossack with a broken nose, pointed to the dining room. Fomin was standing by the window with one arm in the sleeve of his overcoat, reading the newspaper and holding his glasses up to the page.

“Sofia Karlovna needs an escort,” said Nina. “She shouldn’t go out by herself.”

Seeing her, Fomin winced and hurriedly put the newspaper in his pocket.

“Has something happened?” Nina asked, alarmed at the expression on his face.

“It’s nothing.”

She told him again that the old countess needed a chaperone to take her to the French Mission, but Fomin wasn’t listening.

“Don’t leave the house today,” he said finally before putting his overcoat on and heading for the door.

“Then I’ll ask Shushunov to take Sofia Karlovna to the Mission in your automobile,” Nina cried after him, but Fomin didn’t even turn his head.

3

Jacob had only been able to publish Klim’s advertisement a week after he had made his promise. The authorities kept demanding that the newspaper publish instructions and official orders, and he couldn’t find space for the announcement stating that “Nina Vasilievna Kupina’s husband is anxious to know of her whereabouts.”

All this time, Klim had been living with the Froimans, but he had found Rivka’s constant lamentations so unbearable that he preferred to go out to work with Jacob at the editorial office.

Klim was consumed by an absurd, irrational hope. Who knew? Perhaps somebody had seen Nina or at the very least heard something about her. Time and again, he pulled himself up and told himself to prepare for the worst—or rather, for the fact that things would simply go on as usual.

Nevertheless, he didn’t let Jacob out of sight. What if he should change his mind about publishing Klim’s announcement? What if the authorities sent him off to dig trenches? Or what if some scoundrel picked on him again because of his Jewish appearance?

“You’re my guardian angel,” Jacob said, smiling.

The Froimans had sent the petition up to the Red Cross, and now, Jacob walked around whistling nursery rhymes. At nighttime, the family had gathered in their basement and discussed what to take with them to America and how they would get settled in when they got to New York.

The newspaper was printed at night and went on sale at seven o’clock local time. Klim knew that it was ridiculous to expect any response in the morning. Even if someone were going to take the trouble to come, it was highly unlikely that they would rush into the editorial office immediately after reading the announcement.

You’re just fooling yourself, Klim told himself again and again. A thousand copies in an overcrowded city like this—it’s no more than a drop in the ocean.

Nevertheless, he told everyone in the newspaper office that if anyone should ask for a Klim Rogov, he would be at Froiman’s desk right behind the filing cabinet. Meanwhile, Jacob went off to the art department to oversee the illustration of a commercial for breath-freshening peppermint drops. It was a very popular product with the ladies, who were all hoping to entice an influential official and get evacuated with him to Constantinople.

Klim picked up a pencil and balanced it on the pyramid-shaped inkwell on Jacob’s desk. It looked like a little set of scales, and he began to place paper clips and drawing pins on the two ends of the pencil to make it balance. But he couldn’t get it to work, and the whole thing kept falling down.

He heard footsteps behind the filing cabinet, looked up, and froze.

“How are you, Mr. Argentinean?” Fomin said without offering his hand to Klim. He slumped down on Jacob’s rickety stool, which creaked under his weight.

For a few seconds, the two men stared at one another.

Klim was the first to break the silence. “Do you know where Nina is?”

Fomin didn’t answer. His left eyelid trembled, and he bared his large teeth in a scowl.

“How did you manage to lose her, a woman like that?” Fomin said. “You should have looked after her better once you had the good fortune to get her. Where are you staying?”

“At the Froimans’.”

“I see. As I understand it, your situation is desperate—you’ve no money, and dinner in the Czechoslovak canteen costs a hundred and fifty rubles. You can’t even afford to get a shave because that costs another hundred. What do you intend to do, taking into account the storm brewing here? No evacuation for you, I suppose.”