Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

“But why?”

“The rail strike is over, and the Bolsheviks can’t let the bourgeoisie run away just like that. They can’t do without their class enemies to blame for their own blunders.”

Zhora came into the hall too.

“That’s for the best,” he said. “We can’t just sit around anymore. We have to fight.”

“They’ll kill you, you little fool!” Nina moaned. “If you’re not afraid for yourself, at least think of Elena and me.”

She turned to Klim looking for his support.

“I’ll go to Petrograd,” he said, “and ask the Argentine ambassador to help me get you all out of Russia. He won’t turn me down since I’m well-known in Buenos Aires and have important connections.”

“Only rats desert a sinking ship!” cried Zhora. “I won’t go without Elena. What am I going to do in Buenos Aires? Do you want me to become a street sweeper instead of a student? I don’t know a word of Spanish.”

“Sometimes people have to make difficult decisions,” said Nina in a whisper.

5

Nina, Klim, and Zhora sat side by side in front of the fireplace until midnight. Klim tried to coax some heat out of the meager embers with the poker. The lurid reflection of the glowing coals flickered across his gloomy face.

How can I go with them? Zhora thought. What am I going to tell Elena?

What if Klim didn’t keep his word and didn’t take them away to Argentina? Maybe he had had enough of the Bolsheviks, and his trip to Petrograd was just an excuse for him to escape?

Zhora understood him perfectly well though. At first, Klim had seen the Bolshevik coup as an amusing adventure worthy of a couple of wry articles in his newspaper, but now, he had realized that it was no joke anymore. Klim was not foolish enough to take responsibility for so many hungry mouths, especially now when he had neither a job nor his father’s money.

The more Zhora pondered about their situation, the more he prayed that Klim would never return from Petrograd. We will be fine, he thought. Nina is smart, and she will find a way to manage our situation.

He was sure that there would be an anti-Bolshevik rebellion soon, and the usurpers would be overthrown. Everything would be just fine. University, marriage to Elena, and a brilliant diplomatic career—that was the future that awaited him.

But it was painful to look at his sister. She was sitting pressed close to Klim, and it seemed she was too afraid to move.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be in Petrograd,” Klim said. “And I have no idea if I’ll be able to write to you. But I promise I’ll come back for you. Whatever it takes.”

Nina nodded and looked at him, her eyes full of tears.

“You won’t leave me alone tonight, will you?”

As they left, Zhora remained by the fireplace, feeling shocked and ashamed. Nina was about to spend the night with a man whom she wasn’t even married to. Klim may have been a good man, and she may have been deeply in love with him, but this was scandalous.

Sofia Karlovna appeared in the doorway with a flickering church candle in her hand.

“I knew that something like this would happen,” she said. “First, your sister had a relationship with Mr. Fomin and ruined her reputation, and now, men see her as nothing more than a strumpet. They will lie to her saying that they’ll marry her, but they are only really after one thing.”

“Times have changed,” Zhora replied in an unsteady voice.

But Sofia Karlovna just shook her head sadly. She picked up the portrait of her son that had been thrown on the floor by the raiders and dusted off the cracked glass over the photograph.

“See, Vladimir,” she said, “what kind of a woman you have brought into our house.”

6

Klim insisted that Nina did not come to see him off at the station.

“You’ll only be asking for trouble with the Red Guards,” he said. “What if they ask you for your documents?”

She stood on the porch and watched him tying his suitcase onto the sleigh.

Anton Emilievich, in his enormous fur coat, was already waiting for Klim in the driver’s seat. On finding that his nephew was about to leave for Petrograd, he had decided to join him. He intended to travel on to Finland, which had declared independence from Russia and the Bolsheviks in the nick of time.

“You’ll have to forgive me, old man, but I can’t live in this chaos,” he had told Klim. “I’ll sit out the revolution in Helsingfors. I have friends there.”

Klim went up to Nina. Her eyes were swollen with tears, and her lips were trembling.

“Promise you’ll come back,” she whispered.

He embraced her and put the key to his house in her hand. It was next to useless because after the raid at their house, Lubochka had ordered that a new steel-enforced front door be installed.

“What is it?” Nina asked.

“It’s the key to my heart,” Klim said, smiling. “At the moment, I have nothing else to give you.”

“Hurry up, or we’ll be late!” Anton Emilievich cried.

Nina made the sign of the cross over Klim.

“Go inside, or you’ll catch your death of cold,” he said, trying to lead her to the door.

But she stood trembling in the wind until his sleigh was out of sight.

7

It had been impossible to get tickets for a sleeping car. The Bolsheviks had issued another decree abolishing all classes on the railway thus making all passengers equal.

“Let the bourgeoisie enjoy the comforts of the third-class car,” their propagandists said.

But there weren’t even any third-class cars. The train consisted of red boxcars with notices on their sides proclaiming, “Capacity: eight horses or forty people.”

The passengers took the boxcars by storm. The train stood high above the platform with no steps, but Klim was one of the first to manage to get inside. Someone gave him a leg up, and then he helped others load their luggage and pulled in the other passengers, most of them were so-called bagmen, small traders who carried their goods in burlap bags.

In the center of the boxcar was a small stove surrounded by plank beds. The passengers sat on them packed as tightly as herrings in a barrel.

“Close the door!” the bagmen yelled. “There’s no room for any more!”

The door banged, they heard the rasp of the lock, and then everybody began to examine the cuts, bruises, and torn clothes they had received in their rush to board the train.

It was only now that Klim noticed there were no women among them. That made sense. No lady worthy of the name would ever have been able to brave the crush to get onboard, let alone countenanced traveling in a boxcar without a lavatory.

I can’t imagine Nina here, Klim thought. How on earth will I get her to Petrograd when I get her visa?

Anton Emilievich was still panting for breath. In the struggle, somebody had elbowed him in the ribs and winded him.

“At least I’m in one piece,” he said as he examined the torn handle of his suitcase. “I never thought I was capable of such behavior. Isn’t it incredible how suddenly everyone forgets their upbringing and thinks only of themselves? When I used to meet my neighbor on the stairs, we would bow to each other and let each other pass, ‘Please, after you!’ And now just look at us all like pigs fighting to get at the trough.”

The train set off, and the passengers began to unwrap their food and take out their tobacco pouches. Soon, the boxcar was filled with pungent smoke. Klim was lucky to have gotten a place next to a wall perforated by a string of bullet holes. An icy breeze came through them, but at least it was refreshing.

Now, everything in the boxcar—clothes, luggage, and faces—were covered with a white film of dust.

“That’s flour,” Anton Emilievich whispered in Klim’s ear. “These bagmen are carrying food to Moscow and Petrograd—the food shortage there is much worse than in Nizhny Novgorod. The boxcar is shaking so much that some of the dust is escaping out of their bags.”

Klim looked around him at the stern, bearded faces. The Soviet press liked to paint these bagmen as weak, cunning idlers, but nothing could be further from the truth. Those political pen pushers sitting in their offices would never understand what it took to travel across the country in a crowded boxcar carrying heavy bags and risking one’s life on a daily basis. Bagmen were the only people now providing the hungry cities with the provisions that the Bolshevik government was so spectacularly failing to supply.

When the train stopped, the passengers refused to open the door of their boxcar. They could hear the soldiers outside striking the sides of the train with their rifle butts and threatening to throw a grenade under the boxcar.

“There’s no room!” cried the passengers.

They passed out a kettle through the little window under the ceiling to the local boys, asking them to bring boiling water, and paid them with a dried crust of bread.

The passengers amused themselves on the long journey with gambling, scurrilous jokes, and stories about the stationmasters at the different railroad stops—which of them were kind and which of them were corrupt, tight-fisted brutes.

Gradually, the voices subsided. Surrounded by the snores of his fellow passengers, Klim buried his head in his folded arms and dozed, daydreaming sleepily about the previous night.

Nina’s room had been warm. The green glow of the lamp had been reflected in the porcelain horses on her chest of drawers and the mirror tiles on the glass door of her closet.

For Klim, a sense of desperation—as though before a fatal step—had been mingled with the warm, aching joy of holding Nina in his arms. He had felt the gentle touch of her finger on his unshaven cheek and heard her voice.

“I’m drawing your portrait with my fingertips,” she had said. “Here’s your cheekbone, and your eyebrow… and now, your murderer’s earlobe—”

“Why murderer’s?” Klim had asked.

“They say that people with adherent earlobes like yours are capable of the most terrible things.”

Nina had known that Klim had no choice but to carry out the plan they had concocted, but despite herself, she had reproached him for being able to leave her even for a short while.

Klim had blamed himself too, but for other reasons. He should have gotten Nina out of Russia that autumn and away from all of that danger and uncertainty.

“You’d be better off drawing me big muscles,” he had said, trying to distract her. “I’m afraid that soon I’ll be as skinny as a rake, living on these Soviet food rations.”

“I won’t,” Nina had refused. “A man should be athletic but lean. Good breeding implies elegance.”

I was insane to have removed myself willingly from that paradise, Klim thought. I should have stayed with Nina even if it meant death—at least we’d have passed away together.

He dozed fitfully as the wheels of the boxcar intoned, “You have to, you have to, you have to.”

1

It took Klim and Anton Emilievich a week to get to the capital.

Every now and then, their train would stop for no apparent reason, and nobody knew what was going on. Later they learned that they were making way for the trains going in the opposite direction, carrying refugees.

The Bolsheviks had promised the deserters that they would demobilize the Tsar’s Army and offer Germany a peace treaty without annexations and reparations, but the Berlin government just laughed in their faces. And now, German troops were advancing on the defenseless Russian capital.

In Petrograd, a crowd was besieging the ticket offices of the Nikolaevsky railroad station.

“The Germans are coming! The Germans!” Klim heard people shouting.

When he and Anton Emilievich turned down Ligovsky Avenue, they saw a line of loaded carts stretching as far as the eye could see. Writing desks and folded banners stuck out from under the tarpaulin covers. Women and children sat on top of the carts wrapped in fur coats and shawls. Cart drivers yelled at one another, whips cracked, and horses whinnied.

Anton Emilievich glanced at Klim. “What kind of exodus is this?”

“The Bolshevik government is moving to Moscow,” a gentleman in an astrakhan hat remarked. “Along with their families, servants, and concubines.”

Mounted soldiers rode toward the excited, anxious crowd.