Klim and I have no luck sorting our relationship out either, thought Nina gloomily. But nobody is to blame. It just happened that we have had a rough ride.

6

The train had arrived early for a change.

Taking Kitty in her arms, Nina ran through the dim station building and onto the sun-drenched platform. Cheerful passengers hurried past them, carrying suitcases, baskets, and butterfly nets.

Nina saw a crowd gathered at the last car and ran toward the back of the train.

“Stop pushing!” the conductor shouted as he handed out parcels and letters. “You’ll all get your turn.”

He sorted deftly through the packages and envelopes with his wrinkled hands. “Not, this one’s not yours, nor this one either.”

At last, he handed over a plywood box to Nina.

Kitty jumped up and down beside her impatiently. “Mommy! Open it quickly!”

Having settle down on the bench under a poplar tree, Nina cut open the package with a knife borrowed from a vendor selling watermelons nearby.

“What’s inside?” fussed Kitty “Are there any toys?”

There were biscuits, sugar, and chocolate wrapped in paper. At the very bottom, under Norwegian canned goods, there was a letter. Klim wrote that the Krasin icebreaker had saved all the crew members of Nobile’s expedition and that the foreign journalists had not been allowed anywhere. He promised that he would soon be coming to Feodosia to bring Elkin his money and to collect Kitty from Nina. It seemed that it was a lot easier to buy long-distance train tickets up in Archangelsk.

“Thank you for helping me out in a tight spot,” wrote Klim at the end of the letter. “I hope Kitty didn’t make too much of a nuisance of herself.”

7

Nina felt as if the wind had been taken out of her sails. She had been eagerly awaiting Klim’s arrival, but now, she was dreading it. He was planning to take Kitty away and leave her alone.

Elkin saw that Nina was suffering and tried to raise her spirits.

“You and I must definitely go on a tour of the ancient world,” he told her. “I’ll show you such beautiful sights they’ll take your breath away.”

Nina agreed to go. She had to take her mind off her gloomy thoughts in some way.

They spent a day wandering through the rocky spurs of the Kara Dag and staring into the mouths of chasms.

“You and I are standing on an extinct volcano,” Elkin told Nina. “Can you imagine what it would have been like here in prehistoric times? Boiling lava, and the earth shuddering with earthquakes…. But now, everything is quiet and peaceful.”

They climbed a steep cliff and looked down on a breathtaking view.

“It’s so beautiful!” Nina said, almost in tears with emotion. “When you can’t tell where the sea joins the sky, it feels as if you’re on a huge ship floating through the air.”

Elkin took a deep breath. “Nina, I’ve been wanting to say something to you for a while now, and I think now is a good time—”

Nina looked at him in alarm. Had he made up his mind to propose to her? Please, anything but that!

“I have something to say to you too,” she said quickly.

For some time, Nina had been aware that there was only one way to save Elkin from a humiliating refusal: to tell him beforehand all about her relations with Klim.

She told him everything: how she had met her ex-husband, how they had traveled about Russia during the civil war, and how they had emigrated to China.

Elkin listened for a long time, his face frozen into an expressionless smile. Clearly, he understood that Nina was trying to save his dignity, and he was grateful to her for it.

They sat on the edge of the cliff, watching the clouds over the bay turning pink in the sunset.

“I think both of us appeared on this earth at the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Elkin in a thick voice. “I should have been born a hundred years later, and you would have done well in the late eighteenth century. You could have been the ruler of some small, enlightened duchy.”

“What would I have done there?” Nina asked him.

“Well, you would have had secret lovers, a beautiful, well-kept capital city, and loyal subjects. Artists would have painted you as a bright angel surrounded by cupids, and poets would have written ingenious madrigals about you. What else could you wish for?”

“And the story would have ended either with a foreign invasion or a palace coup,” said Nina, getting to her feet. “It’s the same thing in the twentieth century—I was faced with the choice of being sent into exile or put in jail. And there was nothing the greatest intellects could do to help me. It’s just my fate, I suppose.”

8

They came home after dark. Gloria came out to meet them with the kerosene lamp, her face like thunder.

“Where have you been all this time?” she shouted, taking Nina by the arm and dragging her into the house.

“What happened?” Nina asked in alarm.

Gloria opened the door to Nina’s room and showed her Kitty, lying doubled up on the bed in agony. “See for yourself!”

Nina rushed to her daughter. “What’s the matter with you?”

Kitty’s face had swollen up until her eyes were no more than tiny slits, and a painful rash had broken out all over her cheeks.

“It hurts all over again,” she sobbed, flinging her head back.

Nina looked at the child in bewilderment. She had been sure that when Kitty was with her, her daughter would not be taken sick.

“Mommy’s here…. Mommy will make it better,” Nina said, holding Kitty close to her chest. “We’ll go to Feodosia and find you a doctor.”

“What’s the good of getting the girl to a doctor when her fool of a mother feeds her the devil only knows what?” retorted Gloria, pointing to an empty chocolate wrapper on the floor.

“Her father sent it,” Nina said. “Kitty loves sweet things…”

Gloria stamped her foot angrily. “If you had any sense, you’d have realized what the problem was long ago!”

Then she swept out, leaving the paraffin lamp on the chest.

Nina sat for a long time on Kitty’s bed, shaken to the core. So, this was the cause of Kitty’s illness: Klim had been giving her chocolate. Nina had heard that some people had a serious reaction to it.

Soon, however, Nina’s train of thought went off on a different tack. Now that she knew the secret of Kitty’s illness, she could use it to get Klim away from Galina. Nina could tell him that the child became ill when she was with his new lover, and he would believe it.

Nina heard the door creak and saw Gloria standing on the threshold.

“Here, take this,” the old woman said. “I’ve made a likeness of you.” She held out a pot decorated with eyes with handles for ears and curls around the top.

Nina looked inside the pot. There was a tiny mousetrap with a piece of sheep’s cheese.

“That’s what’s in your head at the moment,” said Gloria. “If you don’t like it, you can put something else inside.”

It is true, Nina realized, horrified. All she thought about, regarding Klim, were lures and traps. I wanted to deceive Klim and at Kitty’s expense. What kind of prize I am being a schemer like that?

Gloria was watching Nina’s face with amusement. “Have fun tonight,” she said, closing the door behind her.

Nina could not get to sleep. She was itching to do something, to make some momentous decision, and to act completely differently from now on.

She pondered for a long time what she might put into the pot as a symbol of her new life but had still not thought of anything when she began to doze off.

In the morning, she saw that Kitty had filled the pot with her spillikins.

23. THE SOVIET CASINO

1

Ever since Klim had left, Galina had felt weak and listless as if all the life had drained out of her. Something very wrong was going on: Klim had sent Kitty off God knows where with God knows who, and Galina had only received a single telegram from Arkhangelsk: “Away on leave. Will call on return.”

She could forget her ideas of a dacha outside Moscow or a trip to the South. And it seemed she had sent her daughter to Leningrad for nothing. Still, Tata was not complaining: she had joined the Young Pioneers and was in seventh heaven.

While “Mr. Prince” was away on his work assignment, Kapitolina had started up an illegal trade in dairy produce, smuggling in butter, cream, and milk from the countryside. Her customers were all close to hand on the ground floor of the building. The League of Time had been evicted, and now, instead of penniless students, respectable members of the organization Proletkult had taken up residence there. Their job was to destroy the old aristocratic and bourgeois culture and create a new, proletarian one. This meant attending art exhibitions and theater performances to ensure that the work on offer reflected the class struggle, collectivism, and solidarity among the laboring masses. The Proletkult employees had plenty of money as the government regarded their work as highly important and funded it lavishly.

Kapitolina was weighing out bags of curd cheese on a spring scale.

“Galina, you’ll never guess what!” she said. “I put a love charm on this man I know, a machine operator. I said a special prayer I learned from a wise woman—it’s called a ‘sticking charm.’”

It turned out that the machine operator had already taken Kapitolina to the cinema twice and once even treated her to sunflower seeds.

“You have to look at a photograph when you say the prayer,” Kapitolina instructed Galina. “My Terentiy is on the Wall of Honor right next to the factory entrance, so I went up to it, waited till I heard the church bell chime, and said,

Dead one, rise upon this hour.

Give to me your cursed power.

Let God’s servant, Terentiy, be

now and ever bound to me.

Neither eat nor sleep shall he,

Suffer him my face to see.

This word is the lock that binds,

And the devil has the key.

Amen, amen, amen!”

“And you think it worked?” asked Galina doubtfully.

“I’m certain of it. There was another photograph on the Wall of Honor, an old fellow called Arkadiy Ivanovich, a foreman. And now he’s started giving me the eye. So, it worked on him too.”

When Kapitolina went out, Galina stood for a while in the corridor in a state of indecision. To practice witchcraft was a desperate step, she told herself. But the temptation was too great, and in the end, she went to look for a photograph of Klim.

Kitty had an album in which she kept postcards and photographs. Galina remembered that among them were one or two snapshots of Klim taken for official documents. On opening the album, however, she was thrown into confusion when she discovered a picture of a woman she recognized—the woman who had come to visit Klim and who had gotten a job at Elkin’s store afterward.

Galina stared for some time at the stranger. Where had this photograph come from? Why had Kitty put it in her album?

Galina turned the picture over and was still more amazed to see the name “Nina Kupina” scored out and over it, in Klim’s handwriting, the words “Mrs. Reich.”

So, this was the woman he had tried to find out about. The same woman who had stayed a night with him and seemed to have completely shattered his peace of mind.

Who was she? There was something very familiar about that surname, Reich, but Galina could not remember where she had heard it before.

She took Nina’s photograph as well as Klim’s so that she could cast a spell on both of them. Having resolved on the sinful course of action, she felt she had nothing to lose.

2

Galina wrapped Nina’s picture in paper, and the next time she went in to the Lubyanka, she asked Ibrahim to put it into the pocket of one of the dead prisoners. This was the best way to get rid of a rival—the main thing was for the dead man to take the picture to the grave with him, or if that wasn’t possible, to the crematorium.

Ibrahim was only too happy to oblige. He often helped to load dead bodies onto the meat wagon, and it was easy for him to carry out Galina’s request.

She thanked him and ran off to see Alov.

“Well, is your employer back yet?” he asked and then began to complain of how he and Dunya were fed up of being cooped up in a corner in the room belonging to Valakhov, the Drachenblut’s assistant.