Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

“You’ve been in here?” asked Nina in shock. “Do you mean to say you’re a prisoner?”

“That’s right. It’s fine so long as they give you a sentence without solitary confinement, taking into account your ‘low cultural level and difficult material circumstances.’ Fyodor Stepanych sends us out to make money, and we share it with him.”

“Doesn’t anyone run away?”

“We’d have to be fools to run away from here. Just you try finding a room to yourself outside with free food! They even take us to the bathhouse on Fridays, and the children even hold concerts for us to help reform us quicker.”

Nina gave a nervous laugh, despite herself. Well, she would have to live in a corrective workhouse for the time being. At least Alov would be unlikely to find her here.

Shilo walked onto the porch of a low one-story building and opened the door with a squeak. “In you come. Make yourself at home.”

The dark room smelled of candle wax and dust. Nina looked around. The room with its barred window was empty except for a pot-bellied stove, a bundle of firewood, and a trestle bed covered with a blanket.

“It’s a good place here,” Shilo said, spreading her greatcoat on the floor in front of the stove. “The angels often come and visit me in this room. I sit here with them at the window. We have a smoke, and they take all my sins away. It’s better than stain remover, I tell you.”

“Please,” asked Nina, “couldn’t you give me back my money? Everything I had was in that purse.”

“All right. But I get your coat. Deal?” Shilo tossed Nina her purse. “And I’ll find you another. Don’t you worry.”

“Are you going to steal one?”

Shilo did not answer. She reached under the mattress and took out a hunk of bread and a battered flask.

“Here,” she said, handing Nina the bread. “This is for you. And this is for me.”

She took a swig from the flask, and Nina caught an acrid whiff of home-brewed vodka.

“I like you, you know,” said Shilo a moment later. “It’s not even the coat. It’s just something about you.”

“What about me?” Nina asked.

“You’re like me, you see,” said Shilo. “Before they threw me out the window.”

Nina chewed away at the bread, feeling that nothing would surprise her any more.

5

They were awoken the next morning by a loud male voice. “So, who’s this then?”

Nina, who had slept on the greatcoat on the floor, sat up with a start to see a small, gray-haired Chinese man with a sheepskin coat over his shoulders.

“Hello, Fyodor Stepanych,” Shilo greeted the man cheerfully. “I’ve brought you a seamstress. Just look at what she can do!”

She handed the man Nina’s velvet coat. He examined it critically.

“Who taught you to sew?” he asked Nina.

“My parents were tailors,” she explained.

“Listen, boss. Take her on, why don’t you?” pleaded Shilo. “She can live here. She don’t have a place to go anyway—her husband’s been arrested for profiteering.”

Fyodor Stepanych scratched his chin thoughtfully. “I’ll need to give her a job and see how she manages. If you show you can do it,” he told Nina, “we’ll take you on. You can run courses in cutting and sewing. Let’s go!”

Nina could hardly believe her luck. If they let her stay here and paid her for her work, she would be able to raise the money for a ticket to Vladivostok.

Shilo gave her a blanket to keep her warm. Nina wrapped herself up in it and set off after Fyodor Stepanych.

In the daytime, the monastery did not look at all sinister. Nina saw brick walls with whitewash crumbling off in places, bare bushes, and puddles. It was clean and tidy, and the paths bore the traces of having been swept by a broom. There were no skulls anywhere to be seen.

In front of the ancient cathedral, a row of women stood performing exercises, supervised by a prison guard with a loudhailer. As she shouted out the order, they all raised their arms.

“Up on your toes!” she boomed. “Now breathe out!”

The prisoners obligingly breathed out small clouds of steam.

“I’ve introduced morning exercises to keep them fit,” Fyodor Stepanych said. “All our women here are victims of capitalism. Thieves and prostitutes, you know, and I reform them through labor. Nobody here is idle.”

With his captive women, he was like an estate owner with two hundred serfs. Some he used as groundskeepers and domestic staff, but most had been set to work making funeral wreaths and foot wrappings for Red Army soldiers.

Fyodor Stepanych made no secret of the fact that he sent the most accomplished pickpockets out to ply their trade.

“They only steal from the Nepmen,” he said. “And their number’s up soon, anyway.”

Nina knew already that “Nepmen” was the name for entrepreneurs who had been given permission to engage in manufacturing and trade since 1921. The NEP, or New Economic Policy, had been introduced to restore the economy to its prewar level. After this, the idea was that the class of Nepmen was to be “liquidated,” and the country would begin to build a truly socialist society in which all the means of production belonged to the state, and private enterprise would be forbidden by law.

Fyodor Stepanych took Nina to the vestry, which was in an outbuilding next to the church. Here, in a cold room smelling of mice, was a table with a sewing machine and some old trunks, black with age, on which were piles of church vestments.

“Here is your workstation,” said Fyodor Stepanych. He handed Nina a purple cassock. “I’d like you to make a couple of skirts out of this. I think there should be enough material.”

Nina looked at him, bewildered. “But that’s sacrilege—”

“The priests don’t need any of this stuff anymore,” said Fyodor Stepanych with a wave of his hand. “They’ve all been sent to the Solovki labor camp long ago—to speed them on their way to the Kingdom of Heaven.”

He began to lay out cassocks, surplices, and albs on the table.

“We’ll use the velvet for skirts,” he said, “the brocade for belts and collars, and we can use the winter robes to make coats for the proletarian women. You can sleep here on the trunks. I’ll give you a couple of logs a day to keep you from freezing.”

1

Nina made an excellent job of the sewing task she had been set, but Fyodor Stepanych told her she would not be getting paid for her work.

“Can’t you already sit by a warm stove and eat in our canteen?” he said. “What more do you want?”

Nina realized that she had fallen into a trap. Shilo had still not brought her the promised coat, and now the weather had turned so cold that Nina could not even put her nose outside, let alone go to the market and buy herself something warm.

“I’ve been put in prison without a trial!” she protested.

Fyodor Stepanych only laughed. “But you’re free to go. Nobody’s keeping you here.”

He was only too happy to have a seamstress who could handle expensive material and would work for him free of charge. Nina’s handiwork provided outfits for the prostitutes, bringing in a good profit for Fyodor Stepanych.

He watched Nina like a hawk to make sure that she did not help herself to offcuts and came in from time to time to count the leftover scraps of material. If he was in a good mood, he would sit for a while in the vestry, reminiscing about his youth.

He told Nina he had lived in Khabarovsk, working as a peddler who went door to door selling petty goods. His dream at that time had been to go to Canada. He had heard that the Canadian National Railways needed people to maintain the tracks that ran through remote forested regions. A family with two adult males could get an electric saw and an interest-free loan for twenty-five years. But it turned out that Canada would not take Chinese workers, only whites, and Fyodor Stepanych, smarting from the insult, had joined the Bolshevik party and enlisted in the fight against imperialism by becoming a warden of a women’s prison.

Shilo would sometimes come to see Nina too. If she had a drink or two in her, she would always start telling stories of her past.

“We’re like sisters, you and me,” Shilo told Nina, perching on the cutting table. “Only my family’s grander than yours. Have you heard of the Barons Bremer? Well, that’s us.”

She would describe in detail the luxury life she had once enjoyed and relatives so distinguished they had all but served in the court of the Tsar himself. But in all these stories, there was only one detail that rang true: during the revolution, Shilo had been raped by a group of soldiers and thrown out of a window. Her mind had been affected ever since.

“We had a great big house on Petrovka Lane,” Shilo enthused. “Beautiful—like a palace. There were these carved oak panels in the dining room commissioned by my mother with portraits of all of us children as angels.”

“So, what happened to your siblings?” asked Nina

“My brothers were shot in 1918, and my mother never got over the shock. She had a heart attack on the spot. But my father survived the revolution and the war. He worked as a shoeshiner on Pervomaisky Street, right opposite our apartment block. Only this summer, he was run down and killed by a cart.”

Nina sighed. Everybody, it seemed, had lost loved ones.

“I had a fiancé once, you know,” Shilo said one day. “He was a military attaché from France.”

Suddenly, she began to speak French—correctly and with barely a trace of an accent. As she told the story of her romance with Jean Christophe, how they had met at the racetrack and later begun a correspondence, Nina listened, dumbstruck, glancing now and again at Shilo’s raddled face. Who knew, perhaps she really had been a baroness? Nowadays, there were any number of doormen who had once been army colonels and cleaners who had been born princesses. They all survived as best they could, changing not only their appearance but also their very nature.

All the same, Shilo, with her fevered imagination, was capable of dreaming up any number of extraordinary things: an aristocratic past, angels in army helmets, or a samovar that whistled the “Internationale.”

“Do you know what else I remember?” Shilo said. “I hid some sweets under the windowsill in the library. My brother Mishka was always stealing them from me, and I made a secret hiding place—I was clever, see. There was a panel you could pull out and hide things behind.”

Shilo grabbed a pencil and began to draw a plan on a scrap from an old sewing pattern. “So, this is Petrovsky Lane, and this is our house. This is the gate and the courtyard. You go in and go upstairs…”

She told the story in such detail that Nina did not know what to think.

“You don’t believe me, don’t you?” Shilo asked. “I can prove it! I know where all our papers are. Father buried them in the yard after the revolution. There’s a whole treasure trove there. If you go and dig it up, you’ll see for yourself.”

Only the day before, Nina had read an article in a newspaper about treasure hidden away by the “bourgeoisie” for a rainy day. Workers who were repairing former townhouses belonging to the nobility would sometimes find collections of porcelain, old embroideries, gold coins, and family silver.

“Do you remember exactly what your father buried in the yard?” Nina asked cautiously.

Shilo shrugged. “There was definitely a photograph album. There’s a picture in it of me at seventeen.” Shilo laughed and hugged Nina. “When I saw you on the tram, I stared and stared, and I couldn’t believe my eyes; you were so like me on this picture!”

“Wait,” Nina slipped out of her embrace. “Do you know where the treasure is hidden?”

“You bet I do. You go in the yard and count out five bricks on the wall to the right. The fifth one has a chip in it where Mishka threw a horseshoe and knocked a bit off. You need to dig right under it—” Shilo cut herself short. “But I’m not going there. There are evil spirits there.”

Nina frowned. “Which evil spirits?”

“Those devils who threw me out of the window.”

“But that was ten years ago!”

“I’m not going, I tell you. Go yourself if you want. I can take you there.”

“But I don’t have a coat.”

“I’ll let you have your coat for a bit. Listen. If you get our photograph album back, I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life. I’ll do anything for you! I’d love to have another look at my family after all these years.”