Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

“You’re a brilliant diplomatist, it seems,” Nina said, delighted.

Oscar shrugged. “I guess I just have a feel for business. I earned my first million when I was nineteen years old.”

They sat on the divan and talked. Nina now felt completely relaxed, perhaps from the warmth and comfort or the excellent Italian wine. When all was said and done, she thought that had to be one of the greatest pleasures in life: to sit and chat with an intelligent man who clearly showed an interest in her.

She did not want to think about the future at all, not even the immediate future. But still, she glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece above the fire. It was already long after midnight. She hoped Oscar would let her stay the night in his house. Surely, he would not throw her out—Nina hinted several times that she had nowhere to go.

Oscar took a last sip of wine, put his glass down on the floor, and, without a word, pushed Nina down on the divan.

“What are you doing?” she cried out in a muffled voice.

He put his hand over her mouth and began fumbling hastily at the buttons of his trousers.

5

Yefim, his cigarette in his mouth, took aim at a ball with his cue and sent it rattling into the far pocket.

“You’ll get yourself a dose of syphilis one of these days,” he said, sullenly, as Oscar came whistling into the billiard room.

Oscar waved him away impatiently. “Skip it. Turns out this one was a nice little lady. Just a little shy for my liking.”

Yefim put his billiard cue back in the rack. “I wanted to show you something.”

He brought in one of the large gray envelopes belonging to Baron Bremer and tipped out its contents onto the green baize of the billiard table. It was a bundle of securities in German and Swedish firms along with a will registered with a solicitor, stating that all the baron’s property was to pass to his children on his death.

Oscar looked at Yefim with amazement. “Do you think these papers are genuine?” he asked. “Is our baroness a millionairess?”

“It’s possible.”

Oscar scratched his head. “Well, it’s impossible to get ahold of this fortune in the USSR, anyway.”

“You need to think how to go about it,” said Yefim. “We need all the money we can get.”

Oscar liked to tell everyone that his business was going well, but in fact, things were getting worse every day. According to the original plan, he was to become a model concession-holder and attract foreign investors into the USSR, but nothing had come of it mainly because in the Bolshevik camp, the right hand did not know what the left was doing. One government department would hand out guarantees of private capital while another would threaten to destroy every last capitalist on earth. Who would start up a business in Moscow under such conditions?

But worst of all was the fact that the Bolsheviks kept altering the rules in their own favor. When Oscar had come to Russia, he had been promised that he could change Soviet money into foreign currency at the greatly reduced official rate and transfer the profit from his business into foreign bank accounts. But now there was a foreign currency crisis in the country, and the State Bank was doing all it could to prevent Oscar from taking a single cent out of the country.

Besides all this, Oscar was constantly hounded by various commissions connected with the trade unions or the police or the Chief Committee for Concessions. All these officials pretended to be concerned about the conditions of his workers when their real mission was simply to extort bribes.

Yefim had been the first to suggest to Oscar that they needed to get out of the USSR, and the sooner the better. He had never had any illusions about the Bolsheviks. Before the revolution, he had been the owner of a luxury bathhouse with private suites and had been through all the cycles of nationalization. He had had his accounts and property confiscated and eventually lost his house. If Oscar had not taken him on as his assistant, Yefim would have taken to drink long ago.

Oscar too understood that it was time to fold up his business and get out. But he had put everything he owned into his factory, and it was impossible to sell. He felt like a foolish child who has been warned countless times not to play with fire. Oscar had never heeded such warnings—he was a business genius after all. But now the genius had lost.

The securities belonging to Baroness Bremer could be just what Oscar needed to save him, but he had ruined everything.

A week of courtship, flowers, and chocolates, and Nina would have fallen for him hook, line, and sinker. Instead, he had treated her as just another victim of the revolution—a lishenets girl with whom he could do whatever he wanted.

Lishentsy was the name given in the USSR to former aristocrats, priests, and other “socially hostile elements” who had been stripped of their electoral rights. They could not find a job or receive credit, so in order to survive, young and attractive women in this position often resorted to working as escorts or sometimes even prostitutes. This was something of which Oscar took full advantage. Deep down, he was engaged in his own class struggle. He was Jewish, and once upon a time, princes and barons would not have let him past their thresholds. Now, their daughters were submitting themselves willingly to his embraces.

But this time, he had made a serious mistake.

He hurried back to the library. He had to convince Nina that he had been swept off his feet by a fit of uncontrollable passion.

1

What could have happened to Nina? wondered Magda fearfully. Had she been robbed and killed?

It was more than likely. Magda’s camera and Nina’s velvet coat were valuable enough to attract thieves, and crime in Moscow was rife.

Magda could not make up her mind to go to the police. As sworn enemies of capitalism and White émigrés, they might decide to pursue the victims rather than the criminals. In a country ruled by a dictatorship of the proletariat, “class enemies” could not count on the state to protect them.

The only one who could help Magda was Friedrich; after all, he had friends in high places. But since he had been assigned to his new post, he would disappear abroad for three days at a time, come back, and catch up on his sleep before setting out again.

“I could come out to Germany,” Magda suggested, “and we could meet there if you want.”

But Friedrich did not want anything. He had only just managed to extricate himself from the trouble in China and had no wish to jeopardize his position by associating with an Englishwoman.

To add to her problems, Magda’s visa was about to expire. She pestered all her acquaintances, asking if they could help her find work in the city until at last, a German journalist, Heinrich Seibert, told her that he had some good news.

“On Thursday,” he said, “I’m meeting Edward Owen, the vice-president of the United Press news agency. His Moscow correspondent has broken a leg and gone abroad to get medical treatment, so Owen is on the lookout for a replacement.”

Magda was hugely excited to hear this. Mr. Owen was a legendary reporter. It was said that his London headquarters was hung with photographs of him in the company of royalty, heads of state, and army generals. He earned a king’s ransom and for good reason—under his leadership, the European section of the United Press was flourishing.

If Magda secured the post as the Moscow correspondent, she would not only have her visa renewed but also be able to move out of the despised Metropol into an apartment of her own. Moreover, she would no longer be a member of the bourgeoisie; she would be a member of the working class, and Friedrich would not have to hide from her.

For the first time in many years, Magda had her hair cut and said a prayer or two. She also bought a Kodak camera from another hotel guest just in case. She wanted to be able to show Owen the full scope of her talents not only as a writer but also as a photographer.

2

Heinrich Seibert had come to Moscow soon after the Bolshevik revolution and fallen on his feet; he had a wonderful apartment on the premises of the former Neapolitan Café, a car, and a large circle of friends. With his short, top-heavy body and his large forehead, he looked like an aging satyr. In Germany, no girl would have looked at him twice; but in Moscow, he attracted interest merely by virtue of being a foreigner who possessed countless treasures out of the reach of ordinary mortals: a wristwatch, shampoo powder, sunglasses, and the like.

That evening, Seibert sat at the window of the half-empty restaurant of the Bolshaya Moskovskaya Hotel (formerly the Grand Hotel), celebrating a small victory of his own. A friend of his, an engineer, had smuggled out an article he had written on the reasons behind the current economic crisis in the Soviet Union, and it had caused quite a stir.

The Bolsheviks took great care to prevent material “denigrating the Soviet system” getting out of the country, and articles of this sort had to be published under a false name unless you wanted your visa canceled. But Seibert was still pleased; it tickled him to hoodwink the Soviet censors and to publish an article saying exactly what he thought.

A waiter arrived, bringing Seibert a dish of cold sturgeon with horseradish and a decanter of chilled vodka.

It was already getting dark; the elegant chandeliers and white cloth-covered tables were reflected in the dark blue of the great windows of the restaurant. Seibert poured himself a shot of vodka and raised a glass to his own reflection. “To freedom of speech!”

In his article, he had written about how it was unprofitable for Soviet citizens to engage in industry of any sort whatsoever, let alone agriculture. In order to feed the Red Army, the police, and Soviet officials, the government was deliberately lowering the procurement prices for grain, and each year, the peasants were sowing less and less. What was the point in working for such a paltry sum?

When the Kremlin spread rumors of an imminent English attack on the USSR, the frightened peasants had begun to hide everything edible and to distil their grain into the time-honored Russian “hard currency” of bootleg vodka or samogon. As a result, the markets and shops in the cities were now empty.

Soviet officials had the right to use special cooperative shops attached to each government department, and people had quickly realized that the safest bet was to find work as a civil servant. Meanwhile, the Kremlin, rather than taming this bloated bureaucratic machine, was fighting political opposition and the surviving remnants of private enterprise. Naturally, the country was in the grip of an economic crisis. It was unavoidable.

Glancing out of the window, Seibert saw a taxi draw up at the hotel entrance. Out stepped an elegant foreigner in a dark gray suit and Homburg hat. A smartly dressed little girl of about four years old stepped out after him, holding a toy horse under one arm.

A minute later, the pair came into the restaurant, and Seibert almost choked on his sturgeon: the daughter of this modishly dressed foreigner was Chinese. She had rosy cheeks still flushed from the cold and shiny black eyes, and her spiky hair, which had been pressed flat by her hat, stuck out comically on the back of her head. She brought the toy horse with her and sat it down at a table just a few feet away from Seibert.

The girl’s father was about thirty-five or forty years old. He was slim, tanned, and well-groomed and had the look of a European aristocrat. How could he have married a Chinese woman? Seibert wondered. Now, the man would not be accepted into any respectable company. And his daughter, who had clearly taken after her mother, would encounter all sorts of difficulties.

“Kitty, put your horse on the floor, please,” said the man. He spoke in English but with quite a strong accent. “Horses don’t sit at the table.”

“They do!” said the little girl.

“Is that so? And who decided that?”

“I did. I’m big. I know that two plus two is four.”

“What about two plus three?”

Kitty frowned for a moment but then laughed. “All right. I’ll feed my horse in the hotel room.”

They were speaking in a mixture of three languages: Russian, English, and what sounded like some Chinese dialect.