“You’ll never catch her here these days,” Marisha grumbled. “The mistress is playing around behind her husband’s back. She and her Bolshevik friend brazenly walk the streets, and he gives her presents. Yesterday, she brought home a gilt-backed hairbrush—with someone else’s hair in it.”

Shocked and dispirited, Nina went home.

How could her friend—so smart and so high-minded—keep company with a man who was little more than a bandit? It was an act of utter treachery.

Zhora confirmed what Marisha had told Nina: he had seen the incongruous couple out and about a number of times—elegant Lubochka arm in arm with a soldier in a burned and tattered greatcoat. They had been so engrossed in each other that they hadn’t noticed anyone else.

2

The frost held until mid-March, and then a rapid thaw set in. During the day, avalanches of snow slid heavily from the sun-warmed roofs, but every night a new palisade of icicles as thick as a man’s arm bristled from the eaves again. The city stewed and began to smell as all the rubbish dumps that had been buried under the snow began to thaw out.

Usually, Nina went to the market with Zhora, afraid that she might be attacked and her basket of food stolen. But today, she had to leave her brother at home. The day before, he had declared that now that it was spring, he had no intention of wearing his scarf. He had caught a cold almost as soon as he had stepped outside the door and lost his voice.

Officially, the market was shut, but in fact, a huge crowd gathered on the central square every day. Private trade had initially been prohibited and then briefly permitted only to be banned again. Things had gone on in this way for several months, and the policemen were never quite sure whether they were meant to drive the “criminal capitalist profiteers” away from the market or not. Consequently, they implemented a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as and when the fancy took them, robbing the villagers of whatever goods they wanted for themselves or their friends and family.

The market boiled with life like a giant cauldron. Every imaginable product was on sale there: foot wrappings, Christmas ornaments, poppy cakes, and cocaine.

An old general in cracked glasses was trying to sell a gramophone horn. He stood timidly among the crowds, eyes averted, chewing on the ends of his gray mustache. An old woman with her head wrapped in a shawl was peddling two dirty frying pans. Boys hawked Swedish matches and local “Java” cigarettes and thrust a shivering puppy out toward passers-by. “Do you want a barker to guard your house?”

Nina approached one of the traders she knew, Mitya, a thin man with eyelids that twitched with a nervous tic. He was standing by the fence with his goods laid out on a torn cloth: old doorknobs, soldiers’ belts, and a vintage Bible in a velvet binding.

She nodded to him, and Mitya beckoned to a man idling nearby. “Keep an eye on all this, will you?” Then he set off through the crowd with Nina at his heels.

Mitya went into an empty cobbler’s shop smelling of glue and old leather. The dim light from the small dusty window lit up piles of broken wooden boxes and old cloths on the floor.

“Can you pay me in money today?” asked Mitya.

Nina pulled out some bank notes from the inside pocket of her coat.

“Give me two pounds of barley and half a pound of honey and fill up this matchbox with salt,” she said. “I need tea as usual and bread. Last time I asked you for bread made with unadulterated flour, and you ended up giving me God knows what.”

“That’s the baker’s fault, not mine,” Mitya said, blinking fitfully.

She gave him her food basket, and he disappeared behind the door.

Nina stood and waited, beating a tattoo on the doorframe with the rings on her fingers.

She could hear the noise of the market grow louder and looked out the window nervously. The black crowd was churning like a shoal of fish in a trap, but there seemed to be nothing amiss.

Mitya came back at last, and Nina checked her goods. The heavenly smell of freshly baked bread rose from the basket.

“Do you know anyone who buys expensive liquors?” she asked.

“What sort of liquors?” Mitya inquired, his face twitching.

Nina pulled a strangely curved bottle from her pocket. It was filled with an amber colored liquid.

“It’s a real Scotch whiskey,” Nina said. “It was served in private clubs as a joke. See, the bottle looks as if it’s drunk. This kind of whiskey used to cost more than three hundred rubles before the war.”

Mitya hesitated. “Well… I don’t know… I’ll have to ask. Follow me.”

They walked into a small backyard. A black guard dog with matted hair dashed toward them but began to wag its tail as soon as it recognized Mitya.

Nina glanced around uneasily. He could take me off anywhere and just kill me, she thought.

“Come over here,” said Mitya, pointing to a lopsided gatehouse.

Nina went inside a dim room that smelled strongly of fried fish. A bearded man was sitting next to the window, having his lunch.

Nina gasped. “Mr. Fomin? You of all people!”

He sprang to his feet and opened his arms to embrace her. “Nina, darling! Sorry, my hands are covered in fish oil. I haven’t seen you for so long! How is life treating you?”

3

After Mitya returned to the market, Fomin pushed his plate of cold fried fish toward Nina.

“Help yourself. I’m glad you’ve found me—I need to talk to you.” He gestured at a box in the corner of the room. “You see, I haven’t forgotten you, and I’ve already procured some supplies.”

“Where have you been all this time?” Nina asked.

Fomin wiped his hands on an old newspaper. “I was in hiding in Osinki.”

“How’s the mill?” Nina asked, her heart ready to sink.

Fomin grinned. “A local Bolshevik called Utkin arranged a meeting at the village elder’s house and told the men to establish a Soviet rural council and confiscate your mill together with the mansion. I had a word with them too. ‘If you do that,’ I said, ‘who will provide you with supplies? Who will fix the machinery? Utkin? Appoint him as a manager and just see how he fares.’”

“Did you manage to save the mill?” asked Nina hopefully.

“They haven’t touched the mill shops, but they burned down the house.”

“Good Lord!”

“The women told me Utkin was responsible. They chased him away from the village after that. They were worried that he might decide to burn down their houses too.”

To be on the safe side, Fomin had established a workers’ Soviet administration in Osinki and hung a red banner from the mill gates. But when some of the youngsters began talking about the workers taking control of the mill, Fomin had made his terms clear.

“It’s them or me,” he had said. “If they take charge, I go.” So far, nobody had challenged his authority.

Fomin put the most capable foreman in charge of production and appointed himself in charge of sales. Inflation was rising daily, so he was always on the lookout for goods that could be used for barter. He brought leather shoe soles from Bogorodsk, fishhooks from Gorbatov, and wooden spoons from Semenov. Initially, he had carried all these goods on his own back, but later, he had begun to hire teams of unemployed workers to do the job for him.

“The Bolsheviks put troops at every crossroad,” Fomin told Nina, “but we always manage to get through one way or another.”

“Do you think the Bolsheviks will nationalize my mill?” she asked.

Fomin frowned. “If the Bolsheviks stay in power, they’ll take away the mill sooner or later. According to the peace treaty, the Germans have the right to hang onto their property in Russia. That means the owners of private enterprises will try to sell their shares to German agents to turn at least some of their assets into cash. Naturally, the Bolsheviks won’t want all that property to slip through their fingers, so they’ll try to nationalize the factories and mills before the Germans can get their hands on everything.”

“Get out!” someone shouted from the direction of the market. “There’s a raid!”

The sound of frenzied barking came from the yard. Fomin jumped to his feet and snatched the box he had been planning to give to Nina. “Run!”

They darted behind the sheds and clambered up the log pile and over the fence. As they ran down Pryadilnaya Street, peasants drove by in sled with runners scraping the bare cobblestones. Women ran by at full tilt, clasping their unsold goods to their chests.

Nina was panting, and very soon her skirt was soaked and her feet freezing after running through the puddles that littered the road.

Gunshots could be heard. Nina flinched.

“Don’t cower like that!” Fomin said angrily. “If they catch us, we’ll slip them some money. The only reason they’re raiding the markets is because the Red Guards have nothing to eat, so their commanders have sent them to ‘fight the profiteers.’ They confiscate food from the peasant women, and that’s what they live on. The market will be back to normal in no time. Don’t you worry. The only thing that will change is that the prices will go up again.”

4

Nina sensed that she had brought a dangerous man back home with her. Fomin had turned into a big criminal and was just the sort of men the new political police, the Cheka, were after. It was rumored that terrible things were going on in the basement of their headquarters.

Nina quietly thanked her lucky stars that there was no one in the house when they came in. Sofia Karlovna was in church, and Zhora and Elena had gone off somewhere, but the slightest noise made Nina flinch. Nevertheless, she tried her best to be a good host, inviting Fomin to the dinner table and offering him all of the good things they had brought home that day.