Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

Dr. Sablin was mild mannered and polite, but just as the color-blind are incapable of perceiving certain shades, so he was incapable of feeling delight in a woman. He had no idea how to pay a compliment, never made any physical show of affection, and had only confessed his love for Lubochka once—on the day he had proposed marriage. His passion for his wife consisted of occasional inquiries after her health and regular contributions to the housekeeping money.

For a long time, Lubochka refused to admit that she was bored to death with Sablin and his eternal conversations about the war and medicine. In order to prove to herself that her life still had some meaning and that at least some people needed her, she started throwing parties. The guests danced, talked, and proposed toasts “to our beautiful hostess,” and Lubochka felt pleasantly flattered by these gatherings. They warmed her soul and provided temporary relief like a mustard plaster to the chest.

Then Klim came and destroyed her fragile equilibrium. Lubochka had never told him that she had been madly in love with him as a child. As God was her witness, she had desperately hoped that he had changed and become unworthy of her feelings, but she realized immediately that this was not the case.

She couldn’t stop marveling at his tanned face and smiling brown eyes while he was reading his thick book in Spanish or drinking his Argentinean mate tea through a silver straw called a bombilla, not from a cup but from a calabash gourd with a silver rim and stand.

Klim took little interest in the news about the war and the impotent Provisional Government that was attempting to rule the country after the Tsar’s abdication. He didn’t want to hear about ration cards and asked the cook to buy the best products even if they were the most expensive. To Lubochka this seemed both shocking and delightful—it was as though the affairs of the world simply didn’t apply to Klim.

She tactfully asked him what he was going to do now that he was so rich. He told her jokingly that he was thinking about taking up a career as Tsar Koschei, the famous Russian folk villain who spent his whole time counting his hoard of gold and entertaining himself by kidnapping fair maidens.

Many of Lubochka’s girlfriends would have been over the moon if he were to kidnap them and take them away to the wonderful country that he would describe to them at her soirees. According to Klim, there were sea lions in Argentina, meat was cheaper than bread, and palm trees and cypresses grew right in the streets.

However, Lubochka was not destined to see these miracles. It did not occur to Klim to even think of treating her as a woman. She constantly noticed the unflattering difference between her casual, elegant cousin and her shy husband who looked out at everyone from under lowered brows and tried to walk as little as possible to hide his lameness. He had been shot in the leg during the Russo-Japanese War and had had a limp ever since, which kept him away from the front now.

Lubochka always accompanied Klim around the city and did her best to shield him from seeing the “wrong people.” She felt jealous even of his childhood friends whenever he expressed a desire to visit them. But there was no one to visit anyway. All Klim’s former classmates were in the army.

“When I knock on their doors,” he told Lubochka with a sigh, “I try to guess whether they have been killed, maimed, or taken prisoner. It’s hard to imagine, but half of our class is dead.”

But Lubochka did not want to think about such ugly things. Klim provided her with what she valued most, the beauty of life, and she was determined that nothing would stop her enjoying his company. She took her cousin to theaters and restaurants, and he taught her how to dance the Argentine tango and showed her his old “hunting grounds.” He liked to take her to the islands where he used to go fishing as a child or the ruins of the ancient Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin full of memories of playing and fighting with the other boys.

Lubochka would have given anything for her cousin to remain with her forever, and sometimes it seemed to her that this was a distinct possibility. She could tell right away that he hadn’t just returned to Russia to claim his inheritance but also to reconcile himself with his past and his notion of himself. She diligently tended the seed in his mind that he should stay in Nizhny Novgorod and occupy his appropriate place among the good and the great of the city.

The cab took Lubochka and Klim along the promenade. Breathless, Klim gazed at the green slopes of the shoreline cut through with deep red clay ravines. The Oka River was bustling with fishing boats, wooden barges, and small, quick paddle steamers with black funnels. On the right side, there were storage sheds and the wharfs used for the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, and on the left, the high river bank was dotted with the colorful domes of churches and fancy office buildings. There were palaces, chapels, taverns, and the fearsome Millionka—a neighborhood in which every house hid a den of thieves and every day brought either a fistfight or a fire.

The cab stopped at the entrance to the hilltop restaurant, the Oriental Bazaar. There was a red carpet on the porch, and the liveried doorman greeted patrons with a bow. The guards were dressed in the traditional chokha coats with bandoliers on both sides of their chests and black leather belts inlaid with silver.

Klim and Lubochka followed the head waiter across the dimly lit restaurant hall onto a terrace wreathed in ivy. The orchestra played behind a screen of tropical plants, and the view was breathtaking.

“Not bad, huh?” Lubochka asked as they sat at the table covered with a white starched tablecloth.

While waiting for their order, Klim told Lubochka about the San Telmo district of Buenos Aires where he lived. It used to be a prestigious neighborhood, but after the yellow fever epidemic, all the rich people had moved away and rented their houses to émigrés.

“It’s also beautiful there,” said Klim. “High windows with shutters, and every door is a work of art. But there’s nothing fancy about the locals.”

“Will you move out of your apartment there now?” Lubochka asked.

“I don’t think so. My building has a restaurant on the ground floor, and above that, there’s an Italian family with six marriageable daughters. I’m on the floor above, and I have a beautiful balcony with an ornamental railing and some ancient aristocratic family’s coat of arms. By default, I have come to think of it as my own. How could I give up such delights?”

“I’m sure you can,” said Lubochka.

The waiters brought them some thinly sliced cured fish, golden roast quail, foie gras with prunes in tiny porcelain cups, and champagne in ice buckets. Here, in the Oriental Bazaar, it seemed that no one had heard of the alcohol ban that had been imposed since the beginning of the war and the empty food stores that were being besieged like fortresses.

“What do have to go back to in Argentina?” asked Lubochka, taking a sip of her champagne. “No matter how hard you try, you’ll never be fully accepted there. And neither will your children. Here you have a name, you are the scion of a noble family, but there you’ll always be looked upon as a stranger. You can’t come from nowhere and become someone important.”

Klim smiled and nodded toward the patrons at the neighboring tables: the young ladies in silks and gentlemen in evening dress or military uniforms.

Lubochka lowered her head, embarrassed. She had repeatedly told Klim that the world had been turned upside down by the war and that now everything was run by nameless upstarts. Alas, she had got so used to these new surroundings that she had often fallen victim to her own wishful thinking and failed to notice the alarm signals all around her.

The old ways didn’t work anymore, and Nizhny Novgorod was not what it used to be. Its fair, which had once hosted up to two million visitors per season, was now half boarded up. There were no goods to sell and no customers to buy them. Prices were rising every day, factories were closing, and thousands of soldiers were dying at the front—every single day. Sure, Klim’s inheritance might be able to buy him a semblance of civilized life, but he wouldn’t be able to enjoy it knowing that there were hungry women looting the food store next door.

The more Klim thought about it, the more he wanted to leave Nizhny Novgorod as soon as possible, but he did not dare mention this to Lubochka and her guests. If something bad were to happen, he would be able to escape to safety, but they had nowhere to go.

Suddenly, Lubochka’s expression changed as if she had spotted something strange behind him. He turned and noticed Countess Odintzova standing next to the terrace railing.

This time, she wasn’t dressed in mourning. The evening sun was reflected in the exquisite blue beading of her dress. Her dark hair fell loosely from her parting in waves and was swept into an extravagant chignon on the back of her head. She fanned herself with a large black fan, the delicate ostrich feather fronds waving to and fro like seaweed.

And I took her for a maid, Klim thought. What a fool!

Should he apologize for his stupid mistake? Invite her to his table and then summon the waiters and order whatever dish might take her fancy?

The orchestra struck up a tango, and a singer in a beautiful dress embroidered with red roses started to sing.