Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

Not long ago, a cat had started to visit the canteen where Lubochka worked. The cat was so skinny that its ribs could be seen through his gray marbled fur. It was wild and nervous, and it had never tried to ingratiate itself with Lubochka or beg for food. It had just sat on the doorstep for hours looking at the meat on the chopping board.

The cook had chased the cat away, but it had been too weak to jump the fence and had fallen. The cook had picked it up by the scruff of its neck so that the cat had hung from her hand pitifully, its ears flattened, and its long body stretched out.

“We should kill this damn creature,” the cook had said, grabbing a piece of a brick. “One of these days, it’ll steal our meat.”

But Lubochka had snatched the cat away. She had taken it back to her house and fed it. Still, it refused to acknowledge her and hissed and raised its paw to her if she tried to pet it.

To Lubochka, her cousin Klim now looked like that feral cat. And Nina, clearly half-starved, was all but unrecognizable.

Should I go up to speak to them? Lubochka thought. But what if they shrank away from her? She too had changed but in quite a different way.

Lubochka now lived in her father’s house with all of her beloved men around her: Sablin, Osip, and Anton Emilievich.

Lubochka’s father had come back to Nizhny Novgorod early in the August of 1918. He had gone quite gray, and what was left of his hair stood out in clumps. His left ear had been torn and failed to heal properly. He had never reached Finland but had been arrested on the border and imprisoned, his money taken away. Whenever his daughter tried to quiz him about what had happened, he either tried to laugh it off with feeble jokes or fell into a sudden rage and demanded that she leave him alone.

In early September, Lubochka had run into the head doctor of the Martynov Hospital.

“Sablin is dying,” he had said disdainfully. “Haven’t you even gone to see him?”

She had found her former husband in a terrible state, lying on the floor in the hospital corridor. She had presented her father and Osip with a fait accompli: she would bring Sablin into the house and nurse him until he was fully recovered.

“I’m not going to go back to him,” she had told Osip, who was seething with jealousy. “Sablin will get better, and then he’ll go. What opinion can you have of me, thinking that I could give up on someone so close to me?”

“But Sablin’s not close to you,” Osip protested.

“I would never give up on any of my family members, including you. Under no circumstances.”

Osip looked at her sullenly, unable to find the words to convince her.

Sablin had indeed recovered and returned to work at the Martynov Hospital after being pronounced unfit for military service. But he had had nowhere to go since the house on Ilinskaya Street had been requisitioned, so, he had stayed on in Anton Emilievich’s former library.

In her heart of hearts, Lubochka didn’t want Sablin to move out. Every now and again, Osip went on a business trip, and sometimes he was away from home for weeks. Then Lubochka whiled away the time with her ex-husband.

She still admired him for his education and impressive intellect. She could talk to him on topics that Osip knew nothing about, such as history, science, and culture. This was something she missed terribly in her present marriage.

Lubochka realized that she needed both of them at once: Comrade Drugov and Dr. Sablin.

“You, my daughter, are playing with fire,” Anton Emilievich had said, shaking his head.

During the first year of Soviet rule, Lubochka had believed in miracles and hadn’t refused herself anything. She had realized that everything was possible if you have something to exchange and know how to trade it.

By November 1918, a web of invisible but strong threads had grown up throughout the city, linking all of those who received privileges of one sort or another. It covered all industries and sectors from the newly established University of Nizhny Novgorod to cobbler’s workshops and dental surgeries, and the center of this elaborate network was the Regional Provisions Committee. Those who knew on which side their bread was buttered had lost interest in the dangerous trade of the bagmen and joined the ranks of bureaucrats, trying to get work that allowed them access to consumer goods, communications, or valuable information, all of which were worth a lot more than money.

Lubochka had access to food supplies and high-ranking military officials in the Red Army, and she set up her business in such a way that her family members had been spared mandatory public work and civil defense work. Thanks to her efforts, Sablin had received the position of head of the surgical department, and her father had become executive editor of a newspaper, the Nizhny Novgorod Commune.

Lubochka’s new partners and friends were all people who had adapted to the new regime, something which, in itself, required quick wits and intelligence. And now she found herself staring at her former idol, Klim Rogov. He had stayed on in Russia with his precious girlfriend, sunk right to the bottom, and Nina—of whom she had been so jealous—had ended up with a gaunt, unshaven beggar with haunted eyes.

Congratulations, Lubochka thought. Now, you have one overcoat between the two of you. Quite romantic, I suppose.

Klim turned his head just as though he had felt Lubochka’s gaze on them.

She set off purposefully toward them. “Come with me.”

Now was no time to bear a grudge. Klim and Nina needed to be saved.

1

On the day of the anniversary of the revolution, Sablin was given a day off and found himself alone in the house for the first time in a long while. His former father-in-law had gone to a gala concert, his surrogate for marital duties had been summoned to Moscow again, and Lubochka had gone out to watch the Bolshevik parade.

Sablin had become accustomed to doing everything at a frenetic pace, and now, he felt himself at a loose end. Deciding to go for a stroll, he put on his overcoat, took his cane, and went outside. He walked for twenty minutes without meeting a single living soul.

It’s like a city after the plague, thought Sablin.

To him, there was a remarkable similarity between the Bolshevik revolution and the pandemics of Black Death in the Middle Ages. The plague of ideas—like the plague bacterium—were passed on by contact with infected individuals, and both were incurable unless steps were taken quickly. The Black Death had destroyed around a half of the population of Western Europe, leaving its cities and village empty, its moral standards in decline, and riots breaking out all over the countryside. The same was happening in Russia now. In both cases, nobody had known the cause of the disease, and people blamed demons or foreigners for their misfortune. In Nizhny Novgorod at the moment, there was much speculation about which members of the Bolshevik government were Jewish and which were from the Baltic provinces.

People had tried all sorts of remedies against the plague, from drinking raw vodka on an empty stomach to going to mass, but all of them had proved useless. In any case, prayer meetings—like political demonstrations—only helped the disease spread faster.

Bolshevism is a malignant virus, thought Sablin. When somebody becomes infected, one thing leads to another: hallucinations, fever, and a burning desire to cut the painful swelling—the “bubo”—out of the body even if it only makes things worse.

Sablin knew that he too was infected. He could feel nothing but hatred toward those who had brought Russia to its knees and were now finishing it off for good—Trotsky signing death sentences for his fellow countrymen without batting an eyelid, Osip Drugov, who had stolen Sablin’s wife, and Lubochka herself.

Once Zhora Kupin had written a poem about Comrade Drugov:

This fellow never had enough.

He needed other people’s stuff.

He stole somebody else’s wife,

Hoping to get a brand new life.

Good at division and subtraction—

But ruling held the most attraction.

His school, the College of Hard Knocks,

Has dealt his brain too many shocks.

The doctors tried, it must be said,

But couldn’t mend this young man’s head.

Zhora and others like him were always the first to die in the troubled times. He was too principled; he stood out too much to survive. Would it ever be possible to forgive his murderers? The Cheka had wiped out an entire generation of youngsters who could have been the flowers of the nation. Passionate, talented boys with a burning desire to make the world a better place, these were the young men who had volunteered for the White Army and performed heroic feats for a cause they had believed in. Who was there now to replace them? Of course, there were enthusiastic, dedicated young men among the urban working class and rural poor. But while the Whites had culture and knowledge behind them, these young Reds had to start at the very beginning from a position of medieval ignorance.

How will we survive the plague? Sablin wondered, walking down the street. Some people will develop immunity—they’ll remain untouched by the disease or not be badly affected. Those who survive will have to rebuild everything after the epidemic, which could drag on for years.

Three people were coming around the corner: a man and two women. Sablin peered at them and, to his great surprise, saw that it was Lubochka with Klim and Nina.