Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

Within an hour, Marisha rushed in to see Lubochka, looking bewildered.

“He’s ordered me to sell all the possessions his father left him to the neighbors,” Marisha said. “He told me not to worry about getting a good price and to get rid of it all as soon as possible. He said he’d had enough and was leaving at the earliest opportunity.”

Lubochka gasped. It was obvious that Nina had rejected her Argentinean admirer. What a fool! What a complete and utter fool!

The whole day Lubochka wandered around the house, trying to come up with a way to stop Klim from leaving. But what could she do? She had no power over him.

At dinner, he offered Lubochka’s husband a choice: a long-term lease of the house or redemption.

“He doesn’t want me to pay interest,” Sablin marveled when he and Lubochka were about to go to sleep. “Can you believe we’ll finally have a house of our own? But I hate to profit off your cousin in this way.”

He glanced at Lubochka lying beside him.

“I think Klim isn’t looking too healthy,” Sablin said. “I hinted that I’d be happy to refer him to an expert, but he’s scared of doctors just like you.”

Lubochka could only feel astonishment at her husband’s ability to misjudge and misinterpret the whole situation so spectacularly.

Lubochka’s father, Anton Emilievich Schuster, was the executive editor of the local paper, the Nizhny Novgorod Bulletin. Slim with a solemn narrow face and a gray beard, he was a man of culture and huge erudition who lived in a 17th-century stone tower surrounded by his large and motley collection of antiques, books, and rare objects.

Lubochka liked to visit her father. It was a tradition of theirs to have dinner together once a week. But this Saturday, the dinner table was set for three.

“Are you expecting someone?” Lubochka asked her father, unfolding the napkin on her lap.

Anton Emilievich glanced at his watch with a meaningful look. “Just wait a little, and you’ll see!”

She noticed that many of the Rogovs’ possessions—including the iron safe—had made their way into her father’s collection. Anton Emilievich had taken everything that Klim’s dubious neighbors hadn’t had time to get their hands on.

Klim had bought a ticket to Moscow, and Lubochka tried to prepare herself for what was to come. What was she going to do when he left? Her life would be changed irrevocably.

The brass doorbell jingled in the hall.

“That’s him!” Anton Emilievich exclaimed, jumping to his feet. A minute later, he ushered the newly arrived guest into the dining room. He was a common soldier—not an officer but one of the ordinary rank and file.

“Here he is, my one of a kind,” Anton Emilievich exclaimed. “Osip Drugov. What’s your patronymic?”

“Petrovich,” boomed the soldier in a bass voice.

Lubochka cautiously offered him her hand, and he clasped it firmly in his great rough paw. “Pleased to meet you.”

Osip was tall and broad-shouldered. His face was ruddy, and the whites of his blue eyes were yellowish and threaded with tiny red veins. When he reached for a piece of bread, the folds on the back of his neck—brown from the sun—stretched out to reveal the pale skin beneath.

“Comrade Drugov is something of a hero,” Anton Emilievich said to Lubochka. “He was one of the leaders of the 62nd Regiment rebellion. Soldiers who had recovered from their injuries were being forced to board trains heading back to the front, and Osip Petrovich and his colleagues managed to get them away from their escorts.”

Anton Emilievich was trying to sound ironic, but Lubochka detected an unfamiliar, ingratiating note in his voice. He fawned on Osip. “Do please help yourself. This trout is excellent—it just came today from the farm.”

But Osip paid no attention to his host’s efforts to impress him. “It’s unfair to send men back to be slaughtered while any man whose mother or father can afford to pay sits in safety away from the front,” he said, fixing Lubochka with a stare. “I went straight to the newspaper office, and I met your father there.”

Lubochka huddled back in her chair, her whole body sensing the contrast between the nervous agitation of her father and the confident power exuded by his guest, who was neither offhand nor insolent but felt at liberty to do and say whatever he pleased.

“Did Father interview you?” she asked with a forced smile.

“We talked about things,” Osip said. “I told him, ‘I’ve shed blood for you,’ and all that. ‘I’ve been wounded twice and suffered from shellshock, so you have to help us. And if you won’t write about the demands of the people, we’ll confiscate your newspaper.’”

Anton Emilievich roared with laughter. “I was flabbergasted! So I said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ And he said, ‘I’m a Russian Bolshevik.’”

Now, Lubochka understood. The Bolsheviks were a small left-wing political party gathering momentum with young radicals and deserters from the front joining them, and now, they were calling openly for a coup d’état.

Lubochka’s father in his wisdom could tell that important events were afoot. Recently, he had taken to saying that they were living like goldfish in a glass bowl. They saw everything in a distorted light without actually caring about what was going on in the world outside. Meanwhile, however, the glass in the bowl had cracked.

Anton Emilievich wanted to find out what was going on in the barracks and factories—that was why he had invited a Bolshevik to dinner.

Osip Drugov said things that made Lubochka’s hair stand on end.

“We don’t want Russia to win this war—this is the kind of war that should be lost. It wouldn’t be a defeat for us. It would be a defeat for the Provisional Government. The bourgeoisie has forced us to kill our own brothers, workers from Germany and Austria-Hungary. Just think of it—how many people have died! And for what? Now that we have weapons in our hands, we’ll put them to use against our real enemies—the landlords, the factory owners, and the other oppressors of the working people.”

“And how will you tell who are the working people and who are the freeloaders?” asked Anton Emilievich politely.

“It’ll be easy. Those people who are of some use to society may live. And as for the freeloaders, we’ll string ‘em up from the lampposts. Now, you, Anton Emilievich, have a very useful profession—”

“Wait a minute,” Lubochka interrupted. “So, you think I should be strung up from a lamppost? I don’t work for a living, after all.”

Osip wasn’t in the least embarrassed. “That’s only because bourgeois society sets restrictions on what you can do. A woman Bolshevik came to our hospital and talked to us about women’s rights. Think how useful women could be if they had the chance to work like men! What would you like to do, for instance?”

Lubochka looked around the room and the dining table. “I suppose I’d like to open a restaurant.”

“I’m afraid that’s out of the question. We intend to ban all private property. But we’re going to need people in public catering who know what they’re doing.”

“Visit us again,” Anton Emilievich told Osip as they said goodbye. “Lubochka is having a birthday party soon.”

Osip turned toward her and looked at her with a piercing gaze, showing such frank and obvious sexual interest that she felt slightly weak at the knees.

“What would you like me to get you as a birthday present?” he asked.

“What kind of thing can a Bolshevik get?”

“Everything. The whole world.”

“Then I’ll have that.”

“Right. It’s yours.”

Mr. Fomin, the chairman of the city’s Provisions Committee, sat at his table in the Oriental Bazaar sweating, his broad shoulders bowed by worldly cares, his throat tightened with anger and jealousy as he stared at the dancing couples.

He had asked Nina to come to the restaurant on purpose. There would be people around him, and they wouldn’t allow him to do what he wanted to do most of all.

Nina ran into the half-empty room, blushing with anticipation. She put her wet umbrella on a chair and sat across the table from Fomin. “Tell me all the details! Whom did you meet in Petrograd?”

Nina was uncommonly smart, quick, and self-assured and looked nothing like Fomin’s own sturdy girls who had been living in Geneva with their mother, safely in neutral Switzerland since the beginning of the war.

Fomin tried to be calm and sober while telling Nina the news, and she was so excited that she didn’t notice his mood at all. She gasped, wrinkled her nose, and, like a little girl, bit her lower lip, trying to stop herself from laughing in sheer delight. “Oh, I knew you’d make it happen!”

Fomin could barely hold his emotions in check. Why has all this happened to me? he thought. However, he had no one to blame but himself. It had been he who had invaded Nina’s life, a big balding man whose belly hung over his belt. But how could he stop himself when he had seen her perishing, crushed by her grief and tormented by her mother-in-law? Apart from him, Nina had no one else to rely on except her younger brother.

Fomin had no illusions—he was well aware that she thought of him as no more than her patron. She listened attentively when he gave her advice and was grateful for all the help he gave her. Fomin’s office was full of little gifts that she had given him—tiny jars of jam, knitted mittens, and the like. Nina was under no obligation to pay him back for what he had done, but she had decided in her own naïve way to show her gratitude: You gave me something, so I’ll give you something in return. If you don’t want my jam, well, there’s nothing I can offer you besides myself.