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.

While they were waiting for their order, Kitty’s father performed tricks for her with a sugar lump, hiding it in his fist and then producing it from out of his cuff or behind his ear.

Kitty let out peal after peal of laughter. “Again! Again!”

Seibert could not resist. “Excuse me,” he asked, leaning toward them. “I’m curious. Are you by any chance with a theater?”

The man turned around. “No,” he answered. “I’m a journalist.” He handed Seibert a card on which was written “Klim Rogov.”

“Oh, you’re Russian, are you?” asked Seibert, still more surprised.

“By birth, yes. But I have American citizenship, and Kitty and I live in Shanghai. I work at an English-language radio station there.”

“And I work at the Wolffs Telegrafische Bureau news agency,” said Seibert. “So, how do you find Moscow?”

Klim gave a shrug. “I came here to find people who took part in the civil war in China, but everywhere I’m told that the Soviet Union sent no agents out there.”

Seibert gave a knowing smile. “What do you expect? Politics is nothing but a collection of myths and legends we are told we must believe.”

“Somehow I’m not convinced,” said Klim. “A friend of mine left for the USSR together with a group of political advisers who had been working in China, and they all seem to have vanished into thin air. I’ve been trying to find them for a month but with no luck.”

“You should come to my house tomorrow,” said Seibert. “I’m having a bit of a gathering at five o’clock, and there will be an English lady there, Magda Thomson. She knows some people who used to work in China.”

“Thank you! You’ve been a great help!” Klim turned to his daughter. “You see, Kitty? Didn’t I tell you everything would be all right?”

Seibert felt like some kind of magician who could grant the wishes of ordinary mortals with one click of his fingers.

3 KLIM ROGOV’S NOTEBOOK

Keeping a secret diary is like putting a notice on your door saying, “Keep out!” and then deliberately leaving it slightly open.

It’s a bad habit, and I’ve tried to give it up many times, but what can I do? I’m a scribbler by nature, one of that writerly tribe whose chief pleasure in life lies in hunting out words and collecting meanings. Without this pleasure, I don’t think I could survive. Anyway, I’ve promised to give a detailed account of my adventures in Soviet Russia to Fernando, so let that be my excuse.

I caught sight of this notebook in a kiosk in Vladivostok. It was only after I’d bought it that I noticed it included a note of “memorable events” for every date: executions of revolutionaries, forcible dispersal of demonstrations, assassination attempts on the Tsars, etc. This diary could quite easily be called the “Book of the Dead,” but I hope for me it will tell a story of survival, not of disaster.

My wife has disappeared without a trace. The only clue I have to her whereabouts is an article in Pravda newspaper announcing that the “Chinese group” with which she was traveling has arrived in Moscow.

When my friends in Shanghai heard I was coming to Russia, they thought I had lost my mind. As the Bolsheviks see it, any foreigner with a Russian name is a White émigré, and a White émigré is, by definition, an enemy.

But nobody stopped me at the border. My American passport and respectable coat were enough to mark me out as a VIP. Clearly, the petty Soviet officials were afraid to stick their necks out. Who knows who I might be—a famous engineer or a foreign scientist invited to attend the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution?

It took Kitty and me sixteen days to reach Moscow, and what sights we saw on the way! The train was accompanied as far as Khabarovsk by a convoy of Red Army soldiers who stood on duty on the platforms between the railcars and on the locomotive. They were there to protect us from the gangs of armed bandits that often attack passenger trains in the Far East just like the Indians in films about the Wild West.

There were still several rusty, derailed trains lying about from the time of the civil war. A number of bridges had been blown up, and the Bolsheviks had replaced them with temporary wooden structures. It is quite terrifying crossing these makeshift bridges; the train inches across, the beams groaning and cracking from the weight, and all the passengers hold their breath, praying it will hold out till they reach the other side. Once, the bridge did actually start to break up under us, and the locomotive only just succeeded in dragging the last car across to the opposite bank. It was the strangest feeling as if we had crossed the Rubicon.

I don’t know how long my search will last and how long my money will hold out. I never had access to Nina’s bank account, so Kitty and I are living off my own modest savings.

My friends are right, of course. It is madness to stake everything you own on one card and to set off of your own accord to this bogeyman of a country, which émigré mommies use to frighten their naughty children. Even if I do find Nina, the chances are that we’ll only break up again. Even before she left, we both realized that our life together wasn’t working out, and we were only heading for some inevitable catastrophe.

So, why am I chasing after the ghost of this long-lost love?

I have always admired Nina’s energy, her dignity, and her ability to rise up out of the ashes like a phoenix, but there’s more to it than that. She has her own distinctive feminine charm, which I find quite irresistible. And I’m not the only one by any means. I’ve seen how other men look at her. Where will I find another woman like her? If I hadn’t come to Moscow, I’d be doomed to loneliness or a pointless search for someone exactly like her, and I don’t even want to think about that.

I am like a passenger on the Titanic after the shipwreck, freezing in the icy water, refusing to believe that the ship is doomed, convinced that the whole thing was just some emergency drill. Any minute now, the ship will rise up from the depths, the holes in its hull will close up, and the captain will steer it off on its original course.

4

Klim could not wait for the meeting with Magda.