Magda refused point-blank. “I understand you’re anxious to get back to your husband, but I don’t want to lose Friedrich either. I can take care of you. My father has lots of friends in parliament. We can send Klim a telegram, and he can wire you the money for the return trip.”

“The Bolsheviks couldn’t care less about your parliament,” Nina said. “You won’t find any diplomats here or any legal system to speak of. They can just accuse you of spying and shoot you on the spot.”

Low hills covered in reddish grass stretched away outside the window. From time to time, a chain of railcars would pass, and they would glimpse horses’ faces and the broadcloth helmets of Red Army soldiers. Troops were being sent off somewhere.

Magda slurped at the tea that the attendant had brought in for them. “I don’t know whom Frederick thinks he’s trying to fool,” she said. “Nobody can live without love. He’s just worried about getting me into trouble. But I told him straight away that I’m not afraid of anything… well, perhaps except my father when he’s angry. We just need time to get to know one another better.”

Nina sat in silence. All she could think of was that every second was taking her farther and farther away from Klim.

2

The train flew across half the length of Russia and eventually arrived in Moscow.

Nina was preparing herself for the worst. Any minute, officers from the OGPU might come to the door of their compartment and begin to question her: How had she ended up in China? What had she been up to there?

Magda was also looking as if she had seen a ghost. She was staring through the window at a porter stamping about on the station platform, an enormous man with a brutish face, a matted beard, and a lighted cigarette dangling from his thick lips. He was the spitting image of the Bolsheviks on political posters shown making their way toward a horrified Europe.

“If they try to arrest us,” Nina said in a trembling voice, “jump out onto the rails and hide under the train. Then we’ll run in different directions: you go toward the station, and I’ll go over there to that freight train. We can meet in twenty-four hours on the square in front of the station—in the place where the cab drivers wait for fares.”

There was a knock at the door. Nina pressed her hand to her lips. That was it. They were done for.

But it was only Friedrich.

“What are you doing sitting around in here?” he said. “Go to the Second House of Soviets. They’re expecting you there.”

“And what about you?” fretted Magda. “Where are you going?”

“To the Comintern Hostel.”

Friedrich called a porter, who tied Marga’s suitcases with a leather strap and hoisted them onto his shoulder.

“Where to?” the porter asked.

“To the exit,” ordered Friedrich as he led Magda and Nina through the crowds of passengers.

Nina wondered whether she ought to make a run for it before it was too late. Or would it be better to stay close to Magda? If she were to run away, where could she hide, and how could she survive when she knew no one in the city? And then there was Magda’s influential father who could mobilize the British Parliament if anything were to happen—or so she claimed.

“Friedrich?” said Nina. “What’s the Second House of the Soviets?”

“You’ll see in a minute,” he answered.

Nina assumed it was the place foreigners were taken for interrogation.

3

Nina had been expecting Moscow to be like some abandoned citadel ransacked by the enemy, but it was quite different. The smart station building had been recently refurbished, and there were lots of people on the streets, although nobody here was dressed in the European manner.

Moscow had its own distinctive style of dress. The men wore trousers of woolen cloth, Russian shirts, and peaked hats while the women were all in calico dresses and headscarves tied low over their foreheads.

Friedrich took Nina and Magda out into the square outside the station and pointed to a small Renault parked close by.

“Get yourselves a cab,” he said.

“When will I see you again?” asked Magda with a pleading note in her voice.

“I’ll come and find you.”

Once they were in the car, Magda began her ruminations about love again, but Nina wasn’t listening; she was watching the twilight city as it rushed by outside the window of the cab. So, here it was, the city that was talked of the world over as the embodiment of all evil.

There were crowds of people streaming along the narrow pavements and into open shop doorways. But every minute, it was harder for Nina to make out the shop signs, which were not illuminated as they had been in Shanghai.

There were far fewer cars in Moscow than there had been in China. People got around using horse-cabs or trams, which were full to overflowing. The windows in the buildings were lit up from top to bottom, and even the basement windows below pavement level threw out yellow rectangles of light.

“Why are all the lights on?” Nina asked their driver.

“There are tenants in every room,” he said. “Before you might have had some gentleman taking up a whole apartment by himself. But things are different now. Every family gets a room, and there’s no waste.”

Nina translated his words to Magda.

“Could you imagine if you had to share your house with strangers?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t mind if one of them was Friedrich,” answered Magda

The magic charms of the medicine man in South America had done more than protect Magda from violent death, it seemed. They had also cured her of common sense.

4

The Second House of Soviets turned out to be the former Hotel Metropol. Before, it had been used by members of the government. Now, they had been given private apartments, and the hotel rooms were being rented out to foreigners once again.

Magda’s spirits lifted immediately when she saw the lobby, which was more than respectable with its marble floors and glittering chandeliers.

“There. You see?” she said to Nina. “Things are looking up.”

On the downside, the prices at the Metropol were extortionate. They had to pay as much to stay a night as they would have paid for a whole month in a Peking hotel.

“The country needs hard currency,” explained the receptionist bluntly.

When he asked for their documents, Magda gave him her passport with a five-pound-note inside it.

“This woman is my guest,” she said, indicating Nina.

“I see,” said the receptionist quietly, dropping the note into a desk drawer.

As it was elsewhere, so it was in the land of the Soviets: money might not buy you everything, but it certainly helped solve most problems.

5

Nobody thought to arrest Nina and Magda. They stayed in the Metropol, dining in the restaurant on the ground floor and getting to know the foreigners who had come to the capital to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Magda kept asking after Friedrich, hoping that some foreign communists might know where to find him, but the days passed without a word or sign of him. Friedrich clearly had no intention of resuming relations with his old sweetheart.

“He’s just very busy,” Magda kept saying. “He needs time to sort out his affairs, and he knows where to find me.”

Nina had also had bad news. She had sent a telegram to Klim at home and at his workplace, but they had come back marked “Addressee not known here.” She was beside herself now at the thought that something might have happened to Klim and Kitty.

The telegrams she had sent to her friends had also gone unanswered. There was unrest in Shanghai, and a many of the white settlers had decided to leave, to be on the safe side.

There was nobody to help her out, and Nina would have to find the money for her journey home herself. It would take months to save up the sum needed on the salary she was getting from Magda, and then she had to get the necessary documents to get across the border—a seemingly impossible task.

Magda could not increase Nina’s pay. She did not have enough money herself as her father had refused to pay her bills.

“Come back to England immediately,” he sent back a cable in reply to her request. He did not want to invest a single penny in Bolshevik Russia.

For days on end, Nina and Magda would walk about Moscow looking at the sights, from the wooden mausoleum in which Lenin’s embalmed body lay on show to the Anti-Religious Museum, which had been set up in the old Strastnoy Monastery.

The whole of the city was preparing for the 7th of November when the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution would be celebrated. Buildings were being repaired and refurbished right and left, and columns of workers armed with training rifles or wearing gas masks were marching the streets—in a rehearsal of the coming military parade.

The Soviet Union was living in expectation of imminent war. It could be felt everywhere, in the headlines of the papers and the conversations at the markets.

Posters had been put up all around the town:

The Red Army is the ever-vigilant guard of the Land of the Soviets. Strengthen the Union of Workers and Peasants, and the USSR will be invincible! Death to the blood-soaked Imperialists!

“Who are the Bolsheviks preparing to fight?” asked Magda, puzzled.

“Why, the English, of course. Who else?” Nina said with a smile. “After all, you’re planning to attack the USSR—all the newspapers are talking about it.”