“See you again soon,” said Nina and left, leaving Klim in the company of the stone chimera.

He squinted at the monster crouched on its pedestal. It had the head of a lion and a crest along its back, and its body was like that of no creature on earth. A chimera was nothing but a chimera, a bad dream, a blend of incongruous parts. And that was exactly what Klim’s love had become.

4

Almost every one of the foreign journalists came to the next session of the Shakhty Trial. They all wanted to see the conclusion of the cross-examination of Scorutto.

The judge called the engineer to the microphone, and in quiet, calm tones, Scorutto announced that he fully accepted his guilt.

“I only withdrew my testimony because of my wife,” he told the court.

A barely audible sigh of disappointment was heard in the courtroom.

“His wife should never have shouted out to him,” whispered Seibert in Klim’s ear. “She let the OGPU know that she and her husband loved each other. That was just one more tool in their hands. I expect he was told that his wife would be arrested if he didn’t confess.”

Klim nodded gloomily. The trial was beginning to resemble the medieval allegory of the “Dance Macabre” in which a grinning skeleton leads people of all ranks and all walks of life into a dance, showing that no matter what a man might do, the force of fate still leads him into the grave.

It was utterly hopeless to resist the Bolsheviks.

5

As soon as Klim came out of the House of Unions, he caught sight of Nina. She came toward him, looking light and elegant in a little straw hat and a white flowered dress.

“Hello,” she said. “How’s Kitty?”

“She’s fine,” said Klim without meeting her eye.

Without exchanging a word, they set off in the direction of Okhotny Ryad Street. A stream of people was coming the other way, and as they let them pass, Klim and Nina touched shoulders and then moved apart from one another.

“I know just the place to take Kitty,” said Nina. “Elkin wrote to me that he’s in Koktebel now; it’s a small Bulgarian village in Crimea. His aunt has a house there, and she rents out rooms to holidaymakers. Elkin invited me to go and stay there.”

“I can just picture your playboy of a husband in a Crimean village,” snorted Klim.

“I’d go to Koktebel without Oscar. He’s gone to Germany—he left yesterday.”

There was a crash from above the street, and a cloud of lime dust rose into the air. Klim looked around. Behind a fence plastered with theater posters, a group of workmen was demolishing the Church of St. Parascheva. Already, the golden cupolas had gone, and huge holes gaped in the walls, through which could be glimpsed the heads of the workers.

“I know someone who works for the People’s Commissariat for Railroads,” Nina went on, “and he’s booked a rail compartment for me. You and Kitty can come with me to the town of Feodosia, and from there we can take a bus straight to Koktebel.”

Klim looked at her in amazement. What was all this about a compartment? She didn’t really believe for a moment that he would agree to travel with her?

“My dear girl, you must realize that everything is over between us,” he said.

Nina’s face contorted as if in pain. “But you said yourself that Kitty needs to go to the south!”

“I refuse to take any charity from you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re sharing Reich’s bed!” retorted Klim angrily.

Nina hung her head. “What about you and that Galina?” she whispered. “I don’t imagine you’re just sitting around playing solitaire.”

“Watch out!” came a shout from behind the fence as a beam crashed down from the roof of the church.

“If you’d only listened to me at the start—” said Nina with a catch in her voice. “But I don’t know why I’m even interfering. If you want to kill our child out of sheer stupidity—”

“Don’t use Kitty to blackmail me!” snapped Klim, but Nina interrupted him.

“I’ll be at the Kursk Station on Friday at two o’clock. The train to Feodosia, Car Two, Compartment Four. If you want to come, come.”

Then she turned and walked away.

6

Klim arrived home in a state of turmoil. What sort of plan was this of Nina’s? It was madness for the two of them to travel together, not to mention in a single compartment. Kitty would realize that her mother had been found, and then what?

But what if I don’t manage to find rail tickets in time? Klim thought. His period of leave from work would pass, the summer would be over, and perhaps Kitty would still be sick.

He opened the door to his apartment, and Galina came rushing to meet him. “How was the Shakhty Trial?”

“Fine,” he answered, his mind elsewhere.

What if he did decide to go to Koktebel after all? What would he do about Galina? When he had told her he wanted to go south, she had immediately assumed he was taking her, although he had promised nothing.

Klim stared gloomily at Galina’s thin legs in their short socks, shrunk from constant washing, and at her coarse cloth dress, creased from long hours of sitting at a typewriter.

Why had he got involved with Galina? For months now, he had been justifying himself by reasoning that it was what she wanted, but this charm no longer worked. He had a crime on his conscience: he had allowed Galina to hope for something. Now he faced a choice of either crushing her completely or carrying this pointless and heavy burden around for the rest of his life.

Galina put her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Why were you so long? I missed you!”

Any failure to respond to her affectionate advances was to risk bringing forth a torrent of alarmed questions. But to respond was only to wrap a noose tighter around his own neck.

Galina could already see from his face that something had happened. “What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously.

Klim blurted out the first thing that came into his mind. “I just saw them demolishing the Church of St. Parascheva. What a shame! That church is more than two hundred years old, you know. It’s the same all over the country. I read in the paper that in my hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, the city council has ordered the demolition of the churches on the main square so that they don’t get in the way of military parades.”

Klim remembered the church in which he and Nina had been married. “The Church of St. George is going to be demolished too,” he said. “Those swine don’t give a damn for history or tradition.”

“Are you from Nizhny Novgorod?” asked Galina, surprised. “You always said you were from Moscow.”

Klim cursed himself silently. What a stupid blunder!

“Well… I used to visit Nizhny Novgorod… a long time ago when I was a child….” Just in case, he decided to change the subject. “Do you know what? I think that all those fires and accidents in the Shakhty region were the result not of sabotage but of something far more mundane: worn-out equipment and a failure to observe safety procedures. After all, similar things are happening all over the USSR.”

Klim was hoping to draw Galina into an argument so that she would overlook the slip he had just made. But, unusually for her, she did not rise to the bait.

“I’ve got soup on the stove,” she said and went off into the kitchen.

21. THE HOUSE OF GLORY

1

The news of Kitty’s illness had alarmed Nina so much that it had driven everything else clean out of her head. She was beside herself with fury at Galina. Nina was convinced that the fool of a woman had failed to keep a proper eye on Kitty.

Taking matters into her own hands, Nina managed to get ahold of rail tickets to Feodosia in two days. Now, fate had given her and Klim a chance. What they needed was to go far away and forget all their previous woes.

“He has to come to the station!” Nina kept repeating to herself. But every now and then, a sickening thought would set her heart beating wildly: What if he doesn’t come?

On the day of the last session of the Shakhty Trial, Nina was on the point of telephoning Klim several times to find out what he had decided but could not bring herself to do so.

Everywhere, it seemed, there was talk of “the verdict.” The word was on the lips of market traders and cab drivers and blared from loudspeakers on the street. To distract herself from her own gloomy thoughts, Nina went to the cinema only to find that the main feature was preceded by a newsreel on the Shakhty Trial. Eleven men had been sentenced to be shot while the others had received long sentences in labor camps. The presiding judge of the Supreme Court was shown silently pronouncing sentence while the pianist thumped out a solemn march and the cinema-goers on either side of Nina commented approvingly, “That’ll show them!”

That evening, Yefim came to check on Nina. Oscar had asked him to keep an eye on his wife while he was abroad.

“Have you heard the news about the verdict?” Yefim asked. “They let the Germans off in the end. Oscar arranged a swap—their liberty in exchange for a contract for railroad sleepers. But the Russians are of no use to anybody; neither their government nor their people.”

Nina buried her face in her hands. She felt that she too was of no earthly use to anybody.

2

Nina arrived at the station early and set off slowly along the empty platform to the second car. She had told Elkin that she would be arriving together with Klim and Kitty, but she no longer had any faith that her plan would work.