What would she do if Klim did not come? Should she go to Crimea alone? Oh, God, Nina thought, anything but that!

“Mommy!” she heard a child’s excited cry. “Daddy, I’ve found our Mommy!”

Kitty, dressed in a comical, frilled pink sundress, came running up to Nina and hugged her legs.

Nina was overcome by happiness and relief. Her hands shaking, she kissed Kitty, exclaiming over her and hugging her tightly. “Look how much you’ve grown!”

It was hard to believe that her daughter still recognized her after such a long absence.

“Hello,” said Klim, walking up to them.

He was carrying a small suitcase decorated with pictures of flowers cut out from postcards.

Nina looked up at him happily. “I’m so glad to see you both! Where are your things?”

“I’m not coming with you,” said Klim.

Nina’s heart froze. “But why not?”

Klim took a small folded piece of paper from his pocket and held it out to her. “I got this yesterday evening.”

It was a carbon copy of a typewritten text. Nina quickly scanned it:

Dear Comrade Rogov,

You have been selected as a participant in a polar expedition of journalists leaving for Archangelsk this week. Everything has been arranged with your employers in London.

As you will know, the airship Italia piloted by General Umberto Nobile has been wrecked somewhere in the Spitzbergen Archipelago. The Soviet government has sent the icebreaker Krasin to the aid of the airship, and now, the world is watching our valiant sailors break their way through the ice to the stranded Italian fascists.

You will be taken to the vessel by airplane. There is a radio transmitter onboard which will allow you to send your reports back.

Communist Greetings, Weinstein

“It’s a petty act of revenge by the Press Department,” said Klim with a bitter smile. “Weinstein knew I was planning to go south, so he has deliberately sent me north.”

“But you don’t have to go!” exclaimed Nina. “Why didn’t you refuse?”

“Well, for my press agency, this polar expedition is a great scoop. Usually, the Soviets don’t send foreign journalists to the north. Would you be able to look after Kitty while I’m away?”

“Of course.”

“When will you be coming back home?”

“I’ve left Reich, so there’s nothing to come back to.”

Nina had been sure Klim would be pleased to hear this news, but instead, he clutched Kitty to him as if Nina had told him she was planning to kidnap her.

“Promise you won’t take Kitty away from me!” he said.

Nina stared at him, nonplussed. “What are you talking about?”

“Anything could happen. Your Oscar would never have a little Chinese girl in the house, but you’re a free woman now. You can do whatever you please.”

Klim did not seem to realize how hurtful his words were. He had no faith in Nina’s good intentions and was asking her not to act even more contemptibly than he had come to expect.

“Promise me you won’t take Kitty,” he repeated. “I’ll come and collect her as soon as I can get away.”

Nina was on the point of losing her temper but managed to restrain herself. She took a pencil from her bag and wrote down a few lines on the back of the letter from Weinstein.

“This is Elkin’s address. If you don’t trust me, send him a telegram and ask him to keep an eye on us.”

Klim nodded and put the letter in his pocket.

They went through to the compartment, and Klim explained to Nina what she should do if Kitty became ill again. He showed her where he had packed her medicine and, most importantly of all, her pink rag horse.

Kitty clambered up onto the seat and began fiddling with the light switch on the wall. “Look! You can turn the light on. Daddy, do you remember when we went to Moscow? There wasn’t a light in the train then.”

Kitty kept turning the light switch this way and that. One second it was bright, and the next, they were plunged into gloom.

The bell rang.

Klim got up and hugged Kitty tightly. “Be a good girl; try not to be too much of a nuisance to Nina.”

He had said “Nina” not “Mommy” just as if she were some stranger.

3

The train began to move, and a succession of dreary station outbuildings slid by outside the window.

Kitty sat swinging her legs, chattering to Nina of how she had recently fallen from the porch and got “a re-e-e-ally funny cut on her leg.” She wanted very much to make an impression on her mother.

Nina nodded, looking at the tiny scar on Kitty’s brown knee.

Why hadn’t Klim left Kitty with Galina? she was wondering. Did he trust her even less than Nina? Or perhaps his lover had developed a dislike for the girl?

Nina was quite unprepared for the maternal responsibility that had suddenly fallen to her. Shameful to admit, she and Kitty had been apart from each other for so long that now, neither was sure of how to behave with the other.

They heard a group of children in the neighboring compartment begin to sing the “Internationale” in German. One-third of the railcar was taken up by foreign Young Pioneers, the children of communists from other countries who had been sent to the Soviet Union for summer camp.

Kitty began to pester Nina to take her to meet the foreign children, and when Nina refused, she had a tantrum. All of a sudden, Kitty had realized her father was no longer there, and there was nobody to indulge her every whim.

Things went from bad to worse. The food in the restaurant car was horrible, and the tea was too hot. And what was so bad about putting bread up your nose, anyway, Kitty wanted to know. And if it was so bad, why did people have nostrils? Before long, Kitty was howling, and Nina was desperate.

When the train stopped at the next station, Nina ran out onto the platform and darted about among the peasant women selling home-cooked wares. The engine stood under steam, and every time one of the couplings heaved or gave a shudder, all the passengers would dash back to the cars in a panic. Nina was terrified the train would move off before she could get back on board, taking Kitty with it.

She bought some fried chicken, some boiled potatoes, and a few small cucumbers. Kitty at last consented to eat but was sick almost immediately.

Nina rinsed the pink sundress in the sink in the toilet cubicle. I’ve completely forgotten how to look after my own daughter, she thought with desperation. What if it turns out to be a serious case of food poisoning?

But when she got back to the compartment, Kitty was bouncing on the seats as though nothing had happened.

“Let’s play fishermen!” she said to Nina. “You can be the fisherman—you cast your line and pull me out of the sea.”

She made a great show of pretending to be the biggest fish ever, then a cabdriver’s horse, a singing radio loudspeaker, then a variety of sea monsters.

“You have to faint!” she shouted excitedly. “I’m a hideous three-headed diver!”

Again and again, Nina swooned obediently back on the seat.

After it grew dark, they lay in each other’s arms while Kitty told Nina how Kapitolina would pray to her “little father God” and how she sewed cloths embroidered with cockerels.

Nina wanted very much to ask about Galina, but she did not dare. It would be too terrible to hear confirmation of what she knew anyway.

Sparks from the engine flew past the window, the wheels clattered, and from the corridor came the sound of women laughing.

“Mommy,” said Kitty, “I know a magic spell. Kapitolina taught it to me. You have to say it to the brownie—that’s the house spirit—when you’ve lost something. It goes like this: ‘Brownie, Brownie, bring my sack back to me. What was lost will now be found, in the sack, safe and sound.’ I did the spell, and I asked the brownie to bring you bac k—and look! It worked!”

Nina kissed Kitty on the top of the head. “Now we need to get Daddy back too.”

“All right,” murmured Kitty sleepily. “Only I don’t know if the brownie will be able to pick Daddy up. He’s quite heavy.”

“We’ll think of something,” promised Nina. “Perhaps we can get ahold of a crane.”

4

Elkin was on the platform at Feodosia to meet Nina and Kitty, tanned and bearded, his hair a brighter ginger than ever. In his faded red fez and his Russian shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he looked more like a Turkish fisherman than a Moscow engineer.

“Where is Mr. Rogov?” he asked after he had kissed Nina in greeting.

“Daddy stayed in Moscow, and Mommy and I came on our own,” said Kitty.

Elkin looked at Nina, bewildered. “What do you mean, ‘with Mommy?’ Klim told me his wife was dead.”

Nina blushed awkwardly. She should have warned Elkin about all this. And now there would be all sorts of questions and explanations.

“Klim and I used to be married,” she stammered.

“But what about Kitty? How…?”

“We adopted her.”

For a moment, Elkin was lost for words.

“Well, then, let’s go,” he said at last and, taking the suitcases, led his visitors through the station crowds.

Nina was not sure how Elkin had taken the news about her former marriage. Had he guessed that it was for Klim’s sake rather than his that Nina had been coming in to the Moscow Savannah all that winter?

Feodosia was hot, dusty, and marvelously beautiful, and Nina gradually recovered from her feelings of embarrassment. She gazed at the Tatar women in their brightly colored rags, at men with great black mustaches carrying enormous wooden pallets on their heads, and at the jovial traders selling shrimps that they poured, like sunflower seeds, into cones of newspaper.