Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

Fyodor Stepanych took Nina to the vestry, which was in an outbuilding next to the church. Here, in a cold room smelling of mice, was a table with a sewing machine and some old trunks, black with age, on which were piles of church vestments.

“Here is your workstation,” said Fyodor Stepanych. He handed Nina a purple cassock. “I’d like you to make a couple of skirts out of this. I think there should be enough material.”

Nina looked at him, bewildered. “But that’s sacrilege—”

“The priests don’t need any of this stuff anymore,” said Fyodor Stepanych with a wave of his hand. “They’ve all been sent to the Solovki labor camp long ago—to speed them on their way to the Kingdom of Heaven.”

He began to lay out cassocks, surplices, and albs on the table.

“We’ll use the velvet for skirts,” he said, “the brocade for belts and collars, and we can use the winter robes to make coats for the proletarian women. You can sleep here on the trunks. I’ll give you a couple of logs a day to keep you from freezing.”

Nina made an excellent job of the sewing task she had been set, but Fyodor Stepanych told her she would not be getting paid for her work.

“Can’t you already sit by a warm stove and eat in our canteen?” he said. “What more do you want?”

Nina realized that she had fallen into a trap. Shilo had still not brought her the promised coat, and now the weather had turned so cold that Nina could not even put her nose outside, let alone go to the market and buy herself something warm.

“I’ve been put in prison without a trial!” she protested.

Fyodor Stepanych only laughed. “But you’re free to go. Nobody’s keeping you here.”

He was only too happy to have a seamstress who could handle expensive material and would work for him free of charge. Nina’s handiwork provided outfits for the prostitutes, bringing in a good profit for Fyodor Stepanych.

He watched Nina like a hawk to make sure that she did not help herself to offcuts and came in from time to time to count the leftover scraps of material. If he was in a good mood, he would sit for a while in the vestry, reminiscing about his youth.

He told Nina he had lived in Khabarovsk, working as a peddler who went door to door selling petty goods. His dream at that time had been to go to Canada. He had heard that the Canadian National Railways needed people to maintain the tracks that ran through remote forested regions. A family with two adult males could get an electric saw and an interest-free loan for twenty-five years. But it turned out that Canada would not take Chinese workers, only whites, and Fyodor Stepanych, smarting from the insult, had joined the Bolshevik party and enlisted in the fight against imperialism by becoming a warden of a women’s prison.

Shilo would sometimes come to see Nina too. If she had a drink or two in her, she would always start telling stories of her past.

“We’re like sisters, you and me,” Shilo told Nina, perching on the cutting table. “Only my family’s grander than yours. Have you heard of the Barons Bremer? Well, that’s us.”

She would describe in detail the luxury life she had once enjoyed and relatives so distinguished they had all but served in the court of the Tsar himself. But in all these stories, there was only one detail that rang true: during the revolution, Shilo had been raped by a group of soldiers and thrown out of a window. Her mind had been affected ever since.

“We had a great big house on Petrovka Lane,” Shilo enthused. “Beautiful—like a palace. There were these carved oak panels in the dining room commissioned by my mother with portraits of all of us children as angels.”

“So, what happened to your siblings?” asked Nina

“My brothers were shot in 1918, and my mother never got over the shock. She had a heart attack on the spot. But my father survived the revolution and the war. He worked as a shoeshiner on Pervomaisky Street, right opposite our apartment block. Only this summer, he was run down and killed by a cart.”

Nina sighed. Everybody, it seemed, had lost loved ones.

“I had a fiancé once, you know,” Shilo said one day. “He was a military attaché from France.”

Suddenly, she began to speak French—correctly and with barely a trace of an accent. As she told the story of her romance with Jean Christophe, how they had met at the racetrack and later begun a correspondence, Nina listened, dumbstruck, glancing now and again at Shilo’s raddled face. Who knew, perhaps she really had been a baroness? Nowadays, there were any number of doormen who had once been army colonels and cleaners who had been born princesses. They all survived as best they could, changing not only their appearance but also their very nature.

All the same, Shilo, with her fevered imagination, was capable of dreaming up any number of extraordinary things: an aristocratic past, angels in army helmets, or a samovar that whistled the “Internationale.”

“Do you know what else I remember?” Shilo said. “I hid some sweets under the windowsill in the library. My brother Mishka was always stealing them from me, and I made a secret hiding place—I was clever, see. There was a panel you could pull out and hide things behind.”

Shilo grabbed a pencil and began to draw a plan on a scrap from an old sewing pattern. “So, this is Petrovsky Lane, and this is our house. This is the gate and the courtyard. You go in and go upstairs…”

She told the story in such detail that Nina did not know what to think.

“You don’t believe me, don’t you?” Shilo asked. “I can prove it! I know where all our papers are. Father buried them in the yard after the revolution. There’s a whole treasure trove there. If you go and dig it up, you’ll see for yourself.”

Only the day before, Nina had read an article in a newspaper about treasure hidden away by the “bourgeoisie” for a rainy day. Workers who were repairing former townhouses belonging to the nobility would sometimes find collections of porcelain, old embroideries, gold coins, and family silver.

“Do you remember exactly what your father buried in the yard?” Nina asked cautiously.

Shilo shrugged. “There was definitely a photograph album. There’s a picture in it of me at seventeen.” Shilo laughed and hugged Nina. “When I saw you on the tram, I stared and stared, and I couldn’t believe my eyes; you were so like me on this picture!”

“Wait,” Nina slipped out of her embrace. “Do you know where the treasure is hidden?”

“You bet I do. You go in the yard and count out five bricks on the wall to the right. The fifth one has a chip in it where Mishka threw a horseshoe and knocked a bit off. You need to dig right under it—” Shilo cut herself short. “But I’m not going there. There are evil spirits there.”

Nina frowned. “Which evil spirits?”

“Those devils who threw me out of the window.”

“But that was ten years ago!”

“I’m not going, I tell you. Go yourself if you want. I can take you there.”

“But I don’t have a coat.”

“I’ll let you have your coat for a bit. Listen. If you get our photograph album back, I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life. I’ll do anything for you! I’d love to have another look at my family after all these years.”

That night, Nina could not get to sleep. Maybe this was her chance to escape? If the treasure really existed, it might contain something valuable. She could sell it to pay for her ticket back to Shanghai and return the money to Shilo later.

But who knew what was happening now in the Bremers’ former mansion? There might be a police station there or worse.

Shilo went to Petrovsky Lane to see how the land lay.

“They’ve moved some government office into our house,” she said to Nina. “They don’t have a sign, and there are no dogs or groundskeeper. But there’s a motor car parked in the coach house.”

In the evening, Shilo brought Nina her Chinese coat. She also produced a small shovel. “Look at what I got from our grave robbers! Their business is bad these days. They’re going around the city cemeteries, but there’s only poor folk buried there—they don’t even have gold teeth. Recently, they went to the funeral of a commissar specially, to have a look, and they saw him lying in his coffin with his boots on. But when they opened up his grave, the boots had gone. Someone had already taken them.”

Nina could not imagine climbing into somebody else’s yard—it was a sin after all. But then again, she had nothing to lose now, not after making church robes into dresses for prostitutes. She would never get into heaven with her record anyway.

“What if I’m caught?” Nina asked.

Shilo grinned. “The police will decide you’re a thief and put you back in here.”

Nina decided that if she was successful, she would not come back to Fyodor Stepanych. So, before she left, she changed into a dress she had made out of a gray priest’s robe, trimmed with dark red velvet panels. It was comical to set off on a treasure hunt dressed for a cocktail party, but it would be a shame to leave the dress for the prostitutes—it was the best piece Nina had made.

As it got dark, Nina and Shilo set off for Petrovsky Lane. Snow began to fall. There was nobody about and no light from the windows—luckily for the treasure hunters, all the electricity in the district had been turned off.

“There’s my house,” said Shilo, pointing to a recently refurbished house opposite the Korsh Theater. “Do you see the window on the second floor? That’s my window. I wonder who has that room now. It’s a good thing they’ve put an office in there. If they’d put in tenants, they’d have messed the place up already.”