Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

“And what will happen to me in that Buenos Aires of yours? You yourself said how terrible it is to be a stranger in a strange land.”

“I’ll take care of everything. I have money and proper connections—”

“And what if we have a fight? What would I do then? Walk the streets?”

Nina left the room, brushing against one of the newspapers as she went out. It slipped from the table to the floor with a quiet rustle. Its headline read, “Offensive becomes bogged down, resulting in heavy losses.”

“Zhora, did you take the butter?” Klim heard Nina’s voice in the hall. “I left it on the kitchen windowsill.”

She spoke in a perfectly even and ordinary voice as if nothing had happened at all.

Lubochka was wracked with unrequited love. Klim had passed her over for a shameless imposter, a woman Lubochka had foolishly believed to be her friend.

Sablin could sense that something was wrong and had come to the conclusion that his wife was having a bout of “nerves.” In an attempt to help her, he brought Lubochka a thick medical book describing the symptoms of and remedies for melancholia. She threw it across the drawing room in a fit of temper.

“You should never have married a real live woman with feelings and warm blood in her veins!” Lubochka cried. “The best match for you would have been a skeleton from a dissection room. Then you could have counted her ribs whenever you liked and stood her in the corner if you felt she was getting in your way.”

“Darling, do be reasonable—” Sablin began, but Lubochka didn’t care about being reasonable anymore. Her heart was broken, and nobody could care less.

When Klim came back from the country, Lubochka could tell immediately that something was wrong. Pale and tight-lipped, he entered the house, and without stopping to greet her, he headed straight to his room.

Within an hour, Marisha rushed in to see Lubochka, looking bewildered.

“He’s ordered me to sell all the possessions his father left him to the neighbors,” Marisha said. “He told me not to worry about getting a good price and to get rid of it all as soon as possible. He said he’d had enough and was leaving at the earliest opportunity.”

Lubochka gasped. It was obvious that Nina had rejected her Argentinean admirer. What a fool! What a complete and utter fool!

The whole day Lubochka wandered around the house, trying to come up with a way to stop Klim from leaving. But what could she do? She had no power over him.

At dinner, he offered Lubochka’s husband a choice: a long-term lease of the house or redemption.

“He doesn’t want me to pay interest,” Sablin marveled when he and Lubochka were about to go to sleep. “Can you believe we’ll finally have a house of our own? But I hate to profit off your cousin in this way.”

He glanced at Lubochka lying beside him.

“I think Klim isn’t looking too healthy,” Sablin said. “I hinted that I’d be happy to refer him to an expert, but he’s scared of doctors just like you.”

Lubochka could only feel astonishment at her husband’s ability to misjudge and misinterpret the whole situation so spectacularly.

Lubochka’s father, Anton Emilievich Schuster, was the executive editor of the local paper, the Nizhny Novgorod Bulletin . Slim with a solemn narrow face and a gray beard, he was a man of culture and huge erudition who lived in a 17th-century stone tower surrounded by his large and motley collection of antiques, books, and rare objects.

Lubochka liked to visit her father. It was a tradition of theirs to have dinner together once a week. But this Saturday, the dinner table was set for three.

“Are you expecting someone?” Lubochka asked her father, unfolding the napkin on her lap.

Anton Emilievich glanced at his watch with a meaningful look. “Just wait a little, and you’ll see!”

She noticed that many of the Rogovs’ possessions—including the iron safe—had made their way into her father’s collection. Anton Emilievich had taken everything that Klim’s dubious neighbors hadn’t had time to get their hands on.

Klim had bought a ticket to Moscow, and Lubochka tried to prepare herself for what was to come. What was she going to do when he left? Her life would be changed irrevocably.

The brass doorbell jingled in the hall.

“That’s him!” Anton Emilievich exclaimed, jumping to his feet. A minute later, he ushered the newly arrived guest into the dining room. He was a common soldier—not an officer but one of the ordinary rank and file.

“Here he is, my one of a kind,” Anton Emilievich exclaimed. “Osip Drugov. What’s your patronymic?”

“Petrovich,” boomed the soldier in a bass voice.

Lubochka cautiously offered him her hand, and he clasped it firmly in his great rough paw. “Pleased to meet you.”

Osip was tall and broad-shouldered. His face was ruddy, and the whites of his blue eyes were yellowish and threaded with tiny red veins. When he reached for a piece of bread, the folds on the back of his neck—brown from the sun—stretched out to reveal the pale skin beneath.

“Comrade Drugov is something of a hero,” Anton Emilievich said to Lubochka. “He was one of the leaders of the 62nd Regiment rebellion. Soldiers who had recovered from their injuries were being forced to board trains heading back to the front, and Osip Petrovich and his colleagues managed to get them away from their escorts.”

Anton Emilievich was trying to sound ironic, but Lubochka detected an unfamiliar, ingratiating note in his voice. He fawned on Osip. “Do please help yourself. This trout is excellent—it just came today from the farm.”

But Osip paid no attention to his host’s efforts to impress him. “It’s unfair to send men back to be slaughtered while any man whose mother or father can afford to pay sits in safety away from the front,” he said, fixing Lubochka with a stare. “I went straight to the newspaper office, and I met your father there.”

Lubochka huddled back in her chair, her whole body sensing the contrast between the nervous agitation of her father and the confident power exuded by his guest, who was neither offhand nor insolent but felt at liberty to do and say whatever he pleased.

“Did Father interview you?” she asked with a forced smile.

“We talked about things,” Osip said. “I told him, ‘I’ve shed blood for you,’ and all that. ‘I’ve been wounded twice and suffered from shellshock, so you have to help us. And if you won’t write about the demands of the people, we’ll confiscate your newspaper.’”

Anton Emilievich roared with laughter. “I was flabbergasted! So I said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ And he said, ‘I’m a Russian Bolshevik.’”

Now, Lubochka understood. The Bolsheviks were a small left-wing political party gathering momentum with young radicals and deserters from the front joining them, and now, they were calling openly for a coup d’état.

Lubochka’s father in his wisdom could tell that important events were afoot. Recently, he had taken to saying that they were living like goldfish in a glass bowl. They saw everything in a distorted light without actually caring about what was going on in the world outside. Meanwhile, however, the glass in the bowl had cracked.

Anton Emilievich wanted to find out what was going on in the barracks and factories—that was why he had invited a Bolshevik to dinner.

Osip Drugov said things that made Lubochka’s hair stand on end.

“We don’t want Russia to win this war—this is the kind of war that should be lost. It wouldn’t be a defeat for us. It would be a defeat for the Provisional Government. The bourgeoisie has forced us to kill our own brothers, workers from Germany and Austria-Hungary. Just think of it—how many people have died! And for what? Now that we have weapons in our hands, we’ll put them to use against our real enemies—the landlords, the factory owners, and the other oppressors of the working people.”