There was no point in cursing his fate. Some people have a talent for dancing, and some don’t. Some lucky souls are easygoing while others are born pedantic and boring. Sablin accepted his shortcomings in the same way that he had accepted his limp.
He spent evenings playing against Klim and staking his amber cigarette case as a bet. If they played cards, Klim usually won, but if they played chess, Sablin would beat him every time.
“What a stupid game this is!” Klim said angrily after Sablin had beaten him yet again. “In my opinion, there should be a special chess piece that both players are fighting over—a dragon, for instance. What’s the point in just knocking out all your opponents’ pieces? I need something to fight for.”
That was Sablin’s problem in real life: he had nothing to fight for.
Klim and Nina’s room was next to Sablin’s, and hearing the muffled sounds of their passion at night, he would feel sickened and angered. He wanted to bang on the thin wall with his fist and yell, “You’re not alone here, damn you!”
In the morning, Nina came out of her room still sleepy with a blissful, distracted expression, and Sablin could barely restrain himself from asking, “So, what do you plan to do if you get pregnant?”
Then Lubochka appeared in the corridor as solicitous as a gardener tending her plants. “Sablin, have you taken your medicine? Don’t forget, please. And put your gloves on when you go outside, or your hands will get cold.”
Imagine that we did manage to escape, thought Sablin. After traveling for weeks on a lice-ridden train in constant danger of being robbed or killed, imagine that they got as far as the frontline and survived the shelling and the raids. When everything was over, would he regret his decision? Would he go out of his mind with longing for Lubochka, for Nizhny Novgorod, for his job? There, on the other side of the frontline, Sablin couldn’t just walk into a hospital and say, “Take me on as a surgeon.”
What would happen to him there? How could he find a place for himself? And what use would he be to anyone there anyway as lame, shy, and unsociable as he was?
23. THE OLD COUNTESS’S DIAMONDS
There was no point getting up before nine o’clock. It was still dark, and there was no electricity in the mornings.
With his hard-earned pay from his work on the Nizhny Novgorod Commune, Klim could afford half his breakfast: carrot tea and a piece of bread cut from a frozen loaf he had bought two weeks earlier for a hundred rubles. The other half—a slice of lemon, butter, and cheese—came courtesy of his generous cousin.
Lubochka smiled at his hesitation. “Are you ashamed to be taking gifts from me? Look at it this way—perhaps God is fond of you and using an intermediary to make sure you have lemon for your tea.”
“God must have a dubious sense of humor,” Klim said. “If He really wanted to send me provisions, He should have sent Admiral Kolchak with his White Army. After all, to judge by the Red propaganda posters, the admiral has seized all the food in Russia, including champagne and sausages.”
“At the moment, your Admiral Kolchak is stuck somewhere near the Ural Mountains,” Lubochka said as she poured herself a cup of tea. “He wouldn’t be able to get to Nizhny Novgorod in time for dinner, let alone breakfast.”
Klim left the house at eleven.
Perhaps it was true that everyone else in the world was descended from monkeys, he thought, or from Adam and Eve, but the Soviets must have had hamsters for ancestors. They were all constantly on the lookout for food and squirreling it away—if not into cheek pouches, then into bags and knapsacks.
Klim himself was no exception. There was a very good vegetarian canteen on the way to his newspaper office, and he usually dropped in when he could. The prices there might have been outrageous, but it was the only establishment in Nizhny Novgorod where you could eat without a union card or a special pass.
Unfortunately, the canteen was closed because it had been burglarized the previous night.
Klim decided to go to the Journalists’ House.
But he was out of luck. When he got there, he found an enormous queue of desperately hungry people, most of whom looked as though they could never have even read a newspaper article, let alone written one.
“Our oven isn’t working,” announced the cook, appearing on the porch. “It’ll be at least an hour before it’s fixed.”
There was nothing for it but to go into work.
It was awfully cold in the editorial office. Klim’s colleagues were already busy warming up homemade ink with their breath.
“Klim, you’re late,” said Zotov, a young man with a somewhat vague job description who always kept a watchful eye on his coworkers and informed his superiors about everything that went on. Anton Emilievich—who had a good nose for useful people—held him in high regard.
Zotov pulled a red pencil from his pocket and walked over to a large cardboard sign on the wall. On one side of the sign was the slogan, “Praise to honest workers.” Below was a list of all those who came into work before Zotov and left after he did. The other side proclaimed, “Shame on idlers and loafers.” Naturally, Klim Rogov’s was the first name on this list.
Zotov put yet another big black cross next to Klim’s name and announced that all of the editorial staff had to sign up for a volunteer workday.
“Where are you sending us this time?” Klim asked. “To a sweets factory?”
The office girls laughed. “You wish! We’re being sent to unload freight cars.”
“Then I’m afraid I’m busy.”
Zotov wasn’t sure he could force Comrade Rogov to sign up to compulsory “voluntary” work because not only was Klim technically a foreigner but also apparently personally acquainted with Trotsky.
With a determined look, Zotov set off to see Anton Emilievich’s office. He spent some time inside airing his grievances. As a result, Anton Emilievich gave his nephew a very public reprimand so that nobody should accuse him of nepotism.
“Klim, we have a team here. You behave as though you’re not part of that team.”
To hell with them, Klim thought and went off to the accounts department. He was more interested in when they would get the promised delivery of cabbage from the Journalists’ Union.
The woman in the accounts department told him that the cabbage would be coming in tomorrow. However, it wouldn’t be given to the journalists but to the guards outside the newspaper office. A machine gun detachment had been assigned to protect the Nizhny Novgorod Commune in case the Whites should take it into their heads to seize the newspaper.
Klim wasn’t at all in the mood for work. All he wanted was to go home and sit by the warm stove. Nevertheless, he went over to his place by the windowsill next to a frozen rubber plant, sat down on his broken-backed chair, and unfastened the top button of his overcoat. Today, he had to write a letter from a worker in a steel factory wishing Comrade Lenin a speedy recovery.
The resulting letter was as full of emotion as a passionate love poem. If Lenin had only known how many fervent lines Klim had dedicated to him, he might have shown his gratitude by issuing Comrade Rogov the pair of shoes he needed so badly. But how would the great and glorious Soviet leader ever find out about the heroic labors of a humble journalist?
There was a flutter among the female members of staff as the military instructor, a handsome man in a fur hat, came into the office. The newspaper workers sat themselves down in a circle to listen to him. Klim noticed that the proofreaders were wearing lipstick. Where do you even get ahold of lipstick these days? he wondered.