“I have something to say to you too,” she said quickly.
For some time, Nina had been aware that there was only one way to save Elkin from a humiliating refusaclass="underline" to tell him beforehand all about her relations with Klim.
She told him everything: how she had met her ex-husband, how they had traveled about Russia during the civil war, and how they had emigrated to China.
Elkin listened for a long time, his face frozen into an expressionless smile. Clearly, he understood that Nina was trying to save his dignity, and he was grateful to her for it.
They sat on the edge of the cliff, watching the clouds over the bay turning pink in the sunset.
“I think both of us appeared on this earth at the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Elkin in a thick voice. “I should have been born a hundred years later, and you would have done well in the late eighteenth century. You could have been the ruler of some small, enlightened duchy.”
“What would I have done there?” Nina asked him.
“Well, you would have had secret lovers, a beautiful, well-kept capital city, and loyal subjects. Artists would have painted you as a bright angel surrounded by cupids, and poets would have written ingenious madrigals about you. What else could you wish for?”
“And the story would have ended either with a foreign invasion or a palace coup,” said Nina, getting to her feet. “It’s the same thing in the twentieth century—I was faced with the choice of being sent into exile or put in jail. And there was nothing the greatest intellects could do to help me. It’s just my fate, I suppose.”
They came home after dark. Gloria came out to meet them with the kerosene lamp, her face like thunder.
“Where have you been all this time?” she shouted, taking Nina by the arm and dragging her into the house.
“What happened?” Nina asked in alarm.
Gloria opened the door to Nina’s room and showed her Kitty, lying doubled up on the bed in agony. “See for yourself!”
Nina rushed to her daughter. “What’s the matter with you?”
Kitty’s face had swollen up until her eyes were no more than tiny slits, and a painful rash had broken out all over her cheeks.
“It hurts all over again,” she sobbed, flinging her head back.
Nina looked at the child in bewilderment. She had been sure that when Kitty was with her, her daughter would not be taken sick.
“Mommy’s here…. Mommy will make it better,” Nina said, holding Kitty close to her chest. “We’ll go to Feodosia and find you a doctor.”
“What’s the good of getting the girl to a doctor when her fool of a mother feeds her the devil only knows what?” retorted Gloria, pointing to an empty chocolate wrapper on the floor.
“Her father sent it,” Nina said. “Kitty loves sweet things…”
Gloria stamped her foot angrily. “If you had any sense, you’d have realized what the problem was long ago!”
Then she swept out, leaving the paraffin lamp on the chest.
Nina sat for a long time on Kitty’s bed, shaken to the core. So, this was the cause of Kitty’s illness: Klim had been giving her chocolate. Nina had heard that some people had a serious reaction to it.
Soon, however, Nina’s train of thought went off on a different tack. Now that she knew the secret of Kitty’s illness, she could use it to get Klim away from Galina. Nina could tell him that the child became ill when she was with his new lover, and he would believe it.
Nina heard the door creak and saw Gloria standing on the threshold.
“Here, take this,” the old woman said. “I’ve made a likeness of you.” She held out a pot decorated with eyes with handles for ears and curls around the top.
Nina looked inside the pot. There was a tiny mousetrap with a piece of sheep’s cheese.
“That’s what’s in your head at the moment,” said Gloria. “If you don’t like it, you can put something else inside.”
It is true, Nina realized, horrified. All she thought about, regarding Klim, were lures and traps. I wanted to deceive Klim and at Kitty’s expense. What kind of prize I am being a schemer like that?
Gloria was watching Nina’s face with amusement. “Have fun tonight,” she said, closing the door behind her.
Nina could not get to sleep. She was itching to do something, to make some momentous decision, and to act completely differently from now on.
She pondered for a long time what she might put into the pot as a symbol of her new life but had still not thought of anything when she began to doze off.
In the morning, she saw that Kitty had filled the pot with her spillikins.
23. THE SOVIET CASINO
Ever since Klim had left, Galina had felt weak and listless as if all the life had drained out of her. Something very wrong was going on: Klim had sent Kitty off God knows where with God knows who, and Galina had only received a single telegram from Arkhangelsk: “Away on leave. Will call on return.”
She could forget her ideas of a dacha outside Moscow or a trip to the South. And it seemed she had sent her daughter to Leningrad for nothing. Still, Tata was not complaining: she had joined the Young Pioneers and was in seventh heaven.
While “Mr. Prince” was away on his work assignment, Kapitolina had started up an illegal trade in dairy produce, smuggling in butter, cream, and milk from the countryside. Her customers were all close to hand on the ground floor of the building. The League of Time had been evicted, and now, instead of penniless students, respectable members of the organization Proletkult had taken up residence there. Their job was to destroy the old aristocratic and bourgeois culture and create a new, proletarian one. This meant attending art exhibitions and theater performances to ensure that the work on offer reflected the class struggle, collectivism, and solidarity among the laboring masses. The Proletkult employees had plenty of money as the government regarded their work as highly important and funded it lavishly.
Kapitolina was weighing out bags of curd cheese on a spring scale.
“Galina, you’ll never guess what!” she said. “I put a love charm on this man I know, a machine operator. I said a special prayer I learned from a wise woman—it’s called a ‘sticking charm.’”
It turned out that the machine operator had already taken Kapitolina to the cinema twice and once even treated her to sunflower seeds.
“You have to look at a photograph when you say the prayer,” Kapitolina instructed Galina. “My Terentiy is on the Wall of Honor right next to the factory entrance, so I went up to it, waited till I heard the church bell chime, and said,
“And you think it worked?” asked Galina doubtfully.
“I’m certain of it. There was another photograph on the Wall of Honor, an old fellow called Arkadiy Ivanovich, a foreman. And now he’s started giving me the eye. So, it worked on him too.”
When Kapitolina went out, Galina stood for a while in the corridor in a state of indecision. To practice witchcraft was a desperate step, she told herself. But the temptation was too great, and in the end, she went to look for a photograph of Klim.
Kitty had an album in which she kept postcards and photographs. Galina remembered that among them were one or two snapshots of Klim taken for official documents. On opening the album, however, she was thrown into confusion when she discovered a picture of a woman she recognized—the woman who had come to visit Klim and who had gotten a job at Elkin’s store afterward.