“Did she do something to make Mom mad?”
“Don’t you have to get ready for Hebrew school?”
But he wouldn’t quit. “Did she steal something?”
“No, idiot! Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know. Why did Mom fire her?”
“Because we can’t afford house help right now, capisci? Or haven’t you noticed? Harry is unemployed, and we have to pay dues at the synagogue for the rest of the year so you can stand in front of everyone for ten minutes and stutter your way through three verses of Torah.”
The distress on his face was out of proportion to what she’d expected. The green-brown of his eyes seemed to shatter like the glass of a medicine bottle. “It’s not my f-f-fault! I don’t even want to d-do it!”
He was nearly shouting at her.
“Too late, lemming. You’ll be made a man whether you like it or not, even if we have to eat turnips all year round.”
Maybe it was rotten to break it to him like that, but he deserved the truth. “I’ve got to work today. I’ll be back by dinner,” she said, and placed her gloved fingers on his head in a way she hoped was affectionate. When he didn’t move, she had no choice but to leave him, like a collapsed puppet, and let herself out into the cold February morning.
—
SHE UNLOCKED HER BOSS’S office, expecting solitude, and instead found Scoop with his feet up on his desk, turning the fresh pages of a new Daily Worker.
“You’re back early!”
“It appears so.”
He had been gone all week, traveling through the Middle West by Pullman and brokering deals with steel manufacturers. Now he removed his buckskins from the corner of his desk and said, “You know what I love about America?” He smiled up at the ceiling fan and quoted Whitman: “ ‘I am large! I contain multitudes!’ ” Stopped at a station somewhere in Ohio, he told Florence, he’d watched as a woman and child emerged from a tent camp across the tracks. The woman led the boy carefully across the planks so the child could crouch and do his business. Then, with a glance at the train car, she lifted up her own dress and squatted nearby, offering the passengers a defiant view of her bony bottom. Florence could hear in Scoop’s retelling an exuberance for the bountiful contempt his beloved America had brought upon itself.
He tossed down the Daily Worker and steepled his fingers. “Florence, I have a proposition,” he said. A group of Soviet engineers were journeying to Cleveland for eight weeks, to receive training in the construction of steel plants by the engineering firm McKee and Co. The delegation was due to arrive in mid-June. The men were in need of a translator and intermediary. “We both know you’re tired of being just a secretary.”
“You’re asking me to go to Cleveland?”
“You’d have a new title, sweetheart.” He framed his fingers as if around a banner. “Commerce Liaison.”
“But, Scoop, I don’t know anything about steel mills. And my Russian is only so-so.”
“Some of the guys speak English. And they don’t need another engineer—just someone to assist them in the more practical aspects of American life, keep ’em out of trouble.”
She wondered how exactly she was meant to keep a group of grown Russian men out of trouble, but she didn’t want to disturb Scoop’s faith in her by asking. Instead, she said, “Where would I live?”
“We’ll set you up in a place of your own.”
“An apartment?”
“Sure, if that’s what you’d like.”
“I’m not sure my parents would approve. Living so far away and all.”
Scoop turned up his hands. “Florie, we both know this Trade Mission won’t have its doors open forever. It’s only a matter of time before they open up a real embassy in Washington. Roosevelt’s no Hoover. He knows the Bolsheviks aren’t going away. And a smart girl with field experience in diplomacy…” His eyebrows lifted suggestively. “She could be a useful asset. A real contender for an embassy job.”
—
THE IMMEDIATE DIFFICULTY, FLORENCE realized while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents. Even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl, even if she were to contrive some smooth elision denying the political nature of her work and claim she was merely a bookkeeper, even then Sol and Zelda would certainly take charge of her accommodations. They would call up the roster at Midwood Synagogue until they found a family with respectable relations in Cleveland who could install her in a spare room and chaperone her in loco parentis. But what choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence.
—
THE SKY ABOVE THE ELMS was turning violet by the time she got back to Flatbush. She let herself in through the kitchen door. Hearing her parents’ voices coming from the dining room, she braced herself to plead her case on the subject of Cleveland. But someone else was in there with them—a familiarly didactic voice declaiming loudly. “We understand that some of the boys this age might have certain injudicious reactions to the more sensitive materials in the Toy-rah—the laws dealing with bodily purity, discharges, and so on and so on….”
Florence pushed the door a crack and saw Rabbi Soffer sitting at the table, his huge palm squeezing Sidney’s bony shoulder. “Jokes have their place, but we also expect the boys to exercise certain mah-toority, especially given this important preparation for entry into Jewish adulthood.”
“What exactly did he say in class, Rabbi?” her father inquired cautiously. “Sidney?”
The accused was silent.
“Shmuel?” the rabbi asked, calling Sidney by his Hebrew name. Having brought the boy before justice, he now appeared to be acting in lieu of counsel, trying to persuade Sidney that if he only paraded his contrition everything would be righted. But Sidney was taking the Fifth.
“What he told the boys was that a ‘kosher’ woman was one who waited three hours after the butcher leaves before, er”—the rabbi cleared his throat—“engaging in relations with the milkman.”
A single snort of laughter escaped her father’s nose. “I don’t know where he heard that, Rabbi.”
“It does not matter if he heard it in the street, or at home….”
“Certainly not at home,” Zelda objected.
“Rabbi, he’s usually a good, respectful boy,” said Sol. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”
It pained Florence to see her brother on trial. She of all people knew what a mouth the kid had on him, yet she also knew that Sidney was usually wise enough to keep his jokes out of earshot of his teachers. She tiptoed unnoticed up the stairs to her room. Soon she could hear her parents, full of apologies, escorting the rabbi to the door. The minute the door was shut, the full force of their rage erupted on Sidney.
She went quietly to her bed, lay down, and squeezed her eyes closed, the better to shut out the sounds of the shouting downstairs. She awoke a half-hour later to find her mother standing over the bed. “Did you tell Sidney it was his fault we let Sissy go?”
Florence sat up.
“Did you tell your brother we were going to be eating turnips all year because of his Bar Mitzvah classes?”
With small blue eyes and thin lips, Zelda’s was a face made for disappointment.
“I meant we had to tighten our pockets. I heard Daddy say so himself.”
“What you meant, I don’t know. I know that child listens to everything you say. He does whatever you tell him, and now he’s trying to get himself kicked out of Hebrew school on your account.”
“I didn’t tell him to do that!” But there was no uncowardly way to defend herself. “Can I talk to him?”
“Don’t you dare! Do you know what that boy feels the absolute worst about?”
Florence said nothing.
“Telling on you.” Her mother’s face was heavy with disapproval as she left the room, as though to suggest that even her brother’s loyalty was eviden
ce of her selfishness.
And where, Florence wondered, was Sissy now—the woman who had practically raised her? Was it so selfish to care about others besides her family?
As she heard the resolute sound of a door closing in its jamb, Florence felt an equal resolve in her heart. She would not ask. She would not plead. She would not argue or supplicate. The next morning, she let Scoop buy her a ticket for Cleveland.
“Fueling the Future”—that’s our slogan, hanging right above the doors I walk through each morning into our lobby, an acre of black and white marble that runs past Reception and up to a back wall of blue and red pixels pulsing with the movements of Continental Oil’s three hundred–plus ships as they set sail from ports all over the globe. This breathtaking lobby is the first place I took my old friend Yasha Gendler when he paid me a visit in D.C. In hindsight, this was an error.
Half a decade had passed since Yasha and I had seen each other. He had flown in from Haifa, a trip he undertook every few years to visit his adult son in Bethesda. “Come downtown, I’ll show you where I work,” I offered when he called. If anyone could appreciate the wild course my life had taken, it was Yasha, the one person alive who not only knows my childhood nickname—Yul’ka—but feels it necessary to repeat it at every opportunity. As boys of six and seven, we’d played jacks and nozhiki on the same common hallway, over oak floorboards ruined with lye soap. By 1945, when my parents brought me from Kuibyshev to Moscow as a teething toddler, the apartment (whose original owners had escaped the Bolsheviks in 1922) had been partitioned and subdivided so many times that there were seven families sharing it in schismatic harmony. My mother had been in the Soviet whirlpool for eleven years by this point. Enough time, I imagine, to unlearn the bourgeois habits of her native Brooklyn, to accustom herself to the farting and shouting of her neighbors, to doing her wash by hand in the collective tub, to keeping her dry food locked up in her wardrobe. But where Florence was alien, I was native—Yasha and I both products of that pinnacle of evolution known as the Communal Apartment. Western scholars like to say our Soviet kommunalki were places devoid of personal space. This is not true. What better testament to private dominion could there be than the dense tangle of seven separate buzzers on the front door? The seven separate kerosene burners in the kitchen? The seven separate wooden toilet seats, which each tenant scrupulously tucked under his arm as he marched to the single communal toilet?
Those were the good days, before our real troubles began. Before the disappearances.
The next time I saw Yasha was in 1962, when we were reunited as students at the university. We both sat in a course called Fundamentals of Cybernetics, taught by an aging redheaded asthmatic who’d been tossed out in the early fifties for pursuing research in computer science, a field banned by Stalin for being one of the mercantile whores of imperialism. A decade later, it occurred to someone up top that the country was too far behind in its race with the Americans, and the disgraced professor was tracked down (he was mixing resins in an industrial-paint plant) and reinstated to teach the very subject he’d been fired for pursuing. The little man’s impiety revealed itself on the first day of class, when he wrote his full name on the blackboard: Arnold Peysakhovich Lubarsky. “Most people call me Arnold Petrovich,” he said, turning to face us. “You can call me whatever you prefer.” But that enormous “Peysakhovich” stayed on the board for the rest of the lecture, a patronym not merely Jewish, but so boldly and undauntedly Yid that I couldn’t keep myself from twisting my neck to glance at the faces behind me. Lubarsky might as well have announced he was Ben-Gurion himself come to read us a lecture on Zionism. Thus glancing backward, I locked eyes with the stunned face of Yasha Gendler, possibly the only other Jew in the room who’d also managed to pole-vault the university’s invisible quotas.
Lubarsky was the only professor at the university who dared mock that to which the state had given its approving stamp. One afternoon, he interrupted his own lecture to interrogate the lyric of a popular song. “ ‘I love you, Life, and I hope that the feeling is mutual’…Can anyone tell me what in the world this means?” He removed his spectacles to scan our timid faces. Each time Yasha and I walked into his lecture, we were entering a universe whose plane geometry held nothing in common with the contorted realities of our daily lives. With each theorem and arched brow, Lubarsky seemed to be saying to us, “Young people, what sense is there in these ‘laws’ that are violated by the very officials who issue them? How can they compare to the eternal, immutable laws of Newton, Pascal, Bernoulli, Einstein?”
Neither Yasha nor I ever forgot our little redheaded professor. Lubarsky immigrated to Israel and died a few years thereafter. This was the sort of news that Yasha stayed abreast of and reported to me faithfully in our annual New Year’s Eve phone call. In this way, he was more like a relative than a friend, our relationship cemented by mutual history. Years could pass without our seeing each other, but then we’d meet and Yasha might say, “Remember that New Year’s party when your father made costumes for the kids? We were both crows—he made us caps with cardboard beaks. It was the Year of the Ox, and everyone hung a picture of a bull on their door?” And just like that, I would remember.
The technological revolution arrived at the perfect time for brainy kids like Yasha and me. Strategically indifferent to politics, but not as yet perceiving ourselves as anything other than loyal Soviet citizens, we chose technical fields that seemed relatively immune to propaganda yet unimpeachably useful to society. Though we smirked at slogans, we were no less idealistic or enamored of ourselves than that first generation of revolutionaries. Instead of barricades, we believed in satellite launchers. Instead of marches, we had particle accelerators.
But, as I was reminded upon our reunion in D.C., I had long shed my idealistic notions, whereas Yasha’s had multiplied, like barnacles on a stranded vessel.
“Well, it’s what you always wanted, isn’t it?” He yawned, affecting a grand lack of interest in the pulsing spectacle of Continental’s lobby, and the view of the National Mall from my office window. “A big-time career. That’s why you left, after all.”
The boy who’d once been as lanky as a telephone pole was now a telephone pole with a gut. He’d let his stringy gray hair get too long, and now raked it back like a pompadour across his high forehead.
“Why I left?” I tried to clarify.
“Sure. They denied you your Ph.D., so you said, ‘Nothing more to do here, time to pack up and go to Ah-merica.’ ”
“I would have left sooner or later. We all did.”
“Ah, but if they’d given you your fancy doctorate, you’re telling me you wouldn’t have happily stayed and built ships for them? Hell, who do you think you’re building your ships for now? Who are you making rich? The same bastards who had red telephones on their desks.”
“I see,” I said. “So you left for the right reasons, and I left for the wrong ones.”
“Hey, I applied to leave before the word ‘refusenik’ was invented. I’m not boasting. I’m just talking about principles. When they finally let me leave I’d been working six years as a janitor, not a physicist. A little bird whispers and suddenly you’re tossed out of your department and the only work you can find is cleaning elevators. But I’ll say this: in all those years I never compromised my convictions. I never gave up my activity like they wanted me to.”
Yasha loved alluding to his dissident “activity,” which as far as I knew was limited to attending a few underground Hebrew lessons to meet girls. He hadn’t gotten much past the Aleph-Bet, either with the Hebrew or with the girls. “Yasha, is it my fault,” I said, “that ‘out of principle’ you elected to immigrate to a country that enjoys a Euro-socialist lifestyle of monthlong vacations and forced unemployment? If you wanted a career in research, you could have had one. Picked up where you left off.”
“Oh sure, with all the kids graduating every year from the Technion.”
But Yasha became more animated at the Air and Space
Museum. Forced early retirement had given him abundant time to obsess over Israel’s parliamentary politics while attacking various theorems whose proofs he had abandoned as a young physicist. He was also, he informed me, writing a “popular book” on the lives of the great mathematicians. At present he was working on a chapter about Niels Henrik Abel, a Norwegian who had invented group theory by age nineteen, yet died, penniless and rejected by the Academy, of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six.
Yasha was still talking about this unheralded genius when we arrived at the upscale restaurant that I’d carefully selected for our lunch. But then he abruptly switched topics, from the underappreciated dead to the overrated living.
“A few weeks ago, I open Vesti, our Russian paper,” he said, “and there’s a review of some book. Some samizdat press, but the author’s name I recognize. You remember our apartment neighbors, the Vainers? Their two girls, Dita and Marina…”
I conjured up a vague memory of blue hair-bows and white pinafores. “The family that had the Ukrainian relatives staying for three weeks at a time?”
“The same one. The father with the drooping mustache. Dita immigrated to Israel, and a couple of years ago, she writes the father’s ‘memoirs.’ Full of inaccuracies. Forget the small ones. She writes that, because my mother was never arrested, she must have been the informer in our kommunalka. Can you imagine drawing that conclusion? Very scientific. I wanted to pick up the phone and call the publisher.”
“What’s the point?”
“The point? To ask what this Dita’s process of deduction was! And mezhdu prochim, by the way, if there was an informer, it was probably Vainer himself. Or Flora Solomonovna.”
This was the point where I stopped hearing. The sounds of the restaurant rushed into my ears like an ocean roar. Flora Solomonovna. Florence. My mother. Yasha was still talking ecstatically, gesticulating with his French fry. He must have forgotten for a moment who his audience was. “What are you talking about?” I interrupted. “You’re saying my mother was the apartment informer?”
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