Florence’s wish to merge fully with that titanic abstraction known as the People finally came true on November 7, 1934. She’d woken that morning to the distant sounds of parade music coming from the street’s loudspeakers. Below her window an army of women had been deployed with twig brooms.
Florence was meeting Essie on a prearranged corner of Maroseyka Street, where Essie was marching with a column of American workers from the AMO Factory. Florence, as an employee of Gosbank, was not required to march. Nonetheless, she wanted to catch a glimpse of Stalin and other Heroes of the Revolution. The procession was making its creeping progress to the center of the city before it passed through Red Square. Florence elbowed her way alongside the crowd until she caught sight of Essie’s red-mittened hand waving at her. “You’re late,” she said, pulling Florence in.
“I’m sorry.”
“We were about to start running again.”
Above Florence’s head, figures of the great leaders were mounted like giant paper dolls along the sides of surrounding buildings. Everywhere, red pennants flapped in the wind.
“This is Joe and Leon,” said Essie, introducing Florence to the two men beside her. One, a middle-aged mechanic in a padded jacket, wore the thin red armband of a parade marshal. Next to him stood an unshaven younger man wearing a gangster’s tweed cap and a coat with a raised collar. A cigarette dangled from his fleshy, too-pink lips. The horn blew, indicating that everyone needed to get back in formation. “Get in line! Get in line!” the organizers were shouting. “No stops from here on!” The young gangster spat out his cigarette and got into lockstep with Florence. His cheeks glowed in the winter cold. He looked her over twice before addressing her in English. “Your first time. I can tell.”
The confidence of this assessment made her disinclined to answer. Undiscouraged, he studied her with a pair of sardonic black eyes. “You don’t work at the AMO, either.”
“Lucky guess,” she said.
“I won’t tell, don’t worry. Neither do I. I did, but not anymore.” He took a step toward her and flashed open his coat. “Kept my old pass, though. Any piece of paper you get in this city, better hold on to it.”
“How about we don’t speak English so loud,” Florence suggested.
The gangster shrugged and turned to Essie. “Where you from?”
“Park East, Bronx.”
“No kiddin’. And her?”
“Florence is a Brooklyn girl,” Essie answered.
Florence wished she hadn’t, because the next thing the boy said to her was “Oh yeah. Which corner?”
“Beverly,” she said, not looking at him.
“Beverly and what?”
She was getting irritated by this summary exam. “What do you care, you planning to go there?” she heard herself say.
“Touchy.”
“Florie is from Flatbush,” volunteered Essie.
“Florie from Flatbush,” the young man repeated with insinuating satisfaction, as if he’d wheedled some dirty secret out of her. “Where is that, Prospect Park? Millionaire Park?”
“South of that. Flatbush is all sorts of people.”
“Yeah, all sorts of doctors and all sorts of lawyers. Don’t be so sensitive,” he said, and gave her a familiar pat on the back. He was looking ahead into the crowd, but the triumph of this discovery brought a smile to his face, and the pleasure of the smile seemed to spread outward, past the corners of his mouth to where the unkempt black hairs of his temple cropped down into a curling sideburn.
There was no response Florence could think of that didn’t involve smacking him. A protest tried to take shape in her mouth, but at that moment a wave of music and cheering from the loudspeakers drowned out all talk on the street. The brick pavement was engulfed by workers from other factories around the city. “It means he’s there if they’re cheering,” shouted Essie. Their column began to move forward at a jogging pace to catch up with those ahead. Florence felt her shoes touching cobblestones as the colossal expanse of Red Square opened up before them. Columns of people in front of them were spreading outward, swallowing the Kremlin like sea foam around a sand castle. She had been to demonstrations, but nothing like this, and her powers of observation fell short of its immensity. She was just one of thousands now, one of tens of thousands. It was a carnival of conformity. Above the singing and shouting crowds, transmissions of the official announcer boomed like thunder, saluting the marchers, extolling the selfless effort of the Great Soviet People, the potency of their constructive labor, the leaders of their Party—vanguard of the proletariat. With every step closer to the Mausoleum, the atmosphere in the crowd became more theatrical. They were conscious of Stalin in their midst, and held themselves as though he were conscious of them. Young women suffered spasms of ecstasy, their eyes watering. Men overcome by fits of poise held their shoulders as if at any moment Stalin himself might single out any one of them. “There he is, with his arm in the air!” someone behind Florence shouted.
“That’s Voroshilov, you idiot!”
“No, over there, standing by Budyonny!”
The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognize the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked down at her each workday from the oil painting above Timofeyev’s desk. She slowed her pace to catch a better view, but the Red Army soldiers were prodding rubberneckers with the butts of their gleaming rifles, and the marching crowd pressed her forward.
“Get a good look, Flatbush?” the young man said once they’d crossed to the other side of the Mausoleum.
“You gonna call me that from now on?”
“What would you like me to call you?”
Even this seemingly innocent question made her feel like she was about to have her pockets picked. “Florence,” she said, as a long cheer rose up behind them. Stalin had saluted the workers. Florence tried to involve herself in the “Hurrah!”, but her voice suddenly lacked conviction. The self-forgetfulness she’d experienced only a moment earlier was gone. The music from the loudspeakers no longer carried her ahead toward some glorious future, but backward into a memory: sneaking off with one of her girlfriends from school to Midnight Mass at St. Francis. She was fifteen. She went out of curiosity, hid the expedition from her parents, and felt like an impostor the whole time. The Catholics had smiled kindly at her and her friend, thinking them pious girls worshipping Christ. Now, as then, some dark, subversive corner of her heart was threatening to overturn her awe and deem the whole scene a farce. It was the “Flatbush” remark, she was sure, that had broken the spell: his sly suggestion that she was an interloper among the true proletariat inheritors of the Revolution. She turned to find his pretty mouth still curled in its infuriating shape of wit. Another loud cheer rose from the crowds, and this time he joined it loudly, whistling and whooping like a wino at Mardi Gras.
—
The Foreign Workers’ Club on Hertzen Street was crammed with expatriates of every kind that evening. Austrian Schutzbunders and stiff-necked German socialists danced the foxtrot. Hungarian and Czech polit-emigrants swung each other out in big rumba turns. American Cominternists rushed the floor whenever the band began to play a Lindy Hop. Even the thin, bearded Italian anarchists were having a go on the footworn parquet. The political frenzy of the afternoon had been all but drowned in a flood of cheap champagne. Out in the cold, those who’d started celebrating early now staggered through the icy streets or lay in gutters. From half-frozen mouths could be heard the discordant slur of patriotic hymns.
Because Florence knew few other foreigners, she found it necessary to attach herself to Essie. She had yet to dance, and now it seemed too late: all the amateur dancers were vacating the floor to make room for a professional performance. A few feet away from them Florence recognized loudmouthed Leon from the parade. Before she could turn, Essie shouted at him over the music, “We lost you at the bridge!”
“Sorry about that,” h
e said, approaching, though he didn’t sound very sorry.
“We looked, but there were too many people on the embankment!”
“My friend had to go load the trucks and return all the props to the plant. I got pulled in. I had a hunch you’d end up here.” His eyes flashed back and forth between Florence and Essie.
Florence, having resolved never to speak a word to this person again, kept her eyes on the dance floor. A duo—a young black man and a petite Russian girl—was warming up its act to the whistles and encouragements of the crowd. It struck Florence that in most parts of America this pairing would likely be objected to, if not on legal then certainly on moral grounds. The black man sported a thin Frenchman’s mustache, and his blond partner, a plain-featured girl with a perfect figure, wore a polka-dot dress that fanned to show her underwear as he rotated her in a few fast, sleek turns.
“That’s Jumpin’ Jim Cosgrove and his girl, Polly,” Leon informed her, though Florence hadn’t asked.
“You know him?” Essie said with naked eagerness.
“Everyone knows Jimmy. He’s been tearing up the floors of all the hotels—the National, the Metropol. Dancing for all the big wheels.”
“Jeez—he’s terrific! Is he a professional?”
Florence watched silently while Jumpin’ Jimmy beat out an elaborate tattoo on the floor with his clicking heels. The top half of his body remained perfectly, effortlessly erect.
“Actually, he’s a student,” said Leon. “At the KUNMZ—the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West. But I don’t think he ever goes to class. The hotel restaurants pay him a pretty sum to do the Lindochka every night for their guests. And that doesn’t include the free drinks. He can drink it faster than they can pour it. These Russians can’t get enough of him. Especially the communist wives. Most of ’em never seen a black man before in their lives. One time, a couple of ’em came up to him after a number and tried to touch his hair, then asked if he could speak a few words in ‘Negro.’ ”
“I hope he told them to keep their hands to themselves,” Florence said, breaking her vow of silence.
“It don’t bother him,” Leon replied. “Jimmy makes more dough here in a week than in a month in Chicago. Guys like him are ten a nickel over there, and here he’s a true original.”
She turned to him with a cold look. “You mean a novelty act? Maybe we should ask him how he feels playing Sambo for the Russians like some dancing bear….” Her tone startled her.
“Take it easy. The man has a gift. Why shouldn’t he make a little something from it?” He turned to Essie. “Your cousin always such a stick?”
Florence had no chance to correct him, on factual or philosophical grounds, because Leon’s next question was to ask Essie if she wanted to dance.
Clusters of piano chords throbbed through the ether of body heat while Florence stood alone, watching Leon and Essie move around in a box step on the dance floor. Essie was half his height, but Leon was managing to swing her elegantly in a glissade and pull her back into the crook of his arm. Florence had no idea why she’d felt like being so mean. Everything around her seemed strange, including the music. Spotting her alone, one of the Austrian Schutzbunders approached and asked if she cared to dance. She didn’t, but accepted. She permitted the Austrian to hold her tightly while they moved around in wide, graceless circles, but managed to keep her head turned slightly away to elude the sour waft from the Schutzbunder’s mouth. As soon as the music ended, she extricated herself and found Essie, who was still catching her breath while her fingers lingered on Leon’s elbow. “Where’d you learn to dance like that?”
Leon wiped his forehead. The top buttons of his shirt were unfastened to reveal a prolifically sprouting tuft around a bony sternum. “Where I come from, if you got hungry on a Saturday night, you’d go find whoever in the neighborhood was having a wedding. My friends and I would tell the man at the door, ‘Our mother’s upstairs. It’s an emergency. The icebox is melting.’ And he’d let us up. And five minutes later we’d be slipping around on the floor. Pretty soon everyone would get up and start dancing. That’s when we’d sneak into the kitchen and load up on the rugelach, the fruit, the herring, fill our mouths with seltzer and get the hell out of there.”
“Didn’t you have food at home?” said Florence.
“Sure, we did,” he said, apparently having forgotten her earlier slight. “Potato soup for breakfast. Potato pancakes for dinner. Potato pudding for dessert…”
“So you grew up in New York too,” said Essie.
“Allen Street. But ‘grew up’ I don’t know about. More like got dragged up.”
Essie apparently found this hilarious, and Florence, for her part, did a fair impression of looking amused, if only to encourage the view that their earlier disagreement could still be written off as a misunderstanding. And this, to her surprise, had the unexpected effect of making Leon lift his eyes in a kind of shy, canine affection at her, before pulling his shirt straight. It was only a slight tug, but it laid bare what Florence had been looking at, and managed to make something awkwardly intimate of their truce.
Chords of dance music were rising up again over the tumult of the room. Essie was the first to recognize the tune. “ ‘Stardust!’ ” she shouted suddenly. “They’re playing Hoagy Carmichael, on accordion!” It was true. Florence realized that this was what had been strange about the music: all the numbers were out-of-season tunes that had somehow made their way to Russian soil and settled into a kind of wandering-Gypsy version of themselves, just like her and Essie. It was obvious to her that Leon now felt obliged to ask one of them to dance, but this quandary was resolved by a tall figure bounding toward them. The figure turned into the shape of a lanky, bespectacled man who seemed almost to be rising on his toes as he shouted Leon’s name.
“If it isn’t Seldon Parker!”
“Greetings, Comrade!” announced Seldon, with the sumptuous inflections of an Englishman. He shook each girl’s hand in turn. “Forgive me, I’m terrifically tight tonight.”
“I expected you were at the old Metropol,” said Leon, “drinking rounds with the Alpha and Omega boys.”
“I wouldn’t speak those syllables too loudly, my friend. Anyhow, there’s been a change—they go by ‘the Christian Brothers’ now.”
“Since when?”
“Since the YMCA is easier to remember than the OGPU.”
“I thought they were called the NKVD now,” said Leon.
Seldon removed a handkerchief and blotted the bullets of sweat from his forehead. “Too many damn abbreviations in this city to keep track of. And they’re always changing,” he said, turning to Florence. “Personally, I preferred it back when everyone simply referred to the secret police as the Red Cheka.”
“What about ‘the SPCC’?” suggested Florence.
“What’s that, now?”
“The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Communism.”
“Hey, that’s got a nice ring to it. I think I’ll write that one down.”
“Seldon is going to write a big important book when he leaves this place,” said Leon, “only he can’t seem to leave it.”
“What’s your book about?” said Essie, and was rewarded with an elaborate explanation of Seldon’s interest in the question of proizvol, the notion of “arbitrariness itself!” While Seldon turned Essie into a blinking victim of his theories about “the Russian lack of seemly proportion between cause and effect,” Leon, taking a step toward Florence, said, “I keep telling him to hurry up and go back to London so he can start enjoying Moscow.”
“How does that work?”
“The problem with writers is they don’t know how to have their fun while they’re having it. Only in retrospect.”
“I take it you’re not a writer.”
“I do write, as a matter of fact. Seldon and I work together. We write for TASS.”
“The Soviet wire service? In that big building up on Gorky Street?”
&nb
sp; “So you’ve heard of it,” Leon said with a specious modesty.
“Don’t the Soviets have their own reporters?”
“Ah, but you see, we write news for export.”
“In English?”
“In what else—Tagalog? We write and print a whole magazine. It’s even read in the States. It’s called Sovietland.”
“Sovietland?” She gave him a sidelong look. “Is that an actual place?”
“Certainly. Sovietland has all sorts of marvelous things. Fresh new department stores with gramophones and vacuum cleaners. Cafés for the workers, where payments are made strictly on the honor system.”
“Sounds like a wonderful place to live,” she said.
“Patience, Florence. Patience.”
“It’s no wonder so many people who come to the Soviet Union return disappointed,” she said. “First they read that baloney, then they go back to America and write all sorts of slander about the U.S.S.R.”
Leon grinned innocently, expecting nothing less than this very reaction. He turned his palms out at his sides. “Okay. So let those ligners tell their lies.”
The Patriots Page 19