“With his single feather lighting the way like a torch, he entered the forest, and after much wandering he arrived at a clearing where a princess was bathing with her maidens. Forgetting temporarily about the bird, he began to frolic with these alluring creatures. But soon darkness crept over the forest, and the princess told the smitten prince that she and her companions were obliged to return to the castle of an evil magician-king who turned trespassers to stone. ‘Don’t follow us,’ warned the princess, ‘for it will bring you nothing but pain.’ Ivan, heeding no warnings, sneaked in after the maidens just as the gates of the castle were closing.”
Here Sergey paused to refresh himself with another drink. Florence waited for him to resume the story, but he seemed content to let things conclude there.
“So who was Ivan following—the princess or the Heatbird?” asked Florence.
“Maybe one. Maybe the other.”
“But then what happened?”
“What happened,” Sergey said dryly, “is, Ivan was captured by the magician.” He folded the rest of his sandwich into his mouth and chewed it.
“There’s got to be more.”
“Oh, there is much more. Do you want the version with the gray wolf or the talking bear?”
“Does Ivan rescue the princess? Does he get the Firebird?”
Sergey nodded, chewing. “Yes, yes, much later. After many misfortunes.”
“Does he return home?”
“Many years later. In beggar’s clothes. Nobody recognizes him.”
She stopped stirring her tea and wiped some caviar off the corner of his lip.
“Go home, Flora,” he said.
She stared at him. “What?”
“Believe me when I say socialism doesn’t need your help.”
She gave a weak laugh. “It was you who wrote to say I should come and see everything that’s being built in the Soviet Union.”
“Is that where you think you are? You go out and buy food in your restricted stores, and you think you’re living in…”
“Wait a second, I don’t need any of this.” She waved her arm over the table with its demolished cornucopia. “And I don’t see you declining a second helping. If you didn’t want me to come, you shouldn’t have advertised so enthusiastically….”
He looked at her as at an idiot. “That was for whoever was going to steam open my letter. I expected you to know the difference.”
“Well, I’m sorry you think I’m so awfully naïve. The stupid American woman who’s come here to saddle you….” She couldn’t look at him. She could feel the shame rising up, prickling her under her skin.
“Flora.”
She could no longer form a sentence without first suppressing the tremor in her jaw. “What’s keeping you here?” she said. “You’re free to leave.”
Slowly, without protest, Sergey stood up. She stared out the window, at the mute drama of falling snow, while he put on his clothes. She wrapped the tartan tighter around her shoulders.
“I can’t leave,” he said suddenly. “Flora, look at me.” And when she did she knew he wasn’t talking about her room. “Can’t you understand what I’ve been telling you?”
But now it was her turn to give nothing away.
Picking up his hat, he let his fingers slide with something like tenderness across the smooth leather handle of her trunk. But when he spoke, his voice had the sound of an order: “Take your treasure chest to the station tomorrow, get on a train to Helsinki, and get the first boat out.”
She watched, dumbfounded, as Sergey tucked his shirt into his pants. And then, in a voice eerily like those of her instructors at the political-education class, she said, “The only train I’m getting on is the locomotive accelerating into the future. And if you want to jump off that train, watch out you don’t break your legs!”
As soon as this declaration was out of her mouth, she wanted to take it back. But part of her was glad she’d said words that finally had some effect on him. Sergey looked—no longer repulsed, but panicked. She’d accused him of being disloyal. The sober disbelief in his eyes gave her an exhilarating, brief feeling of power. It settled the score between them. And yet a tiny part of her was already aware that this power had a cost: that it was the last, impassible barrier between them.
“Happy travels, Flora.”
They were the last words he’d ever speak to her.
Go home, Flora.
For weeks, the words floated up into her consciousness at inappropriate times. She did not tell anyone of her meeting with Sergey, not even Essie. With the same power of will with which she would, decades later, shove the word “America” into a locked drawer of her mind, Florence resolved now not to utter Sergey’s name again. She was convinced that if she let it pass her lips he would continue to be the reason she’d come to Russia.
But his words lingered, and resurfaced in the frequent letters from her mother and father: “Come home, Florence.” “Come back, kindeleh.” Before her encounter with Sergey, she’d been able to skim over her parents’ slanting, pleading script. Afterward, even touching the parchment paper of those letters made her feel sickeningly alone. Just a week earlier her brother had written her about starting high school at Erasmus, lampooning the same teachers whose classes she’d once endured. His words resounded from the page in Sidney’s best Eddie Cantor voice. Now, as she sat at her office desk, working into the evening on a dictation Timofeyev had assigned that afternoon, the upwelling of loneliness was so sharp and so pure that it took all her will to clamp her jaw against the pain. She’d already gone through three drafts of Timofeyev’s memorandum, each more error-scarred than the last. Glancing up with her tear-lensed eyes, she saw that the wooden desks around her stood empty. Everyone had left for the day. She pulled out the incomplete dictation with its carbon copy and rolled a clean sheet of paper into the carriage.
Dear Siddy,
Ahoy. By the time you receive this letter, your Thanksgiving gut will long have shrunk. It appears that the mail travels twice as speedily from there to here as vice versa, so I’ll indemnify myself early and wish you and the gang a HAPPY NEW YEAR!! What am I doing for Gobbler-day, you ask? I will tell you. Turkeys here are hard to come by, but I did manage to get myself a chicken. They were “handing them out” (as we say here) half a block from where I work. The food here is good, and cheap, so that no one ever has to go hungry. But sometimes you don’t know what they’ll be handing out till you’re in line. I’ve gotten much better at what the Soviets call the hunting-gathering game. As there is a separate line in a shop for every type of item—butter, bread, bologna—the trick is to know what each thing costs in advance, go straight to the cashier and get your receipt, then jump in the slowest line and ask the person behind you to hold your place. While they’re holding it, you jump to a line that’s moving faster, get your bread or butter, and run back to the first line! If the person behind you isn’t a gargoyle, you can get away with up to four runs, like in baseball. Only trouble is when everyone decides to use the same queue as home base! Then your game goes into overtime, and the bread you came for is eaten by the time you get the bologna.
Don’t show this to Mom, as she will send me another tear-smudged letter telling me how red her eyes are from crying and adding another illness to the list of Papa’s ailments that he has already written me he does not have. I am taking care of myself well here. (And if she does read this, am eating well also.) In fact, things are getting better and better. My Russian is good enough that I can pass for a not very bright local. The city is getting bigger and better, too. The future everyone talks about is really happening here! Soon we will have our very own first-class subway. I say “we” because a great number of Moscow inhabitants, including your sister, have participated in building it during “subbotniks” or voluntary days, shoveling earth and rocks, carting debris, and so on. Even if it is just a little help, when everyone pitches in, they feel that the metro is their very own. When it finally opens, it will have columns of ma
rble, beautiful lighting, and escalators so long that boys will want to ride up and down on them all day. I hope you will visit and see for your
Her fingers would not obey the order to keep typing.
Lying to her parents was simple. She had done it all her life. But the chipper veil did not go down so easily with Sidney. He would never visit her. She pictured herself going down one of those deep escalators, alone. The interminable ride. Forever.
The deep, buffering silence that surrounded her tiny whimpers made Florence realize it was snowing again. Her eyes lifted to the cathedral gloom of the enormous windows, inky with night. In the grainy darkness, she could detect the stirring motion of floating snowflakes. How many mornings, seeing the snowy web on her windowpanes, had she wanted to crawl back under her blanket to let her bruised heart hibernate like a daffodil bulb?
Tell me what to do!
She heard herself whisper this, though she didn’t quite know to whom. To God? It had been years since she’d prayed. To her little brother? Or…Between the tall cathedral windows hung a portrait of Him. She’d sat under the mustachioed Leader’s all-seeing gaze for so long she barely noticed it anymore. Her failure to feel the obliterating devotion to Joseph Stalin that others professed seemed to be one more symptom of her foreignness. She felt she could escape her own unspeakable loneliness if only she could believe with a less uncertain heart. Now, in the wintry, humming silence, she heard: I believe in one thing only: the power of human will.
They were Stalin’s words and they rang in the chamber of her head like an indictment. Grow up, Florie, she told herself sharply. But self-pity exerted its own allure. She understood, as she never had before, how exquisitely satisfying it was to drink your own misery, and how tasteless it was to everyone else. Perhaps if she had sat there longer it might have occurred to her to see Sergey as something other than a spurning lover. That in cutting her loose he was trying to offer her rescue. But the chrysalis of her melancholy was broken by an unexpected sound. It was the scrape of Timofeyev’s door opening. Florence had presumed he’d gone home with the others, but he was only now coming out of his office, buttoning his long coat and fixing his black Astrakhan hat on top of his head.
She yanked the letter from the roller, but it came out only after a long hiccupping squeal.
“Flora?”
“Grigory Grigorievich—I didn’t see you.”
“The building is going to close soon.”
“I was just sorting out my…Lost track of the time.”
“Have you been crying?”
“Oh no. It’s just the snowfall—it’s so…beautiful.”
His sharp eyes squinted in concern behind his amber-tinted spectacles.
“Have you ever eaten solyanka?”
In one gesture she shook her head and wiped her face with her arm.
“My wife makes the best solyanka in Moscow. Tonight you’ll try it, all right? We’re having guests for dinner; I’d like you to join us.”
“Oh, I’m not dressed for dinner.”
“You’ll do just fine. Get your coat.”
—
TIMOFEYEV’S APARTMENT BUILDING, a sand-colored Art Nouveau mansion on Prechistenka Street, stood equipped with a liveried doorman and an ancient elevator attendant who escorted them in the ornate cage up to the top floor. When Timofeyev opened the door the warmth gathered inside caused Florence to sweat in her heavy coat. The sound of her heels was absorbed by a woven rug that buffered the glare of a varnished entry hall. Two steps below, in a sunken living room, a few guests had already gathered. On an elegantly overstuffed sofa were seated a well-fed gentleman and a tall woman whose blond-gray head and dusty complexion recalled to Florence a species of exotic moth. “It’s only natural that the new theater should wear new clothes,” the man was saying in a voice rife with discernment.
“I recall you saying something quite different last year, Max,” spoke a redheaded beauty Florence took to be the young Madame Timofeyev. Her unbrushed ringlets hung down to the middle of her back. Her mouth was full and painted. Over one naked shoulder she wore a silk smock that clung to the flex and sinews of her body. Her threadbare, embroidered houseslippers only seemed to add to the effect of careless elegance.
“I haven’t changed my mind, Ninochka. I’ve always said that our theater should avoid an archeological approach. It achieves nothing new with restorations of former plays.”
Florence hadn’t yet taken off her shoes when a shaggy dog began sniffing at her skirt. “Stop that at once, Misha!” Ninochka said, dragging the dog roughly by his collar. “I’m sorry about this fat fool,” she said. For a moment Florence thought she was talking about the man on the sofa.
“What a lovely dog! What breed is he?”
“He’s a mutt. We found him on the street,” Timofeyev answered, taking her coat.
“There is no breed of dog in any part of the world that corresponds precisely to the Russian family hound,” chimed in the man on the couch. “He is a mixture of all the worst varieties. They sleep all day and bark all night.”
Nina, having taken the dog into the kitchen, now came back with cognac. “Grisha, you didn’t tell me your American was so adorable,” she declared before making effusive introductions of her two guests—Max, a theater critic and “absolute genius,” and Valda, who, as Nina explained, had only just come back from Denmark, where she had been traveling with an all-Soviet delegation to the Scandinavian nations.
“Are you a diplomat?” Florence inquired.
“No, no.” The woman crinkled her eyes modestly. “Only a translator.”
“Valda is a specialist in the Nordic tongues. She knows a dozen of them—Finnish, Swedish, English, Dutch….” Nina might have gone on to include Portuguese and Basque in this list if she hadn’t disappeared again into the kitchen to give loud orders to the elderly maid whom she addressed as Olga Ivanovna. It struck Florence that, like every good hostess, Timofeyev’s wife knew how to trade in lavish indiscriminate praise. And yet it was almost physically impossible for Florence not to be warmed by her enthusiasm.
“My position has always been,” Max said, now addressing Timofeyev, “that, no matter how great the role of the classics, they can’t fully satisfy the demands of the new audience. There must be new themes for the new mentalìtēt.”
“I have nothing against the new mentalìtēt, but why must these adaptations always be so dull?” said Timofeyev. “Why does Hamlet need to be set in Uzbekistan? Why should Molière’s plays be set on the floor of a factory?”
“There are no new themes, Maxim darling,” Nina said, coming in with glasses. “There is but one immortal theme.”
“And what’s that, my dear?”
“Love!”
“Love will always be an absorbing subject,” said Max, “but it has to be subordinated to more complex social questions.”
The moth-faced Valda, listening to this in amused silence, smiled at Florence from the couch.
“Love is subordinate to nothing!” declared Nina, pouring for herself a drink that Florence guessed was not her first that evening.
“Why not combine the two,” suggested Timofeyev. “Set Romeo and Juliet on a collective farm.”
“What a spectacular idea, Grisha,” said Valda.
“To our health!” Nina proclaimed.
Timofeyev splashed some wine into Florence’s glass as they took their seats at the table, and urged her with a wink to have a drink. She wet her lips on the edge of the glass and for the first time felt such a genuine sensation of enjoying the company she was in; it was like a flash of her childhood memory of being allowed to stay up late with the grown-ups and discovering that despite all the exoticism of forbidden late-night fun, the adults she knew were doing nothing more remarkable than talking and eating and laughing! How much easier it was to be around these jaunty, ironic intellectuals—the exceptional people who had privilege heaped on them—than the simple, salt-of-the-earth, great Russian narod, against whom she had to jostle
and shove every day as though through some hostile, obstructive medium.
“It’s a question of emphasis,” Max went on, refusing to drop his topic. “Look at our new production of Resurrection. The story is even more brilliant than Tolstoy realized when writing it. The playwright saw beyond all the religious moralizing and now it’s no longer a story about a love affair between a servant girl and a wealthy cad, but a splendid social canvas! A picture of the oppression and ignorance of the peasantry! The corruption of the aristocracy and the hypocrisy of the church!”
Florence surprised herself by speaking. “But how many changes can be made to a story,” she began, and hesitated—everyone at the table was looking at her—“before Tolstoy becomes, well, propaganda?”
“Our guest has a point,” said Nina, looking at Max, who now addressed the question without actually addressing Florence.
“Yes, our foreign visitors are often remarking on the ‘propaganda’ in our theater, but they are entirely blind to the propaganda in their own. Take the chorus girls in Paris or New York, your Follies. Young women and, I might add, not such young ones, advertising their legs and breasts for two hours, without so much as an intermission. What do you call that if not sexual propaganda? We boycott such displays here and have a healthier theater for it.”
“You might change your mind about that if you ever caught one of those chorus productions yourself, Max,” Timofeyev said.
Grinning off this slight, Max resumed: “I find it charming that foreigners show such concern about the influence on the arts by propaganda when in fact Moscow’s theaters continue to produce more classics than any other capital’s, and do a finer job of it. A Chekhov production that was recently applauded in London would have met only polite toleration by Moscow’s public.”
The Patriots Page 21