Florence’s criticism of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District would echo the scathing still-to-come review in Pravda: “coarse,” “primitive,” “epileptic.” “Comrade Shostakovich presents us with the crudest naturalism…,” the reviewer wrote. “The composer has clearly not made it his business to heed what the Soviet public looks for in music and expects of it.” This blast of official wrath would result in the opera’s being taken out of circulation for the next three decades. “You mean you didn’t find Katerina lovable?” Leon said, cocking his head, an edge of mockery in his voice.
“The lady is a monster.”
“How about a clever, electrifying woman perishing in the nightmarish conditions of an oppressive society?”
“She’s a calculating manslaughterer!”
“So she kills a couple of fellas.”
“For the love of a confirmed philanderer!”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Comrade Fein. Katerina’s crime is not a crime of love. A crime of love would be a spiritual sin. She, on the other hand, is possessed by pagan furies. Hence the title of Lady Macbeth….” And here Leon did a most unexpected thing: he quoted Shakespeare. “ ‘I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.’ ”
For a moment Florence stood observing him in the lit Moscow evening, her mouth exuding icy silver breaths. “So you’ve read Shakespeare…,” she said.
“Ay, good lady. I was even cast as Macduff in the City College production.”
“You never told me you went to City!”
Having perhaps overreached in his claims at erudition, Leon issued a quick retraction. “I quit after less than a year.”
“How come?”
“Figured college had nothing to teach me.”
His continual boasting was like an endless brief in his own defense.
“I ran out of money, besides,” he amended. “Even if the learning’s free, life wasn’t. Figured I’d learn more by traveling, anyway. I had a magnificent idea to ride the trains across America, but it turned out about a thousand guys had already beat me to it. I might’ve ended up in Argentina, but they had a military coup.”
“So Russia was left.”
“As a matter of fact, I was on my way to China. But then I read about Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Republic…Stalin’s own Siberian Zion! And I wouldn’t even have to learn Chinese.”
“I didn’t peg you for a homesteader.”
“You kidding? I love the frontier! It was the pictures in the pamphlet that sold me—this youth who looked like some Berdichev Hercules lifting a wheat sack. And a big-calved Levantine princess strumming her balalaika. The only thing they forgot to put in the pamphlet was a picture of the mosquitoes.”
“It sounds like paradise.”
“I wasn’t expecting the French Riviera. But here I get off the Trans-Siberian and the train platform is nothin’ but a wooden plank in the middle of a mud field. I turn to the conductor and say, ‘How much farther to Birobidzhan, Comrade?’ He’s already laughing at me. ‘Two years, son!’
“So I get there, and they put me to work draining swamps. After two nights I have mosquito bites on my mosquito bites. Now, I wouldn’t’ve minded being eaten alive if at least I’d had something to eat. But I think the zookeepers forgot about us.”
“What do you mean, ‘us’?”
“They stuffed all us foreigners into one commune—Polacks, Bulgarians, Krauts, South Americans. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a Zulu in there. Guess someone wanted to see if we could build another Tower of Babel. If we weren’t all so busy running to the latrines with dysentery, we might’ve even succeeded in killing each other.”
“How long did you stay?”
“Almost four months I stuck around, if you can believe it. And those mamzers threatened to throw the book at me when I finally told ’em I was quitting. Said I’d never get a job in the Soviet Union if I didn’t finish ‘serving my time.’ ”
“What did you do?”
“I told them Zai gezunt, and Va-fan-gulo in my best Italian.”
“So much for the dream of a Jewish republic,” Florence said.
“How can I put it? It wasn’t that there were too many Jews, it was that there was insufficiently everything else. See, the way I figure it, every place where there’s just a few of us, we’re like fertilizer. But all in one place?” He shook his head. “That’s just a big pile of manure.”
Florence laughed despite herself. Before she could catch her breath, Leon said: “What are you doing tomorrow evening?”
From that point on, it became the winter Florence started lying again. She blew off Essie, claiming committee meetings after work. At work, she skipped the meetings by claiming she had to attend her political-education class (the only permissible excuse), then played hooky from her class to go to the Udarnik Theater with Leon for the new film Chapayev.
Purges and politics aside, there was plenty of fun to be had in Moscow in 1934. Florence listened to her first symphony and attended her first ballet. She was astounded by how much high culture was available so cheaply. In the audiences, she saw people who looked and dressed like ordinary workers. Their hunger for culture flattered her sense of pride at being a resident of a city that had declared the differences between high culture and low, classic and current, elite and popular, to be merely bourgeois distinctions. She told herself that these dates with Leon were not really dates. This was egalitarian Russia, after all; no reason men and women couldn’t be friends. There was no smooching, or even hand-holding—Florence kept it all on the level of talk. She even tried to prime the pump a little, do a bit of matchmaking.
“What do you think of Essie?”
“She’s a nice girl.”
“She has such pretty eyes, doesn’t she?” Florence suggested encouragingly.
“Yes, and so close together, too,” said Leon.
—
THEIR COURTSHIP UNFOLDED IN two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories. Passing over the cobblestones of the Arbat District, he’d tell her about his childhood working as a puller in the garment stalls on Canal Street.
“You know why all those suits on Canal have so many little price labels?”
“Why?”
“There’s a hole underneath every one of them!”
Sipping mugs of foaming kvass in Gorky Park under a banner proclaiming that “Life Has Become Better, Life Has Become More Cheerful,” they recalled the egg-cream sodas they’d drunk in Brooklyn.
“What I wouldn’t give for a little chocolate syrup in this!”
“Won’t help. You gotta know the formula,” said Leon.
“You know it, I suppose.”
“Sure do. This bartender on Greene Street showed me the secret recipe.”
“You alone.”
“Yup. Felt sorry for me ’cause I never had a Bar Mitzvah. He took me back into the kitchen and showed me how he done it. Told me, ‘Today you are a man.’ ”
She never knew if he was making it up as he went along. After a while, she didn’t care.
“I never see you drink very much, Leon.”
“Alcohol interferes with my suffering.”
With Leon she went to lectures at the House of Culture and to the State Jewish Theater on Bronnaya Street to watch Solomon Mikhoels perform his famous King Lear. But it was at the Metropol that Leon finally got his chance.
The restaurant of the Metropol Hotel deserves a place among the pantheon of the century’s great pleasure dens. Its ceilings were, or appeared to Florence upon first inspection, thirty feet high. Palladian doors circumscribed the enormous dining room, rising to a colonnaded balcony under a stained-glass ceiling. Like the Ritz or the Copacabana, the Metropol could successfully pass off its garishness as timeless. Its ornate brass carvings and red plush furnishings had, by the 1930s, already acquired an air of departed glory, a feel of slightly frayed and shopworn luxury that was of a piece with the gold-braided uniforms of its liveried waite
rs, some of whom had been around since the days of the tsar.
Like the restaurants of other valyuta hotels, the Metropol was the sort of place that had been allowed to stay open to satisfy the bourgeois tastes of Moscow’s foreign residents and visitors, especially the members of the press, who liked to loiter in its well-stocked bar, nursing whiskeys and eyeing the hotel’s spectacular barmaids. Thus it was at the Metropol that the motley crew of correspondents, in whose number Leon counted himself, had chosen to ring in the new year.
On a dance floor teeming with naked shoulders and bare backs, projectors animated a sparkling fountain in autochrome. The smoky mirrors around the dining room were like steamy windows into another world. Outside, in the twenty-below weather, abounded the usual wintry spectacle of proletarianism: men in spartan sheepskins hurrying down the sidewalk with string bags. But inside, the Tropics: Feathers sprouted from eye masks. Carnations bloomed in buttonholes. Pomaded heads rested on downy décolletages. Outside, shuttered stores guarding meager rations of black bread and salted lard. Inside, wild duck with solyanka, herring in a “fur coat” of beets and horseradish. On the street, snow. Inside, confetti. Out there, the slurred pugnacious howling of national hymns. In here, jazz!
Florence and Essie had arrived just as the conversations at the table were acquiring the lunatic, reckless clarity of an all-night bender. The six-piece orchestra, retuning their instruments, had given the stage over to a pair of Gypsy fiddlers, a man and young woman in embroidered vests.
“You fancy she’s a real Gypsy?” said a man named Alistair.
“Don’t be ridiculous! The real ones are as cross-eyed as inbred kittens!” said Seldon Parker, beside whom Florence had sat down with the aim of ignoring Leon.
“I thought they banned Gypsy music,” said a bald-pated Australian who went by Michaels.
“That was last month,” corrected Seldon. “This month they repealed it.”
“Seldon’s turned sour on them after covering the big Gypsy trial last summer,” Leon assured the table.
“There’s no criminal in the world lower than a horse thief!” Seldon proclaimed decisively. “Or an automobile thief, which is all the same, really. The government has been trying to make decent Soviets out of them for years, but it’s a failure. They hang posters of Lenin in their tents, and just keep thieving.”
Now Seldon turned to Florence. “Have you ever noticed they’re never satisfied with how many coins you give them? I once gave a hag the last of my pocket change, and she asked me where the rest was. The nerve.”
“Why should she suffer just because you’ve had a bad week?” Leon called out from across the table. He blew a smoke ring and let it fade before he looked for the second time at Florence.
She had seated herself at the opposite end of the table hoping to let Leon down easy. Now her stomach was palpitating, her brain rehearsing reasons for putting an end to whatever was going on between them. Three days earlier, when she had met Leon at the theater on Bronnaya Street, he’d informed her that he was turning twenty-one in the summer.
Merely twenty! She had tried to hide her alarm, and succeeded in wresting just enough control of her face to keep him from guessing her age (she’d be twenty-five in a month). It certainly explained the combative way he’d tried to win her attention, the humble bragging and flinty arrogance. She believed it amounted to a failure of will, a failure of her imagination, that, having come all the way to Moscow, she’d allowed herself to become entangled with an American—from the Lower East Side, no less. Now it shamed and panicked her that this American had turned out to be no more than a boy, afflicted with rootlessness and cheerful wanderlust. She experienced her panic as an inability to touch the rich foods on the table. She’d let herself get distracted after the fiasco with Sergey, but hadn’t intended to get in over her head. Now that she was in a more sober state of mind, it was time to stop procrastinating and be the serious person she’d come here to become. From an assorted platter of smoked fish, displayed in a pinwheel, a pair of beady piscine eyes stared up at Florence accusingly. It was time to cut bait.
“Essie, did you know,” Florence said encouragingly, “you and Leon both attended the Workmen’s Circle School.”
“Yeah, what branch?” said Leon, slipping a dumpling in his mouth.
“Bronx East,” Essie said, perking up. “What about you?”
“East Broadway,” said Leon indifferently, “but I didn’t stay around long.”
And here the parallel dried up. Florence’s anxiety was spreading to encompass her friend. Essie might have found Leon’s indifference easier to handle were all the other men at the table not so conspicuously smitten with the barmaids who slithered back and forth between tables with their trays of cigarettes and Bengal lights. Yet another difference between the Metropol and the world outside: the gender relations inside the restaurant were patently mercantile. Michaels beckoned a Tatar-eyed beauty and purchased from her a dozen sparklers in exchange for a dollar and a pat of her satin-clad bottom. The Australian was let off with a wagging finger for his naughtiness.
“Are they always so…friendly?” Essie inquired with visible horror.
“Certainly!” said Seldon. “Some of them will even let you tip them. If, that is, you tip them.”
“Michaels is in love with one of them,” Leon confided loudly in Florence’s direction. “Her name is Nelly.”
“A former aristocrat,” Michaels said wistfully. “An unfortunate victim of the Revolution. Such fragile creatures are not made for the daily grind of Soviet work.”
“But Nelly won’t have anything to do with him,” continued Leon. “She specializes in the Japanese.”
“He does know that these girls report everything to the secret police,” said Essie.
“Know? It’s his only hope,” said Leon. “He’s exhausted from thinking up new state secrets to keep her attention.”
These remarks, physically aimed at Essie, seemed also to be intended for Florence, who had hoped that the return to socializing in a group might restore a platonic amity to her and Leon’s relations. What she had not counted on was that their physical distance would present not a discouragement but a tantalizing obstacle. Florence was uncomfortably aware of Leon watching her every gesture (and had she not chosen the seat at the table that would offer him the best view of her profile, which he so claimed to admire?).
“It’s too bad no one gives a damn about Australia’s secrets,” concluded Seldon, before getting up from his seat with his drink in hand. “A toast, to our American friends!” he said. And though his knees seemed in danger of giving out under him, he held his glass elegantly from below with a linen napkin. “I propose that we bid a fond farewell to 1934, the first full year that this fine nation which has hosted us was recognized by the United States.”
“To no longer living in sin!” Leon exclaimed from his end of the table. “Za nas,” he suggested, urging the table to clink glasses, which everyone did happily.
“How much longer do we have for all this nostalgia?” Seldon said.
Michaels consulted his watch. “Twelve minutes left of good old ’34.”
With this information, Leon bluntly turned to Florence. “Time for a last dance?”
Florence let her napkin drop on the table. Glancing at Essie, she offered a wan smile of apology and stood up, a little languidly, to convey the impression that she was assenting out of politeness. Her efforts at conciliation were pointless; Essie’s acquaintance with romance had always been characterized by extravagant hopes and swift concessions. Florence drained her glass of champagne and rose to her feet. A physical sensation of plunging downward accompanied the column of champagne bubbles fizzling upward into her head, their sour effervescence absolving her of accumulated guilt. The unfairness of being allowed to pass ahead of the Russians in line because she’d addressed the Metropol’s guards in English. The injustice of abundance in the midst of scarcity. Her failure to discourage the attentions of a young man she couldn�
��t allow herself to be serious about. But it was New Year’s Eve, for heaven’s sake, and she was tired of feeling bad about everything. She set the glass down decisively and walked on ahead of Leon to the dance floor, not pausing to let him lead her by the hand.
The six-piece band was playing a recognizable number slightly altered by an accordion’s minor keys. The song sounded like a Slavic interpretation of an old Guy Lombardo hit, which it was. No words were being sung, but Leon Brink provided them murmuringly in her ear: Hear me—why you keep foolin’, little coquette? Making fun of the one that loves you…Breaking hearts you are ruling, little coquette. True hearts, tenderly dreaming of you-oo…
Florence’s reluctant smile gave him an opening, but she turned her face sideways just in time to avoid his lips. From the corner of her eye, Florence was watching her friend at the table. Wishing to look enticing, Essie had not worn her glasses. She was gazing about myopically while wetting her lips on the edge of her champagne glass like a kid faking devotion at communion. “Hmm, la dididi, little coquette…,” Leon sang. Like a rooting animal, he buried his nose in the fragrant updo at the back of Florence’s neck.
“Behave.”
“Why?”
“There’s people around.”
Leon looked about. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” For the past three weeks, while he’d been taking her out, Leon had gotten nothing from this girl besides a few stolen smooches on wet park benches. What had been denied him in private he now pursued, like a deprived teenager, on the public arena of the dance floor.
“Stop it!” she said when he licked a bead of sweat from behind her ear.
“What’s the matter? You didn’t sit down beside me. And now…you waiting on some other fellow?”
“It’s nothing like that.”
Her answer was not, in the strictest sense, true. Being out with Leon, she’d been unable to stop thinking about the irony of her situation: of this forceful, big-talking youngster from Allen Street showing her the beautiful city to which she had hoped Sergey would be her guide. Even as she’d grown fonder of Leon, the ghost of Sergey continued to haunt their encounters. She saw him in the broad backs of the theater audience, in the dull-blond heads of hair at the park, a stock type of which Moscow had no shortage.
The Patriots Page 24