“What is it, then—have I got horns on my head?”
“Leon, I feel maybe I’ve been giving you a wrong impression.”
“And that would be…?”
“I’m quite a bit older than you. I’m almost twenty-five.”
Her confession generated a lopsided smile. “So what?”
And she realized he already knew.
“I promise,” he said, “not to hold your wanton cravenness against you, Madame Comrade, if we can set aside this divide in our generations.”
“You see! Even you think it’s…”
“What?”
“Unbecoming.”
“Unbecoming?” The word was so quaint it actually caused him to hiccup a laugh.
“Yes, when a woman is older than the man.”
“I am genuinely surprised by you, Miss Fein. I didn’t think you went in for that sort of petit-bourgeois philistinism.”
“Leon, you’re…you’re a boy, practically.”
“Now, there’s no need to call names. What about Krupskaya and Lenin? Were they unbecoming?” He swung Florence around.
“Oh, Leon.”
“And Catherine the Great and Potemkin! She had a good ten years on that powdered old queer.”
At last Florence gave in and laughed. “But she was the queen!”
Leon gave her a quick glance-over, as if to say, And this one here is not?
Not beneath such cheap flattery, Florence blushed. She put her hands around his thin neck. In the smoky mirror that multiplied the dozen other couples on the dance floor, she saw herself laying her head gently down on his shoulder (in her heels, she was the slightly taller of the two). A surprising, not unpleasant smell, the brilliantine in his heavily sleeked hair, accosted her nose. Leon, hoping to devastate Florence in style, had bought the cream that afternoon, from a music store that sold it as a grease for trombones. Waltzing past them, a stout, elegantly turned-out older couple angled their heads and smiled, seeing in the young lovers the happiness of all Soviet youth.
And maybe it was this vision of them that woke Florence with a start. Was it an instinct toward their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind’s eye, was an image of the two of them dancing on the edge of the world, not realizing they were about to fall off. With the clarity of a premonition, she suddenly understood that all night her discomfort had been running deeper than insincere feminine guilt. What she felt around Leon was a fear so pure it was almost like ecstasy. But here was the strange part: It was fear not for herself, but for him. As if, by accepting his love, she would bring about his ruin, make him pay for loving her with nothing less than his life.
How did she know this? She would not have been able to say. The only words that came to her were “Leon, I’d like us to be friends, for now.”
But her feeble clairvoyance was no match for his resolve. “Are you trying to make me mad?” he said, studying her face.
“No!”
“You don’t want to see me?”
“I’m saying I want to take things…more slow, is all.”
“How much slower, Florence? Even cold molasses gotta know which way’s down.”
Between the bursts of laughter and drunken cheers, their song was dissolving into a prolonged rustle from the percussion section, a murmurous warning of the countdown to the new year. The carousel of pink and green lights passed over Leon’s face as he studied her. “I get it. You’re the type that wants a fella to toss her on the floor,” he said unpleasantly, “give it to her against a wall somewhere, while you turn your little head away, sniffling ‘No, no, no, no,’ and loving every minute of it.”
His voice had gone brittle with scorn, without any of the old playfulness. “I didn’t peg you for one of those frail little clinging vines….”
“Lemme go, you egg!” She turned sideward and gasped as he clenched her forearm.
“You’ve been giving me the sign ever since we met. Don’t think I couldn’t have obliged you, if I thought that’s all we both wanted.”
“Get off me!”
And to her surprise, he did—tossing her arm aside and making her stumble backward on her heels.
She stood holding her sore wrist.
She watched him prowl toward the frosted Palladian doors, which a waiter was just then opening. His “obliged” still hung cruelly between them. But his eyes had spoken a different story; before turning away they had been sparkling like broken shards with humiliation and pain.
The percussive countdown to 1935 had begun.
Florence looked at the faces around the ballroom, certain that they had all been staring at her. But the band had started up once more, playing some nostalgic anthemlike song, and all attention was on the bandleader in his maestro’s white tails, delivering a final toast over the throbbing melody—“To the New Year, to the New Happiness!”
Through the clog of bodies, Florence saw Seldon Parker in his half-fogged glasses, bending to light a cigarette off of the sparkler in Essie’s hand. Catching sight of her, Seldon wagged his hand. Their faces, the sparklers, the lurid sounds of vodka-laughter no longer seemed real to her. What she’d allowed to happen had diverged so sharply from what she’d set out to do that she was gripped once again by the same painful suspicion about herself that all her efforts to do good and be good couldn’t seem to erase: the feeling that, despite her intentions to live honestly and to hurt no one, everything she said and did was a lie; that she was at the mercy of urges—loyalty and rivalry, selflessness but also colossal narcissism—too contrary to be reconciled. She was sure Leon was wrong about her on every count, about being a tease and a slut, but she feared nonetheless that he had torn her open like a sheet of gypsum to expose her wiring. She saw how decisively he could free himself of her, how ruthless he could be if she pushed him too far, and it made her feel with some consolation that everything she’d thought about him was wrong.
She made a sharp turn for the lobby, where Leon had gone.
He was nowhere to be seen.
Under the scattered light of the foyer’s chandeliers, the settees were strewn with pensive-looking Russian men leaning together in serious conversations, as well as impatient lovers not waiting for the New Year’s bell.
Then she saw him. Coming out of the cloakroom, his coat in hand. He lifted his head and saw her, and before he could look away she called his name, not recognizing the voice that came out of her throat like the dying squeak of a balloon.
He waited, with perceptible reluctance, for her to approach him. The clock’s chimes had started; from inside the banquet hall could be heard shouts of “Six! Five! Four!” And then a collective cheer of “Urrah!” followed by a burst of music from the band.
Reaching him, she let out a dramatic exhale and hung her head. “You’re twenty, Leon, how can you possibly know what you want?”
He didn’t seem to want to meet her eyes and looked instead in the direction of the music. “It isn’t a choice, Florence. A man isn’t free to choose when he walks into an elevator shaft. I walked in—okay—but there were no floors to select, no buttons to push. I just fell right down.”
The area where they stood was cold and damp, infused with the musty smells of the garderobe. Nothing had warned her about what it might feel like to be cared for this much. He was young, yes, but he spoke like a man. And maybe, she thought, it was youth that made him capable of that kind of certainty. He had no family to abide by. He was not always looking over his shoulder, like Sergey. Tied down to nothing, he was free to love her completely. And she sensed now that such devotion might not come her way again for a long time.
Leon was unprepared for the kiss she planted on his loose mouth, returning it first like a child, with startled confusion, and then with the vigorous force of someone working out a knot of pain. She closed her eyes and let him bury his lips in her temple, press his forehead to hers. There was such a logic to their togetherness that she wondered
how she had ever imagined she’d have the strength to pull away. “All right, Potemkin,” she said, taking his hand. “Let’s go in before they drink all our champagne.”
In this way, Leon and Florence began the year 1935.
By the spring, they would be living together in a room of their own—a mighty eleven square meters, which, at the tail end of those still-emancipated times, could occasionally be allotted to a couple living in an unregistered “revolutionary marriage.”
A photo of Florence and Leon remains from this period, preserved only because it was sent by Florence to her family in America. Taken on a trip to Crimea—the closest the two came to a honeymoon—it shows them on a pebbly beach, with two other couples. The men kneel in the sand; the women, in bathing costumes, sit perched and laughing on their men’s backs, styling their poses after the “sports photography” so popular at that time. Florence, pale in her dark bathing suit, sits on Leon’s wiry, sun-blackened shoulders. He stares at the camera, a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, his eye squinting suspiciously against the sun. On the reverse of the photograph, only the words “Yalta ’35.”
—
EVERY YEAR FOR THE next three years, Leon Brink asked Florence Fein to marry him officially, and each time she answered, half jokingly, “You surprise me, Leon Naumovich. I didn’t think you went in for that kind of petit-bourgeois philistinism.” She did not know what stood behind her reluctance. Perhaps a corner of her heart could not yet accept that the “permanent” part of her life—the marrying and settling down and bearing children—would happen under the crimson-and-yellow flag. And yet, dancing in the buoyant infant hours of the new year, she could not have known that the strand which began to unspool with Kirov’s assassination would eventually thread through their lives too. And that her decision to marry Leon would not in the end be separated from a long chain of events begun the day the charismatic Leningrad Party secretary was rewarded for his loyalty with a bullet.
The old Metropol, it seems, is still open for business. Unlike numberless other establishments in Moscow, it never closed its doors. In fact, in all the years I lived in the city, the hotel remained largely unchanged. Now it’s restored in all its Art Nouveau detail—the fairytale mosaics, the plaster friezes, the ornate Deco balconies gleaming in tsarist splendor. The cars parked out front when we arrive are BMWs. Inside, frowning, bald-pated bachelors stand around the jewelry boutique with pouting blondes. “Just like Hollywood,” Tom, my boss, observes as we walk past them.
“But with fewer communists,” I amend.
Our compatriots from L-Pet are already gathered at a table in the imperial dining room. It is a custom of bilateral dinners such as ours that the first three shots go down smoothly and merrily, and that the repertoire of opening toasts follows a set script: First, to the success of our joint endeavor. Second, to the health of Faraz Abuskalayev, L-Pet’s CEO. And, finally, za nas, za vas, za neft i gaz!
The libations for this trifecta are poured not from common, lowbrow bottles, but from two civilized crystal carafes set by our waiter at opposite foci of our ovoid banquet table.
Some brief introductions are in order, starting with the honored guest to my right: Ivan Kablukov (“the Boot,” as Tom and I lovingly refer to him). Kablukov’s official job title at L-Pet is “vice-president of corporate security and communication,” though what he actually does there is anyone’s guess. He has about fifty kilograms on me and looks ten years my senior, but he claims to have been born in ’47, making him four years younger. If this is the case, he was apparently never much of a student, since he didn’t manage to graduate from the Gubkin State University of Oil and Gas until 1992. In fact, I’ve never been able to reliably ascertain how the Boot passed the first forty-five years of his life. Given his security post I assume he was connected with the law. Which side of the law I can’t say. I can say that Kablukov knows not a goddamn thing about either oil or ships. The last time he and I met, in Helsinki, where I was testing our tankers’ new propulsion system at the Aker ice pools, he sat beside me through our discussion with the Finnish engineers in assassinlike silence, wearing his Ray-Bans like he was at a poker tournament. Every once in a while he’d turn to me and say, “Na khera nam vsyo eto nujno?” “The fuck we need to know all this for?”
And, like the helpful boy I am, I was set and ready to explain to him what the fuck we needed to know it all for, except he disappeared mid-meeting. I didn’t see him again until dinner, where he showed up with some devitsa two meters tall. A blonde in boots, spilling out of her silver-fox stole. Guffawing like a horse the whole meal. You would have thought he brought her along to show her off, but throughout our three-day trip Kablukov did nothing but complain to me about her. “I have to take this padlo shopping again. This heifer won’t leave me alone until I buy her two suitcases of fur in Helsinki. Like we don’t have our own fur in Russia! Where the hell does she think the Finns get theirs?”
We got to know each other a little more intimately the last evening, in the sauna, over chicken cutlets and eighty-proof Finnish Koskenkorva. “It’s softer,” he tells me. And that’s when I notice that our VP of security is a patron of the arts—covered neck to belly in ink. And not those “Never forget mother” tattoos, either, but ones that indicate membership in certain exclusive societies the likes of which simple men like me are better off not knowing about. For two steamy hours I had little else to look at but 118 kilos of tattooed flesh wrapped in a bedsheet. The Boot must have made the same toast twelve times: “Time spent with friends does not get added to one’s life span!”
Now that Kablukov and I have done the ritual flogging of each other with birch twigs, he treats me as affectionately as a brother. “How have you been, friend?” he says now at the banquet table, and pours a neat thirty grams into my shot glass. Right up to the top.
“Very fine, Ivan Matveyevich. And you?”
He sighs. “I’d be better off if those two weren’t buzzing in my ear.”
Seated to Kablukov’s left are his first two lieutenants, Mukhov and Serdyuk. Mukhov is a former tanker captain from the merchant marines. Now he heads L-Pet’s Department of Safety and Compliance. His idea of protective measures can be summarized in a single phrase: avos’ da nebos’, which translates roughly into “cross our fingers.” As in “It’ll get from here to there, cross our fingers,” or “It’ll stay afloat, let’s hope.” But I vastly prefer Mukhov’s company to Serdyuk’s—or “Captain” Serdyuk, as we must call him. He’s a former nuclear sub commander, hired by L-Pet ten years ago on the day of his retirement from the navy. Short, stocky, buzz-cut, with a flat mouth that, if it opens, says little. The few sentences I’ve heard him speak favor the royal “we”: “We want it like this,” “We have something to discuss with you.” His brows are permanently knit together, like he’s Sean Connery still charting his nuclear course beneath the Atlantic.
Besides Tom and me, there are two others at the banquet, young guys about Lenny’s age: Valery Gibkov and Steve McGinnis, a Russian and a Canadian who make up the “PolarNeft Working Group.” McGinnis and Gibkov work neither for Continental nor for L-Pet, but for the joint-stock company that’s been set up to run our mutual venture. They are, so to speak, the house management to L-Pet’s landlords, and their presence this evening is a gentle buffer zone. Gibkov in particular strikes me as neither unreasonable nor an imbecile. If there is any hope for Russia’s future, it’s in this younger breed, who interpret the word “business” according to its primary definition as “making an enterprise profitable,” rather than its secondary, local, definition as graft and larceny.
By now we have all praised the smoked Baltic salmon, the sturgeon stew, the remarkably tender veal, and come to the agreement that the vodka (Cîroc? Jewel of Russia?) goes down “very cleanly.” Now that the initial six hundred grams have been dispensed with, Kablukov curls a finger at the waiter and orders “the rest.”
I’ve hardly touched my beef Stroganoff before two more decanters materializ
e on the table. I know it doesn’t bode well for my sustained sobriety that every time I glance upward into the restaurant’s blue glass ceiling I feel like I’m falling into an enormous swimming pool. But maybe it’s just an elemental confusion, a trick not of the eye but of the ear, evoked by the sound of the incontinent tinkle coming from the pissing cherub atop the marble fountain. It’s a tinkle suggestive of certain “enhanced interrogation methods” that are currently the topic of conversation between Mukhov and Tom. “Waterboarding—it sounds like summer sport,” says Mukhov, grinning ferociously. “You Americans make even torture sound like leisure-time activity.”
“Well, now, technically speaking, Oleg, it isn’t torture but a simulation,” Tom corrects. “The prisoner has the sensation of drowning without actually drowning.”
“Technically speaking, we have a saying in Russia: ‘A chicken is not a bird, and a woman is not a person.’ You also have a saying in America: ‘Waterboarding is not torture, and a blow job is not sex.’ ”
“Ha-ha…,” Tom objects: “I see your point there, but you might say that the latter is also a kind of, umm, simulation.”
This is the point when Kablukov, leaning in close to me, confides in his loose gravel voice, “To hell with all this politics. What are they jabbering about like dopes at the G8? Let’s have another drink.” He refills my shot glass to the rim, not spilling a single drop. “Now, if we only had a little female company,” he says, and sinks his drink with a quick jerk of his head before I’ve even touched mine.
“Speaking of company,” I say, “how is your lovely lady friend—what’s her name?”
There’s an audible grumble beneath Kablukov’s chewing that makes me rethink this line of inquiry.
“Those telki are all raving mad. My wife’s got a rule. She doesn’t care who the telka is as long as I drop her after three months.”
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