As she depicted herself to Florence, Agnessa had come to Moscow a naïve young woman, traveling from the countryside with other girls in search of factory work. At twenty, she’d married a boy who “drank a little, but seemed gentle.” Her mother-in-law thought her a rustic and a yokel and “dragged me around the floor by my hair when I got pregnant.” She held Florence’s fingers to the bumps and valleys on her scalp where she’d been walloped by the young husband and his mother. Whatever marks the abuse had left on Agnessa’s body, they seemed to have spared her spirit, for she spoke of all the violence visited on her in a voice that was buoyant and jolly. She remembered every detail of her younger days—the weather, how much things had cost—which made her stories as gripping as the plays onstage. More so, Florence thought, because they were true. Onstage, the heroes acted out scenes of redemption by joining collectives and subsuming their ambitions to the common will; the leitmotifs of Agnessa’s stories always strove in the opposite direction: an almost monomaniacal quest for a room of her own. “I went to work setting type at a printing press and divorced the bastard,” she told Florence in the shadow of brooms and brushes. “But we were still living in the same room! I went to the administration and said, ‘Give me and my daughter a room.’ They tell me: ‘Bring us the paper attesting how many square meters you and your former husband have.’ I brought them the paper. It was fifteen and a half. They say, ‘We can’t help you. Everyone gets five meters a person, and the two of you have a half-meter extra. You’ll have to exchange it on your own—barter it for two smaller rooms.’ ‘But he refuses!’ I say. ‘That’s not our problem.’ So what am I supposed to do—have another baby by the pig to get my own room? That’s when I understood what ‘city life’ was, girlie. You have to earn money here! And put bread in the right palms. So I worked days and took a night job as a cleaner in a morgue. Never slept, never saw my child. I was the living envying the dead. Then I took what I earned and went to the right people. That’s how I got my own room at last.”
At some point toward the end of Act 2, when it was time to reopen the cloakroom, Agnessa’s stories would conclude on some philosophical or wistful note. “Curious how life turns out, isn’t it? Look at my hands. I came to the city for an easier life. My sister, she stayed in the country, and hers is the life that turned out better. She became a midwife. She helped me out once. After I divorced, I met a man—a good one, but married. Well, what could I do? Couldn’t keep it. Don’t look so shocked. She helped many women that way. Got herself a quiet little house in the village. Girls from all over Moscow used to come, even when the deed was legal. And now she’s even busier. Her hair is always colored. Fine clothes. Never short in the pocket.”
To Florence’s relief, Agnessa rarely asked her about herself.
“And how did you end up here?” she once inquired.
Florence had learned by now that simple answers were better than complicated ones. “There was no work in America. So I came here. I met a man, and I stayed.”
And Agnessa had nodded in understanding. “That’s how it always is.”
—
DURING FLORENCE’S FIRST MONTHS at the theater, she had been forever on the alert for a familiar face, clandestinely peeking into the cloakroom crowds so she might have time to turn away if spotted. But after many months, when no face from her old life had materialized, she eased her vigilance. And so it was an odd thing to hear her own name spoken, one cold April evening in 1939, by a woman handing her a rabbit-fur coat.
Florence squinted as if someone had shined a bright light in her face.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” said the woman. “It’s Valda.”
It wasn’t her face but the Baltic name that tripped a wire, and suddenly Florence recalled the well-bred Latvian translator from Nina and Timofeyev’s apartment so many years ago. “Valda. Of course!”
The first bell interrupted them, and Florence did not see her old acquaintance again until after the performance. Valda was waiting for her inside the doors of the theater lobby. “Flora, I’m surprised to see you here.”
Ancient tides of fear and embarrassment rose up in her, but she steeled herself against them. “Many things are surprising now,” she said.
Valda seemed to take the hint. “We ought to talk and catch up,” the tall woman suggested in a softer tone.
“Care to stick around until midnight?” Florence offered ironically.
“How about early afternoon? Next Thursday.”
And to Florence’s surprise, Valda took a slip of paper from her purse and wrote down an address.
—
UNTIL THE VERY LAST MOMENT, Florence was not at all sure if she would go to meet Valda. It had been a long time since she’d had an occasion to put on a good dress and style her hair. The thought of making herself presentable for the world filled her with a dangerous hope she didn’t trust. The address Valda had given her was near Sokolniki Park, at the pine-wooded boundary of Moscow, reachable only by a tram from the very last metro stop. When she arrived, the place turned out to be not a woodsy vista but a student cafeteria at the university where Valda taught—the Institute of Philology, History, and Literature, or IFLI for short. During her self-sequester, the city seemed to have edged outward. In the café, enjoying a bowl of surprisingly delicious soup with Valda, Florence felt like a nocturnal animal awakening to daylight. “You teach here?”
“Yes, in the department of classical philology.”
“It must be a delight, this sort of work, discussing literature every day.” From the bright sun melting the heaps of snow, from the reviving smell of black soil, from the naked, hatless faces of passing students, Florence felt the intoxication of spring’s arrival.
“Yes, I suppose. The students are bright, but…” Valda lowered her voice. “I can’t discuss the structure of a classical poem anymore without having one of them tell me it’s reactionary, or that I’m being a ‘formalist.’ What can I say? We’re supposed to keep up with the times.”
But hearing Valda’s complaints only made Florence more envious. Not until they were alone, walking at the vacated edge of the park, did Valda say, “To be frank, Flora, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw you in that little coat box inside the theater.”
“Why?”
Valda’s eyes grew wide. “What do you mean? I assumed you’d gone back to America or that, well, that you’d been…carted off.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Because of Timofeyev. Don’t look so surprised. Haven’t you heard what happened to him? He was picked up after the Pyatakov trial.”
“Grigory Grigorievich?” Florence knew that even to speak like this was dangerous, but something in Valda’s eyes—the noble plainness of her face—gave Florence confidence to go on. “Goodness! What about Nina?”
“She’s gone. Went back to Tbilisi. Heaven knows who’s been moved into their beautiful apartment on Prechistenka by now.”
She understood now that Valda’s link to the glittering world of the Timofeyevs had been severed just as hers had been. They were, both of them, lonely planets who’d lost their orbit.
“You’re saying Nina just left him?”
“Left him? Oh, Flora, do you think Moscow is any closer to Siberia than Tbilisi is?”
For the first time, Florence learned that Timofeyev, as a young man, had been a part of some opposition group or other. It dawned on her that he had, all along, been prescient about his arrest. He had fired her to spare her from association with him. Again she recalled his glamorous wife’s glib advice: “Who are we to think we can fathom everything that goes on up top?”
“Nina’s contacts got me work at the theater,” she confessed to Valda.
“That little dark theater.” Valda shook her head sympathetically. “Of course, it is perfectly respectable work,” Valda said, backpedaling. “I only meant that with your skills—typing, accounting, your English—you could find very suitable work indeed.”
Did Valda have something in mind?
“What about right here at the institute? You could teach English to the advanced philology students.”
“Aren’t there enough instructors?”
“We’ve had some shifts in the staff and administration.”
Florence didn’t ask her to elaborate. She guessed that the institute had not been left untouched by the purge. But now, Valda seemed to suggest, the pendulum was swinging in the other direction. “Overzealousness” was what they called it in the papers. The Politburo had relieved the NKVD chief, Nikolai Yezhov, of his position for doing his work too passionately. Now, with Beria at the helm, the worst certainly had to be over.
She knew what Leon would say to the plan: at the theater no one bothered her. She was safe there. But what was safe? She was rotting away inside. The most vital years of her life were being wasted in idleness. Whatever Valda’s motives for offering her a different path, Florence had no doubt that Valda’s sympathy was real. She was painfully aware that, no matter how proudly and confidently she tried to present herself, her act wasn’t fooling anyone. Valda was genuine intelligentsia, not one of the new phonies who’d clawed their way into positions of influence. There were still a few people in Moscow, Florence thought, who had a sense of human decency.
“But IFLI is a serious institute. Scholars teach there, and I’ve never taught.”
“That doesn’t matter. You have a university degree. And what about those engineers you told me you once tutored in America? You could say you taught them.” Valda wrote something in her small address book. “I’ll speak to the dean. He’s a reasonable man. I have a feeling it will work out.”
And so it did.
…was how Mukhov introduced the men from Sausen Petroleum, though neither fellow struck me as remotely Swiss. Their Slavic mugs, like their names, left no mistake as to their citizenship. Their speech and clothes, however, bespoke a more tangled marriage between Northern and Southern Europe: Anglicized Russian accents suggestive of London educations, narrow suits with Italian tailoring. Costumed in Gucci, the two looked terrifically pleased to meet us, indeed. When Gucci Number One pumped my hand, it was with a pleasure so forceful I had the sense he was hoping to squeeze a few squirts of petroleum from my palm.
Our meeting took a while to get started, since every L-Pet executive on the floor wanted to drop in and wish our Geneva friends the best of luck. Clearly no luck was needed. So secure were the Gucci brothers in their confidence that they casually declined all the antiquarian devices we offered them for their presentation. They had no use for the pull-down screen or the slide projector, no need of laptops with PowerPoint. Not to suggest they were lacking in manners—quite the opposite. They were as amiable as could be; they delivered the same speech, about their long and loyal service to L-Pet (as its former oil broker), at least twice. It seemed their strategy was to speak as little as possible about what they actually planned to do as our oil shipper, and simply let the authority of Abuskalayev’s name do the work of persuading. After an hour and a half of this “presentation,” almost impressive in its nearly flawless lack of content, the Gucci twins asked if we had any questions for them.
I had a question: How were they planning on operating the ships we were building? Gucci Number Two’s knowing smile presaged his answer. “We’ll hire professionals, of course.”
The professionals they intended to hire turned out to be “the best crew from Sovcomflot”—one of the competing bidders.
I did the math in my head. Sovcomflot was bidding sixty-five thousand a day. Sausen’s bid was $111,000. So, building the same ships, at the same shipyard, employing essentially the same operator, they intended to charge us an extra seventeen million dollars per annum for the next ten years. “Your bid is considerably higher than Sovcomflot’s,” I said. “Do you mind spelling out what this extra money pays for?”
“Certainly. What you are getting is”—and almost in unison our new friends from Geneva uttered a phrase incubated so long ago inside the womb of American capitalism that on their dandy tongues it sounded disarmingly quaint—“quality control.”
The only question remaining was the one that couldn’t be asked in the open: With whom, among L-Pet’s suited ranks, were the Gucci boys planning to split the 170 mil? Was it Mukhov, or Serdyuk, both now bobbing their heads in stern agreement? Was it CEO Abuskalayev himself? Very possibly it was Kablukov, the Boot, though his absence from our meeting suggested ambiguous commitment to his own racketeering—unless he simply didn’t like to be present when his orders were executed. I looked over my shoulder at Tom. Surely, he could spot the two-bit swindlers disguised behind all that worldly swank. Since Tom was leading the financial end of this joint venture, I lamely hoped that he might have some artful way of broaching the $170-million question. But the Clintonesque squint he flashed me was of no comfort at all. Without acknowledging my wordless plea, Tom allowed his huge hand to squeeze my regular-sized shoulder in a way that seemed to say: Hold back, tiger. This isn’t a fight worth wasting your fangs on.
I raised my cuff and checked the time. The hour on my Timex was inching closer to three. I had to head to Neglinnaya Street to meet with the archivist before they closed. I continued to dally, hoping the question of Sausen could be put to a speedy and final rest once the Genevans left our conference room, but, to my chagrin, a catered lunch of overstuffed pastrami sandwiches and sauerkraut was rolled in on a silver cart.
When I could stand it no longer, I escaped. Our final vote wasn’t until Monday, I told myself. It was still Thursday. I raced to the metro and resurfaced at the Kuznetsky Most station among the parked Benzes and baby-faced smokers in business suits. Against the foot traffic, I bolted toward the anodized double doors of the archive building. It was, blessedly, still open. No sooner had I entered the heel-dimpled linoleum lobby than the FSB man on duty—a new fellow this time—informed me the building was about to close.
“It’s a half-hour early,” I protested. With an indifferent tilt of his head he indicated a paper sign taped to the wall: SUMMER HOURS.
“The archivist said he’d be here until three.”
“He left an hour ago.”
I peeked into the reading room. The place was empty. Even impoverished intellectuals had better places to be on a summer afternoon. Then, at the filing closet in the back of the room, I spotted the stoop-shouldered archivist’s assistant. “Hey, remember me!” I waved my hand in his peripheral vision. The man turned his head slowly, reluctantly. I took my cue to approach. “I submitted some documents to you regarding my parents’ files.”
“You’re the one from America.”
“That’s right.”
He sized me up with his falcon eyes. “I filed your request,” he said.
“Oh, good.”
“The personnel will search for it in one of our warehouses. It takes time.”
“How long?” I said, trying not to wince at my own infantile tone.
“Who knows? A week. Two.”
“But I’m leaving Tuesday,” I pleaded.
He considered this. “Have you got someone here who can pick them up for you?”
I paused. I did, of course, have someone, but I was reluctant to have Lenny collect the files on my behalf. Who knew what he’d find in them?
“What if I do?” I said.
“I can give you a form to authorize the receiver. But, mind you, there’s photocopying fees.”
“How much?”
He gave me the price in rubles. It came to almost fifty cents a page.
“How many pages are in a typical dossier?”
He shrugged. “Could be two hundred. Could be six hundred. Depends on the type of crime.”
Now it was my turn to look at him askance. You couldn’t move sideways in this city without somebody trying to extort you. I asked him for the necessary forms.
Outside, I stood in the haze of the late afternoon watching as the guard dead-bolted the doors, slamming shut the vault holding my parents’ deeds and misdeeds, th
e repository of my unanswered questions. A tuft of poplar floated into my face. More were tumbling down the sidewalk, plugging the gutters. I began to tramp back uphill. The air felt ionized, barometrically moody. I glanced up and saw that the clouds were curdling, trapping in the remaining daylight. What are you terrified of? I thought. That my own son would know the truth about his family? Or know more than I do? Lenny had been nineteen when my mother passed away. He was the only one in the family that Florence had loved with a self-forgetting passion; she spent whole weekends with him after we came to America, something she’d rarely done with Masha, my oldest. Lenny adored Florence, and even into his adulthood continued to harbor certain bizarre romantic notions about the “free-spirited” way she’d lived her life. Though now, recalling the kind of inane advice my mother used to give him—“You shouldn’t be too practical in this life,” “Leave the thinking to your heart, you’ll get fewer headaches”—I wasn’t entirely sure that some part of me didn’t want to puncture a hole in my son’s inflated image of her. “What the hell, we’re all grown-ups,” I said to no one and took my phone out of my jacket.
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