After six rings, the call went to Lenny’s message service. I tried again. This time it went straight to voice mail. I waited for the beep. “It’s me,” I said into the electronic silence. “How about an early dinner? Your pick. There’s something I want to talk to you about. A favor.”
I glanced up once more at the inscrutable sky, then scrolled on my phone until I found the number for Lenny’s apartment. The line was busy. I tried again, and this time it trilled twice before a feverish, wet-sounding female voice answered, “About time, where are you?”
“Katya?” I said unsurely.
“Who’s this?” It wasn’t a question but a demand, though one made in a thin, suspicious tone.
“Yuliy Leontevich. Can I speak to Lenny?”
The voice on the other end seemed to collapse into a distraught incoherence. “Oh, Yuliy Leontevich, oh God, Lenny’s not here. They took him an hour ago. I’ve been calling everyone.”
“Slow down, darling. Who took him?”
“Those guys. From the MVD, the Ministry of the Interior. That’s what they said. They gave him the paper. They said they were charging him with defrauding the shareholders of some plant in…oh, I can’t remember. Then they took him.” Her voice was trembling on the verge of unintelligibility.
“Where, Katya? Where did they take him?” I was already jogging to the corner, my index finger extending into the street.
“They wouldn’t let me go with him. They said they were heading to Holding Facility Nine. In the Kapotnya District, I think. Oh, it’s all nonsense. I know it’s all to do with those bitches he calls his friends.”
At last, a battered blue Lada screeched up to the curb. “Don’t go anywhere,” I told Katya. “I’m coming over.”
Life at the Institute of Philology, History, and Literature was indeed an improvement over cleaning toilets. Florence’s paperwork was carried out with surprising swiftness, and by fall she was teaching two classes of intermediate English to undergraduates so deferential and earnest that they rendered her past two years of subservience a forgettable intermission. The institute was composed of a modest cluster of five-story buildings. Inside, it was full of crowded landings and noisy halls that reminded Florence of her own student days, with the critical difference being that she now stood at a distance from all that colliding, permanent motion.
There had been no need to struggle at composing a curriculum; it was composed for her. The syllabus consisted of grammar books and approved authors such as Mark Twain and Upton Sinclair, who stood on the correct side of the crude classification that divided all Western writers into progressives and reactionaries. She would have loved to show her brighter students a paragraph of the Yeats or D. H. Lawrence she’d adored in her youth. But even if their books had been obtainable, the presence of such decadent obscurantists on her syllabus would have cost her her job. It was a relief to be spared such decisions. Teaching a foreign language, one could remain insulated from the hostile intrigues that ulcerated in other departments, where professors accused one another of being old-guardists and reactionary formalists. During Florence’s first semester, a professor at the institute was forced to leave her post after her book received savage reviews in Izvestia for its “fetishistic use of aesthetic devices.” Not long thereafter, another article came out in the same newspaper praising the book. And, just as suddenly, she was reinstated, with her colleagues resuming friendly relations as though nothing had happened. It was not at all clear to Florence what had happened—whether the professor had finally repudiated her errors or had simply been the beneficiary of a sudden reversal in policy. Florence had long given up trying to understand the logic of these turnabouts.
Every so often, she met Valda for lunch, but their teaching schedules rarely coincided, and Florence was just as happy to remain aloof from the other faculty members, fearful of entangling herself in any political fray that might toss her pitifully back on her knees, scrubbing footprints off carpets.
One day, toward the end of her first term, the vice-rector called Florence into his office and suggested she raise the grades of several of the working-class students who were members of the Komsomol. There had been complaints, she was informed, about her teaching method after a series of low exam scores.
Watching the rector’s beard and mustache twitch around his moving mouth, Florence could feel her skin breaking out in allergic distress. All year she’d applied herself fastidiously to her duties, knowing one mistake could cost her. “I warned the students that from now on a portion of their lectures would be conducted in English,” she protested contritely. “I go slowly, but if some of them still don’t have a basic grasp of the grammar, perhaps they shouldn’t be at this level.”
“Maybe they should not be. But…ah, allowances must be made, Flora Solomonovna. This is about correcting the injustices that came before. Not all students have had the same opportunities and privileges.” The vice-rector seemed to bear her no ill-will. His beard, tinged yellow from pipe smoke, had a stale, benevolent smell. She left his office promising to help the slower students.
This proved easier in theory than in practice. One pupil in particular, who Florence suspected was the one behind her summons, was a tall, horsily pretty girl named Yulia Larina—a shortcut taker who openly fell asleep in class after exhausting herself at Komsomol meetings and parade rallies. Following the vice-rector’s directive, Florence gave Yulia her last poor dictation with all the corrections written out carefully to help the girl grasp her errors. “There will be a makeup dictation tomorrow after classes,” she suggested. “You will come here to take it, and if you do better on that one, I’ll replace your grade.” But instead of gratitude, the girl offered her only a look of rude boredom. “I have a newspaper meeting tomorrow after class.”
“Then come after that; I will wait.”
“After that, I have to go home and cook dinner. I have two younger brothers. Our mother works two shifts.” In each of these excuses Florence could sense a suppressed but perceptible challenge. It was clear that Yulia had no intention of redoing this dictation, or any other. She expected Florence to raise her grade simply because of her good standing with the administration.
“You’re not the only student with competing priorities,” said Florence. But the following afternoon, she was not sure she’d handled things well. Teachers were little more than university servants, a fact that operators like Yulia intuitively grasped. And so it was no surprise that the next day, in her lecture, Florence lost her nerve.
Among the approved texts for her course she had discovered an excerpt from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi that she was shocked she’d never read before. In it, Twain described the Mississippi River two times: first with the eyes of his youth, as a boy overcome by the river’s colossal beauty, and later with the gaze of a seasoned skipper who knew that a golden sunset portended high morning winds, and that graceful ripples in the tide were messengers of mortal hazards. “No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.” Like a fisherman’s hand, the words had grabbed her with a cold, euphoric shiver. The country she’d come to six years earlier—once so romantic and full of possibility—had become for her full of perilous signals.
Florence felt safe in the understanding that her students were unlikely to draw this connection. But she hoped that, with her help, they might still be touched by the words, enough to contemplate that the optimistic certainty stamped on their faces might one day give way to other forms of knowledge.
“What do you think Twain is really talking about?” she asked them the next afternoon, letting her gaze drift from one set of obedient eyes to another. A pale, literal-minded young man named Alexei raised his hand in the front row. “He is disenchanted with the river because it’s made him lose his eye for beauty.”
“Has it really, though?” She tilted her head as she smiled.
“The quest for knowledge comes with a cost?” murmured a tiny, serious girl Florence had come to think of as “Little Brontë.”
“That’s very good.” Again, Florence looked about encouragingly, waiting for lights to go on in other eyes.
A voice came from the back. “Twain is nostalgic for his own ignorance.” Florence knew this voice well, though she’d never before heard Yulia volunteer an answer. “It’s just anti-progressive, reactionary romanticism,” said the girl, with her usual pointed indifference. Of all the remarks, this was, oddly enough, the most cogent exegesis on the essay so far, enough to confirm for Florence that Yulia’s lackluster work had little to do with her intelligence.
“So you don’t agree that Mark Twain feels he has lost something unique with his new knowledge?”
The other students watched Yulia alertly now. Even Florence could feel her own face contorting into an appeasing grimace, as if to reassure the girl that her view was as welcome as the others’. Only, the “view” Yulia had to offer was hardly her own: “Writers have to depict life in its revolutionary development,” she said confidently, and left it at that. It wasn’t an opinion so much as an incantation—specifically, of Zhdanov’s official statement from the Soviet Writers Congress of ’34. It was a Commandment of a Revealed Truth, and the other students, Florence observed nervously, were all nodding along with it in repentant agreement, as though Yulia were Moses stepping down from Sinai, and they, the shamefaced Hebrews who’d forgotten the Law in their moment of pantheistic abandon. Florence could feel her own advantage slipping. She knew that if she didn’t turn things around, she too would be going the way of the golden calf. “And, indeed, Twain spent his life doing just that,” she said with smooth elision. “He was a revolutionist not only as a writer of stories, but as an anti-imperialist campaigner and a speaker.” And soon Florence found herself launching into a lengthy disquisition on Twain’s attacks on organized religion, his critique of slavery, and even his swipes at monarchy through the figures of satiric characters like the duke and the king—drawing from the information she had read in the institute-approved Introduction to English Authors. And she continued in this vein even as class time ran out and the bell rang, adding bits and pieces of her own knowledge, about Twain’s rage over America’s brutal imperialist seizure of the Philippines, while her students, looking around with shy embarrassment, packed up their notebooks. “Our final dictation will be next week. Those of you who plan to make up previous ones should see me after class,” she called with ear-splitting congeniality as they filed out. But Yulia was not among those who lingered to take advantage of this indulgence.
After everything was over and she was left alone, Florence continued to reassure herself that she had handled the situation adroitly. She’d had the good sense to know that to argue with Yulia (whose great rhetorical talent, it seemed, lay in uttering with diabolical timing anything that would put her at an ideological advantage) would have been to play into her snare. Why, then, was her mouth still sour from the anxious way she’d affirmed a point opposite from the one she believed? She could taste the acetic juices of her own fear. She’d come to class hoping to make her students conscious of the more mysterious, philosophical musings of Twain’s essay and had succeeded in turning him into just another propagandist. She didn’t know if she felt worse about abandoning Twain or abandoning her own courage. Florence sat in the small teachers’ lounge with Yulia’s error-riddled dictation in front of her. She had not imagined in the vice-rector’s office how keenly it would offend her sense of fairness, how supremely painful such a minor capitulation, to have to let this Komsomol bitch off the hook.
The lounge around her resembled nothing so much as a kitchen, with two regular wooden tables, a hand-washing sink, and a couple of ratty armchairs facing a window that looked onto the institute’s inner courtyard. Here teachers came to smoke and read between classes, eager to get away from the incessant attention of their students and possibly to get away from another kind of unrelenting gaze—the lounge, being a not quite official space, was the only room unadorned with a portrait of their Great Leader. At the neighboring table, scratching his disheveled balding pate and rubbing his fleshy cheeks, sat Boris Rechok, a professor in the history department. His briefcase, as untidy as his head, was spilling over with papers he seemed to have no interest in straightening. He was distracted by an article in the day’s Pravda, turning the pages back and forth with a petulance so flamboyant that it had started to distract Florence from the squalid comforts of her own resentment. “Now we’re selling them wheat to feed the armies they’ll use to attack us!” Rechok muttered loudly to no one. “And they’re selling us the metal for the shrapnel we’ll use to shoot them in the back. Whose genius idea is this?” He looked at Florence and shook his head at the insanity of the new expanded trade policy with Germany, as if importuning some sort of response. Florence pretended not to hear him. She’d seen the same look of confusion and alarm on Leon’s face when he’d read about the new protocol of friendliness toward Hitler. “All of Europe blockading Germany, and Russia is sending it provisions. Fifty tons of wheat, rubber, petroleum, a year after the Soviet army is purged of its own suspected fascists!”
“Is a good war better than a bad peace?” she’d asked him in their room, and he’d looked at her strangely. Did she care nothing for what the Germans were doing to the Jews?
But did he really believe those rumors were true?
“How can you believe they aren’t? When someone says they want to wipe out our people, you can take them at their word.” Our people. It was the first time she’d heard him use those words. Even in the semi-private confines of their apartment, they unsettled her.
And here, in the open, was Boris Rechok, inquiring out loud: “What am I supposed to get up and tell the students? First historic enemies, now historic friends! Today the dog’s a Rottweiler, tomorrow he’s a poodle?”
This time, it was harder to ignore him. They weren’t alone anymore. Two professors from the faculty of literature—Belkova and Danilova—had strolled into the lounge. Whatever the women were discussing was abruptly aborted at the sound of Rechok’s fulminations. Belkova threw the old man a disapproving look he was too preoccupied to notice, then retreated with her colleague to the rear of the lounge to crack open a casement window and light cigarettes. Rechok was still quietly erupting over the new deal with Germany, but Florence was no longer listening to him, eavesdropping instead on Belkova, who was rendering her own tart judgments, albeit on a milder topic—an uninspired performance she’d seen at the theater. Florence listened just long enough to decipher whether the theater in question was the one where she’d worked (it was not), before deciding to pack up her papers and nurse her worries somewhere more solitary.
She might have gone on indulging her preoccupations with Yulia Larina well into the night had something unexpected not happened that evening to replace them.
“You’re wanted on the phone,” her dyspeptic neighbor announced from the hall after dinner, before returning to a squatting position on his shoe-shine stool.
The receiver still smelled of polish when she took hold of it. “Flora Fein?” said a man’s voice.
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“We’d like to speak to you about your exit-visa application.”
In the stale-smelling hallway the polish fumes were suddenly making her dizzy. She wondered if she’d heard correctly. She cupped her hand over the receiver. “Are you calling from the OVIR?”
But the voice at the other end answered smartly, “Come to this address tomorrow at four, after your classes.”
Florence’s fingers fumbled for the red pencil she’d dropped in her dress pocket, and then sought blindly for a scrap of paper among the slips tucked behind the telephone. She scratched down the street and house number on the back of a butcher’s receipt. “What department did you say this was?” But whoever had called had already hung up.
“Who was that?”
Leon asked when she reentered their room, where he was clearing the desk for their dinner.
“I’m not sure….” But a buried part of her mind grasped who might be requesting her presence. “No one important,” she said. “Just a secretary from the institute. They’re rearranging the exam times again.”
—
THE ADDRESS AT WHICH Florence had been instructed to appear lay on a quiet patch of streets just inside the inner loop of the Moscow Canal. In the rapidly dimming light an aura of Tolstoy’s genteel Moscow hovered over the pastel-painted houses and gated courtyards. She searched for the correct number in the murky light of streetlamps, wary of asking for help.
She told herself that it was best, for now, that Leon didn’t know where she was. Three years had passed since that day she’d attempted to gain access to the U.S. Embassy (the whole plaza, not to mention the country, was now sealed off). Leon had been enraged at the risk she’d taken, so really there had been no point in telling him about her other trip to OVIR to seek a visa to leave the country. Now, as before, she fortified herself with the knowledge that, as long as she kept Leon out of it, he would not need to be “responsible for her” if something unpleasant happened. Had she told him about the mysterious phone call, he would have undermined her plan, convinced her that it was a trap, and turned her hope into torment and worry. And she did have hope, a galvanizing hope, even now, after years of half wishing that her foolhardy application had been lost or forgotten. On the wings of this hope she kept her eyes open for the right address, even as another part of her knew perfectly well that the building she was looking for was nowhere near the vicinity of a visa office, or, for that matter, any official government building.
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