The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  And now, two months later, here she was.

  Florence’s mind tried to rifle back to the conception date, which she fixed at just after New Year’s. She and Leon had seen in the year 1940 with a wedding—Essie’s. Their friend had found love at last, with a slim, reserved Jewish boy who shared Essie’s affection for the movies and her nearsighted, protruding eyes. A musician, he’d played clarinet for them at his parents’ apartment, where they’d all gone to celebrate after the ten-minute ceremony at the ZAGS marriage bureau, where Essie and her groom had stood alongside four other couples to be joined by the state. Florence had served as witness. That night, walking home in the falling snow, Leon had taken her arm and said, “And what about us—don’t you think it’s time?”

  She’d responded by laughing. “Darling, they only went to that registration bureau because nowadays nobody will give ’em a room of their own without a piece of paper. She doesn’t want to live with his parents.”

  “You don’t respect me, Florence. You’ve never let me be a man.”

  “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “If Essie can get legally betrothed to someone she’s known for five weeks, why must I be barricaded—don’t give me that look—yes, barricaded from marrying a woman to whom I’ve given everything for five years!”

  She couldn’t admit that the real reason for her playing hard to get was the other game she was playing with the secret police. A game that had as its eventual aim the severing of all her ties with Russia, maybe Leon included. And so, like an anxious philanderer in a spasm of self-reproach, she gave in to his wish and let Leon have what he most wanted. The very next day, they’d gone out and gotten themselves quietly hitched at the registration bureau. Their honeymoon was just as quiet, with no caviar or clarinets, but two voluptuously restful days and nights wrapped and tangled up in bed. She’d covered Leon’s face and body with kisses as if he were a bountiful human shrine. She did this because she loved him and because she needed to ease her conscience, to make up for the ways she had deceived him and was still deceiving him by carrying on private meetings with Comrade Subotin, an entanglement that—bloodless as it was—she knew was more unfaithful than any affair. And so, being scrupulous about hiding her tracks with Subotin, she’d let herself get sloppy where it mattered most.

  Her meetings with Subotin took place every three weeks as he’d ordered. For the first few sessions, he had not asked Florence very many difficult questions. He was mostly interested in her colleagues at IFLI: he wanted to know what they said during faculty meetings, who seemed to be on friendly terms and who on strained ones, which professors were allies or friends, and what was the basis of their friendship.

  “Belkova and Danilova both love classical music,” she reported blandly. “They go to concerts together at the Tchaikovsky. And I think Danilova’s son is in the conservatory.”

  It was gossipy, but not essentially “criminal” information that Florence believed she gave Subotin. She found she had a knack for describing people, getting to the core of their character in a few quick strokes. This one was overly congenial but qualified everything he said with stipulations, just in case, always hedging his bets. That one found a way to disagree with whatever you were saying, even if you were agreeing with him wholeheartedly. Sometimes Florence found herself preparing these little profiles as she set off to meet Subotin, or as she sat listening to her colleagues during interminable meetings. It was only when Subotin began to ask her more pointedly about the “counterrevolutionary” conversations she was privy to, and any “anti-Soviet” activity she observed, that her mind began to gyrate like a creaky, overheated machine. “I am not interested in your personal opinions about these people, Comrade Fein,” Subotin said one day. “I want to know why you aren’t providing us with any useful information.”

  “Do you want me to make things up? I tell you everything I hear.”

  “Then find a way to hear more.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Start conversations.”

  “Surely you aren’t saying I should be a provocateur?”

  “I am saying that partial information will be treated as lies. And lies, in your case, Comrade Fein, don’t instill in us faith that you can be trusted with a foreign assignment.”

  But even in her hunger for an exit visa, Florence found she could not bring herself to say anything truly damning about anyone. She knew that what she was doing was sordid enough that she didn’t want to tell even Leon about it, but she took some moral comfort in reminding herself that at least she would not dissemble, would not bear false witness against anybody. Subotin could use what she said as he wished, but she would do no more than act as a perfect mirror of her world, making up nothing, adding nothing. If Subotin was genuinely interested in her trustworthiness, then he had people spying on her, which meant it behooved her to continue delivering what she knew without slander or embellishment.

  But Subotin’s persistence was frightening.

  He was tired of her “womanly fluff,” he told her the following session. This wasn’t summer Pioneer camp. He was tired of wasting his time with her pointless gossip and insinuations. Did he have to remind her of the punishment for trying to leave the country illegally? He knew she was withholding—he had other ears to the ground. So, if she wasn’t interested in doing her duty by the state, she could prepare to sever their relationship and take her chances.

  She came home looking as pale as the ghost of consumption. She had eaten nothing since noon. Her purse seemed as heavy as a spade. Her feet were sore, her spine felt like badly warped steel, her nipples chafed under the caress of starched fabric that might as well have been mosquito netting. “What’s happened to you?” Leon said, observing her collapse on the daybed.

  Florence cupped her face in her hands and rubbed her aching eyes, then looked at Leon through her slightly spread fingers. The one person who could help her now was the one to whom she was too afraid to tell the truth. Leon, who could talk to anyone, would surely know how to talk his way out of this noose with Subotin. He’d be able to tell her what to say. She dug her thumbs deeper into her sockets to keep her eyes from exploding with tears.

  “Florence, has something happened?”

  Too many secrets. Too many…

  “Sit up. There, good. Let me get you some water.”

  “Leon. I have to tell you something…but first you have to promise not to get angry.”

  He smiled in baffled anticipation. “When have I gotten angry?”

  “You have to promise.”

  Too many secrets.

  And so she spilled the wrong one.

  Now he was the one cupping his face, his hand wrapped around his mouth, to hide the grin that was spreading from ear to ear. “How long?” he said quietly, through parted fingers.

  “About three months. I haven’t got it confirmed.”

  “Oh, baby, how could I ever be angry at you about that?”

  She shook her head. “Leon, how could we let ourselves get so careless?”

  He knelt and took her sunken shoulders. “This is the most tremendous thing, don’t you see? Oh, baby, no wonder you’ve been so worn down. You have to start taking care of yourself, Florie. Tell ’em you can’t keep staying late at those faculty meetings anymore.”

  That he believed her lies about how she spent her afternoons was more tormenting even than his elation. “But, Leon, it’s not the time….”

  “Shhh, shhh….let me worry about that. Shhh, you just rest now….” And he hurried to the kitchen to cook her up some dinner.

  —

  HER PREGNANCY TURNED LEON into an indulgent husband. He began to come home with delicacies: herring, caviar, chocolates.

  “How much did you pay for this?”

  “Never mind!” he told her. “Eat.”

  He woke up earlier than usual to cook breakfast, then sat staring at her with a bashful smile while she spooned up her buckwheat and eggs. Look at him smiling, sh
e thought. He is finally getting what he wants: a wife, a real family. Leon had grown up without a father, and it was plain to see how badly he wanted to be a father himself. She wondered why she had never understood this about him before: under all of his youthful wanderlust and adventuring had been a bottomless craving for a real home.

  Her own desires were unreadable even to her. She felt like Dr. Faustus: two souls residing within her breast, each one reacting in its own way to Leon’s tender attentions. She had a real life here—a good job, a loving man. What more was she waiting for? Women her age were already mothers of ten- and twelve-year-olds. The idea that she would be sent to America as some sort of spy was a delusion. What were the chances that she would really be sent abroad on “special assignment”?

  Not zero. Possibly it was all a ruse on Subotin’s part. But the NKVD didn’t need ruses. They could force her to cooperate without this carrot. Certainly their interest in her was long-term. But how long-term? She had to show Subotin that she was ready for the job, and to do it before her pregnancy started showing. A criminal abortion was out of the question—she could get tossed in jail if discovered. No decent doctor would do it, which meant she’d have to find some babka in the sticks who might maim her reproductive organs forever, or kill her. It occurred to her that she could take measures to conceal her condition from Subotin. Didn’t one hear stories about village girls who kept their pregnancies secret until the end? She’d take out the seams on her dresses, buy a looser coat. Men didn’t always take notice of such things. But would she take the risk of getting on a boat to America at, say, eight months? Yes, she would. If only she could just forget the word “America”! Couldn’t she choose the reality of her husband’s loving touch over the beckoning tide of her dreams?

  In the two weeks that followed, her schemes exhausted her more than even her pregnancy. She knew she needed to take some kind of action. And so a plan at last shaped itself in her mind: She would walk into her next meeting with Subotin and announce that she was pregnant. She would inform him that, now that she was going to be a mother, she would, regrettably, be unable to carry out any kind of foreign assignment. She might even have to take indeterminate leave from her job. And since she was no use to the NKVD staying home all day changing nappies, it was best if they terminated their relationship as soon as possible.

  But a week later, instead of requesting that he respectfully sever their connection, what she in fact heard herself asking Subotin as soon as they sat down was “Has there been any progress about my foreign assignment?”

  He glanced up at her from his papers with curiosity. “Are you in a hurry?”

  “No, of course not. But…I’ve been giving some thought to what you said.”

  “Yes?”

  “About faculty whose positions on certain matters of national policy aren’t always…clear.”

  “Go on.”

  “Some of the old guard. Of course, I’m not qualified to interpret their views….”

  “Your only qualification is your loyalty.”

  “There is a Professor Rechok; he’s in the history department.”

  “You’ve had conversations with him.”

  “Yes. No. Not really.”

  “Well, have you or haven’t you?”

  Under the table, she held her stomach with both hands. A life was growing inside her. She had always viewed herself as an honest, loyal, straightforward person, but what did all that mean now? She had to be loyal to her child.

  “We both have a break in our classes at one-thirty. He sometimes spends it in the second-floor lounge, reading the paper. And sometimes he mutters things…to himself, mostly.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  She struggled to recall Rechok’s reaction to the pact between Hitler and Stalin, the expansion of trade with Germany. What had he said? So now they’re friends, and why not? They understand each other perfectly. No, that wasn’t it. Her imagination was embellishing. What had the old fool said? He was worried about what to tell his students. Last year the dog’s a Rottweiler, this year he’s a poodle. That was it.

  “Rechok thinks we may be attacked by the Germans in the future. That Russia is helping them strengthen their military might by selling them materials.”

  “And you know all this from things he ‘mutters.’ ”

  “Yes. He paraphrases what he reads in a way that suggests so.”

  Subotin took some time to record this with an even, neat hand in his notebook. “A professor on the history faculty promulgating anti-Soviet views among students and other faculty, then.”

  “Oh no, I don’t think he shares his views with the students. I’m sure he doesn’t.”

  “How can you be sure? Do you sit in on his classes?”

  “The institute follows a strict program. Violations of the curriculum would be reported at once.”

  “We don’t need you to tell us what gets reported. As you said, it’s all a matter of tone. In who else’s presence has Rechok voiced these opinions?”

  “Well, people walk in and out of the lounge.”

  “Which people?”

  She took a siplike breath. Subotin’s eyes, she noticed, were almost aquamarine. Like water in a tiled fountain, still and cold. “Sometimes Anna Belkova and Maria Danilova come in.”

  “Were they present the day he was talking about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?”

  “They were.”

  “And how did they respond to Rechok’s anti-Soviet outbursts?”

  “Most of the faculty just treats him as an eccentric old man. They generally don’t reply to his muttering.”

  Subotin responded to this answer with a shadow of a smile, a sneer that pulled his lip toward the back and which seemed to say, You can’t have it both ways, golubushka. “So they said nothing, and allowed him to keep voicing his slander,” Subotin clarified.

  “I suppose so.”

  She waited while he wrote a report on a fresh leaf of paper. To her surprise, when Subotin was finished, he gave Florence the transcript to read over.

  The facts were as she had told them, but somehow the overall meaning was different. The transcript stated that she’d had anti-Soviet conversations with Boris Rechok, during which Rechok disseminated information about the German threat and contradicted Stalin’s economic policy, in the presence of Belkova and Danilova, who had listened to his slanderous statements without contradicting him. The report made it appear almost as though the two women were in agreement with Rechok. It also stated that Boris Rechok promulgated these views in his classes.

  “Now, wait,” she said. “This makes it seem as though Rechok were addressing them. All I said was that he made these statements to himself, while he read the paper.”

  “If he wanted to say them to himself, he would have spoken them to the wall at home. Obviously, he was expecting reactions.”

  “But Belkova and Danilova just happened to be in the room. He wasn’t conversing with them.”

  “They were in the room, and they allowed this dissembler to spread his lies unobstructed.”

  “But your report makes it seem like they share his views.”

  “Whether they share them or not is for us to determine. The fact remains that they had responsibility, as educators, as citizens, to correct Rechok’s lies, and they failed in this responsibility, as did you.”

  It was an impossible argument to win. The NKVD had their own logic, according to which passive witnesses were no different from conspirators. According to this logic, you bore responsibility not only for your own words, but for the words of all those around you.

  “But I never said he promulgated these views among his students,” Florence protested. She knew she was grasping at straws.

  “If these views are being shared with you, what makes you think they are not being shared elsewhere, with more impressionable minds?”

  “But I can’t testify to that.”

  There was a strange flash in Subotin’s cool-water eyes. They seemed to
go round in surprise for a moment. The grin on his face was almost like the stifled wince of someone who’d had a cheap point scored against him. “Very well,” he said. He picked up his pen and crossed out the words “in his courses,” keeping only “at the institute.”

  “Is this better?”

  Florence nodded.

  He passed her his pen. “Sign it.”

  She did.

  —

  OUTSIDE, IN THE FAMILIAR gated courtyard, the day-melted snow had refrozen to crust. She could see a sickle of moon in the east, but the sky was still lucent, dimming slowly now that the days were getting longer. The moist April air carried smells of boiled meat and onions. Florence felt sick in her stomach. She had to sit down. A shellac of ice covered the green bench. She could feel its cold, melting moisture through her coat, almost down to her ass. She had given them enough to arrest Boris Rechok, a person she barely knew, on charges of “primitive anti-fascism.” If they brought him in, would they show him her statement and make him respond? Well, why did he have to say those things around her? What had she been supposed to do? Lie? Then Belkova and Danilova would have told the truth in her place, and then where would she be? She had finally given Subotin what he wanted. But he had said nothing afterward about her going to America. On the contrary, he’d seemed irritated that she hadn’t been more enthusiastic in her denunciation of Rechok! And that look on his face when she’d objected to parts of his report—she couldn’t get it out of her head. What was that look? She had seen it before. Not on Subotin’s face, no. But—God, to remember it now—on the face of Sergey Sokolov so many years ago. A look of utter surprise—less emotional state than physical instinct, like a reaction to the smell of something spoiled. They were memories she had buried—as an animal buries its droppings—so shameful that her mind took great pains not to shed light on them. They came back now with hallucinatory vividness. She saw herself reflected in her old boss Scoop’s eyes when it was revealed that she’d helped the Russian engineers, and then in Sergey’s eyes when she tracked him down in Moscow. The look they had both given her—as though they had suddenly realized that the intelligent, quick-witted woman in front of them was at heart a fool. It was this recognition of her foolishness that she thought she recognized in Subotin’s eyes. He honestly could not believe she was haggling with him over the details. Had she forgotten where she was, with whom she was arguing? She still thought she could have it both ways—get into bed with the NKVD and come out with her slip unwrinkled, her soul clean and unbesmirched. Too late for that, little dove. She was like a whore haggling over her honor.