The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  The queasiness was overpowering. Florence needed to put her head between her knees just to keep breathing. Beads of sweat slid down between her breasts. Something percolated in her gut. And then all illusion of control vanished and she was retching, paralyzed by mutinous spasms until there was nothing left to heave but a thin, watery fluid. It spilled and dribbled on her shoes.

  The necessity of sitting back up and cleaning herself now proposed a host of dangers. Somebody was touching her. Florence wiped her mouth with a corner of her kerchief and turned to see who it was. A tiny old babushka in a lumpy coat was sitting beside her. All the lines in her face crinkled imploringly. “Are you all right, dearie?” She touched Florence’s shoulder, but this only caused Florence to jerk. Who was this woman? Was she one of them? Her eyes cast up and around the surrounding buildings. Did one of Subotin’s windows face this little quadrangle? Were they watching her even now? She flicked her chin at the old woman. “Mind your own damn business,” she said and, clutching her bag, made haste out of the courtyard.

  Karl Marx was right: we are not the rulers of our destinies. For all my renouncements of the secular prophet of my youth, I was ready to concede this truth as I sat in helpless silence in the L-Pet conference room. When our meeting came to an end we were down to three bids, two reasonable ones and the hot-air balloon floated by the boys from Geneva. I’d found myself unable to prune Sausen Petroleum out of the running completely. Yet in spite of the pressure from Kablukov I had not been able to mount a convincing defense, either. So I stayed mostly mute through the ceremony of selection, conscious throughout of Kablukov groaning subaudibly in his chair like a disappointed father. Tom looked no less displeased with me when we adjourned (early, so that the men of L-Pet could flee town in their Cherokees and get to their Zhukovka dachas before sunset). With about as much sincerity as I’d brought to our meeting, I told him I had food poisoning, then fled. I also had a dacha to hurry to, if I wanted to lose no time in beating some sense into my offspring.

  But, once outside, I found myself unable to work up the will to head straight to my hotel and pack. Instead, I traced a long arc around the Bolshoi, trying not to think about how I’d failed Lenny. I felt plunged in disgrace and ugliness. It was miserably obvious that I had actually believed that my pathetic banter with Kablukov at the Metropol would get him over “to my side.” Stupidly, I had only brought more chaos into my child’s already exposed life. The only way to get Lenny out of danger was to tell him the truth. This, I knew, was the reason I was in no hurry to get to the dacha to see him. To say what? That I had done the one thing I’d always warned him not to do: opened my mouth? So mired was I in my self-contempt that I suddenly realized I had no idea where I was walking. And here, against a blinding setting sun in Theater Square, I looked up to behold a scene at once ancient and intimately familiar: Beneath the statue of Karl Marx were half a dozen shabbily dressed, graying men—all of them about my age—gathered around open attaché cases and felt display boards to which were mounted hundreds of tiny lapel pins—those antique nickel-and-enamel-painted znachki that, like a thousand other amateur collectors, I’d once bought and mounted to felt boards of my own. These falerists had assembled to compare their rare specimens, to trade or to sell them (to profiteer, as might say Mr. Marx, in whose shadow all this speculation was happening). The znachki caught the five o’clock sun like scraps of gold and touched a deep memory of Lenny at five years old, a demon of childish excitement, jumping at a gift of a new znachok I’d brought back from one of my latest research trips to Leningrad. And all at once I was remembering kneeling beside him as he removed the souvenir pin from its acetate pocket—a dime-sized Yuri Gagarin head in a cosmonaut’s helmet or a Vostok 2 aircraft hurtling into black space—my fingers helping him affix the small bent pin carefully to the velvet lining of his own collector’s case.

  As playthings these lapel pins could not have been much fun for a five-year-old. How much of the excitement, I now wondered, was Lenny’s, and how much was my own? Of the thousands of pins minted to commemorate every possible enterprise, sports club, city centennial, historical battle, our favorites were those celebrating space travel. Unlike the others, which were merely stylized paeans to socialist construction, the space pins were emblems of a more universal hope—a hope that we could, quite literally, rise above our failings as a species through technology, through science, through optimism. Was I, even then, conveying to him the sort of man I wished him to become—a scientist or an engineer, a believer in the reassurances of steady, incremental achievement? Were these the same expectations that were now at the heart of the belligerent hypersensitivity that reared itself whenever the subject of Lenny’s work—or lack of it—arose? I wanted to assure him that no good parent took satisfaction in his child’s failures. I happened to know a little something about how crushing defeat can feel, what a near decade of wasted years can do to the soul. Had I felt it possible to engage in such a conversation without risking some high point of drama or misunderstanding, I would have told my son about May 12, 1977, the day I was flatly deserted by my illusions. The day this beloved city of mine, to which he was still so in thrall, stopped being home.

  During the years when I was buying Lenny his znachki, I had been working toward my candidate-of-sciences degree—equivalent to a Ph.D.—in hydrodynamics, pursued in between full-time work and minding a young family. Our apartment in those days consisted of two rooms. Our marital bed was a sofa Lucya and I unfolded each night so the children could sleep in a room of their own, and my “study,” where I performed calculations late into the night, was a corner of our negligible kitchen. At thirty-four, I already had one brief failed marriage under my belt (made disastrously while I was still a university student). This time around I was “getting it right”—remarried to a smart and devoted girl who was also an adoring mother of our kids, and who heroically bore both shares of the housework to make it possible for me to pursue my dream of a doctorate. Every several months—over a period of six years—I would travel to the wharves in Leningrad to perform studies into gases that might be used to separate ice from its grip on the surface of water. The practical applications of the research were numerous. In those days, the conventional methods of sending ships through ice-cold waters still involved heavy diesel engines to compress massive quantities of air; I was looking into ways to deploy gases from a ship’s hull to reduce drag, to reduce the bulk of unnecessary machinery, and to employ redesigned gas turbine engines, diffusers, and expansion chambers to generate hot compressed gas and save fuel. My ambition was nothing short of reshaping the discipline of shipbuilding.

  I can no longer remember all the faces of those deciding my fate the day of my doctoral defense, or their questions. I remember that they asked me many. If any member of the review board was especially impressed with my findings, the enthusiasm was well hidden. By the time I left the room, I was covered in sweat. My pulse was still racing a good twenty minutes later, as I waited for the committee’s decision in an empty hallway of the Institute of Control Sciences. At last, one of the three came out of the room and approached me. He was short and seemed to be compensating for his small stature with an enormous mustache. During the prolonged interrogation, he had been the most encouraging of my work. “Some interesting ideas there, Brink,” he said to me in the corridor. He paused to repeat my name, “Brink,” somewhat speculatively. “I saw you were born in Kuibyshev. Your family from there?”

  He was suggesting that he was familiar with my passport, which included, of course, the notorious “fifth column” revealing my American nationality and my Jewish last name. But at that moment I was sure that he was suggesting I wasn’t a “real Muscovite,” so I set him straight. “My parents were both from Moscow,” I informed him. “I was born during the war evacuation.”

  “I’m from Kazan myself,” he said. “Not many of us Volgans here, are there?” He smiled. I had no idea what he was talking about. At least not then.

  “I’ll be sq
uare with you, Brink,” he continued, gazing out the window. “I was hoping you might be from Kuibyshev, or someplace far off like that, because here in Moscow we have our production norms, if you will.” He pulled a cigarette neatly out of his shirt pocket and lit it. “The trouble is,” he said, after taking a hungry drag and clearing his throat, “we can’t give you a degree until we give it to everyone ahead of you. And in your case, Comrade, it’s a clogged pipeline.”

  He looked at me to see if I understood him. I said nothing.

  “So you have a choice,” he continued. “Wait six years in our queue, or”—he gestured toward the window, including in the sweep of his hand the whole of the Soviet empire west of the Volga—“you can go somewhere else—say, to Kuibyshev—enroll in their university, and defend your project through a less high-profile institute without our…restrictions.”

  As with all bad news, the meaning of his words failed at first to register. I watched the caterpillar of his mustache flexing, but the message entering my ears was as abstract as a radio broadcast. Possibly a catastrophe, yes, but not necessarily applying to me.

  I wasn’t a complete dolt. I knew about the Jewish quota system in Russia’s universities. I had beaten its odds before; maybe I thought I’d go on beating them forever. Whatever handicaps my “nationality” had inflicted on me, I’d been coping with them since I was six with as much patience as lefties cope with the tyranny of right-turning doorknobs, with the monocracy (in those days at least) of right-handed penmanship, scrupulously overcorrecting for my disadvantage with quiet, monumental effort.

  But this was a much narrower hoop than the ones I’d jumped through before. This felt like a needle’s eye. (Later, I’d learn that fewer than 5 percent of candidate-of-sciences degrees at the institute in any single year were awarded to Jews. But at that moment, at the age of thirty-four, I was once again little Abrashka in the children’s home, not sure if I was going to sob or throw a punch.) Why had the man come out to speak to me personally? The rejection of my doctorate could have been conveyed by dry official means. Something about him told me that he had come to speak to me not as an emissary of the committee, but out of some private discomfort. In his manner I detected the faintest note of apology.

  I walked out, my dissertation manuscript inside my briefcase, out of the sallow lobby and down the grassy median of the boulevard. It was a beautiful day made more brilliant by a recent rain, one of those days when you noticed for the first time that whole limbs of trees had gone green with budding leaves, when telephone wires suddenly swarmed with noisy flocks of swallows. And suddenly all of it—all that beauty, all the scholarly aspiration I’d basked in for seven years—was repellent to me. None of it was any longer mine. The sight of their buildings made me sick. The sight of their statues, even their trees—all of it sent a wave of nausea down my throat. After an hour, I was able to collect myself enough to find a pay phone and call my wife. “Start selling our stuff,” I told her. “We’re leaving this cursed place.”

  The first mass migration was still two years away, the first murmurs about the gates being opened only then just spreading. But I already knew that when the day came I’d be ready to leave everything behind. I would cross the border in my underpants if I had to.

  Florence’s meeting with Subotin had left her brutally altered. In the morning, she did not get up until Leon was gone. On the desk by the bed he had left milk and a pan of groats for her. Both had gone cold.

  The day was gelid and bright with spring-melting snow. Florence rolled up her stockings and put on a hat. It was Friday and she had no classes to teach. There was only one person she had to go see.

  From the nickel-bright street she entered the darkness of the theater; its smells of dust and powder accosted her with their familiarity. Down a narrow hall she made her way to the chamber where the attendant sat with her knees apart, boiling tea on her rusted kettle.

  “Flora?”

  “Agnessa Artemovna.” Florence removed her hat. “I need your help.”

  —

  TWO KILOMETERS OUT OF Moscow, modern life dropped away as suddenly as an ocean floor. From the window of the train she watched the muddy countryside encroach on the city. Three hundred rubles—most of her month’s salary—were stacked inside her coat pocket. Off the main road, peasant women squatted on muddy banks to wash laundry in a cold stream. Time hung over everything like a dead weight.

  She found the cabin down a dirt road from the village post office, out of sight behind a stand of pines. An old izba with carved picture-book windows, it reminded Florence of Baba Yaga’s house, except it wasn’t standing on chicken legs. The sister was a thickset, imposing woman whose faint resemblance to Agnessa Artemovna was well concealed behind rosacea-complected cheeks and a ruddy nose. She led Florence to an alcove formed by the back wall of a wood stove and a sideboard. In the alcove stood an iron bed, a board on the metal webbing. Florence removed her muddy knee-boots and unrolled her stockings while the woman prepared. The room had a cloying, churchlike smell from the candle that flickered in the sideboard’s beveled mirror. She told Florence to undress while she went to boil water in a kettle.

  With her head back so the room tilted, Florence could see the chiffonier and the conserves jar of alcohol in which the woman kept the instruments of her trade. Bubbles clung to the inside like fizz in a glass of champagne that was going flat. The sight of them made Florence weak with nausea. The woman brought her a stale-smelling pillow to bite on for the pain. “You can moan,” she instructed, “but don’t scream.”

  A small, piercing ache as she inhaled, and then pain that could make you forget your own name. The pillow between her teeth tasted sour with the saliva and sebum of others.

  “Steady, steady.” Her feet were tied to the bed frame. The woman hummed as she worked—“Lyuli, Lyuli”—lullabying while she scooped out the life inside. The flavor of blood filled the air as the daylight grew grainy. The leaping candle on the bureau turned the mirror into a slab of light.

  On the meadow stood a little birch tree.

  Lyuli, Lyuli, there it stood.

  She came to with the stout woman sponging her brow.

  “Up, up now.”

  Her head was still full of echoes. “I can’t move.”

  “Come, off you go.”

  If the hemorrhaging didn’t stop, she was instructed to go to a doctor and tell him she had fallen on the ice and suffered a miscarriage.

  She took the evening train back to Moscow, weighed down by the bandages in her underwear as if by sandbags. Every moment, she felt herself losing blood. Around her, figures fluctuated like pulsing ghosts. She told herself she’d been spared more barbaric methods—the carbonate douches and mustard baths. Blood soaked through her stockings and skirt.

  Leon found her on the daybed, trembling as if with a chill. He hurried to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of pearl-barley soup and a mug of steaming milk. He sat Florence up and placed the mug to her lips, watching as she made an effort to swallow. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead and upper lip while she sipped. “You’re burning up!” He tried to feed her the soup with a spoon, but she refused, pulling the blanket tightly around herself.

  “You have to eat.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Then eat for the baby.”

  “There is no baby.”

  “You’re all hot, Florie. You’re confused.”

  He attempted to remove her blanket. This time she had no strength to stop him.

  She had never heard a sound of such anguish come out of a human mouth: “Oy vey z’mir, Florence! Oy mayn gut, oy gu-u-u-t-t…” He was inhaling the words as he howled them, his fists at his temples. Madness had taken hold of him in spasms. He rocked back and forth, clutching at the bloodied sheet. “Oy mayn gut, what have you done?”

  “I couldn’t let him know, Leon.”

  “We have to take you to a hospital.”

  “No. Let me die here.”

  “Tell me who d
id this!”

  “I couldn’t go through with it, Leon. If he found out, I’d be trapped forever. It would have all been for nothing….”

  “Who, goddamn it?”

  Then it all spilled out of her, in incoherent, hopeless sobs: the visit to OVIR, the meetings with Subotin, the long, doomed course of her ruination. “He said he would send me home. He told me I would see my family….” She could hear just how weak, how fatuous these promises sounded. She summoned the strength for the abject confessions, believing them to be her last.

  The intensity of his suffering as he listened seemed to turn his black eyes blue, to make them glow like diamonds. He would know now how she’d tried to flee from him. He would recognize at last what kind of whore he’d bound his fate with. On the abortionist’s bed, Florence had believed she would die. She had begged Providence to give her another chance among the living. But the world was mechanistic, and now she prepared herself to pay the price. Leon continued to clutch the sheet. Now he buried his face in it, as if to inhale the redolence of its carnage.