“I don’t know. I think something’s being cooked up,” said Seldon.
“Inside the committee or the whole bureau?”
“All the staff changes—the twat of a section editor they brought in. We’ve been preparing a series on ‘Great Inventions.’ Mostly culling from old years’ encyclopedias. I let the words ‘Nobel’s dynamite’ slip past the copy controls, and she went at me like a bag of ferrets. Didn’t I know Nobel had nothing to do with dynamite? He only stole the patent from Zinin and Petrusevski!”
Florence sat Yulik down in the zinc tub and bathed him in the water, scooping it up with a cup and letting it fall like rain around his pale shoulders. She felt deep discomfort with the direction of the conversation.
“I told her, ‘I ain’t the writer, ma’am. I just translate what I’m given.’ ‘We all have to be vigilant about inaccuracies,’ she says. ‘Inaccuracies, distortions, and political errors.’ ”
Leon took no notice of Florence’s displeasure. He permitted himself a laugh. “Lucky thing you weren’t making an entry on Edison’s incandescent lamp or she’d have charged you with maligning the name of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, inventor of the Lenin lightbulb.”
Florence ordered the little boy to step out of the tub and patted him down with a kitchen towel. She found Leon’s total faith in Seldon smug and disconcerting. Abandoning oneself to this kind of joking was imprudent even with one’s best friend. “Seldon. It’s late,” she reminded their guest. “We have to put Yulik to bed.”
“I’m feeling pretty knackered myself. Come on over here,” he said, addressing the boy, who was now dressed in a fresh nightshirt. “I got something for you.”
Yulik came up and was lifted onto Seldon’s knee. Seldon took the last two papirosi out of his pack of Kazbek and handed the empty pack to the boy. “A new stallion for you,” he said, as Yulik studied the picture of the horse and rider.
“We’ll cut it out tomorrow,” said Leon. “You can add it to your stable. What do you say to Uncle Seldon?”
“Thank you.”
Seldon roughed the boy’s hair as he stood up. “And thank you, Florie, for the libations.”
She nodded as Leon walked Seldon to the door. “Good night, family,” he said. “Sleep innocently.”
—
All in all, Florence thought, the war and its end had left them better off than before. When they returned from evacuation with their small son, she and Leon had continued to work for the SovInformBuro, the broadcast network, with its peacetime staff moved into a vast new maze of offices on Leontievsky Lane. Like Leon, she had stayed on as a translator. Her job now entailed scanning select American periodicals for news items that could be plucked out and repackaged for the Soviet press. With a glance at an American paper, she could pick out a story about the acquittal of a lynch mob in South Carolina and enlarge it to a feature that demonstrated the corruption of the American court system. Or rewrite a report on a coal mine explosion in Centralia, Illinois, to illustrate the disregard of mine owners for the oppressed worker class. It was not enough merely to translate a story. One had to translate it in a way that gave the correct depiction of events. A short news item on an auto manufacturer’s offer to replace its car owners’ tire rims with new, unscuffable metal rims could be restyled in a way that suggested that American capitalist firms regularly duped consumers with flimsy and dangerous products and were forced to replace those products only when their abuses were discovered. Even a story about a natural disaster, like a tornado that had leveled eighty houses in Woodward, Oklahoma, could be reworked to emphasize the low quality of houses constructed by corner-cutting capitalists who cared for nothing so much as the almighty dollar.
Such interpretive sorcery was a labor for which Florence was well suited. Her lifelong talent for flagging injustices large and small, which had left her feeling misunderstood by her teachers and fellow students when she was a schoolgirl, had finally found its ideal expression. For Florence it required no more mental limbo to interpret the foreign news in this reproachful light than it took to square her own daily life with the utopia promised by the Soviet press. Among her co-workers, she was not unique in this respect. Within the sealed offices of the SovInformBuro, the journalists and translators who every morning read and discussed the foreign dispatches, which were denied and forbidden to the rest of the population, treated these stories as wholly reliable, whereas the Soviet press reports chronicling bountiful harvests and anniversaries, unanimous votes of approval, uninterrupted workers’ achievements, and fulminations against imperialists were treated as fiction. To hold these two premises was merely necessary for the work and did not make one unpatriotic.
Aside from access to bountiful reading material, the job’s more utilitarian benefits included a larger room for Florence and Leon, in a better apartment that was also closer to the city center. Through the bureau’s channels Florence had also managed to help widowed Essie trade her double room and move into the single spare room at the end of their hall. The act had not been entirely altruistic. The discomfort of living in a kommunalka without allies still haunted Florence’s memory. Now she would have a friend who was like a sister just down the hall, to take her side in apartment divisions and disputes.
As a young woman, she had bristled at the lack of privacy. As a mother, Florence discovered the advantage of always having a neighbor nearby to watch Julian in a bind. Motherhood had recomposed her life along new lines, and helped drive from her memory the last of her nostalgia for home. Of course, she wished her parents could meet their grandson. But from the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past. Every morning, she gazed into her son’s small face and marveled at the alert, inquisitive intelligence she saw in it, his bottomless, frequently manic delight in the sensate world—a song his father might make up, the free association of words, the taste of a sesame candy.
And so, for his sake, she resolved to accept things as they were. She did not care to remember her despair before the war, her nervous exhaustion, her wild and foolish attempt at escape. She was arriving at a revelation that the secret to living was simply forgetting. Besides, the war was over. The country was at peace—with itself, too. The immeasurable toll of the war seemed to have satiated Russia’s enraged cannibal heart at last.
She no longer experienced homesickness as a great ache in her bones but as a manageable prickle that could pass with time. At her desk at the SovInformBuro, while her eyes scanned headlines from Cleveland or New York, Florence might carefully allow a little of the old malady to rise up inside her, but only enough—as she translated the climbing tally of injustices—to remind herself that she’d done right to leave. Only occasionally did she permit America to occupy her full consciousness, and that was when, in the seclusion of Essie’s room, the two of them paged through the glossy stock of foreign magazines that Florence managed to sneak out of the office.
Every now and then, there circulated among the translators’ desks issues of Time, Newsweek, and Life. Strict procedures were in place for signing out magazines to one’s desk. But Florence had discovered that if one of these periodicals found its way to you through another desk, and if the issue was not recent, it could go absent for a night, a whole day sometimes, without causing a great eruption of suspicion from the inventory librarians. And though no one would admit to it, Florence was sure she was not the only one who now and again left the SovInformBuro office with an American magazine hidden inside the creased newsprint of her Pravda.
It had become a ritual: once Yulik was tucked into his cot, Florence would take the magazine, still concealed by newsprint, across the hall to Essie’s room, where Essie would have prepared a pot of tea in anticipation of their reading, along with a plate of wafer cakes, the only treat they could indulge in without the risk of staining the magazine’s film
y pages.
One evening some months after Mikhoels’s funeral, and after weeks on the lookout, Florence was able to get her hands on a recent issue of Newsweek with youthful Soviet troops on the cover, and the headline “Could the Red Army Overrun Europe?” bannered alarmingly across it. While Essie fussed with pouring the tea, Florence sat at the small table Essie employed as a vanity, leafing through pages. It was their unspoken agreement that she would get first look at whatever she brought into the apartment. Some of the corners were already frayed and bent. A few of the pages were torn out at the root, to expunge, Florence presumed, the most forbidden material. And yet on the page right in front of her was a political cartoon—a caricature of a mustachioed Stalin holding a bird rifle and trying to shoot down cranes carrying bags of food labeled “Marshall Plan” to beleaguered Berliners. The man they were all sworn to love and fear was here pictured as a buffoon, a sloppy, spiteful poacher. Florence tore the page out and stuffed it into her apron pocket. She did not care to look at this cartoon in the presence of another person, even Essie. It served only to remind her of the risks she was taking in sneaking the magazine home and showing it to others.
“Enough hogging,” Essie said, sidling up in her chair beside Florence. With the corner of her blouse she wiped the lenses of her horn-rimmed glasses. “Jeez Louise, what’s that?”
“Says here it’s the Westinghouse automatic clothes washer.”
“Looks like some sort of jukebox radio with that window. Where the heck does it go, in the kitchen?”
“I guess so.”
Essie ran her fingertips over the wide glossy page. She adjusted the glasses that enlarged her pale eyes and suggested constant awe and bewilderment at whatever she saw.
A fact that didn’t need to be stated: it wasn’t for the articles they lusted but for the advertisements. Here, between the “serious” stories, were all manner of whimsical new inventions: “pressure cookers” that never burned a meal, “duplex refrigerators” that kept meat fresh from June until October, electric ovens that could roast thirty-pound turkeys, Hoovers that sucked dust from drapes and blinds, “pop-up toasters” in which one could behold one’s own reflection. Looking at these colorful illustrations, Florence was struck by the vision of the birth of a new era, one in which the technological ingenuity perfected during the war was now being turned toward a singular aim: the easing of the housewife’s burdens, a brawny project of domestication on a national scale. The high gloss of modern kitchens illustrated a life that was at once familiar in her memories, and not at all believable: a sumptuous, sunlit dream of the future.
“Look at the dresses they wear nowadays,” said Essie, “with the bow at the back—and that’s just at home?”
“Oh, Essie, I don’t think anybody washes the dishes wearing a dress like that, here or in America.”
“I wouldn’t mind my own ‘sink bowl’ to wash the linens in, never mind one of those machines. And a desk telephone like that, instead of that enormous thing always ringing outside my door. I’m the only one who ever picks up, you know, because I can’t bear to have it ringing all the time.”
“You’d rather seven telephones be ringing in seven rooms?”
“At least they’d get picked up once in a while.”
Whenever they got together like this, Florence had noticed, Essie got into the habit of ebullient complaining, speaking in helpless response to whatever happened to pop into her head. Outside this room there would be a dangerous edge to such innocence. And yet, in a peculiar way, Essie’s glib deprecations of their Soviet reality were the only appropriate response to Florence’s sharing the magazines with her. It was a kind of routine they had perfected: spurred on by Florence’s feeble defenses of their quotidian lives, Essie would go on to issue ever more mounting grievances. Sure, on New Year’s they got subsidized caviar and champagne. But who needed cheap aristocratic delicacies one day a year when they couldn’t reliably obtain fresh meat or cheese the other 364? Or fish that didn’t smell like it had been thawed and refrozen half a dozen times? Or when they couldn’t see the nose-and-throat doctor without bribing the nurse first? And Florence let her go on, let Essie’s mouth run with all the things she too was thinking but wouldn’t say.
If Florence had still been in communication with Captain Subotin, she might have begrudged her friend for exposing her ears to such damning anti-Soviet talk. After all, this was the very sort of colloquy the secret police would be keen to know about and surely punish her for withholding. And if she withheld it, who could say that Essie herself would not someday be hauled in and forced to describe it? Such were the perils that adhered to any group of more than one. But Essie herself surely was aware of these dangers. It occurred to Florence that her friend’s candor was served up as a sort of collateral of trust in compensation for the risk Florence herself was undertaking in smuggling forbidden loot out of SovInformBuro’s quarantined offices. Likewise, Florence was aware that there would be little pleasure for her in perusing these magazines alone. Essie was all that stood between her and the bitter despair that seized her whenever she opened their pages by herself. The diabolical paradox of her life was that her escape from America had been fueled by an ambition to flee the servitude of domesticity. And yet, at thirty-eight, after a day of working as an equal alongside men, her liberation took the form of evenings spent elbowing in lines for food, arguing with her neighbors over every square centimeter of ledge space and scrubbing her child’s linens on an old washboard in the common tub. Come morning, there was more waiting, this time outside the common toilet to flush the chamber pot from the night before. Her crockery and plates were all chipped. She felt deserted by America, and enraged with herself for the nostalgia that gripped her heart; and, still, she could not stop looking at the pictures.
She was glad when Essie changed the subject.
“You think Seldon might notice if I wore a dress like that, with a cut up the leg?”
Seldon again. It amused her how much Essie despaired of getting his attention.
“Honey, I don’t think he’d notice if that slit went up to the waist.”
Essie’s eyes met Florence’s in the mirror on the vanity table. “What makes you say that? It’s a rather mean thing to say.”
Florence glanced down, back at the magazine. “Essie, don’t fish for compliments. You know you’re perfectly cute without any fancy frocks.”
“Then what were you trying to say?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s an odd duck, Seldon. How about some more tea?”
“Sometimes I get a feeling he has a wrong impression of me.”
“What’s that?”
“That I’m a silly or a trifling sort of person. It’s only because I’m a little nervous around him. And he always seems to be testing me to see if I get the joke.”
“Well, I’ve never heard him say anything of the sort about you.”
“And, see, that’s the trouble. Most of the time he doesn’t notice me at all. You could help change that.”
“How?”
Essie smiled. “By inviting me in more often when he comes over.”
“It’s Leon he comes to see, not me.”
“Still, considering everything,” Essie said, modestly glancing away, “it would be a nice thing to do.”
Considering everything Essie did for little Yulik was what she meant. Watching him and warming up meals when Florence was out. Essie adjusted her glasses and turned the page to a silverware advertisement that read “The happiest brides have Community.”
“All right.”
“Thank you,” said Essie without looking up.
—
LATER, FLORENCE WOULD WONDER if everything might have turned out differently if she’d only made more of an effort to keep her promise to Essie. The image of the two of them turning the pages of Newsweek would come back to her vividly, like the last clear memory before the onset of a savage illness that turned everything into a malarial hallucination. Only then would Florence r
ecognize Essie’s wish to be invited into their company less as an expression of lust for Seldon Parker than as a longing to embed herself once more into the warm crucible of Florence’s own intimacy, to be welcomed in as a fourth into their tight little trio.
When she remembered the weeks of that summer and fall—weeks that raced by so quickly they seemed to her like slippery leaves falling and skidding underfoot—the only part of the story she would recall with clarity was the beginning, which was also the story of the radio, the real and secret fourth member of their quartet.
It had taken Leon all winter and part of the spring of ’48 to collect the necessary pieces to build his device. Shortwave parts were hard to come by. For months he had loitered around the electric exchange shops on the margins of the city’s outdoor bazaars, until he’d collected everything he needed. And then, to Florence’s wonder, he brought his autodidactic capacities to bear on a whole new set of skills—on the logic of circuits, pentodes, power transformers, and endless mechanical minutiae of which he spoke at length to Seldon Parker. With pieces of mounting wire and insulated wire, he managed to rig an antenna capacitor. With parts of an old Radiofront set, he tooled together a converter which made it possible to switch their longwave radio reception to the greatly expanded number of shortwave stations. Stacked together, the whole setup resembled a tiered cake, a miniature Rockefeller Center made of receiver, converter, and amplifier. Its completion precipitated more visits from Seldon, late evenings whose memory for Florence became a continuous wall of scratchy white noise, of sputtering and hissing, of jammed signals, and occasional rewards for patience: the high nasalities of BBC English, or the mid-continental drawl of the Voice of America.
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