The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  And then came May 14, and their already fervid gatherings around the radio acquired a new, exhilarated preoccupation. To Leon and Seldon, all scraps of news from Europe and America became secondary in importance to Israel’s progress against its foes: Egyptians in the Negev, Syrians in the Galilee. For weeks, Florence listened to her husband talk about the capture of Nazareth, the strategic value of Beersheba—places whose names she had not heard since her little brother Sidney had been studying Biblical history in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah.

  One hot evening in July, when the light outside was still as pale as at noontime, she sat at the open window, mending the scalloped edge of a tablecloth as feeble snatches of sound issued from the rubber military headphones Leon liked to cup to one ear while catching a signal. Out in the hall could be heard the squeals and the screech of Yulik’s new training bike as he rolled it down the parquet floor with the neighbor boy, Yasha. Florence felt a headache blooming in her temple.

  “They’re trying to jam it,” Leon said hopelessly.

  “Bugger, we just had it!” complained Seldon. He rubbed Leon’s shoulder. “The important thing is not to let the Old City fall to the Arabs now. We’ll take it back, won’t we, Florie?”

  We. Us. An unsettling sense of collectivity was creeping into Seldon’s normally egocentric speech, as if he and Leon had personally fought off first the British, then the Arabs from her apartment. She looped a knot. “Why, so they can die guarding a few shrines?” she said, and bit the remaining thread off with her back teeth.

  Leon put the rubber headset down and looked at her. “We’re talking about the Old City of Jerusalem. Aside from what those words may or may not mean to you, it’s of vital strategic importance.”

  She folded the tablecloth and got up. “Some of us have things of vital importance around here too, like mending your linens and making some dinner for our child.” She went to the door.

  “If you’re going to the kitchen, darling, pop a kettle on the stove, will you?” said Seldon.

  She didn’t answer him. “Turn the volume down,” she said to Leon.

  She too had rejoiced when the Soviet Union had cast its vote in favor of an independent Jewish State. That didn’t mean she was going to let her enthusiasm overwhelm her common sense. Their Jews weren’t our Jews.

  Every evening after dinner she opened Pravda to learn about ours. Composers, critics, directors who had abandoned their duty to the people or had “infiltrated” the Soviet theaters, the professional journals, the academies, with the aim of impeding the progress of Soviet drama, or literature, or art. There seemed to be no common thread, aesthetic or ideological, to those being exposed. Only the charge of “nationalism,” and their names bearing a distressing contiguity: Abramov, Adler, Kalmanovich, Pinsker, Segal. Were there any doubts, the original family name was printed in parentheses after the changed one: Gankin (Kagan), Lisov (Lifshitz), Bonderenko (Berdichievsky). Nobody at the SovInformBuro was unmindful of this new current. The Anti-Fascist Committee’s Yiddish journal, Einkayt, had been shut down. The committee’s signboard had been removed from its office.

  In the wide hallway, Yulik and the stout Yasha Gendler were still riding around on Julian’s new wheelie. Or rather, Yasha was pumping the pedals while her son chased after him on foot.

  “Mama, it’s mine,” the child cried in helpless appeal when he saw her.

  “Yasha, why don’t you give Yulik his turn.”

  “Just one minute, I wanna test the bell first,” called the boy, trilling the metal bell.

  Florence did not dislike Yasha, but privately she disapproved of the way he was being brought up. His mother, Rosa Gendler, always fearful that he would not have enough to eat, still followed him around the kitchen with a spoon.

  In the common kitchen Florence set a pot of water to boil and got a couple of potatoes from where she stored them under a square table. She rinsed a knife and began to peel them, then did the same with some carrots, and tossed everything into the pot. Down the long hallway, she heard the big front door clatter and open. Everybody had his own way of unlocking it, and Essie’s was always a key-jangling, winded, sighing entrance. Still in her coat, Essie entered the kitchen carrying groceries—some bruised tomatoes and canned sardines in her string bag, and a paper-wrapped kielbasa. “Mmm. What are you making?” She peered into the pot, the curiosity in her eyes enlarged by her glasses.

  “A little salat Olivier, that’s all. Have to finish this can of peas.”

  “Expecting company?”

  Florence glanced quickly in the direction of her closed door. “Seldon was just leaving.” She wished she hadn’t spoken. But what if Essie saw him on his way out? Essie set her woven bag down on the table and stood watching Florence chop vegetables.

  “Well, that won’t be enough,” she said finally. “What you need is a side dish. How about a little doktorskaya kielbasa? It’s finally back in the stores. Smell this, just like perfume.”

  Florence took an obligatory sniff.

  “I’ll slice it up and join you.”

  The headache was reaching around to her other temple, like a snail peeking its head in and out of its shell. The thought of a crowd in her room tonight was giving the throbbing snail permission to come out of hiding. Florence pushed back. “Not tonight, Essie. I’m just too beat. And I have to feed Yulik and put him to bed. Next time.”

  A well-worn disappointment gathered around Essie’s mouth. “Well, I won’t ask twice,” she said.

  Florence stood staring into her pot of boiling water. She tried to reassure herself that Essie really wasn’t as hurt as she appeared. She was aware, nonetheless, that she’d have no problem inviting Essie in were it not for Seldon’s petulant suspicion of her friend. Whenever Essie knocked while the radio was on, Leon would turn it off and cover it before she entered, then endure her small talk kindly, eyes darting with longing at the radio. But it was Seldon who, of late, radiated toward Essie a silence that was openly rude. When Florence looked up from her pot, Essie was gone.

  Florence left the kitchen with a metallic aftertaste of guilt in her mouth. She made a mental note to sit down and have a conversation with Seldon. If she could trust Essie enough to share foreign magazines with her, they could trust her to be present while they listened to these foreign transmissions.

  But, on entering her room, she found not the men but lumps under a tartan blanket. They’d gotten a signal. Florence set her salad on the table and lifted up the blanket to stick her head in. Leon and Seldon were huddled together in the warm dark, their ears cocked to the broadcast coming scratchily out of the speakers. The announcer was talking about an assassination in Italy, which was inciting communist-organized strikes.

  “What are you two fools smiling about?”

  Leon turned the dial to the off position and pulled down the tartan. “You won’t believe it, Florie. Golda Meyerson is coming here, to Moscow in seven weeks.”

  “The woman from Palestine?”

  “She’s leading the first diplomatic legation, they’ve announced it.”

  “She’s coming to speak at the Choral Synagogue,” said Seldon.

  “When?”

  “During the Jewish holidays.”

  Florence looked at Leon quizzically.

  “We’ll all go and see her!” Seldon announced with incautious triumph.

  Florence stood up and went to the window. The summer daylight was dimming at last. “I don’t know. I haven’t set foot inside one of those places since I was eighteen.”

  “You don’t have to go inside,” Seldon reassured her. “It’ll be outdoors, I’m certain. If Mikhoels’s funeral was any indication, there’ll be thousands.” He turned to Leon. “We’ll need to get there early.”

  Florence glanced back at Leon. He looked completely on board with the plan. “What do you say, Florie?”

  She heard herself give a simpering laugh. “Well, now we know how you like them, Seldon,” she said. “Built like a bulldozer with legs like tre
e trunks.”

  Seldon did not look impressed by her snideness. “Meyerson may be no beauty, but she’s one hell of a woman.”

  “That’s how they grow ’em on those kibbutzes,” Leon chimed in. “They’ve done what we couldn’t: manage to turn our Jews into regular peasants after all.”

  “Go and listen to her speak; you’ll hear she’s no peasant,” objected Seldon.

  Florence said, “Thousands of people—all the more reason to stay home.”

  “Fine, then I’ll take Yulik,” said Leon, as if he’d expected her answer.

  Florence bored her eyes into her husband. Did she really need to remind him, in front of Seldon, that the last thing they ought to be doing was showing up on the street of the central synagogue, sure to be crawling with NKVD agents? Was he so dense he couldn’t understand this? No, he understood. He didn’t care. With Seldon around he became like a boy, hungry for risk and adventure.

  “If you think I’ll let you take my son into that mad crowd…”

  “Our son. And he’ll be fine. He’ll sit on my shoulders like the other children. I want him to see it and remember it.”

  There had been a time, she wanted to remind Leon, when he would have forbidden her to expose herself to such foolish danger, restrained her with the force of a prison warden. When had he become the one who threw caution to the wind?

  Seldon, in his chair, was watching their exchange hungrily. Her face-off with Leon seemed to have kindled in their guest an amused if guilty enjoyment. No doubt he’d primed Leon for it.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  —

  It wasn’t long before Essie’s feelings about Florence’s slight showed themselves. At first Florence did not perceive any change. Whenever she saw Essie, her friend looked cheerful—joking and making small talk, or carelessly laughing with Yasha’s mother, Rosa. If Florence entered the conversation, Essie excused herself. In the hallway Essie acknowledged Florence’s greeting by raising her chin only slightly in a cool salute. It occurred to Florence that Essie’s new closeness with Rosa Gendler was a demonstration of her social self-reliance, her loud laughter a display for Florence. She stayed alert for a moment when she could approach Essie with a lighthearted apology, a jokingly remorseful defense of herself that would restore feelings on both sides. At last, she found Essie alone in the kitchen, trying to retrieve a hanging bag of onions from a hook inside the storm window.

  “You need some help with that?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  Florence slipped off her shoes, hoisted herself onto the windowsill, and untwined the snagged strings of the bag from the hook. “There you go.”

  “Thanks,” Essie said quietly without much gratitude.

  Florence hesitated for a moment. She had prepared a whole spiel, but now the words escaped her. “Seldon will be coming tomorrow evening,” she hinted. “Why don’t you drop in? You know, make an appearance.”

  “Thank you, I have plans.”

  “Oh, Essie—I’m sorry for the other time. I had a crushing headache and…”

  “I appreciate the invitation, Florence, but I’d rather not.”

  “Oh, come off it, you know you don’t need an ‘invitation’ to knock on our door.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “I feel bad. I want everyone to get along. You’d be doing me a favor.”

  Essie sighed.

  “What did I say?”

  “I accept your apology, Florence. I just don’t want to.”

  “Can you at least tell me why?”

  Essie squinted out the window. “I realized you were right, is all.”

  “About what?”

  “Seldon. Let’s face it, he has as much interest in me as a horse does in a wheelbarrow.”

  “I never said that.”

  But Essie seemed not to hear this. “I was chatting about it with Rosa and it struck me smack between the eyes that I’d been wasting beans of time on a man who doesn’t care for our kind anyhow.”

  “Our kind. What kind’s that?”

  “Oh, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I promise I don’t.”

  “You said yourself he’s an odd duck. Well, Rosa thinks so too.” Essie’s voice fell to a whisper. “He reminded me of one of those swishy fellas the Workmen’s Circle would hire to help us put on plays. In the Bronx…Oh, don’t look so startled. That’s what you were trying to tell me.”

  Florence felt the glow of humiliation spreading up her neck. “I wasn’t.”

  “Well, then,” Essie said, turning away again, “maybe it’s that dandy way the English have. All their men got a touch of purple on them, don’t they?”

  Florence could feel the shock gathering like palsy in her face, her mouth paralyzed in its alarm. She pictured Seldon touching Leon’s wrist. She pictured the two of them in the breath-filled, warm darkness under the tartan blanket with the radio. Suddenly she had the feeling she was looking at Essie through the wrong end of a telescope, with Essie appearing remote and horribly small. “Why must you utter every stupid thing that comes into your silly head?” she sputtered. “Only children and idiots do that.”

  Essie narrowed her eyes. “I’m sorry I said anything at all.” But she didn’t look very sorry.

  —

  FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, FLORENCE attempted to forget Essie’s malicious insinuation. But the distasteful notion had taken semi-official residence in Florence’s mind, and renewed its lease the morning when Leon and Seldon left for the Choral Synagogue to hear the ambassador from Israel, Golda Meyerson, speak. (The only centimeter of ground Florence had won was in forbidding Leon to take little Yulik along with them.) It stayed in her head when Leon came home alone that evening, intoxicated by what he’d witnessed. He didn’t even remove his aviator’s jacket, merely hung his flat cap on the hook by the door before gathering Florence in his arms and gripping her waist. “Florie, I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole street, it was like a river of bodies: students, old folks, men in uniform, mothers and kids! Thousands of people! I didn’t know there were so many Jews in Moscow. Oh, and the most amazing part—do you know the first thing Meyerson said when she got up to speak? ‘A dank ir zai giblybn idyn’—‘Thank you for remaining Jews.’ ”

  Yulik, whom she’d been getting ready for bed, ran up in his stockinged feet to his father. Leon lifted the boy to his shoulder and gave his son a moist kiss on the head.

  “Papa, you’re wet!”

  It was true. Leon was glistening. His hair—cut short now, so that only a bit of curl showed—was matted to his head by the sweat of his excitement. He set the boy down and wiped his forehead. “Oh, you should’ve seen it!” His hands were on Florence’s hips again. “Right in the open, they were calling out ‘Am Yisrael chai!’ When she came down, everyone was crowding around her. People were trying to touch the hem of her dress and kiss it. She’s speaking again on Yom Kippur, and this time we’re all going.”

  “I wanna go!” cried Yulik.

  “That’s right. You’ll go with your dad. I’ll teach you a new song, ‘Am Yisrael, am Yisrael, am Yisrael chai!’ ” Leon sang.

  Yulik started hopping. “Ha misraim, ha misraim…” He was chanting it louder than Florence thought advisable. The smart thing—the wifely thing, she knew—was to pretend to share Leon’s excitement. Later, in bed, she could tell him quietly of her misgivings. And yet something about his grotesquely happy face warned her that he was in the thrall of a new love affair—not with Seldon Parker, as Essie had implied, but with something still more dangerous.

  “Is she the Messiah, that people need to kiss the hem of her gown?” Florence heard herself say.

  She could tell from the unpleasant bitterness around Leon’s mouth that she’d bruised something delicate. “So clever, Florie. So it doesn’t mean anything to you?”

  “It means something,” she said. “It means all the ones who touched her holy robe will be called in for questioning next week. And I hope, for your s
ake, it was well worth it when they ask you to explain, inside the ‘Special Department’ at the SovInformBuro, what you were doing there.”

  “Ha misraim, ha misraim!” Yulik continued chanting in his high voice.

  “Enough making that noise already!”

  The boy stopped singing, startled. He glanced at his father.

  “Don’t shout at him.”

  “Go wash your face, and get some water for your teeth,” she ordered Yulik.

  “There were thousands of people. Nobody saw who was who,” said Leon.

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “If they call me in, then they’ll call in Seldon too, and dozens of others.”

  “What happens to them or to Seldon Parker is of no concern to me,” she said, getting the child’s toothbrush off the windowsill. “You can be sure that crowd was crawling with agents.”

  “So was Mikhoels’s funeral, for heaven’s sake! What do you expect me to do—stop living my life? I can’t worry about them every minute. Tell me, what are you frightened of: that the word ‘Jew’ was said in public today? Not any more than it was said at all those rallies the committee held during the war.”

  “That was the war! There was a reason for it—we were raising money for the army.”

  “Understood. It was fine to say it when they told us to say it. But not now, not when people actually believe it.”

  “Are those your words or Mr. Parker’s?” she said.