The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  “Feffer’s missing.”

  “What do you mean, missing?” Leon asked.

  “Missing. And still no word about Hofshteyn.”

  David Hofshteyn’s disappearance in Kiev had occurred in September. People had thought him ill and in a sanatorium. Now word came that the poet’s wife was in Moscow, searching for him at Lefortovo Prison. Stalking their floor as he informed them of these developments, all six gangling feet of Seldon seemed to Florence raw and almost physically menacing, making her want to get Yulik out of the room as quickly as possible.

  She put valenki on the boy’s feet, bundled his capped head in her scarf, and herded him to Avdotya Grigorievna’s room, giving the old woman a ruble in advance to take him outside. She returned to a room quickly growing thick with the acrid smell of Kazbek shag tobacco. Seldon was pacing back and forth, spilling ash from a cigarette that smoldered neglected between his fingers. He was talking too quickly to have time to smoke. “An organization with any independent political strength can’t be his tool, you see? The personnel are too cemented, too interconnected. That’s why the cadres are constantly being ‘cleansed,’ as they say. It’s the permanent revolution, see, so no personal ties can form that are stronger than his authority. I’ve thought a lot about this.”

  Florence looked at Leon in panic. A terrible force had entered their life in the form of Seldon. All she could think now was that it must not drag them down, too.

  “Seldon, sit down,” Leon urged softly.

  “I’d rather stand.” He stuck a finger into his collar as though suffocating. “They’re cooking up something. Have you been reading the paper? ‘Glorification of alien culture,’ ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’—who do you think they’re talking about? They’re trying to brand the Jewish Committee a nest of saboteurs. I’ll wager for a big show; they’re just painting the stage now.”

  It took a long time to make sense of Seldon’s staccato speech but eventually Leon and Florence unpacked his disturbing intuition: The press was merely ahead of the police; the recent disappearances were only the tip of a monstrous case being fashioned somewhere in the bowels of the NKVD. More and more people would be pulled under; no one was safe. “Wherever Feffer is now, I can only imagine what that second-rate bastard has already told them.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Florence heard herself saying, but she found she couldn’t meet his eye. “Anyway, why would they care about us? We only translated. What did we do?”

  He peered at her as though she, not he, was the one in need of a psychiatric examination. “What did we do?” He mimicked her voice in a cruel falsetto. “Flora Solomonovna, what did they do?”

  “For chrissake, Florie,” said Leon, turning on her, “you’re asking the wrong goddamn question!”

  “Well, what should I be asking?”

  “What is there in this room that we ought to be getting rid of!” Leon said, as if stating the obvious.

  “That’s it, man!” With that Seldon began pulling volumes off their bookshelf, unsettling the dust of their notebooks and papers. “What’s this?”

  “Theodore Dreiser.”

  “To the fireplace. The dictionaries, too. Get rid of everything.” He upturned a crate of back issues of Einkayt that stood at the end of their daybed.

  “Stop it, don’t touch them!” She flung herself at Seldon’s arm, knocking the books out of his hand, and then fell to her knees before the pile scattered on the floor.

  What she did not expect was Seldon bending down on his knees to help her. “I’m sorry, Florie. I’m so sorry.” He took her hand and held it with such alarming tenderness that she felt it like an electric charge. He helped her up. Stripped of the demonic will that had possessed him just a moment earlier, he collapsed in their sagging armchair. “All right,” he said, forcibly pressing his eye and forehead with the heel of his hand as if kneading the flesh of thoughts behind his skull. “All right,” he repeated. “We can’t sit and wait for them to come for us.” There was a certainty in his voice now, a deadpan calm that chilled Florence even more than his hysteria a few minutes before. He stared out at her and Leon but also beyond them into some permanent elsewhere. What followed—what he said then—might have been the reason he had knocked on their door that morning, or it might as easily have burst forth from some sudden protective impulse to which he had succumbed. There was a man, he said quietly, a worker at the British Foreign Office here in Moscow, who knew his brother.

  Leon: “Your brother?”

  “Half-brother. From my father’s first marriage.” A half-brother nine years older who had started working at the Royal Treasury before the war. A friend of his in the Foreign Service had recently been rotated to Moscow. Somehow the man had tracked Seldon down and delivered to him a letter from the brother in England.

  “Where is it?” said Florence.

  “I got rid of it. I’m not mad.”

  “You’ve been meeting this man!”

  He had, but he was careful. They met only in crowded places—in the metro, or at the fountain by the Bolshoi.

  It didn’t mean they weren’t being watched, Florence objected.

  They had a system, said Seldon, a system consisting of writing a note on thin typing paper and rolling it inside a cigarette. The man, whose name was Hank Kelly, Seldon said, would light up a regular cigarette and take a few puffs until he saw Seldon. Then he’d put out his cigarette and drop it on the ground. The one he actually dropped on the ground was, of course, the clean one with the note, which Seldon would pick up to learn any news, and the location of their next meeting. “It’s always a different place. We go back and forth like that. He knows the situation in the country. He says he wants to help me leave.”

  “Escape?”

  “Yes. The key is getting past security and into the British Embassy. Once we’re inside, they can doctor any documents.” He looked at Leon. “They can do it for us all.”

  She looked at him in amazement. What was he proposing?

  “Seldon, it won’t work,” said Leon. “They abandoned us years ago. The American embassy is as sealed as a fortress. Nobody goes in or out except by automobile. The guards won’t let you in even if you’re American-born. Why is it that none of the embassy workers have ever made any contact with the likes of us?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “We’re trash to them. Absconders. Traitors. We left and good riddance. They despise us, and that’s the truth. It’s no different with the English. I don’t know who this man is, but you need to stop this, Seldon. The punishment for attempting to escape the country now is execution.”

  Seldon looked at her but didn’t seem to hear what she’d said. He was in the thrall of his plan. “Yes—if I was just anyone, that might be true. But I told you, my brother works for the United Kingdom! He is an important person. Just listen. All this fellow has to do is get himself a car without the official driver. They’re all rats, naturally. But if he can drive the car himself, we can get into the embassy undetected.”

  She got up to stand by the window. She thought if she could catch a glimpse of her little boy outside, even for an instant, her heart might be better able to bear this conversation. Below, she saw Julian, a small bundled figure, chaperoned by the larger bundled figure of Avdotya Grigorievna, playing among the other children in the iron-fenced inner yard.

  Leon now ventured the honest question, proposing it gently, like someone talking to a madman. “But why us, Seldon? Surely, this is a risky proposition to take on your own?”

  But it was Seldon—his eyes full of that painful tenderness again as they flickered between Florence and Leon—who spoke to them as though they were the mad ones. “Don’t you know? Because you will perish here. Even as we talk they are signing your death warrants.”

  And now Florence glanced at her husband, to find that he was looking at her for an answer.

  “And what about Julian?” she said.

  “All of us. I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell Kelly I’ll
only go if he takes you, too. But you have to make the decision.”

  She looked at Leon. Hadn’t he told her that they had to accept their life here, had to accept the lot they’d drawn? Hadn’t Leon made her abandon all her hopes of escape? And now he was looking at her for the answer. He wanted her to tell him what to do.

  “I need to know if you’re in,” Seldon said.

  She closed her eyes and waited for her husband to break the silence.

  “We’re in,” Leon said.

  —

  TWO SLEEPLESS NIGHTS LATER, in bed, she said, “Do you believe him?”

  “He’s our only hope, Florence.”

  “It’s too odd, his whole story,” she whispered. “The cigarettes, the brother, or half-brother or whoever.”

  “I don’t know. If anyone’s going to pursue a plan like this, make contacts on the outside, Seldon would be the man.”

  “All right,” she said, sitting up in bed. “Suppose it’s true. Why would the British Embassy give two copper pennies about us? They don’t get their own people out.”

  “He said his brother is an important person.”

  “Oh, Leon, how much do we know about Seldon? He said himself they were raised by different mothers. He seems to think he’s important enough to be rescued, when…”

  He cut her off. “I don’t think he’d be telling us all of this if they were just empty words.”

  “He imagines things, Leon.”

  “He embroiders things, maybe, but…”

  “Not just this. I can see it in his eyes, the way he looks at you.”

  There was a long silence in the darkness.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, but I think you do know.”

  Even in the darkness Leon’s body exerted a powerful force over her—his smooth shoulder and the bones of his large hands, the muscle of his naked calf jutting out from under the blanket.

  “Don’t pretend you’re blind,” she said, her voice sounding exactly like Essie’s.

  “You’re speaking nonsense, Florie. Let’s both go to sleep.”

  But once started she could not stop. “Am I? That love-struck look he gives you every time you say something encouraging to him. Putting his hands on your arm like some debutante when he’s loosened up after a drink.”

  “I think maybe you should learn to watch your mouth.”

  “Is that so? Watch my mouth while I let that queer eat my food and ogle my husband on the courage of my vodka? You know what I think? I think he would be perfectly glad if he could take you with him—only you—and leave us here to rot.”

  And then her head was pressed to the wall, the fibers of the hanging carpet above their daybed stabbing into her back and ass through her nightgown as he pinned her hip with his knee.

  “You never get it, do you?” Her hair was in his fist, her head jacked back. In the white luminescence from a streetlamp she could see the contorted lineaments of his repulsed face.

  “Let me go,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and stifled.

  He released his grip from her hair and rolled heavily off of her. “Goddamn you.” He balled his hand into a fist. She winced as he swung his clenched fist into the stout torso of the pillow. “Goddamn you, Florence. Why do you think I want us to do this? We can’t live how we’re living, like trapped animals, bound, gagged. Maybe before the war I could, because I dreamed things would get better. But we can never be free here.” He turned his head toward the pale floral curtain behind which their son slept. “I don’t want him to grow up hearing the word ‘kike’ every day.”

  She steadied herself against the wall to regain some composure and tried to make her voice sound reasonable. “You think he won’t hear it in America, or England?”

  “Maybe. But once we’re out, we can go anywhere…even to Palestine.”

  It was then that she felt sorriest for him—for his falling prey to his own dreams of flight, for the way he had nurtured them in secret as she once had. “Is that your plan now?” She could not resist punishing him for them. “Didn’t manage to get yourself killed in the last war, so you want to pick up a rifle in the desert, huh? Get us killed by the Arabs instead?”

  “At least there the Jews fight out in the open—they don’t quiver like sitting ducks, which is what we are, Florence, make no mistake. Things are getting bad.”

  “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know they’re getting bad. You don’t have to tell me! Subotin called me in again.”

  Silence.

  She couldn’t summon the will to look at him.

  “When?”

  “Last week.”

  “How could you? How could you not tell me?”

  And suddenly he was off the bed, snatching the blanket off her as though to see what else she was hiding. Giving her that look like he didn’t know who she was.

  “I meant to, I promise. I was waiting to, and then Seldon came and…”

  “What have you told him already?”

  “God, don’t act so suspicious. What makes you think I’ve told him anything important? You don’t trust me.”

  “What does he want now?”

  “He knows things. He knew you and Seldon were at that rally for Meyerson. He thought I’d gone, too, tried to pin it on me. Damn it, I told you not to go. Every minute you spend with Seldon shortens your life by a day.”

  “Be quiet, you’ll wake up the boy. What else?”

  “He wants reports from Kuibyshev. Conversations. Anything involving the Jewish Committee.”

  He lowered himself back down on the bed. “So it’s true.”

  “I think if I just tell him what he wants he’ll leave us alone.”

  “And what do you think he wants?”

  “The truth! That it was a nest of saboteurs and spies…!”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “What does it matter? Oh, darling.” Gently, experimentally, she touched his shoulder. “We didn’t do anything. We only translated what they gave us.”

  He stiffened at her touch. “Don’t fool yourself. Everybody’s tied together with the same rope.”

  “What else do you expect me to do, Leon? We have a child.”

  But her sob-strained voice, her lachrymal nasal breathing had no effect on him.

  “If you think you’re helping yourself, or us, you’re making a mistake, Florence. Once you’ve given him what he wants, it’s over. Their attitude toward informers is no better than toward the ones being informed on.”

  “Don’t call me that! You think I want to be doing this? I need to give him something. I have to wiggle my way out of this. Don’t berate me, for chrissake, help me.”

  It was as if she had said, “Open sesame.”

  He turned to face her. None of her bullying ever exerted the same force on him as her raw need.

  He rested his face in his hands. “I have to think.”

  For a long time he sat like that, as if staring down into a lake. At last he said, “All right, tell him anything about Mikhoels. Whatever you give Subotin about him, it’s just more dirt on his coffin.”

  “Subotin is smarter than that—it’s too convenient.”

  “Name someone who’s already in prison. Feffer. He’s finished anyway. He’ll be the first one shot. I don’t know about the others. Seldon said Hofshteyn was sick when he disappeared. Maybe he’s dead now.”

  “My God, how can we be talking like this? So calmly! It’s so horrible. I can’t.”

  “Hold it together. If you lose your composure like this you’re in his hands. You need a strategy, Florence, not just tactics. It’s the only way. The important thing is not to name anyone who hasn’t been taken.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “We can’t tell Seldon.”

  “Of course not.” She gave Leon another pleading look. “I don’t want him coming here at all hours….He presses the buzzer and the whole apartment knows he’s here.”

  “Where should we talk then?
At the SovInformBuro all the walls have ears.”

  “On the street, in a park.”

  “And do what—drop cigarettes with notes for one another? What if he’s on to something? We need somewhere we can really talk, Florence.”

  “All right. But he can’t just show up unannounced and press our buzzer anytime he wants. Tell him he has to tell us in advance, and to come after it’s dark, and stay down below, on the street, and you’ll come down for him.”

  “I’ll tell him,” he said, “if that’s what you want.”

  —

  AT THEIR NEXT MEETING she sat watching Subotin write in his blank notebook. His hair had thinned up top. That was the other change in him, one she’d failed to notice the first time because his hair had been cropped so short and because she had been so nervous. Now she let her eyes stare at the balding forehead above that hateful, elegant face.

  For several days she had rehearsed the testimony she would give Subotin. She would “recall” conversations she had heard in which Mikhoels had voiced “nationalistic views.” She would tell him that after the war Mikhoels had spoken to his staff about the situation the Jews were facing in the U.S.S.R.: the evacuees coming back after the war and finding their houses occupied, the ongoing discrimination in hiring, and so on. He had insisted that it was the job of the Jewish Committee to intervene on their behalf. This, some of the personnel had felt, was a brazen overstepping of the committee’s clear role as a propaganda organ.

  Of all of this she now spoke to Subotin confidently, having the inner assurance that it happened to be true. As he recorded her testimony, his expression remained inscrutable. “And did Mikhoels implicate the Soviet government in this?”

  “He said not enough attention was being paid to the problem.”

  “He voiced the view that the Soviet government was negligent in its duties….”

  “Yes.”

  “And he felt it was within the scope of his duties to take over the work of the government.”

  “No…Well, he only wanted to draw the attention of important people to the fact that Jews had lost their homes when they’d been evacuated….”