Her current strategy now consisted of stalling when it came to the question of Seldon Parker, and yet at the same time convincing Subotin that she was getting Parker to open up about what he’d been told in devious confidence by the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, in wartime and after. But what was there to disclose? She needed to feed Subotin’s paranoid fiction with little scraps, just enough to keep him hungry for more testimony. And now the only shred of incriminating testimony she had to offer was something Leon had told her to say, a phrase Mikhoels was rumored to have spoken in defense of starting a Jewish republic in Crimea: “You can live wherever you like, but you need to have your own house and roof.” That was it, and so she served it as her meager catch from working over Seldon Parker.
Subotin’s pen stopped making its scratching sound. “So Mikhoels was preparing,” he said, “to settle Crimea with Jews who would help America seize it for their imperialist purposes.”
“Well, I don’t think his aim was to wrest Crimea away from Soviet power. That wouldn’t even be possible.”
“I am not interested in your opinions but in facts,” said Subotin.
She would have thought he’d be intrigued by such an inculpatory quote from the head of the committee, but ever since she had walked into the apartment and taken a seat, Subotin had been visibly impatient, scratching down something with his pen, then crossing it out when she contradicted the testimony he sought.
“The fact is,” she said, trying to sound conciliatory, “that a plan to settle Crimea was discussed. According to Parker, it was the kind of romantic idea that only actors or poets would come up with.” She was on her own now, making it up as she went along. “I can’t say for sure how far it went. I’d need to work on Comrade Parker a little longer to be able to know.”
“You’ve had many weeks.”
“To prompt someone about conversations that took place years ago is not a straightforward matter. One has to create the right atmosphere of…reminiscence.”
She could give Subotin the “version” he wanted. She could do it now: say that the top brass of the Jewish Committee were preparing to wrest Crimea away from the Soviet Union with aid from America, and so on. Claim that Seldon Parker had been aware of all this, was in cahoots with it. It would lead to Seldon’s arrest, certainly, but it might leave her and Leon spared. Her offering would buy them their lives, would leave her family intact. Wasn’t that all she wanted? To protect them, to protect Yulik? Who was Seldon to her? Not her blood. A friend? What was a friend? A deviant was what he was, a shicker with an unsound mind.
But she could not do it. Maybe his plan was nothing but a castle in the air. Maybe this Hank Kelly did not exist. Maybe he did exist but would lose his nerve at the last moment, get them all thrown in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison. And yet. And yet Seldon had confidence. And because he did, so did she. Whatever pure or unwholesome motives had stirred him into coming to their aid, the plan he had conceived—the pact to which all three of them had bound their fates, their lives—was all she had now. It was the one hope she still safeguarded from all the broken promises of her fifteen years in Russia.
“You’ve had more than a month to ‘set the mood,’ ” Subotin said.
“Please, I’m getting closer. Last time Parker dropped by for a drink I got him talking but he would only stay for a short time.”
Subotin recorded this and said, “This was when? The Thursday before last?” He seemed to be consulting something in his notes.
“Yes, I believe so.” She pretended to think. Had she told him the precise day Seldon had visited?
“And how long do you consider to be ‘a short time’?”
“Pardon me?”
“Would you say an hour is a ‘short’ time? Two hours?”
His pale-blue eyes had fixed on her. Was this a theoretical question? What was he asking her?
And then, suddenly, her mind caught the meaning of his words.
Two hours.
For a moment, it was like Russian was again a foreign tongue to her and she had grasped the essence of the question at the last possible second.
Two hours. It was not theoretical. He knew. He knew that Seldon had been in their room two Thursdays ago for two hours. That was what he was telling her, in the guise of a question.
He was watching to see how she would respond. But how did he know? Nobody in the apartment had seen Seldon walk in or out. He had hidden in the shadows for just this reason. Only Essie, when she’d brought them the napoleon torte. Essie, of whom Seldon had harbored suspicions all along. Florence had never considered the possibility that her best friend could have occupied this very room with Subotin, or someone like him. Why not? An assumption so fleeting and vain that she had not even registered it as a thought—that she, Florence, had been singled out in some way for her insight and intelligence. Yes, a part of her had taken a depraved kind of pride in this venal, repellent work they forced her to do. This violation of herself, which sullied and antagonized her every waking moment, had sustained in her some shabby illusion: that she was shrewd, that she was, in some way, special. And now she did not even have that. An idiot was what she was, to think that Essie had sought entry into their company out of desire for Seldon. The blushing-girl act had been a ruse to worm her way into all the secret talk going on in Florence’s room. Essie running her mouth off about those magazines—what was it but a provocation? To get Florence to start yapping. Did anything else even make sense? Two hours. Those two words were all it took. They were enough. And now it was no longer Subotin who sat across that polished oak table from her, staring her down across the lace runner heaped with papers—his deck of cards. The reflection in the burnished, shining surface of that samovar from which no tea was ever poured was no longer of her and Subotin. It was of her and Essie. Subotin now was only the repository for whatever Essie had told him, or had told somebody else who had told him.
But he had been informed wrong before. She knew that. His sources made mistakes, or lied.
It’s your word or mine, little girl.
“The last time Seldon Parker stopped by my room,” she said, “I did get him talking. He wanted to talk, I could sense it. But, unfortunately, we were interrupted.”
“Interrupted by what?”
“By whom. My neighbor, Esther Frank. Seldon never talks openly when she’s around.”
“Why is that?”
Florence permitted herself a shrug. “Doesn’t trust her. Finds her irritating, and also…provocative.”
If Essie’s eagerness had been her asset, it could also be her liability.
“Provocative in what way?”
“She gripes. About the rations, the shortages. That the government is ignoring ordinary people.” At last, Florence found she could meet Subotin’s gaze head-on. “She tries to draw people into discussions, arguments they don’t want to have.”
A talentless informant, was what she was telling him.
“Yet you have never reported her anti-Soviet talk before.”
“You have never been interested in Esther Frank before.”
“You’ve listened to her outbursts and said nothing.”
“What can I say to a person who is determined to be unsatisfied? I suppose she compares her life here unfavorably to the one she had before, in America.”
She flinched as Subotin brought his fist down hard on the table, causing two sheets of paper to fly off onto the floor.
“You suppose. You presume. It appears to me that most of your purported ‘information’ is just that: Supposition. Presumption. More of your womanly prattle! You have been trying to elude this investigation.”
“But I tell you everything I know!”
She could feel the tears welling in her eyes. Her nerves were worn raw. She could not stand to be in this room one minute longer. “Everything I know. I have nothing to hide.” She let the film of tears fill her eyes. Let him think she was crying because he had wounded her honor.
“You have yet to provide me with any validatable information about concrete plans or activities of anybody in your circle.”
“But I can. If you just give me more time.”
He pointed a finger at the ceiling. “I also have orders, and I need results.”
Florence swallowed. The words, when she spoke them, did not sound like they were coming out of her mouth. “You want something concrete. She keeps foreign magazines in her room.” She could not look at him, though she was aware of his looking at her, aware of the silence.
“What magazines?”
“Noosveek. Laif…I don’t remember.” She wiped her eyes. “That is why Esther Frank slanders our Soviet reality, because she compares it to gaudy tinsel she sees in capitalist propaganda.”
Let him call Florence a liar. If Essie was reporting the opposite story from her end, let Subotin now sort it out. Your word against mine, girlie.
“Where does she get those magazines?”
“She works at the Foreign Languages Publishing House of TASS. Maybe there, or maybe from her foreign contacts.”
“You’ve seen these magazines.”
“I’m afraid I have.”
“Why haven’t you reported it before?”
“It’s vulgar frippery, nothing I considered substantive compared to the treasonous activities of the JAFC.”
She could hear him tapping his pen on the paper, perhaps struggling to decide where this all fit in. “You leave it for us to decide what’s substantive,” he said. She watched the top of Subotin’s balding forehead as he moved his pen across the paper. It would be her last memory of him.
—
FOR TWO NIGHTS SHE did not sleep. Yulik was sick again. The icebound Moscow winter, which lasted into April, had left him weakened with bronchitis. Once again he was plagued with fevers and the expectorant wet cough that kept him from sleeping for more than a few hours. Nursing a sick child left time for little else, and gave her reason to withdraw from the communal life of the apartment—to keep her distance from Essie without exciting suspicion. It was past midnight when she went to the kitchen to make mustard plasters to lay on the boy’s back and draw out his congestion. She was standing at the stove, heating the water, when she heard it—the voice of the building janitor, wheedling and slightly drunk. She set the pot on the table, beside the plasters dusted with flour and dry mustard. “I don’t know nothing about those ones, them’s all foreigners,” he was telling someone, the slurred words pitching higher as the voices ascended the stairs. She thought of running back to their room, to alert Leon, to gather her son in his blanket and take him…where? She tried the door to the unlit back staircase—the old servants’ entrance—and found it miraculously open. But what could she do—take her son’s heat-radiating, feverish body out of bed and into the stairwell’s dank cold? And then what? She had not seriously thought of running until now, did not think of it because she knew it was pointless. There was nowhere to go. And it was already too late. She could hear the footsteps on the landing, the janitor with his chain of keys leading the men in boots inside. They were already here, out in the hallway. And she, hidden just inside the door of the servants’ entrance to the kitchen, could not see them. But she could hear. A gruff voice demanding, “Which room is it?”
Please, don’t let it be ours.
“Who’s in the kitchen?” The squeaking slap of their boots coming closer.
“Here it is,” said the janitor in his raspy voice. The boots stopped just outside the kitchen door.
And then she knew.
They were knocking on the last door in the hall. Essie’s room. Three insistent knocks, and then an impatient fourth. The commotion was drawing the other neighbors out of their rooms. At last, the door creaked open. “Yes?” Essie’s voice was as weak as a child’s. They were demanding her papers.
“What do you want with her?” Florence recognized it as Avdotya Grigorievna’s voice—that old woman was afraid of no one.
“Back in your rooms,” a voice was ordering them. They had a warrant for a search and arrest.
And Florence, concealed behind the kitchen door, was too terrified to move. She could not see Essie in her battered house slippers, in that loud florid robe hastily thrown over her nightgown. She did not see her blinking myopically, blind to this ghoulish surprise, as she was blind to everything. Florence was spared the sight of her friend’s face—the terror mingling for an instant with female embarrassment at being caught in her slatternly state in the middle of the night. She did not need to see it. She knew it.
But she had not believed—not really—that anyone would come after Essie. Not if Essie was the apartment’s real informer. Because what she had said to Subotin, about the magazine, in her moment of fright, she had said only to cover herself, being sure that Essie had already whistled on her. But what had made her sure? Florence could not remember anymore. Two hours. Yes. The disquieting vision of Essie with her napoleon torte. But what if Essie was not the conniving one? What if someone else was watching the house—someone outside, watching whoever came in and who went out? Or the janitor himself. Or anyone. She had fooled herself into thinking she knew the whole dark clockwork of how it worked. Would you say an hour is a “short” time? Two hours? Nothing more than a goading conjecture intended to rile her. And she, out of her mind with fear, had risen to the bait. On animal impulse, she had abandoned all the safeguards of her “strategy” in order to defend herself against a cunning provocation behind which stood possibly nothing. Defending herself—with a reckless disclosure, with a lie!
Her back against the wall, she pressed her hand to her mouth to keep herself from saying the words aloud: What have I done?
But it was too late. No amount of doubting would alter the course of what was taking place on the other side of the door. The police had pushed themselves past Essie into her room, where they were bound to find, behind the bureau or under the bed, the magazine Essie had not yet given back—Florence’s gift, the final memento of their truce.
—
FLORENCE’S LIAISONS WITH SUBOTIN ended as suddenly as they had begun, with the telephone. At work the following day, she picked up the heavy receiver and was told that she was to be rotated to another handler, who would make contact with her in time. As the days wore on and the week of their departure approached, she waited in a state of agitation for a contact that did not come. Whatever distress the meetings with Subotin had caused her, Florence found this new, uncertain period of waiting an even greater strain on her nerves. She had no way now to assess the conditions in which they found themselves. At night, she was seized with a feeling of calamity and awoke in alarm at the slightest noise. Leon too saw the break in contact as a bad sign and told her they needed to be prepared. They both kept packed and ready a rucksack with clean underwear and a tin of tooth powder, some money, and a pencil, in case the police knocked on the door. They had rid themselves of most of what they believed could compromise them. At Seldon’s suggestion, Leon had dismantled the radio, throwing pieces of it away in different trash bins around the neighborhood. They had long ago disposed of their Hemingway and Twain, and their tattered issues of Einkayt. Now even old editions of Lenin’s writing were no longer safe, Leon claimed. One by one, they tore out pages from their books and ripped them into scraps to be flushed down the common toilet. Disposing of these scraps at night, Florence imagined all of Moscow clogging the network of pipes beneath itself with forbidden literature. Leon had told her to tear up her brother’s letters, but this single thing she could not bring herself to do. Instead, she preserved them rolled up inside a tin full of flour; she just couldn’t rip up the brittle, yellowed pages, her last link to a universe beyond their tumorous world of fear.
Only her resolute determination not to transmit her feelings to her young son—to allow Yulik to go on as if everything were normal—carried her through the weeks. But the boy, sensitive to every change, seemed to become afraid of separating from her even for short periods, as though he
sensed that if he let her out of his sight just once she might disappear forever.
She kept him home from school and let him spend his days looking at picture books in his cot. His favorites were the books that showed how to make models out of cardboard, with pages whose figures could be cut out with scissors to make parachutes or toy windmills, grain elevators, lighthouses. She sat up reading to him from books about aircraft and sea vessels, locomotives and steamships overcoming great distances. She let him nap late into the evening, while the red sun was setting behind snow-covered roofs. At night the boy would wake up and find his mother sitting on a chair beside his cot, leaning over him, her thick curls falling on her shoulders, her warm hand petting his cold, moist forehead. She would shush-shush him and tell him to go back to sleep. Watching her son breathe heavily while he slept, she experienced for the first time an acute sense of her mortality. She tried not to anticipate what might happen to the three of them. She could no longer picture a future.
I felt like Alice in Wonderland. The cat tattooed on the side of Kablukov’s breast grinned homicidally as it vanished and reappeared through a veil of floating steam. I tried not to stare too pointedly at Kablukov’s flesh while the three of us—Tom, Kablukov, and I—lounged like Roman senators with bedsheets draped around our laps.
Kablukov had left his Ray-Bans in the locker room, but his eyes were half hooded in the attitude of someone accepting obeisance. “Do you know why I like doing business with Americans?”
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