Now that I had expended so much energy and come so far to take on his challenge, my reaction—or lack of one—nearly shocked me in its strangeness. Okay, Yashka, I said to him in my head. You’ve won this one.
And then, a second surprise: for the first time in my adult life I was not leaping to become my mother’s judge, or her defense attorney. For so many years, those had been the only two roles I could play. Prosecutor was the default—there was always an abundance of her qualities to criticize and impugn—but the prosecutor’s costume could be instantly traded for the defender’s if, and only if, I was in the docket along with her. Neither posture carried much meaning now.
The clock on the nightstand read 2:37. On the wall above hung a winter scene by Savrasov—crows roosting in naked branches. There was no denying the grief that had come upon me, a grief almost greater than that which possessed me the day of her funeral sixteen years before. I mourned now because when she had been alive I had not understood her. To the end, she frustrated my understanding, defied it with her own silences, her suppressions and elisions. Not about her past in the camps, per se. I was careful not to probe too hard into her tour through the bowels of hell, respecting her silence on the subject. No, what I blamed her for was another kind of silence. What I could not abide was her unwillingness to condemn the very system that had destroyed our family. Her refusal to impugn the evil that had deprived me of a father and left me motherless in those years when a boy most needs a mother’s love. I am not a crybaby. I am not one to nurse old wounds. Others suffered more, God knows. It would have been enough for me if she had said, just one time, Yes, what they did to you, to me, to our family—that was unforgivable. But she did not say those words, and her muteness—her apologism for the system that she insisted—to me!—“would always take care of the children”—became a second, no less painful, abandonment. In the sixties and seventies, when I was compulsively reading samizdat, I wanted her to be as cynical and disillusioned as I was. I wanted her to be angry for the miseries that she had endured: the murder of her husband, the forcible separation from her child, seven years of bondage and humiliation and hunger. That all this failed to enrage her infuriated me all the more. For it left me to carry the anger for both of us.
That she wore the habitual submissiveness of the slave made me pity her as a victim of her times, of her political beliefs, a victim of her stubbornness and of her illusions. And, certainly, she had been a victim, but until this night I had not considered how she might also have been something else. An accomplice to that very same system that preyed on her. Only now did I allow myself to consider the alternate explanation: that her muteness was not the submissiveness of a slave but the silence of an accessory. I wondered now if her refusal to condemn the whole machine in which she herself had been a cog, however small, was not—as I once believed—the consequence of lifelong brainwashing, but an appropriate, even honest, response in the face of her own abiding guilt.
Was she apprehensive about decrying what she herself had done, however unwittingly? Reading through the text once more, I saw that the reason she’d given for bearing false witness against Esther Frank was very odd: she was convinced that the same charge had been leveled by Essie against her. If this excuse was to be believed, it spoke to her terrorized state of mind: a hall of mirrors full of goblins.
But if she believed that Essie had it in for her, why would she come so belatedly to her former friend’s defense? Why did she admit to possessing the forbidden magazine? I reread for the nth time the list of seized items. It did not include any foreign magazines or other foreign bourgeois literature for which she was accused of having such a passionate craving. They wouldn’t have missed recording such a jewel of evidence. Perhaps she had gotten rid of it before her arrest. Why then admit to having possessed it at all? In the basement of the Lubyanka it would have been my mother’s word against Essie’s. Was it her conscience that made her fess up to spare her friend? I would have liked to believe it, but I didn’t think so. I tossed the charred filter of my cigarette down the shaft of balconies and stepped back in to resume my inquiry.
I was nearing the bottom of the pile when something occurred to me. My mother had been accused on two charges, of which the propaganda-and-agitation charge (58.10) carried the relatively lighter punishment of seven years. If she had been found guilty of espionage, the punishment would have been twenty-five years, or more likely, as it had been with my father, a bullet in the back of the head. Was it possible, I wondered, that her “confession” to sharing the magazine was strategic? That she was pleading, as it were, to the lesser charge because she sensed there were only two ways out of the Lubyanka—via Siberia or via a body bag—and she was holding out hope for the former?
I need to admit that it was on the hotel toilet that this thought came to me. Whatever calming effects I’d expected the cigarettes to have on my nerves, they’d had the opposite effect on my bowels. No sooner had I finished the second Marlboro than I felt my gut seizing up in spasms. I fled to the bathroom, archives in hand, determined to piece together the last days of my mother’s imprisonment even as my body was intent on expelling all the zakuski I had been forced to devour at the banya with my own tattooed tormentor. Or maybe it was nerves, after all; my overwhelmed organism seemed unable to process anything new until it had purged itself completely of everything dispensable.
By the time I was finished on the john I felt as light and immaterial as a yogi. There were black circles under my eyes, and my exhausted, ravaged reflection looked like it had lost a solid fifteen pounds. I was at last a hollow vessel ready to receive my spiritual nourishment. This was around the point when I got to the bottom of the stack. All along, I had kept reading. Based on her contacts alone, the case for my mother’s being found guilty of spying was a strong one. She had worked with and known spies at the Jewish Committee. Her husband, “the spy Brink,” had, according to her interrogators, already confessed to forwarding industrial and military materials to American spies, like the journalists Paul Novick and B. Z. Goldberg, who’d come to the Soviet Union to prowl around for state secrets. According to the logic of association, she was bound for a thirty-year term or worse. Which was why it shocked me when, in the second-to-last protocol, I discovered this:
POSTANOVLENIE O PEREKVALIFIKATSII OBVINENIIA
* * *
PROPOSAL TO RE-QUALIFY THE CHARGES
* * *
30 April 1950—Brink, F. has been accused of being an agent of foreign reconnaissance, and for an extended time of engaging in spy work against the Soviet Union.
We did not find adequate proof of espionage in the investigation.
But along with this—being anti-Soviet oriented, Brink, F. kept up ties with enemies of the people, concealed their and her own enemy work, and voiced her anti-Soviet views to them, as well as kept and distributed anti-Soviet literature.
We propose changing the charge 58-1(a), according to statute 204, to charge 58-10.
I reread it because I couldn’t believe my eyes. Just like that, with no buildup, her interrogators had dropped the espionage charge.
Had her gambit worked?
How could it have? Most of the seven-month-long interrogation had been devoted to “unearthing” her contact with “known spies” and espionage cells. In contrast, the only so-called evidence to support her being a dispenser of anti-Soviet propaganda was the temporary possession of an anodyne magazine that featured as its main story a flattering puff piece about a movie star—Ingrid Bergman in the role of Joan of Arc, hardly a symbol of capitalist decadence. Furthermore, it was a magazine she had had in her possession because she worked as a translator for the foreign press. Could they really argue that showing a friend an article about an actress could constitute “distributing propaganda”?
I was fully aware that I was attempting to use logic in a logic-free zone. And yet it was undeniable that—if measured by correlation and volume alone—the weight of so-called evidence in my mother’s case fell
much more heavily on the spying charge than on that of propaganda. How, then, I was forced to wonder, had the second charge been so abruptly dropped by her eager executioners? I inspected the protocols once more for an answer. There was no clue.
—
THE CLOCK ON MY BED stand flashed 3:12 A.M. I opened the mini-fridge and poured myself a club soda, then sat in the armchair, sipping it from a whiskey glass, gazing down at the white tunnel of Xeroxed papers on the bed. I’d have to clear them off soon if I planned to get any sleep. I finished my drink and rose slowly. With great effort I started putting the protocols back together. My eyes fell once more on the “Mish-Pok” page, which staggered me anew with its outrageousness. But now another thought arrested me: all this time my mother had never stopped communicating with her brother. She had kept writing to him, and he to her, through a Great Depression, two sets of purges, a world war, through the numerous trials and setbacks of her life. No doubt the letters had been heavily self-censored, and yet…in spite of the various pressures she must have been under, in spite of the various disruptions in their communication, she had never completely severed the thread of their correspondence! It was amazing, really. When I thought about it, there was no one else with whom she had shared such unbroken intimacy, not even me. I recalled now my mother’s final years, when I had installed her in her own Section 8 apartment in Brooklyn, in a largely Russian neighborhood off Ocean Parkway. She was happy to have her independence again after living with us in Bensonhurst. On Saturdays, when I would drive over with a carful of groceries, I’d often find her with Sidney, who would come from New Jersey to see her; the two of them would stroll slowly along the tree-lined median of the parkway. Sidney would hold my mother’s elbow as she pressed ahead with the help of her new rubber-tipped cane. I’d roll along past them in my car, unnoticed, before parking in front of her apartment building. It always surprised me how animated and unguarded her face looked in those moments. By the time I parked and walked over to them, they’d be sitting down on a bench, in mid-conversation, my mother chatting away as I rarely saw her do. Seeing me walk up, she’d stop talking and smile, happily but slyly, like a gossiping schoolgirl spotting an approaching teacher. I never bothered to ask myself what the two of them spent so much time discussing. They had their whole lives to catch up on, after all. And yet she was different around Sidney, more candid and innocent somehow, almost—I thought now—like the young Florie before all kinds of calamities had befallen her. A girl arrested in time.
—
I CHECKED THE CLOCK. Almost 3:30 A.M. in Moscow. I counted back the hours: 7:30 P.M. in New Jersey. I took my phone out to the balcony and dialed Sidney’s number.
He picked up on the first ring.
“Uncle Sidney?”
“Julian! Back so quick?”
“No, still in Moscow. Am I disturbing you? It’s probably dinnertime there.”
“Nah. They feed us all at six.”
“So early?”
“Doctor’s regimen. They’re as strict as the army with a quarter of the portions. It must be the middle of the night for you. What’s up?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“What’s the trouble? Work?”
Now I paused. “I have new respect,” I said, “for women who give lap dances to fat men for money. It’s not easy to put on a smile and pretend to enjoy it.”
I was glad to get a laugh out of him. “Welcome to the corporate world,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Mama.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I passed the Lubyanka the other day,” I continued. “You know, they’ve declassified a lot of those old dossiers.”
“It was no picnic” was all he said. I thought maybe he hadn’t understood me.
“Did Florence ever talk to you about it?”
There was a long pause, and then a sigh. “Some. Toward the end.”
I didn’t know how else to broach the subject, so I said simply, “I got hold of her file. I’ve been reading it over.”
A pause, and then, “Good for you.”
I couldn’t tell in what spirit he meant this, so I continued, somewhat faux-naïvely. “I’ve been trying to piece it together—her time in the prison. Some of it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I thought…I don’t know, maybe, if she told you something, you could help me get a better picture.”
“I don’t know what I’d be able to tell you.”
“Well, for one thing, they were charging her with spying and spreading propaganda….”
“It was all nonsense. She wasn’t any kind of spy or…”
“I know that. But see, they’d connected her to all these rings—these fake conspiracies—and then, all of a sudden, they dropped the spying charge. Dropped the questioning altogether. I can’t figure it out.”
I waited awhile for him to answer. From below came the sound of an occasional whooshing automobile along the night-abandoned avenue. I thought I’d lost the connection. “Uncle Sid?”
“Those weren’t her shining moments, Julian,” he said suddenly.
And I knew. She had told him. If not everything, then more than I’d imagined.
“I’m only interested in knowing what happened. It won’t make a difference to me. She’s still my mother. Did she give someone up? Did she make a deal?”
“No. It was too late for deals once you were inside that place.” On the other side, I could hear a raspy intake of breath. “See—there were two guys…questioning her.”
“Right. It’s here in the papers. Bykov and Antonov.”
“I don’t know the names. One of them she called the Hayseed.”
Antonov, I thought immediately.
“Half the time she didn’t understand what he was roaring at her. And he was always threatening her with rass-treyol.”
“With what?”
“You know—paint a little rubbing alcohol on her third-eye and bang! Bang!”
“Oh, rasstrel. A bullet in the head. But why the alcohol?”
“To prevent a blood infection.”
I smiled to myself and let him continue.
“Also, he was a real frothing anti-Semite. Of course, a lot of them were, but he was always shouting at her, ‘You ungrateful hag. You ate Russian bread. The Soviet government gave you a roof and now you betray it. For your people I fought on the front lines. For your ilk my brother lost his leg in the war…’ and so on. He’d keep her awake all night, then hand her over to the other one. And that one would make her sit in a chair against the wall for hours—no sleeping, of course—while he shuffled around his papers. He’d even make phone calls home while she was there. Ask his kid if he’d done his homework. Tell his wife he was going to be late again. ‘Hi, honey, long evening at the inquisition office again, don’t stay up.’ That kind of thing.”
“Why?”
“Who knows with them. Maybe to remind her that there was an outside world.”
“Maybe to show he wasn’t a bad guy—loved his wife and family? Good cop, bad cop?”
“Sure. The classic strategy. He was the one who’d tell her your father was still alive, that they were holding him somewhere in another part of the building. He’d say, ‘I’ll be frank with you, lady—your husband’s not in good shape. He’s been here a long time. We could make things easier for him with your help—confirm such and such and I’ll see to it that you get to see him. Maybe we can even arrange a conjugal visit, hee-hee.’ ”
“Was any of it true?”
“No, all lies! He was just trying to rattle her. He was taunting her. He’d say, ‘The question is whether your husband would be interested. After all, if he saw you now…’ This sadist, he’d look her up and down and say, ‘Yes, I can see you were once not a bad-looking woman.’ He’d put his hand on her knee and shake his head. ‘You’ve turned into a real hag here, Flora Solomonovna. You’ve really let yourself go.’ Of course, she hadn’t seen herself in the mirror in months. Her hair had gone gray and she didn’t e
ven know it.”
“But I mean, did she believe him? About my father. Did she fall for it?”
“No, she didn’t. Stop asking questions. That’s not important.”
How could it be not important? I wondered. But I had no time to pick an argument. It was 3:50 A.M. in Moscow. I had New Jersey on the phone. I did as I was told.
“Anyway, this guy—he got his kicks from talking like that to the women. They called him Karman—the Pocket.”
“Who did?”
“The women in her jail cell. There were about fifteen of them.”
“In one cell?”
“Yes. His left hand never left the pocket of his military trousers.”
“He had a reputation among the women?”
“You could say that. There was a girl in her cell—the pretty daughter of some disgraced big-time communist. Whenever the Pocket called her in, she’d return to the cell in tears. Evidently, he made her describe in minute detail all her past sexual experiences. Florence, I think, got spared because maybe she was too old. She was maybe thirty-nine.”
“So he didn’t touch her.”
“As far as I know, aside from the knee patting, his mode was that he just listened and kept that hand inside his pocket. That’s how he got his kicks.”
“Wow.”
“So, one time, the Hayseed, he walked in while the Pocket was doing his routine about the conjugal visit, his hand on her thigh. Well, he was disgusted by it. Maybe he said something, maybe he just gave a smirking look—but the message was the same: Even this hag?”
“So they weren’t exactly comrades?”
“They couldn’t stand each other. More important, they were afraid of each other.”
“Afraid how?”
The Patriots Page 51