Still she was glad when, after the flurry of morning activity, the hair brushing and feeding and getting-the-kids-ready-for-school, they finally hurried off and left her alone. Through the kitchen window, sipping her tea, Florence watched autumn dissolve the last of the summer warmth with endless rains. A moist haze covered the towering buildings in this featureless new neighborhood. The rain washed the potholed streets while the new metro, nine stories below, swallowed and disgorged commuters. With her fractured ankle healing in its cast, she’d been obliged to cancel most of her lessons. For a time, some of her students agreed to come to Julian’s apartment, to be tutored at the tiny laminate table in the minuscule kitchen where she now sat alone. But in the permanent disorder of a home teeming with two small children, it was impossible for her to do her work properly.
All her life she had managed to keep herself busy, to stay one pace ahead of unwanted thoughts. But now, with no responsibilities aside from recuperating, Florence was left with little else besides her ruminations. Her frailty and the pain pills made her tired in the afternoons. In those dead hours she welcomed the ablutions of synthetic sleep. But the enforced rest also did something strange to her. Sometimes, coming out of the mists of a chemical nap, she would experience an unmoored sensation in her throat or stomach, as if she’d just been standing at the railing of an undulating ship. Other times, she would wake with a start, hearing a voice in her dreams. “How can a girl leave her family?” it asked her. “Who in their right mind would do such a thing?” It had been a long time since she’d had such a powerful memory of her father’s voice. In the apartment’s failing afternoon light it was not her son’s but her father’s disappointment that she felt most keenly.
But she’d had to leave. In that place, so long ago, fettered by all the ancestral guilt, she’d refused to let her own desires be cramped by all that mindless rectitude. It was not that she hadn’t believed things would change in America—they were changing, even then, all around her. But who could have foreseen what was bound to come: the schisms, the wars, the race struggle, the whole age of “sexual politics” they wrote about nowadays. The women libbers. Who could have predicted the Pill—unburdening girls from the weight of millennia. Yes, she could have stayed and waited for all the changes to happen—the decades-long march toward progress. She could have stayed and become part of that march. But she’d had no patience for all that. She had wanted to skip past all those prohibitions and obstructions, all the prejudice and correctness, and leap straight into the future. That’s what the Soviet Union had meant to her back then—a place where the future was already being lived. And so she had fled the Land of the Free to feel free. She’d had to make the decision unilaterally or she would never have made it at all.
How can a girl leave her family? She hadn’t given thought, back then, to what it meant to have a child of your own. Or what it meant to lose your child. She would learn all that later.
More and more she thought about Leon. Had she known how little time they’d have together, would she still have been so restless, so penny-pinching with her affections? A poor wife she had been to him, who was so steadfast with his love, who forgave her the unforgivable, justified the mess she got herself into with the secret police, entanglements she could hardly find the strength anymore to justify to herself. They’d had no peace in those days, those years of humiliations and terrors. But how much more terrible would they have been without Leon by her side? Would he still have perished had she been wiser? Had not spoken to Subotin about the rally for Meyerson, said nothing of their friend Seldon? Yes, sometimes she wondered about this too. Had her embroilments delayed their fates or sped them all faster to the season of their deaths?
It was impossible to know. Old age made you discover that it wasn’t the big mistakes but the small ones that laid claim to your regrets. That she had not brought more pleasure into Leon’s life—this now caused her more heartache than anything she could or could not have done to save his life. How stingy she’d been to rush off somewhere when he wanted her to sit and listen to a joke. How she’d rolled her eyes at his entertainments, his “frivolity,” when all along it was only her he wanted to make laugh. How parsimonious not to make love more often, to turn away from his desire because she was too tired, not to tell him at every opportunity how much he meant to her.
For all her misfortunes, life had done right by her in some ways—it had given her, above all else, a good child. When she came back from the camps, without Leon, she’d longed for nothing so much as to make up for lost time, to raise and protect Julian as she knew a mother ought to. Only, by then, he didn’t need her protection. He was used to taking care of himself. He made his own bed in the mornings, sewed buttons on his shirts, polished his own shoes like a soldier. Already like a little man—all elbows and knees—cooking macaroni for himself after school. All those years she had missed had made of him a contained and self-sufficient boy. At thirteen, he was cordial to her, addressing her as “Mama” out of respect, though the word fell so awkwardly from his lips. And on her part, it had not been easy to be a mother again after those solitary years. Some of his memories of her had remained intact. But it would take time for any affection to grow again naturally. Still, he didn’t seem to hold anything against her. Not for a while, at least. The friction would erupt later, in his final year of high school, when the Great Reaction set in, camouflaged in his political and philosophical opinions, rhetorical challenges, a contempt for anything she dared to defend or even treat neutrally. Whatever hurts had taken root during those missing years had finally broken earth.
Perhaps it was her just deserts after the contempt she’d shown her own parents. Her son seemed to take pleasure in pointing out her every ideological “contradiction,” as he called it. If she so much as complained about the kerosene breath of a bus driver or cashier, he’d say sardonically, “You mean the working people, Mama?” When he spoke with disgust about how he and other college students were forced to go around the neighborhood on election day with their wooden ballot boxes, knocking on doors and imploring people to cast their one-candidate ballots into the hole to assure a 99-percent voter turnout, she would tell him that at least he was giving everyone an opportunity to vote. He would look at her like she was out of her mind. He could not stop laughing when she mentioned (just once!) that he ought to be proud his country had no unemployment. “You know where else had zero unemployment, Ma?” he’d said, needling her. “Bergen-Belsen.” When she told him he might at least be grateful for the free college education that was teaching him to be such a matador of logic, he reminded her of the three years of forced residency he’d have to serve in some backwater town, and how, as a scientist-engineer, he’d still spend his life being paid less than a drunken assembly-line worker.
Of course she knew that parents and children argued, but with Julian there was something different. He would not admit how much he blamed her for abandoning him as a child. To a child’s heart, the reasons for the abandonment made no difference. Yet the mind of the grown man could not perceive this simple truth. He wanted her to atone for leaving him by repudiating the whole system that had torn her away from him. It wasn’t enough for him to be right and for her to be wrong. If that was all he needed, she could have obliged. But no. He wanted her to reject all of it, renounce every beautiful idea she’d ever cherished. And this need seemed to her so bottomless, so much deeper than a simple desire to best her intellectually, that she was at a loss as to how to fulfill it.
Those were the times she experienced the loss of Leon most acutely. Leon would have known how to talk to Julian. He would have transmuted to comedic gold the base metal of Yulik’s hard sarcasm. But she did not know how to summon such beautiful words. “Your tongue is hung on two swivel hinges, I can’t keep up with you,” she’d say whenever he’d try to back her rhetorically against the wall. Eventually the best they could learn to do for each other was respect each other’s silences.
Now, with Julian no longer bri
nging up the name of the place he was going, it was only the slow emptying out of the apartment that stood to remind Florence of the unalterable fact of his leaving.
They were selling off their things. In the evenings, she watched her son write up lists of books and records to sell or give away to friends, his fingers stained by the purple ink of the mimeograph paper underneath. Over the course of several weeks the bookshelf in the living room where Florence slept was evacuated of the authors who’d been her irreproachable, loyal friends during her recuperation. Out went the bound volumes of Tolstoy and Pushkin. Gone were the Gogol and Lermontov. Out went the record player on which she’d listened to Stravinsky and the poems of Tsvetaeva. The shelves began to fill up with something else: black-lacquered wooden dishes hand-painted with gold leaves and red berries, wooden spoons and saltshakers rendered with green-and-gold petals and patches of strawberries—decorative Khokhloma that, in all her years in Russia, Florence had never been tempted to buy. It was her daughter-in-law’s idea. A high-strung, practical girl, Lucya intended to wrap all these peasant tchotchkes in shirts and socks inside their suitcases and drag them to America as gifts to be distributed in gratitude to anyone who might help them along the way. What else would they have to offer to their American benefactors? How odd it was, Florence thought, to picture her own son arriving, in the place of her birth, a Russian bearing gifts of the Old World.
—
SHE THOUGHT THAT HER FATHER’S VOICE would stop haunting her once she ceased taking the sleeping pills, but it only seemed to grow in resolve as she recovered and began to maneuver on her own around the apartment. Once more she was severing the cord between herself and her family. A part of her had always known this day would come. She’d prayed for the day of Julian’s release, steeled herself to let him go. Couldn’t he understand that it was because of everything she’d had to deny him—because she could not now bequeath to him anything substantial—that she wanted to spare her son the burden of her old age in his new life in America? I can’t, Papa, she told Solomon. I can’t oblige him to look after me forever. But what her father said next stunned her: He is the one who needs looking after, don’t you see? It’s not enough you left him once? It was then that she knew: not in word but in deed could she atone herself with Julian.
Yet what right did she have to escape the soil that had swallowed up Leon, Seldon, Essie? As long as she knew that her bones were destined to be buried along with theirs, she could hold off the reckoning. As long as she went nowhere, she could continue to tell herself that it was this cursed land that had swallowed them all, and not she who had sacrificed them for her own deliverance. After forty years in the desert, even old Moses hadn’t been permitted to cross into the Promised Land.
With her students no longer keeping her busy, she began to practice English with her grandchildren, reading to Masha from some of the British storybooks that Lucya had managed to find. Masha was a quick, attentive child, just as Julian had been, but it was curly-headed Lyonya, little Lenny, whom Florence adored, the child they had named after her Leon. It was he who nuzzled up to her on the sofabed, sitting with his legs in wool stockings folded beneath him, his rosebud lips hanging open while he listened to her tell him about the crocodiles who prowled the New York subways.
“But should I be scared of them?” he asked her.
“Only if you’re by yourself, which you won’t be.”
“Because Baba will be there with me.”
She was at a loss what to tell him. “Your father and mother will be with you, bunny.”
But he looked unconvinced, as if he intuited even then how disoriented his immigrant parents would be in the grim labyrinth of the subway.
His grandmother, though—she wouldn’t be lost anywhere. “But you’ll be there too,” he said again with more certainty.
And she found she couldn’t muster the strength to tell him no.
The staff at the Avalon retirement community had folded up and packed away all the deck chairs save our own. Down on the grass, Sidney and I sat on our lounges, observing the last of the sun’s brightness. The blue turned to pale amber, almost exactly the color of the Amstel Lights we were sipping. I’d been nervous about the effects of the beer on my uncle’s intestines, but he assured me he was doing much better since his surgery, and in any case he seemed to take only one sip for every five of mine. Though his wrists were still unsettlingly thin, I was relieved to see that Sidney’s face no longer had the hollowed-out look that had so worried me last time.
It was late September in New Jersey, the weather still warm enough for us to linger, the air smelling of longleaf pines, which were just now shedding their needles, and also, more faintly, of a sour and slightly feculent whiff of algae that carpeted a pond on the edge of the grounds. Sidney had been asking about the family and I told him that Lenny was now applying for jobs in private equity firms around the globe, from Prague to Pretoria, anywhere that might reasonably be called an emerging market.
“No dishonor in following the money.” Sidney nodded. “None at all. But no plans to come home soon, huh?”
Maybe, I said, Lenny’s staying away would induce me and Lucya to finally take a real vacation. It was time we became more like American baby boomers and learned to leverage every phase of life for pleasure. “Maybe we’ll all be taking a safari in Cape Town,” I suggested.
“How about you? Any plans to return to Moscow?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. “I don’t know,” I said, truthfully. The joint venture had been put into motion; I’d done my part, such as it was. And then I told him my other news: I’d gotten back in touch with my colleagues at Herbert Engineering, where I’d worked before I’d been poached by Continental Oil. The news was that in six months an icebreaker I had worked on would be sailing from New Zealand to Antarctica to escort supply vessels to the McMurdo polar station, a trip that happened only once a year. The NSF was, as usual, sponsoring this science mission, and this year the project’s manager had called to ask if I wanted to be on board with the other researchers and eccentrics. It was an opportunity to test the ship in real conditions. The only hitch, of course, was that I’d need to go in the capacity of an independent engineer, not as an executive on the payroll of a big oil company.
“So you want to cut your paycheck in half for a chance to see some polar bears?” Sidney said.
“There’re no polar bears, but…” I could hear my voice growing high with excitement. “It’s a whole other world down there, Uncle Sid.” I told him I’d been reading about the professional dreamers and oddballs who worked in Antarctica for months at a time. They seemed like my kind of people. I would go see the outposts of the great explorers, Scott and Shackleton, the hero-adventurers whose stories I’d devoured as a boy. Everything in their huts had been left just as it was a hundred years ago—all preserved forever in the perfect cold. “It’s the very bottom of the world,” I said, trying not to sound too adolescent. “A place where time stands still.”
Sidney nodded sympathetically. “And your own explorations? Did you find what you went for?”
I knew he was talking about our last conversation, when I’d called him at three in the morning. “Not everything,” I said.
Somebody on the second floor switched on the radio to a local jazz-and-blues hour, and for a few moments Sidney and I were both quiet while dissonant and tender piano chords finally resolved themselves into a silvery downtempo melody.
“Uncle Sidney, when exactly did you know that she tried to escape the country?”
“I knew.” Sidney closed his eyes. “By ’47, I knew. Maybe even before the war happened, only I was too young to understand then. She wrote to the family.”
I stared at him. “She put her intention in letters?”
“The language was very Aesopian. You had to read between the lines, which was something my parents were not experts at doing.”
“What do you mean?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Well, there’d be hi
nts. She wrote me a letter once where she talked about a time when we were kids on the farm and she fell down a well, and I ran to town to get help and rescue her, and that she always knew I’d do that again for her.”
“Did that really happen?”
“What are you talking about? What fucking farm? We lived in Brooklyn!”
“You mean it was code?”
“Well, that’s what I realized after I went through the war and got some brains in me. It was encrypted. She knew the censors read all the letters.” Sidney breathed hard. The labor of remembering seemed to take some strength out of him. “Then, after the war, I wrote to Secretary of State Byrnes, then Marshall. I wrote a handwritten letter stating that my sister, Florence Fein Brink, who had lived in Russia since 1934, was being held in the Soviet Union against her will. I asked could the State Department please look into the matter through our embassy in Moscow.”
“Did you get a response?”
“After the second letter, yes.”
“What was it?”
“It was very curt. It said, ‘Since your sister no longer has the status of an American citizen, the Department of State is not able to take any steps to assist in obtaining information with respect to her.’ I still remember the wording.”
“That’s it?”
“Yup.”
Now it was my turn to exhale. “You couldn’t have done anything more.” It seemed to be the least fraught thing I could say given the enervated tone of Sidney’s voice.
“Maybe I couldn’t, maybe I could.”
He paused, as if to listen to a few more chords of the music. “Anyway,” he said a moment later, “that was my failure of courage. I got their response and I didn’t pursue it further. I was twenty-nine years old, starting a career, starting a family—in the thick of my own life. The American government said to lay off, so I did.
“I knew a fellow at the State Department, a friend from school. I could have called him, pressed the subject. But it was 1948. McCarthy already had his fingers in everything. The whole country was watching Alger Hiss on TV, testifying before Congress that he wasn’t a communist. This was a man who’d been very high in Roosevelt’s administration. Nobody was untouchable. The blacklisting had started. My firm had big contracts with the government. Everybody had to take loyalty oaths. What did I need the trouble for? Making phone calls blabbing about my pinko sister over there in the Soviet Union…They wrote me that letter and I let it go.”
The Patriots Page 60