The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  “How do you know this?” said Florence.

  “The play was reviewed in our theater press here, as well as in the foreign press.”

  Emboldened by wine, she pursued the impulse to challenge him. “But you didn’t see it yourself. You’re repeating what you read.”

  This remark induced in Max a laugh full of scorn and unease. His reply took the form of a mumble that Florence could not entirely make out, but which suggested the absurdity of what she was proposing.

  Then it was her turn to feel uneasy. She’d wanted to impress the others with her wit but instead had succeeded in silencing the whole table. It was Timofeyev who broke the awkwardness. “Flora, you of all people, working in our Foreign Currency Department, ought to know that every citizen who goes abroad is a direct burden to the country. He requires foreign currency, which can otherwise be used for importing items of social value. Naturally, our government can’t allow every citizen to travel abroad unless the money spent on him brings an equal return….”

  “Grigory Grigorievich, I didn’t mean to suggest…”

  “The government would gladly let every theater lover travel to watch a show in London, but, besides the expense, each Soviet citizen in a capitalist country is, as you know, liable to be made a cause for a diplomatic incident….”

  “Stop lecturing the poor girl, Grigorievich,” said Nina, rising up from her chair. “She meant nothing by it. This whole conversation is getting too complicated for our simple female brains. Come, Florochka, help me in the kitchen.”

  Florence excused herself. But the relief of Nina’s invitation was followed by the surprise of being led not into the kitchen, partially shielded by a view of Olga Ivanovna’s ample behind, but farther down the hall, into the bedroom. At Nina’s touch a ceiling lamp illuminated a satin lair of creamy coverlets and tasseled lampshades. In the center of the room, a mirrored vanity supported an elaborate collection of perfume flasks and jars of cream such as Florence had not seen in any store.

  “Don’t feel too awful about Max,” Nina said, removing a small brass key from her vanity. “He is a genius, of course—a genius for glomming on to whatever’s current. He needs to be taken down a notch once in a while.”

  “I didn’t mean to say anything disagreeable….”

  “No need to apologize, dear, but let me give you some teeny advice.” Nina stood working the key into a door in her sizable oak wardrobe. “I only say this because your Russian, though it’s very good considering…Well, I don’t want you to miss the nuances of etiquette, either.”

  The steamy warmth of the bedroom couldn’t account for how hot Florence suddenly felt. A vision of unrenewed invitations to the Timofeyevs’ spirited home struck her as a consequence of her big mouth.

  “Frankly, I don’t care to talk politics in this apartment,” Nina said, finally getting the wardrobe door opened. “After all, who are we to think we can fathom everything that goes on up top? Right? We have the Party to settle these questions for us, so that we can get on with more lively matters.” She bent toward the mirror inside her wardrobe door and fixed her lipstick, as though to demonstrate what livelier matters there were for her to attend to. There came a tap on the door.

  “Come in,” sang Nina, not taking her eyes off her reflection.

  The bedroom door opened, and Valda tiptoed in. “I had to get away from that peacockery.”

  “Of course you did.”

  Florence now saw that Valda was holding a small suitcase. “Should I come back with this?” she spoke tentatively.

  “No, I want Flora to take a look, too. Let’s see the goodies.”

  Valda unlocked the suitcase and began to spread out on the bed blouses and dresses, gloves and hats. Pressing one of the pieces to her wireframe of a body, Nina twirled around to face Florence. “Is this what they’re wearing in New York?”

  “I really can’t say.”

  Nina frowned. This was not the answer she was seeking. Her face suggested that Florence ought at least to learn to play the sophisticated foreigner, even if she in fact was not one.

  “It’s from Finland,” said Valda, to vouch for the dress’s quality and style. “And, look, it has a zipper, like the Elsa Schiaparelli dresses.”

  “I don’t know.” Nina moved the dress back and forth across her body.

  And then, so simply, Florence understood what was happening. How dumb she was! Valda and Nina weren’t playing dress-up. They were negotiating. Valda, having just been abroad for the social good of her nation, was now performing another social good by refreshing Nina’s imported wardrobe.

  “It’s nice, but the waist is a bit tight, for New York,” Florence heard herself say now, with the expert air expected of her. “We wear it looser, like this.”

  “It can be let out,” Valda offered eagerly.

  “All right, I’ll have my seamstress have a look. How much do you want for it?”

  “Oh, let’s settle all that later,” Valda suggested.

  “As you wish.” Nina carried the dress to her wardrobe and returned with a black tasseled shawl emblazoned with carmine roses. “And this,” she said, wrapping the light wool kerchief around Florence’s face and shoulders, “is how we wear things in Moscow. Keep it forever, dear.”

  —

  IT WAS PAST ELEVEN when Florence left the Timofeyevs’ apartment. The filigree of the iron gate, opened for her by the doorman, was dusted with snow. In the stinging, scentless cold, she felt aglow with wine and happiness. No longer Florie from Flatbush. No longer the lovelorn wanderer. Some invisible barrier between herself and the city had been removed. In the cozy oasis of Timofeyev’s salon she felt a sense of rarity and belonging that her life back in Brooklyn had stingily withheld. She had only to play the cosmopolitan role requested of her to gain admission. Even her blunder at the dinner table had been treated as a forgettable faux pas. In the future, she’d be more careful. How unnecessary her tears had been earlier that evening, how illusory her loneliness. She had merely to quiet her doubts, and life would open its doors.

  In some secret corner of her heart, where she was less of an atheist than she liked to admit, she was certain that the prayer she’d made in the office had been spontaneously answered. But who exactly had answered it—Timofeyev, Stalin, or God? In her tipsiness, the three had somehow merged into distinct facets of a single divine force. A holy trinity. In the iodine sky, telephone wires swung with a trim of shaggy icicles like the fringe of her new shawl. They clinked like chimes in the wind. She was almost twenty-five years old and she’d never witnessed anything so marvelous. She stuck out her tongue and tasted the falling snow, sure that if she could only let herself embrace this feeling her happiness might last forever.

  It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.

  —ERIC HOFFER

  I have this quote copied into a file on my laptop. I came across it some years ago in a book, The True Believer, left for me by my daughter. She read it in a college class and presented it to me as a badly needed addition to what she claims is my holy trinity of old white men: Clancy, Grisham, and Dershowitz. When I finally opened Hoffer, I was struck with a cold shudder of recognition at the words above, and those that followed:

  All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world….It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacles nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence….

  It was her. And here I’d been thinking all these years that I was the only one burdened by the “innumerable unbeliefs” that formed the brickwork of my mother’s pyramid of pure conviction.

  She didn’t even have the excuse of being a communist. After all her decad
es in the Soviet Union, she was proud of never carrying a Party card (though joining the Party in Russia was not as easy or automatic as many imagine, certainly not for foreigners). But this did not mean that my mother was any less blindly dedicated to the Grand Idea. More so, even, than the legions of card-carrying Stalinists and Trotskyites who remained in New York to duke it out among themselves for the next forty years. All those shabbily dressed Reds who refused to talk to one another (out of principle!) well into the 1970s were just that—talkers! My mother had no interest in their rabbinical hairsplitting. She wanted to leap over all that talk straight into the future.

  Why she came to Russia never struck me as odd. Why she stayed is a different question, and one I’ve often found myself wondering about. Under what (or whose?) spell did the colorless landscape around her transform into one of those vivid proletarian mosaics that still decorate this mercantile city?

  In her recollections of her arrival, one person rises most often in my mother’s retelling: the man she called Timofeyev, her boss at the State Bank. (Throughout her life, my mother had few female friends, and seems to have preferred the role of ingénue to a certain sort of older gentleman.) I have no reason to suspect anything incorrect went on between them. From her account, Grigory Grigorievich Timofeyev was married to a theater actress sixteen years his junior—a Georgian princess from Tbilisi whose love of luxury frequently caused her husband awkwardness. One of Timofeyev’s virtues, according to Mama, was that even in company he never drank anything stronger than Georgian mineral water, a trait acquired from his Old Believer ancestors—that Russian analogue to the American Quakers, merchants and capitalists and resisters who secretly bucked the autarchy of the tsar by giving runaway serfs refuge and work in their factories.

  By the time Florence met Timofeyev, what remained of the old religious discipline and merchant spirit of his ancestors had assumed the narrower forms of strict sobriety and an energetic pursuit of socialist efficiency. I am convinced it was Timofeyev’s eloquence regarding the latter that swayed my mother toward the unimpeachable rationality of the Soviet system. I once asked her what she’d thought of the complete lack of freedom in the press when she arrived. “You must have noticed that the newspapers failed to provide any real information,” I said. “And didn’t you find it odd that the papers carried no opinion columns? No comic strips? No crosswords? Didn’t you think all those official pronouncements and statistics were just a tiny bit relentless?”

  Her answer: “Well, Timofeyev used to say that it was all nonsense about foreign magazines’ being ‘forbidden.’ They were just like any other luxury—to import them would mean the government would have to pay for them. And, yes, the Russian national press was often dull—that was a pity—but…you have to appreciate how much had already been accomplished in the country since the Revolution. Of what use to the people would all this debate in the press have been? Most of them still signed their names with ‘X’s. The language they read had to be clear and simple…clear and simple.” I remember her repeating this in the schoolteacher’s way that Timofeyev might have used with her. “You can’t feed hard-to-chew meat to an infant, can you? The fact that they were reading the papers at all was a triumph.”

  I suspect the last bit about infants needing to swallow pre-chewed meats is a direct quote. Mama seemed attached to this explanation well into her sixties, like a duckling that gets imprinted on a farmer’s boot and keeps thinking the boot is its mother, even while its neck is being cracked under the weight of the rubber sole.

  I can imagine these early-winter evening walks my mother and her mentor take from the office on Neglinnaya Street to his home on Prechistenka, where Madame Timofeyev is hosting one of her salons. At this hour Moscow is at the height of its pristine gray beauty. I can see the thin layer of oil glistening like mother-of-pearl on the surface of the river. They pass a massive foundation for a stone bridge, yet unbuilt. Florence has watched a gang of men working on it for more than two weeks. Now she sees that the work has been abandoned, and the men and their wheelbarrows have moved eighty meters down the riverbank, to break ground for yet another foundation. Can they really be building a second bridge so close to the first? she asks Timofeyev.

  To the practiced eye, it’s clear what has happened: The river’s curve makes it impossible for the first bridge to connect with the street on the other side. A typically sloppy Soviet drafting error that was ignored until it was too late. But Timofeyev only laughs it off as he adjusts his Astrakhan hat. “My dear Florochka, if you’re ever to be a real Soviet, you must first understand that the great Russian people are a nation of maximalists. Our ambition is like love—it is impatient of delays and rivals. We built the world’s largest warplane—it crashed on its first flight. But we’ve built others just as large, and they’re still in the sky. We challenged France and constructed the mightiest stratospheric balloon, but couldn’t get it to lift. Then we tried again, and broke all the world records!”

  This is not empty boosterism. He is already developing in my mother that critical Soviet ability to see life not as it is, but as it is becoming. Or better still, as it ought to become. Everything they pass is something else in potential: A muddy culvert clogged with garbage is transformed through words into a future aqueduct. A block of demolished houses from which residents have been forcibly removed is not a vacant, brick-littered lot, but a People’s Palace in the making. In my mother’s mind, the future and the present are already becoming agreeably fused together.

  She has no idea that they’re about to explode apart.

  The winter of 1934 was monotonously snowbound, and so Florence could not be blamed for failing to experience the more mercurial political weather around her. On the morning of December 2, she walked into her office at Gosbank to find it a place of mourning. Heavy vapors of bereavement and alarm hung over every desk. Bookkeepers’ tears fell in thick drops into giant ledgers. Florence’s first reaction was confusion. “What’s happened?” she asked, turning to a clerk beside her.

  “For heaven’s sake, don’t you listen to the radio?”

  This was not a question so much as an incrimination. Indeed Florence listened to the radio all the time. The radios of Moscow’s apartments, like the megaphones in Moscow’s streets, were devices apparently manufactured with no off switch. Within a month of her arrival in Russia, she had almost entirely stopped paying attention to the staticky bulletins issuing at all hours of the day from the radio in her communal kitchen. She was hardly the only burgeoning Soviet to acquire the gift of listening-and-not-hearing. Yet to succeed in missing the news of “the Crime of the Century”?

  Very simply, she had overslept. Catapulting from her room to the trolley stop without so much as stopping in the kitchen to boil an egg, she’d failed to notice her communal neighbors bowed around the tombstone-shaped LKW radio from which a very real eulogy was just then issuing.

  At the office, her colleague now said: “Where have you been, girlie? They’ve killed Sergey Kirov!”

  “Who’s killed him?” Florence said, with an alarm she hoped would conceal the question she was too embarrassed to ask: Who was Sergey Kirov?

  For those not acquainted with the mother of Russia’s political murders—an assassination of JFK proportions, which launched a thousand conspiracy theories—the murder of Sergey Kirov, Leningrad Party secretary, was much like the Kennedy affair, a murder complete with its own lone gunman (killed almost instantly), and its impenetrable cloud of conflicting testimonies and forensic evidence. Not to mention the obvious parallel with Kirov himself—a figure of Kennedyesque looks and charisma, a man whose political popularity was on its way to eclipsing even the Great Leader’s. Consider the comparison: on one side, a handsome strapping Slav; on the other, a pockmarked Caucasian; the Leningrader, a dynamic and sociable leader; the Ossetian, a reclusive and paranoid sociopath who kept his Politburo colleagues up for half the night drinking vodka while he himself sat sipping water.

  “Damned butchers!” Th
e bookkeeper across the aisle now opened her mouth. “How can the earth spawn such villains!”

  But why the plurals? Florence wondered. Hadn’t a killer already been apprehended? The answer seemed to be in the newspaper the bookkeeper was holding. “ ‘The double-dealers, the craven vipers,’ ” she resumed, no longer declaring her disgust but merely reciting aloud from the Pravda on her desk, “ ‘sworn enemies of Socialism raised their hand against not one man, but the whole Proletarian Revolution. The working people now unanimously demand justice for the killers!’ ”

  The news of the murder had charged the room, herded everyone together in somber, excitable communion. It was as if a great audition were taking place around Florence: a chorus being handpicked for Oedipus Rex. But who was doing the handpicking? And just then our heroine took notice of a figure she had not seen before, a woman in a white blouse buttoned high over a grand bosom. A bosom as well strapped in and fastened as a parachutist’s.

  “Enough dawdling, Comrades,” the parachutist commanded—an order that sent the girls scattering to their desks. To everyone but Florence, the identity of this woman, the head of the bank’s Party Committee, was well known. “Enough mewling,” she chided a girl still tearily reading the paper. “On with your business.” Florence took the order at face value by knocking, as she did each morning, on Timofeyev’s door. After several knocks, she twisted the knob. Her error became apparent as soon as her boss’s red-rimmed eyes fastened on her. “What do you want?” he said curtly, even rudely. His beard was unkempt; his normally placid eyes were so irate they looked wild. “The reports on the silver markets are in,” she declared idiotically, pointing to the portfolio under her arm.

  It was at this moment that, from behind the open door, a blind spot in Florence’s vision, a back as broad as a rhino’s and sheathed in a thick hide of black leather turned slowly to take stock of the intruder. Holding one of Timofeyev’s books, the man in the leather coat eyeballed her, not unpleasantly. Florence had only just begun to understand the significance of the leather jacket in Soviet life. The knee-length leather coat, perhaps the first and only fashion statement communism ever gave the world (aside from Mao’s notable collar), the quintessential symbol of proletarian ruggedness and revolutionary masculinity, was adopted first by the Bolshevik defenders of the working class, before becoming the favored apparel of the secret police. It did not diminish the coat’s vanquishing effect that its current wearer had a middle-aged, bloated, and slatternly face. Florence took a step backward.