“Does this look like a suitable time, Comrade Fein?” said Timofeyev.
“Forgive me.”
“Next time, knock.”
But she had knocked! Walking back, she felt like a church bell that had been violently struck. Her head and fingers were still concussing in humiliation as she sat down at her desk.
The possibility that her boss and mentor might not wish to appear, before the Chekist in his office, to be on too-friendly terms with the foreigner in his employ did not enter her mind. Had she taken a look at that morning’s Pravda, she might have noticed that tarred among the “craven vipers and sworn enemies of Socialism” were also “camouflaged enemies in the employ of foreign intelligence.” Instead, still struggling to think of what she’d done wrong, she laid her cheek down on the cover of her typewriter and began to sob quietly. Her despair could not have been more appropriate to the occasion.
“Nu, nu…” Somebody was standing behind her and patting her shoulder. Wiping the water from her eyes, Florence turned to see that it was the office manager. “Tears won’t bring back even saints, my dear,” the woman said. Then, still comforting Florence, she added, “They’ll clean up those vermin good now; then it’ll be their turn to cry.”
Florence will recall this prophecy three weeks later, packed in a room within the bank’s bureaucratic bowels with other workers. The room, a small auditorium, is blossoming with the heat of winter sweat. Only one casement window has been left ajar; the morning breeze is stirring the leathery leaves of three giant ficus plants perched on the windowsill. The Ficus elastica, commonly known as the rubber plant, a hateful symbol (during earlier years of the Revolution) of petit-bourgeois domesticity, has now been rehabilitated by the mighty proletariat. No other plant, it turns out, thrives quite so succulently in the stale radiator heat of Soviet meeting rooms. Before this tropical background appear, like the heads of a tribal council, the faces of the bank’s Party Committee and All-Union Committee. Against the opposite wall hangs a black-bordered flag of mourning.
The headlines have followed one another so forcefully over these past weeks that even Florence can’t help paying attention. A week following the assassination, 103 “White Guardists” have been arrested and summarily executed. Their names have not been made public, and the only information disclosed about them is that they smuggled their way into the Soviet Union through Latvia, Finland, Poland, and Turkey for the purpose of assassinating Kirov and other leaders. More recently, Grigory Zinoviev, old revolutionary and comrade-in-arms of Lenin, has been arrested as well, his guilt already gospel though his trial is still two weeks away. But the roll call is just beginning. In two years’ time the number of parties responsible for a single man’s murder will grow to include 104 Leningrad counterrevolutionaries, 78 conspirators of the “Moscow Center” (to evolve into the nefarious “Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center”), 12 Leningrad Chekists, and more. Kirov’s death is the golden goose that keeps bearing suitable new enemies, all the way up to 1941, when its fertility is interrupted temporarily by the war.
But let’s now return to the auditorium with its rehabilitated ficuses. Surely, if an ideologically incorrect rubber plant can be rescued from bourgeois vulgarity then the young woman on trial today can also redeem herself in the eyes of her co-workers. Florence can just make out the bobbing bun of the stenographer recording the enumerated charges:
“Regression.”
“Blunted political diligence.”
“Failing to break off contacts.”
“But how?” says the ginger-haired girl, her voice quivering. “How could I break off contact? He’s my father, after all.” She does not pose the question rhetorically. Her small eyes flicker up briefly at the audience as though there might be a genuine answer out there somewhere. Seeing those desperate eyes, Florence feels her flesh go cold.
The girl, it turns out, is a daughter of one of the “Zinovievites.” For the first time, Florence learns that Zinoviev and Kamenev were part of a political opposition years ago.
“Truly, you surprise me, Golubtsova,” says the woman Florence recognizes as the parachutist with the formidable bust. Her tone is far from belligerent. On the contrary, her words have an almost joyful feel. “When the conspirators’ arrests were made known, you did not come to the committee to declare your association with the enemies.”
“I didn’t believe it all myself.”
“You didn’t believe they were guilty?” says a man at the end of the table.
“No…Yes.”
“You thought the Party picks people up for nothing?”
“I…was confused.”
“Yet not confused enough,” the woman resumes, “to contact your old friends in Leningrad and see to it that your name was not on any roster of activists at the Smolny Institute.”
“I was an organizer there four years ago, but I’ve been residing here since.”
“But in all your time here you never called anyone in Leningrad to ask to have your name whitewashed from any lists—how do you explain it?”
“In all honesty, I confess, I knew nothing of the schemes that have been suggested by…”
“What do you mean by ‘suggested by’?” says another man. “You persist in refusing to denounce the terrorists in the face of a mountain of evidence.”
But the woman in charge raises her palm to politely silence him.
“Whether you knew or didn’t know is beside the point here. Instead of coming clean with your associations at once, you first made plans to cover your own back, going to your uncle for help….”
“It was he who suggested it, only because I was no longer a member of—”
“Nobody here is interested in your alibis,” protests the man at the end.
Florence is still struggling to follow what the girl is being asked to confess to, though it is already clear that, whatever new confession she offers, the court will immediately cast it aside as inadequate and insincere. For the past two weeks, Florence has been trying to make sense of the cascade of unmaskings in the newspapers, but she keeps being confounded by the same stubborn paradox: There seem to be too many Iagos hiding in the wings. If the White Guardists have already killed Kirov, then surely the “Zinovievites” are off the hook. Or vice versa. It’s a heretical logic of elimination that the mathematical branch of her intelligence persists in performing. And what does it say about the Party, she wonders, that all those Bolsheviks were involved in this business—members of the Central Committee? Did they have no other way of speaking up, that they had to resort to a murder? She longs to bring up these questions with Timofeyev. But her boss has been giving her the brush-off. His days are now taken up with meetings, and Florence has found it difficult enough to borrow his time to clarify his increasingly convoluted morning dictations, let alone ask him to unriddle politics. Instead, it’s the voice of Timofeyev’s wife, Nina, that Florence now hears in her head: “Who are we to think we can fathom everything that goes on up top?” Her mind returns to this answer as to a lucky amulet. There’s enormous comfort in reminding herself that she doesn’t—that she can’t possibly—have all the answers. Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian. She repeats this mantra to ward off any guilt she might be tempted to feel for not speaking up in defense of the poor girl on the stand. What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence might be on the chopping block herself.
Her silence is only a symptom of the collective muteness permeating the nation. By 1934, crimes of passion have all but ceased in the Soviet Union. Likewise accidents, criminal negligence, and any act committed in the sweet shade of opportunism. Every malfeasance reported in the newspapers is an act of collusion.
Industrial accidents? Wreckers!
Production below plan? Saboteurs!
Murder and, yes, even rape—all guerrilla maneuvers in the war against the toiling classes. An overlooked headline on the back page of Izvestia just
a week before the Kirov affair reads: “Young Pioneer Girl Dragged and Defiled in Wheat Field.” Who are her attackers? Kulaks!
The question remains: Did the bullet that punctured Kirov’s neck and, in its figurative way, go on to puncture the skulls of countless others, make at least a small dent in the membrane of Florence’s enthusiasm for the land of her choosing? All evidence suggests that the events of the winter of ’34 led her to draw no permanent conclusions about the système soviétique. Or maybe it was all simpler than that. Florence had other things on her mind that December: she was falling in love again.
—
AS HE’D PORTRAYED HIS CHILDHOOD to their group of friends, Leon Brink had inherited his revolutionary consciousness in utero. “Dragged up,” as he told Florence, by a headstrong, lunatic mother and no father. From the age of three, when other Jewish boys in his neighborhood were starting kheyder, he’d been taken along to strikes and demonstrations and left to wait amid the raucous sidewalk crowds while his mother pummeled scabs with her lead-weighted umbrella and sharpened hairpins. Batia Brink, a garment worker and follower of Clara Lemlich, raised her son on a diet of contempt for economic despotry, which, she liked to say, boiled in the cauldrons of capitalism and rose like scum to the top.
Her hostility to capitalism was a uniquely American product, but her hatred of religion harked back to her youth in Polish Russia. At nineteen, she’d been married off to a young man, poor but brilliant, who as his mother’s only son could claim exemption from the army draft. The following year, all exemptions were lifted. Fearing his death in the service of Tsar Nikolai, she had sold everything and sent her young husband to America. His first correspondence had been to say that work was hard to find and he could send her nothing to live on. She suffered reading his letters and suffered more when months passed without a word. It seemed he had no interest in paying her way over, though she had paid his. In time she went to the town’s rabbi and begged him to write the young man in New York so that he’d agree to give her a divorce, which as a woman she had no power to grant herself. The rabbi had instead told her relatives to collect money and put her on a ship to America. In New York, she tracked down her husband, and for a short time the two lived together in a tenement room where, according to Leon, “he filled her full of semen” and disappeared again, this time going out west, and deserting her with debts at the butcher’s and the grocery store. From that day onward, working in airless rooms six and seven days a week to feed and clothe her only child, Batia never stopped railing against the cowardice of men and the hypocrisy of the “rabbinical overlords” whose authority had laid waste her innocence. Her fanatical contempt—as it was comically relayed by Leon in his unflagging efforts to keep his audience entertained—appeared to Florence so out of proportion to the benevolent atheism of her own father as to seem a kind of exotic faith all its own. What else but fervent devotion could explain the fragrant four-course meal his penniless mother scraped together once a year on Yom Kippur, the fasting day, so as to scandalize and mock her pious neighbors?
Leon Brink was one of those men naturally gifted at turning his own life into a kind of vaudeville, even a kind of myth. It was a talent not so rare, in fact, among the sort of rebel misfits cast up in Moscow in the thirties—unfettered spirits proudly disinheriting their capitalist homelands. Young, mostly Jewish, hailing from the Bronx or Manchester, England, but coming also from places as exotic as Missoula, Montana. Observe them now: Florence and her friends at the Moscow Café on Pushkin Square, ordering nothing but coffees for the girls and a carafe of vodka for the fellows, so as to be allowed to sit for hours and talk and talk (the socializing, like everything else, being done collectively). So much of their talk centers on America, as if in profaning their birthplace they are performing a kind of ritual to relieve homesickness. See them filing one by one onto the skating rink at Petrovka, still so busy debating, discussing, that in a moment the whole bunch of them will land on their asses, as the natives swerve ably around them.
Leon Brink is the only one of the Americans to keep his balance. A lit cigarette hangs from his mouth. Florence shakes away his outstretched hand and hoists herself up without help. He extends it next to Essie, who takes it gratefully.
Was she still sore about his calling her “Flatbush”? Did she find his stories of sleeping on fire escapes and using the East River as a public toilet a kind of bragging? After all, like the rest of them, he was now a privileged foreigner insulated from the chronic shortages, the waiting in line, and the moral harassment that passes for customer service in Russia. To this upgrade of status they had all accommodated themselves quite swiftly. Out of the dead-end bog of American poverty and obscurity Leon had risen to the privileged post of “journalist” for a foreign outlet of TASS, a privilege that came with a standing table at every hotel café, a pair of tickets for each new concert, play, and film. How had a poor boy from a hard neighborhood managed to pull off such a transformation? Insane Batia, it seemed, was not without some pragmatism. She’d sent her son, at age twelve, to work for a pince-nez-wearing typesetter named Meyer Levitsky, who paid Leon by teaching him the printing trade and lending him books, so that by fifteen young Brink had read his way through most of the Russian classics and political philosophers. At the Foreign Workers’ Club and the Moscow Café where his fellow expats gathered, he was not shy about quoting at length from Bakunin, Tolstoy, Jabotinsky, Marx. The only author he failed to cite in this revolutionary company was Horatio Alger, whose books had played no less a role in consummating the great maneuver of metamorphosis that was Leon Brink’s life.
Florence could not explain the unease that snuck over her when he regaled their crowd from the corner of some table, not quite seated and not quite standing, either, gripping the back of a chair or someone’s shoulder as if half expecting to be pulled up at any moment into the blue clouds. Even the spindles of his hair, the tufts of his sideburns seemed exempt from gravitational pull. Whatever it was, Florence could hold out for only so long.
The beginning of her capitulation came one silvery Moscow evening when, having run as fast as she could toward the fortress of the Bolshoi, she found Leon waiting for her in front of one of its creamy pillars. None of their other friends were there.
“Where is everybody?”
“You asking me?”
“I thought Essie was coming.”
“Isn’t she with you?” Leon said innocently.
“Where’s Seldon?”
“Indisposed this evening. We were the honored guests of some Georgians last night. I warned him that wine was an unreliable mistress who doesn’t leave promptly in the morning. Good old vodka, on the other hand…”
“We’re going to be late,” Florence said with perceptible impatience. “Do you have the tickets?”
From inside his meager overcoat, Leon pulled out two tickets for Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.
In the grand vestibule, a furious footrace had started for the cloakrooms. The public wardrobes of Russia were, then as now, no optional convenience. To sneak into the opera without first checking one’s overcoat would have been an unthinkable offense even for rebellious spirits like Leon and Florence. Seated with her program, Florence attempted to read the libretto of the production she was about to hear. In 1934, before the avant-garde was to be squeezed out completely by Stalin, Russia was enjoying the final days of a period of artistic innovation begun in the revolutionary era. These last explosions of the experimental Belle Époque, of which Florence caught the tail end upon her arrival, helped lull her into believing the country she’d come to was freer than the one she’d left. Florence made an effort to absorb herself in the plot of Dmitri Shostakovich’s tragi-satiric opera about a merchant’s wife who falls for a charming farmhand. In adapting Nikolai Leskov’s dark story to music, Shostakovich had struggled to conform to the encroaching dictates of Sots-realism, but, to his own peril, he had been unable to repress his artistic idiosyncrasies. This might have explained why, inside the
opera house, Florence was having trouble with the music. Onstage, the wild-eyed Katerina, lusting after her farmhand Sergey, writhed and convulsed as she murdered first her father-in-law, then her husband. The music groaned and panted along with her. A good deal of the action took place on the merchant’s velvet-covered double bed, stage right.
No less agitating than the humid atmosphere of the opera was the potent stillness of the man beside her. The maritime tartness of his eau de cologne enveloped her in the draftless theater air. For the duration of the opera, Florence’s knee remained locked in a position intended to prevent accidental brushing. She had nothing to worry about. Leon kept his hands to himself and left the seduction to Shostakovich. The opera had already had a run in Leningrad and rumors of its aphrodisiacal properties had reached Leon well in advance. It was no coincidence that he’d arranged to meet Florence alone for this engagement.
“What did you make of that?” Leon inquired after the lights were raised.
They had given their tickets to the cloakroom attendant by this point and collected their outerwear. Her two-hour effort to quell her arousal was now bringing on a kind of backwash of matronly disapproval. “It’s a fine opera,” she said, letting Leon help her into her coat, “if you don’t care for things like melody, or cadence, or a sympathetic hero.”
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