“We’re in for bad luck, Leon.”
“Oh, baby, everything’s all jumbled in your head right now because you don’t have your man with you. It’s simple. But I’ll be there real soon to take care of my girl. Do you read me?”
“Yes.”
“Go on, get some sleep now, you’ll feel finer tomorrow.”
After a few more stifled simpers, which he seemed to read as a sign of assent, she let him go.
And the funny thing was, he was right. She did feel better the next morning. A clean, white, afterlife sort of light awoke her gently at precisely seven. In the window, a thin carpet of silvery snow covered the streets, the trees, the roofs, and the wool shoulders of the street cleaner sweeping the sidewalk with a twig broom.
Consulting the mirror, Florence noticed that sleep had brought a flush back to her cheeks.
What had she expected from Leon? She was ashamed of sounding so weak. The fault was hers. She had allowed herself to indulge in the delusion that he would be on board with her plan, and that they would do together what she now knew with certainty she would have to do alone. Her pain and dismay at this realization began to turn, as she started to get dressed, into a kind of renewal of self-reliance. So he liked how they were living, was grateful for eleven square meters, crammed in like TB patients with total strangers. So let him. He liked turning out his little ditties about how the future was just around the corner—good for him. He liked being sent out to the sticks to be treated like some pasha by the locals and sit around on carpets sipping sour camel’s milk—fine with her. She didn’t need him to hold her hand; she didn’t need anybody’s permission to get the hell out of a country that promised to be nothing for her but bad news. Already, the morning seemed to be in full agreement with her plan. The toilet room was miraculously free, the water in the shower pleasantly scalding. In the gloriously empty kitchen Florence brewed herself coffee on the stove. Through the double-pane glass of the kitchen window, the rays had found their way around the clouds and were sending their cold sunshine down in benediction. Back in her room, she put on her downy shawl and her mittens and headed purposefully to the metro.
When she surfaced at Manezh Square, she could just glimpse, under low-lying afternoon clouds, her homeland’s rugged little flag flapping against stiff, rapidly cooling Moscow air. In fact, only the flag’s tip was visible, a red-and-white wagging tail. To Florence it resembled a shivering finger beckoning from a short height above the U.S. Embassy, whose actual building remained largely hidden behind the ornate Hotel National, and behind its own gates.
Ignoring the moist sponginess that had taken residence in the toes of her stockings, Florence crossed Gorky Street and continued to advance across the plaza toward the yellowed limestone compound. She passed her own reflection in the doors of the Hotel National. In front of a shopwindow, she walked past a man in a caramel-brown coat and fedora who watched her pointedly from behind his round glasses, but didn’t alter his expression when she nodded politely.
At each corner of the gates stood a guard in a green overcoat and ursine hat. Bayonetted rifles were strapped assertively across their felt-covered backs. And because one of the guards, on closer inspection, appeared to be an extraordinarily large adolescent, Florence selected the older of the two to approach. He had a beefy peasant’s face redeemed by intelligent eyebrows that lifted slightly in readiness to hear what she had come for. Politely, she explained her reasons for needing to enter.
He showed little sign of either understanding or caring about her explanation, and spoke only one word: “Documents.”
She dug into her pocket and produced the paper with her passport information.
“This is not valid.”
“It is the receipt for my American passport, which was taken by the Housing Office. If you would just read there…” She had to rise slightly on her tiptoes to point to her place of birth.
He studied the paper compliantly but blindly, like a child holding a book upside down.
“This is not a passport,” he said, handing it back.
“I am aware of that. As I said, I’ve lost my passport, and this is the only place in this city that I can get a new one made. So, if we can solve this problem right here…”
“Entry allowed only for official reasons. We need proof that you can enter.”
“I just gave you proof….Oh, this is too pointless. I need to speak with the American guard on duty.”
“I am the guard.”
“Somebody in there.” She pointed behind the gates.
“We have instructions about who may enter.”
“Please, if you could just go in and talk to somebody, anybody, inside, I’m sure this will all be settled in a few minutes.”
“If you keep standing here, we will have to report you to the police.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, all I’m asking is for you to ask somebody to come out—just to talk to me through the goddamn gate.”
“You will have to leave now.”
“I am sure you are overstepping your authority by preventing an American from entering her own embassy.”
“Vaclav…,” the guard said, jerking his head toward the giant teenager, who, after a second of slothful adolescent hesitation, began to approach.
She sensed that her opportunities were numbered. “Yoohoo-oo! An American here!” she shouted in English through the metal gates to no one. “Hello-o-o! Is anybody there? Can somebody please come out and tell these morons…”
But here she felt her underarms gripped by upholstered appendages whose embrace, in size and texture, was not unlike that of a comfortable armchair, only that they seemed to be conveying her backward with the torque of a wrecking ball. Her feet, slightly off the ground, beat like weak swimmers in rough tide.
“Help me, somebody! I am a citizen of the United States!” she shouted in English. She was deposited roughly on the sidewalk.
The sun had long taken leave behind the clouds. She pulled enough oxygen into her lungs to restore her ability to see and regain control of her limbs. Her ears were still pounding, either from the rush of traffic or from the blood echoing in her eardrums. With an effort, Florence got up on one heel and wiped the dirt off the palms of her hands. She examined the pink flesh, and found it speckled with dents from loose asphalt. She straightened up and fixed her twisted stockings through her skirt, permitting herself one last look back at the guards, who had returned to their posts. Gradually, the pressure in her ears settled and her eyes once again took in the street, the whizzing automobiles, the wedding-cake façade of the National. Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone.
—
SHE HAD NEVER BEEN good at deferring an urge once it manifested itself in her consciousness. She marched the ten blocks back to the OVIR.
“I would like to fill out the papers, please, for an outgoing visa to travel abroad,” she announced to the clerk on duty with a confidence that suddenly sounded strained and counterfeit. She presented the receipt for her passport as her form of identification.
The woman behind the pane—the same one as at her first visit there—appraised Florence casually, then picked up the slip and handled it as though it were an item of dubious value that Florence was trying to sell her.
“I am an American citizen, as you can see there.” She pointed to the paper through the glass. “I would like to travel to visit my family.”
“American citizen? This is a Moscow residency permit. You are a Soviet citizen according to this.”
“No, no, you can see.” Florence tapped her finger on the pane. “You can see my passport number there.”
“This is a permit for a Soviet national living in Moscow, and required of all citizens. All this indicates is that you were given residency permission when you submitted your American passport to the housing office. You were supposed to go to the passport office to get your internal passport.”
A Soviet citizen? What in the world was this prune-headed ogre talking about?
“No, no…I think you’re mistaken. You see, I never went through any formalities of getting Soviet citizenship. And I have this receipt that I was given by your people for my American passport when I came here to renew my residency. And you told me—very clearly, in fact—that I would have my passport back within a week.”
She was employing the plural “you”—the royal you—to address her tormentor, though her mannered politeness was obviously doing very little to ingratiate her.
“I told you nothing of the sort,” the woman said with an insistence that veered on threat. “This is not a receipt. It is your identification card.”
Florence smiled and shook her head. “I beg your pardon, but I don’t have cotton in my ears, and this is not what I was told.”
People had collected behind Florence, and it was becoming increasingly obvious to them and to herself, even as she continued to make her case with deferential hostility, that she was now engaging in what by jungle law might be considered a foolish behavior—prancing with her ass exposed to antagonize a large and threatening rival.
And yet the prospect of backing down felt like an equally impossible option. “Do you plan to explain to all these people that you’ve been giving us inconsistent information?” she found herself saying now. That did the trick.
“I’m not the one you should be talking to,” the woman said, slipping back the paper. “Sort it out with your own at your embassy.”
My own embassy won’t help me without it, Florence thought, but strained to maintain a firm smile. “I will certainly do that, but in the meantime,” Florence persisted, “I’d like to, as I said before, fill out the paperwork for the visa.”
It was then that the ogre stood up out of her chair to her full, not inconsiderable height and, instead of coming out to do harm to Florence’s physical person, waddled down a short corridor. For a few uncertain minutes Florence stood there with her chin lifted and her jaw set tight against the mutters behind her (“We’ll be here all day”; “An American, she says”). But soon enough, the woman returned with the forms. And Florence, stepping aside, filled out all the boxes with fingers only slightly shaky from her triumph. The woman took them back without further words.
—
Leon returned to Moscow four days early.
It was not the homecoming he was expecting.
No dinner set out on a linen tablecloth. No tea with lemon and sugar. Only his stalking wife pacing up and down the room in a frenzy of psychotic silence.
“Well, that’s it. I’ve called in all my favors. No one will hire me. And you aren’t going to ask at TASS, are you? Or you would have offered on the phone. I’m right, aren’t I? I can see it in your eyes. You’re terrified, like the rest of them.”
Tired, unwashed, he walked to the daybed and collapsed on its cluster of scratchy pillows. “I’ll ask, Florie,” he said weakly. “But there’s no point.”
“No, of course,” she said with unhappy satisfaction. “So what’s going to happen to me?”
“Hopefully, nothing tragic, Florence, as long as you manage to keep your goddamn voice down and lie low for a little while. We’re entering a difficult time. People are losing their lives and freedom, and you’re complaining to me about losing your job.”
Her eyes jerked ceaselessly around the room. “It’s those careerists, like that Orlova. They’re like insects. They use the Party line to get rid of people who are good workers so they can install their own idiots. They’re like parasites who lay their own eggs and kill the host.” It crossed her mind that the particular phraseology with which she was inveighing against the bank’s Party Committee secretary was the same language Orlova herself regularly used to denounce the “wreckers and saboteurs” in the government and elsewhere. But since she couldn’t admit to Leon the real reason for her panic, she continued. “This bloodsucking abuse, Leon. It has to be exposed!”
“And how do you plan to expose it?”
“Write to the papers!”
“I’m sure you’re familiar with the dispatches we’re producing now, Florence. The only letters the papers are going to publish are more bloodthirsty calls for the murder of ‘enemies’ who no one knows very much about, letters demanding that human beings be ‘put down’ like dogs. So how about you stop with the hysterics, and use your head.”
“I am using my head! I can’t not work. It’s illegal. As soon as the little snoops around here start asking themselves what I do here all day, I’m leaving myself open to arrest. What do you propose: that I get dressed every morning and wander the streets?”
“We could formalize our marriage. ‘Housewife’ is a valid profession.”
“Housewife?” She pronounced the word as though it were the quintessence of everything she’d ever had contempt for. “How very kind of you to try to make an honest woman of me! I should be grateful, shouldn’t I? Well, let me tell you something: for such a grand fate I could have stayed in Brooklyn.”
She’d never seen him truly angry before, at least not since their first night at the Metropol. He stood absolutely still, expressionless. Only his black eyes, boring into her, assumed a kind of burn, while the rest of his face remained rigid. “Forgive me,” he said suddenly, in a sinister, implausibly precious voice. “I almost forgot. The Great Florence Fein! How can they fail to appreciate her brilliance, her energy, her valuable service to the Soviet State Bank! Think of the injustice. Let’s for a minute forget that more important people are being rounded up and sent away to the devil knows where. The distinguished Florence Fein has been pushed aside. Forgive me for trying to offer you a reasonable way out!”
“Playing wifey in this room all day is not a reasonable way out….We need to leave this place, Leon! Oh God.” She began to wail. He clasped her wrist, but even then she couldn’t stop. “If only I hadn’t given those awful people my passport!” She sunk to her knees as he released her. “That stupid paper they gave me is useless. The guards at the embassy couldn’t even read it.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, kneeling down close beside her.
“They said it wasn’t a valid passport, and I tried to explain that I had to get inside to get the new passport, but they turned me away.”
She could see the life draining out of his face.
“But I’m going back, and you have to come with me,” she continued with a reassuring pressure to his hand. “Like you promised. You’re more persuasive. If we can just get past the Russian guards and talk to an actual American, it’ll be okay.”
He shut his eyes.
“I’ll do no such thing, Florence,” he said, drawing a breath and raising himself up. “I won’t, and neither will you.”
“I’m going back to America with or without you.”
“Do you even understand what you’ve done?”
And the trouble was that a part of her did understand, had understood all along.
“Did you give the guard your name?” Suddenly he was all business.
“No. He looked at my permit, but briefly.”
“Was there anyone else you spoke to?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anyone outside the embassy. Did anyone follow you out?”
She hesitated, remembering the man in the fedora.
“There was this…man, loitering outside a shopwindow between the Hotel National and the embassy. I didn’t get a good look at him, but…”
“What?”
“He was still there when I came out.”
“My God, Florence. Next time they see you, they’ll stuff you right into one of their automobiles. That whole square is lousy with knockers in
plain clothes.”
“How do you know all this?” she nearly shouted. “Why are you only telling me this now?”
“Because I didn’t think you’d be fool enough to do it!”
And he brought his clenched fist down on the table with a thwap so fierce the sugar tin fell to the floor, its pencils scattering.
In the quiet that followed she was keenly aware that the terror she was feeling was misplaced, that Leon’s rage was only a drop of water in comparison with the unguessably deep swamp of shit she’d waded into. Florence lifted herself up and clawed out the second-to-last of the cigarettes from a pack in her skirt. But the sight of Leon’s chagrined eyes made it hard to stop trembling long enough to light a match.
At last she managed it and took a too-fast, painful drag. She had an urge to press the ember into the meat of her palm.
“All right, let’s calm down,” he said after a while. “Let’s look at this reasonably….Have you filled out any papers—signed your name anywhere?”
Oh, how she wanted to tell him—about going to the OVIR, the ogre whom she’d stared down so tenaciously, the application she’d filled out for an exit visa. She had planned to tell him. But now—the way he was looking at her—she couldn’t. She threw her head back and blew a gray curl of smoke toward the plaster-mold ceiling. “No,” she said.
“Promise me you won’t go there again. Not for a while.”
“All right. But what about finding a job?”
He shook his head impatiently. “Take any kind of job, Florence.”
“You mean work in a factory? A public laundry?”
“What’s wrong with that? It’s honest labor.”
She blew another ring of smoke up at the ceiling. “Now you sound like them.”
“Maybe I do. But there are plenty of decent folks working all kinds of jobs. Educated people, too. You know I’d switch places with you tomorrow, Florence, if I could.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?”
The Patriots Page 29
