The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  “Pure bosh,” objects Seldon, rolling himself a cigarette of cheap makhorka, the only tobacco available. “Nothing’s going to be over until the Allies open a second front in Europe. We’ll provide them with cannon fodder until everyone’s exhausted or dead, and then the squire of Hyde Park and that pompous pair of jowls will finally grace us with a few battalions. And just in time, deus ex machina, to get all the bloody credit.”

  “Roosevelt wants to enter, he’s only waiting for a decision from Churchill.”

  “You sweet soul. Those two gentlemen sausages are in it together. If Germany were winning, they’d help Russia. But if Russia is winning, they’ll help Germany by doing nothing. Just as long as they’re getting as many dead bodies as possible on both sides.”

  Since their evacuation to Kuibyshev, the three of them have been living and working side by side in this tiny attic flat. Staying up and talking late into the nights. Their domestic arrangement makes Florence think of Seldon as their ward, though more often it’s Seldon, with his mix of Yiddish and East London inflections, who sounds like their guardian. When he gets his teeth into a topic, he won’t let go, and he keeps sounding off about Roosevelt and Churchill even as the siren wail from the loudspeakers announces curfew. Florence squints through the window. Everywhere, lights are being turned off, gas lamps extinguished, cigarettes snuffed out. She gets on her knees and fetches the thick black-painted paper they keep behind the wardrobe. She drags a chair to the window and carefully mounts it, her movements becoming more deliberate and cautious as, on her tiptoes, she begins to tape the paper to the top of the window. By now the street below is practically invisible, quarantined in a darkness meant to protect the city from German air-raid bombs. For the past two years they have lived in a constant state of emergency, and still, during most of that time, Florence has been unaccountably happy. So happy, in fact, that she can hardly admit it to herself without a momentary twinge of shame. All over the Eastern Front, men are falling dead—being slaughtered, as they say, in the flower of their youth. Wives have been separated from their husbands, sweethearts from lovers. And every morning, she wakes afresh into a state of guilt and gratitude to find Leon asleep (alive!) beside her. It is like a miracle. All over the country, mothers and wives are opening envelopes with death notices. Essie, back in Moscow, has already received a pokhoronka of her own. In a letter, she has informed Florence that her young husband perished during the assault on Rostov. At the age of twenty-six, Essie is already a widow, her grief tempered only by the fact that she has “no orphan mouth to feed at a time like this.” It is while Florence is balanced on top of the wooden chair, thinking about her friend, that she suddenly feels it. A brief flutter in the slightly gas-distended balloon of her abdomen. But this time it is not indigestion from the Lend-Lease gelatinized meat Leon brought home a few days earlier (a delicacy donated by the Americans, with the letters SPAM printed on the can). What she feels is a disturbance not at all gastronomical: a flapping of butterfly wings, a tiny somersault. For the first time, the new life, quarantined in a protective darkness all its own, announces itself. For a moment, Florence loses her balance.

  Leon jumps up, hearing the chair’s scrape. “What are you doing up there! You shouldn’t be doing that.”

  “You were too busy strategizing our victory.”

  “Put that paper down. I’ll glue it.”

  “That’s right,” pipes in Seldon. “Your woman’s been on her feet long enough. Come and have a drink, Florie. We’re celebrating tonight. Your boy’s a man. Almost thirty years old!”

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” she says.

  “Enough, you teetotaler. A little homespun spirit won’t kill you.”

  Leon attaches the last piece of rolled paper to the window and glances at Florence as if asking permission. She gives a happy shrug.

  “Seldon, Florie’s going to have a baby.”

  Seldon’s eyes, growing wide, turn from one to the other. “You’re having me on.”

  “No, it’s true.”

  “Fancy that—she’s up the duff! How long?”

  “Going on six months,” Florence says, almost demurely. The wartime rations have kept her alarmingly skinny. And this time, she thinks, there won’t be any stupid abortions. She has been given a second chance. This child, when he is born—God willing—she will cherish to the end of her days.

  “Well, well,” says Parker. “Keeping your little secret all this time from Uncle Seldon.”

  From his green bottle he pours a bit of moonshine into their mismatched glasses. He always seems to have a supply, in spite of the deficits, procuring it through his own secret channels. “A little bit for Mama,” he says, pouring a drop into Florence’s teacup (“It’s bad luck to toast with water”), and then raises his own glass. “From now on,” Seldon announces, “may it be only the baby’s cries that keep us up in the dark.”

  She raises her cup, satisfyingly heavy in her hand, and takes a drink.

  The actor’s funeral took place on an overcast day in January and was held in the grand style accorded to state heroes. Mourners met the coffin at the Belorusskaya railway station as it was being removed from the Minsk concourse. A polished motorcade ferried the casket through the snowy streets of Moscow into the open courtyard of the Moscow State Jewish Theater where thousands had gathered on the surrounding streets to say their goodbyes. The casket was laid open in the Russian style. Inside, ensconced in a froth of satin and smothered by flowers, lay the great Solomon Mikhoels, his mutilated features made up with greasepaint as if for one last role. His body had been found days earlier in an ice-scabbed snowbank on a side street in Minsk, where Mikhoels had been summoned to judge a play for the Stalin Prize. An apparent hit-and-run. Pressed into his flesh by the wheels of an automobile was the solid-gold cigarette case given to him by the Jews of America during his tour of their continent—the souvenir of his propaganda work.

  Overhead, the telephone wires sagged with sheaths of ice. Tears froze on faces before they could be wiped away. Among the mourners were Mikhoels’s compatriots from the theater. The Yiddish actors of Minsk had followed the body in its casket to Moscow. Two evenings earlier, they had taken turns lingering like inconspicuous bodyguards outside Mikhoels’s hotel room, alert to a foreboding they could not themselves explain. That evening was dark and windy. Mikhoels was paged to the hotel telephone. The caller invited him to a dacha belonging to the Belorussian minister of state security. Snow was falling when a taxi arrived for him. On the road to the city outskirts its headlamps were trained on the softly sifting flakes. At the dacha, agents held back Mikhoels’s balding head and beat him unconscious. He was taken to the ruins of the old Minsk ghetto and run over by a truck. The snow continued to fall well into the morning.

  The theater building was too small to hold the crowd, which spilled out into the courtyard and alleys. In the great congress of mourners stood writers and associates of Mikhoels from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. At the foot of the casket was gathered the triumvirate of Yiddish lyrical poets: Markish, Kvitko, and Hofshteyn. It had been agreed that Markish would give the eulogy. Mounting the speaker’s platform, the poet wore no hat. His hair stood up, stiff and unruly, as if suggesting the tormented outrage of his being. His voice rang through the brittle air with the clang of bronze.

  Snow covered the wounds on your face,

  so the shadows of darkness couldn’t touch you

  but the pain rages in your dark eyes,

  and cries out from your trampled heart.

  A stir passed through the crowd. The poem was the first sign given during the carefully orchestrated ceremony that Mikhoels’s death was not accidental. Markish continued to read from his slip of paper, taking no notice of the crowd.

  I want to come, eternity, before your defiled door

  with the stigmata of murder and blasphemy upon my face,

  just as my people walk five-sixths of the globe,

  a testimony to axe and hatred for you to reco
gnize.

  Standing pressed in the throng, Florence felt the charge pass through the bodies like an electric current. Her Russian, though capable and quick, was not attuned to the coded clairvoyance of poetry. She tried to read the faces around her. Beside Markish stood the actor Benjamin Zuskin, who had played the Fool to Mikhoels’s Lear. The two had been the great acting duo of Moscow’s Yiddish theater. In the past two days Zuskin had taken Mikhoels’s place as the head of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had been moved to Moscow at the end of the war. Now his comic face seemed seized by a kind of physical pathology. His promotion to this top office had made him unable to sleep. He did not expect to live to see 1949. On the other side of the speaker’s podium stood the poet Hofshteyn, who had lived in Palestine but returned to Kiev before the war to care for his two sons, left motherless by the death of his first wife. He was as bald as a rook. His black eyes gazed into the distance in front of him so intensely they appeared to cross. It occurred to Florence that all of them had the look of chess pieces left vulnerable by the capture of their queen. The only exception to this was Solomon Lozovsky, the chairman of the SovInformBuro, to whom Florence herself reported. The old revolutionist had been a compatriot of Lenin’s. At seventy, he was still physically imposing. He had once worked as a blacksmith in the railroad town of Lozovaya, Ukraine—which was how he’d gotten his name. Now every breath Lozovsky took left a crystal residue on the hairs of his spade-shaped beard. His eyes seemed to flash a terrible Biblical judgment at Markish’s reckless push against the limits of caution.

  Florence and Essie stood together, holding each other’s gloved hands. Leon and Seldon Parker were stationed closer to the casket, among the important people, having been the official translators for the JAFC. The ceremony was drawing to a close. One by one, people began to approach the casket, lay their lips on the waxen forehead. But it was Seldon who now drew Florence’s attention. Standing beside Lozovsky’s middle-aged secretary, Olivia Bern, he was whispering something in her ear. The lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles flashed as he pointed a finger up to the roof of the theater building, where, as if out of nowhere, a man had materialized.

  Undaunted by the cold, the man wore no coat. His shirt, open to his thin chest, flapped in the wind. His only concessions to the climate, Florence saw as he raised his violin, were the fingerless gloves with which he held his instrument. And then, spontaneously, the music ruptured the tight air like a rip in a bolt of fabric. Gathering into a melody, it seemed to erase its own pattern with each new note. The violinist appeared to play as if through no effort of his own, the dirge pulling him to and fro with the wind. Florence could feel the melody’s precarious grip on her frightened heart. She had met Mikhoels in Kuibyshev but had not known the great man closely. Now she experienced the music as a thin torch throwing its light on the steps of a spiraling scaffoldless stairwell, ascending even as it illuminated the cavernous depths below. Among Mikhoels’s gallery of characters had been Tevye the Dairyman. And now the fiddler’s song was heard by those below as an ode to that role. There seemed to be no definition of grief other than the one announced by his tune.

  Slowly, the cortege of people began to disperse, some following the casket to its burial, others heading homeward. The fiddler, whoever he was, continued to play his strange requiem into the evening, long after the last of the mourners was gone.

  —

  ALL DAY THEY HAD STOOD outside on their feet. Now strong tea and cognac were the means by which the four of them, in Leon and Florence’s room, revived themselves from the cold. The dark window was spattered with icy rain, and neither Essie nor Seldon seemed to want to be the first to leave.

  “Wouldn’t you say it was as grand as Kirov’s funeral?” said Essie, addressing Florence in a confectionary voice intended to lift everybody’s spirits. From his place in the old armchair, Seldon took a deep suck of cognac. The contraction on his face was too slight for Essie to notice. “Well, maybe not as fancy as Kirov’s,” she pursued, “but certainly as grand as Maxim Gorky’s.”

  “Grand, grand, grand,” intoned Seldon. “Funerals are to the Russians what carnivals are to the Portuguese.”

  “Well, I thought it was rather somber, not festive at all,” said Essie.

  Seldon turned to her. “Do you know what the definition of a carnival is, Essie?”

  Leon, who had been gazing off into space, turned to give Seldon a look of mute warning. Essie didn’t reply. “It’s a ritual of sanctioned absurdity,” Seldon continued. “Everyday rules are suspended for its duration so that everybody can temporarily indulge in pretending things are the opposite of what they are.” Seldon’s voice had grown rich and heavy with drink.

  “Essie, why don’t you and I collect Yulik from Aunt Dunya’s room,” Florence suggested. “I shouldn’t have left him napping into the evening.”

  “Yes, the time. I’d better be scurrying,” said Seldon, though he made no move to get out of his chair.

  —

  YULIK WAS AWAKE. HE was sitting with his stockinged feet curled under him on the bed, playing with some mismatched buttons and knickknacks in a rusty tin. Seeing his mother, the boy abandoned his project and hopped off the bed to run into Florence’s arms. She gathered him and lifted him up on her hip. “Have you had a good day with Aunt Dunya, bubala?” The boy didn’t answer. He continued to stare at Florence, as if to verify the reality of his mother’s presence.

  “We went to the children’s park, and now he’s helping me sort out my sewing kit,” said Aunt Dunya, who was nobody’s aunt. Avdotya Grigorievna had been a servant to the apartment’s original owners, before they had fled to Paris. She’d managed to appropriate for her room some of their better furnishings, including a mirrored vanity, a rosewood armoire, and an intricate house-shaped cuckoo clock, all of which she kept as polished as when she’d been the family maid. She had contrived to get herself a disability certificate and enjoyed the official status of “invalid.” Nonetheless, her disability pension was small, and in spite of its valuable bric-a-brac, her room always emitted a mildewed smell, possibly because all of Aunt Dunya’s clothes and underwear dated from the same period as the furniture. What money she lived on came from looking after the building’s small children when their parents were at work.

  “How about a kiss for Aunt Essie?”

  The boy acknowledged Essie but hung on to his mother’s neck with the grip of a primate. “Has he been fed?”

  “We had some nice cabbage soup, but he only ate half the bowl.”

  “It had boiled onions,” the boy finally spoke, in his defense.

  —

  IN THE HALLWAY THE BOY watched the pattern of shadows cast by his mother’s and Essie’s moving bodies on the floorboards. He was tugging his mother’s hand, trying to lead her back toward their room, while her friend held on to her other wrist, forcing her motion in the opposite direction. They were speaking in quiet, secretive tones.

  “Any chance you might be bringing any more magazines around?”

  “Essie, hush.”

  “Oh, there’s no one here. It’s been months. I miss our ‘reading nights.’ ”

  “I do too, but they’ve gotten so strict at work, even with the old issues. I’d have to stay late to get them, after everyone’s gone.”

  “Just do it like before. Slip one into a Pravda and stick it in your coat. I don’t even care if it’s in English, honey, as long as it’s got some pictures.”

  The boy tugged harder on his mother’s arm, to no avail.

  “Is there something else?”

  “No. Well, yes,” said Essie. “I wanted to ask you about Seldon….”

  “Our Seldon?”

  “You’d tell me if he’s…got somebody.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A woman.”

  “Oh. If he does, it’s no one he’s told us about.”

  “It’s just…I saw him chatting with Olivia Bern, Lozovsky’s secretary, after the funeral. They were stand
ing together a long time.”

  Florence had an impulse to smile. She knew Bern from Kuibyshev, a Swiss émigrée who’d come to Russia in the twenties. As secretary to the head of SovInformBuro, she was dry and humorless, dispensing assignments in a clipped manner, one of those Bolshevik old maids who were married to their work. “Olivia’s too old for him by fifteen years. They’re friendly, as far as I know.”

  “You’re right. She’s so plain and unattractive. I don’t know why I asked….Please don’t mention it.”

  “Essie, I’d never.”

  “I know you wouldn’t breathe a word.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, dear.”

  —

  IN THE KITCHEN, FLORENCE found her galvanized tin tub and warmed some water on the stove. She brought the tub and water back into the room and found a starched linen towel in their wardrobe. Leon had Yulik on his lap, and Seldon was still sitting in the old armchair, his long legs crossed, exactly as when she’d left.

  “If they wanted him d-e-a-d, why the hero’s funeral?” Leon said.

  “Would it be the first time?”

  “Accidents happen.”

  “Is he an old drunk that he’d be walking around at night, freezing in a snowbank? They wanted him out of the way.”

  “But what for?”

  Over the armrests of the chair, Seldon’s hands hung as if severed at the joints. He was a willowy man with an absence of bony definition in his limbs. Without quite knowing why, Florence found it puzzling and amusing that Essie should take a sudden interest in him. Above the bed in Essie’s room hung an enlarged portrait of the dead young man to whom she’d been briefly married. The corners of the frame were festooned with artificial lilies. She and her young man had been husband and wife for twenty-three months—most of that time spent apart—but Essie had taken so ardently to her mourning that she still spoke of “my Misha” with vocal trembling that suggested a lifetime of love. However, every widow had a right to her grief, and Florence, counting her own blessings, kept quiet whenever Essie dwelled rapturously on her sorrow. Perhaps her shy curiosity about Seldon suggested a positive change. He might not be a dashing officer, but the war’s losses had left eligible men in short supply. Yet Florence could not help feeling something…misguided, perhaps, in the attraction, if only because Seldon had never shown any interest in Essie apart from the elaborate irony with which he frequently treated her. Florence took Yulik out of her husband’s arms. “Raise your hands,” she said, and lifted his shirt over his head. She knelt and slid his ribbed wool stockings down his four-year-old legs.