The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  “It wouldn’t have changed things,” I said, and knew instantly that it was the wrong thing to have said, to try to assuage whatever storms had brewed in his heart all those years.

  “The point, my friend,” Sidney said sharply, “is we’re all leashed pretty tightly to the era we’re living through. To the tyranny of our time. Even me. Even you. We’re none of us as free as we’d like to think. I’m not saying it as an excuse. But very few of us can push up against the weight of all that probability. And those that do—who’s to say their lives are any better for it?”

  I knew he meant Florence—unpinning herself from one set of circumstances, only to be pinned down by another.

  “But enough…,” he said. He was exhausted from wading into these philosophical depths and wished, I sensed, to move on to something else.

  Only I couldn’t. “Leashed is right,” I said. “When she finally had a chance to leave, she was so goddamn intractable.”

  “You’ve been bludgeoning your poor dead mother with that for years. It’s not such an interesting question. She had her life there! Her theaters, her students. More interesting is why she finally agreed.”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “She was fragile. She’d had that accident. She didn’t want to be left to care for herself on her own.”

  “Is that what you think—us old people, we’re all frightened of having no one to bury us? Come on. After all she’d been through, being left alone was the last thing she was worried about.”

  “Then why?”

  “For you, dummy! Because you’d never have forgiven her if she didn’t go.”

  I looked at the sharp, fragile contours of his face, harder to see now in the dark. “Is that what she told you?”

  “Not in so many words. She said to me, ‘I was a bad daughter, Sidney, and I wasn’t any kind of wife. I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “duty.” I wanted to be a real mother, but I didn’t have a choice then.’ She was calling me long-distance from Moscow to tell me this. Of course I was thrilled to learn she was coming to the U.S. with the rest of the family. I said, ‘Florie, what’s changed?’ She said: ‘I already orphaned my boy once, Sidney. I can’t do it to him twice.’ ”

  I could feel her words suddenly in my body, rattling my veins, swelling into a clot in my throat. The sensation I’d felt that night in my hotel room, of how little I’d allowed myself to understand her all those years, returned to me now in the form of a fresh and tormenting grief. “I was thirty-six,” I said, my voice growing thin. “I had kids of my own. I wouldn’t have been devastated if Mama hadn’t…”

  “Don’t you tell me,” Sidney said, not letting me finish.

  He was right. I took a deep breath of the pine-scented air. I understood better than I wanted to what she’d meant. Sidney and I had never spoken like this before. He had never told me about the girl who’d turned her back on “duty” and the old woman who’d renounced her freedom for the duty she’d once forsaken.

  Sidney sat with his eyes shut. The lawn had gotten louder as darkness descended. The symphony of insects was vying with the music floating down from the window. Whoever was listening had turned it up to be heard above the intruding noises of nature, but the frogs and crickets, not to be outdone, had raised their volume. I sat in the near darkness, listening to the horn and piano mix with the hissing percussion of the cicadas, the frogs keeping time—the whole pulsing orchestration of the natural world that knew nothing and cared nothing of the suffering and resplendence of our short lives.

  Sidney’s eyes were still closed, and for a moment I thought he had fallen completely asleep in his cushioned chair, that our conversation had taken the last of the day’s vitality out of him, and that I would now have to shake him awake. But when I spoke his name, softly, his eyes popped open again, their slightly protuberant whites flashing like the peepers of some alert nocturnal animal.

  I helped him up, taking his elbow, and guided him through almost total darkness along the steps to the back porch, where the sliding doors had been left open. “Don’t dawdle too long at the South Pole,” he warned me. “Time might stand still there, but from where I’m sitting it flies fast.”

  I made him a promise that I would come back to visit him soon. I watched him walk slowly inside until he’d closed the sliding door behind him, and then I walked the ten moist, grassy yards back to my car and took the uncrowded nighttime highways home.

  Every week, navigating the strange new city, she discovered what was not there. The Polo Grounds. The soaring glass cathedral of Penn Station. The splendid Gothic spire of the Singer Building, replaced by the chubby functionality of another skyscraper. The Brooklyn Bridge trolley service. Sidney’s beloved Dodgers and their old stadium at Ebbets Field, now a swarm of housing projects.

  There were neighborhoods into which she could not venture alone. Brownsville, Bedford-Stuy, South Brooklyn. Places where the streets had been gutted by arson and something called “smack.” Graffiti mauled the buildings where she’d once taken her typing classes. Gone were the elevated tracks raining soot on pedestrians below. Fulton Street was not girdled by metal tracks but abandoned to light and foliage. Even the street signs had upgraded their drab yellow and gray to a bright, assertive, chemical green.

  In the first months, Florence had felt assaulted by the changes, but soon she came to like that there was so little Old Brooklyn left to remind her of her past. She prided herself that she’d never been vulnerable to nostalgia. The soddenness of this destitute borough no longer had the power to disillusion her.

  It was funny, Florence sometimes thought, sitting in her kitchen and looking down through the fire-escape window onto Ocean Parkway, that, after having accomplished the great act of her escape from it so young, it was to Brooklyn that she’d ultimately returned.

  She’d been granted her U.S. citizenship upon arrival (her reward for being born an American). The other privileges had taken more effort. With the help of Sidney and Julian, she’d filed paperwork with the state of New York and the city to get her SSI benefits, and her Section 8 housing, and her own Jamaican home attendant, who came twice a week to help her cook and clean, to measure her blood pressure, to take her to the doctor and the hair salon. But aside from this weekly help, she was living on her own again, in a one-bedroom on the corner of Avenue C, where car alarms howled all day and night, and where each Saturday she watched black-hatted Jews, like ghosts of an ancient era, walking with their legions of children to shul.

  She found that, in spite of her fears, she was not useless. At all hours of the day her new neighbors—those from Odessa and Kiev, with spilling décolletages and pumpkin-colored hair; Georgians who spoke Russian with thicker accents than her own; Tats from Azerbaijan who wore headscarves and skirts long enough to sweep up the grime off their tiled tenement floors—found reason to knock on her door, seeking translation help with the confusing paperwork that arrived every week in envelopes from Social Security, Medicaid, and the Publishers Clearing House. The elderly among them came to her for intercession with their impossible-to-understand home attendants, whom they persisted in calling “foreigners,” though these women from Jamaica and Barbados had been in the country far longer than they.

  But the knock on her door she most looked forward to was her brother’s. It was Sidney who got Florence out of the house and to the old parts of Brooklyn where, fifty years ago, they’d gone in search of petty treasures: cake cutters, pencil charms, police whistles, sucking candies, parakeets. Of course there were no more Woolworths and five-and-dimes where one could scout for such cheap gems. Nothing could be bought for a nickel or a dime anymore. Even the pay telephones now cost a quarter. And there was nowhere to go that made a decent egg-cream soda. And so, instead, brother and sister sat on benches in the parks, talking while they watched the lanes of traffic, talking until the thread of words pulled a circle around them that made the past half-century vanish. Remember! Remember! “Remember when you tried to get a job like Eliza Weiss,
selling clocks up at Martin’s all Christmas?”

  “Eliza—dear God, could that poor girl even tell time?”

  “Remember when Mama took us walking past the Menkens’ mansion so she could peek at their new ‘oriental room’?”

  “Sure. She couldn’t stop talking about those paper fans and silk damask wallpaper! Word was, Mr. Menken had a lot of apologizing to do.”

  “A scandal?”

  “That’s what everyone was talking about, silly. You were too young to get it.”

  “So who told you?”

  “Nobody told me, but I heard. As our nanny Sissy used to say: A rich man can’t say sorry with daisies any more than a poor one can ask forgiveness with jewels.”

  —

  TODAY THEY’D MOVED PAST their favorite bench, taking care to walk slowly so that Florence could favor her good leg. She hung on to Sidney’s arm, her purse hanging between them, so no hoodlum would be tempted to snatch it, though there were no valuables in it, aside from twenty dollars and a handful of bus tokens. Nothing important, besides the letter.

  Her brother was the only one who’d ever known about the original letter. The one that, after five years of writing in her head, Florence had finally committed to paper in July 1959. It was the month when Sidney had visited them in Moscow, maneuvering to arrive as a delegate for the American National Exhibition hosted by Khrushchev.

  In all these years she had never forgotten her pilot, the man who’d dropped down out of the sky like an angel to give her a chance at a second life. Yet, in making the promise to tell Henry’s family of his fate, she had committed another falsehood. Years after the camps, struggling to rebuild her life and raise her son, she’d continued to tell herself that her offer could not, under the circumstances, have been binding. A promise forged in the crucible of hunger and desperation, made while one could not even intuit a future in which one was alive—surely it had to be null and void. If such a letter were mailed from the Soviet Union and opened by authorities, she could expect an immediate and unpleasant visit from the kind of people who still had the power to do her, and her son, enormous harm.

  She wondered if she would have had the courage to write the letter had her daring brother not volunteered to slip it out in his briefcase. Seeing Sidney that afternoon in Sokolniki, so outwardly changed—standing at his full height in a sports jacket and sunglasses, his bristly hair now a gelled wave, on his hand a plain gold band—made her panic. How sure of himself and of life he was. How American, with his glow of health and certainty. A stranger. But she’d misjudged: The same love and loyalty burned in him as always. He’d brought along a thick stack of photographs—of their parents, of her older brother, of the nieces and nephews they knew she’d never see—and spoke to her for hours about all the life she’d missed. In the end, it was he who suggested that she sew the letter to Robbins’s family into the breast lining of his flannel suit. Sidney encouraged her to use her real name, but she was still too cautious. And it had not gratified Florence to realize, the day she and Julian saw Sidney off at the Moscow airport, that the promise she’d made in bad faith to Robbins was the one promise in her life she’d been able to keep.

  Up on Albemarle Road was the Baptist church that had once been their synagogue, its Star of David still visible on the railing of the gate as the doors emptied out. The accents she heard now were Creole instead of Yiddish. These were neighborhoods into which Julian didn’t like her venturing, even with Sidney by her side. As quickly as he’d been able, her son had left New York and made the move to Westchester. What he didn’t know wouldn’t kill him. Besides, not everything had changed. Erasmus Hall was still the white Gothic fortress she remembered, the pines in front now tall enough to hide its upper windows. The Loew’s Kings Theatre still stood on Flatbush Avenue like a grand old opera palace, the dilapidated grandeur of its baroque façade soot-stained and water-damaged. The post office too was exactly where she remembered it, inside a venerable old brick building that aside from some graffiti scrawl had escaped the ravages of time.

  The letter she planned to send today had more details than the one she’d penned in ’59. Her real name, for instance, which she’d been too terrified to include the first time around. The details of the camp where she’d come across Henry. If they wanted to know more, they could call her. She included her telephone number.

  She still felt queasy and light-headed at the thought of revealing so much information about herself, especially since Sidney had urged her to mail a second copy to the Veterans Department missing-persons office in Washington. If her years in Russia had taught her anything, it was that there would always be a dear price to pay for giving away too much.

  Yet what a relief it was to ignore those lessons. To break the penitential silences.

  There was no line inside the post office. The postal clerk, a heavyset woman in thick glasses, took Florence’s envelopes, stamped them, and summarily handed her a receipt.

  Outside, an April wind tossed about litter of orange rind and wet newspaper. In the brightness of high noon, Florence lifted her chin and let the sun warm her face. She could still picture him—the man whose eyes, black and bruised, had shone with such constant, implausible, and incorruptible faith in her. Robbins had called her Sleeping Beauty, and she felt now that she was at long last waking up.

  Sidney was waiting for her at the curb. “Ready to head home, Florie?” His dry hand was warm on her elbow.

  “Yes,” she said, “let’s.”

  For T. Friedman

  There are people without whom this book would not exist, whose stories and insights were the soil from which my characters could grow: Timothy Friedman, Aleksandr Iyerusalimskiy, Ilya Ponorovsky—my heroes in every sense of the word. I’m grateful to my family, who never let me compromise this book’s vision: Sophia Krasikov, my mother and fellow creative seer, who read every page and let no falsehood pass her doorstep; Gregory Warner, my husband and compañero in life and storytelling, and my finest editor.

  I’m grateful for the sharp-eyed friends who read the original manuscript and gave fabulous advice: Alexis Calice, Aoife Naughton, and Laura Starecheski. Thanks to my dad, Jacob Krasikov, for his merciless cuts, and to my sister, Tatiana, my anchor. To the friends who have become my extended family over years of writing: Natasha Iyerusalimskaya and Olga and Anya Ponorovsky. To my friends and guides in Moscow: Olga Ladygina, Olga Osnovskaja, Sergey Zhuravlev, and Tatiana Smirnova. I am indebted to the Rohr Family Foundation for the priceless gift of time and to Carolyn Hessel for her enthusiastic support of this work as it evolved from talk to prose. Thanks to my editor, Cindy Spiegel, to my agent, Richard Abate, and to the early thoughtful readers: Judy Sternlight, Laura Van der Veer, Caitlin McKenna, Louis Pelosi, Jackie Stapleton, Lynn Lovett, Michael Meyer, Walter and Betty Grey, Carol Christian, Robert Herz, and Rosalind Fink.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to the hundreds of papers, interviews, and books that aided my knowledge of the turbulent and tragic Stalinist era and helped me fill the interstices of my characters’ lives. Two volumes were especially helpful in understanding the political context of their plight: Tim Tzouliadis’s excellent The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia and Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov.

  And finally, my thanks to the guiding spirit of Pauline Friedman, one of the daring women who made the world go round.

  BY SANA KRASIKOV

  One More Year

  The Patriots

  SANA KRASIKOV’s debut short story collection, One More Year, was named a finalist for the 2009 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, received a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award, and won the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, among other publications. Born in Ukraine, Krasikov grew up in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and New York, where she curre
ntly lives with her husband and their two children.

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