Her rescue arrived in the form of a national catastrophe. The Great Patriotic War got Florence out of Moscow, out of the hands of the secret police, and once more into the bustle of consequential work that she craved.
On the Volga River’s docks, the dusty summer evening of ’43 presents a ramming chaos of evacuees. The old river city of Samara, since renamed Kuibyshev, has become the nation’s wartime capital. Around the chipped embankment form serpentine lines for meager wartime rations of sugar, vegetable oil, kerosene, matches. The only bread available is the roughest rye. These provisions are ferried into the city on boats or brought on horse-drawn covered wagons and sold off the wagons and boats themselves. All of the trucks and automobiles have been recommissioned for the military. It has occurred to Florence that—were it not for the mounted loudspeakers on every corner, providing constant updates on the war—life in Kuibyshev might resemble the bootstrapping bustle of some nineteenth-century frontier town. Down at the bottom of the docks, where paddlewheel steamers deliver more supplies, the mosquitoes have started to swarm. The terraced hills across the Volga are ablaze with a dissolving sunset. Everyone is in a hurry to get their provisions—which this evening include salted fish and salami, on account of the recent victory in Kursk—and be indoors by sundown. At last, Florence, her copious hair tied back in a kerchief to protect it from the dust, obtains her own food parcel swaddled in newspaper, and is spat out by the same elbowing crowd that’s borne her to the front of the line. The fish feels pleasantly heavy under her arm as she squeezes past bodies of every age and variety of sweat—the musky brawl of men, the resinous stink of the old, the grapy tang wafting off the necks of young women—until she is released into the open air, then proceeds down a street littered with oily bits of newsprint, and approaches a brick doorway from which a cold cellar draft emerges to greet her. There is no light—the bulb has been screwed out—and the stairwell windows are covered with dark paper. She navigates by touch until she reaches the top floor and opens the door to the odor of burnt coffee. The first thing she sees is the table, still covered in papers, though she has asked to have it cleared tonight. At either end sit Leon and his friend Seldon Parker, Parker’s glasses reflecting the last of the evening’s saffron light.
“I thought we were celebrating tonight. Why are you two still working?”
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Parker says, lifting a sheet of paper like it’s a dirty undergarment. He begins to read aloud: “?‘Hitler’s savage hordes set out to overrun the world, rob the toiling people of their last crumb of bread, kill, rape, gouge out eyes, rip off women’s breasts, disembowel, chop off heads.’?”
“Who wrote that one?” says Leon.
“Our national literary treasure, Dovid Bergelson.” He reads on: “?‘The most atrocious of all is the cruelty they practice on our Jewish brothers and sisters in all of the countries they overrun. They never tire of inventing new instruments in the forms of torture and execution….’?” He pauses to add, “And Dovid Bergelson never tires of ways to describe them. ‘All the calamities which have ever beset our long-suffering people—both in ancient times when Nero drove Jews into circus arenas to be devoured by lions, and in the Middle Ages when Jews donning shrouds went to die at the stake or themselves applied sharp knives to the throats of their children in order to save them from a more horrible death that awaited them—all these calamities pale before Hitler’s cruelties….Day and night their blood, splattered against fences, running over the pavement, calls out to us. It flows and flows in ditches and sewers, and no Mother Rachel will rise from her grave and cry out for Justice.’?”
“He hasn’t left anything out, has he?” says Florence.
“Nero’s circuses, lions, disembowelments, Mother Rachel—oh my!” Seldon clutches his hair. “Give a Jew a pen and he’ll maul you with it. Doesn’t he understand that no paper in England or America is going to print this?”
“You can’t expect a great novelist to conform to the dictates of the Western capitalist press,” says Leon.
“Great novelist, ha! He’s become a bigger hack than Ehrenburg.”
“Then cut something,” says Florence, starting to clear the papers from the table herself.
“We’re translators, not editors,” Parker says helplessly. “And if you haven’t noticed, we have a mountain of these masterpieces to finish.”