I conjured up a vague memory of blue hair-bows and white pinafores. “The family that had the Ukrainian relatives staying for three weeks at a time?”
“The same one. The father with the drooping mustache. Dita immigrated to Israel, and a couple of years ago, she writes the father’s ‘memoirs.’ Full of inaccuracies. Forget the small ones. She writes that, because my mother was never arrested, she must have been the informer in our kommunalka. Can you imagine drawing that conclusion? Very scientific. I wanted to pick up the phone and call the publisher.”
“What’s the point?”
“The point? To ask what this Dita’s process of deduction was! And mezhdu prochim, by the way, if there was an informer, it was probably Vainer himself. Or Flora Solomonovna.”
This was the point where I stopped hearing. The sounds of the restaurant rushed into my ears like an ocean roar. Flora Solomonovna. Florence. My mother. Yasha was still talking ecstatically, gesticulating with his French fry. He must have forgotten for a moment who his audience was. “What are you talking about?” I interrupted. “You’re saying my mother was the apartment informer?”
Yasha reluctantly bit his fry. A familiar twitch at the corner of his mouth told me this was no slip. He’d meant to say it. But his voice carried a note of regret, even sympathy. “Look, I wasn’t there. My mother, she lost her mind a little by the end. I don’t know who was right, who was wrong—and I don’t care. But to put it on paper like that! That’s what got me.”
“Come on, now, Yasha, I didn’t pull you by the tongue. You started, please finish. What did she say?”
“Who, Mama?”
I was silent.
He palmed back his untidy gray hair. “Flora used to talk to her…when all the chaos started in that apartment with the arrests. Flora told her, ‘Rosa, if you’re taken away, they can send your boy to live with relatives. If it happens to me, where is Yulik going to go? Lord knows they won’t send him to my relatives in America. What will happen to him?’ Mama said Flora was ready for anything. Ready to go to any length.”
“Well, that’s certainly more deductive.” I felt something cold and stern taking hold of me. “A conversation over a kerosene burner.”
Yasha was avoiding my eyes, wolfing down his brisket like a sword swallower, though the effort of it seemed to be causing him some difficulty now. “She said some things. What does it matter now? I’m sure you could get all the facts, if you wanted.” I could see satisfaction wearing through his apologetic grin. “They’ve opened up the archives again. Didn’t you tell me you always wanted to get your mother’s classified files?”
I stared at him. He certainly never forgot a thing. It was true: I’d once lamented to him about missing my chance to obtain my parents’ dossiers. That had been some time after ’92, when Yeltsin had decreed that the KGB’s old archives could be opened for anyone who’d had a relative arrested, killed, or sent away under Stalin. But a few years after the announcement, access to the files was again restricted, without warning or explanation, as is our Russian way.
Yasha mopped up the sauce on his plate. “You must have read about it. It was in all the papers.”
“I haven’t had much time for reading,” I said.
“Of course.” He gazed around at last, taking in the view with a look that said, I can see you’ve kept yourself busy. “Well, if you’re still interested, you ought to do it soon. You never know, they could start reclassifying everything tomorrow. That’s how it is—a few years of so-called freedom and they turn the screws tight again.”
I smiled. “I’ll give it some thought.” I raised two fingers to signal for the check.
“Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, right?” Yasha said, giving me a shrug and a half. “Especially if you’re already traveling there for business.”
“My trips are scheduled pretty tightly,” I said.
He took another bite of beef. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll find the time.”
—
That night, I couldn’t sleep, thinking about all the counterarguments I’d failed to make to Yasha’s face. My mother, going “to any length” to save her child? Was he kidding? The defining tragedy of my mother’s life was that she’d never had an instinct for family preservation. I recalled a conversation around our small kitchen table in Moscow. We’d been reminiscing about my old babysitter, Avdotya Grigorievna, the old woman who’d lived down the hall and was fond of me. Mama and I were laughing at old Auntie Dunya’s queer way of rolling her “o”s when Florence suddenly said, “Her family was from one of those Volga villages, outside Gorky somewhere. She offered to help us get there, stay with her relatives for a while, keep low after Papa was arrested.”
“So why didn’t we go?” I said.
But she’d laughed at my dismay. “What was I going to do in a village? Pick turnips? Grow potatoes?”
“And what were you doing that was so special in Moscow? Writing letters to Comrade Stalin? Dragging me out before dawn so you could get a better spot on the prison lines?”
“I wasn’t going to abandon your father. I had to find out what happened to him.”
“You knew what happened to him. You were just drawing attention to yourself.”
At this, her face acquired that gloss of incomprehension she liked to retreat behind when challenged. “I couldn’t have just left him,” she said irritably.
“And what about me, Mama? Did you ever think about what would happen to me when they came for you?”
She chewed her food for a while before answering. Then she said, “Yes, I did think about it. Your father and I talked about it.” This was a surprise to me. “We knew that, no matter what happened to either of us, they would never let anything bad happen to the children here. The children were always going to be taken care of.”
Then it was my turn to laugh. Taken care of, indeed! It was a miracle my arm hadn’t been emancipated from its socket when I was six years old by my state-appointed caretakers.
“No matter what happened to you, Mama?”
“Yes, no matter what happened to us, the country would always look after the children,” she repeated like a robot.
“But, Mama,” I said, “it didn’t have to happen to you at all! Don’t you get it? None of it had to happen to you, or to anybody.”
Again the fact-proof screen was raised. Once more her eyes acquired the perplexed look that indicated all communication had ceased.