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 standing 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.”