“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.
“I don’t know. I think something’s being cooked up,” said Seldon.
“Inside the committee or the whole bureau?”
“All the staff changes—the twat of a section editor they brought in. We’ve been preparing a series on ‘Great Inventions.’ Mostly culling from old years’ encyclopedias. I let the words ‘Nobel’s dynamite’ slip past the copy controls, and she went at me like a bag of ferrets. Didn’t I know Nobel had nothing to do with dynamite? He only stole the patent from Zinin and Petrusevski!”
Florence sat Yulik down in the zinc tub and bathed him in the water, scooping it up with a cup and letting it fall like rain around his pale shoulders. She felt deep discomfort with the direction of the conversation.
“I told her, ‘I ain’t the writer, ma’am. I just translate what I’m given.’ ‘We all have to be vigilant about inaccuracies,’ she says. ‘Inaccuracies, distortions, and political errors.’?”
Leon took no notice of Florence’s displeasure. He permitted himself a laugh. “Lucky thing you weren’t making an entry on Edison’s incandescent lamp or she’d have charged you with maligning the name of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, inventor of the Lenin lightbulb.”
Florence ordered the little boy to step out of the tub and patted him down with a kitchen towel. She found Leon’s total faith in Seldon smug and disconcerting. Abandoning oneself to this kind of joking was imprudent even with one’s best friend. “Seldon. It’s late,” she reminded their guest. “We have to put Yulik to bed.”
“I’m feeling pretty knackered myself. Come on over here,” he said, addressing the boy, who was now dressed in a fresh nightshirt. “I got something for you.”
Yulik came up and was lifted onto Seldon’s knee. Seldon took the last two papirosi out of his pack of Kazbek and handed the empty pack to the boy. “A new stallion for you,” he said, as Yulik studied the picture of the horse and rider.
“We’ll cut it out tomorrow,” said Leon. “You can add it to your stable. What do you say to Uncle Seldon?”
“Thank you.”
Seldon roughed the boy’s hair as he stood up. “And thank you, Florie, for the libations.”
She nodded as Leon walked Seldon to the door. “Good night, family,” he said. “Sleep innocently.”
—
All in all, Florence thought, the war and its end had left them better off than before. When they returned from evacuation with their small son, she and Leon had continued to work for the SovInformBuro, the broadcast network, with its peacetime staff moved into a vast new maze of offices on Leontievsky Lane. Like Leon, she had stayed on as a translator. Her job now entailed scanning select American periodicals for news items that could be plucked out and repackaged for the Soviet press. With a glance at an American paper, she could pick out a story about the acquittal of a lynch mob in South Carolina and enlarge it to a feature that demonstrated the corruption of the American court system. Or rewrite a report on a coal mine explosion in Centralia, Illinois, to illustrate the disregard of mine owners for the oppressed worker class. It was not enough merely to translate a story. One had to translate it in a way that gave the correct depiction of events. A short news item on an auto manufacturer’s offer to replace its car owners’ tire rims with new, unscuffable metal rims could be restyled in a way that suggested that American capitalist firms regularly duped consumers with flimsy and dangerous products and were forced to replace those products only when their abuses were discovered. Even a story about a natural disaster, like a tornado that had leveled eighty houses in Woodward, Oklahoma, could be reworked to emphasize the low quality of houses constructed by corner-cutting capitalists who cared for nothing so much as the almighty dollar.
Such interpretive sorcery was a labor for which Florence was well suited. Her lifelong talent for flagging injustices large and small, which had left her feeling misunderstood by her teachers and fellow students when she was a schoolgirl, had finally found its ideal expression. For Florence it required no more mental limbo to interpret the foreign news in this reproachful light than it took to square her own daily life with the utopia promised by the Soviet press. Among her co-workers, she was not unique in this respect. Within the sealed offices of the SovInformBuro, the journalists and translators who every morning read and discussed the foreign dispatches, which were denied and forbidden to the rest of the population, treated these stories as wholly reliable, whereas the Soviet press reports chronicling bountiful harvests and anniversaries, unanimous votes of approval, uninterrupted workers’ achievements, and fulminations against imperialists were treated as fiction. To hold these two premises was merely necessary for the work and did not make one unpatriotic.