Aside from access to bountiful reading material, the job’s more utilitarian benefits included a larger room for Florence and Leon, in a better apartment that was also closer to the city center. Through the bureau’s channels Florence had also managed to help widowed Essie trade her double room and move into the single spare room at the end of their hall. The act had not been entirely altruistic. The discomfort of living in a kommunalka without allies still haunted Florence’s memory. Now she would have a friend who was like a sister just down the hall, to take her side in apartment divisions and disputes.
As a young woman, she had bristled at the lack of privacy. As a mother, Florence discovered the advantage of always having a neighbor nearby to watch Julian in a bind. Motherhood had recomposed her life along new lines, and helped drive from her memory the last of her nostalgia for home. Of course, she wished her parents could meet their grandson. But from the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past. Every morning, she gazed into her son’s small face and marveled at the alert, inquisitive intelligence she saw in it, his bottomless, frequently manic delight in the sensate world—a song his father might make up, the free association of words, the taste of a sesame candy.
And so, for his sake, she resolved to accept things as they were. She did not care to remember her despair before the war, her nervous exhaustion, her wild and foolish attempt at escape. She was arriving at a revelation that the secret to living was simply forgetting. Besides, the war was over. The country was at peace—with itself, too. The immeasurable toll of the war seemed to have satiated Russia’s enraged cannibal heart at last.
She no longer experienced homesickness as a great ache in her bones but as a manageable prickle that could pass with time. At her desk at the SovInformBuro, while her eyes scanned headlines from Cleveland or New York, Florence might carefully allow a little of the old malady to rise up inside her, but only enough—as she translated the climbing tally of injustices—to remind herself that she’d done right to leave. Only occasionally did she permit America to occupy her full consciousness, and that was when, in the seclusion of Essie’s room, the two of them paged through the glossy stock of foreign magazines that Florence managed to sneak out of the office.
Every now and then, there circulated among the translators’ desks issues of Time, Newsweek, and Life. Strict procedures were in place for signing out magazines to one’s desk. But Florence had discovered that if one of these periodicals found its way to you through another desk, and if the issue was not recent, it could go absent for a night, a whole day sometimes, without causing a great eruption of suspicion from the inventory librarians. And though no one would admit to it, Florence was sure she was not the only one who now and again left the SovInformBuro office with an American magazine hidden inside the creased newsprint of her Pravda.
It had become a ritual: once Yulik was tucked into his cot, Florence would take the magazine, still concealed by newsprint, across the hall to Essie’s room, where Essie would have prepared a pot of tea in anticipation of their reading, along with a plate of wafer cakes, the only treat they could indulge in without the risk of staining the magazine’s filmy pages.
One evening some months after Mikhoels’s funeral, and after weeks on the lookout, Florence was able to get her hands on a recent issue of Newsweek with youthful Soviet troops on the cover, and the headline “Could the Red Army Overrun Europe?” bannered alarmingly across it. While Essie fussed with pouring the tea, Florence sat at the small table Essie employed as a vanity, leafing through pages. It was their unspoken agreement that she would get first look at whatever she brought into the apartment. Some of the corners were already frayed and bent. A few of the pages were torn out at the root, to expunge, Florence presumed, the most forbidden material. And yet on the page right in front of her was a political cartoon—a caricature of a mustachioed Stalin holding a bird rifle and trying to shoot down cranes carrying bags of food labeled “Marshall Plan” to beleaguered Berliners. The man they were all sworn to love and fear was here pictured as a buffoon, a sloppy, spiteful poacher. Florence tore the page out and stuffed it into her apron pocket. She did not care to look at this cartoon in the presence of another person, even Essie. It served only to remind her of the risks she was taking in sneaking the magazine home and showing it to others.
“Enough hogging,” Essie said, sidling up in her chair beside Florence. With the corner of her blouse she wiped the lenses of her horn-rimmed glasses. “Jeez Louise, what’s that?”
“Says here it’s the Westinghouse automatic clothes washer.”
“Looks like some sort of jukebox radio with that window. Where the heck does it go, in the kitchen?”
“I guess so.”
Essie ran her fingertips over the wide glossy page. She adjusted the glasses that enlarged her pale eyes and suggested constant awe and bewilderment at whatever she saw.
A fact that didn’t need to be stated: it wasn’t for the articles they lusted but for the advertisements. Here, between the “serious” stories, were all manner of whimsical new inventions: “pressure cookers” that never burned a meal, “duplex refrigerators” that kept meat fresh from June until October, electric ovens that could roast thirty-pound turkeys, Hoovers that sucked dust from drapes and blinds, “pop-up toasters” in which one could behold one’s own reflection. Looking at these colorful illustrations, Florence was struck by the vision of the birth of a new era, one in which the technological ingenuity perfected during the war was now being turned toward a singular aim: the easing of the housewife’s burdens, a brawny project of domestication on a national scale. The high gloss of modern kitchens illustrated a life that was at once familiar in her memories, and not at all believable: a sumptuous, sunlit dream of the future.
“Look at the dresses they wear nowadays,” said Essie, “with the bow at the back—and that’s just at home?”
“Oh, Essie, I don’t think anybody washes the dishes wearing a dress like that, here or in America.”
“I wouldn’t mind my own ‘sink bowl’ to wash the linens in, never mind one of those machines. And a desk telephone like that, instead of that enormous thing always ringing outside my door. I’m the only one who ever picks up, you know, because I can’t bear to have it ringing all the time.”
“You’d rather seven telephones be ringing in seven rooms?”