It had taken Leon all winter and part of the spring of ’48 to collect the necessary pieces to build his device. Shortwave parts were hard to come by. For months he had loitered around the electric exchange shops on the margins of the city’s outdoor bazaars, until he’d collected everything he needed. And then, to Florence’s wonder, he brought his autodidactic capacities to bear on a whole new set of skills—on the logic of circuits, pentodes, power transformers, and endless mechanical minutiae of which he spoke at length to Seldon Parker. With pieces of mounting wire and insulated wire, he managed to rig an antenna capacitor. With parts of an old Radiofront set, he tooled together a converter which made it possible to switch their longwave radio reception to the greatly expanded number of shortwave stations. Stacked together, the whole setup resembled a tiered cake, a miniature Rockefeller Center made of receiver, converter, and amplifier. Its completion precipitated more visits from Seldon, late evenings whose memory for Florence became a continuous wall of scratchy white noise, of sputtering and hissing, of jammed signals, and occasional rewards for patience: the high nasalities of BBC English, or the mid-continental drawl of the Voice of America.
And then came May 14, and their already fervid gatherings around the radio acquired a new, exhilarated preoccupation. To Leon and Seldon, all scraps of news from Europe and America became secondary in importance to Israel’s progress against its foes: Egyptians in the Negev, Syrians in the Galilee. For weeks, Florence listened to her husband talk about the capture of Nazareth, the strategic value of Beersheba—places whose names she had not heard since her little brother Sidney had been studying Biblical history in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah.
One hot evening in July, when the light outside was still as pale as at noontime, she sat at the open window, mending the scalloped edge of a tablecloth as feeble snatches of sound issued from the rubber military headphones Leon liked to cup to one ear while catching a signal. Out in the hall could be heard the squeals and the screech of Yulik’s new training bike as he rolled it down the parquet floor with the neighbor boy, Yasha. Florence felt a headache blooming in her temple.
“They’re trying to jam it,” Leon said hopelessly.
“Bugger, we just had it!” complained Seldon. He rubbed Leon’s shoulder. “The important thing is not to let the Old City fall to the Arabs now. We’ll take it back, won’t we, Florie?”
We. Us. An unsettling sense of collectivity was creeping into Seldon’s normally egocentric speech, as if he and Leon had personally fought off first the British, then the Arabs from her apartment. She looped a knot. “Why, so they can die guarding a few shrines?” she said, and bit the remaining thread off with her back teeth.
Leon put the rubber headset down and looked at her. “We’re talking about the Old City of Jerusalem. Aside from what those words may or may not mean to you, it’s of vital strategic importance.”
She folded the tablecloth and got up. “Some of us have things of vital importance around here too, like mending your linens and making some dinner for our child.” She went to the door.
“If you’re going to the kitchen, darling, pop a kettle on the stove, will you?” said Seldon.
She didn’t answer him. “Turn the volume down,” she said to Leon.
She too had rejoiced when the Soviet Union had cast its vote in favor of an independent Jewish State. That didn’t mean she was going to let her enthusiasm overwhelm her common sense. Their Jews weren’t our Jews.
Every evening after dinner she opened Pravda to learn about ours. Composers, critics, directors who had abandoned their duty to the people or had “infiltrated” the Soviet theaters, the professional journals, the academies, with the aim of impeding the progress of Soviet drama, or literature, or art. There seemed to be no common thread, aesthetic or ideological, to those being exposed. Only the charge of “nationalism,” and their names bearing a distressing contiguity: Abramov, Adler, Kalmanovich, Pinsker, Segal. Were there any doubts, the original family name was printed in parentheses after the changed one: Gankin (Kagan), Lisov (Lifshitz), Bonderenko (Berdichievsky). Nobody at the SovInformBuro was unmindful of this new current. The Anti-Fascist Committee’s Yiddish journal, Einkayt, had been shut down. The committee’s signboard had been removed from its office.
In the wide hallway, Yulik and the stout Yasha Gendler were still riding around on Julian’s new wheelie. Or rather, Yasha was pumping the pedals while her son chased after him on foot.
“Mama, it’s mine,” the child cried in helpless appeal when he saw her.
“Yasha, why don’t you give Yulik his turn.”
“Just one minute, I wanna test the bell first,” called the boy, trilling the metal bell.
Florence did not dislike Yasha, but privately she disapproved of the way he was being brought up. His mother, Rosa Gendler, always fearful that he would not have enough to eat, still followed him around the kitchen with a spoon.
In the common kitchen Florence set a pot of water to boil and got a couple of potatoes from where she stored them under a square table. She rinsed a knife and began to peel them, then did the same with some carrots, and tossed everything into the pot. Down the long hallway, she heard the big front door clatter and open. Everybody had his own way of unlocking it, and Essie’s was always a key-jangling, winded, sighing entrance. Still in her coat, Essie entered the kitchen carrying groceries—some bruised tomatoes and canned sardines in her string bag, and a paper-wrapped kielbasa. “Mmm. What are you making?” She peered into the pot, the curiosity in her eyes enlarged by her glasses.
“A little salat Olivier, that’s all. Have to finish this can of peas.”
“Expecting company?”
Florence glanced quickly in the direction of her closed door. “Seldon was just leaving.” She wished she hadn’t spoken. But what if Essie saw him on his way out? Essie set her woven bag down on the table and stood watching Florence chop vegetables.
“Well, that won’t be enough,” she said finally. “What you need is a side dish. How about a little doktorskaya kielbasa? It’s finally back in the stores. Smell this, just like perfume.”
Florence took an obligatory sniff.
“I’ll slice it up and join you.”
The headache was reaching around to her other temple, like a snail peeking its head in and out of its shell. The thought of a crowd in her room tonight was giving the throbbing snail permission to come out of hiding. Florence pushed back. “Not tonight, Essie. I’m just too beat. And I have to feed Yulik and put him to bed. Next time.”
A well-worn disappointment gathered around Essie’s mouth. “Well, I won’t ask twice,” she said.
Florence stood staring into her pot of boiling water. She tried to reassure herself that Essie really wasn’t as hurt as she appeared. She was aware, nonetheless, that she’d have no problem inviting Essie in were it not for Seldon’s petulant suspicion of her friend. Whenever Essie knocked while the radio was on, Leon would turn it off and cover it before she entered, then endure her small talk kindly, eyes darting with longing at the radio. But it was Seldon who, of late, radiated toward Essie a silence that was openly rude. When Florence looked up from her pot, Essie was gone.
Florence left the kitchen with a metallic aftertaste of guilt in her mouth. She made a mental note to sit down and have a conversation with Seldon. If she could trust Essie enough to share foreign magazines with her, they could trust her to be present while they listened to these foreign transmissions.
But, on entering her room, she found not the men but lumps under a tartan blanket. They’d gotten a signal. Florence set her salad on the table and lifted up the blanket to stick her head in. Leon and Seldon were huddled together in the warm dark, their ears cocked to the broadcast coming scratchily out of the speakers. The announcer was talking about an assassination in Italy, which was inciting communist-organized strikes.