Not long thereafter, Florence made good on her promise to Essie, knocking on her door with an issue of Life magazine in her hand. On the cover was Ingrid Bergman, costumed in her role as Joan of Arc.
“Florence! How did you manage to—”
Florence placed a finger on her lips. “There was more than one copy. Now, put it away quickly, before I change my mind.”
“Oh, let’s look at it together,” Essie said, blushing in gratitude.
“Not tonight—I have somewhere to be. You hold on to it.”
“You’re sure?” Essie held the magazine tightly.
“Just don’t wrinkle the corners or get any marmalade on it.”
—
IN SPITE OF THE NAGGING WORRIES on the margins of her consciousness, Florence felt agreeably magnanimous toward Essie all the next morning. Sharing the magazine was the best thing she could have done for their long-standing friendship. She assured herself that Essie could be trusted to keep it well hidden. But the pleasure she took in her own high-mindedness began to dwindle later in the day when Seldon showed up out of the blue, unshaved and smelling of alcohol. His hair was uncombed and his clothes were crumpled, as if they’d been slept in.
“Feffer’s missing.”
“What do you mean, missing?” Leon asked.
“Missing. And still no word about Hofshteyn.”
David Hofshteyn’s disappearance in Kiev had occurred in September. People had thought him ill and in a sanatorium. Now word came that the poet’s wife was in Moscow, searching for him at Lefortovo Prison. Stalking their floor as he informed them of these developments, all six gangling feet of Seldon seemed to Florence raw and almost physically menacing, making her want to get Yulik out of the room as quickly as possible.
She put valenki on the boy’s feet, bundled his capped head in her scarf, and herded him to Avdotya Grigorievna’s room, giving the old woman a ruble in advance to take him outside. She returned to a room quickly growing thick with the acrid smell of Kazbek shag tobacco. Seldon was pacing back and forth, spilling ash from a cigarette that smoldered neglected between his fingers. He was talking too quickly to have time to smoke. “An organization with any independent political strength can’t be his tool, you see? The personnel are too cemented, too interconnected. That’s why the cadres are constantly being ‘cleansed,’ as they say. It’s the permanent revolution, see, so no personal ties can form that are stronger than his authority. I’ve thought a lot about this.”
Florence looked at Leon in panic. A terrible force had entered their life in the form of Seldon. All she could think now was that it must not drag them down, too.
“Seldon, sit down,” Leon urged softly.
“I’d rather stand.” He stuck a finger into his collar as though suffocating. “They’re cooking up something. Have you been reading the paper? ‘Glorification of alien culture,’ ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’—who do you think they’re talking about? They’re trying to brand the Jewish Committee a nest of saboteurs. I’ll wager for a big show; they’re just painting the stage now.”
It took a long time to make sense of Seldon’s staccato speech but eventually Leon and Florence unpacked his disturbing intuition: The press was merely ahead of the police; the recent disappearances were only the tip of a monstrous case being fashioned somewhere in the bowels of the NKVD. More and more people would be pulled under; no one was safe. “Wherever Feffer is now, I can only imagine what that second-rate bastard has already told them.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Florence heard herself saying, but she found she couldn’t meet his eye. “Anyway, why would they care about us? We only translated. What did we do?”
He peered at her as though she, not he, was the one in need of a psychiatric examination. “What did we do?” He mimicked her voice in a cruel falsetto. “Flora Solomonovna, what did they do?”
“For chrissake, Florie,” said Leon, turning on her, “you’re asking the wrong goddamn question!”
“Well, what should I be asking?”
“What is there in this room that we ought to be getting rid of!” Leon said, as if stating the obvious.
“That’s it, man!” With that Seldon began pulling volumes off their bookshelf, unsettling the dust of their notebooks and papers. “What’s this?”
“Theodore Dreiser.”
“To the fireplace. The dictionaries, too. Get rid of everything.” He upturned a crate of back issues of Einkayt that stood at the end of their daybed.
“Stop it, don’t touch them!” She flung herself at Seldon’s arm, knocking the books out of his hand, and then fell to her knees before the pile scattered on the floor.
What she did not expect was Seldon bending down on his knees to help her. “I’m sorry, Florie. I’m so sorry.” He took her hand and held it with such alarming tenderness that she felt it like an electric charge. He helped her up. Stripped of the demonic will that had possessed him just a moment earlier, he collapsed in their sagging armchair. “All right,” he said, forcibly pressing his eye and forehead with the heel of his hand as if kneading the flesh of thoughts behind his skull. “All right,” he repeated. “We can’t sit and wait for them to come for us.” There was a certainty in his voice now, a deadpan calm that chilled Florence even more than his hysteria a few minutes before. He stared out at her and Leon but also beyond them into some permanent elsewhere. What followed—what he said then—might have been the reason he had knocked on their door that morning, or it might as easily have burst forth from some sudden protective impulse to which he had succumbed. There was a man, he said quietly, a worker at the British Foreign Office here in Moscow, who knew his brother.
Leon: “Your brother?”
“Half-brother. From my father’s first marriage.” A half-brother nine years older who had started working at the Royal Treasury before the war. A friend of his in the Foreign Service had recently been rotated to Moscow. Somehow the man had tracked Seldon down and delivered to him a letter from the brother in England.
“Where is it?” said Florence.
“I got rid of it. I’m not mad.”
“You’ve been meeting this man!”
He had, but he was careful. They met only in crowded places—in the metro, or at the fountain by the Bolshoi.
It didn’t mean they weren’t being watched, Florence objected.
They had a system, said Seldon, a system consisting of writing a note on thin typing paper and rolling it inside a cigarette. The man, whose name was Hank Kelly, Seldon said, would light up a regular cigarette and take a few puffs until he saw Seldon. Then he’d put out his cigarette and drop it on the ground. The one he actually dropped on the ground was, of course, the clean one with the note, which Seldon would pick up to learn any news, and the location of their next meeting. “It’s always a different place. We go back and forth like that. He knows the situation in the country. He says he wants to help me leave.”