“Escape?”
“Yes. The key is getting past security and into the British Embassy. Once we’re inside, they can doctor any documents.” He looked at Leon. “They can do it for us all.”
She looked at him in amazement. What was he proposing?
“Seldon, it won’t work,” said Leon. “They abandoned us years ago. The American embassy is as sealed as a fortress. Nobody goes in or out except by automobile. The guards won’t let you in even if you’re American-born. Why is it that none of the embassy workers have ever made any contact with the likes of us?”
“That’s right,” she said. “We’re trash to them. Absconders. Traitors. We left and good riddance. They despise us, and that’s the truth. It’s no different with the English. I don’t know who this man is, but you need to stop this, Seldon. The punishment for attempting to escape the country now is execution.”
Seldon looked at her but didn’t seem to hear what she’d said. He was in the thrall of his plan. “Yes—if I was just anyone, that might be true. But I told you, my brother works for the United Kingdom! He is an important person. Just listen. All this fellow has to do is get himself a car without the official driver. They’re all rats, naturally. But if he can drive the car himself, we can get into the embassy undetected.”
She got up to stand by the window. She thought if she could catch a glimpse of her little boy outside, even for an instant, her heart might be better able to bear this conversation. Below, she saw Julian, a small bundled figure, chaperoned by the larger bundled figure of Avdotya Grigorievna, playing among the other children in the iron-fenced inner yard.
Leon now ventured the honest question, proposing it gently, like someone talking to a madman. “But why us, Seldon? Surely, this is a risky proposition to take on your own?”
But it was Seldon—his eyes full of that painful tenderness again as they flickered between Florence and Leon—who spoke to them as though they were the mad ones. “Don’t you know? Because you will perish here. Even as we talk they are signing your death warrants.”
And now Florence glanced at her husband, to find that he was looking at her for an answer.
“And what about Julian?” she said.
“All of us. I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell Kelly I’ll only go if he takes you, too. But you have to make the decision.”
She looked at Leon. Hadn’t he told her that they had to accept their life here, had to accept the lot they’d drawn? Hadn’t Leon made her abandon all her hopes of escape? And now he was looking at her for the answer. He wanted her to tell him what to do.
“I need to know if you’re in,” Seldon said.
She closed her eyes and waited for her husband to break the silence.
“We’re in,” Leon said.
—
TWO SLEEPLESS NIGHTS LATER, in bed, she said, “Do you believe him?”
“He’s our only hope, Florence.”
“It’s too odd, his whole story,” she whispered. “The cigarettes, the brother, or half-brother or whoever.”
“I don’t know. If anyone’s going to pursue a plan like this, make contacts on the outside, Seldon would be the man.”
“All right,” she said, sitting up in bed. “Suppose it’s true. Why would the British Embassy give two copper pennies about us? They don’t get their own people out.”
“He said his brother is an important person.”
“Oh, Leon, how much do we know about Seldon? He said himself they were raised by different mothers. He seems to think he’s important enough to be rescued, when…”
He cut her off. “I don’t think he’d be telling us all of this if they were just empty words.”
“He imagines things, Leon.”
“He embroiders things, maybe, but…”
“Not just this. I can see it in his eyes, the way he looks at you.”
There was a long silence in the darkness.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, but I think you do know.”
Even in the darkness Leon’s body exerted a powerful force over her—his smooth shoulder and the bones of his large hands, the muscle of his naked calf jutting out from under the blanket.
“Don’t pretend you’re blind,” she said, her voice sounding exactly like Essie’s.
“You’re speaking nonsense, Florie. Let’s both go to sleep.”
But once started she could not stop. “Am I? That love-struck look he gives you every time you say something encouraging to him. Putting his hands on your arm like some debutante when he’s loosened up after a drink.”
“I think maybe you should learn to watch your mouth.”
“Is that so? Watch my mouth while I let that queer eat my food and ogle my husband on the courage of my vodka? You know what I think? I think he would be perfectly glad if he could take you with him—only you—and leave us here to rot.”
And then her head was pressed to the wall, the fibers of the hanging carpet above their daybed stabbing into her back and ass through her nightgown as he pinned her hip with his knee.
“You never get it, do you?” Her hair was in his fist, her head jacked back. In the white luminescence from a streetlamp she could see the contorted lineaments of his repulsed face.
“Let me go,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and stifled.
He released his grip from her hair and rolled heavily off of her. “Goddamn you.” He balled his hand into a fist. She winced as he swung his clenched fist into the stout torso of the pillow. “Goddamn you, Florence. Why do you think I want us to do this? We can’t live how we’re living, like trapped animals, bound, gagged. Maybe before the war I could, because I dreamed things would get better. But we can never be free here.” He turned his head toward the pale floral curtain behind which their son slept. “I don’t want him to grow up hearing the word ‘kike’ every day.”
She steadied herself against the wall to regain some composure and tried to make her voice sound reasonable. “You think he won’t hear it in America, or England?”
“Maybe. But once we’re out, we can go anywhere…even to Palestine.”
It was then that she felt sorriest for him—for his falling prey to his own dreams of flight, for the way he had nurtured them in secret as she once had. “Is that your plan now?” She could not resist punishing him for them. “Didn’t manage to get yourself killed in the last war, so you want to pick up a rifle in the desert, huh? Get us killed by the Arabs instead?”
“At least there the Jews fight out in the open—they don’t quiver like sitting ducks, which is what we are, Florence, make no mistake. Things are getting bad.”
“You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know they’re getting bad. You don’t have to tell me! Subotin called me in again.”
Silence.
She couldn’t summon the will to look at him.
“When?”
“Last week.”
“How could you? How could you not tell me?”
And suddenly he was off the bed, snatching the blanket off her as though to see what else she was hiding. Giving her that look like he didn’t know who she was.
“I meant to, I promise. I was waiting to, and then Seldon came and…”