“What have you told him already?”
“God, don’t act so suspicious. What makes you think I’ve told him anything important? You don’t trust me.”
“What does he want now?”
“He knows things. He knew you and Seldon were at that rally for Meyerson. He thought I’d gone, too, tried to pin it on me. Damn it, I told you not to go. Every minute you spend with Seldon shortens your life by a day.”
“Be quiet, you’ll wake up the boy. What else?”
“He wants reports from Kuibyshev. Conversations. Anything involving the Jewish Committee.”
He lowered himself back down on the bed. “So it’s true.”
“I think if I just tell him what he wants he’ll leave us alone.”
“And what do you think he wants?”
“The truth! That it was a nest of saboteurs and spies…!”
“Do you believe that?”
“What does it matter? Oh, darling.” Gently, experimentally, she touched his shoulder. “We didn’t do anything. We only translated what they gave us.”
He stiffened at her touch. “Don’t fool yourself. Everybody’s tied together with the same rope.”
“What else do you expect me to do, Leon? We have a child.”
But her sob-strained voice, her lachrymal nasal breathing had no effect on him.
“If you think you’re helping yourself, or us, you’re making a mistake, Florence. Once you’ve given him what he wants, it’s over. Their attitude toward informers is no better than toward the ones being informed on.”
“Don’t call me that! You think I want to be doing this? I need to give him something. I have to wiggle my way out of this. Don’t berate me, for chrissake, help me.”
It was as if she had said, “Open sesame.”
He turned to face her. None of her bullying ever exerted the same force on him as her raw need.
He rested his face in his hands. “I have to think.”
For a long time he sat like that, as if staring down into a lake. At last he said, “All right, tell him anything about Mikhoels. Whatever you give Subotin about him, it’s just more dirt on his coffin.”
“Subotin is smarter than that—it’s too convenient.”
“Name someone who’s already in prison. Feffer. He’s finished anyway. He’ll be the first one shot. I don’t know about the others. Seldon said Hofshteyn was sick when he disappeared. Maybe he’s dead now.”
“My God, how can we be talking like this? So calmly! It’s so horrible. I can’t.”
“Hold it together. If you lose your composure like this you’re in his hands. You need a strategy, Florence, not just tactics. It’s the only way. The important thing is not to name anyone who hasn’t been taken.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“We can’t tell Seldon.”
“Of course not.” She gave Leon another pleading look. “I don’t want him coming here at all hours….He presses the buzzer and the whole apartment knows he’s here.”
“Where should we talk then? At the SovInformBuro all the walls have ears.”
“On the street, in a park.”
“And do what—drop cigarettes with notes for one another? What if he’s on to something? We need somewhere we can really talk, Florence.”
“All right. But he can’t just show up unannounced and press our buzzer anytime he wants. Tell him he has to tell us in advance, and to come after it’s dark, and stay down below, on the street, and you’ll come down for him.”
“I’ll tell him,” he said, “if that’s what you want.”
—
AT THEIR NEXT MEETING she sat watching Subotin write in his blank notebook. His hair had thinned up top. That was the other change in him, one she’d failed to notice the first time because his hair had been cropped so short and because she had been so nervous. Now she let her eyes stare at the balding forehead above that hateful, elegant face.
For several days she had rehearsed the testimony she would give Subotin. She would “recall” conversations she had heard in which Mikhoels had voiced “nationalistic views.” She would tell him that after the war Mikhoels had spoken to his staff about the situation the Jews were facing in the U.S.S.R.: the evacuees coming back after the war and finding their houses occupied, the ongoing discrimination in hiring, and so on. He had insisted that it was the job of the Jewish Committee to intervene on their behalf. This, some of the personnel had felt, was a brazen overstepping of the committee’s clear role as a propaganda organ.
Of all of this she now spoke to Subotin confidently, having the inner assurance that it happened to be true. As he recorded her testimony, his expression remained inscrutable. “And did Mikhoels implicate the Soviet government in this?”
“He said not enough attention was being paid to the problem.”
“He voiced the view that the Soviet government was negligent in its duties….”
“Yes.”
“And he felt it was within the scope of his duties to take over the work of the government.”
“No…Well, he only wanted to draw the attention of important people to the fact that Jews had lost their homes when they’d been evacuated….”
Subotin cocked a groomed eyebrow.
She bit her lip. Why was she relapsing into defending Mikhoels, when she was supposed to be condemning him? The truth was that she had not at the time seen what Mikhoels was doing as wrong. He had been deluged by letters from suffering people. How could the man who had served as the heart and voice of Jews in the Soviet Union all through the war refuse to help them once the war had ended? But to defend him wouldn’t cause his resurrection, would it? It would only bring harm to her. How long ago, it seemed, had she told herself that she “would not distort or exaggerate,” that she would be a clear mirror and say nothing that might imperil another person. Now she knew all those airy promises were worthless. Whatever information she gave him, Subotin would rework to serve his version, just as she herself had reworked articles in the American press for her bulletins. Leon was right: better to throw dirt on a covered grave.