“Wait, wait,” Florence interrupted. “How can we know—even if everything goes as this…this Kelly says, how can we be sure the embassy won’t toss us back out? We’re Soviet nationals, after all.”
“According to this country’s laws, yes. But we were all issued our new passports illegally, which means we never stripped ourselves of our previous citizenships. It was chicanery. They poached our passports and that’s that. You have a child, for heaven’s sake! It would be heartless for them to toss you out.”
“People will know we’re missing.”
“Leave everything in the apartment just as it is. Tell your neighbors you’re taking a short holiday. By the time anyone notices, we’ll be on a train to Finland with new papers.”
They sat talking over the plan in cautious whispers meant less to keep the child from waking up than to keep themselves from being alarmed by their own audacity. They spoke calmly, as though they were discussing the plans and fates of other people. Even after Seldon gave them all the information he had, they went over the details for the better part of two hours, until a light knocking on the door finally broke the inertia.
Florence tiptoed to the door and in Russian inquired who was there. “Me,” came the taut treble of Essie’s voice. Florence unlatched the lock and found Essie holding a platter with several pieces of napoleon torte, her eyes scanning the room. “Oh, Seldon, you’re still here.” Essie’s surprise seemed as feigned as the occasion of her visit. She made an effort to smile. “I thought if you were still up, you might have a taste. I made more than I need.”
As though waking from a trance, Seldon rose to his feet. He donned his coat and took a square of torte off Essie’s tray. Turning to address Leon and Florence, he said, “I ought to be out of your hair at this hour.” Then, taking a bite of the torte, he looked with surprise at Essie. “Umm. Terrifically tasty.”
“I put rum in, just a splash.”
“That must be it.”
And bending his head in salute, he took his leave.
—
IN THE UNINTERRUPTED FLOW of days that followed, Florence went out and bought new clothes and fabrics. For herself she purchased a pleated tartan skirt, which she hemmed to below the knee, a wide-brimmed hat, and short matching gloves. For Leon she was able to find a button-up vest and striped tie. For Yulik she bought a pair of checkered flannel pants, which she intended to shorten on her sewing machine into a pair of knickerbockers like those she’d seen in foreign magazines, a style she had decided fit the pampered child of English diplomats. She worried about Yulik’s role in their scheme but told him nothing of the plan, allowing herself to hope that when the time came he would be prepared to play along. He understood English, after all, though at the age of five he already knew better than to speak it outside their room. Still, in private, Florence began speaking to him exclusively in English, correcting his pronunciation more forcibly than she ever had in the past, with an insistence he found odd and stifling at first, but that with time he began to accept in his usual good-natured way. In her mind she was now daily rehearsing the testimony she would give if the car was stopped by a Russian guard—“Why, on a short outing? I hardly imagined we’d need documents.” Alone in front of the small mirror by the door, she pronounced each word as crisply and carelessly as she imagined an Englishwoman might speak it. In this way she girded herself for their departure and at the same time tried not to think about the future. The whole thing could be called off at any moment. And yet, several times during the course of a day, she found herself slipping unconsciously across that invisible border between reality and fantasy, the present and the future—she and Leon, in the costumes she was so scrupulously assembling, and Julian still in his English schoolboy’s getup, with their new papers in hand, crossing into Latvia, then Finland, the lashing wind on the ship, the final passage across the ocean. The worst-case scenario she did not dare let herself imagine. If harrowing and unbearable punishments lay in store, there was no sense in trying to anticipate them. Strangely, it was no longer their imminent escape (still a month away) but her impending meeting with Subotin that kept Florence awake at night.
Her current strategy now consisted of stalling when it came to the question of Seldon Parker, and yet at the same time convincing Subotin that she was getting Parker to open up about what he’d been told in devious confidence by the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, in wartime and after. But what was there to disclose? She needed to feed Subotin’s paranoid fiction with little scraps, just enough to keep him hungry for more testimony. And now the only shred of incriminating testimony she had to offer was something Leon had told her to say, a phrase Mikhoels was rumored to have spoken in defense of starting a Jewish republic in Crimea: “You can live wherever you like, but you need to have your own house and roof.” That was it, and so she served it as her meager catch from working over Seldon Parker.
Subotin’s pen stopped making its scratching sound. “So Mikhoels was preparing,” he said, “to settle Crimea with Jews who would help America seize it for their imperialist purposes.”
“Well, I don’t think his aim was to wrest Crimea away from Soviet power. That wouldn’t even be possible.”
“I am not interested in your opinions but in facts,” said Subotin.
She would have thought he’d be intrigued by such an inculpatory quote from the head of the committee, but ever since she had walked into the apartment and taken a seat, Subotin had been visibly impatient, scratching down something with his pen, then crossing it out when she contradicted the testimony he sought.
“The fact is,” she said, trying to sound conciliatory, “that a plan to settle Crimea was discussed. According to Parker, it was the kind of romantic idea that only actors or poets would come up with.” She was on her own now, making it up as she went along. “I can’t say for sure how far it went. I’d need to work on Comrade Parker a little longer to be able to know.”
“You’ve had many weeks.”
“To prompt someone about conversations that took place years ago is not a straightforward matter. One has to create the right atmosphere of…reminiscence.”