—
FOR TWO NIGHTS SHE did not sleep. Yulik was sick again. The icebound Moscow winter, which lasted into April, had left him weakened with bronchitis. Once again he was plagued with fevers and the expectorant wet cough that kept him from sleeping for more than a few hours. Nursing a sick child left time for little else, and gave her reason to withdraw from the communal life of the apartment—to keep her distance from Essie without exciting suspicion. It was past midnight when she went to the kitchen to make mustard plasters to lay on the boy’s back and draw out his congestion. She was standing at the stove, heating the water, when she heard it—the voice of the building janitor, wheedling and slightly drunk. She set the pot on the table, beside the plasters dusted with flour and dry mustard. “I don’t know nothing about those ones, them’s all foreigners,” he was telling someone, the slurred words pitching higher as the voices ascended the stairs. She thought of running back to their room, to alert Leon, to gather her son in his blanket and take him…where? She tried the door to the unlit back staircase—the old servants’ entrance—and found it miraculously open. But what could she do—take her son’s heat-radiating, feverish body out of bed and into the stairwell’s dank cold? And then what? She had not seriously thought of running until now, did not think of it because she knew it was pointless. There was nowhere to go. And it was already too late. She could hear the footsteps on the landing, the janitor with his chain of keys leading the men in boots inside. They were already here, out in the hallway. And she, hidden just inside the door of the servants’ entrance to the kitchen, could not see them. But she could hear. A gruff voice demanding, “Which room is it?”
Please, don’t let it be ours.
“Who’s in the kitchen?” The squeaking slap of their boots coming closer.
“Here it is,” said the janitor in his raspy voice. The boots stopped just outside the kitchen door.
And then she knew.
They were knocking on the last door in the hall. Essie’s room. Three insistent knocks, and then an impatient fourth. The commotion was drawing the other neighbors out of their rooms. At last, the door creaked open. “Yes?” Essie’s voice was as weak as a child’s. They were demanding her papers.
“What do you want with her?” Florence recognized it as Avdotya Grigorievna’s voice—that old woman was afraid of no one.
“Back in your rooms,” a voice was ordering them. They had a warrant for a search and arrest.
And Florence, concealed behind the kitchen door, was too terrified to move. She could not see Essie in her battered house slippers, in that loud florid robe hastily thrown over her nightgown. She did not see her blinking myopically, blind to this ghoulish surprise, as she was blind to everything. Florence was spared the sight of her friend’s face—the terror mingling for an instant with female embarrassment at being caught in her slatternly state in the middle of the night. She did not need to see it. She knew it.
But she had not believed—not really—that anyone would come after Essie. Not if Essie was the apartment’s real informer. Because what she had said to Subotin, about the magazine, in her moment of fright, she had said only to cover herself, being sure that Essie had already whistled on her. But what had made her sure? Florence could not remember anymore. Two hours. Yes. The disquieting vision of Essie with her napoleon torte. But what if Essie was not the conniving one? What if someone else was watching the house—someone outside, watching whoever came in and who went out? Or the janitor himself. Or anyone. She had fooled herself into thinking she knew the whole dark clockwork of how it worked. Would you say an hour is a “short” time? Two hours? Nothing more than a goading conjecture intended to rile her. And she, out of her mind with fear, had risen to the bait. On animal impulse, she had abandoned all the safeguards of her “strategy” in order to defend herself against a cunning provocation behind which stood possibly nothing. Defending herself—with a reckless disclosure, with a lie!
Her back against the wall, she pressed her hand to her mouth to keep herself from saying the words aloud: What have I done?
But it was too late. No amount of doubting would alter the course of what was taking place on the other side of the door. The police had pushed themselves past Essie into her room, where they were bound to find, behind the bureau or under the bed, the magazine Essie had not yet given back—Florence’s gift, the final memento of their truce.
—
FLORENCE’S LIAISONS WITH SUBOTIN ended as suddenly as they had begun, with the telephone. At work the following day, she picked up the heavy receiver and was told that she was to be rotated to another handler, who would make contact with her in time. As the days wore on and the week of their departure approached, she waited in a state of agitation for a contact that did not come. Whatever distress the meetings with Subotin had caused her, Florence found this new, uncertain period of waiting an even greater strain on her nerves. She had no way now to assess the conditions in which they found themselves. At night, she was seized with a feeling of calamity and awoke in alarm at the slightest noise. Leon too saw the break in contact as a bad sign and told her they needed to be prepared. They both kept packed and ready a rucksack with clean underwear and a tin of tooth powder, some money, and a pencil, in case the police knocked on the door. They had rid themselves of most of what they believed could compromise them. At Seldon’s suggestion, Leon had dismantled the radio, throwing pieces of it away in different trash bins around the neighborhood. They had long ago disposed of their Hemingway and Twain, and their tattered issues of Einkayt. Now even old editions of Lenin’s writing were no longer safe, Leon claimed. One by one, they tore out pages from their books and ripped them into scraps to be flushed down the common toilet. Disposing of these scraps at night, Florence imagined all of Moscow clogging the network of pipes beneath itself with forbidden literature. Leon had told her to tear up her brother’s letters, but this single thing she could not bring herself to do. Instead, she preserved them rolled up inside a tin full of flour; she just couldn’t rip up the brittle, yellowed pages, her last link to a universe beyond their tumorous world of fear.