BYKOV: Since you examined them and studied their content it follows that you were an accomplice to the articles’ undercover character. Testify to the hostile nationalist orientation you developed in Kuibyshev.
F. BRINK: I admit, in part, that while working for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee I fell under the influence of those around me. I absorbed their hostile anti-Soviet attitudes and found myself acquiring a nationalistic stance.
BYKOV: And you held anti-Soviet discussions and invented lies against the Soviet Union.
F. BRINK: I categorically deny this. I never expressed dissatisfaction with Soviet government policy.
BYKOV: You admit to being poisoned by bourgeois Jewish nationalism but deny the criminal acts that are the natural consequence of it.
F. BRINK: I allow that I experienced some nationalistic deviation. It was not manifested externally.
BYKOV: But you admit that it existed in your soul?
Her soul? What business did they have asking about her soul? What was this, I thought, a trial or an exorcism?
—
The final verdict read:
The fact that you listened to anti-Soviet outbursts and did not rebuke others for their nationalist remarks means that you became a co-conspirator and nationalist.
Savages with chronometers. It was not merely that her interrogators had no understanding of logic. Their questions and conclusions were underwritten by an essentially primordial worldview: one’s thoughts and actions are either holy or sinful, pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet, with us or against us. This crude cosmology left no room for neutrality. Even the medieval Catholics of Europe had surmised, between heaven and hell, the zone of purgatory, from which salvation was still possible. Russian Orthodoxy had never accepted such a notion—its consciousness was incapable of recognizing anything but immaculate piety or irredeemable guilt.
I suspected Valya had not been able to retrieve my father’s documents for the same reason Mama had not been able to pass to him any parcels: my father had been killed too soon after his arrest. Was that, I suddenly wondered, his punishment for refusing to sign any of the papers given him? I felt sure he’d refused to play his part in the sham production in order to spare us. To protect Mama and me, he’d given no testimony that could implicate Florence in any way. I was likewise certain that, in some sane portion of her mind, Florence must have known this all along. Her refusal to leave Moscow after his arrest only made me angrier.
My suspicion was substantiated when I scavenged my mother’s documents for my father’s name and found it appearing in the testimony not in the capacity of “your husband Leon Brink,” but as “the spy and slanderer Brink,” and even, occasionally, “your accomplice Leon Brink.” It would seem, according to these papers, that my mother had no friends or intimates, only accomplices, conspirators, and collaborators. Every now and again she was accused of being, along with some other felonious character, a yedinomyshlennitsa—a word I’m at a loss to translate into English, because the concept would be a paradox in the American vernacular. It means, simply, a creature of identical single-mindedness with another. If such conformity of the mind were possible, the list of my mother’s yedinomyshlennikov included my father, various members of the Jewish Committee, and “the spy and slanderer Seldon Parker,” who after some confusion I recognized as my father’s friend “Uncle Seldon,” whose nicotine-stained fingers I associated in my child’s mind with matchbook horses and aluminum fish that he promised could tell my fortune.
It was in the midst of my scavenger hunt for something recognizable—something that matched my own jumbled, painful childhood recollections of the year 1949—that I came upon a thing that stopped me cold. I didn’t know how I could have missed it on my first perusal of the archives, since it was so close to the top of the monstrous stack. It was a list, three pages long, appended to my mother’s Order of Arrest, containing nearly every item seized on that terrible night when two uniformed officers of the MGB barged into the room in which my mother and I had been living on our own since my father’s arrest, seven months earlier.
TAKEN FOR DELIVERY TO MGB THE FOLLOWING:
* * *
1. Passport no. XXIII-CU no. 599812, issued 25 September 1936 by the 64th department of militia of the city of Moscow to the name of Brink, F. S.
2. Medal for Outstanding Labor in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, and Certificate of Authenticity.
3. Bank savings book no.___ with remaining 1,024.45 rubles.
4. Wristwatch of foreign firm Voltan in yellow metal, no. 5648891 (on cap). Working, without a second hand.
5. Assorted documents in a foreign language—7 items.
6. Assorted photographs—16 items.
7. Assorted notebooks—4 items.
8. Forms and certificates—7 items.
9. Cutouts of geographic maps from Soviet newspapers—4 items.
10. Carbon copy paper—used. 1 pack.
11. Anglo-Franco-German dictionary.
* * *
SIGNED BY SUPERINTENDENT OF HOUSE,
* * *
TALKOVSKAYA, VARVARA ARTUROVNA,
* * *
WITNESS TO SEIZURE.
* * *
HOUSEHOLD ITEMS:
* * *
1. Dinner table—1, good condition, previously owned
2. Cabinet chairs—2, PO
3. Soft chair—1, old
4. Table servante—1, PO
5. Wardrobe closet—1, PO
6. Commode—1
7. Assorted metal beds—2
8. Book étagère—1
9. Assorted suitcases—2
10. Storage trunk—1
11. Photo camera, Komsomolets brand—1
12. Photo camera, foreign brand—1, broken
13. Assorted porcelain statuettes—3
14. Bronze bust of V. I. Lenin—1
15. Assorted table lamps—2
16. Reproducer radio—1
17. Assorted autopens—2, broken
18. Footstools—2
19. Daybed with springs—1
20. Mattresses, cotton—2
21. Bedspread, cotton—2
22. Blanket, wool, gray—1
23. Blankets, cotton—2
24. Sheets—6
25. Alarm clock, round—1, fixed
26. Suit, children’s, gray wool—1
27. Suit, children’s, brown wool—1
28. Pants, gray wool, children’s—1
29. Coat, children’s, semi-seasonal, mouse-colored—1
30. Jacket, children’s, wool, with lining—1
31. Jacket, men’s, brown leather—1
32. Jacket, men’s, canvas—1
33. Robes, women’s, assorted—2
34. Jacket, women’s, gray wool—1
35. Suit, women’s, steel-colored wool—1
36. Shirts, women’s, assorted—3
37. Summer coat, women’s, dark-blue wool—1
38. Shirts, women’s—tricotage and silk—2
39. Dress, checkered linen—1
40. Dress, black crepe de chine—1
41. Dress, blue silk—1
42. Silk pajamas, women’s, birch pattern—1
43. Netted table oilcloth—1
44. Jacket, men’s, canvas with fur lining—1
45. Military jacket, men’s, wool—1
46. Underwear, men’s, white wool—3
47. Shirts, men’s, assorted wool—2
48. Undershirts, men’s—2
49. Button-downs, men’s—8
50. Sweaters, children’s, assorted—3
51. Button-downs, children’s, assorted—3
52. Pants, children’s, assorted—4
53. Underpants, children’s—9
54. Tablecloths, assorted—3
55. Undershirts, children’s—4
56. Towels, assorted—3