What was this? Had I missed something? It seemed that Bykov and my mother were not the only people in the room. There was another witness (aside from the invisible stenographer)—this “E. Frank,” who was not only an onlooker to the whole exchange, but a participant. When in the course of her imprisonment had my mother mentioned an Esther Frank? I had not seen it mentioned until now. And then a sickening thought arrested me.
BYKOV: Did you not inform to Captain Subotin of the NKVD that Frank was disseminating vicious anti-Soviet propaganda?
F. BRINK: I said that we had looked at the magazine together.
BYKOV: And that Frank attacked our Soviet reality.
E. FRANK: It is she herself, not I, who attacked it.
F. BRINK: I did not say she expressed dissatisfaction with Soviet government policy. Frank did not share with me these views. It is true that I said she compared the Soviet living standard to the images in the magazine.
E. FRANK: I never asked to see this magazine, or others. It is Brink who foisted them on me in her actions as a provocateur.
F. BRINK: This is not true. At the time I had the magazine I did not see anything slanderous about it.
BYKOV: Yet you reported that the magazine belonged to Frank.
F. BRINK: Yes, I do not deny it.
BYKOV: If you saw nothing hostile in the magazine, why did you deny your possession of it to Captain Subotin?
F. BRINK: I was led to believe that Esther Frank was an informer who had arranged our meetings so as to provoke me into sharing with her the materials I used for my classified work.
E. FRANK: This is a lie. I was not an informer of the NKVD. It was Brink who had this honor.
The hotel room’s air conditioning could not account for the chill I suddenly felt up and down my limbs. It was as though some metabolic engine keeping me warm had sputtered and ground to a halt. My arms were breaking out in gooseflesh. I got up and turned off the thermostat, then opened the doors of the narrow balcony for some warm air. I knew that what I had just read, if it wasn’t fire, was at least smoke.
Esther Frank. Earlier in the interrogation, Florence had been questioned about a number of people, most of them other translators and writers for the JAFC, their names indistinctly known to me from history and books. But the name Esther Frank shocked me now with its instant familiarity. Could it be…Aunt Essie from down the hall? Aunt Essie with glasses a foot thick and silk paisley bathrobes? The apartment’s middle-aged spinster (though maybe not; I recalled now a portrait of a man in military uniform hanging above her bed). Yasha Gendler and I had both spent many hours in Aunt Essie’s room, playing on her iron post bed. She had a foldout card table beside it, on which we’d play games of Durak, with me often trying to convince her that my sixes were really nines, which I could sometimes succeed in doing if her glasses were off.
I scanned the rest of the stack in search of mentions of Essie’s name, but found nothing.
Here were the facts I was left with: (1) Florence had confessed, or lied, to a previous interrogator, “Captain Subotin,” that Esther Frank had been the purveyor of bourgeois propaganda; (2) she was now not denying that she had (i) informed on Esther Frank and (ii) was herself the purveyor of said propaganda.
My heart beat maniacally. Was this it—the evidence I had been hoping not to find? Was this the proof that my mother had informed on her friends and neighbors, as Yasha had insinuated with such self-satisfaction?
Rapidly I read through twenty or thirty more pages for more evidence, or names of other people that my mother had informed on. I could not find any. It didn’t matter. Perhaps there had been ten others, perhaps only Essie. N = 1 made this proof no less true than N = 10. What I had discovered amid this terrible treasure I was holding was my mother’s betrayal of a real-life person I had known.
And suddenly I pictured Aunt Essie through Mama’s eyes, felt the chill that must have run down her body at the sight of her friend, ill and emaciated and laid low by prison’s indignities. The same friend who had shared her berth and her secrets on the steamer, the two of them vibrating with girlish expectation on their way to Russia. Essie, for whom she must have felt some trace of affection even in this hell. Had she found it necessary to steel herself against these tender ghosts even as the two of them kept up this ceremony of mutual denunciation? I could feel all the madness of it suffocating me. In spite of the warm night breeze coming in through the balcony, the hotel room with its tidily made bed and plush carpet felt as confining as a jail cell. And so, leaving the papers on the spread, I fled. Downstairs and out the front door and into the warm night, until I was walking down along the brightly lit avenue of Tverskaya, still exploding with traffic and blinding billboards at one-thirty in the morning, with people avidly strolling in pairs and sitting in restaurants and drinking black coffee behind the radiant glass of all-night cafés. Whoever said New York was the city that never sleeps has not strolled at 2:00 A.M. in Moscow. I walked until I came to a kiosk, manned by a young leather-clad Tajik, and did something I hadn’t done in decades: I bought a pack of cigarettes. Then, after pulling one from the pack and lighting it with a match from the hotel matchbook, I walked several more blocks, smoking my throat-scratching Marlboro in the clammy night warmth, until I circled back around to the rear entrance of the Marriott Grand.