She shook her head furiously.
’Cause it’s the end of the line for Henry Robbins here.
But hadn’t he been talking about the American skin he was shedding and leaving in Perm before he became a different man in the capital? Oh, how stupid she was. He had alerted her, made his plan perfectly clear.
“He didn’t tell me anything.”
“Better not have,” said Konstantin. “The commandant is fired up like fifty pitchforks, questioning everybody.”
She understood that Konstantin was telling her this to warn her.
But the questioning didn’t come. By some grace, she was once more spared.
For weeks thereafter Florence worried that the incident would cost Kachak his escape from Perm to Moscow, and the reprieve he’d promised her. But whatever promotion he had exacted from the big wheels inside the MGB was honored. He kept his pledge to her. She stayed on the books as an orderly in the clinic. Until one day in March of the following year she heard, on the radio loudspeaker mounted in the main patient ward, a sound her ears had forgotten. Classical music! Not the celebratory marching kind, but a solemn and pristine movement, like the voice of angels. Was it Beethoven? Handel? The music was followed by a medical announcement, a complete report on Stalin’s vital signs, including an analysis of his urine. His urine! Like the music, the voices proclaimed grief but rang with ecstasy—speaking of a God who pissed and shat like all the rest of dirty humanity. And she knew it would not be long now.
By the sixties, Moscow, like an oak, had added another ring to her center—the Automobile Ring Road. If you happened to find yourself driving along one of its four asphalt lanes in 1975, you would bear witness to a luminous sight: white outcroppings like a new species of meadow mushroom had sprouted in semicircles around preplanned courtyards, imposing their lucid, indelicate physiques over territories marked for future construction. Our new residential districts—the mikrorayoni—once villages of a hundred inhabitants, were now being zoned for a hundred thousand.
The people were saying goodbye to their crowded, peeling kommunalki, abandoning their dowdy one-room flats in pockmarked, cinderblock Khrushchevkas, moving out to the city’s nine-, sixteen-, twenty-five-storied frontier! And in 1975 my family was moving with them. Lucya, the kids, and I joined the tide of optimists picking out Yugoslavian wall units, Polish bedroom suites, Bulgarian kitchen cabinets to fill up the expanse of three whole rooms. In the kitchen, atop the new semi-automatic washing machine that Lucya tried to domesticate with a piece of macramé, stood our German Grundig shortwave radio. A Japanese stereo set squatted proudly behind the glass of the Yugoslavian stenka. Trade relations between the Eastern and Western blocs were on the up. The word “détente” was on everybody’s lips. Out in orbit, the astronauts of the Apollo mission and the cosmonauts of Soyuz linked up their two spinning crafts in a weightless space tango. News of this great cooperation was broadcast to us on our Horizon television set, on which months later we would watch Ford and Brezhnev, speaking as if his mouth were stuffed with sausage, fail to reach an agreement on cruise missiles and backfire bombers. It couldn’t last, of course, all this mutual cheek kissing in Helsinki. By the end of the decade the party would be moved to Afghanistan.
But all that was still years ahead. In the summer of 1975, I had a different sort of fragile détente to attend to. For years now my mother and I had adhered to a delicate truce of our own—which is to say we were “getting along,” which is to say we were not discussing politics. Florence no longer remarked that socialism was a wonderful idea in theory, and I no longer answered that so was flapping your arms and flying around the house for exercise before breakfast. In the end, the schism of our truce was precipitated not by affairs of state but by that most Muscovite of impasses: the apartment question.
“Not for me” was what she said. “I’m perfectly fine where I am. I can manage.”
I can manage. A phrase much favored by my mother, along with There’s no need to make trouble.
“No, you can’t manage,” I said. “Or maybe you can, but why should you have to?” I reminded her of the previous month, when I had twice taken her to the hospital after a herniated disk, acquired in the camps, had induced near paralysis in her leg. “And if the pain comes back and you can’t move?”
“I won’t be any closer to the doctors if I’m out there in the sticks.”
“You’ll be closer to us, to me—that’s what I’m telling you.”
She was still occupying the same cramped communal apartment that the two of us had lived in since 1956—when she’d returned from the camps, and I from the children’s home.
“I can’t walk up all those stairs.”
“The buildings have elevators!”
“No, no…I’ve seen those places. Very low ceilings. I’ve lived my whole life with high ceilings.”
“But, Mother, you’ll have more space, not less. You live in a high-ceilinged closet. Everything’s stacked on top of everything else. There’s no room to hang a picture! Two steps between the lavatory and the kitchen. How can you think?”
“It suits me fine.”
If it was the money, I told her, I would be more than happy to put down a payment for a one-bedroom cooperative for her in our building. The offer was disingenuous, I admit. Not because I wasn’t willing to pay for a co-op for Mama, but because I knew perfectly well that she had money for it herself. I knew this because, two years earlier, when I’d asked to borrow a little cash for our own down payment, Florence had stunned me by producing, as if by the rub of a genie’s lamp, half a dozen fat rolls of hundred-ruble notes—almost four thousand rubles—spooled so tightly and rubber-banded with such asphyxiating force that to get all that paper flat again required the use of a hot iron. She told me firmly that it was not a loan. “Am I an Egyptian that I need to be buried with it?” she said of my promise to pay her back.