Perhaps it was her just deserts after the contempt she’d shown her own parents. Her son seemed to take pleasure in pointing out her every ideological “contradiction,” as he called it. If she so much as complained about the kerosene breath of a bus driver or cashier, he’d say sardonically, “You mean the working people, Mama?” When he spoke with disgust about how he and other college students were forced to go around the neighborhood on election day with their wooden ballot boxes, knocking on doors and imploring people to cast their one-candidate ballots into the hole to assure a 99-percent voter turnout, she would tell him that at least he was giving everyone an opportunity to vote. He would look at her like she was out of her mind. He could not stop laughing when she mentioned (just once!) that he ought to be proud his country had no unemployment. “You know where else had zero unemployment, Ma?” he’d said, needling her. “Bergen-Belsen.” When she told him he might at least be grateful for the free college education that was teaching him to be such a matador of logic, he reminded her of the three years of forced residency he’d have to serve in some backwater town, and how, as a scientist-engineer, he’d still spend his life being paid less than a drunken assembly-line worker.
Of course she knew that parents and children argued, but with Julian there was something different. He would not admit how much he blamed her for abandoning him as a child. To a child’s heart, the reasons for the abandonment made no difference. Yet the mind of the grown man could not perceive this simple truth. He wanted her to atone for leaving him by repudiating the whole system that had torn her away from him. It wasn’t enough for him to be right and for her to be wrong. If that was all he needed, she could have obliged. But no. He wanted her to reject all of it, renounce every beautiful idea she’d ever cherished. And this need seemed to her so bottomless, so much deeper than a simple desire to best her intellectually, that she was at a loss as to how to fulfill it.
Those were the times she experienced the loss of Leon most acutely. Leon would have known how to talk to Julian. He would have transmuted to comedic gold the base metal of Yulik’s hard sarcasm. But she did not know how to summon such beautiful words. “Your tongue is hung on two swivel hinges, I can’t keep up with you,” she’d say whenever he’d try to back her rhetorically against the wall. Eventually the best they could learn to do for each other was respect each other’s silences.
Now, with Julian no longer bringing up the name of the place he was going, it was only the slow emptying out of the apartment that stood to remind Florence of the unalterable fact of his leaving.
They were selling off their things. In the evenings, she watched her son write up lists of books and records to sell or give away to friends, his fingers stained by the purple ink of the mimeograph paper underneath. Over the course of several weeks the bookshelf in the living room where Florence slept was evacuated of the authors who’d been her irreproachable, loyal friends during her recuperation. Out went the bound volumes of Tolstoy and Pushkin. Gone were the Gogol and Lermontov. Out went the record player on which she’d listened to Stravinsky and the poems of Tsvetaeva. The shelves began to fill up with something else: black-lacquered wooden dishes hand-painted with gold leaves and red berries, wooden spoons and saltshakers rendered with green-and-gold petals and patches of strawberries—decorative Khokhloma that, in all her years in Russia, Florence had never been tempted to buy. It was her daughter-in-law’s idea. A high-strung, practical girl, Lucya intended to wrap all these peasant tchotchkes in shirts and socks inside their suitcases and drag them to America as gifts to be distributed in gratitude to anyone who might help them along the way. What else would they have to offer to their American benefactors? How odd it was, Florence thought, to picture her own son arriving, in the place of her birth, a Russian bearing gifts of the Old World.
—
SHE THOUGHT THAT HER FATHER’S VOICE would stop haunting her once she ceased taking the sleeping pills, but it only seemed to grow in resolve as she recovered and began to maneuver on her own around the apartment. Once more she was severing the cord between herself and her family. A part of her had always known this day would come. She’d prayed for the day of Julian’s release, steeled herself to let him go. Couldn’t he understand that it was because of everything she’d had to deny him—because she could not now bequeath to him anything substantial—that she wanted to spare her son the burden of her old age in his new life in America? I can’t, Papa, she told Solomon. I can’t oblige him to look after me forever. But what her father said next stunned her: He is the one who needs looking after, don’t you see? It’s not enough you left him once? It was then that she knew: not in word but in deed could she atone herself with Julian.
Yet what right did she have to escape the soil that had swallowed up Leon, Seldon, Essie? As long as she knew that her bones were destined to be buried along with theirs, she could hold off the reckoning. As long as she went nowhere, she could continue to tell herself that it was this cursed land that had swallowed them all, and not she who had sacrificed them for her own deliverance. After forty years in the desert, even old Moses hadn’t been permitted to cross into the Promised Land.
With her students no longer keeping her busy, she began to practice English with her grandchildren, reading to Masha from some of the British storybooks that Lucya had managed to find. Masha was a quick, attentive child, just as Julian had been, but it was curly-headed Lyonya, little Lenny, whom Florence adored, the child they had named after her Leon. It was he who nuzzled up to her on the sofabed, sitting with his legs in wool stockings folded beneath him, his rosebud lips hanging open while he listened to her tell him about the crocodiles who prowled the New York subways.
“But should I be scared of them?” he asked her.
“Only if you’re by yourself, which you won’t be.”
“Because Baba will be there with me.”
She was at a loss what to tell him. “Your father and mother will be with you, bunny.”
But he looked unconvinced, as if he intuited even then how disoriented his immigrant parents would be in the grim labyrinth of the subway.
His grandmother, though—she wouldn’t be lost anywhere. “But you’ll be there too,” he said again with more certainty.
And she found she couldn’t muster the strength to tell him no.
The staff at the Avalon retirement community had folded up and packed away all the deck chairs save our own. Down on the grass, Sidney and I sat on our lounges, observing the last of the sun’s brightness. The blue turned to pale amber, almost exactly the color of the Amstel Lights we were sipping. I’d been nervous about the effects of the beer on my uncle’s intestines, but he assured me he was doing much better since his surgery, and in any case he seemed to take only one sip for every five of mine. Though his wrists were still unsettlingly thin, I was relieved to see that Sidney’s face no longer had the hollowed-out look that had so worried me last time.
It was late September in New Jersey, the weather still warm enough for us to linger, the air smelling of longleaf pines, which were just now shedding their needles, and also, more faintly, of a sour and slightly feculent whiff of algae that carpeted a pond on the edge of the grounds. Sidney had been asking about the family and I told him that Lenny was now applying for jobs in private equity firms around the globe, from Prague to Pretoria, anywhere that might reasonably be called an emerging market.
“No dishonor in following the money.” Sidney nodded. “None at all. But no plans to come home soon, huh?”
Maybe, I said, Lenny’s staying away would induce me and Lucya to finally take a real vacation. It was time we became more like American baby boomers and learned to leverage every phase of life for pleasure. “Maybe we’ll all be taking a safari in Cape Town,” I suggested.