Florence watched silently while Jumpin’ Jimmy beat out an elaborate tattoo on the floor with his clicking heels. The top half of his body remained perfectly, effortlessly erect.
“Actually, he’s a student,” said Leon. “At the KUNMZ—the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West. But I don’t think he ever goes to class. The hotel restaurants pay him a pretty sum to do the Lindochka every night for their guests. And that doesn’t include the free drinks. He can drink it faster than they can pour it. These Russians can’t get enough of him. Especially the communist wives. Most of ’em never seen a black man before in their lives. One time, a couple of ’em came up to him after a number and tried to touch his hair, then asked if he could speak a few words in ‘Negro.’?”
“I hope he told them to keep their hands to themselves,” Florence said, breaking her vow of silence.
“It don’t bother him,” Leon replied. “Jimmy makes more dough here in a week than in a month in Chicago. Guys like him are ten a nickel over there, and here he’s a true original.”
She turned to him with a cold look. “You mean a novelty act? Maybe we should ask him how he feels playing Sambo for the Russians like some dancing bear….” Her tone startled her.
“Take it easy. The man has a gift. Why shouldn’t he make a little something from it?” He turned to Essie. “Your cousin always such a stick?”
Florence had no chance to correct him, on factual or philosophical grounds, because Leon’s next question was to ask Essie if she wanted to dance.
Clusters of piano chords throbbed through the ether of body heat while Florence stood alone, watching Leon and Essie move around in a box step on the dance floor. Essie was half his height, but Leon was managing to swing her elegantly in a glissade and pull her back into the crook of his arm. Florence had no idea why she’d felt like being so mean. Everything around her seemed strange, including the music. Spotting her alone, one of the Austrian Schutzbunders approached and asked if she cared to dance. She didn’t, but accepted. She permitted the Austrian to hold her tightly while they moved around in wide, graceless circles, but managed to keep her head turned slightly away to elude the sour waft from the Schutzbunder’s mouth. As soon as the music ended, she extricated herself and found Essie, who was still catching her breath while her fingers lingered on Leon’s elbow. “Where’d you learn to dance like that?”
Leon wiped his forehead. The top buttons of his shirt were unfastened to reveal a prolifically sprouting tuft around a bony sternum. “Where I come from, if you got hungry on a Saturday night, you’d go find whoever in the neighborhood was having a wedding. My friends and I would tell the man at the door, ‘Our mother’s upstairs. It’s an emergency. The icebox is melting.’ And he’d let us up. And five minutes later we’d be slipping around on the floor. Pretty soon everyone would get up and start dancing. That’s when we’d sneak into the kitchen and load up on the rugelach, the fruit, the herring, fill our mouths with seltzer and get the hell out of there.”
“Didn’t you have food at home?” said Florence.
“Sure, we did,” he said, apparently having forgotten her earlier slight. “Potato soup for breakfast. Potato pancakes for dinner. Potato pudding for dessert…”
“So you grew up in New York too,” said Essie.
“Allen Street. But ‘grew up’ I don’t know about. More like got dragged up.”
Essie apparently found this hilarious, and Florence, for her part, did a fair impression of looking amused, if only to encourage the view that their earlier disagreement could still be written off as a misunderstanding. And this, to her surprise, had the unexpected effect of making Leon lift his eyes in a kind of shy, canine affection at her, before pulling his shirt straight. It was only a slight tug, but it laid bare what Florence had been looking at, and managed to make something awkwardly intimate of their truce.
Chords of dance music were rising up again over the tumult of the room. Essie was the first to recognize the tune. “?‘Stardust!’?” she shouted suddenly. “They’re playing Hoagy Carmichael, on accordion!” It was true. Florence realized that this was what had been strange about the music: all the numbers were out-of-season tunes that had somehow made their way to Russian soil and settled into a kind of wandering-Gypsy version of themselves, just like her and Essie. It was obvious to her that Leon now felt obliged to ask one of them to dance, but this quandary was resolved by a tall figure bounding toward them. The figure turned into the shape of a lanky, bespectacled man who seemed almost to be rising on his toes as he shouted Leon’s name.
“If it isn’t Seldon Parker!”
“Greetings, Comrade!” announced Seldon, with the sumptuous inflections of an Englishman. He shook each girl’s hand in turn. “Forgive me, I’m terrifically tight tonight.”
“I expected you were at the old Metropol,” said Leon, “drinking rounds with the Alpha and Omega boys.”
“I wouldn’t speak those syllables too loudly, my friend. Anyhow, there’s been a change—they go by ‘the Christian Brothers’ now.”
“Since when?”
“Since the YMCA is easier to remember than the OGPU.”
“I thought they were called the NKVD now,” said Leon.
Seldon removed a handkerchief and blotted the bullets of sweat from his forehead. “Too many damn abbreviations in this city to keep track of. And they’re always changing,” he said, turning to Florence. “Personally, I preferred it back when everyone simply referred to the secret police as the Red Cheka.”
“What about ‘the SPCC’?” suggested Florence.
“What’s that, now?”
“The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Communism.”
“Hey, that’s got a nice ring to it. I think I’ll write that one down.”
“Seldon is going to write a big important book when he leaves this place,” said Leon, “only he can’t seem to leave it.”
“What’s your book about?” said Essie, and was rewarded with an elaborate explanation of Seldon’s interest in the question of proizvol, the notion of “arbitrariness itself!” While Seldon turned Essie into a blinking victim of his theories about “the Russian lack of seemly proportion between cause and effect,” Leon, taking a step toward Florence, said, “I keep telling him to hurry up and go back to London so he can start enjoying Moscow.”
“How does that work?”
“The problem with writers is they don’t know how to have their fun while they’re having it. Only in retrospect.”
“I take it you’re not a writer.”
“I do write, as a matter of fact. Seldon and I work together. We write for TASS.”
“The Soviet wire service? In that big building up on Gorky Street?”
“So you’ve heard of it,” Leon said with a specious modesty.
“Don’t the Soviets have their own reporters?”
“Ah, but you see, we write news for export.”
“In English?”
“In what else—Tagalog? We write and print a whole magazine. It’s even read in the States. It’s called Sovietland.”