Lying to her parents was simple. She had done it all her life. But the chipper veil did not go down so easily with Sidney. He would never visit her. She pictured herself going down one of those deep escalators, alone. The interminable ride. Forever.
The deep, buffering silence that surrounded her tiny whimpers made Florence realize it was snowing again. Her eyes lifted to the cathedral gloom of the enormous windows, inky with night. In the grainy darkness, she could detect the stirring motion of floating snowflakes. How many mornings, seeing the snowy web on her windowpanes, had she wanted to crawl back under her blanket to let her bruised heart hibernate like a daffodil bulb?
Tell me what to do!
She heard herself whisper this, though she didn’t quite know to whom. To God? It had been years since she’d prayed. To her little brother? Or…Between the tall cathedral windows hung a portrait of Him. She’d sat under the mustachioed Leader’s all-seeing gaze for so long she barely noticed it anymore. Her failure to feel the obliterating devotion to Joseph Stalin that others professed seemed to be one more symptom of her foreignness. She felt she could escape her own unspeakable loneliness if only she could believe with a less uncertain heart. Now, in the wintry, humming silence, she heard: I believe in one thing only: the power of human will.
They were Stalin’s words and they rang in the chamber of her head like an indictment. Grow up, Florie, she told herself sharply. But self-pity exerted its own allure. She understood, as she never had before, how exquisitely satisfying it was to drink your own misery, and how tasteless it was to everyone else. Perhaps if she had sat there longer it might have occurred to her to see Sergey as something other than a spurning lover. That in cutting her loose he was trying to offer her rescue. But the chrysalis of her melancholy was broken by an unexpected sound. It was the scrape of Timofeyev’s door opening. Florence had presumed he’d gone home with the others, but he was only now coming out of his office, buttoning his long coat and fixing his black Astrakhan hat on top of his head.
She yanked the letter from the roller, but it came out only after a long hiccupping squeal.
“Flora?”
“Grigory Grigorievich—I didn’t see you.”
“The building is going to close soon.”
“I was just sorting out my…Lost track of the time.”
“Have you been crying?”
“Oh no. It’s just the snowfall—it’s so…beautiful.”
His sharp eyes squinted in concern behind his amber-tinted spectacles.
“Have you ever eaten solyanka?”
In one gesture she shook her head and wiped her face with her arm.
“My wife makes the best solyanka in Moscow. Tonight you’ll try it, all right? We’re having guests for dinner; I’d like you to join us.”
“Oh, I’m not dressed for dinner.”
“You’ll do just fine. Get your coat.”
—
TIMOFEYEV’S APARTMENT BUILDING, a sand-colored Art Nouveau mansion on Prechistenka Street, stood equipped with a liveried doorman and an ancient elevator attendant who escorted them in the ornate cage up to the top floor. When Timofeyev opened the door the warmth gathered inside caused Florence to sweat in her heavy coat. The sound of her heels was absorbed by a woven rug that buffered the glare of a varnished entry hall. Two steps below, in a sunken living room, a few guests had already gathered. On an elegantly overstuffed sofa were seated a well-fed gentleman and a tall woman whose blond-gray head and dusty complexion recalled to Florence a species of exotic moth. “It’s only natural that the new theater should wear new clothes,” the man was saying in a voice rife with discernment.
“I recall you saying something quite different last year, Max,” spoke a redheaded beauty Florence took to be the young Madame Timofeyev. Her unbrushed ringlets hung down to the middle of her back. Her mouth was full and painted. Over one naked shoulder she wore a silk smock that clung to the flex and sinews of her body. Her threadbare, embroidered houseslippers only seemed to add to the effect of careless elegance.
“I haven’t changed my mind, Ninochka. I’ve always said that our theater should avoid an archeological approach. It achieves nothing new with restorations of former plays.”
Florence hadn’t yet taken off her shoes when a shaggy dog began sniffing at her skirt. “Stop that at once, Misha!” Ninochka said, dragging the dog roughly by his collar. “I’m sorry about this fat fool,” she said. For a moment Florence thought she was talking about the man on the sofa.
“What a lovely dog! What breed is he?”
“He’s a mutt. We found him on the street,” Timofeyev answered, taking her coat.
“There is no breed of dog in any part of the world that corresponds precisely to the Russian family hound,” chimed in the man on the couch. “He is a mixture of all the worst varieties. They sleep all day and bark all night.”
Nina, having taken the dog into the kitchen, now came back with cognac. “Grisha, you didn’t tell me your American was so adorable,” she declared before making effusive introductions of her two guests—Max, a theater critic and “absolute genius,” and Valda, who, as Nina explained, had only just come back from Denmark, where she had been traveling with an all-Soviet delegation to the Scandinavian nations.
“Are you a diplomat?” Florence inquired.
“No, no.” The woman crinkled her eyes modestly. “Only a translator.”
“Valda is a specialist in the Nordic tongues. She knows a dozen of them—Finnish, Swedish, English, Dutch….” Nina might have gone on to include Portuguese and Basque in this list if she hadn’t disappeared again into the kitchen to give loud orders to the elderly maid whom she addressed as Olga Ivanovna. It struck Florence that, like every good hostess, Timofeyev’s wife knew how to trade in lavish indiscriminate praise. And yet it was almost physically impossible for Florence not to be warmed by her enthusiasm.
“My position has always been,” Max said, now addressing Timofeyev, “that, no matter how great the role of the classics, they can’t fully satisfy the demands of the new audience. There must be new themes for the new mentalìtēt.”
“I have nothing against the new mentalìtēt, but why must these adaptations always be so dull?” said Timofeyev. “Why does Hamlet need to be set in Uzbekistan? Why should Molière’s plays be set on the floor of a factory?”
“There are no new themes, Maxim darling,” Nina said, coming in with glasses. “There is but one immortal theme.”
“And what’s that, my dear?”
“Love!”
“Love will always be an absorbing subject,” said Max, “but it has to be subordinated to more complex social questions.”
The moth-faced Valda, listening to this in amused silence, smiled at Florence from the couch.
“Love is subordinate to nothing!” declared Nina, pouring for herself a drink that Florence guessed was not her first that evening.
“Why not combine the two,” suggested Timofeyev. “Set Romeo and Juliet on a collective farm.”
“What a spectacular idea, Grisha,” said Valda.