“I don’t know.” Nina moved the dress back and forth across her body.
And then, so simply, Florence understood what was happening. How dumb she was! Valda and Nina weren’t playing dress-up. They were negotiating. Valda, having just been abroad for the social good of her nation, was now performing another social good by refreshing Nina’s imported wardrobe.
“It’s nice, but the waist is a bit tight, for New York,” Florence heard herself say now, with the expert air expected of her. “We wear it looser, like this.”
“It can be let out,” Valda offered eagerly.
“All right, I’ll have my seamstress have a look. How much do you want for it?”
“Oh, let’s settle all that later,” Valda suggested.
“As you wish.” Nina carried the dress to her wardrobe and returned with a black tasseled shawl emblazoned with carmine roses. “And this,” she said, wrapping the light wool kerchief around Florence’s face and shoulders, “is how we wear things in Moscow. Keep it forever, dear.”
—
IT WAS PAST ELEVEN when Florence left the Timofeyevs’ apartment. The filigree of the iron gate, opened for her by the doorman, was dusted with snow. In the stinging, scentless cold, she felt aglow with wine and happiness. No longer Florie from Flatbush. No longer the lovelorn wanderer. Some invisible barrier between herself and the city had been removed. In the cozy oasis of Timofeyev’s salon she felt a sense of rarity and belonging that her life back in Brooklyn had stingily withheld. She had only to play the cosmopolitan role requested of her to gain admission. Even her blunder at the dinner table had been treated as a forgettable faux pas. In the future, she’d be more careful. How unnecessary her tears had been earlier that evening, how illusory her loneliness. She had merely to quiet her doubts, and life would open its doors.
In some secret corner of her heart, where she was less of an atheist than she liked to admit, she was certain that the prayer she’d made in the office had been spontaneously answered. But who exactly had answered it—Timofeyev, Stalin, or God? In her tipsiness, the three had somehow merged into distinct facets of a single divine force. A holy trinity. In the iodine sky, telephone wires swung with a trim of shaggy icicles like the fringe of her new shawl. They clinked like chimes in the wind. She was almost twenty-five years old and she’d never witnessed anything so marvelous. She stuck out her tongue and tasted the falling snow, sure that if she could only let herself embrace this feeling her happiness might last forever.
It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.
—ERIC HOFFER
I have this quote copied into a file on my laptop. I came across it some years ago in a book, The True Believer, left for me by my daughter. She read it in a college class and presented it to me as a badly needed addition to what she claims is my holy trinity of old white men: Clancy, Grisham, and Dershowitz. When I finally opened Hoffer, I was struck with a cold shudder of recognition at the words above, and those that followed:
All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world….It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacles nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence….
It was her. And here I’d been thinking all these years that I was the only one burdened by the “innumerable unbeliefs” that formed the brickwork of my mother’s pyramid of pure conviction.
She didn’t even have the excuse of being a communist. After all her decades in the Soviet Union, she was proud of never carrying a Party card (though joining the Party in Russia was not as easy or automatic as many imagine, certainly not for foreigners). But this did not mean that my mother was any less blindly dedicated to the Grand Idea. More so, even, than the legions of card-carrying Stalinists and Trotskyites who remained in New York to duke it out among themselves for the next forty years. All those shabbily dressed Reds who refused to talk to one another (out of principle!) well into the 1970s were just that—talkers! My mother had no interest in their rabbinical hairsplitting. She wanted to leap over all that talk straight into the future.
Why she came to Russia never struck me as odd. Why she stayed is a different question, and one I’ve often found myself wondering about. Under what (or whose?) spell did the colorless landscape around her transform into one of those vivid proletarian mosaics that still decorate this mercantile city?
In her recollections of her arrival, one person rises most often in my mother’s retelling: the man she called Timofeyev, her boss at the State Bank. (Throughout her life, my mother had few female friends, and seems to have preferred the role of ingénue to a certain sort of older gentleman.) I have no reason to suspect anything incorrect went on between them. From her account, Grigory Grigorievich Timofeyev was married to a theater actress sixteen years his junior—a Georgian princess from Tbilisi whose love of luxury frequently caused her husband awkwardness. One of Timofeyev’s virtues, according to Mama, was that even in company he never drank anything stronger than Georgian mineral water, a trait acquired from his Old Believer ancestors—that Russian analogue to the American Quakers, merchants and capitalists and resisters who secretly bucked the autarchy of the tsar by giving runaway serfs refuge and work in their factories.