By the time Florence met Timofeyev, what remained of the old religious discipline and merchant spirit of his ancestors had assumed the narrower forms of strict sobriety and an energetic pursuit of socialist efficiency. I am convinced it was Timofeyev’s eloquence regarding the latter that swayed my mother toward the unimpeachable rationality of the Soviet system. I once asked her what she’d thought of the complete lack of freedom in the press when she arrived. “You must have noticed that the newspapers failed to provide any real information,” I said. “And didn’t you find it odd that the papers carried no opinion columns? No comic strips? No crosswords? Didn’t you think all those official pronouncements and statistics were just a tiny bit relentless?”
Her answer: “Well, Timofeyev used to say that it was all nonsense about foreign magazines’ being ‘forbidden.’ They were just like any other luxury—to import them would mean the government would have to pay for them. And, yes, the Russian national press was often dull—that was a pity—but…you have to appreciate how much had already been accomplished in the country since the Revolution. Of what use to the people would all this debate in the press have been? Most of them still signed their names with ‘X’s. The language they read had to be clear and simple…clear and simple.” I remember her repeating this in the schoolteacher’s way that Timofeyev might have used with her. “You can’t feed hard-to-chew meat to an infant, can you? The fact that they were reading the papers at all was a triumph.”
I suspect the last bit about infants needing to swallow pre-chewed meats is a direct quote. Mama seemed attached to this explanation well into her sixties, like a duckling that gets imprinted on a farmer’s boot and keeps thinking the boot is its mother, even while its neck is being cracked under the weight of the rubber sole.
I can imagine these early-winter evening walks my mother and her mentor take from the office on Neglinnaya Street to his home on Prechistenka, where Madame Timofeyev is hosting one of her salons. At this hour Moscow is at the height of its pristine gray beauty. I can see the thin layer of oil glistening like mother-of-pearl on the surface of the river. They pass a massive foundation for a stone bridge, yet unbuilt. Florence has watched a gang of men working on it for more than two weeks. Now she sees that the work has been abandoned, and the men and their wheelbarrows have moved eighty meters down the riverbank, to break ground for yet another foundation. Can they really be building a second bridge so close to the first? she asks Timofeyev.
To the practiced eye, it’s clear what has happened: The river’s curve makes it impossible for the first bridge to connect with the street on the other side. A typically sloppy Soviet drafting error that was ignored until it was too late. But Timofeyev only laughs it off as he adjusts his Astrakhan hat. “My dear Florochka, if you’re ever to be a real Soviet, you must first understand that the great Russian people are a nation of maximalists. Our ambition is like love—it is impatient of delays and rivals. We built the world’s largest warplane—it crashed on its first flight. But we’ve built others just as large, and they’re still in the sky. We challenged France and constructed the mightiest stratospheric balloon, but couldn’t get it to lift. Then we tried again, and broke all the world records!”
This is not empty boosterism. He is already developing in my mother that critical Soviet ability to see life not as it is, but as it is becoming. Or better still, as it ought to become. Everything they pass is something else in potential: A muddy culvert clogged with garbage is transformed through words into a future aqueduct. A block of demolished houses from which residents have been forcibly removed is not a vacant, brick-littered lot, but a People’s Palace in the making. In my mother’s mind, the future and the present are already becoming agreeably fused together.
She has no idea that they’re about to explode apart.
The winter of 1934 was monotonously snowbound, and so Florence could not be blamed for failing to experience the more mercurial political weather around her. On the morning of December 2, she walked into her office at Gosbank to find it a place of mourning. Heavy vapors of bereavement and alarm hung over every desk. Bookkeepers’ tears fell in thick drops into giant ledgers. Florence’s first reaction was confusion. “What’s happened?” she asked, turning to a clerk beside her.
“For heaven’s sake, don’t you listen to the radio?”
This was not a question so much as an incrimination. Indeed Florence listened to the radio all the time. The radios of Moscow’s apartments, like the megaphones in Moscow’s streets, were devices apparently manufactured with no off switch. Within a month of her arrival in Russia, she had almost entirely stopped paying attention to the staticky bulletins issuing at all hours of the day from the radio in her communal kitchen. She was hardly the only burgeoning Soviet to acquire the gift of listening-and-not-hearing. Yet to succeed in missing the news of “the Crime of the Century”?
Very simply, she had overslept. Catapulting from her room to the trolley stop without so much as stopping in the kitchen to boil an egg, she’d failed to notice her communal neighbors bowed around the tombstone-shaped LKW radio from which a very real eulogy was just then issuing.
At the office, her colleague now said: “Where have you been, girlie? They’ve killed Sergey Kirov!”
“Who’s killed him?” Florence said, with an alarm she hoped would conceal the question she was too embarrassed to ask: Who was Sergey Kirov?
For those not acquainted with the mother of Russia’s political murders—an assassination of JFK proportions, which launched a thousand conspiracy theories—the murder of Sergey Kirov, Leningrad Party secretary, was much like the Kennedy affair, a murder complete with its own lone gunman (killed almost instantly), and its impenetrable cloud of conflicting testimonies and forensic evidence. Not to mention the obvious parallel with Kirov himself—a figure of Kennedyesque looks and charisma, a man whose political popularity was on its way to eclipsing even the Great Leader’s. Consider the comparison: on one side, a handsome strapping Slav; on the other, a pockmarked Caucasian; the Leningrader, a dynamic and sociable leader; the Ossetian, a reclusive and paranoid sociopath who kept his Politburo colleagues up for half the night drinking vodka while he himself sat sipping water.
“Damned butchers!” The bookkeeper across the aisle now opened her mouth. “How can the earth spawn such villains!”
But why the plurals? Florence wondered. Hadn’t a killer already been apprehended? The answer seemed to be in the newspaper the bookkeeper was holding. “?‘The double-dealers, the craven vipers,’?” she resumed, no longer declaring her disgust but merely reciting aloud from the Pravda on her desk, “?‘sworn enemies of Socialism raised their hand against not one man, but the whole Proletarian Revolution. The working people now unanimously demand justice for the killers!’?”