The news of the murder had charged the room, herded everyone together in somber, excitable communion. It was as if a great audition were taking place around Florence: a chorus being handpicked for Oedipus Rex. But who was doing the handpicking? And just then our heroine took notice of a figure she had not seen before, a woman in a white blouse buttoned high over a grand bosom. A bosom as well strapped in and fastened as a parachutist’s.
“Enough dawdling, Comrades,” the parachutist commanded—an order that sent the girls scattering to their desks. To everyone but Florence, the identity of this woman, the head of the bank’s Party Committee, was well known. “Enough mewling,” she chided a girl still tearily reading the paper. “On with your business.” Florence took the order at face value by knocking, as she did each morning, on Timofeyev’s door. After several knocks, she twisted the knob. Her error became apparent as soon as her boss’s red-rimmed eyes fastened on her. “What do you want?” he said curtly, even rudely. His beard was unkempt; his normally placid eyes were so irate they looked wild. “The reports on the silver markets are in,” she declared idiotically, pointing to the portfolio under her arm.
It was at this moment that, from behind the open door, a blind spot in Florence’s vision, a back as broad as a rhino’s and sheathed in a thick hide of black leather turned slowly to take stock of the intruder. Holding one of Timofeyev’s books, the man in the leather coat eyeballed her, not unpleasantly. Florence had only just begun to understand the significance of the leather jacket in Soviet life. The knee-length leather coat, perhaps the first and only fashion statement communism ever gave the world (aside from Mao’s notable collar), the quintessential symbol of proletarian ruggedness and revolutionary masculinity, was adopted first by the Bolshevik defenders of the working class, before becoming the favored apparel of the secret police. It did not diminish the coat’s vanquishing effect that its current wearer had a middle-aged, bloated, and slatternly face. Florence took a step backward.
“Does this look like a suitable time, Comrade Fein?” said Timofeyev.
“Forgive me.”
“Next time, knock.”
But she had knocked! Walking back, she felt like a church bell that had been violently struck. Her head and fingers were still concussing in humiliation as she sat down at her desk.
The possibility that her boss and mentor might not wish to appear, before the Chekist in his office, to be on too-friendly terms with the foreigner in his employ did not enter her mind. Had she taken a look at that morning’s Pravda, she might have noticed that tarred among the “craven vipers and sworn enemies of Socialism” were also “camouflaged enemies in the employ of foreign intelligence.” Instead, still struggling to think of what she’d done wrong, she laid her cheek down on the cover of her typewriter and began to sob quietly. Her despair could not have been more appropriate to the occasion.
“Nu, nu…” Somebody was standing behind her and patting her shoulder. Wiping the water from her eyes, Florence turned to see that it was the office manager. “Tears won’t bring back even saints, my dear,” the woman said. Then, still comforting Florence, she added, “They’ll clean up those vermin good now; then it’ll be their turn to cry.”
Florence will recall this prophecy three weeks later, packed in a room within the bank’s bureaucratic bowels with other workers. The room, a small auditorium, is blossoming with the heat of winter sweat. Only one casement window has been left ajar; the morning breeze is stirring the leathery leaves of three giant ficus plants perched on the windowsill. The Ficus elastica, commonly known as the rubber plant, a hateful symbol (during earlier years of the Revolution) of petit-bourgeois domesticity, has now been rehabilitated by the mighty proletariat. No other plant, it turns out, thrives quite so succulently in the stale radiator heat of Soviet meeting rooms. Before this tropical background appear, like the heads of a tribal council, the faces of the bank’s Party Committee and All-Union Committee. Against the opposite wall hangs a black-bordered flag of mourning.
The headlines have followed one another so forcefully over these past weeks that even Florence can’t help paying attention. A week following the assassination, 103 “White Guardists” have been arrested and summarily executed. Their names have not been made public, and the only information disclosed about them is that they smuggled their way into the Soviet Union through Latvia, Finland, Poland, and Turkey for the purpose of assassinating Kirov and other leaders. More recently, Grigory Zinoviev, old revolutionary and comrade-in-arms of Lenin, has been arrested as well, his guilt already gospel though his trial is still two weeks away. But the roll call is just beginning. In two years’ time the number of parties responsible for a single man’s murder will grow to include 104 Leningrad counterrevolutionaries, 78 conspirators of the “Moscow Center” (to evolve into the nefarious “Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center”), 12 Leningrad Chekists, and more. Kirov’s death is the golden goose that keeps bearing suitable new enemies, all the way up to 1941, when its fertility is interrupted temporarily by the war.
But let’s now return to the auditorium with its rehabilitated ficuses. Surely, if an ideologically incorrect rubber plant can be rescued from bourgeois vulgarity then the young woman on trial today can also redeem herself in the eyes of her co-workers. Florence can just make out the bobbing bun of the stenographer recording the enumerated charges:
“Regression.”
“Blunted political diligence.”
“Failing to break off contacts.”
“But how?” says the ginger-haired girl, her voice quivering. “How could I break off contact? He’s my father, after all.” She does not pose the question rhetorically. Her small eyes flicker up briefly at the audience as though there might be a genuine answer out there somewhere. Seeing those desperate eyes, Florence feels her flesh go cold.
The girl, it turns out, is a daughter of one of the “Zinovievites.” For the first time, Florence learns that Zinoviev and Kamenev were part of a political opposition years ago.
“Truly, you surprise me, Golubtsova,” says the woman Florence recognizes as the parachutist with the formidable bust. Her tone is far from belligerent. On the contrary, her words have an almost joyful feel. “When the conspirators’ arrests were made known, you did not come to the committee to declare your association with the enemies.”
“I didn’t believe it all myself.”
“You didn’t believe they were guilty?” says a man at the end of the table.
“No…Yes.”
“You thought the Party picks people up for nothing?”
“I…was confused.”
“Yet not confused enough,” the woman resumes, “to contact your old friends in Leningrad and see to it that your name was not on any roster of activists at the Smolny Institute.”
“I was an organizer there four years ago, but I’ve been residing here since.”
“But in all your time here you never called anyone in Leningrad to ask to have your name whitewashed from any lists—how do you explain it?”