“In all honesty, I confess, I knew nothing of the schemes that have been suggested by…”
“What do you mean by ‘suggested by’?” says another man. “You persist in refusing to denounce the terrorists in the face of a mountain of evidence.”
But the woman in charge raises her palm to politely silence him.
“Whether you knew or didn’t know is beside the point here. Instead of coming clean with your associations at once, you first made plans to cover your own back, going to your uncle for help….”
“It was he who suggested it, only because I was no longer a member of—”
“Nobody here is interested in your alibis,” protests the man at the end.
Florence is still struggling to follow what the girl is being asked to confess to, though it is already clear that, whatever new confession she offers, the court will immediately cast it aside as inadequate and insincere. For the past two weeks, Florence has been trying to make sense of the cascade of unmaskings in the newspapers, but she keeps being confounded by the same stubborn paradox: There seem to be too many Iagos hiding in the wings. If the White Guardists have already killed Kirov, then surely the “Zinovievites” are off the hook. Or vice versa. It’s a heretical logic of elimination that the mathematical branch of her intelligence persists in performing. And what does it say about the Party, she wonders, that all those Bolsheviks were involved in this business—members of the Central Committee? Did they have no other way of speaking up, that they had to resort to a murder? She longs to bring up these questions with Timofeyev. But her boss has been giving her the brush-off. His days are now taken up with meetings, and Florence has found it difficult enough to borrow his time to clarify his increasingly convoluted morning dictations, let alone ask him to unriddle politics. Instead, it’s the voice of Timofeyev’s wife, Nina, that Florence now hears in her head: “Who are we to think we can fathom everything that goes on up top?” Her mind returns to this answer as to a lucky amulet. There’s enormous comfort in reminding herself that she doesn’t—that she can’t possibly—have all the answers. Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian. She repeats this mantra to ward off any guilt she might be tempted to feel for not speaking up in defense of the poor girl on the stand. What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence might be on the chopping block herself.
Her silence is only a symptom of the collective muteness permeating the nation. By 1934, crimes of passion have all but ceased in the Soviet Union. Likewise accidents, criminal negligence, and any act committed in the sweet shade of opportunism. Every malfeasance reported in the newspapers is an act of collusion.
Industrial accidents? Wreckers!
Production below plan? Saboteurs!
Murder and, yes, even rape—all guerrilla maneuvers in the war against the toiling classes. An overlooked headline on the back page of Izvestia just a week before the Kirov affair reads: “Young Pioneer Girl Dragged and Defiled in Wheat Field.” Who are her attackers? Kulaks!
The question remains: Did the bullet that punctured Kirov’s neck and, in its figurative way, go on to puncture the skulls of countless others, make at least a small dent in the membrane of Florence’s enthusiasm for the land of her choosing? All evidence suggests that the events of the winter of ’34 led her to draw no permanent conclusions about the système soviétique. Or maybe it was all simpler than that. Florence had other things on her mind that December: she was falling in love again.
—
AS HE’D PORTRAYED HIS CHILDHOOD to their group of friends, Leon Brink had inherited his revolutionary consciousness in utero. “Dragged up,” as he told Florence, by a headstrong, lunatic mother and no father. From the age of three, when other Jewish boys in his neighborhood were starting kheyder, he’d been taken along to strikes and demonstrations and left to wait amid the raucous sidewalk crowds while his mother pummeled scabs with her lead-weighted umbrella and sharpened hairpins. Batia Brink, a garment worker and follower of Clara Lemlich, raised her son on a diet of contempt for economic despotry, which, she liked to say, boiled in the cauldrons of capitalism and rose like scum to the top.