Her hostility to capitalism was a uniquely American product, but her hatred of religion harked back to her youth in Polish Russia. At nineteen, she’d been married off to a young man, poor but brilliant, who as his mother’s only son could claim exemption from the army draft. The following year, all exemptions were lifted. Fearing his death in the service of Tsar Nikolai, she had sold everything and sent her young husband to America. His first correspondence had been to say that work was hard to find and he could send her nothing to live on. She suffered reading his letters and suffered more when months passed without a word. It seemed he had no interest in paying her way over, though she had paid his. In time she went to the town’s rabbi and begged him to write the young man in New York so that he’d agree to give her a divorce, which as a woman she had no power to grant herself. The rabbi had instead told her relatives to collect money and put her on a ship to America. In New York, she tracked down her husband, and for a short time the two lived together in a tenement room where, according to Leon, “he filled her full of semen” and disappeared again, this time going out west, and deserting her with debts at the butcher’s and the grocery store. From that day onward, working in airless rooms six and seven days a week to feed and clothe her only child, Batia never stopped railing against the cowardice of men and the hypocrisy of the “rabbinical overlords” whose authority had laid waste her innocence. Her fanatical contempt—as it was comically relayed by Leon in his unflagging efforts to keep his audience entertained—appeared to Florence so out of proportion to the benevolent atheism of her own father as to seem a kind of exotic faith all its own. What else but fervent devotion could explain the fragrant four-course meal his penniless mother scraped together once a year on Yom Kippur, the fasting day, so as to scandalize and mock her pious neighbors?
Leon Brink was one of those men naturally gifted at turning his own life into a kind of vaudeville, even a kind of myth. It was a talent not so rare, in fact, among the sort of rebel misfits cast up in Moscow in the thirties—unfettered spirits proudly disinheriting their capitalist homelands. Young, mostly Jewish, hailing from the Bronx or Manchester, England, but coming also from places as exotic as Missoula, Montana. Observe them now: Florence and her friends at the Moscow Café on Pushkin Square, ordering nothing but coffees for the girls and a carafe of vodka for the fellows, so as to be allowed to sit for hours and talk and talk (the socializing, like everything else, being done collectively). So much of their talk centers on America, as if in profaning their birthplace they are performing a kind of ritual to relieve homesickness. See them filing one by one onto the skating rink at Petrovka, still so busy debating, discussing, that in a moment the whole bunch of them will land on their asses, as the natives swerve ably around them.
Leon Brink is the only one of the Americans to keep his balance. A lit cigarette hangs from his mouth. Florence shakes away his outstretched hand and hoists herself up without help. He extends it next to Essie, who takes it gratefully.
Was she still sore about his calling her “Flatbush”? Did she find his stories of sleeping on fire escapes and using the East River as a public toilet a kind of bragging? After all, like the rest of them, he was now a privileged foreigner insulated from the chronic shortages, the waiting in line, and the moral harassment that passes for customer service in Russia. To this upgrade of status they had all accommodated themselves quite swiftly. Out of the dead-end bog of American poverty and obscurity Leon had risen to the privileged post of “journalist” for a foreign outlet of TASS, a privilege that came with a standing table at every hotel café, a pair of tickets for each new concert, play, and film. How had a poor boy from a hard neighborhood managed to pull off such a transformation? Insane Batia, it seemed, was not without some pragmatism. She’d sent her son, at age twelve, to work for a pince-nez-wearing typesetter named Meyer Levitsky, who paid Leon by teaching him the printing trade and lending him books, so that by fifteen young Brink had read his way through most of the Russian classics and political philosophers. At the Foreign Workers’ Club and the Moscow Café where his fellow expats gathered, he was not shy about quoting at length from Bakunin, Tolstoy, Jabotinsky, Marx. The only author he failed to cite in this revolutionary company was Horatio Alger, whose books had played no less a role in consummating the great maneuver of metamorphosis that was Leon Brink’s life.
Florence could not explain the unease that snuck over her when he regaled their crowd from the corner of some table, not quite seated and not quite standing, either, gripping the back of a chair or someone’s shoulder as if half expecting to be pulled up at any moment into the blue clouds. Even the spindles of his hair, the tufts of his sideburns seemed exempt from gravitational pull. Whatever it was, Florence could hold out for only so long.
The beginning of her capitulation came one silvery Moscow evening when, having run as fast as she could toward the fortress of the Bolshoi, she found Leon waiting for her in front of one of its creamy pillars. None of their other friends were there.
“Where is everybody?”
“You asking me?”
“I thought Essie was coming.”
“Isn’t she with you?” Leon said innocently.
“Where’s Seldon?”
“Indisposed this evening. We were the honored guests of some Georgians last night. I warned him that wine was an unreliable mistress who doesn’t leave promptly in the morning. Good old vodka, on the other hand…”
“We’re going to be late,” Florence said with perceptible impatience. “Do you have the tickets?”
From inside his meager overcoat, Leon pulled out two tickets for Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.
In the grand vestibule, a furious footrace had started for the cloakrooms. The public wardrobes of Russia were, then as now, no optional convenience. To sneak into the opera without first checking one’s overcoat would have been an unthinkable offense even for rebellious spirits like Leon and Florence. Seated with her program, Florence attempted to read the libretto of the production she was about to hear. In 1934, before the avant-garde was to be squeezed out completely by Stalin, Russia was enjoying the final days of a period of artistic innovation begun in the revolutionary era. These last explosions of the experimental Belle époque, of which Florence caught the tail end upon her arrival, helped lull her into believing the country she’d come to was freer than the one she’d left. Florence made an effort to absorb herself in the plot of Dmitri Shostakovich’s tragi-satiric opera about a merchant’s wife who falls for a charming farmhand. In adapting Nikolai Leskov’s dark story to music, Shostakovich had struggled to conform to the encroaching dictates of Sots-realism, but, to his own peril, he had been unable to repress his artistic idiosyncrasies. This might have explained why, inside the opera house, Florence was having trouble with the music. Onstage, the wild-eyed Katerina, lusting after her farmhand Sergey, writhed and convulsed as she murdered first her father-in-law, then her husband. The music groaned and panted along with her. A good deal of the action took place on the merchant’s velvet-covered double bed, stage right.
No less agitating than the humid atmosphere of the opera was the potent stillness of the man beside her. The maritime tartness of his eau de cologne enveloped her in the draftless theater air. For the duration of the opera, Florence’s knee remained locked in a position intended to prevent accidental brushing. She had nothing to worry about. Leon kept his hands to himself and left the seduction to Shostakovich. The opera had already had a run in Leningrad and rumors of its aphrodisiacal properties had reached Leon well in advance. It was no coincidence that he’d arranged to meet Florence alone for this engagement.
“What did you make of that?” Leon inquired after the lights were raised.