They had given their tickets to the cloakroom attendant by this point and collected their outerwear. Her two-hour effort to quell her arousal was now bringing on a kind of backwash of matronly disapproval. “It’s a fine opera,” she said, letting Leon help her into her coat, “if you don’t care for things like melody, or cadence, or a sympathetic hero.”
Florence’s criticism of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District would echo the scathing still-to-come review in Pravda: “coarse,” “primitive,” “epileptic.” “Comrade Shostakovich presents us with the crudest naturalism…,” the reviewer wrote. “The composer has clearly not made it his business to heed what the Soviet public looks for in music and expects of it.” This blast of official wrath would result in the opera’s being taken out of circulation for the next three decades. “You mean you didn’t find Katerina lovable?” Leon said, cocking his head, an edge of mockery in his voice.
“The lady is a monster.”
“How about a clever, electrifying woman perishing in the nightmarish conditions of an oppressive society?”
“She’s a calculating manslaughterer!”
“So she kills a couple of fellas.”
“For the love of a confirmed philanderer!”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Comrade Fein. Katerina’s crime is not a crime of love. A crime of love would be a spiritual sin. She, on the other hand, is possessed by pagan furies. Hence the title of Lady Macbeth….” And here Leon did a most unexpected thing: he quoted Shakespeare. “?‘I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.’?”
For a moment Florence stood observing him in the lit Moscow evening, her mouth exuding icy silver breaths. “So you’ve read Shakespeare…,” she said.
“Ay, good lady. I was even cast as Macduff in the City College production.”
“You never told me you went to City!”
Having perhaps overreached in his claims at erudition, Leon issued a quick retraction. “I quit after less than a year.”
“How come?”
“Figured college had nothing to teach me.”
His continual boasting was like an endless brief in his own defense.
“I ran out of money, besides,” he amended. “Even if the learning’s free, life wasn’t. Figured I’d learn more by traveling, anyway. I had a magnificent idea to ride the trains across America, but it turned out about a thousand guys had already beat me to it. I might’ve ended up in Argentina, but they had a military coup.”
“So Russia was left.”
“As a matter of fact, I was on my way to China. But then I read about Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Republic…Stalin’s own Siberian Zion! And I wouldn’t even have to learn Chinese.”
“I didn’t peg you for a homesteader.”
“You kidding? I love the frontier! It was the pictures in the pamphlet that sold me—this youth who looked like some Berdichev Hercules lifting a wheat sack. And a big-calved Levantine princess strumming her balalaika. The only thing they forgot to put in the pamphlet was a picture of the mosquitoes.”
“It sounds like paradise.”
“I wasn’t expecting the French Riviera. But here I get off the Trans-Siberian and the train platform is nothin’ but a wooden plank in the middle of a mud field. I turn to the conductor and say, ‘How much farther to Birobidzhan, Comrade?’ He’s already laughing at me. ‘Two years, son!’
“So I get there, and they put me to work draining swamps. After two nights I have mosquito bites on my mosquito bites. Now, I wouldn’t’ve minded being eaten alive if at least I’d had something to eat. But I think the zookeepers forgot about us.”
“What do you mean, ‘us’?”
“They stuffed all us foreigners into one commune—Polacks, Bulgarians, Krauts, South Americans. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a Zulu in there. Guess someone wanted to see if we could build another Tower of Babel. If we weren’t all so busy running to the latrines with dysentery, we might’ve even succeeded in killing each other.”
“How long did you stay?”
“Almost four months I stuck around, if you can believe it. And those mamzers threatened to throw the book at me when I finally told ’em I was quitting. Said I’d never get a job in the Soviet Union if I didn’t finish ‘serving my time.’?”
“What did you do?”
“I told them Zai gezunt, and Va-fan-gulo in my best Italian.”
“So much for the dream of a Jewish republic,” Florence said.
“How can I put it? It wasn’t that there were too many Jews, it was that there was insufficiently everything else. See, the way I figure it, every place where there’s just a few of us, we’re like fertilizer. But all in one place?” He shook his head. “That’s just a big pile of manure.”
Florence laughed despite herself. Before she could catch her breath, Leon said: “What are you doing tomorrow evening?”
From that point on, it became the winter Florence started lying again. She blew off Essie, claiming committee meetings after work. At work, she skipped the meetings by claiming she had to attend her political-education class (the only permissible excuse), then played hooky from her class to go to the Udarnik Theater with Leon for the new film Chapayev.
Purges and politics aside, there was plenty of fun to be had in Moscow in 1934. Florence listened to her first symphony and attended her first ballet. She was astounded by how much high culture was available so cheaply. In the audiences, she saw people who looked and dressed like ordinary workers. Their hunger for culture flattered her sense of pride at being a resident of a city that had declared the differences between high culture and low, classic and current, elite and popular, to be merely bourgeois distinctions. She told herself that these dates with Leon were not really dates. This was egalitarian Russia, after all; no reason men and women couldn’t be friends. There was no smooching, or even hand-holding—Florence kept it all on the level of talk. She even tried to prime the pump a little, do a bit of matchmaking.
“What do you think of Essie?”
“She’s a nice girl.”
“She has such pretty eyes, doesn’t she?” Florence suggested encouragingly.
“Yes, and so close together, too,” said Leon.
—
THEIR COURTSHIP UNFOLDED IN two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories. Passing over the cobblestones of the Arbat District, he’d tell her about his childhood working as a puller in the garment stalls on Canal Street.
“You know why all those suits on Canal have so many little price labels?”
“Why?”
“There’s a hole underneath every one of them!”
Sipping mugs of foaming kvass in Gorky Park under a banner proclaiming that “Life Has Become Better, Life Has Become More Cheerful,” they recalled the egg-cream sodas they’d drunk in Brooklyn.
“What I wouldn’t give for a little chocolate syrup in this!”
“Won’t help. You gotta know the formula,” said Leon.
“You know it, I suppose.”
“Sure do. This bartender on Greene Street showed me the secret recipe.”
“You alone.”
“Yup. Felt sorry for me ’cause I never had a Bar Mitzvah. He took me back into the kitchen and showed me how he done it. Told me, ‘Today you are a man.’?”
She never knew if he was making it up as he went along. After a while, she didn’t care.
“I never see you drink very much, Leon.”