“Alcohol interferes with my suffering.”
With Leon she went to lectures at the House of Culture and to the State Jewish Theater on Bronnaya Street to watch Solomon Mikhoels perform his famous King Lear. But it was at the Metropol that Leon finally got his chance.
The restaurant of the Metropol Hotel deserves a place among the pantheon of the century’s great pleasure dens. Its ceilings were, or appeared to Florence upon first inspection, thirty feet high. Palladian doors circumscribed the enormous dining room, rising to a colonnaded balcony under a stained-glass ceiling. Like the Ritz or the Copacabana, the Metropol could successfully pass off its garishness as timeless. Its ornate brass carvings and red plush furnishings had, by the 1930s, already acquired an air of departed glory, a feel of slightly frayed and shopworn luxury that was of a piece with the gold-braided uniforms of its liveried waiters, some of whom had been around since the days of the tsar.
Like the restaurants of other valyuta hotels, the Metropol was the sort of place that had been allowed to stay open to satisfy the bourgeois tastes of Moscow’s foreign residents and visitors, especially the members of the press, who liked to loiter in its well-stocked bar, nursing whiskeys and eyeing the hotel’s spectacular barmaids. Thus it was at the Metropol that the motley crew of correspondents, in whose number Leon counted himself, had chosen to ring in the new year.
On a dance floor teeming with naked shoulders and bare backs, projectors animated a sparkling fountain in autochrome. The smoky mirrors around the dining room were like steamy windows into another world. Outside, in the twenty-below weather, abounded the usual wintry spectacle of proletarianism: men in spartan sheepskins hurrying down the sidewalk with string bags. But inside, the Tropics: Feathers sprouted from eye masks. Carnations bloomed in buttonholes. Pomaded heads rested on downy décolletages. Outside, shuttered stores guarding meager rations of black bread and salted lard. Inside, wild duck with solyanka, herring in a “fur coat” of beets and horseradish. On the street, snow. Inside, confetti. Out there, the slurred pugnacious howling of national hymns. In here, jazz!
Florence and Essie had arrived just as the conversations at the table were acquiring the lunatic, reckless clarity of an all-night bender. The six-piece orchestra, retuning their instruments, had given the stage over to a pair of Gypsy fiddlers, a man and young woman in embroidered vests.
“You fancy she’s a real Gypsy?” said a man named Alistair.
“Don’t be ridiculous! The real ones are as cross-eyed as inbred kittens!” said Seldon Parker, beside whom Florence had sat down with the aim of ignoring Leon.
“I thought they banned Gypsy music,” said a bald-pated Australian who went by Michaels.
“That was last month,” corrected Seldon. “This month they repealed it.”
“Seldon’s turned sour on them after covering the big Gypsy trial last summer,” Leon assured the table.
“There’s no criminal in the world lower than a horse thief!” Seldon proclaimed decisively. “Or an automobile thief, which is all the same, really. The government has been trying to make decent Soviets out of them for years, but it’s a failure. They hang posters of Lenin in their tents, and just keep thieving.”
Now Seldon turned to Florence. “Have you ever noticed they’re never satisfied with how many coins you give them? I once gave a hag the last of my pocket change, and she asked me where the rest was. The nerve.”
“Why should she suffer just because you’ve had a bad week?” Leon called out from across the table. He blew a smoke ring and let it fade before he looked for the second time at Florence.
She had seated herself at the opposite end of the table hoping to let Leon down easy. Now her stomach was palpitating, her brain rehearsing reasons for putting an end to whatever was going on between them. Three days earlier, when she had met Leon at the theater on Bronnaya Street, he’d informed her that he was turning twenty-one in the summer.
Merely twenty! She had tried to hide her alarm, and succeeded in wresting just enough control of her face to keep him from guessing her age (she’d be twenty-five in a month). It certainly explained the combative way he’d tried to win her attention, the humble bragging and flinty arrogance. She believed it amounted to a failure of will, a failure of her imagination, that, having come all the way to Moscow, she’d allowed herself to become entangled with an American—from the Lower East Side, no less. Now it shamed and panicked her that this American had turned out to be no more than a boy, afflicted with rootlessness and cheerful wanderlust. She experienced her panic as an inability to touch the rich foods on the table. She’d let herself get distracted after the fiasco with Sergey, but hadn’t intended to get in over her head. Now that she was in a more sober state of mind, it was time to stop procrastinating and be the serious person she’d come here to become. From an assorted platter of smoked fish, displayed in a pinwheel, a pair of beady piscine eyes stared up at Florence accusingly. It was time to cut bait.
“Essie, did you know,” Florence said encouragingly, “you and Leon both attended the Workmen’s Circle School.”
“Yeah, what branch?” said Leon, slipping a dumpling in his mouth.
“Bronx East,” Essie said, perking up. “What about you?”
“East Broadway,” said Leon indifferently, “but I didn’t stay around long.”
And here the parallel dried up. Florence’s anxiety was spreading to encompass her friend. Essie might have found Leon’s indifference easier to handle were all the other men at the table not so conspicuously smitten with the barmaids who slithered back and forth between tables with their trays of cigarettes and Bengal lights. Yet another difference between the Metropol and the world outside: the gender relations inside the restaurant were patently mercantile. Michaels beckoned a Tatar-eyed beauty and purchased from her a dozen sparklers in exchange for a dollar and a pat of her satin-clad bottom. The Australian was let off with a wagging finger for his naughtiness.
“Are they always so…friendly?” Essie inquired with visible horror.
“Certainly!” said Seldon. “Some of them will even let you tip them. If, that is, you tip them.”
“Michaels is in love with one of them,” Leon confided loudly in Florence’s direction. “Her name is Nelly.”
“A former aristocrat,” Michaels said wistfully. “An unfortunate victim of the Revolution. Such fragile creatures are not made for the daily grind of Soviet work.”
“But Nelly won’t have anything to do with him,” continued Leon. “She specializes in the Japanese.”
“He does know that these girls report everything to the secret police,” said Essie.