And here we are again, dragged by the tide of alcohol into that vast epistemic gulf where every lunatic proposition is self-evident while universal truths are hauled in for questioning. A Logic-Free Zone where I’ve been, more than once, cornered into testifying that Roosevelt did not have advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor bombing, or challenged to “prove” that smoking really causes cancer.
“Don’t forget to mention how Neil Armstrong never set foot on the moon,” I suggest. “That it was all a hoax pulled off in some Hollywood studio.”
He gives me a sidelong look, trying to gauge my sincerity. But in the end, it’s another landing that’s of interest to him. “The moon I don’t know about,” he says. “What I’d rather find out is what happened to the other planes.”
“Which planes would those be?” I say.
“Come on, now, the 9/11 planes! There were seven of them.”
The PolarNeft guys and I trade looks. “I never heard of any seven,” I say.
“Wow.” Mukhov looks around the table, aghast. “They really don’t report anything to you people over there, do they?”
“Well, what’s your theory,” I say, “the CIA set it up?”
“How should I know? Maybe the CIA. Maybe the FBI…”
“Or maybe the KGB, right. Let’s not go too deep into all the hairy theories tonight.”
“Who’s talking about theories? You’re an intelligent person. I’m only saying, look at who benefits.”
“According to that logic,” I say, “the Kremlin bombed those apartment buildings and blamed it on the Chechens so your troops could reenter Grozny.”
Across barriers of language, Tom is sensing enough explosive tinder in my accusation so that his arm begins to rise toward a defusing toast. But he has no chance to make one, because Mukhov is beaming—not with fury but with jubilation! “Yasnoye delo!” he shouts. “Of course we did it!” He reaches out his arms as though to give my recalcitrant head a kiss, his face shining with the satisfied glow of a man who’s gotten his point across at last.
It was after nine when Florence awoke. Leon was lying beside her with his eyes shut and his mouth open. His arm was thrown over her breasts, gathering her in a half-hug. She took care to untangle herself gently from his embrace, but her ankle nonetheless knocked against the wooden leg of the armchair by their bed.
When she first moved with Leon into their very own eleven-square-meter room, Florence had envisioned the place as a kind of Soviet version of a bohemian Greenwich Village studio. Unlike some of the tiny, plywood-partitioned rooms their neighbors occupied, the quarters she would share with her new common-law husband came with its own fireplace, and a deep window that cast oblongs of light on their walls—golden Moscow light that struck the grain of the naked parquet and infused the room with an air of intellectual and spiritual contemplation. Their limited space, Florence had believed, could be overcome with a charming and spare arrangement of furniture: their bed doing double duty as a couch, her trunk turned on its side to form a bookcase, the deep windowsill serving as a reading area, and Leon’s writing desk transformable with a painted kerchief into a table for entertaining. What she had not accounted for was that the common kitchen down the hall would not be nearly big enough for all the people in the apartment to store their food and cooking utensils (and if it had been, Florence would not have trusted her items to remain unsnatched), so, in the end, her contemplative windowsill had been conscripted as a shelf for storing sacks of flour, bread, oil, tomatoes, and jars of pickles and conserves. Leon’s writing table was likewise occupied by daily necessities: their kerosene lamp and Primus hot plate, and a basket of linens to iron. From this basket Florence now fished out a dry towel. She threw on her house robe and grabbed her bucket and soap from behind the door, then marched on toward the communal washroom, dismayed to hear already the sounds of someone’s scatological efforts from the adjoining toilet.
If living under the iron rule of her old landlady on Petrovka had been like lodging in a strict boarding house, then life in a nine-room kommunalka was like residing in the ward of a public hospital: a habitation made humid with haste and confrontation, always tense and always on the verge of a crisis. Everything in their cramped conditions had the capacity to provoke hatred and jealousy. With the worsening of the political situation and the daily newspaper headlines warning of “spies and saboteurs,” the hostility had become more apparent. “Not enough that they’re nipping at us from outside, the ones here gotta be riding on our backs,” a neighbor named Vitkina had said one day in the kitchen, after putting down the paper. She did not look at Florence when she said it. She did not need to.
But Florence was also aware that the real trouble lay not in the prevailing political winds but in her own personality. She did not play the game. She was unwilling to waste time listening to Vitkina complain about her rheumatism, or rehash her old adventures as a partisan in the war rebuffing the proposals from highly attractive officers. Nor did Florence have the patience to gossip with whoever happened to interrupt her cooking in the kitchen to conscript her into the latest entente. While she understood, in a general way, the unspoken rule of communal living—which was that men could keep a kind of neutrality in conflicts, but women could not—in practice it offended Florence’s sense of pride and autonomy to lower herself to the level of these gossipy shrews just to get along.