—
SHE DIDN’T SEE LEON until evening, when she returned from work. On the way to their room—the farthest down the hall—Florence nearly tripped over the brushes and tins of the old man who cleaned and shined his shoes in the hallway. All the fussy apparatuses of his shoe polishing seemed to have been arranged precisely to get in everyone’s way, and yet he had growled at Florence to watch where the hell she was going. Inside, Florence hung her coat on a peg in what Leon jokingly called their “foyer,” bounded by the doorjamb and the side of their commode. A tower of folded linens was stacked on the table where Leon stood over them in the act of ironing. With a gentle, almost motherly attention to the task, which Florence admired for having so little of it herself, he finished ironing a crease into his linen trousers and placed the pants in a suitcase that lay open on their folded daybed. “I can’t remember—am I supposed to drink sage tea if I get diarrhea, or chamomile?” he said by way of a greeting.
Florence dropped into the armchair and pried off her boots, delaying the moment when she’d have to relate to him the events of the morning.
“I think I’ll pack both,” Leon said with visible satisfaction. He was embarking on the first epic assignment of his propagandist’s career—a project that, he’d explained to Florence, was “not just another banalizing caricature” of the happy lot of Russia’s workers. He was once more returning to the East, this time not as a penniless homeless Jew, but as a reporter for the state’s official news agency, TASS, on assignment to chronicle the transformation of the national minorities—the Uzbeks, the Kazaks, the Tajiks—from backward illiterates hiding their women under yashmak veils into tractor drivers! Machine operators! Sports fans and amateur thespians! Through his reports, the Western press would bite its knuckles to read of the irrigation schemes that Soviet power was imposing on the arid land, now ripe for growing cotton. Looking at his neatly packed hardboard suitcase and aluminum flask, Florence felt a pinchlike sensation of envy. “You should bring some iodine,” she said, getting up and reaching for the top shelf of the commode where she kept the medicines. The loss of her passport still weighed on her chest. Now, still turned away from him, she said, “Something very strange happened to me this morning at OVIR.”
She heard the hiss of the iron stop abruptly. She continued without facing him.
“They had my new residence permit. But they didn’t seem to have my passport, which I gave the clerk last week. She gave me this….”
Leon came close and stood blinking at the slip in Florence’s hand. “My question is,” he said at last, “who is Florentz Feyn? I’m not sure I know that fellow.”
“Leon, you don’t think this whole thing is a little odd?”
“You know what’s odd? That everyone’s telling me to bring cigarettes as palm grease when Uzbekistan is drowning in tobacco.” He went back to the table and began to test, one by one, the various tiny cutting, filing, and tweezing implements in his folding knife.
“I’m certain it’s a mistake. I’m going back there tomorrow to get some answers.”
“Don’t fight against the procedure, Florence; you’ll just get a chipped tooth. Look”—he unfolded and examined a miniature pliers—“it’s got all your information on it, doesn’t it?”
“I’m going back, and I’m going to stay there until I talk to whoever’s in charge.”
At this remark, the canny animation seemed to drain from Leon’s face. “Florence, don’t do that. It’s not the time for that right now. Look, look….” He rummaged through the pile of documents on the bed until he found his leather passport case, then dug into one of the pockets and produced a square of paper very much like the one she’d shown him.
Speechlessly, she took it by the corner as though it were a razor blade. It contained Leon’s name, his passport number, place and date of birth, date of issue—in short, the sum of scattered particles that formed his American identity, reassembled and typed out in Cyrillic.
“They gave this to me when I went to renew my visa four months ago. Told me it was too close to the expiration date. That’s why they issued me this temporary one here.”
“You mean to say you’ve been walking around with this nothing piece of paper for four months?”
It crossed Florence’s mind that her impulse to browbeat Leon might be only a natural reaction to the secret worry she’d nursed all day that he would be the one reproaching her. This awareness, however, did nothing to diminish her passion for a fight. “You didn’t think I’d be curious to know about this before I went to OVIR?”
“I didn’t know you were heading there that day!”
“Well, it’s a little strange that neither one of us has our original passport now.”
“All right, it’s odd. There’s probably some new nachal’nik in charge up there who’s taken a dislike to the color brown. It’s not like America has forgotten we exist.”
Florence let herself drop into the armchair and bit her thumbnail. She couldn’t be sure if she was more upset about the passports or about the fact that Leon was leaving her all alone.
“How long will you be gone?” she said.
“Only four weeks. And when I come back—oh, baby—I’ll bring you some of that turquoise jewelry their harem girls wear in their hair and bellybuttons, ooh-la-la.”
“They don’t have harem girls, Leon. You’re thinking of Turkey.”
“Maybe, but I’ll tell you what they do have—hashish.”
“How will I reach you?”
“Telephones happen to be something the Uzbeks are a little short on, but I’ll try to find one where I’m staying.”
“Leon, maybe I should stop by the American embassy. Sort this out.”
He took a step toward her and knelt down. With the side of his hand he brushed aside a curl on her forehead and smoothed it behind her ear. “We’ll take care of it when I get back, okay? We’ll do it together. The important thing is not to be in such a hurry all the time.” He cupped her head to kiss it the way he might have once kissed, Florence thought, the head of his deranged, tormented mother.
—
SHE MIGHT HAVE HEEDED Leon’s advice were it not for the letter.