It was clear to Florence that Essie wouldn’t ask again; she was too scared for her own position. Florence made other inquiries, but it was hopeless. The problem was unsolvable. Everybody had to be registered at some place of employment, yet one couldn’t get a decent job unless somebody would vouch for you. The newly passed Constitution guaranteed the right to work. In reality this meant that it was against the law not to work.
Night after night, she lay awake in a torpor of self-reproach. What had she done to get fired? Why had she not held on more dearly to her passport? When would Leon call? It was the curse of communal apartments that the muffled noises out in the hall were at once too loud and unsettlingly inaudible. Too noisy for her to sleep, too indistinct for her to know what slanders her neighbors were spreading about her. As the days wore on her mental state now vacillated between panic and dread. She had never been a regular smoker, but now, after buying her milk and bread in the morning, she also stopped by the tobacco kiosk. With the window open to the sharp, moist air of early December, she stood trembling in the cold as she chain-smoked Kazbek cigarettes until the nicotine dulled her anxiety and made her tingle with its inviolable aura. She smoked until the world in the window became dove-gray, then fully dark, so that finally the only light in the room was the throbbing ruby of her cigarette ember. If she could only hear Leon’s voice! He would know just what to say to calm her and mollify whatever demons were pursuing her.
Instead, she crawled into bed with Sidney’s photograph as if it were a talisman. She had always been prone to the clarity that extreme loneliness can bring. The alluring beginnings of a new plan now began to take shape in her mind. It wasn’t the first time she’d thought about the plan, only the first time she had fully allowed herself to let it take on such a vivid form. Before, her days had been too full of distractions—with work and meetings, and Leon always trying to amuse her and make her feel better about everything. Now, at last, she could think. Again and again the same image came to her: a boat cutting through the waters off the coast of Finland, while out on the deck, standing firm in the spray of cold Baltic waters, she stared resolutely westward. Was there really any shame in going home? Yet now another thought tormented her: Would she be standing alone, or would Leon be by her side?
Cigarettes and brandy-spiked tea carried her through the next four days, until Leon, at last, phoned the apartment.
She darted to the big hallway telephone without having to be called (for two weeks her ears had been alert to every ring). But when Leon’s voice came percussively on the line and asked for Flora in Room 6, she spoke indifferently.
“I’d started to lose hope I’d ever hear from you.”
“Sorry, darling. I told you it’d be difficult. Can’t talk long. I’m making this call on the credit and the good graces of Intourist.”
“Is that where you’ve been staying?”
“No, they’ve been taking me around the new farms. Last night, I stayed with the chairman of the kolkhoz. The accommodations have been surprisingly pleasant.”
“Eastern hospitality.”
“Whoever said the Mussulmen are opposed to the drink has never been here. They’ll stop at nothing, Florie, to wrangle you into a contest, which I might have a chance at not losing if their refreshments were limited to humble vodka, but do you know what they drink here?”
She let the expensive silence of three time zones go unchecked by her voice.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, answering his own question. “Fermented camel’s milk. I’ve become quite fond of it. It gives your mouth a strange little kick, almost like champagne.”
“When are you coming home?” she said matter-of-factly.
“Scheduled to leave next Monday. The train is three days. Is everything all right?”
She paused, fingering the scraps of paper and store receipts tucked behind the telephone’s broad back. “No, it isn’t,” she said finally. “I lost my job.” And when there was silence on his end, she went on: “I can guess who was behind it. The new office manager, Orlova. Timofeyev didn’t have the guts to stand up to her….”
“Just like that, with no warning?”
She thought back to a few weeks earlier, when Timofeyev had suggested she take a vacation. He had told her she looked “worn down.” But to Leon she said: “And the worst part of it is that no one wants to hire a…‘foreigner.’ No one will go over their head to put in a good word for me. Even Essie is of no use—never mind everything you’ve done for her, getting her that job in the first place.”
“Listen, Florie, why don’t we just talk about this when I get home.”
“Everyone’s got an Orlova in their office who’ll ask, ‘Why did you hire some foreigner?’ So that’s that, Leon. I’m going to the embassy….”
“I can’t talk about this now, Florie….”
“I’m still an American citizen, after all.”
“All right, take it easy. You don’t sound well.”
“I can’t get to sleep, Leon. I miss my family….” Her final word came out as something between a squeak and a sob. She had been prepared to present her case to him succinctly and decisively, but now she was whimpering and letting mucus run down her nose like a child.
“Shhh…shhh…Just…be quiet, will you? I told you we’ll sort it all out when I’m back.”
“I can’t wait that long.”
“Florence, please, just…don’t do anything or go anywhere. Eight days, sweetheart, that’s all I’m asking. Can you do that for me? I’ll try to get an earlier train. There’s money in a tin box in my shearling on the top shelf.”
“We’re in for bad luck, Leon.”
“Oh, baby, everything’s all jumbled in your head right now because you don’t have your man with you. It’s simple. But I’ll be there real soon to take care of my girl. Do you read me?”
“Yes.”
“Go on, get some sleep now, you’ll feel finer tomorrow.”
After a few more stifled simpers, which he seemed to read as a sign of assent, she let him go.
And the funny thing was, he was right. She did feel better the next morning. A clean, white, afterlife sort of light awoke her gently at precisely seven. In the window, a thin carpet of silvery snow covered the streets, the trees, the roofs, and the wool shoulders of the street cleaner sweeping the sidewalk with a twig broom.