The woman behind the pane—the same one as at her first visit there—appraised Florence casually, then picked up the slip and handled it as though it were an item of dubious value that Florence was trying to sell her.
“I am an American citizen, as you can see there.” She pointed to the paper through the glass. “I would like to travel to visit my family.”
“American citizen? This is a Moscow residency permit. You are a Soviet citizen according to this.”
“No, no, you can see.” Florence tapped her finger on the pane. “You can see my passport number there.”
“This is a permit for a Soviet national living in Moscow, and required of all citizens. All this indicates is that you were given residency permission when you submitted your American passport to the housing office. You were supposed to go to the passport office to get your internal passport.”
A Soviet citizen? What in the world was this prune-headed ogre talking about?
“No, no…I think you’re mistaken. You see, I never went through any formalities of getting Soviet citizenship. And I have this receipt that I was given by your people for my American passport when I came here to renew my residency. And you told me—very clearly, in fact—that I would have my passport back within a week.”
She was employing the plural “you”—the royal you—to address her tormentor, though her mannered politeness was obviously doing very little to ingratiate her.
“I told you nothing of the sort,” the woman said with an insistence that veered on threat. “This is not a receipt. It is your identification card.”
Florence smiled and shook her head. “I beg your pardon, but I don’t have cotton in my ears, and this is not what I was told.”
People had collected behind Florence, and it was becoming increasingly obvious to them and to herself, even as she continued to make her case with deferential hostility, that she was now engaging in what by jungle law might be considered a foolish behavior—prancing with her ass exposed to antagonize a large and threatening rival.
And yet the prospect of backing down felt like an equally impossible option. “Do you plan to explain to all these people that you’ve been giving us inconsistent information?” she found herself saying now. That did the trick.
“I’m not the one you should be talking to,” the woman said, slipping back the paper. “Sort it out with your own at your embassy.”
My own embassy won’t help me without it, Florence thought, but strained to maintain a firm smile. “I will certainly do that, but in the meantime,” Florence persisted, “I’d like to, as I said before, fill out the paperwork for the visa.”
It was then that the ogre stood up out of her chair to her full, not inconsiderable height and, instead of coming out to do harm to Florence’s physical person, waddled down a short corridor. For a few uncertain minutes Florence stood there with her chin lifted and her jaw set tight against the mutters behind her (“We’ll be here all day”; “An American, she says”). But soon enough, the woman returned with the forms. And Florence, stepping aside, filled out all the boxes with fingers only slightly shaky from her triumph. The woman took them back without further words.
—
Leon returned to Moscow four days early.
It was not the homecoming he was expecting.
No dinner set out on a linen tablecloth. No tea with lemon and sugar. Only his stalking wife pacing up and down the room in a frenzy of psychotic silence.
“Well, that’s it. I’ve called in all my favors. No one will hire me. And you aren’t going to ask at TASS, are you? Or you would have offered on the phone. I’m right, aren’t I? I can see it in your eyes. You’re terrified, like the rest of them.”
Tired, unwashed, he walked to the daybed and collapsed on its cluster of scratchy pillows. “I’ll ask, Florie,” he said weakly. “But there’s no point.”
“No, of course,” she said with unhappy satisfaction. “So what’s going to happen to me?”
“Hopefully, nothing tragic, Florence, as long as you manage to keep your goddamn voice down and lie low for a little while. We’re entering a difficult time. People are losing their lives and freedom, and you’re complaining to me about losing your job.”
Her eyes jerked ceaselessly around the room. “It’s those careerists, like that Orlova. They’re like insects. They use the Party line to get rid of people who are good workers so they can install their own idiots. They’re like parasites who lay their own eggs and kill the host.” It crossed her mind that the particular phraseology with which she was inveighing against the bank’s Party Committee secretary was the same language Orlova herself regularly used to denounce the “wreckers and saboteurs” in the government and elsewhere. But since she couldn’t admit to Leon the real reason for her panic, she continued. “This bloodsucking abuse, Leon. It has to be exposed!”
“And how do you plan to expose it?”
“Write to the papers!”
“I’m sure you’re familiar with the dispatches we’re producing now, Florence. The only letters the papers are going to publish are more bloodthirsty calls for the murder of ‘enemies’ who no one knows very much about, letters demanding that human beings be ‘put down’ like dogs. So how about you stop with the hysterics, and use your head.”
“I am using my head! I can’t not work. It’s illegal. As soon as the little snoops around here start asking themselves what I do here all day, I’m leaving myself open to arrest. What do you propose: that I get dressed every morning and wander the streets?”
“We could formalize our marriage. ‘Housewife’ is a valid profession.”
“Housewife?” She pronounced the word as though it were the quintessence of everything she’d ever had contempt for. “How very kind of you to try to make an honest woman of me! I should be grateful, shouldn’t I? Well, let me tell you something: for such a grand fate I could have stayed in Brooklyn.”
She’d never seen him truly angry before, at least not since their first night at the Metropol. He stood absolutely still, expressionless. Only his black eyes, boring into her, assumed a kind of burn, while the rest of his face remained rigid. “Forgive me,” he said suddenly, in a sinister, implausibly precious voice. “I almost forgot. The Great Florence Fein! How can they fail to appreciate her brilliance, her energy, her valuable service to the Soviet State Bank! Think of the injustice. Let’s for a minute forget that more important people are being rounded up and sent away to the devil knows where. The distinguished Florence Fein has been pushed aside. Forgive me for trying to offer you a reasonable way out!”
“Playing wifey in this room all day is not a reasonable way out….We need to leave this place, Leon! Oh God.” She began to wail. He clasped her wrist, but even then she couldn’t stop. “If only I hadn’t given those awful people my passport!” She sunk to her knees as he released her. “That stupid paper they gave me is useless. The guards at the embassy couldn’t even read it.”