“What are you talking about?” he said, kneeling down close beside her.
“They said it wasn’t a valid passport, and I tried to explain that I had to get inside to get the new passport, but they turned me away.”
She could see the life draining out of his face.
“But I’m going back, and you have to come with me,” she continued with a reassuring pressure to his hand. “Like you promised. You’re more persuasive. If we can just get past the Russian guards and talk to an actual American, it’ll be okay.”
He shut his eyes.
“I’ll do no such thing, Florence,” he said, drawing a breath and raising himself up. “I won’t, and neither will you.”
“I’m going back to America with or without you.”
“Do you even understand what you’ve done?”
And the trouble was that a part of her did understand, had understood all along.
“Did you give the guard your name?” Suddenly he was all business.
“No. He looked at my permit, but briefly.”
“Was there anyone else you spoke to?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anyone outside the embassy. Did anyone follow you out?”
She hesitated, remembering the man in the fedora.
“There was this…man, loitering outside a shopwindow between the Hotel National and the embassy. I didn’t get a good look at him, but…”
“What?”
“He was still there when I came out.”
“My God, Florence. Next time they see you, they’ll stuff you right into one of their automobiles. That whole square is lousy with knockers in plain clothes.”
“How do you know all this?” she nearly shouted. “Why are you only telling me this now?”
“Because I didn’t think you’d be fool enough to do it!”
And he brought his clenched fist down on the table with a thwap so fierce the sugar tin fell to the floor, its pencils scattering.
In the quiet that followed she was keenly aware that the terror she was feeling was misplaced, that Leon’s rage was only a drop of water in comparison with the unguessably deep swamp of shit she’d waded into. Florence lifted herself up and clawed out the second-to-last of the cigarettes from a pack in her skirt. But the sight of Leon’s chagrined eyes made it hard to stop trembling long enough to light a match.
At last she managed it and took a too-fast, painful drag. She had an urge to press the ember into the meat of her palm.
“All right, let’s calm down,” he said after a while. “Let’s look at this reasonably….Have you filled out any papers—signed your name anywhere?”
Oh, how she wanted to tell him—about going to the OVIR, the ogre whom she’d stared down so tenaciously, the application she’d filled out for an exit visa. She had planned to tell him. But now—the way he was looking at her—she couldn’t. She threw her head back and blew a gray curl of smoke toward the plaster-mold ceiling. “No,” she said.
“Promise me you won’t go there again. Not for a while.”
“All right. But what about finding a job?”
He shook his head impatiently. “Take any kind of job, Florence.”
“You mean work in a factory? A public laundry?”
“What’s wrong with that? It’s honest labor.”
She blew another ring of smoke up at the ceiling. “Now you sound like them.”
“Maybe I do. But there are plenty of decent folks working all kinds of jobs. Educated people, too. You know I’d switch places with you tomorrow, Florence, if I could.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?”
“Whatever I had to do to save myself, or you.”
She couldn’t bear the look on his face. It was one of bottomless devotion, more frightening to her than all of his rage.
There were other reasons—besides my friend Yasha’s hints about Mama’s unsavory entanglements with the secret police—why I was eager to return to the archives on Neglinnaya Street. For years, another question has riddled me. How was it that my mother survived the twin horrors of prison and the camps, whereas my father, an altogether more charming and resourceful person, perished? If he had succeeded in withstanding the treadmill of interrogation and torture, and the cattle car to Siberia, I am certain Mama and I would have been informed of it. All we were ever told during those freezing, senseless excursions to the Lubyanka Prison at five in the morning was that my father had been given “ten years of corrective labor without the right of correspondence,” which everyone, even then, knew was a euphemism for a bullet in the back of the neck. (Only Florence remained unnervingly optimistic about the possible definitions of Papa’s penal sentence.) How did someone who willingly imbibed such self-deceptions withstand the brutal realities of the Gulag? In circumstances identical to my father’s, how did she manage to get her own crime reduced from treason to a minimal sentence of “agitation”?
Now that I was seeking answers, I could admit to being in the grip of a still more puzzling conundrum, about which I’d never managed to extract a satisfying answer from my mother. It concerned her aborted attempt to escape the Soviet Union. During my college years at the progressive height of Khrushchev’s thaw, Florence let slip that she and Papa had tried, quite intrepidly, to leave Russia before it had become “too late.” When I later brought it up, she retracted. Heaven knows, Florence had a gift for backpedaling on all manner of revelations, but this one I could not let rest, in light of her nerve-grating refusal to discuss, in 1978, the subject of our family’s emigration. If it were true—if she herself had tried to escape—why not admit it now that we could all leave the country together? And why, after pounding (however briefly) on a locked door, did she decline even to consider stepping across a suddenly open threshold with her own family? Didn’t she want to pick up the keys to her cage? What had happened between 1937 and 1978 that made her constitutionally incapable of even discussing it?
I wondered if maybe, very simply, she had finally given up on America the same way America so pitilessly had given up on her.
—