Florence survived the year 1937 working as a janitress at the V____ Theater on Arbat Street, a job she obtained through the theater connections of the wife of her former boss, Timofeyev. It would be his final favor to his American ingénue, not counting the favor she still did not recognize as one, which was to cut off all contact.
And so, in January, while the Party’s inner chambers were swept of Stalin’s former comrades, Florence pushed a broom down the dusty labyrinth of actors’ dressing rooms. In March, when Stalin launched his campaign to rub out deviationist intellectuals like the writers Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam, Florence struggled to eradicate muddy boot-prints from the crimson carpets in the old theater lobby. In May, when the Great Leader commenced his purge of the Red Army, liquidating thirty-five thousand officers in a span of eighteen months, she expunged grime from the fibers of velvet cushions. The cleanings would go far into 1938, when the “Father of the Peoples” would order masses of Poles, Koreans, Greeks, and Finns to be rounded up and dumped in Siberia, all while Florence disposed of bucketfuls of cigarette ash and soiled newspaper into rubbish bins along Arbat’s crooked alleys. And while Yezhov, the new head of the NKVD, was “cleansing the organs” by executing thousands of his predecessor’s agents, thereby setting himself up to be flushed out along with them, Florence chafed her knees scrubbing the porcelain bowls of public toilets.
And yet it would not have been fair to say that she hated the work. Just as a hospital orderly may come to like the smell of chloroform, Florence grew to enjoy the scent of makeup that clung to the carpet runners and drapes after performances. She found herself reawakened to a kind of lonely childhood magic in the company of the empty costumes and abandoned props, the dingy soaring ceiling, the voluptuous curtains that were of a piece with the tattered magnificence of old theaters everywhere. She attended the dress rehearsal of every new production, leaning on her broom like Cinderella in the dark rear corners of the auditorium. She understood perfectly well that she’d been given this job on the tacit condition that she keep herself tishe vody, nizhe travy, quieter than water and lower than grass. Watching other dramas unfold onstage, Florence took care not to be noticed, struggling to take comfort in her anonymity.
At night, she came to life in recounting the plays to Leon, scene by scene. She let him knead her tired feet with the heel of his hand while she shut her eyes in raconteurial pleasure at the tales of the characters’ tantrums and love affairs, their thwarted aspirations and bitter disappointments—so much easier to speak about than her own. She did not miss a play that season: Arbuzov, Gorky, Chekhov. Sometimes her eyes drifted from the performers to the audience. They too seemed to her like actors, if only because she felt equally apart from them. She interacted with no one unless the cloakroom attendant, Agnessa Artemovna, was ill and Florence sat in her place, stacking moist coats and hats, or wadding scarves into sleeves. Then, after the show, Florence would watch the crowds muscling back toward her in their sharp-elbowed footrace to the cloakroom and would feel, like one of Chekhov’s consumptives, shocked at their energy for life. It was the agreeable company of Agnessa Artemovna—a decade and a half older than Florence, but mistakable for Florence’s mother if one were to judge from her swollen legs and knuckles—that made Florence’s demotion more tolerable. The janitor’s closet just off the public cloakroom was Agnessa’s private realm, and she tended its clutter of busted chairs, cracked broom handles, scraps of carpet, and chipped pans as neatly as a city sparrow tends her nest of sidewalk trash. After the first act of a play, Agnessa would lock up the cloakroom and invite Florence for a glass of black tea that she brewed with an ancient, calcium-scarred teakettle.
As she depicted herself to Florence, Agnessa had come to Moscow a na?ve young woman, traveling from the countryside with other girls in search of factory work. At twenty, she’d married a boy who “drank a little, but seemed gentle.” Her mother-in-law thought her a rustic and a yokel and “dragged me around the floor by my hair when I got pregnant.” She held Florence’s fingers to the bumps and valleys on her scalp where she’d been walloped by the young husband and his mother. Whatever marks the abuse had left on Agnessa’s body, they seemed to have spared her spirit, for she spoke of all the violence visited on her in a voice that was buoyant and jolly. She remembered every detail of her younger days—the weather, how much things had cost—which made her stories as gripping as the plays onstage. More so, Florence thought, because they were true. Onstage, the heroes acted out scenes of redemption by joining collectives and subsuming their ambitions to the common will; the leitmotifs of Agnessa’s stories always strove in the opposite direction: an almost monomaniacal quest for a room of her own. “I went to work setting type at a printing press and divorced the bastard,” she told Florence in the shadow of brooms and brushes. “But we were still living in the same room! I went to the administration and said, ‘Give me and my daughter a room.’ They tell me: ‘Bring us the paper attesting how many square meters you and your former husband have.’ I brought them the paper. It was fifteen and a half. They say, ‘We can’t help you. Everyone gets five meters a person, and the two of you have a half-meter extra. You’ll have to exchange it on your own—barter it for two smaller rooms.’ ‘But he refuses!’ I say. ‘That’s not our problem.’ So what am I supposed to do—have another baby by the pig to get my own room? That’s when I understood what ‘city life’ was, girlie. You have to earn money here! And put bread in the right palms. So I worked days and took a night job as a cleaner in a morgue. Never slept, never saw my child. I was the living envying the dead. Then I took what I earned and went to the right people. That’s how I got my own room at last.”
At some point toward the end of Act 2, when it was time to reopen the cloakroom, Agnessa’s stories would conclude on some philosophical or wistful note. “Curious how life turns out, isn’t it? Look at my hands. I came to the city for an easier life. My sister, she stayed in the country, and hers is the life that turned out better. She became a midwife. She helped me out once. After I divorced, I met a man—a good one, but married. Well, what could I do? Couldn’t keep it. Don’t look so shocked. She helped many women that way. Got herself a quiet little house in the village. Girls from all over Moscow used to come, even when the deed was legal. And now she’s even busier. Her hair is always colored. Fine clothes. Never short in the pocket.”
To Florence’s relief, Agnessa rarely asked her about herself.
“And how did you end up here?” she once inquired.
Florence had learned by now that simple answers were better than complicated ones. “There was no work in America. So I came here. I met a man, and I stayed.”
And Agnessa had nodded in understanding. “That’s how it always is.”