—
DURING FLORENCE’S FIRST MONTHS at the theater, she had been forever on the alert for a familiar face, clandestinely peeking into the cloakroom crowds so she might have time to turn away if spotted. But after many months, when no face from her old life had materialized, she eased her vigilance. And so it was an odd thing to hear her own name spoken, one cold April evening in 1939, by a woman handing her a rabbit-fur coat.
Florence squinted as if someone had shined a bright light in her face.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” said the woman. “It’s Valda.”
It wasn’t her face but the Baltic name that tripped a wire, and suddenly Florence recalled the well-bred Latvian translator from Nina and Timofeyev’s apartment so many years ago. “Valda. Of course!”
The first bell interrupted them, and Florence did not see her old acquaintance again until after the performance. Valda was waiting for her inside the doors of the theater lobby. “Flora, I’m surprised to see you here.”
Ancient tides of fear and embarrassment rose up in her, but she steeled herself against them. “Many things are surprising now,” she said.
Valda seemed to take the hint. “We ought to talk and catch up,” the tall woman suggested in a softer tone.
“Care to stick around until midnight?” Florence offered ironically.
“How about early afternoon? Next Thursday.”
And to Florence’s surprise, Valda took a slip of paper from her purse and wrote down an address.
—
UNTIL THE VERY LAST MOMENT, Florence was not at all sure if she would go to meet Valda. It had been a long time since she’d had an occasion to put on a good dress and style her hair. The thought of making herself presentable for the world filled her with a dangerous hope she didn’t trust. The address Valda had given her was near Sokolniki Park, at the pine-wooded boundary of Moscow, reachable only by a tram from the very last metro stop. When she arrived, the place turned out to be not a woodsy vista but a student cafeteria at the university where Valda taught—the Institute of Philology, History, and Literature, or IFLI for short. During her self-sequester, the city seemed to have edged outward. In the café, enjoying a bowl of surprisingly delicious soup with Valda, Florence felt like a nocturnal animal awakening to daylight. “You teach here?”
“Yes, in the department of classical philology.”
“It must be a delight, this sort of work, discussing literature every day.” From the bright sun melting the heaps of snow, from the reviving smell of black soil, from the naked, hatless faces of passing students, Florence felt the intoxication of spring’s arrival.
“Yes, I suppose. The students are bright, but…” Valda lowered her voice. “I can’t discuss the structure of a classical poem anymore without having one of them tell me it’s reactionary, or that I’m being a ‘formalist.’ What can I say? We’re supposed to keep up with the times.”
But hearing Valda’s complaints only made Florence more envious. Not until they were alone, walking at the vacated edge of the park, did Valda say, “To be frank, Flora, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw you in that little coat box inside the theater.”
“Why?”
Valda’s eyes grew wide. “What do you mean? I assumed you’d gone back to America or that, well, that you’d been…carted off.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Because of Timofeyev. Don’t look so surprised. Haven’t you heard what happened to him? He was picked up after the Pyatakov trial.”
“Grigory Grigorievich?” Florence knew that even to speak like this was dangerous, but something in Valda’s eyes—the noble plainness of her face—gave Florence confidence to go on. “Goodness! What about Nina?”
“She’s gone. Went back to Tbilisi. Heaven knows who’s been moved into their beautiful apartment on Prechistenka by now.”
She understood now that Valda’s link to the glittering world of the Timofeyevs had been severed just as hers had been. They were, both of them, lonely planets who’d lost their orbit.
“You’re saying Nina just left him?”
“Left him? Oh, Flora, do you think Moscow is any closer to Siberia than Tbilisi is?”
For the first time, Florence learned that Timofeyev, as a young man, had been a part of some opposition group or other. It dawned on her that he had, all along, been prescient about his arrest. He had fired her to spare her from association with him. Again she recalled his glamorous wife’s glib advice: “Who are we to think we can fathom everything that goes on up top?”
“Nina’s contacts got me work at the theater,” she confessed to Valda.
“That little dark theater.” Valda shook her head sympathetically. “Of course, it is perfectly respectable work,” Valda said, backpedaling. “I only meant that with your skills—typing, accounting, your English—you could find very suitable work indeed.”
Did Valda have something in mind?
“What about right here at the institute? You could teach English to the advanced philology students.”
“Aren’t there enough instructors?”
“We’ve had some shifts in the staff and administration.”
Florence didn’t ask her to elaborate. She guessed that the institute had not been left untouched by the purge. But now, Valda seemed to suggest, the pendulum was swinging in the other direction. “Overzealousness” was what they called it in the papers. The Politburo had relieved the NKVD chief, Nikolai Yezhov, of his position for doing his work too passionately. Now, with Beria at the helm, the worst certainly had to be over.
She knew what Leon would say to the plan: at the theater no one bothered her. She was safe there. But what was safe? She was rotting away inside. The most vital years of her life were being wasted in idleness. Whatever Valda’s motives for offering her a different path, Florence had no doubt that Valda’s sympathy was real. She was painfully aware that, no matter how proudly and confidently she tried to present herself, her act wasn’t fooling anyone. Valda was genuine intelligentsia, not one of the new phonies who’d clawed their way into positions of influence. There were still a few people in Moscow, Florence thought, who had a sense of human decency.
“But IFLI is a serious institute. Scholars teach there, and I’ve never taught.”
“That doesn’t matter. You have a university degree. And what about those engineers you told me you once tutored in America? You could say you taught them.” Valda wrote something in her small address book. “I’ll speak to the dean. He’s a reasonable man. I have a feeling it will work out.”
And so it did.