Now it was my turn to look at him askance. You couldn’t move sideways in this city without somebody trying to extort you. I asked him for the necessary forms.
Outside, I stood in the haze of the late afternoon watching as the guard dead-bolted the doors, slamming shut the vault holding my parents’ deeds and misdeeds, the repository of my unanswered questions. A tuft of poplar floated into my face. More were tumbling down the sidewalk, plugging the gutters. I began to tramp back uphill. The air felt ionized, barometrically moody. I glanced up and saw that the clouds were curdling, trapping in the remaining daylight. What are you terrified of? I thought. That my own son would know the truth about his family? Or know more than I do? Lenny had been nineteen when my mother passed away. He was the only one in the family that Florence had loved with a self-forgetting passion; she spent whole weekends with him after we came to America, something she’d rarely done with Masha, my oldest. Lenny adored Florence, and even into his adulthood continued to harbor certain bizarre romantic notions about the “free-spirited” way she’d lived her life. Though now, recalling the kind of inane advice my mother used to give him—“You shouldn’t be too practical in this life,” “Leave the thinking to your heart, you’ll get fewer headaches”—I wasn’t entirely sure that some part of me didn’t want to puncture a hole in my son’s inflated image of her. “What the hell, we’re all grown-ups,” I said to no one and took my phone out of my jacket.
After six rings, the call went to Lenny’s message service. I tried again. This time it went straight to voice mail. I waited for the beep. “It’s me,” I said into the electronic silence. “How about an early dinner? Your pick. There’s something I want to talk to you about. A favor.”
I glanced up once more at the inscrutable sky, then scrolled on my phone until I found the number for Lenny’s apartment. The line was busy. I tried again, and this time it trilled twice before a feverish, wet-sounding female voice answered, “About time, where are you?”
“Katya?” I said unsurely.
“Who’s this?” It wasn’t a question but a demand, though one made in a thin, suspicious tone.
“Yuliy Leontevich. Can I speak to Lenny?”
The voice on the other end seemed to collapse into a distraught incoherence. “Oh, Yuliy Leontevich, oh God, Lenny’s not here. They took him an hour ago. I’ve been calling everyone.”
“Slow down, darling. Who took him?”
“Those guys. From the MVD, the Ministry of the Interior. That’s what they said. They gave him the paper. They said they were charging him with defrauding the shareholders of some plant in…oh, I can’t remember. Then they took him.” Her voice was trembling on the verge of unintelligibility.
“Where, Katya? Where did they take him?” I was already jogging to the corner, my index finger extending into the street.
“They wouldn’t let me go with him. They said they were heading to Holding Facility Nine. In the Kapotnya District, I think. Oh, it’s all nonsense. I know it’s all to do with those bitches he calls his friends.”
At last, a battered blue Lada screeched up to the curb. “Don’t go anywhere,” I told Katya. “I’m coming over.”
Life at the Institute of Philology, History, and Literature was indeed an improvement over cleaning toilets. Florence’s paperwork was carried out with surprising swiftness, and by fall she was teaching two classes of intermediate English to undergraduates so deferential and earnest that they rendered her past two years of subservience a forgettable intermission. The institute was composed of a modest cluster of five-story buildings. Inside, it was full of crowded landings and noisy halls that reminded Florence of her own student days, with the critical difference being that she now stood at a distance from all that colliding, permanent motion.
There had been no need to struggle at composing a curriculum; it was composed for her. The syllabus consisted of grammar books and approved authors such as Mark Twain and Upton Sinclair, who stood on the correct side of the crude classification that divided all Western writers into progressives and reactionaries. She would have loved to show her brighter students a paragraph of the Yeats or D. H. Lawrence she’d adored in her youth. But even if their books had been obtainable, the presence of such decadent obscurantists on her syllabus would have cost her her job. It was a relief to be spared such decisions. Teaching a foreign language, one could remain insulated from the hostile intrigues that ulcerated in other departments, where professors accused one another of being old-guardists and reactionary formalists. During Florence’s first semester, a professor at the institute was forced to leave her post after her book received savage reviews in Izvestia for its “fetishistic use of aesthetic devices.” Not long thereafter, another article came out in the same newspaper praising the book. And, just as suddenly, she was reinstated, with her colleagues resuming friendly relations as though nothing had happened. It was not at all clear to Florence what had happened—whether the professor had finally repudiated her errors or had simply been the beneficiary of a sudden reversal in policy. Florence had long given up trying to understand the logic of these turnabouts.
Every so often, she met Valda for lunch, but their teaching schedules rarely coincided, and Florence was just as happy to remain aloof from the other faculty members, fearful of entangling herself in any political fray that might toss her pitifully back on her knees, scrubbing footprints off carpets.
One day, toward the end of her first term, the vice-rector called Florence into his office and suggested she raise the grades of several of the working-class students who were members of the Komsomol. There had been complaints, she was informed, about her teaching method after a series of low exam scores.
Watching the rector’s beard and mustache twitch around his moving mouth, Florence could feel her skin breaking out in allergic distress. All year she’d applied herself fastidiously to her duties, knowing one mistake could cost her. “I warned the students that from now on a portion of their lectures would be conducted in English,” she protested contritely. “I go slowly, but if some of them still don’t have a basic grasp of the grammar, perhaps they shouldn’t be at this level.”