After everything was over and she was left alone, Florence continued to reassure herself that she had handled the situation adroitly. She’d had the good sense to know that to argue with Yulia (whose great rhetorical talent, it seemed, lay in uttering with diabolical timing anything that would put her at an ideological advantage) would have been to play into her snare. Why, then, was her mouth still sour from the anxious way she’d affirmed a point opposite from the one she believed? She could taste the acetic juices of her own fear. She’d come to class hoping to make her students conscious of the more mysterious, philosophical musings of Twain’s essay and had succeeded in turning him into just another propagandist. She didn’t know if she felt worse about abandoning Twain or abandoning her own courage. Florence sat in the small teachers’ lounge with Yulia’s error-riddled dictation in front of her. She had not imagined in the vice-rector’s office how keenly it would offend her sense of fairness, how supremely painful such a minor capitulation, to have to let this Komsomol bitch off the hook.
The lounge around her resembled nothing so much as a kitchen, with two regular wooden tables, a hand-washing sink, and a couple of ratty armchairs facing a window that looked onto the institute’s inner courtyard. Here teachers came to smoke and read between classes, eager to get away from the incessant attention of their students and possibly to get away from another kind of unrelenting gaze—the lounge, being a not quite official space, was the only room unadorned with a portrait of their Great Leader. At the neighboring table, scratching his disheveled balding pate and rubbing his fleshy cheeks, sat Boris Rechok, a professor in the history department. His briefcase, as untidy as his head, was spilling over with papers he seemed to have no interest in straightening. He was distracted by an article in the day’s Pravda, turning the pages back and forth with a petulance so flamboyant that it had started to distract Florence from the squalid comforts of her own resentment. “Now we’re selling them wheat to feed the armies they’ll use to attack us!” Rechok muttered loudly to no one. “And they’re selling us the metal for the shrapnel we’ll use to shoot them in the back. Whose genius idea is this?” He looked at Florence and shook his head at the insanity of the new expanded trade policy with Germany, as if importuning some sort of response. Florence pretended not to hear him. She’d seen the same look of confusion and alarm on Leon’s face when he’d read about the new protocol of friendliness toward Hitler. “All of Europe blockading Germany, and Russia is sending it provisions. Fifty tons of wheat, rubber, petroleum, a year after the Soviet army is purged of its own suspected fascists!”
“Is a good war better than a bad peace?” she’d asked him in their room, and he’d looked at her strangely. Did she care nothing for what the Germans were doing to the Jews?
But did he really believe those rumors were true?
“How can you believe they aren’t? When someone says they want to wipe out our people, you can take them at their word.” Our people. It was the first time she’d heard him use those words. Even in the semi-private confines of their apartment, they unsettled her.
And here, in the open, was Boris Rechok, inquiring out loud: “What am I supposed to get up and tell the students? First historic enemies, now historic friends! Today the dog’s a Rottweiler, tomorrow he’s a poodle?”
This time, it was harder to ignore him. They weren’t alone anymore. Two professors from the faculty of literature—Belkova and Danilova—had strolled into the lounge. Whatever the women were discussing was abruptly aborted at the sound of Rechok’s fulminations. Belkova threw the old man a disapproving look he was too preoccupied to notice, then retreated with her colleague to the rear of the lounge to crack open a casement window and light cigarettes. Rechok was still quietly erupting over the new deal with Germany, but Florence was no longer listening to him, eavesdropping instead on Belkova, who was rendering her own tart judgments, albeit on a milder topic—an uninspired performance she’d seen at the theater. Florence listened just long enough to decipher whether the theater in question was the one where she’d worked (it was not), before deciding to pack up her papers and nurse her worries somewhere more solitary.
She might have gone on indulging her preoccupations with Yulia Larina well into the night had something unexpected not happened that evening to replace them.
“You’re wanted on the phone,” her dyspeptic neighbor announced from the hall after dinner, before returning to a squatting position on his shoe-shine stool.
The receiver still smelled of polish when she took hold of it. “Flora Fein?” said a man’s voice.
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“We’d like to speak to you about your exit-visa application.”
In the stale-smelling hallway the polish fumes were suddenly making her dizzy. She wondered if she’d heard correctly. She cupped her hand over the receiver. “Are you calling from the OVIR?”
But the voice at the other end answered smartly, “Come to this address tomorrow at four, after your classes.”
Florence’s fingers fumbled for the red pencil she’d dropped in her dress pocket, and then sought blindly for a scrap of paper among the slips tucked behind the telephone. She scratched down the street and house number on the back of a butcher’s receipt. “What department did you say this was?” But whoever had called had already hung up.
“Who was that?” Leon asked when she reentered their room, where he was clearing the desk for their dinner.
“I’m not sure….” But a buried part of her mind grasped who might be requesting her presence. “No one important,” she said. “Just a secretary from the institute. They’re rearranging the exam times again.”
—
THE ADDRESS AT WHICH Florence had been instructed to appear lay on a quiet patch of streets just inside the inner loop of the Moscow Canal. In the rapidly dimming light an aura of Tolstoy’s genteel Moscow hovered over the pastel-painted houses and gated courtyards. She searched for the correct number in the murky light of streetlamps, wary of asking for help.
She told herself that it was best, for now, that Leon didn’t know where she was. Three years had passed since that day she’d attempted to gain access to the U.S. Embassy (the whole plaza, not to mention the country, was now sealed off). Leon had been enraged at the risk she’d taken, so really there had been no point in telling him about her other trip to OVIR to seek a visa to leave the country. Now, as before, she fortified herself with the knowledge that, as long as she kept Leon out of it, he would not need to be “responsible for her” if something unpleasant happened. Had she told him about the mysterious phone call, he would have undermined her plan, convinced her that it was a trap, and turned her hope into torment and worry. And she did have hope, a galvanizing hope, even now, after years of half wishing that her foolhardy application had been lost or forgotten. On the wings of this hope she kept her eyes open for the right address, even as another part of her knew perfectly well that the building she was looking for was nowhere near the vicinity of a visa office, or, for that matter, any official government building.