He seemed satisfied with that. “We’re sorry to have missed you. Your colleague there has been rather unpleasant in his cross-examination of the candidates for this contract.” He gestured toward Tom, just entering from lunch and giving me a dismayed look that said, Where the hell have you been? I gathered he’d been holding the fort against L-Pet for the both of us.
“Mr. Boston is my boss, actually,” I said, though Kablukov knew as much.
“We can all see he defers to you.”
I tried to assure Kablukov that this wasn’t so, that Tom’s deferential manner belied his authority, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Listen to me,” he said, taking me by the shoulder. I could feel the burn of his gaze even through his dark shades. “You designed these ships, did you not? So you tell your nachal’nik over there who you think ought to charter them.”
“With due respect, Ivan Matveyevich,” I said, “I’m not comfortable telling my boss how to do his job.”
At this, Kablukov’s mutton-colored face split open with a leisurely smile. All of his teeth were fake. “Comfortable,” he repeated. “It’s an interesting word. In my life, I’ve had to become comfortable with many things.” He lifted the cuff of his jacket sleeve. On his wrist was a white-gold Rolex that I suspected cost more than my car. It wasn’t the watch he wanted me to look at, however, but what was just above it—a faded purple tattoo of a card with an upside-down spade. “This I got in Khabarovsk. Now, that wasn’t comfortable. But wherever we are, we must learn to be comfortable.”
I knew that the chill in my arms was only in part on account of the air conditioning. The indigestible lump I’d felt this morning was back, pressing into my lower gut. I recognized it as the sensation I had earlier—an absurd possibility taking the shape of something monstrously certain. And suddenly I knew why I’d been so reluctant to thank Kablukov for his help.
Albert Einstein once wisely said that the formulation of a problem is more essential than its solution. Now these words assaulted me in their most sickeningly literal implication. Nobody, not even Kablukov, could pull strings that quickly. He had devised the problem for which he himself was the solution. This was the simple fact that my worries about Lenny had kept hidden from me. I remembered our dinner at the Metropol several nights prior, my gushing about how much Lenny loved this worm-eaten place. How many hours had it taken Kablukov to find out where Lenny worked and lived? The Boot readjusted his cuff. His gravel voice broke the inertia of my silence. “Now we’re singing from the same songbook?” he said pleasantly.
It was almost March before Florence noticed anything different. Her tiredness might have been explained by the heavier course load she took up in February. The new packed schedule could account for why she felt so winded walking up a flight of stairs at the institute, or why her eyes shut spontaneously on the trolley ride home as soon as her forehead touched the glass. But what about the other signs? The fact that she’d twice had to flee to the toilets and leave her students alone in the classroom. That her one good brassiere forced her to breathe as heavily as if she were immersed ten leagues under the sea.
She struggled not to believe it. Her last period had been lighter than usual. Too light, really, when she thought about it. And now another month had passed, and nothing. The thing to do was to get it confirmed, but that, instinct told her, would make the reality of the matter too undeniably permanent.
The trouble, as always, was due to the national shortages. Since September the pharmacies had been out of Prekonsol cream. And then, all winter, Florence had been trying to replace her old kafka cap only to find, when the new shipment of diaphragms finally arrived on the shelves, that the one she bought felt too loose. She’d returned to the pharmacy, but all they sold were the one-size-fits-all models. Unlike dropping off a shirt to be tailored, she couldn’t have this “taken in” unless she planned to waste a day at the public clinic, sitting in a room packed with mothers of screaming children, waiting to see a doctor who might be able to fit the thing properly (or at least give her something else, maybe one of those Vagilen balloons that were likewise out of stock in the pharmacies), but who would as likely chastise her, like the doctor she’d seen that summer, for her decision to put off motherhood. He warned that at her advanced age (twenty-nine) she was already bound to be a starorodka, an old birther, leading to “irremediable problems” for herself and her child later on. The only encouraging thing that jowly dinosaur had said was that at this rate it would take her at least five or six months even to conceive.
And now, two months later, here she was.
Florence’s mind tried to rifle back to the conception date, which she fixed at just after New Year’s. She and Leon had seen in the year 1940 with a wedding—Essie’s. Their friend had found love at last, with a slim, reserved Jewish boy who shared Essie’s affection for the movies and her nearsighted, protruding eyes. A musician, he’d played clarinet for them at his parents’ apartment, where they’d all gone to celebrate after the ten-minute ceremony at the ZAGS marriage bureau, where Essie and her groom had stood alongside four other couples to be joined by the state. Florence had served as witness. That night, walking home in the falling snow, Leon had taken her arm and said, “And what about us—don’t you think it’s time?”
She’d responded by laughing. “Darling, they only went to that registration bureau because nowadays nobody will give ’em a room of their own without a piece of paper. She doesn’t want to live with his parents.”
“You don’t respect me, Florence. You’ve never let me be a man.”
“That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“If Essie can get legally betrothed to someone she’s known for five weeks, why must I be barricaded—don’t give me that look—yes, barricaded from marrying a woman to whom I’ve given everything for five years!”