She couldn’t admit that the real reason for her playing hard to get was the other game she was playing with the secret police. A game that had as its eventual aim the severing of all her ties with Russia, maybe Leon included. And so, like an anxious philanderer in a spasm of self-reproach, she gave in to his wish and let Leon have what he most wanted. The very next day, they’d gone out and gotten themselves quietly hitched at the registration bureau. Their honeymoon was just as quiet, with no caviar or clarinets, but two voluptuously restful days and nights wrapped and tangled up in bed. She’d covered Leon’s face and body with kisses as if he were a bountiful human shrine. She did this because she loved him and because she needed to ease her conscience, to make up for the ways she had deceived him and was still deceiving him by carrying on private meetings with Comrade Subotin, an entanglement that—bloodless as it was—she knew was more unfaithful than any affair. And so, being scrupulous about hiding her tracks with Subotin, she’d let herself get sloppy where it mattered most.
Her meetings with Subotin took place every three weeks as he’d ordered. For the first few sessions, he had not asked Florence very many difficult questions. He was mostly interested in her colleagues at IFLI: he wanted to know what they said during faculty meetings, who seemed to be on friendly terms and who on strained ones, which professors were allies or friends, and what was the basis of their friendship.
“Belkova and Danilova both love classical music,” she reported blandly. “They go to concerts together at the Tchaikovsky. And I think Danilova’s son is in the conservatory.”
It was gossipy, but not essentially “criminal” information that Florence believed she gave Subotin. She found she had a knack for describing people, getting to the core of their character in a few quick strokes. This one was overly congenial but qualified everything he said with stipulations, just in case, always hedging his bets. That one found a way to disagree with whatever you were saying, even if you were agreeing with him wholeheartedly. Sometimes Florence found herself preparing these little profiles as she set off to meet Subotin, or as she sat listening to her colleagues during interminable meetings. It was only when Subotin began to ask her more pointedly about the “counterrevolutionary” conversations she was privy to, and any “anti-Soviet” activity she observed, that her mind began to gyrate like a creaky, overheated machine. “I am not interested in your personal opinions about these people, Comrade Fein,” Subotin said one day. “I want to know why you aren’t providing us with any useful information.”
“Do you want me to make things up? I tell you everything I hear.”
“Then find a way to hear more.”
“What do you mean?”
“Start conversations.”
“Surely you aren’t saying I should be a provocateur?”
“I am saying that partial information will be treated as lies. And lies, in your case, Comrade Fein, don’t instill in us faith that you can be trusted with a foreign assignment.”
But even in her hunger for an exit visa, Florence found she could not bring herself to say anything truly damning about anyone. She knew that what she was doing was sordid enough that she didn’t want to tell even Leon about it, but she took some moral comfort in reminding herself that at least she would not dissemble, would not bear false witness against anybody. Subotin could use what she said as he wished, but she would do no more than act as a perfect mirror of her world, making up nothing, adding nothing. If Subotin was genuinely interested in her trustworthiness, then he had people spying on her, which meant it behooved her to continue delivering what she knew without slander or embellishment.
But Subotin’s persistence was frightening.
He was tired of her “womanly fluff,” he told her the following session. This wasn’t summer Pioneer camp. He was tired of wasting his time with her pointless gossip and insinuations. Did he have to remind her of the punishment for trying to leave the country illegally? He knew she was withholding—he had other ears to the ground. So, if she wasn’t interested in doing her duty by the state, she could prepare to sever their relationship and take her chances.
She came home looking as pale as the ghost of consumption. She had eaten nothing since noon. Her purse seemed as heavy as a spade. Her feet were sore, her spine felt like badly warped steel, her nipples chafed under the caress of starched fabric that might as well have been mosquito netting. “What’s happened to you?” Leon said, observing her collapse on the daybed.
Florence cupped her face in her hands and rubbed her aching eyes, then looked at Leon through her slightly spread fingers. The one person who could help her now was the one to whom she was too afraid to tell the truth. Leon, who could talk to anyone, would surely know how to talk his way out of this noose with Subotin. He’d be able to tell her what to say. She dug her thumbs deeper into her sockets to keep her eyes from exploding with tears.
“Florence, has something happened?”
Too many secrets. Too many…
“Sit up. There, good. Let me get you some water.”
“Leon. I have to tell you something…but first you have to promise not to get angry.”
He smiled in baffled anticipation. “When have I gotten angry?”
“You have to promise.”
Too many secrets.
And so she spilled the wrong one.
Now he was the one cupping his face, his hand wrapped around his mouth, to hide the grin that was spreading from ear to ear. “How long?” he said quietly, through parted fingers.
“About three months. I haven’t got it confirmed.”
“Oh, baby, how could I ever be angry at you about that?”
She shook her head. “Leon, how could we let ourselves get so careless?”
He knelt and took her sunken shoulders. “This is the most tremendous thing, don’t you see? Oh, baby, no wonder you’ve been so worn down. You have to start taking care of yourself, Florie. Tell ’em you can’t keep staying late at those faculty meetings anymore.”
That he believed her lies about how she spent her afternoons was more tormenting even than his elation. “But, Leon, it’s not the time….”
“Shhh, shhh….let me worry about that. Shhh, you just rest now….” And he hurried to the kitchen to cook her up some dinner.
—
HER PREGNANCY TURNED LEON into an indulgent husband. He began to come home with delicacies: herring, caviar, chocolates.
“How much did you pay for this?”
“Never mind!” he told her. “Eat.”
He woke up earlier than usual to cook breakfast, then sat staring at her with a bashful smile while she spooned up her buckwheat and eggs. Look at him smiling, she thought. He is finally getting what he wants: a wife, a real family. Leon had grown up without a father, and it was plain to see how badly he wanted to be a father himself. She wondered why she had never understood this about him before: under all of his youthful wanderlust and adventuring had been a bottomless craving for a real home.