Her own desires were unreadable even to her. She felt like Dr. Faustus: two souls residing within her breast, each one reacting in its own way to Leon’s tender attentions. She had a real life here—a good job, a loving man. What more was she waiting for? Women her age were already mothers of ten-and twelve-year-olds. The idea that she would be sent to America as some sort of spy was a delusion. What were the chances that she would really be sent abroad on “special assignment”?
Not zero. Possibly it was all a ruse on Subotin’s part. But the NKVD didn’t need ruses. They could force her to cooperate without this carrot. Certainly their interest in her was long-term. But how long-term? She had to show Subotin that she was ready for the job, and to do it before her pregnancy started showing. A criminal abortion was out of the question—she could get tossed in jail if discovered. No decent doctor would do it, which meant she’d have to find some babka in the sticks who might maim her reproductive organs forever, or kill her. It occurred to her that she could take measures to conceal her condition from Subotin. Didn’t one hear stories about village girls who kept their pregnancies secret until the end? She’d take out the seams on her dresses, buy a looser coat. Men didn’t always take notice of such things. But would she take the risk of getting on a boat to America at, say, eight months? Yes, she would. If only she could just forget the word “America”! Couldn’t she choose the reality of her husband’s loving touch over the beckoning tide of her dreams?
In the two weeks that followed, her schemes exhausted her more than even her pregnancy. She knew she needed to take some kind of action. And so a plan at last shaped itself in her mind: She would walk into her next meeting with Subotin and announce that she was pregnant. She would inform him that, now that she was going to be a mother, she would, regrettably, be unable to carry out any kind of foreign assignment. She might even have to take indeterminate leave from her job. And since she was no use to the NKVD staying home all day changing nappies, it was best if they terminated their relationship as soon as possible.
But a week later, instead of requesting that he respectfully sever their connection, what she in fact heard herself asking Subotin as soon as they sat down was “Has there been any progress about my foreign assignment?”
He glanced up at her from his papers with curiosity. “Are you in a hurry?”
“No, of course not. But…I’ve been giving some thought to what you said.”
“Yes?”
“About faculty whose positions on certain matters of national policy aren’t always…clear.”
“Go on.”
“Some of the old guard. Of course, I’m not qualified to interpret their views….”
“Your only qualification is your loyalty.”
“There is a Professor Rechok; he’s in the history department.”
“You’ve had conversations with him.”
“Yes. No. Not really.”
“Well, have you or haven’t you?”
Under the table, she held her stomach with both hands. A life was growing inside her. She had always viewed herself as an honest, loyal, straightforward person, but what did all that mean now? She had to be loyal to her child.
“We both have a break in our classes at one-thirty. He sometimes spends it in the second-floor lounge, reading the paper. And sometimes he mutters things…to himself, mostly.”
“What sorts of things?”
She struggled to recall Rechok’s reaction to the pact between Hitler and Stalin, the expansion of trade with Germany. What had he said? So now they’re friends, and why not? They understand each other perfectly. No, that wasn’t it. Her imagination was embellishing. What had the old fool said? He was worried about what to tell his students. Last year the dog’s a Rottweiler, this year he’s a poodle. That was it.
“Rechok thinks we may be attacked by the Germans in the future. That Russia is helping them strengthen their military might by selling them materials.”
“And you know all this from things he ‘mutters.’?”
“Yes. He paraphrases what he reads in a way that suggests so.”
Subotin took some time to record this with an even, neat hand in his notebook. “A professor on the history faculty promulgating anti-Soviet views among students and other faculty, then.”
“Oh no, I don’t think he shares his views with the students. I’m sure he doesn’t.”
“How can you be sure? Do you sit in on his classes?”
“The institute follows a strict program. Violations of the curriculum would be reported at once.”
“We don’t need you to tell us what gets reported. As you said, it’s all a matter of tone. In who else’s presence has Rechok voiced these opinions?”
“Well, people walk in and out of the lounge.”
“Which people?”
She took a siplike breath. Subotin’s eyes, she noticed, were almost aquamarine. Like water in a tiled fountain, still and cold. “Sometimes Anna Belkova and Maria Danilova come in.”
“Were they present the day he was talking about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?”
“They were.”
“And how did they respond to Rechok’s anti-Soviet outbursts?”
“Most of the faculty just treats him as an eccentric old man. They generally don’t reply to his muttering.”
Subotin responded to this answer with a shadow of a smile, a sneer that pulled his lip toward the back and which seemed to say, You can’t have it both ways, golubushka. “So they said nothing, and allowed him to keep voicing his slander,” Subotin clarified.
“I suppose so.”
She waited while he wrote a report on a fresh leaf of paper. To her surprise, when Subotin was finished, he gave Florence the transcript to read over.
The facts were as she had told them, but somehow the overall meaning was different. The transcript stated that she’d had anti-Soviet conversations with Boris Rechok, during which Rechok disseminated information about the German threat and contradicted Stalin’s economic policy, in the presence of Belkova and Danilova, who had listened to his slanderous statements without contradicting him. The report made it appear almost as though the two women were in agreement with Rechok. It also stated that Boris Rechok promulgated these views in his classes.
“Now, wait,” she said. “This makes it seem as though Rechok were addressing them. All I said was that he made these statements to himself, while he read the paper.”
“If he wanted to say them to himself, he would have spoken them to the wall at home. Obviously, he was expecting reactions.”
“But Belkova and Danilova just happened to be in the room. He wasn’t conversing with them.”
“They were in the room, and they allowed this dissembler to spread his lies unobstructed.”
“But your report makes it seem like they share his views.”
“Whether they share them or not is for us to determine. The fact remains that they had responsibility, as educators, as citizens, to correct Rechok’s lies, and they failed in this responsibility, as did you.”
It was an impossible argument to win. The NKVD had their own logic, according to which passive witnesses were no different from conspirators. According to this logic, you bore responsibility not only for your own words, but for the words of all those around you.
“But I never said he promulgated these views among his students,” Florence protested. She knew she was grasping at straws.