But this was a much narrower hoop than the ones I’d jumped through before. This felt like a needle’s eye. (Later, I’d learn that fewer than 5 percent of candidate-of-sciences degrees at the institute in any single year were awarded to Jews. But at that moment, at the age of thirty-four, I was once again little Abrashka in the children’s home, not sure if I was going to sob or throw a punch.) Why had the man come out to speak to me personally? The rejection of my doctorate could have been conveyed by dry official means. Something about him told me that he had come to speak to me not as an emissary of the committee, but out of some private discomfort. In his manner I detected the faintest note of apology.
I walked out, my dissertation manuscript inside my briefcase, out of the sallow lobby and down the grassy median of the boulevard. It was a beautiful day made more brilliant by a recent rain, one of those days when you noticed for the first time that whole limbs of trees had gone green with budding leaves, when telephone wires suddenly swarmed with noisy flocks of swallows. And suddenly all of it—all that beauty, all the scholarly aspiration I’d basked in for seven years—was repellent to me. None of it was any longer mine. The sight of their buildings made me sick. The sight of their statues, even their trees—all of it sent a wave of nausea down my throat. After an hour, I was able to collect myself enough to find a pay phone and call my wife. “Start selling our stuff,” I told her. “We’re leaving this cursed place.”
The first mass migration was still two years away, the first murmurs about the gates being opened only then just spreading. But I already knew that when the day came I’d be ready to leave everything behind. I would cross the border in my underpants if I had to.
Florence’s meeting with Subotin had left her brutally altered. In the morning, she did not get up until Leon was gone. On the desk by the bed he had left milk and a pan of groats for her. Both had gone cold.
The day was gelid and bright with spring-melting snow. Florence rolled up her stockings and put on a hat. It was Friday and she had no classes to teach. There was only one person she had to go see.
From the nickel-bright street she entered the darkness of the theater; its smells of dust and powder accosted her with their familiarity. Down a narrow hall she made her way to the chamber where the attendant sat with her knees apart, boiling tea on her rusted kettle.
“Flora?”
“Agnessa Artemovna.” Florence removed her hat. “I need your help.”
—
TWO KILOMETERS OUT OF Moscow, modern life dropped away as suddenly as an ocean floor. From the window of the train she watched the muddy countryside encroach on the city. Three hundred rubles—most of her month’s salary—were stacked inside her coat pocket. Off the main road, peasant women squatted on muddy banks to wash laundry in a cold stream. Time hung over everything like a dead weight.
She found the cabin down a dirt road from the village post office, out of sight behind a stand of pines. An old izba with carved picture-book windows, it reminded Florence of Baba Yaga’s house, except it wasn’t standing on chicken legs. The sister was a thickset, imposing woman whose faint resemblance to Agnessa Artemovna was well concealed behind rosacea-complected cheeks and a ruddy nose. She led Florence to an alcove formed by the back wall of a wood stove and a sideboard. In the alcove stood an iron bed, a board on the metal webbing. Florence removed her muddy knee-boots and unrolled her stockings while the woman prepared. The room had a cloying, churchlike smell from the candle that flickered in the sideboard’s beveled mirror. She told Florence to undress while she went to boil water in a kettle.
With her head back so the room tilted, Florence could see the chiffonier and the conserves jar of alcohol in which the woman kept the instruments of her trade. Bubbles clung to the inside like fizz in a glass of champagne that was going flat. The sight of them made Florence weak with nausea. The woman brought her a stale-smelling pillow to bite on for the pain. “You can moan,” she instructed, “but don’t scream.”
A small, piercing ache as she inhaled, and then pain that could make you forget your own name. The pillow between her teeth tasted sour with the saliva and sebum of others.
“Steady, steady.” Her feet were tied to the bed frame. The woman hummed as she worked—“Lyuli, Lyuli”—lullabying while she scooped out the life inside. The flavor of blood filled the air as the daylight grew grainy. The leaping candle on the bureau turned the mirror into a slab of light.
On the meadow stood a little birch tree.
Lyuli, Lyuli, there it stood.
She came to with the stout woman sponging her brow.
“Up, up now.”
Her head was still full of echoes. “I can’t move.”
“Come, off you go.”
If the hemorrhaging didn’t stop, she was instructed to go to a doctor and tell him she had fallen on the ice and suffered a miscarriage.
She took the evening train back to Moscow, weighed down by the bandages in her underwear as if by sandbags. Every moment, she felt herself losing blood. Around her, figures fluctuated like pulsing ghosts. She told herself she’d been spared more barbaric methods—the carbonate douches and mustard baths. Blood soaked through her stockings and skirt.
Leon found her on the daybed, trembling as if with a chill. He hurried to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of pearl-barley soup and a mug of steaming milk. He sat Florence up and placed the mug to her lips, watching as she made an effort to swallow. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead and upper lip while she sipped. “You’re burning up!” He tried to feed her the soup with a spoon, but she refused, pulling the blanket tightly around herself.
“You have to eat.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Then eat for the baby.”
“There is no baby.”
“You’re all hot, Florie. You’re confused.”
He attempted to remove her blanket. This time she had no strength to stop him.
She had never heard a sound of such anguish come out of a human mouth: “Oy vey z’mir, Florence! Oy mayn gut, oy gu-u-u-t-t…” He was inhaling the words as he howled them, his fists at his temples. Madness had taken hold of him in spasms. He rocked back and forth, clutching at the bloodied sheet. “Oy mayn gut, what have you done?”
“I couldn’t let him know, Leon.”
“We have to take you to a hospital.”
“No. Let me die here.”
“Tell me who did this!”
“I couldn’t go through with it, Leon. If he found out, I’d be trapped forever. It would have all been for nothing….”
“Who, goddamn it?”
Then it all spilled out of her, in incoherent, hopeless sobs: the visit to OVIR, the meetings with Subotin, the long, doomed course of her ruination. “He said he would send me home. He told me I would see my family….” She could hear just how weak, how fatuous these promises sounded. She summoned the strength for the abject confessions, believing them to be her last.