Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

There was no possibility of being allowed upstairs; as he made the request, he perceived that the soldier tightened her grasp on her rifle. The woman at the desk would not even accept a letter for Larissa, grimly shaking her head.

“How about flowers? Would you give her my flowers?”

The matron laughed abruptly, a short, unpleasant bark, but a laugh nevertheless. After all, this was Moscow, in December of 1927.

“So you would deliver flowers? You would make sure she received them?”

“Young man, the day you bring her flowers, I will make sure she receives them.”

“Thank you. Comrade-soldier, you are my witness.” Israel reached into his briefcase and removed from it copies of Pravda, Izvestia, and the Yiddish newspaper he worked for, Der Emmes. “Madame Comrade, do you have a pair of scissors I may borrow? Well, never mind.”

In Belorussia he had bunked with a young Polish communist who had performed magic tricks to entertain the troops. The Pole believed that magic belonged to the people and that it was a hegemonic misappropriation of universal cultural property to keep the secrets of the trade from them. Every fifteen-minute performance was followed by at least an hour of instruction. He was a good teacher: after the company was routed, the surviving troops drifted back to their villages, their sleeves lined with playing cards and their pockets rattling with loaded dice and trick handcuffs (the Chekist grinned when he snapped his more reliable manacles around the Pole’s wrists). From this legacy—and from speeches by Comrade Stalin to a visiting Italian delegation, a photograph of a power plant built into the walls of a former monastery, news of the flyer Comrade Shestakov’s triumphant arrival in Tokyo, a first-person account of the 1905 revolution in the Presnya district, greetings from the Komsomol to young French workers, denunciations of the Left Oppositionists by Lipetsk peasants, compliments from Indochinese anti-colonialists on the successful completion of the Fifteenth Party Congress, an enthusiastic report on the Dnepr dam project, warnings that the British were plotting an economic blockade, a Central Committee resolution on revolutionary vigilance, and congratulations tended to the state security apparatus on its tenth anniversary—Israel tore and folded and coaxed into bloom a bouquet of black-and-white flowers. With a copy of Trud, he made smaller arrangements for the receptionist and the soldier. The soldier smiled primly at the gift but refused it. The dormitory matron promised to bring the bouquet to Larissa at her tea break.

Rachel in her bedclothes stepped softly through the room. Her roommates snored undisturbed by the pale, diffuse light thrown off by her smile. Despite a tragic adolescence (both her parents had been killed in pogroms during the civil war), Rachel smiled easily and made emotional attachments fearlessly. I believe that, by the end of the evening, she had fallen a little in love with Israel. Perhaps more than a little—supposing, as Israel did (though he wouldn’t own up to it, in precisely those terms), that it was possible to fall in love with another person after a single encounter. Rachel descended into her bed as if into an embrace. But it was her romanticism and fearlessness that persuaded her that Larissa was the proper target of Israel’s affections, and it would make her Israel’s critical ally in the coming campaign. The newsprint flowers were soon followed by invitations to rallies, plays, political lectures, and gallery openings. Rachel congratulated Larissa on the arrival of each and encouraged their acceptance.

At first Larissa was flattered by the attention and, despite herself, pleased by the approval conferred by her dormitory girlfriends. They insisted upon putting the origami in a vase. One of them, a Russian country girl from beyond the Urals, asked if flowers made from newspapers were something Jewish. For her part, Larissa voiced the hope that this gesture would be the last and, as the invitations and humorous notes continued to arrive in the post during the next several weeks, she told Rachel, “What does he think? That I sit around all day attending to suitors?”

“You should write back. Tell him what you do.”

“I’ll send him a report on my last dissection. I’ll send him the dissection.”

But then the invitations ceased. No letter warned that he was surrendering to her resistance. She was surprised to find herself annoyed. Where was his determination? Men characteristically failed to persevere; it was proof of their insincerity. But what had she expected? That the invitations would continue indefinitely? She didn’t mention her disappointment to Rachel. Nor did Rachel mention her own. And then late one afternoon at the precise minute of the day when Larissa had begun to wonder at her closed-mindedness and timidity, another student arrived to say that Israel had presented himself downstairs at the dormitory reception and had demanded to see her.

She didn’t hurry, but neither did she primp before the mirror. She was wearing the same plain olive dress that she had worn to her lectures that day. At the foot of the stairs, at the place where the shoe boxes had been assembled, Israel now kept vigil, fashionably dressed in a pressed shirt and vest beneath his open wool coat, a fedora in his hands. He bowed at her arrival. The guard who had been there the first night monitored their exchange.

“I received your invitations,” Larissa said, by way of a greeting.

“And the flowers?”

“The flowers too. They’ve become something of a fire hazard. You seem surprised to see me,” she observed. “You did call on me, didn’t you?”

“Yes, many times. This is only the first I’ve been able to persuade someone to give you a message. You’d think this was a convent.”

She replied stiffly, “The working people of this country have paid with their blood so that I may attend university. I didn’t come to Moscow to dance in nightclubs.”

This time she was fully sincere. She added, “I’m the first in my family to receive a higher education.”

“Who said anything about nightclubs?” Israel shook his head, frowning. “I’m a former commissar in the Red Army. My unit fought in Belorussia and Bashkiria. I never received a higher education, but, you’re correct, among the things we fought for was for the right of peasants, workers, and Jews to attend university.”

She bit her lip. “Sorry.”

“And we also fought for the right of the people of this country to produce the world’s first example of proletarian high culture, free of bourgeois cant and chauvinism. Look, I have two tickets to a concert tonight. Will you join me?”

“I need to study.”

“Then why aren’t you at the library?”

“What kind of concert is it?” she asked suspiciously.

“If I give the wrong answer, you won’t come? It’s music. What can be bad?”

She frowned, exposing a dimpled chin. He loved it.

“Where?”

“At the Jewish State Theater,” he conceded. “It’s klezmer. Jewish music.”

She betrayed not the slightest inclination to agree, but he had her trapped. It was the klezmer. She paused before she answered, as if to consider the proposal. At the mention of the Jewish State Theater, the soldier had screwed up her eyes. Larissa raised three fingers.

“Get another ticket. Rachel will come too.”

“Can we ring her?”

“She doesn’t have a telephone.”

“A ticket’s not a problem. But the concert begins at eight,” he said, gesturing helplessly at his wristwatch. “If you want to fetch her, we’ll never get to the theater in time.”

But Larissa insisted, unsure of the source of her obstinacy. Did she think she needed a chaperone? Or a witness? Forty-five minutes later, Rachel was startled to discover the two of them in her foyer and in each other’s company. She tried to hide her smile of wonderment. Embarrassed, Larissa studied her muddied, unborrowed boots.