The Patriots: A Novel by Sana Krasikov

Author:Sana Krasikov [Sana Krasikov]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385524414
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2017-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

“You’re saying Nina just left him?”

“Left him? Oh, Flora, do you think Moscow is any closer to Siberia than Tbilisi is?”

For the first time, Florence learned that Timofeyev, as a young man, had been a part of some opposition group or other. It dawned on her that he had, all along, been prescient about his arrest. He had fired her to spare her from association with him. Again she recalled his glamorous wife’s glib advice: “Who are we to think we can fathom everything that goes on up top?”

“Nina’s contacts got me work at the theater,” she confessed to Valda.

“That little dark theater.” Valda shook her head sympathetically. “Of course, it is perfectly respectable work,” Valda said, backpedaling. “I only meant that with your skills—typing, accounting, your English—you could find very suitable work indeed.”

Did Valda have something in mind?

“What about right here at the institute? You could teach English to the advanced philology students.”

“Aren’t there enough instructors?”

“We’ve had some shifts in the staff and administration.”

Florence didn’t ask her to elaborate. She guessed that the institute had not been left untouched by the purge. But now, Valda seemed to suggest, the pendulum was swinging in the other direction. “Overzealousness” was what they called it in the papers. The Politburo had relieved the NKVD chief, Nikolai Yezhov, of his position for doing his work too passionately. Now, with Beria at the helm, the worst certainly had to be over.

She knew what Leon would say to the plan: at the theater no one bothered her. She was safe there. But what was safe? She was rotting away inside. The most vital years of her life were being wasted in idleness. Whatever Valda’s motives for offering her a different path, Florence had no doubt that Valda’s sympathy was real. She was painfully aware that, no matter how proudly and confidently she tried to present herself, her act wasn’t fooling anyone. Valda was genuine intelligentsia, not one of the new phonies who’d clawed their way into positions of influence. There were still a few people in Moscow, Florence thought, who had a sense of human decency.

“But IFLI is a serious institute. Scholars teach there, and I’ve never taught.”

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