He, Dora, and Marianne had to remain in the city, where Lusk had been given a job as a researcher at the Marxist-Leninist Institute (and membership in the Soviet Communist Party) and where Dora, if the Soviet party agreed to transfer her membership from the KPD, might find work in the Yiddish theater. Tonight would be their last dinner together for a long while, and they chose a restaurant with plush red carpets, white tablecloths, and meat on the menu, a place favored by party officials. Lusk took pleasure in the way the waiter refilled their crystal water glasses—efficient without being obsequious—but what one felt from the officials’ burdened faces, and the bottles of vodka on the tables, wasn’t privilege and pleasure but a sense of foreboding and grim resolve. As the papers said, the rapid march to industrialization had been bound to intensify class divisions, and that week Zinovyev and Kamenev had confessed in open court that at Trotsky’s order, they’d arranged for Kirov’s assassination.
