“No. I’m from New York.”
“New York—whah!” Sergey said, showing an appropriate amount of awe. “They take us around New York City when we came off the ship—first three days. Whah! The trains always making noise on top of your head. They look like they are rolling on buildings.”
“What else did you see in New York?”
Sergey consulted with Fyodor. “Aquarium? Rockefeller Center.”
“Radio City Music Hall,” Fyodor chimed in.
They might have gone down the entire list of attractions if she hadn’t interceded. “The usual tourist trumpery.” There was a silence, during which she worried that she’d come across as unbecomingly cynical.
“You don’t like New York?” said Sergey finally.
“I didn’t say that. It’s a grand city but they showed you the kid stuff. They might have shown you Greenwich Village. They might have taken you to the piers.”
“Cleveland: it is not New York.” The bored aplomb with which Sergey uttered this snooty bon mot forced her to laugh. He raised his prominent brows in clownish surprise.
“Well—that’s true,” she said. “It’s just that…you sounded like someone from New York just now.”
He evidently found the laugh an encouraging sign, for his next question was: “You have young man in New York?”
“I don’t have a ‘young man.’ ”
“Old man?”
“Pardon?”
“Why did you run away to Cleveland?”
She looked dumbstruck at him. “I didn’t run away. I took a job. Same as you.” But he didn’t seem altogether convinced. “For a crust of bread,” she said, and to make sure he understood, she switched to Russian. “Zarabotat’ na kuska khleba.”
This amused Sergey. “Na kusok khleba,” he corrected, and patted her on the head.
Fyodor eyed her more suspiciously. “How you know Russian?”
“My father’s mother was from Litva. She lived for Russian novels. She used to read to me from Evgeniy Onegin when I was sick in bed.”
Fyodor looked at her inquisitively. She tried to think of something to convince him she wasn’t spying on them. “I also took a class at the university. I understand better than I speak. I would like to improve.”
Fyodor tossed what was left of his cigarette into the dry dirt and got up from his crate. He seemed convinced enough to say, in Russian, “We better watch it with this one,” with a wink at Sergey.
Sergey turned to Florence. “Very well. You talk to us in your language, and we’ll talk to you in ours. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll switch to French.”
—
AFTER THE FIREWORKS, they drove back through the midland darkness until they could see Cleveland light up on the interstate’s horizon like a glowing ember at the end of a long cigarette. So much had Fyodor and Sergey enjoyed the outing that they extended an invitation for Florence to join them the following Sunday, to smoke fish they intended to catch at the lakefront. Taking a trolley uphill, Florence could see, in the abandoned furnaces and mills along the river, signs of a once-brawny city. The men’s bungalow was the last on a block of disused houses once occupied by mill workers and their families. She found Sergey seated on a bench inside the covered back porch, scaling a trout over that day’s copy of The Plain Dealer. A few steps down, in the tiny backyard, Fyodor was stoking a fire in a smoker he’d fashioned out of a trash can and an oven grate.
“To your health,” said Sergey, pouring her some cloudy liquid from a milk jug.
She wasn’t prepared for the burn that went all the way down her throat as she swallowed. “Where did you get this? It tastes like rotten bread!”
“Our new Ukrainian friends on the West Side,” said Sergey.
“Where did you meet these friends?”
“Church,” Fyodor answered from his post at the trash-can grill.
“Your friends crooked you. Have you got any cola to water this down?”
“The missus does not keep cola.”
“Or salt,” said Fyodor.
“I saw a general store a few blocks back,” Florence offered. “I’ll go fetch some.”
Sergey cleaned his knife and dropped the rest of the fish into a water bucket. “I will go with you.”
They walked quickly, crossing the little park on Lakeside. It was five o’clock, but the sun was still beating down. She could smell the tang of her own perspiration through her linen dress. “How does anyone live in this heat? I feel destroyed by it,” she said, trying to keep one step ahead of Sergey so he wouldn’t smell her.
“If you want—you come to the lake with me and Fyodor?”
“Last thing I need is those crowds,” she said, panting.
“Your young man in New York—he is married?” said Sergey out of the blue. In the colonnaded shadow of a courthouse that dwarfed the other buildings, Florence stopped walking.
“What kind of person do you take me for?”
“You are a woman from New York. New York is jazz music.” He did a little jig. “Flapper girl like Louise Brooks?”
“Louise Brooks? Is that what you’ve been sold about American women—that we’re all craven and erotically obsessed?”
He shook his head. “Yes.”
“Well, then, you’re playing the wrong number,” she said, walking again. She wanted not to be enjoying this conversation as much as she was. All week long, thoughts of Sergey had been hovering on the edge of her consciousness, as though waiting for some acknowledgment from the rest of her mind. Now the two of them were walking in lockstep, his hand casually within an inch of her arm, his audacity annulling all of her mental discipline.
“But it is not true…,” he said wistfully. “I can see now. American women are, we say, potatoes without salt. Young women dress same as grandmothers. Not interesting like in Russia. Women here are…prundes.”
“Prunes?”
“Proo-d’s!” he said, biting down on the “d.”
“First we’re vamps, and now we’re prudes.”
“Yes.”
“Well, which is it?”
“You are both. You either grandiotize sex or you say, ‘Is cheap!’ In Russia—it is more simple. We say: sex is unimportant as drinking a glass of water when you are thirsty.”
If he were someone else, she might have given him a slap. Instead, she said, “Is that so? How nice for the Bolshevik men.”
“But it is a woman who said this. Alexandra Kollontai. She sleep with many men,” he said, gallantly opening the door of the general store for Florence.
Florence gazed over her shoulder at the two men outside, spitting tobacco juice out of the corners of their mouths.
“Shh. You can’t talk like that here.”
“Why? Kollontai talked about this to Lenin.”
“Maybe your leaders discuss things like that,” she whispered, “but we don’t. Salt, please,” she requested, and smiled chastely at the grocer behind the counter. At a sedentary speed the man took his stepladder and began his catatonic ascent up to the dry-goods shelf.
“Because in your country everything is comm-yerce,” Sergey whispered loudly. “Commerce and bourgeois morality make sex ‘decadent.’ When sex is only part of healthy spirit of youth.”
He smiled sinlessly, delighted to be scandalizing her.
The high-waisted grocer gave a little headshake, as if beleaguered more than offended by this low-mindedness. “Iodized is what you want?” he said.
“Yes, sir. And two colas, please,” Florence answered in a wholesome way. Once they were outside again, she turned to the still-smiling Sergey. “I’m not as bourgeois as you think.”
“I knew it. You have a man in New York.”
“What if I did?”
“But you did not marry him.”
“I despise the whole institution of marriage,” she said with implausible vigor.
“Whah—the whole institution!” Sergey did a good impression of being impressed.
“I mean, mo
st girls marry for expediency rather than love. It’s just so hypocritical. Plus, it seems like sheer madness to marry at a time like this, with the whole country falling apart.”
“So you are not interested in men?”
“What? Yes. I mean no.” She was starting to feel light-headed from the speed of their walk and conversation. “I just feel my energy would be better spent on…a less narrow purpose.”
“What is a ‘narrow purpose’—your pleasure?”
“Pleasure? Goodness, Sergey. I didn’t have you down for a hedonist.”
“Why I am hedonist? Hedonists live only for pleasure. In Russia we live for other things also. This is why sex is not so important.”
“Yes—I forgot—it’s like drinking a glass of water.”
He gave her a sad look that seemed to say, You mock me, fair lady. “I am like you,” he said. “I live to work. To build. I believe: when you do not satisfy desire, it is like you are pouring sawdust into engine of your mind.”
A surf of prickles washed up and down her flesh. The heat of the sun couldn’t explain away the pinkness of her cheeks. “Spoken like an engineer,” she said, picking up speed to keep his remark from gathering too much meaning.
“Spoken like a human being,” said Sergey.
—
SHE DRANK HER COLA on the porch swing while Sergey gutted the last of the fish. Underneath the pine, Fyodor poked at the coals in his smoker with a branch. “Do you know what I love about the Europeans?” Florence said, stretching her toes. “A man can cook for a woman, and cook just as well.”
“You hear that?” said Fyodor. “We’re Europeans!”
“That one can cook and sew and geld a horse,” Sergey said in Russian. “A Cossack!”
“Not like him,” said Fyodor, as if responding to a slight.
“A real war hero,” said Sergey.
“I wonder if we’ll have anything like that here,” said Florence. “I mean a civil war, like you did.”
“America had civil war to end chattel slavery,” Fyodor said. “Same law of history will work in overturning capitalist order of wage slavery.”
She glanced over at Sergey, who said nothing and went inside to wash his hands.
“But our communists aren’t like your communists. In New York, they’re always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand that landlords open up their vacant apartments to house the unemployed. They even demand that the Communist Party distribute unemployment relief instead of the Labor Department. They might as well demand cake and champagne.”
“I don’t know about ‘your’ communists. I only know what is scientific laws of history,” Fyodor said.
“Well, if that sorry bunch is who’s bringing us the revolution, then we can wait another hundred years,” Florence said. The Coca-Cola and moonshine were sending a primal warmth down her veins. She felt a combative urge to keep talking. “What riles me is how we pretend in this country that everything is just dandy. ‘Good Times Just Around the Corner!’ ” she said, quoting the headline on the fish-stained Plain Dealer that had been lying at Sergey’s feet. “And now everyone is cheering Mr. Roosevelt. Praise be! He’s signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act! He’s putting Americans back to work! But tell me what Americans. Not the women. No one’s talking about the women who’ve been losing their jobs thanks to the anti-nepotism laws he’s signed. If your husband works in the government and so do you, well, then, you can kiss your job goodbye. One of the spouses has to go, but do you think anyone’s discharging the men? No, sir. It’s the wives who are being given the boot. Because in this country, if a woman works, she’s un-American. A money grubber.”
She was conscious of Sergey listening from inside the screen door. She raised her voice. “It’s the whole damn attitude here. The eminent Mrs. Gompers, widow of the leader of the biggest union that’s ever looked out for the rights of workers—that silk-stockinged ninny has the nerve to tell women: A home no matter how small is large enough to occupy a woman’s mind and time. And this from one of the so-called progressive women in our country—the heroic first lady of the AFL!” She felt unable to stop herself. How delicious was the pleasure of letting your convictions rip, of holding nothing back. Washing down the last of the booze and cola, she said, “And my own landlady, she says to me: ‘Sweetie, I don’t see how it’s right for a girl to work when so many of our fellas have to feed their families.’ She looks at me like I’m the reason all the fine boys of Cleveland aren’t making a living.”
“You are the reason,” said Sergey, coming back out to the porch.
“How?”
“Because women will work for less money. Your bosses keep them when they cut payrolls. And men then also have to accept low pay to stay. Marx wrote about all this already. When wages are set by your ‘free market,’ men and women are natural enemies.” Sergey delivered these self-evident principles without passion, as if he were reciting building codes.
“If you want to work so bad, come to Russia,” Fyodor suggested. “We’ll put you to work in no time. Our gals are regular horses—you ought to see them shoveling gravel, slapping paint on buildings. We’ve put them into production and taken them out of reproduction.”
“What he means,” said Sergey, “is that a woman with your energy would be valued, not made ashamed.”
“You don’t have to translate, Casanova,” Fyodor responded. “I know what I meant. All right, children, our fish is ready.” He laid the last of the trout on a wooden board, sat on a porch step, and washed back his second glass of moonshine. “Why does a girl like you want to work so much, anyhow? I know girls your age been married and divorced twice already.”
“Let her be,” said Sergey.
“Why? She ought to be able to find herself a fellow.”
“Not every woman can find herself a Fyodor,” Florence said, smiling at Sergey.
“My wife’s not complaining,” rejoined Fyodor. “Lives in our engineers’ compound in Magnitogorsk, doesn’t lift a finger. Spends half her morning putting on perfume, and the afternoon bossing around the maid.”
Florence took a piece of fish. “Lucky her.”
“Don’t get smart. She’s damn lucky. I got her set up like a countess in an English cottage.”
“An English cottage in the empty Russian steppe,” remarked Sergey.
“Listen to this high-hat! Member of the former exploiting classes!”
“You’re drunk stiff, Fyodor.”
“Sure, I am. Sure, I am.” He turned to Florence. “Ask this exploiter why his English is so good.”
“Never stops babbling, does he? He’ll gab his whole life away.”
“I know what I’m talking about,” Fyodor said, turning away petulantly. “I don’t wish to have this chat in front of our female company.” He refilled his glass and lifted it once more. “Let us drink to women. When they love us, they forgive even our crimes! When they don’t, they do not credit even our virtues!”
Florence raised her nearly empty glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
Fyodor smacked his lips and looked at Sergey again. “You know who said that, lyceum boy?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“Honoré de Balzac!” Fyodor pursed his lips to mimic French.
“Enough posturing, Fyodor. Why don’t you play us something already?”
Fyodor finished what was left in his glass and went inside. By the amber backlight through the screen door, Florence watched him take down a guitar from the wall. He carried it out under his arm and sat down to tune the strings. And then he began to strum a soft, melancholy tune. From the plaintive gravel of his voice, she could make out a few stray words of a love song.
Sergey had seated himself on the floorboards by her feet. “Do you understand what he’s singing?”
She shook her head.
Quietly, over the sound of the music, he said: “My dear, please do not deceive me so my heart
does not break. Geese—swans in the sky—it was not your fault that we cry.”
Fyodor’s eyes were closed as he strummed, and the chirping of grasshoppers seemed to grow louder as he sang, as though they feared being outdone. Moths circled the porch lantern and made weird shadows. She stared at the top of Sergey’s head. In the dim porch light his hair looked like baled hay. Her fingers tingled with an almost irresistible desire to comb it.
“I have put on my old vest,” Sergey translated quietly. “Sweetheart, where have you gone?” He circled his thumb and forefinger around Florence’s naked ankle and, smiling, closed and released his grip around it as if he found its narrowness a structural curiosity. And she let him, as they both listened to Fyodor’s tune of unrequited love.
Coming by a bottle of hooch had never been a problem for most Clevelanders. From the first days of Prohibition, cases of quality liquor had been floated down Lake Erie from Canada in cabin cruisers and delivered to drop-off points all along the Huron River. From there they were trucked to basement bars and clandestine saloons all over the city. It was in one of these dusky establishments that Fyodor, having just been told to move his elbows off the bar by a prodigious Clevelander of Polish extraction, turned to Sergey and spoke audibly in his native tongue, “Fat Polish hairbag smells like a sewer pipe.” At which point the fat hairbag landed a rabbit punch on Fyodor’s neck to exact retribution for every repression suffered by Poles under Russian rule since the failed November Uprising of 1831. Staggering forward, Fyodor managed to dodge another punch and throw one himself—his first and last before the Pole landed an uppercut to his jaw, this time in memory of the failed January Uprising of 1864. The final punishment (in payback for the disastrous Polish-Soviet War of 1919) was a cut so low it slammed into Fyodor’s groin and lifted him clear off the floor. A moment later relief arrived in the form of a bouncer—an ape in a suit who pinned Fyodor’s elbows to his sides and dumped him in the street with a warning that the next time his Red ass would be hanging from a meat hook.
It was past midnight when Florence discovered the two men at her back door, scratching at the screen. Turning on the porch light, she found a bloodied Fyodor draped around an unhappy Sergey. Florence touched her face, tight with egg whites she’d rubbed in for the night. She pulled her housecoat tighter. “My God—what happened?”
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