“Let us in.” Fyodor’s heavy shoes scuffed the threshold as Sergey dragged him inside. Blood had dried under Fyodor’s nose. His eye was swollen and turning a livery purple.
“You can’t stay here,” she said. “My landlords will be up….”
“It is another two kilometers to our house. I cannot carry him myself.”
Left and right, the three of them veered down a lampless street. The moon, moving through clouds, reflected off the faces of public buildings. From the alleys came smells of things fecal. “The cavalry’s arrived!” shouted Fyodor, his arms draped around their shoulders. “So you’ve brought your Levantine beauty to show her what drunks and scoundrels we are?”
“You’re showing her well enough without my help. Grab his arm,” Sergey instructed.
“You’ve got this pony eating out of your hand.”
“She understands what you’re saying, you fool.”
A freight yard appeared in the shadow of a sinister-looking warehouse.
“All the better.” Fyodor turned his head to Florence and gave her a drunken grin. “All you intelligentsia girls, vowing you’ll only love a real proletarian, a real worker—and then you go off and start making eyes at fakes like him. This careerist.” She could feel the sharpness of Fyodor’s nails digging into her shoulder as they dragged him. “See for yourself, little girl,” he slurred, his breath like kerosene. “We Russians get drunk, sing songs, cry like children. While you Jews keep yourself busy scheming how to make a ruble.”
“There’s plenty of poor Jews,” Florence muttered.
“But they’re always trying to get rich. Or powerful—look at Litvinov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, all the big wheels.”
“You already have one black eye tonight, Fyodor,” Sergey warned. “Would you like another?”
“What am I—insulting her honor? Who said I didn’t like Jews? I knew a Jewish girl in Leningrad, before the Revolution. She wasn’t allowed to live in the city, because of the quotas. So she got herself a yellow pass”—he turned to Florence—“that’s what the prostitutes used, to get across the bridge and do their business. Imagine! Pretending to be a prostitute, so she could be a student at the university! You Jews—if there’s a way, you’ll find it. So why don’t you ask her to help us out, Seryozha?”
“You want to ask, you ask.”
“Why should I? It’s not me she’s got eyes for. We go home with lint in our pockets and the whole plan is thrown. Whose heads are on the chopping block then?”
“That isn’t her problem.”
“What’s the harm in asking—she’ll find a way.”
—
AFTER SERGEY HAD STRIPPED off Fyodor’s big shoes, peeled his pants, and dumped him on the sagging mattress in the bedroom, he returned to the main room, where Florence sat waiting at the table with her palms between her knees.
“Is he all right?”
“He won’t remember it tomorrow.”
She edged her palms on the table and raised herself abruptly.
“I will walk you home,” Sergey offered.
“I’ll be fine.”
“You cannot walk alone.”
“How could you take him to a place like that?”
Sergey looked back without speaking.
“You’re lucky he’s not at the bottom of the river. You’re lucky he wasn’t picked up by the police! Did you think what a nightmare that would be—for me, if not for you?” And because he gave no sign of speaking, she lit in more. “You’re not in your country—do you understand? There are some sacrifices you have to make.”
“Okay, I will go buy sheep and slaughter it tomorrow.”
“What?”
“You said: sacrifices.”
“Is this all a joke to you?”
He slammed his fists on the table. “What do you want me to tell you?” He got up and made his way to the kitchen cabinets, where he searched through some drawers until he found what he was looking for: the folded yellow pages of a letter. He slapped it on the table as he sank back onto his chair.
“Fyodor’s wife—she has left him. He received this letter today: She writes she does not want anymore to live in Magnitogorsk. Uncivilized. Dirty. No culture. She has gone back to Leningrad, to live with his friend.”
Florence lifted the pages and tried to make out the tiny, delicate hand. She glanced at Sergey. “Are you afraid of getting a letter like that?”
He was sitting in his motorcycle-saddle way again, his knees apart. “I am not married. You know that.”
“I don’t know much about you.”
“I was married. Now I am not. It was only one year. We tried. We ended it.” This explanation seemed barely to interest him.
“Just like that.”
“Divorce, marriage—these are simple things where I am from.”
She held the letter in her hand. “Many things seem more simple there.”
“No,” he said in a bored voice. “Only that.”
Their exchange had become a wilted echo of their earlier conversation. From the other side of the bedroom door came moaning sounds and a hacking cough. “I need to go,” she said. But his hand reached out for her wrist.
The compulsion to work, to be useful, to escape futility’s grip—maybe these things foretold a deeper wish to be used up. Eradicated. Maybe the pleasures of being backed up against the wall, of having your head wrenched back by its curly hair until you puffed shallow breaths, perhaps these satisfactions and others came from the same obliterating impulse that made the soul search for a cause worthy of consuming it. The varied delights of being lifted and flung across a sofa bed, and having your raw backside pressed into its scratchy fibers while a man pinned back your fists and crushed his erection into your thigh, and washed the dusty residue of your thoughts away with a roughly stroking tongue on your nipple—maybe it all arose from a primordial yearning to be completely spent.
Sergey’s face, hovering over her, was deadly serious. No jokes now. None of the outlandish, hick excitement of the foreigner. His claim over her body was that of a man who might have been her lover for years. When he came, his back broke out in one fierce sweat. But in that very instant he was off of her, for even in this paroxysm of passion he had the foresight, or experience, to pull out and roll down onto the floor. He lay there in his gorgeous natural state for several minutes while Florence stretched out lengthwise on the cushions and let her head fall back. In her ears was the unexpected loudness of birds at dawn. The soreness between her legs brought curious fulfillment, if not exactly pleasure. She placed her hand between her thighs and confirmed the loss of her innocence with the ferric smudge on her fingertips. Sergey was lying on the floor, his eyes still shut. He seemed to have noticed nothing. Her head was pounding from sleeplessness, she had bits of egg white in her hair, her breath very likely stank, and she was shivering as if from a chill. And yet she had never felt so light-headed in her own desirability, so awakened to herself, so animated and frightened by the awareness of her own freedom. Despite her veneration for Emma Goldman, with boys her age she had never done anything more than neck. Only five hundred miles from home could she have allowed this to happen. She tried to summon up some sense of solemnity for the loss of her prolonged girlhood, but came up with nothing but a bird’s song.
Through the upside-down window Florence could see the first pale prairie light entering the sky. She got up and found her bloomers, a big cotton pair that suddenly mortified her. She watched the movement of his chest, the rise and fall of the soft dark hair on his belly, and the thicker hair around the impressive but now harmless member that Sergey, his eyes closed, displayed with uninhibited candor. She had an overpowering urge to cup her fingers around it, to test its reality with a touch.
Her hand did not get a centimeter past his stomach before Sergey cracked open one eye. He peered up at her like a smiling Cyclops, then abruptly curled himself up and planted a kiss between her collarbones.
“Your smell—what is it?”
/> She hesitated. “I don’t know. Eggs? I should go.”
“Why?” he said, trailing his prickling cheek down her sternum.
“I don’t want him to find me here.”
“Don’t worry. He will be sleeping until noon.”
Quickly, she slipped her dress on over her arms and head. “What was Fyodor going on about last night?”
Sergey had found his trousers and put them on without bothering to look for his underwear. “He doesn’t believe half of what he says, and the other half he can’t remember.”
“I mean about you coming back with lint in your pockets?”
Sergey took a thoughtful breath and buttoned his pants. “McKee is still refusing to change the mill plans. We cannot agree to the terms that make us buy all the steel they require. They claim there isn’t enough time to make the changes we want.”
“Will it really take that long?”
“Maybe for them. For me and Fyodor, we could do it in three weeks—while we have original plans to work from.”
“Then they ought to let you do it. They complain that you sit around doing nothing.”
Sergey gave her an indulgent smile. “Flora, you lovely girl. It is not enough to have blueprint. We also need manuals.”
“What manuals?”
“With specifications—strength, density, material properties.” He sighed. “For conversion.”
“McKee’s got a whole library of technical manuals on the sixth floor.”
Sergey sighed again, as if communication was impossible. “But who will let us on the sixth floor?”
“It’s not classified material. Just ask permission.”
“It is easier, I find, to ask for forgiveness than for permission, Florence.”
“What are you saying?”
He touched his temple. “I should not have said anything.”
The sober, reasonable part of her mind told her not to pursue this any further. She watched Sergey button his shirt over his splendid chest.
“Wait,” she said. “Tell me.”
Sergey rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “They do not want to lose their commission from Burlington Steel. They do not want to admit the plant can be built from cheaper materials. There is only one way to defang their argument, to show them—yes, it can be done!” He’d gotten to the top button of his shirt. “So you see now—our difficulty.”
The difficulty, as Florence saw it, was that the Russians needed desperately to industrialize, while McKee and Burlington were conspiring to inflate the costs and squeeze them out of their last kopek. “It’s hardly fair to you,” she said.
Sergey shrugged. “ ‘Business is business’ is the expression, no?”
“I suppose I could obtain those manuals for you,” she heard herself say.
He looked up at her with an almost loving surprise. “You would really do this?” He seemed unsure suddenly. “No, I cannot ask you….” But there was in his imploring eyes already that joyful mix of gratitude and admiration that some part of her seemed to need like oxygen.
“We’d have to be careful,” she said.
Coming up as an only child in pre-Revolution Petersburg, Sergey Sokolov had never thought of himself as a member of the proletariat. His father, Arkady, a toolmaker’s son, had risen to the rank of foreman at the Petrograd Metal Works, where he adapted designs of Rateau turbines and boilers of Vulcan destroyers that the foundry was commissioned to make for the French and Germans. Sergey’s mother, Yelena, was a sought-after seamstress to society ladies. Together the Sokolovs brought home enough money to enroll Sergey in one of the city’s top boys’ schools: the Second Petrograd Gymnasium, near St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Attending class with the children of civil servants, doctors, merchants, clergymen, and a few of the lesser nobles, Sergey was expected to further his father’s ascent, to become a top engineer in one of the many factories that were rising like a brick shadow around the marble-colonnaded city. By the time Sergey was in the sixth form, Arkady was in his fifties, occupying his own office in the workshop, fixing workers’ hours and pay and waiting for his chance to retire on the family-owned plot outside the city. Then the Revolution came, and Arkady’s dreams of moving to the countryside were cut short. The Metal Works were nationalized, the Sokolovs’ plot was requisitioned by the government for a workers’ sanatorium, and the Sokolovs were forced to suffer mutely as their five-room apartment was subdivided and stuffed with shrill, illiterate workers who promptly destroyed their floors and furniture.
To the young Sergey, whose classes had dwindled with the sudden emigration of his classmates, the Revolution was a mixed prospect. He’d seen the cretins it brought to power, endured his father’s complaints about the new Metalworkers’ Union, dominated no longer by master craftsmen like himself but by unskilled dolts; he had watched his mother suffer as their new “neighbors” flung muddied boots on her brocade chairs. At the same time, he thrilled at Russia’s industrial ambitions: building steel mills in Siberia and oil refineries on the Caspian Sea, laying out factories in Stalingrad. As a boy enamored of machinery, he shared the Bolsheviks’ love of bigness. His parents’ weariness could not dampen the boy’s wonder at the great dams thrown across broad rivers, the awesome machines so complex he couldn’t imagine how human hands had built them or how human minds had conceived them. He knew that, to ensure a place for himself in the new order and among the rising ranks of young engineers, he would need to join the youth division of the Party: the Komsomol. But at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute this proved to be far from simple.
Not long after he entered, the first purge of the student body was conducted. He was called into a room and questioned by an unfriendly troika including the flabby-faced Party Committee secretary in a worker’s leather jacket. They asked him questions about his mother and father, his grandparents, uncles, his former classmates at the gymnasium. With a father who had been a foreman in a tsarist factory, there was now some doubt as to whether the Sokolovs were true proletarians or “hostile class elements.” Sergey tried to answer the questions modestly and directly, concealing his fear and pretending to show no insult. He said that his father, a simple man, had been promoted gradually from the shop floor to the lowest rung of management because of his skill. He spoke of how he himself had worked for a year on the same factory floor, in a cold-shop, before attending the Polytech. At the end of the purge, all students with a bourgeois class background were expelled. He had been spared, though barely. From that moment on, he understood that he would have to work harder than the others to keep his nose clean. His first two attempts to join the Komsomol were unsuccessful. It wasn’t until his penultimate year that he was given another chance, thanks to the endorsement of a girl—a combustible little blonde named Olga, a Komsomol organizer he’d somehow become involved with. Taken with his impressive height and aloofness, she’d pursued Sergey as a conquest. He had discovered early on that, though the tall, slender beauties were shy around him, something about his size provoked the scrappy ones to want to climb him like alpineers.
It was the year the government had started collectivizing the farms, and Olga told him she’d help him get his Komsomol ticket in the fall if he did “social work” with her brigade over the summer. That June, he exchanged his britches for a pair of overalls and traveled with a student brigade to the town of Tikhvin to educate the peasants in the surrounding villages.
In many of the villages that were forced to collectivize, the peasants had already slaughtered their animals so that they would not have to hand them over to the collectives. He’d never seen a town market so full of meat. Shanks of cow and pork attracted hordes of flies. In the village of Luginy, the peasants were prosperous and did not want to join the commune. Inside a church that had had its steeple lopped off, the young communists showed the peasants pictures of buxom women in wheat fields with full baskets on their shoulders, and the gleaming tractors and combines they’d get when they joined the collective farm. “First give us the machines; then we’l
l think about joining your collective,” one silver-haired farmer had said, drawing cheers from the others.
“Old kulak thinks he’s clever,” Olga had remarked afterward.
“What makes you think he’s a kulak?” Sergey had wondered. “He doesn’t hire anyone—he’s got his three huge sons to help him till his land.”
“Don’t be naïve, Seryozha. No one does that well working the land with his own hands. The man is a kulak, and we will find someone to testify to it.”
At the following week’s meeting of the Regional Party Committee, a skinny, half-drunk peasant had shown up to say the old man had hired him during harvests, and to throw in that the farmer was a speculator who bought pig bristles from the villagers, made them into hairbrushes, and sold them at a profit in town. The whole thing had been a farce. Olga had practically fed him the script; Sergey guessed that she’d bought him off with a few bottles of vodka. He had not challenged her at the meeting, but protested to her privately afterward: “Plenty of peasants do a little trading on the side. It’s not the truth to call him a speculator.”
“You’re so silly, Seryozha. What gets recorded at our meeting, that’s the truth.” The troublemaker was going to poison the whole village. Sergey’s impulse to defend him showed only that he didn’t have “real class consciousness,” just intellectual idealism—the cowardice of the bourgeoisie, Olga said. “You want your Komsomol ticket, but you’re afraid of building socialism.” He never learned what happened to the old peasant who’d stood up at the meeting. Most likely his house and land had been requisitioned, and he, along with his three sons, had been shipped off to Siberia.
That summer he had learned how the Revolution was really made.
And so it was strange that, so many years later, so far away from home, he was thinking about Olga again. Something in Florence reminded him of her. Not a physical resemblance—though both fit his type: mouthy women who knew how to look good in a dress. What they shared was a certain impulsivity, like little girls wanting to dispense with some chore as quickly as possible. Unlike himself, who weighed every word and action carefully, they acted first and thought afterward. Florence had helped them outwit the engineers at McKee. And for what benefit to herself? None, as far as he could see. And now, with her landlords away visiting family, she’d helped herself to their Chevrolet, without so much as thinking to check the oil or bring a proper map.
The Patriots Page 8
