The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  —

  “SO NOW YOU’VE DECIDED to become a hooligan.” Mark Pavlovich locked the door behind him. “I can assure you that it’s a profession you won’t succeed in.”

  On the director’s desk a glint of metal caught my eyes. Guchkov walked to his desk and picked up the knife by its hard celluloid handle. “I confiscated it several days ago.” His eyes were not impressed with me: Had I really believed he would let the police search here before doing his own sweep? “They wanted to call in different boys, one by one, and talk to them. Would you have told them what you told me?”

  “They said if we didn’t help catch hooligans we’re as bad as them.” Even as I spoke these words I regretted them.

  “So you would have fingered Lyova?”

  “I don’t know,” I said challengingly.

  He lifted his chin, but his eyes did not wander from my face. His gaze was like a piercing shaft of light, searching around for some object at the bottom of a murky pond. I didn’t know what the director was looking for, only that the object he sought had a dangerous power of its own.

  “I know he did it,” I said.

  “Let’s suppose he did. By our laws, a child of twelve can be imprisoned for ten years. Have you thought of what happens to someone when he’s shipped to a juvenile colony? They leave you in a dirty barracks with no heat or light and you huddle at night over a kerosene lamp like a dog. And the others will beat you—or worse—for a stale piece of bread. Lyova won’t get any better at a place like that.”

  But I didn’t care about Lyova. I recognized this and knew that Guchkov knew it too. As though reading my mind, he said, “As for you, Yuliy Brink, you are a thinking boy. You can put two and two together. Your cleverness will make people want to use you. So let me give you some advice: Beware of your first impulse. It’s always the most noble and the most dangerous.”

  No better counsel has ever been given to me.

  However dimly, I sensed that the object Guchkov had been looking for in the murky pond of my being was that. My noble impulse, he called it. Until then, I’d never been aware of my power to hurt someone, only of being hurt myself.

  Guchkov pulled back his gaze. He looked confident that I understood him. What made him so sure of me? I still can’t say.

  The director let me out through the back door, the same way the militzia-men had gone the morning before. The brief winter day was rapidly turning dark. The smell of wood smoke hung in the icy air. A few winter birds made their sounds high up in the treetops. In between their distant squawks, I could hear another song. I followed the path that led from the back entrance to the animal sheds. There, behind a fence, I could see Baldy, wearing a hat with its earflaps pulled down, shoveling manure with a metal spade into a bucket. He was humming a melody, some jovial obscene tune about six burglars screwing an old lady to her great delight. Hearing someone come near, he stopped and rested the shovel under his elbow. His eyes met mine in a knowing, lewd grin. “Can’t get enough of that stink?” he said in an almost friendly voice. “Betcha wanna take a few swings at the slop yourself, eh?” And then, aware that he now had an audience, he sang his song with more gusto, letting his voice be carried up to the treetops.

  It was the fate of Magnitogorsk to forever pull things toward itself. Long before the mountain’s mythical magnetite lured the first Bolshevik scouts on horseback; before the twitch of compass needles enticed prospectors to ride to the barren frontiers of the tsar’s empire; before the day when the Bashkir nomads fighting off their Mongol invaders watched, astonished, as their attackers’ arrows flew backward, attracted by the magnetic hill; long before the hill itself was even a wrinkle on the lower lip of the Urals—an invisible force was already pulling Europe into its inescapable collision with Asia, drawing the continents toward their millennia-long turbulent marriage.

  Florence Fein was neither the first nor the last pilgrim to be called into the city’s orbit. By the time her train came to the end of its long crawl through the steppes and rounded the city on the mountain, the sight she took in through her dust-smeared window was of a gargantuan anthill of crisscrossing rails, refineries, and furnaces rising out of a fog of their own making.

  The train’s corridor was cluttered with the bundles, baskets, and trunks of those who’d arrived looking for work. Before her journey, Florence had imagined the Russian East to be something like the American West: a territory filled with swells of settlers. What she discovered instead was a boundless emptiness that went on without beginning or end. The few people she’d seen at by-stations along the tracks stood silently, holding up their strings of onions or parsnips, pushing the food through the train windows for a kopek. Their eyes had a mad, hollow look that shamed and frightened Florence. At Amtorg she had heard rumors of a famine in the South but could not imagine that these bearded invalids could be its refugees. The passengers on her pilgrimage were of a reassuringly different sort: they’d come on board with hard-boiled eggs, bread, and sugar cubes that they sucked while they sipped their tea, happy to share. Her trip had required four changes and taken eight days and nights. Florence’s response to the sight of the Magnetic City was physical: she scratched her itching scalp. Her sebum-ripe hair, her pimple-sown chin, her bile-shriveled stomach, and the swampy mess in her underwear were all ready for the relief of urban comforts. Her body would be disappointed.

  At the brick fortress of the arrival center, a tiny, beetle-browed woman rattled off a series of rapid questions about Florence’s point of origin and skills, and placed her name on a list of construction trusts. She would be commanded to go where they wanted her, the woman informed Florence when she offered herself up as a translator. She was given a slip with the number of her barracks, which proved impossible to find even for the boy assigned to help her. Residential Magnitogorsk, it was becoming clear, was one giant barracks, composed of identical rows of whitewashed huts. In the pink evening air, mosquitoes and flies swarmed and hummed, taking nips at Florence’s unaccustomed flesh as she picked her way through puddles of mud. “Your villa,” the boy said, leaving Florence and her trunk in front of Dormitory 19. From between a pair of laundry lines, a woman stared at her. In reply to Florence’s timid smile, she looked Florence over unceremoniously, pulled down her sheet, and walked back into her darkened quarters. Perhaps it was at this moment that Florence understood how truly lost she was. That she had no idea what she was doing here was a simple fact that her previous two months of travel had somehow kept hidden from her. To survive the ship and train journeys she had told herself that her real problem was that she’d lived too comfortably for too long. It was her love of comfort that had kept her, as Marx warned, in a bourgeois prison and out of the galvanizing medium of History. Now, looking around her makeshift, sordid habitat, she clung to this idea as fiercely as she’d clung to the railing on the Bremen, to keep her stomach from going weak with recoil. The barracks, she discovered, had no amenities at all—no kitchens or bathrooms or showers. Water came from an outdoor pump that was now broken, forcing the women and men who shared the “dormitory” to walk a half-kilometer to the next pump. The outhouse was nothing more than a covered shed, split by an immodest partition that divided a row of five holes for men from the five for women. One couldn’t step into this so-called toilet without opening one’s mouth to breathe. Closing one’s nose and eyes was a necessary measure, not only to avoid the stench and sight but to keep the mucous membranes from being stung by a thick cloud of powdered chloride. After this exquisite persecution it was a relief indeed to return to the overcrowded barracks, where a dozen makeshift Primus stoves sent the odor of cabbage soup and kerosene fumes down the hallways.

  Her room was shared by three others: a mother and daughter, and a village girl whose pregnancy was already showing through her heavy overalls. The mother, who might have been thirty-five or fifty, touched Florence’s navy wool jacket on the first night, tactlessly fingered her houndstooth blouse, and immediately offered Florence two hundred rubles for them. Fl
orence’s shock at this mercantile greeting was offset only by the greater shock that a working-class woman would have so much cash. Florence had as yet no idea that money was plentiful in Magnitogorsk. There was simply not much on which to spend it. The shelves of the workers’ store abounded with loaves of black bread but had no butter. Boxes of artificial coffee were stacked in pyramids, but sugar was a rarity. The mother, who was in fact thirty-nine and old enough to remember the civil war, claimed that the store clerks who tore off the coupons in her food book were lying when they told her that the sugar industry had under-fulfilled its plan for the year. There had been sugar during the war, after all. And now there was no war! She found much in the Magnetic City preposterous. “A confirmed amerikanka in one bed, and in the other, this one who got herself knocked up by the king of England,” she sneered.

  “And you can fuck off, you dirty old Troktist!” the village girl spat back.

  “It’s ‘Trotskyite,’ you imbecile! She ought to learn to write her name before she takes mouthfuls like that,” the woman said to Florence.

  They asked her why she did not live in the foreigners’ settlement at Beryozovka, a cozy cul-de-sac tucked between two hills and rumored to be equipped with running water. Her best answer was that she had come not on a specialist’s contract but as a volunteer. “No straw mattresses and broken stools in America that you were so eager to come here?” inquired the daughter. Florence tried, in reply, to paint a bleak picture of the hardships of the working class in the United States (she now counted herself among their number). But neither the mother nor the daughter could take her eyes off Florence’s laced leather boots. Had she simply said she’d come to Magnitogorsk looking for an old sweetheart, they might have happily drawn her into the warm comfort of their bosoms. But she was too proud to admit to herself, let alone to them, a fact that might recast her entire noble journey not by the lantern of courage but by the murkier bed lamp of longing.

  Her foreign credentials did have some advantage: she was sent to work for a foreman supervising construction of a chemical plant. The American consultants assigned to oversee the plant’s assembly had abruptly returned to Pennsylvania when the Russians had started paying them in worthless rubles instead of gold dollars. Similar exoduses were happening all over the chaotic camp. Foundation pits yawned in the earth like primordial craters, filling up with rain and larvae. Around them, excavators and gravel washers with torn gears stood abandoned, like tired beasts at watering holes. Florence saw work that should have been done by machines being performed by human hands. Men with sharp-cornered faces and women with fleshy ones excavated dirt with short shovels, tossed gravel with ungloved hands, put into practice the doctrine of sexual equality by lugging equal loads of bricks on their equally bent backs.

  Though work on the chemical plant had stalled for two months while the foreman struggled irately to make sense of the Americans’ assembly instructions, he looked less than eager to discover Florence ready to help. Pumping his short, burly arms in the air, he accused the Americans of sabotage. He denounced their designs and demonstrated his Soviet allegiance by altering them freely. In spite of his harangues he was not a frightening man. Every day the foreman informed her that a German firm would soon be taking over the work. In the meantime, he had to abide Florence.

  Since the foreman had little use for her except as a Greek chorus, Florence was largely free to roam Magnitogorsk’s countless construction trusts in search of Sergey. At high noon she picked her way through brambles of barbed wire, negotiated her lace-ups down steep banks of gravel, crouched under the ungodly clanking of cranes. She inquired about Sergey at the Metalworks Park and at the coke ovens, at the lumberyards, at the Novomagnitsky Settlement and the October Settlement. Word began to spread about the foreign woman prowling for her tomcat of an engineer. Clerks eyed her from under censorious brows. On their desks were newspapers from the capital that warned of wreckers and foreign saboteurs, of capitalist spies. It was a testament to their distance from Moscow that the speculations Florence inspired took on a prurient rather than political innuendo.

  She was in the Engineers’ and Technicians’ Club, idly looking at the notices pasted on the wall and waiting to speak to an organizer, when she heard a familiar voice behind her. “Do my eyes deceive me? Flora? Flora Solomonovna?”

  A shiver came over her. In the incandescent glare of the gloomy entryway Florence saw a man in a tweed cap, his face covered with thick blondish stubble. “Yes, I am Flora.”

  The man clapped his hands. “The belle of Cleveland! At first I thought, It can’t be, so I came closer. I’d remember your face anywhere,” he said, and then, in a quieter voice, “Fyodor Zimin—don’t you recognize me?”

  Florence’s pulse quickened. Yes, she did recognize him. His cheeks were unshaven and sunken in, but it was the same man, the small blue eyes and long nose. “Fedya, of course! You’ve changed. You’re thinner.”

  “Enjoying the benefits of our health-resort diet,” Fyodor said, patting his flat stomach. “As are you, it appears! Oh—this is unbelievable!”

  Florence smoothed down her hair. After two weeks in Magnitogorsk, her clothes had become loose on her body, but she had not taken a look at herself in anything but the small pocket mirror she’d hung above her cot.

  “I promised you I’d come,” she said, taking a light, foolish tone.

  The noon whistle rang. Men in vests and greasy pants began to file in through the doors. Girls with colorful rags over their hair headed for the canteen. Fyodor took her arm. “Let’s get in line before these philistines empty the trough.”

  The dining room was thick with bodies. Waitresses wove between wooden tables, ferrying enormous trays of soup bowls and mashed potatoes. A smell of fermenting cabbage cut the air. There were no spoons left for Florence. Fyodor gave her his. “Don’t worry, I always bring my own,” he said, and pulled a second aluminum spoon from his pocket. “I’m sorry our cuisine can’t be more gourmet,” he apologized while polishing his spoon with the inside of his vest.

  “It’s gourmet enough for me.”

  His face registered surprise at watching her hungrily slurp her fish soup. “This is better than in our cafeteria, actually,” she said. “At least the bones in your soup still have some meat on them.”

  “You can’t be serious. Surely, you take your meals with other foreigners—there ought to be a few who haven’t gone home yet.”

  “I’m not on a valyuta contract like the specialists.”

  Fyodor’s face looked puzzled, concerned. But he didn’t investigate. “Still, you’re entitled to an Insnab book for the foreigners’ store,” he advised. “You can get all sorts of delicacies there. Butter, fish, a little Georgian wine.”

  She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she hadn’t known to ask for one. “It doesn’t seem entirely fair, though, does it,” she said, “to be demanding special privileges when everyone else is making such sacrifices?”

  Fyodor looked her over from under his merging brows. “You always were an odd one, Flora Solomonovna. Wait for what’s fair and soon you’ll be begging like a cripple at a cross.”

  She was about to laugh when a sudden din in the rear made Fyodor whip his head about. A loud scraping of chairs and dropped plates made one corner of the hall thunderous while the ordinary clamor elsewhere died to a silence. Two men had jumped to their feet over some altercation Florence couldn’t hear. The atmosphere in the dining room had become theatrical. The men were pulled off each other, cursing and spitting on the floor.

  “And there you are,” Fyodor said, turning around, “the Man of Tomorrow. As our pamphleteers like to say, ‘We are not remaking ore into steel here, we are remaking people!’ It’s all true: they arrive on the train as yokels in birch-bark shoes, and we turn them into genuine proletarian jackasses.”

  Florence laughed. “How I’ve missed the pleasure of your company, Fedya.”

  “Have you really?” he said, and something like mournfulness misted hi
s eyes. “Some sense of timing you have, little girl,” he said suddenly. “To come when all the rest of your kind is leaving. Even Sergey is gone.”

  She could feel a knot in her chest, an embolus of woe sinking down like a lead ball into her stomach. “Sergey isn’t in Magnitogorsk?”

  Something of her shock was reflected back in a pantomime on Fyodor’s face. “And here I was, thinking you’d come all this way for me.”

  She stiffened, before realizing he was joking. But the naked effort of her laughter wasn’t lost on Fyodor. “Yes,” he said, nodding woefully, “our mutual friend has left for good. To Moscow. A fortunate development, considering where else he might have ended up.”

  “How do you mean? Did he get on the wrong side of someone?”

  “A perceptive bird you are,” Fyodor said and lowered his voice so that she had to lean in to hear. “Our Sergey made the mistake of complaining about under-allotment of materials, and this new director of ours said, ‘If you need them, go and find them.’ ”

  “What does that mean—‘go and find’?”

  Fyodor cast her a tender look. “Make friends, Florochka. Find the right fellow in the supply chain, split a bottle or something else, until he promises to help.”

  “But that wasn’t Sergey’s job,” she said defensively.