In reply, Sue turned off the light and took Jack’s hand to pull him toward her.
Jack let her do it. He was finding it difficult to think, his senses were dulled, and the contact with Sue didn’t help. He wanted to resist, but the come that she said softly into the darkness pulled him in like a whirlpool sucking down a drifting raft. Somehow he stripped down to his underpants. Sue wrapped him in the blanket and pressed herself against him. They were in total blackness. In the silence, Jack could only hear the young woman’s breathing near his ear. He felt Sue’s bare legs, soft and warm, entangle in his, while her arms pulled him closer. He tried to stop and think, but her hands, stroking his chest and hair, made it impossible, dragging him toward a place of confusion and desire, where the faces of Sue, Elizabeth, and Natasha blended into one, appeared and disappeared, offered themselves, then moved away.
He was unable to string together two thoughts. He let himself go.
He couldn’t recall ever having such a bad hangover. His head felt as if it were filled with razor blades that cut through his brain with the slightest movement. He lay in silence, trying to remember what had happened, but all he could rough out was a collection of vague images in which the banjo music and the vodka merged with a tornado of kisses and caresses. However, Sue’s naked body beside him in the bed left no room for doubt. He got up and woke her. They had to hurry. They had only fifteen minutes before the vehicle that was taking them to the factory set off, and he didn’t want to miss it. They quickly got dressed and ran to the communal bathroom in the corridor, which, because of the late hour, was deserted. Then they went down the stairs as they finished tidying their hair and climbed into the van just as it was leaving. Neither of them said anything about what had happened. They endured the drive in silence, saying not so much as a good-bye when they separated to go to their respective destinations, she to a cleaning gang and he to his dangerous undertaking.
The first day of work felt like carting a mountain rock by rock, but at least it meant Jack could forget about the consequences of his encounter with Sue and see the various buildings that made up the gigantic factory.
As instructed by Wilbur Hewitt, he went first to the equipment warehouse to fetch the white overalls that he’d have to wear at all times as a uniform, and which would identify him as an American supervisor. On the apron, which had been used and was made of a coarse fabric, a badge showed the name “George McMillan,” the sick engineer he was replacing. They also supplied a notebook, a pencil, a rubber eraser, an articulated wooden ruler, a gauge, some woolen gloves, an ushanka, and a pair of felt boots.
From there, accompanied by Anatoly Orlov, the Soviet operative who’d been assigned to him as a guide while he familiarized himself with his duties, he had continued to the press shop, where the stamping took place. Much like at the Ford River Rouge factory in Michigan, the noise from the presses was deafening. Though Jack knew the process inside and out, Orlov insisted on explaining that the steel sheets arrived at the guillotines in huge rolls, before being cut into rectangular plates; then trimmed, pressed, and die-stamped, they were shaped into the parts that would make up the bodywork. However, from that point on, any similarity between the two factories was purely superficial.
The Ford River Rouge Complex in Dearborn was a gigantic miracle of efficiency and technology, where each element—whether man, supplies, or machinery—slotted together with all the other elements with the precision of a clock mechanism. But that was not all. Of the more than one hundred thousand workers employed at the Dearborn installation, five thousand had the exclusive task of keeping the facilities in impeccable condition: hosing down the floors, emptying the waste containers every two hours, cleaning the windows, and repainting the walls and pillars in the company’s blue and white. At the Rouge, one could lick the floor without ingesting a single piece of dirt. Doing so at the Avtozavod would be a sure way to poison oneself to death.
Wherever Jack looked, he struggled to find a spot that wasn’t a dumping ground. Metal shavings covered the floors, piles of off-cuts and rusty components shared the space with scattered supply carts, and dozens of crates of spare parts were strewn throughout the corridors, as if they’d been abandoned there years before. The Avtozavod’s approach to order and cleanliness was like letting a herd of pigs into an operating theater and expecting them to keep it sterile.
And yet, despite the mess and chaos of the facility itself, what really struck Jack most was the inefficiency and lax attitude with which the Soviets seemed to undertake each task. Far from being highly trained operatives, the people responsible for production resembled an army of peasants who handled the welding torches with as much finesse as if they were herding goats.
Amid the flying sparks and the penetrating smell of solder that stuck in the throat, Jack examined them closely. Many of the men were no older than twenty, but their faces, consumed by work, were those of men much older. The women, who were almost as numerous as the men, covered their hair with white scarves to protect it from the dangerous machinery. Near the older men were open vodka bottles, despite the signs that prohibited drinking during working hours and the omnipresent guards, apparently more concerned with other problems. The cold was appalling, to the point that sheets of ice had formed in the corridors where there were leaks.
In America, the iron ore arrived via the River Rouge wharves on Monday morning, and it was turned into a four-cylinder automobile ready for sale by Thursday afternoon. That was efficiency, the meaning of which they did not know at the Avtozavod.
He took note of everything he saw but left his reflections for another day. He went to the warehouse where they’d stored the machines damaged during the storm, and spent the rest of the morning explaining to the operatives what they had to do to repair them.
At the end of the day, Jack found Harry Daniels and his son in the press shop canteen, a vast warehouse-like structure with hundreds of tables set out in lines. While they waited in the line to buy their meal tickets, Jack asked about their first day’s work.
“Not too bad,” replied old Harry. “Cold as hell, but I’m happy to be manning the presses again.”
Jack nodded. He’d persuaded Hewitt to assign Harry and his elder son, Jim, to the mold repair shop, where the most skilled operatives were needed to deal with the faults. It hadn’t been difficult. In stamping techniques, the Daniels family was highly experienced. “And your Soviet workmates? Are they friendly?” Jack pressed them.