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, most 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.”