“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.
They had set out in the morning to beat the upwelling of heat, a jug of water in the back, and a flask of gin on the seat between them, of which she’d already dispatched at least a quarter.
“I’ll tell you what I won’t miss when I leave this place,” she said as he drove out of the city. Ringlets around her ears flapped in the wind made by the car’s bumping speed. “I won’t miss hearing those hideous radio sermons the Shits are always listening to.” “The Shits” was what she’d taken to calling the Shultes—Dwayne and Alva—whose car they’d temporarily appropriated. “Bad enough the Shits keep the radio on at all times, but when that Father Coughlin comes on with his gripes against the Negroes and the ‘Jewish Conspirators’—then they play it full-volume, probably so I’ll hear upstairs. And if it’s not him, it’s the ‘Reverend’ Smith. Always with an honorific, these cranks, these men of God, ready to tell us on whose account we’re suffering. Blame someone, just don’t question the whole rigged capitalist setup that is the U.S. of A. No, sir!”
In reply, he had laid his hand on her bare leg where the chiffon of her dress was hiked up. They stopped for an early lunch at a farmer’s roadside stand, where a chalked sign advertised peaches and baby chickens. She was so soused by then that he had to convince her to take the peaches and leave the chicks. And then she decided she wanted to see the country, so they turned the car onto a sandy road that cut through farmland. Another mistake.
The heat had started thickening. As the distance from Cleveland grew, the furrowed countryside got browner and dustier. Singed weeds leaned away from the blacktop, and crops lay flattened where thunderstorms had battered them a few days earlier. She gazed off into the distance where corn stubble met flat-bottomed clouds, and said, “I heard it all smelled like coffee roasting around here last winter.”
“Coffee—why?”
“?’Cause they were burning corn instead of coal.” She turned to look at him, eyes glazed with drink. “Imagine that?”
He had no desire to imagine it. He was in no mood to engage in another discussion about the absurdities of “the whole capitalist setup,” or to listen to another harangue about the American Way, with its unwanted goods and unwanted people.
What he wanted, in the time he had left, was to soak in the physical grandeur of a country he would surely never see again. Frankly, he had been surprised they’d given him the exit permit, considering his less-than-impeccable class origin. It was a testament to how few specialists they had to choose from—the ones who knew a screw from a lightbulb, who could speak proper Russian, let alone converse in English. Where were they? Run out. Exiled. Shot. Who was left? Narod—the sentimentalized horde known as “the People” in whose name all this epic work was being carried out. He doubted he’d receive much gratitude from them once he’d completed his duty. All he wanted now was to savor the texture of the leather seat, feel the polished wood of the steering wheel turning lightly under his fingers. Fleetingly, he allowed himself to wonder what it might be like to have a car of his own. The engineers who worked at McKee all drove the latest Fords and lived in their own houses. They weren’t better engineers than he was. It was true that the crisis of capitalism had degraded the country, but if one had a few pennies to one’s name, one was still a free man. If he were living here, he would do fine, he knew, just as these men were doing quite fine. He’d briefly considered defecting, but that was no option. They’d arrest his parents in Leningrad and exact punishment in some gruesome way he could not imagine. He stole a glance at Florence in the passenger’s seat. Her eyes were shut, as if against some pain. Her skin was flushed—from the heat or the gin, he couldn’t tell.