He turned to her with a look of stone. “You want to yell at me?”
She continued trudging, half lamely, behind him. The field and mesh fence along the road were beginning to spin. “Where are you taking us? You don’t know where this road leads!” A wave of dizziness overtook her. The sun in the west blotted out her vision. Through the haze of airborne dirt, she sank to her knees.
“Get up, Flora.”
“No,” she whimpered.
“Up!”
She shook her head.
“I am leaving.”
“Leave! Go!” She hated the need that her voice betrayed. “Go back to Russia. Go on!”
Sergey turned around and watched Florence for what seemed like a long time. She let her eyes fall shut and opened them again. Sergey was squatting on his haunches beside her. “So here it ends? In a cornfield?”
She felt sick. Sick of making him comfort her. Sick of her weak flesh. Sick of griping. Sick of her need to have all their humid late hours in her bed produce in him an equivalent in words.
“Forgive me.” She wiped the side of her wet face with her arm. “This isn’t how I want you to remember me—as some silly American woman.”
He frowned sympathetically. “Silly? You are the opposite of silly, Flora. What would I have done without you here?” He looked at her more seriously now. “But you are too moved by everything wrong in this world. You feel it too much,” he pleaded. “It is madness to burn up inside about things you cannot change.”
She felt almost idiotically flattered by his words—by his possibly false belief that her heart, her sense of justice, was capacious enough to embrace the world.
“So what is this, that you cannot go?” He touched her face and moved aside a curl. “A little dust? A little heat? A little gin?” He stretched out his hand.
She let him pull her up. On the horizon, the light had become malt-colored. A dark, backlit figure was walking along the dirt road toward them, a man in denim and a hat. In the sidelong evening rays he appeared to be surrounded by a halo.
—
THE FARMER’S HOUSE WAS only a mile south, and he soon returned with his truck and a tow chain for the Chevy.
She sat on the farmer’s porch step, a chunk of wrapped ice tucked in her armpit. Like the car, she’d suffered sunstroke. Now the ice, and the sugar water she was sipping, were restoring her back to herself. In the ginger-colored field, Sergey and the farmer worked over the engine. Soot had gummed under the seat of a valve and sprung the leak. Florence watched Sergey scrape off carbon deposits from the cylinders. He removed his shirt and placed it delicately over the valves, to protect them from the carbon’s dust. The amber light gave a deep tan to the flexed muscles of his back, a blond sheen to the hair on his chest and stomach. She could never respond indifferently to his body.
Shadows cast by the clouds moved down the earth. A bird flew over her head, trailed by its reflection. She could hear the farmer chattering while he handed Sergey tools. He was telling Sergey about the way things had changed since the war. How people used to help out one another, lending corn if someone’s crop was low. “A handshake was as good as an IOU. No more.” The farmer lifted his hat to reveal his balding, closely cropped head. “Now it’s only the bank, making you sign twenty pages for a bag of seed.” Sergey, bent over the open hood, murmured something that made the farmer laugh. Even here he could find a common language with people. How was this so simple for him, she wondered, yet so complicated for her? Did it have to do with coming from a place where egalitarianism was lived and not just talked about?
A murky little creek wound through the farmer’s front property. That was what she felt like—that nameless little rivulet. To the surface of her memory now rose a line from Middlemarch: “Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.” She had copied it into her notebook at sixteen, moved by the tragic poignancy of a mighty river forced to expend its energies into nameless streams. Even at sixteen, she had nursed visions of a great destiny for herself. Had she realized that Eliot was simply mourning the tragedy of being a woman? If she had, then she, Florence, believed she’d be spared. All around her, women were bobbing their hair, raising their hemlines, enrolling in universities, blowing cigarette smoke at a whole lot of stuffy Victorian commandments. Feminine disobedience was in vogue, and she had been too young, she saw now, to understand that vogue was all it was. She had mistaken style for matter, fashion for progress. America had not changed at all. The promise that had been dangled before her at sixteen—the possibility by which a free-spirited girl might grow up into a free woman—had, in the years since she’d actually become a woman, been withdrawn so gradually that she’d barely noticed its passing.
In her lap lay Sergey’s jacket. He’d asked her to hold it, along with the documents he kept there. She dug into the cool lining of the pocket and removed his passport. It was heavier than she expected. She cracked open the booklet and unfolded the tissue-thin “Zagran passport” stapled to one of the pages. A portrait of him, serious and pale, was glued to the bottom. A part of his face was branded by one of three identical purple stamps, applied to the page at various pressures. The paper was cool and brittle to the touch. Here it was—the engine of his mobility. Holding it made her feel landlocked. She slipped it back in his pocket. Out in the field, she watched Sergey turn the motor over a few times. It came to life with the sound of an artillery round. He climbed out of the car and strode toward her, wiping his grease-stained hands on a rag. “Princess,” he announced, “your carriage is ready.”
—