FLORENCE RETURNED HOME A week later, while the passport she’d cradled accompanied its owner on a steamer to Europe. At the Finnish border, it was thumbed and inspected by a Soviet official whose spectacles gleamed with sedate hostility. Sergey was taken into a small penal room and questioned about his voyage. His answers did not matter. There was nothing he could say that could dispel the permanent cloud of suspicion he had earned for his service to his country. This was the price he would pay, forever, for his American summer. On the table between Sergey and his interrogator lay the items he had brought back: a set of fine drafting tools, a Gillette shaving kit, bone cufflinks, cologne. They had been vigorously picked out of his bloated suitcase. In America, each purchase had beckoned to him with its promise of sophistication and quality, but on the table, the items seemed to be coated with shame, proof of his lust for the gaudiness of a decadent nation. The customs agent had him sign for them. “Something’s missing,” Sergey said suddenly. It was a carved Lucite brooch he would not have dared to mention had he not bought it for his mother. “File a complaint,” the agent said, his eyes radiant with mockery.
Clouds began to storm as his train crossed into Russia. It was late September, the intimate warmth of summer erased by a cold haze of rain. He shut his eyes. The thunder above was like the sound of an enormous door closing shut behind him.
In March, while snows were still falling on the half-excavated hills of Magnitogorsk, Sergey received a letter from Florence. This was not a complete surprise. He had written her first himself, care of the Soviet Trade Mission in New York, a holiday greeting timed to arrive just before New Year’s. He had discovered that he missed her after all, or at least missed their Cleveland summer, the heat and abandon of it, Florence’s careless daring and outspokenness. In Magnitogorsk, things were not going well; construction of the rolling mill had been bedeviled by delays and breakages, thanks to the new management’s cutting corners to appease Moscow’s unrealistic norms. He had made the mistake of speaking up openly about this and run afoul of the wrong people. None of this did he report to Florence in his letter.
—
THE ENVELOPE THAT ARRIVED at her desk at Amtorg was as thin as cigarette paper, and when she unsealed it, a photograph fell out. It was Sergey—a small figure standing in front of a great brick building. He was wearing a white undershirt tucked into a pair of high-waisted dungarees, shielding his eyes from the strong Central Russian sun. He wished her a happy new year, and hoped his letter would arrive before 1934 did. The construction of the rolling mill was coming along tremendously. He wished to thank her for her help with its design, everything she had done for him, for being his guide and a beacon of kindness in a foreign country, and especially for making his summer in America a time he would never forget. He had just finished reading a novel by “your great American writer Jack London.” A Daughter of the Snows, it was called, and its heroine, Frona Welse, had reminded him of Florence. A “brave, natural woman” was how he described either Frona, or Florence, or both. He saw now how lucky he was that life’s twists of fate had brought them together, if only for a short time. It made him very happy to think about those weeks.
Reading these lines, Florence felt overtaken by a strange impulse to cross and recross her legs. Her body’s intuitive response to the words on the page—merely to the Cyrillic bend of Sergey’s penmanship—was like the pulse of a looping current. Hearing his voice in her head, Florence felt haunted by the ghost of every kiss, every touch from the summer. Was this open flow of feeling on his part a quirk of translation? she wondered. Were the unmistakable romantic notes quite standard fare in Russian? She scanned the rest of the pages. With a heroic-sounding enthusiasm that seemed somewhat uncharacteristic, Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. “How far we’ve come. How much work there is still to do!” The picture, he wrote, did not convey the proper scale of the work being done. She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes.
Florence reread the last line with a turbulent flip in her stomach. Was this an invitation?
—
IN THE COURSE OF the next several weeks, she attempted to compose a response. She could not manage to match the broad spirit of Sergey’s letter. Her bid to strike the same easy romantic note seemed shot through with lovesick desperation. She wished to pour out her whole gloomy heart, but did not want to compromise his image of her as Jack London’s physically splendid and brave heroine. It was late in January when she finally managed to write something on her portable.
JANUARY 23, 1934
Dear Sergey,
Your letter arrived like a diamond from the sky. It brought me joy to again see the triumphant and carefree face that I remember so well from Cleveland. All that now seems part of a dream. Looking at snow on top of dead leaves, or smelling the rain, I’ve sometimes wondered if it was a dream. Perhaps this is only because, ever since I’ve returned, it often feels to me that the real and important portion of my life is happening elsewhere.
You may have read in the newspapers that our President has declared an end to the odious dry laws. So our New Year was quite merrier than last. Aside from that, there’s little that’s changed—I won’t bore you with all of that. People say things are improving thanks to Roosevelt. Maybe so, but not fast enough for me. You often said I ought to see with my own eyes the majesty of Magnitogorsk. I think I shall.
She had not planned to write this, but as soon as she put down the words, she knew they were true.
I fear if I stay I may fall into the ranks of the indifferent, or, worse, the eloquent malcontents. This thought frightens me more than anything else. Whatever the name of this new craving in me—to see the world firsthand—it’s finally come into bloom. Now that I have diligently resolved to see the Soviet Union with my eyes, it should not be too difficult to secure a visa through Amtorg connections. I hope to set sail by Spring.
Perhaps you and I might meet again after all.
Yours,
Flora
Her letter had not been entirely truthful: her desire to leave her job and country did not come about wholly voluntarily. The word of Florence’s breach of loyalties had traveled back to New York before she had. Scoop was sympathetic but unhelpful. “You’ve got a good heart, Florence; you did what you thought was the right thing, the fair thing, at the time.” Only, the first rule of diplomacy, he reminded her, wasn’t to say or do the right things, but to avoid saying and doing the wrong things.
“But I thought you wanted me to help the Russians,” she’d said, sounding more helpless than necessary.
“What I said,” he clarified, “is to try to get the McKee men and Magnitogorsk boys to find a compromise.”
It occurred to Florence that Scoop would have solved the problem by inviting men like Clement and Knur Anderson to palaver over roast pig and home brew—the sort of male statecraft it would have been impossible for someone like her—rigid, appeasing, Eastern-born, young, a woman—to carry off. Yet, were she to point this fact out to Scoop, she knew she would sound even more pitiful. Already the disappointment in her boss’s voice was more painful than any reproach.
Amtorg would soon be closing its doors. Roosevelt had recognized the Soviet Union over the protests in Congress. As Scoop predicted, there would soon be a consulate in Washington, with trade no longer having to be laundered through a complex web of executive and Amtorg emissaries. Scoop had succeeded in getting himself hired by a group of export managers to lobby Roosevelt’s new people for lower tariffs and open trade. “It appears this old sled dog is going solo,” he told her. There was no question now of his getting her a job at the new embassy.