—
ESSIE HAD BROUGHT ALONG sour drops and saltines to prevent seasickness and fed them to Florence while enormous waves pounded the side of the ship. When the storm abated, she took Florence under an umbrella up to the deck for fresh air. Scaly purple clouds filled the sky. Florence held on to her friend’s arm and tried not to look down into the churning black water. She was glad to have Essie there. Clumsy as she’d appeared at first, Essie proved herself to be uncommonly knowledgeable in all practical matters involving travel. She forbade Florence to stay indoors all day and told her to look at the horizon as often as possible. Once the sea calmed, she advised her on everything else. Not to convert her dollars at the Russian border: “They’ll give you a standard rate of two rubles for the dollar. Don’t take it. Once you’re inside, you can exchange them for twenty-five on the dollar.” She instructed her not to let the Russian border guards confiscate her typewriter: “Tell them you’ve got official papers for it. Make a fuss and say you’ll call the embassy.” A little palm-grease always helped: “Have you got any jazz records, or some pretty tins of face powder?”
Florence bit her lip. She’d packed some rouge and perfume, but had planned to use them when she saw Sergey.
“The guards will give you some line,” Essie went on, “about how they’re decadent and spread moral corruption. Don’t argue. Just let them take something home to their wives or mothers.”
—
AFTER MOST OF THE PASSENGERS disembarked at Danzig, the ship was quieter. By the time they reached the Latvian coast, the sea had acquired a softer, Baltic hue. In 1934, the Baltic States had yet to be absorbed into the Soviet Union under the gentleman’s swap of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Florence would have seen neither Soviet boots nor German ones on the large, broken cobblestones that paved Libau’s narrow streets. In Riga, no red banners marred the high-pitched ochre roofs. Florence and Essie took a room in an old-fashioned boarding house and woke up to the clear, reverberating toll of church bells. In the freshness of morning everything around them suggested a miniature kingdom. In Riga, they purchased tickets for the Rizhsky railroad station in Moscow. The train that arrived for them was bright red, fitted with polished brass ornaments—one of the grand old locomotive models that no longer ran in America. Instead of coal, it burned wood, and had to stop frequently in the dense forest to refuel. Along the tracks, men in logger boots and woolen hats piled pyramids of timber to sell to the railroad. Closer to the Russian border, Florence noticed, the wood sellers all had vanished.
Dark pine forests flashed by, drew closer, retreated. “Look, Florence! Red Army soldiers,” Essie cried excitedly as the train slid into a wooden depot supporting a roof with painted letters that urged workers of all lands to unite. Inspectors dressed as soldiers in khakis strutted onto the train and commenced with their searches. They confiscated Essie’s Life magazines and Silver Screens, which she’d packed strategically toward the top of her luggage. (In fact, Florence was quick to note, Essie looked positively exultant with the privilege of giving away her “anti-Soviet” literature.) When the search was over, Essie assured Florence that she too had made out well, losing only her last pack of Camels and a bottle of Shalimar. Nevertheless, the first feeling Florence experienced upon crossing the Soviet border was a sense not of wonder but of violation. She told herself it was foolish to be angry when most of their American money was still safely tucked in their brassieres. Equally foolish was to believe that such searches didn’t occur at every border station in the world. Any other kind of reasoning would have required too severe a downgrade of her hopes about the new land she was about to enter.
Soon her eyes were once more alighting on the majestic pines and flickering birches, little houses with carved windows like those she’d seen in her grandmother’s storybooks. But it wasn’t long before this mythic countryside peeled away abruptly to reveal the great hammering, bumping, screeching city.
In no time, the swaying train corridor filled with people, and Essie and Florence were funneled along with their trunks into the echoey swarm of Moscow’s Rizhsky Station. Out on the huge square, the chrome fenders of Soviet Fords flashed reflections of horses and wooden carriages. Bearded coachmen from the era of Tolstoy mingled on the curb with pomaded taxi drivers. Essie did the haggling, in a rough Russian the drivers attributed to Baltic rather than Bronx origins. And soon the girls were off, rolling at deadly speed along the Prospekt Mira, their GAZ nearly colliding with rumbling trams overloaded with people flattening their bodies against doors and windows.
It was June in Moscow, a late-afternoon hour thick with brick dust from torn-up cobblestones and drifting fluff from ripe poplar trees. On the curbs, crowds ten and fifteen deep jostled in front of shops.
“Oh, Florence, did you ever think it would be so tremendous?” Essie remarked. And, indeed, its proportions seemed to Florence Mesopotamian. Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate donkey tracks had been torn open and replaced with boulevards broader than two or three Park Avenues. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were being detoured onto planks around enormous construction pits. Derricks poked out of excavated trenches where a vast underground rail system was being drawn. A smell of sawdust and metal filings hung in the air.
Essie was dropped off first, at Baumanskaya, a neighborhood their driver called the German District. “I’ll miss you so, Essie!” Florence said, embracing her friend tightly. She was afraid that if she let Essie go she might start sobbing and not stop. She knew no one else in this city, and suddenly felt that fact in all its overwhelming terror. Essie did no better at holding in her tears. “I wish you were staying, Florie. Be my sister here. You could get work at the institute. Well, I can see your mind’s made up.” She removed her tear-streaked glasses and handed Florence a slip with her address. “Find me when you’re back from Magnitogorsk.” And then she stood on the street a long time as the black GAZ pulled her friend back into the currents of late-afternoon traffic.
—
THE HOTEL NOVOMOSKOVSKAYA WAS in the very heart of the old city, and the attention Florence received from the concierge was in every way swift and agreeable until she was told to pay four nights in advance.
“But I’m only staying one or two nights.”