It was the fate of Magnitogorsk to forever pull things toward itself. Long before the mountain’s mythical magnetite lured the first Bolshevik scouts on horseback; before the twitch of compass needles enticed prospectors to ride to the barren frontiers of the tsar’s empire; before the day when the Bashkir nomads fighting off their Mongol invaders watched, astonished, as their attackers’ arrows flew backward, attracted by the magnetic hill; long before the hill itself was even a wrinkle on the lower lip of the Urals—an invisible force was already pulling Europe into its inescapable collision with Asia, drawing the continents toward their millennia-long turbulent marriage.
Florence Fein was neither the first nor the last pilgrim to be called into the city’s orbit. By the time her train came to the end of its long crawl through the steppes and rounded the city on the mountain, the sight she took in through her dust-smeared window was of a gargantuan anthill of crisscrossing rails, refineries, and furnaces rising out of a fog of their own making.
The train’s corridor was cluttered with the bundles, baskets, and trunks of those who’d arrived looking for work. Before her journey, Florence had imagined the Russian East to be something like the American West: a territory filled with swells of settlers. What she discovered instead was a boundless emptiness that went on without beginning or end. The few people she’d seen at by-stations along the tracks stood silently, holding up their strings of onions or parsnips, pushing the food through the train windows for a kopek. Their eyes had a mad, hollow look that shamed and frightened Florence. At Amtorg she had heard rumors of a famine in the South but could not imagine that these bearded invalids could be its refugees. The passengers on her pilgrimage were of a reassuringly different sort: they’d come on board with hard-boiled eggs, bread, and sugar cubes that they sucked while they sipped their tea, happy to share. Her trip had required four changes and taken eight days and nights. Florence’s response to the sight of the Magnetic City was physical: she scratched her itching scalp. Her sebum-ripe hair, her pimple-sown chin, her bile-shriveled stomach, and the swampy mess in her underwear were all ready for the relief of urban comforts. Her body would be disappointed.
At the brick fortress of the arrival center, a tiny, beetle-browed woman rattled off a series of rapid questions about Florence’s point of origin and skills, and placed her name on a list of construction trusts. She would be commanded to go where they wanted her, the woman informed Florence when she offered herself up as a translator. She was given a slip with the number of her barracks, which proved impossible to find even for the boy assigned to help her. Residential Magnitogorsk, it was becoming clear, was one giant barracks, composed of identical rows of whitewashed huts. In the pink evening air, mosquitoes and flies swarmed and hummed, taking nips at Florence’s unaccustomed flesh as she picked her way through puddles of mud. “Your villa,” the boy said, leaving Florence and her trunk in front of Dormitory 19. From between a pair of laundry lines, a woman stared at her. In reply to Florence’s timid smile, she looked Florence over unceremoniously, pulled down her sheet, and walked back into her darkened quarters. Perhaps it was at this moment that Florence understood how truly lost she was. That she had no idea what she was doing here was a simple fact that her previous two months of travel had somehow kept hidden from her. To survive the ship and train journeys she had told herself that her real problem was that she’d lived too comfortably for too long. It was her love of comfort that had kept her, as Marx warned, in a bourgeois prison and out of the galvanizing medium of History. Now, looking around her makeshift, sordid habitat, she clung to this idea as fiercely as she’d clung to the railing on the Bremen, to keep her stomach from going weak with recoil. The barracks, she discovered, had no amenities at all—no kitchens or bathrooms or showers. Water came from an outdoor pump that was now broken, forcing the women and men who shared the “dormitory” to walk a half-kilometer to the next pump. The outhouse was nothing more than a covered shed, split by an immodest partition that divided a row of five holes for men from the five for women. One couldn’t step into this so-called toilet without opening one’s mouth to breathe. Closing one’s nose and eyes was a necessary measure, not only to avoid the stench and sight but to keep the mucous membranes from being stung by a thick cloud of powdered chloride. After this exquisite persecution it was a relief indeed to return to the overcrowded barracks, where a dozen makeshift Primus stoves sent the odor of cabbage soup and kerosene fumes down the hallways.
Her room was shared by three others: a mother and daughter, and a village girl whose pregnancy was already showing through her heavy overalls. The mother, who might have been thirty-five or fifty, touched Florence’s navy wool jacket on the first night, tactlessly fingered her houndstooth blouse, and immediately offered Florence two hundred rubles for them. Florence’s shock at this mercantile greeting was offset only by the greater shock that a working-class woman would have so much cash. Florence had as yet no idea that money was plentiful in Magnitogorsk. There was simply not much on which to spend it. The shelves of the workers’ store abounded with loaves of black bread but had no butter. Boxes of artificial coffee were stacked in pyramids, but sugar was a rarity. The mother, who was in fact thirty-nine and old enough to remember the civil war, claimed that the store clerks who tore off the coupons in her food book were lying when they told her that the sugar industry had under-fulfilled its plan for the year. There had been sugar during the war, after all. And now there was no war! She found much in the Magnetic City preposterous. “A confirmed amerikanka in one bed, and in the other, this one who got herself knocked up by the king of England,” she sneered.
“And you can fuck off, you dirty old Troktist!” the village girl spat back.