“It’s ‘Trotskyite,’ you imbecile! She ought to learn to write her name before she takes mouthfuls like that,” the woman said to Florence.
They asked her why she did not live in the foreigners’ settlement at Beryozovka, a cozy cul-de-sac tucked between two hills and rumored to be equipped with running water. Her best answer was that she had come not on a specialist’s contract but as a volunteer. “No straw mattresses and broken stools in America that you were so eager to come here?” inquired the daughter. Florence tried, in reply, to paint a bleak picture of the hardships of the working class in the United States (she now counted herself among their number). But neither the mother nor the daughter could take her eyes off Florence’s laced leather boots. Had she simply said she’d come to Magnitogorsk looking for an old sweetheart, they might have happily drawn her into the warm comfort of their bosoms. But she was too proud to admit to herself, let alone to them, a fact that might recast her entire noble journey not by the lantern of courage but by the murkier bed lamp of longing.
Her foreign credentials did have some advantage: she was sent to work for a foreman supervising construction of a chemical plant. The American consultants assigned to oversee the plant’s assembly had abruptly returned to Pennsylvania when the Russians had started paying them in worthless rubles instead of gold dollars. Similar exoduses were happening all over the chaotic camp. Foundation pits yawned in the earth like primordial craters, filling up with rain and larvae. Around them, excavators and gravel washers with torn gears stood abandoned, like tired beasts at watering holes. Florence saw work that should have been done by machines being performed by human hands. Men with sharp-cornered faces and women with fleshy ones excavated dirt with short shovels, tossed gravel with ungloved hands, put into practice the doctrine of sexual equality by lugging equal loads of bricks on their equally bent backs.
Though work on the chemical plant had stalled for two months while the foreman struggled irately to make sense of the Americans’ assembly instructions, he looked less than eager to discover Florence ready to help. Pumping his short, burly arms in the air, he accused the Americans of sabotage. He denounced their designs and demonstrated his Soviet allegiance by altering them freely. In spite of his harangues he was not a frightening man. Every day the foreman informed her that a German firm would soon be taking over the work. In the meantime, he had to abide Florence.
Since the foreman had little use for her except as a Greek chorus, Florence was largely free to roam Magnitogorsk’s countless construction trusts in search of Sergey. At high noon she picked her way through brambles of barbed wire, negotiated her lace-ups down steep banks of gravel, crouched under the ungodly clanking of cranes. She inquired about Sergey at the Metalworks Park and at the coke ovens, at the lumberyards, at the Novomagnitsky Settlement and the October Settlement. Word began to spread about the foreign woman prowling for her tomcat of an engineer. Clerks eyed her from under censorious brows. On their desks were newspapers from the capital that warned of wreckers and foreign saboteurs, of capitalist spies. It was a testament to their distance from Moscow that the speculations Florence inspired took on a prurient rather than political innuendo.
She was in the Engineers’ and Technicians’ Club, idly looking at the notices pasted on the wall and waiting to speak to an organizer, when she heard a familiar voice behind her. “Do my eyes deceive me? Flora? Flora Solomonovna?”
A shiver came over her. In the incandescent glare of the gloomy entryway Florence saw a man in a tweed cap, his face covered with thick blondish stubble. “Yes, I am Flora.”
The man clapped his hands. “The belle of Cleveland! At first I thought, It can’t be, so I came closer. I’d remember your face anywhere,” he said, and then, in a quieter voice, “Fyodor Zimin—don’t you recognize me?”
Florence’s pulse quickened. Yes, she did recognize him. His cheeks were unshaven and sunken in, but it was the same man, the small blue eyes and long nose. “Fedya, of course! You’ve changed. You’re thinner.”
“Enjoying the benefits of our health-resort diet,” Fyodor said, patting his flat stomach. “As are you, it appears! Oh—this is unbelievable!”
Florence smoothed down her hair. After two weeks in Magnitogorsk, her clothes had become loose on her body, but she had not taken a look at herself in anything but the small pocket mirror she’d hung above her cot.
“I promised you I’d come,” she said, taking a light, foolish tone.
The noon whistle rang. Men in vests and greasy pants began to file in through the doors. Girls with colorful rags over their hair headed for the canteen. Fyodor took her arm. “Let’s get in line before these philistines empty the trough.”
The dining room was thick with bodies. Waitresses wove between wooden tables, ferrying enormous trays of soup bowls and mashed potatoes. A smell of fermenting cabbage cut the air. There were no spoons left for Florence. Fyodor gave her his. “Don’t worry, I always bring my own,” he said, and pulled a second aluminum spoon from his pocket. “I’m sorry our cuisine can’t be more gourmet,” he apologized while polishing his spoon with the inside of his vest.
“It’s gourmet enough for me.”
His face registered surprise at watching her hungrily slurp her fish soup. “This is better than in our cafeteria, actually,” she said. “At least the bones in your soup still have some meat on them.”
“You can’t be serious. Surely, you take your meals with other foreigners—there ought to be a few who haven’t gone home yet.”
“I’m not on a valyuta contract like the specialists.”
Fyodor’s face looked puzzled, concerned. But he didn’t investigate. “Still, you’re entitled to an Insnab book for the foreigners’ store,” he advised. “You can get all sorts of delicacies there. Butter, fish, a little Georgian wine.”
She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she hadn’t known to ask for one. “It doesn’t seem entirely fair, though, does it,” she said, “to be demanding special privileges when everyone else is making such sacrifices?”
Fyodor looked her over from under his merging brows. “You always were an odd one, Flora Solomonovna. Wait for what’s fair and soon you’ll be begging like a cripple at a cross.”