She was about to laugh when a sudden din in the rear made Fyodor whip his head about. A loud scraping of chairs and dropped plates made one corner of the hall thunderous while the ordinary clamor elsewhere died to a silence. Two men had jumped to their feet over some altercation Florence couldn’t hear. The atmosphere in the dining room had become theatrical. The men were pulled off each other, cursing and spitting on the floor.
“And there you are,” Fyodor said, turning around, “the Man of Tomorrow. As our pamphleteers like to say, ‘We are not remaking ore into steel here, we are remaking people!’ It’s all true: they arrive on the train as yokels in birch-bark shoes, and we turn them into genuine proletarian jackasses.”
Florence laughed. “How I’ve missed the pleasure of your company, Fedya.”
“Have you really?” he said, and something like mournfulness misted his eyes. “Some sense of timing you have, little girl,” he said suddenly. “To come when all the rest of your kind is leaving. Even Sergey is gone.”
She could feel a knot in her chest, an embolus of woe sinking down like a lead ball into her stomach. “Sergey isn’t in Magnitogorsk?”
Something of her shock was reflected back in a pantomime on Fyodor’s face. “And here I was, thinking you’d come all this way for me.”
She stiffened, before realizing he was joking. But the naked effort of her laughter wasn’t lost on Fyodor. “Yes,” he said, nodding woefully, “our mutual friend has left for good. To Moscow. A fortunate development, considering where else he might have ended up.”
“How do you mean? Did he get on the wrong side of someone?”
“A perceptive bird you are,” Fyodor said and lowered his voice so that she had to lean in to hear. “Our Sergey made the mistake of complaining about under-allotment of materials, and this new director of ours said, ‘If you need them, go and find them.’?”
“What does that mean—‘go and find’?”
Fyodor cast her a tender look. “Make friends, Florochka. Find the right fellow in the supply chain, split a bottle or something else, until he promises to help.”
“But that wasn’t Sergey’s job,” she said defensively.
“Well, he didn’t think so. He thought the man was just trying to take him down a notch for being a specialist who’d worked in America! He wrote a letter to Moscow that got returned to the same people it sought to expose. Anyway, he must have had one or two friends upstairs, because he got a transfer before things really got ugly.”
“Where is he now?”
Fyodor sighed. “Something in light industry. Maybe auto or metallurgy. It was a strange appointment.”
She gathered from Fyodor’s tone that, in spite of Sergey’s rescue, the assignment he’d been given was a kind of demotion.
“I thought I’d tell you before you mentioned our friend’s name to someone else you shouldn’t,” Fyodor said.
It took Florence a moment to register the meaning of his words. Blood flushed her face. She could feel herself dying of shame at the thought of Fyodor looking for her all over Magnitogorsk, the same way she’d been looking for Sergey. But he was only trying to spare her embarrassment, and now he said no more about this; his face stayed tender and serious. “Look around this place, Florochka. My suggestion: get yourself a train ticket before your last pair of stockings runs.”
In the end, it was a relief to discover that Sergey was gone. It allowed her grim adventure to remain untainted by defeat. She hadn’t, after all, arrived and then, weak-spined, turned back. She’d stayed and weathered the appalling sanitation, battled her nausea and endless hunger, endured her bullying superiors, forgiven the barracks drunks who had kept her up all night with their howling accordion songs. Now that she was saying goodbye, Florence could let herself feel some affection for the place.
She returned to her barracks to find the women outside, beating their straw mattresses with sticks. In her room she discovered the mother washing the walls with a steaming rag. All the cots had been moved to the center of the room and stripped of bedding. “July’s arrived,” the mother announced. Her daughter came in, carrying a boiling kettle. She climbed on a chair and attempted to pour boiling water on a moldlike spot in the corner of the ceiling.
“What’s up there?”
“Klopi! What else?”
Florence had never heard the word, but its meaning struck her instantly with terror: bedbugs. The girl tossed some boiling water against the wall, then got down to pour what was left onto the window casing. This was pasted with old newsprint, which was also stuffed in the frame to keep out the draft.
“Peel it all off,” the mother commanded. “And you”—she turned angrily to Florence—“go boil more water instead of gawking like a flytrap.”
“No use washing the walls,” muttered the pregnant girl, who was just walking in. “All they’ll do is crawl up onto the ceiling.”
“According to you there’s no use in washing our hands, neither,” said the mother.
—
THEY SLEPT WITH THE BEDS in the middle, close enough to give and receive one another’s body heat. Florence’s dream was an extension of her reality: sleeping, she fantasized about the public bath, of washing herself and her clothes before her train journey. Drops fell on her face, tickled her mouth. In the near-perfect blackness, she opened her eyes and saw the iron-colored night in the cockeyed window. Another drop fell on her cheek, just under her eye. Then it moved.
The first sign of madness is a howl that, once uncorked, cannot stop. Such was the sound that exploded in the room’s snore-filled darkness. Someone was scrambling to turn on the light, as Florence flailed, shrieking and grabbing at herself.
“They’ve gotten in her hair!”
“Serves her right. She ought to have covered up a thicket like that. Go calm her down.”
But no one did. Under the swinging electric bulb they all stood watching as Florence scratched her face and pulled her hair. “It’s useless,” remarked the pregnant village girl. “They’ve gripped in good now.”