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IN ALMOST EVERY WAY Florence found her work at the Foreign Currency Desk to be a mirror image of the work she’d done at Amtorg: instead of facilitating the procurement of American steel via Russian gold, she was now midwifing the exchange of Russian gold into currencies to buy up American steel—a reverse alchemy of deposits, notes, and receipts. Her new boss, Timofeyev, though less florid in his praise than Scoop, was showing himself to be a more benevolent benefactor. Having solved the question of Florence’s housing by finding her an adequate, if overpriced, room in a communal flat, he took on the matter of her Soviet education, enrolling her in a “political-pedagogy” class at the Moscow Electric Lamp Factory. From then on, Florence left work an hour early twice a week to race through the riotous crowds of the factory district and take her seat in a lecture hall full of factory girls and young construction workers. She was relieved to discover that among her peers were students even more poorly schooled in grammar and diction than she, girls and boys only a few years younger who were eager to erase their village pasts and absorb into their vernacular all manner of hyphenated idioms: klass and dialektika; materializm, induktsia, and radiofikatsia. They chewed on these words like young horses with a mouthful of feathers in their hay. And still there was something touching, even epic, in their collective effort to groom their speech into proletarian respectability. Not even at Hunter College, among the sons and daughters of immigrants, had Florence seen so much singular, fused attention, so much passion for self-betterment. She was dimly aware of a similar metamorphosis taking place in herself. Only now, while struggling to express herself simply in a new language, did she feel the burden of her lifelong exceptionalism cast aside. It was as if the very substance of herself was finding new form in a new tongue—not as polished, certainly, but somehow freed from the grip of her nervous hurry, her qualifications and apologies: undistinguished, rough, and plain as freshly cut gingham cloth. She found that the challenge of fitting in could be more exciting than the burden of standing out. She was discovering in herself a talent for picking up clichés, localisms, platitudes, and banalities of all sorts, and stringing them together so adroitly that to an unpracticed ear she sounded almost like a Muscovite. It was rudeness she courted now, for only the rudeness of strangers, cloakroom attendants, and store clerks could assure her that she was no longer regarded as a delicate, confused alien but a bona-fide Soviet.
From outward appearances, it would have seemed she’d forgotten all about Sergey. This was far from the truth. It had taken Florence only a little asking around to extrapolate from Fyodor’s hint about “metallurgy” that Sergey could only be employed by one factory: the giant Hammer and Sickle plant near the Yauza River. But now that she was almost certain of where he was, something strange happened: her wanderer’s heart, always so resolute, wavered. Like Odysseus with Ithaca so close in sight, she found herself unable to proceed. She knew she was changing, becoming a new person, unburdening herself from her old individualistic hunger for special attention. She wanted him to see how different she’d become, and yet this very desire made its fulfillment impossible. The very act of seeking him out savored of desperation. A year had passed, after all. Maybe he had a woman. Maybe he was remarried. Deep down, she wasn’t ready for any meeting with Sergey that didn’t involve his lifting her up off her feet, kissing her passionately on the mouth, and shouting “Hurrah!” And so, like napping Odysseus, she stayed put, waiting for some final, mysterious change to come.
Florence’s wish to merge fully with that titanic abstraction known as the People finally came true on November 7, 1934. She’d woken that morning to the distant sounds of parade music coming from the street’s loudspeakers. Below her window an army of women had been deployed with twig brooms.
Florence was meeting Essie on a prearranged corner of Maroseyka Street, where Essie was marching with a column of American workers from the AMO Factory. Florence, as an employee of Gosbank, was not required to march. Nonetheless, she wanted to catch a glimpse of Stalin and other Heroes of the Revolution. The procession was making its creeping progress to the center of the city before it passed through Red Square. Florence elbowed her way alongside the crowd until she caught sight of Essie’s red-mittened hand waving at her. “You’re late,” she said, pulling Florence in.
“I’m sorry.”
“We were about to start running again.”
Above Florence’s head, figures of the great leaders were mounted like giant paper dolls along the sides of surrounding buildings. Everywhere, red pennants flapped in the wind.
“This is Joe and Leon,” said Essie, introducing Florence to the two men beside her. One, a middle-aged mechanic in a padded jacket, wore the thin red armband of a parade marshal. Next to him stood an unshaven younger man wearing a gangster’s tweed cap and a coat with a raised collar. A cigarette dangled from his fleshy, too-pink lips. The horn blew, indicating that everyone needed to get back in formation. “Get in line! Get in line!” the organizers were shouting. “No stops from here on!” The young gangster spat out his cigarette and got into lockstep with Florence. His cheeks glowed in the winter cold. He looked her over twice before addressing her in English. “Your first time. I can tell.”
The confidence of this assessment made her disinclined to answer. Undiscouraged, he studied her with a pair of sardonic black eyes. “You don’t work at the AMO, either.”
“Lucky guess,” she said.
“I won’t tell, don’t worry. Neither do I. I did, but not anymore.” He took a step toward her and flashed open his coat. “Kept my old pass, though. Any piece of paper you get in this city, better hold on to it.”
“How about we don’t speak English so loud,” Florence suggested.
The gangster shrugged and turned to Essie. “Where you from?”
“Park East, Bronx.”
“No kiddin’. And her?”
“Florence is a Brooklyn girl,” Essie answered.
Florence wished she hadn’t, because the next thing the boy said to her was “Oh yeah. Which corner?”
“Beverly,” she said, not looking at him.
“Beverly and what?”
She was getting irritated by this summary exam. “What do you care, you planning to go there?” she heard herself say.
“Touchy.”
“Florie is from Flatbush,” volunteered Essie.
“Florie from Flatbush,” the young man repeated with insinuating satisfaction, as if he’d wheedled some dirty secret out of her. “Where is that, Prospect Park? Millionaire Park?”