Two days later Florence set out to find the man who’d led her to Moscow. Along the crumbling edge of the Yauza’s asphalt embankment her streetcar swayed from side to side. She was headed to the outskirts of the city, up past coal sheds and warehouses and the stone fortifications of monasteries requisitioned for workers’ dorms.
Florence had imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own. Florence stepped out of the streetcar and was almost knocked down by the chaotic flow of people. She had worn, over her narrow skirt, her mother’s old fur coat. In the swarm of padded cotton jackets she felt like Anna Karenina’s foppish heir. One glimpse through the open gates confirmed that each shop within the factory grounds had its own security guard. Whatever mistake she’d made in coming here, Florence knew it would be a greater mistake to announce herself to these ursine-hatted sentries. Bodies stampeded past while Florence stood in a stupor of indecision. She could feel the last bit of warmth from the trolley leaving her limbs. The crowd was thinning and the gates would soon close. She didn’t know what to do, and so it was like reaching out for a piece of floating driftwood when her hand of its own accord took hold of a passing elbow. The elbow belonged to a woman—gaunt, with a face the color of a dying lightbulb that ignited with a menacing brightness at Florence’s touch.
“Pardon me,” Florence said, stepping back. “I’m looking for someone—an engineer at this factory.”
“The bell is about to ring. I can’t find you no engineer.”
“What does she want, Inna?” said a second girl, with a healthier complexion, in a bandanna.
“I’m looking for an engineer named Sokolov.”
The girl peered about curiously. “Engineers are all in that far building.”
“We can take you through the personnel office,” suggested the skinny girl, as though she’d been trying to be helpful all along.
“No—I don’t want to make trouble,” said Florence.
“Everyone has to be declared,” said the first woman.
“I—maybe I’m in the wrong place.”
“Do you know who it is you’re looking for or not?”
“Yes, he’s”—she heard her own words clearly—“my cousin.”
“Cousin, eh?”
Against their crude but effortless Russian her foreign accent was as baroque as her coat. “I’m his cousin,” she resumed. “From Armenia. I got off at the train station this morning. He was supposed to meet me. Maybe he forgot.” She was surprised at how easily this lie came to her. “Maybe I got off on the wrong side—everything is so big and confusing in this city.” She sighed in a naked ploy for sympathy. “Maybe one of you could just tell him I’m here. The name is Sergey Sokolov.”
“All right, wait over there,” said the girl in the bandanna, making a sign to her friend to head in alone and cover for her.
“Tell him it’s Flora,” Florence called after her. “He’ll know!”
—
SHE WAITED IN THE COLD while the striped shadows of the factory gates faded under a cover of clouds. The sun had been deceptively bright that morning, and without it the winter day was baring its teeth. Florence, berating herself for no reason at all, barely noticed when a tall figure approached the gates.
He was thinner than she’d been expecting, and his face wasn’t visible under the cap he’d pulled low on his head. But the unmistakable stoop of those tremendous shoulders could only belong to Sergey. He squinted between the bars as the guard opened the gates for him. The rich summer tan that had been Florence’s strongest memory of him was no more. His eyes, too, had dimmed and paled; they looked down at her as though at a specter, a stranger he couldn’t place.
“Don’t you recognize me?” Florence said, holding her hands together.
He permitted a tiny smile to cross his lips. “Cousin Flora?” But it was when the corners of his brows lifted, satyrlike, that Florence truly recognized him. “So,” Sergey said, “you found me.”
—
IN HER ROOM THAT EVENING they undressed quickly, removing each other’s winter clothes like stiff gauze bandages. “Why are you laughing?” he said. But she couldn’t stop. The absurdity of finding themselves together made her delirious.
On the walk over from the tram station where she’d met him, Florence had entertained him with tales of the bewildered American girl she’d been when she’d disembarked at Magnitogorsk, a Red Riding Hood out of her depths in the woods of socialism. Sticking a hand on her hip, she mimed her peasant roommates and remade of them trusty, rough-and-tumble guides in the forest, her confidantes. In the street-lit darkness, Sergey’s laughing eyes settled on different points of her face, and soon he was tossing in a few choice details of his own about his “pioneer life” in Magnitogorsk, so that finally a common thread began to weave itself between their past and present. But as soon as they were in her room, he’d shut the door and pulled her roughly to himself. On the tiny metal bed they made cramped, rapid love, shoving everything else to the side. The sensation of his hair in her fingers, the quick hydraulic jolt of him inside her, was a paralyzing shock, like diving into a cold pool, and yet, within moments, strangely familiar. When they recovered, stunned and spent, they were as famished as two people getting over an illness.
Fortunately she was prepared: before going out to meet him at the trolley station, Florence had thrown a tablecloth over her desk. She’d laid out a spread of brined mushrooms, pickled tomatoes, sturgeon, cold cuts, caviars, wine, and brandy. Now, wrapped in her big tartan bedcover, she watched him spear one of the small pickled tomatoes—a tiny red globe—and raise it to eye level, as though studying it. He swallowed it whole, grimacing at its sourness, then flushed it down with a shot of brandy. Florence sat rediscovering the curve of Sergey’s back with her fingertips as he bent low over the desk to make an elaborate sandwich of butter, caviar, and cucumbers.
“Red caviar and black; how did you manage that?”
She smiled. An entire month’s allotment of Insnab coupons had gone to the purchase of these singular delicacies in the well-lit aisles of the exclusive foreigners’ store, where her Caspian sturgeon, Georgian wine, and off-season tomatoes were efficiently wrapped by a smiling girl whose obliging nature bore no resemblance to the white-coated guardians of Moscow’s common store counters.
“This is ossetra quality,” he said approvingly.
“How can you tell?”
“Come here, I’ll show you.” He spooned more black roe and spread it thinly across the buttered bread. “You see, the eggs are plump, not sticking to each other in the juice. The last time I had this was—oh, let me think”—he stared up at the ceiling—“1928. No! Twenty-seven! New Year’s Eve.”
She slapped his shoulder. “Sergey, always joking.”
“Not at all!”