“Is that where you think you are? You go out and buy food in your restricted stores, and you think you’re living in…”
“Wait a second, I don’t need any of this.” She waved her arm over the table with its demolished cornucopia. “And I don’t see you declining a second helping. If you didn’t want me to come, you shouldn’t have advertised so enthusiastically….”
He looked at her as at an idiot. “That was for whoever was going to steam open my letter. I expected you to know the difference.”
“Well, I’m sorry you think I’m so awfully na?ve. The stupid American woman who’s come here to saddle you….” She couldn’t look at him. She could feel the shame rising up, prickling her under her skin.
“Flora.”
She could no longer form a sentence without first suppressing the tremor in her jaw. “What’s keeping you here?” she said. “You’re free to leave.”
Slowly, without protest, Sergey stood up. She stared out the window, at the mute drama of falling snow, while he put on his clothes. She wrapped the tartan tighter around her shoulders.
“I can’t leave,” he said suddenly. “Flora, look at me.” And when she did she knew he wasn’t talking about her room. “Can’t you understand what I’ve been telling you?”
But now it was her turn to give nothing away.
Picking up his hat, he let his fingers slide with something like tenderness across the smooth leather handle of her trunk. But when he spoke, his voice had the sound of an order: “Take your treasure chest to the station tomorrow, get on a train to Helsinki, and get the first boat out.”
She watched, dumbfounded, as Sergey tucked his shirt into his pants. And then, in a voice eerily like those of her instructors at the political-education class, she said, “The only train I’m getting on is the locomotive accelerating into the future. And if you want to jump off that train, watch out you don’t break your legs!”
As soon as this declaration was out of her mouth, she wanted to take it back. But part of her was glad she’d said words that finally had some effect on him. Sergey looked—no longer repulsed, but panicked. She’d accused him of being disloyal. The sober disbelief in his eyes gave her an exhilarating, brief feeling of power. It settled the score between them. And yet a tiny part of her was already aware that this power had a cost: that it was the last, impassible barrier between them.
“Happy travels, Flora.”
They were the last words he’d ever speak to her.
Go home, Flora.
For weeks, the words floated up into her consciousness at inappropriate times. She did not tell anyone of her meeting with Sergey, not even Essie. With the same power of will with which she would, decades later, shove the word “America” into a locked drawer of her mind, Florence resolved now not to utter Sergey’s name again. She was convinced that if she let it pass her lips he would continue to be the reason she’d come to Russia.
But his words lingered, and resurfaced in the frequent letters from her mother and father: “Come home, Florence.” “Come back, kindeleh.” Before her encounter with Sergey, she’d been able to skim over her parents’ slanting, pleading script. Afterward, even touching the parchment paper of those letters made her feel sickeningly alone. Just a week earlier her brother had written her about starting high school at Erasmus, lampooning the same teachers whose classes she’d once endured. His words resounded from the page in Sidney’s best Eddie Cantor voice. Now, as she sat at her office desk, working into the evening on a dictation Timofeyev had assigned that afternoon, the upwelling of loneliness was so sharp and so pure that it took all her will to clamp her jaw against the pain. She’d already gone through three drafts of Timofeyev’s memorandum, each more error-scarred than the last. Glancing up with her tear-lensed eyes, she saw that the wooden desks around her stood empty. Everyone had left for the day. She pulled out the incomplete dictation with its carbon copy and rolled a clean sheet of paper into the carriage.
Dear Siddy,
Ahoy. By the time you receive this letter, your Thanksgiving gut will long have shrunk. It appears that the mail travels twice as speedily from there to here as vice versa, so I’ll indemnify myself early and wish you and the gang a HAPPY NEW YEAR!! What am I doing for Gobbler-day, you ask? I will tell you. Turkeys here are hard to come by, but I did manage to get myself a chicken. They were “handing them out” (as we say here) half a block from where I work. The food here is good, and cheap, so that no one ever has to go hungry. But sometimes you don’t know what they’ll be handing out till you’re in line. I’ve gotten much better at what the Soviets call the hunting-gathering game. As there is a separate line in a shop for every type of item—butter, bread, bologna—the trick is to know what each thing costs in advance, go straight to the cashier and get your receipt, then jump in the slowest line and ask the person behind you to hold your place. While they’re holding it, you jump to a line that’s moving faster, get your bread or butter, and run back to the first line! If the person behind you isn’t a gargoyle, you can get away with up to four runs, like in baseball. Only trouble is when everyone decides to use the same queue as home base! Then your game goes into overtime, and the bread you came for is eaten by the time you get the bologna.
Don’t show this to Mom, as she will send me another tear-smudged letter telling me how red her eyes are from crying and adding another illness to the list of Papa’s ailments that he has already written me he does not have. I am taking care of myself well here. (And if she does read this, am eating well also.) In fact, things are getting better and better. My Russian is good enough that I can pass for a not very bright local. The city is getting bigger and better, too. The future everyone talks about is really happening here! Soon we will have our very own first-class subway. I say “we” because a great number of Moscow inhabitants, including your sister, have participated in building it during “subbotniks” or voluntary days, shoveling earth and rocks, carting debris, and so on. Even if it is just a little help, when everyone pitches in, they feel that the metro is their very own. When it finally opens, it will have columns of marble, beautiful lighting, and escalators so long that boys will want to ride up and down on them all day. I hope you will visit and see for your
Her fingers would not obey the order to keep typing.