They had set out in the morning to beat the upwelling of heat, a jug of water in the back, and a flask of gin on the seat between them, of which she’d already dispatched at least a quarter.
“I’ll tell you what I won’t miss when I leave this place,” she said as he drove out of the city. Ringlets around her ears flapped in the wind made by the car’s bumping speed. “I won’t miss hearing those hideous radio sermons the Shits are always listening to.” “The Shits” was what she’d taken to calling the Shultes—Dwayne and Alva—whose car they’d temporarily appropriated. “Bad enough the Shits keep the radio on at all times, but when that Father Coughlin comes on with his gripes against the Negroes and the ‘Jewish Conspirators’—then they play it full-volume, probably so I’ll hear upstairs. And if it’s not him, it’s the ‘Reverend’ Smith. Always with an honorific, these cranks, these men of God, ready to tell us on whose account we’re suffering. Blame someone, just don’t question the whole rigged capitalist setup that is the U.S. of A. No, sir!”
In reply, he had laid his hand on her bare leg where the chiffon of her dress was hiked up. They stopped for an early lunch at a farmer’s roadside stand, where a chalked sign advertised peaches and baby chickens. She was so soused by then that he had to convince her to take the peaches and leave the chicks. And then she decided she wanted to see the country, so they turned the car onto a sandy road that cut through farmland. Another mistake.
The heat had started thickening. As the distance from Cleveland grew, the furrowed countryside got browner and dustier. Singed weeds leaned away from the blacktop, and crops lay flattened where thunderstorms had battered them a few days earlier. She gazed off into the distance where corn stubble met flat-bottomed clouds, and said, “I heard it all smelled like coffee roasting around here last winter.”
“Coffee—why?”
“ ’Cause they were burning corn instead of coal.” She turned to look at him, eyes glazed with drink. “Imagine that?”
He had no desire to imagine it. He was in no mood to engage in another discussion about the absurdities of “the whole capitalist setup,” or to listen to another harangue about the American Way, with its unwanted goods and unwanted people.
What he wanted, in the time he had left, was to soak in the physical grandeur of a country he would surely never see again. Frankly, he had been surprised they’d given him the exit permit, considering his less-than-impeccable class origin. It was a testament to how few specialists they had to choose from—the ones who knew a screw from a lightbulb, who could speak proper Russian, let alone converse in English. Where were they? Run out. Exiled. Shot. Who was left? Narod—the sentimentalized horde known as “the People” in whose name all this epic work was being carried out. He doubted he’d receive much gratitude from them once he’d completed his duty. All he wanted now was to savor the texture of the leather seat, feel the polished wood of the steering wheel turning lightly under his fingers. Fleetingly, he allowed himself to wonder what it might be like to have a car of his own. The engineers who worked at McKee all drove the latest Fords and lived in their own houses. They weren’t better engineers than he was. It was true that the crisis of capitalism had degraded the country, but if one had a few pennies to one’s name, one was still a free man. If he were living here, he would do fine, he knew, just as these men were doing quite fine. He’d briefly considered defecting, but that was no option. They’d arrest his parents in Leningrad and exact punishment in some gruesome way he could not imagine. He stole a glance at Florence in the passenger’s seat. Her eyes were shut, as if against some pain. Her skin was flushed—from the heat or the gin, he couldn’t tell.
—
THE SUN FELT HEAVY on her head, like a manhole cover. In another week Sergey would be returning home and she would go back to New York. She wanted him to display at least a small sign of regret about leaving her. She opened her eyes and gazed out the windshield. They were in another town, almost exactly like the one before, only emptier: a single street with a browned church steeple, vacant storefronts with orange Nehi and Coke advertisements dangling in dust-streaked windows. She too was thinking about the McKee men. It was improbable that any of them had seen her with Sergey. Though it didn’t matter now. Her mood of irritation, with herself and with Sergey, had started taking on a distinctly McKee-like flavor. The “heist” that she and Sergey had contrived, to get their hands on those manuals, do the conversions of the plans, and demonstrate that the mill in Magnitogorsk could be effectively constructed with cheaper materials, had come off almost flawlessly. They had “defanged” McKee’s arguments, in Fyodor’s words. “I hope you’re happy with yourself” was what Knur Anderson had said to Florence afterward. Clement had only shaken his head. Deducing that she’d been the one who’d helped the Russians, the American engineers looked at her as though she was either immeasurably conniving or unfathomably dumb. Her conviction that she’d only leveled an unjust playing field dulled the distress she felt at knowing they were talking about her behind her back as a turncoat. Harder to ignore were the smirking looks. It rankled her that the McKee men assumed she was sleeping with one of the Russians, and galled her all the more that they’d guessed right. She’d been feeling a kind of moral asphyxia in Cleveland for weeks now. She wanted Sergey to redeem her despair, redeem the sacrifice she’d made on his behalf—but how? Love was a thing you couldn’t get a receipt for, if this could even be called love. And the things they’d said to each other in the dark—well, those were part of the game too. “Could you imagine us, together—if you didn’t live over there and I didn’t live here?” “Yes, why not?” “Oh, but then you wouldn’t be who you are. You’d be somebody else, and I would, too.” It was astonishing how this nonsense could arouse them. Lately, she’d even wept afterward, and let him console her with kisses, all of these dramatics somehow necessary to give meaning to what was otherwise just a lot of dirty business.
For most of the summer, they hadn’t spoken about what they were doing. But her body, it turned out, needed no help in understanding the signs of its hungers. She might be falling asleep in her room, but the quietest sound of Sergey’s finger scratching at her screen door late at night could rouse her to full wakefulness. Just the sight of him in her porch light could revive her body to that weightless yearning it had spent all day suppressing. He never rushed her. They could kiss until her chin was raw and her lips were numb, until she was utterly immobilized by desire. She understood now what people, including her mother, meant when they spoke of girls getting themselves “caught.” There seemed to be no ways but dangerous ways to be in love, no ways to satisfy your heart without deforming your mind.
The road had narrowed and they had to drive slower. A sputtering knock could be heard in the engine with every few revolutions of the wheels. On the right another churchyard appeared, this one with sagging willow trees. Behind its neatly whitewashed fence several picnic tables were set out in a long snake. Florence pointed to the sign: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
“They must be running a soup kitchen out of there.”
“The missus who rents to us makes soup for her church, too. A kind woman.”
“God bless America. Soup kitchens as far as the eye can see.”
“Why are you being nasty?” he said. “Give me the map.” The road signs made no sense to him. He looked for something that might lead them back to the motorway.
“I’m not being nasty.” She spread the flapping map between them. “I’m only saying philanthropy in this country is a way for some people to alleviate their sins. Morgan, Rockefeller—all they’re doing is tossing a few pennies back to the people they’ve robbed.” She knew she was being a shrew, souring whatever pleasure was left in their time together.
“I was not talking about Rockefeller. I was talking about old ladies making soup,” he said impatiently. He took the map and studied its network of blue veins.
“This map won’t help you. It�
��s of Ohio, and we entered Indiana twenty minutes ago.”
“Why did you not tell me!”
“Didn’t you see the sign?”
Sergey shut his eyes.
“We’re fine,” she said, trying to sound reassuring. “We’re just along the side here. It’s like what Fyodor was saying: these are the same people protecting their interests with guns and…”
“Fyodor! Really? This is who you’ve been listening to?”
Her eyes were radiant with anger and embarrassment. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. I am thinking it is better if you stop so much blah-blah-blah, and look at the map,” he said in a voice thick with irritation.
She averted her face and tried to swallow the knot of tears in her throat. The car’s engine was laboring louder as they mounted a slope. Sergey stepped down on the accelerator, but the Chevrolet only climbed stiffly while the rear wheels turned dirt and rocks with an alarming squeal. “What’s happening?” she said. Sergey strained his jaw and threw the car into high gear. It lunged distressingly. He clamped on the brake and turned off the ignition. Steam was rising from the engine. “Chyort!” he muttered. He climbed out and stood looking blindly under the hood. “You drive,” he ordered suddenly.
He put the car into neutral and Florence moved into the driver’s seat. She clamped her heel on the gas pedal while Sergey pushed from the back. The Chevy bucked forward, then died with another pounding sputter. On the edge of the field, crows were picking at the corn stubble. She felt weak and watered down from the heat. Doom was starting to settle over everything. She gazed around for some sign of human life but saw only the distant silhouette of a barn against the low clouds. Sergey cursed louder and kicked a tire. “Now we walk,” he announced. He grabbed his jacket and the water jug from the back seat. Only a few drops remained, and he let Florence swallow them. As she stepped out, she glimpsed the oily leak under the chassis, a trail of black drops as far as her eye could see.
“We’ve been leaking this whole time?” she yelled, limping after him. “How could you not notice?!”
He turned to her with a look of stone. “You want to yell at me?”
She continued trudging, half lamely, behind him. The field and mesh fence along the road were beginning to spin. “Where are you taking us? You don’t know where this road leads!” A wave of dizziness overtook her. The sun in the west blotted out her vision. Through the haze of airborne dirt, she sank to her knees.
“Get up, Flora.”
“No,” she whimpered.
“Up!”
She shook her head.
“I am leaving.”
“Leave! Go!” She hated the need that her voice betrayed. “Go back to Russia. Go on!”
Sergey turned around and watched Florence for what seemed like a long time. She let her eyes fall shut and opened them again. Sergey was squatting on his haunches beside her. “So here it ends? In a cornfield?”
She felt sick. Sick of making him comfort her. Sick of her weak flesh. Sick of griping. Sick of her need to have all their humid late hours in her bed produce in him an equivalent in words.
“Forgive me.” She wiped the side of her wet face with her arm. “This isn’t how I want you to remember me—as some silly American woman.”
He frowned sympathetically. “Silly? You are the opposite of silly, Flora. What would I have done without you here?” He looked at her more seriously now. “But you are too moved by everything wrong in this world. You feel it too much,” he pleaded. “It is madness to burn up inside about things you cannot change.”
She felt almost idiotically flattered by his words—by his possibly false belief that her heart, her sense of justice, was capacious enough to embrace the world.
“So what is this, that you cannot go?” He touched her face and moved aside a curl. “A little dust? A little heat? A little gin?” He stretched out his hand.
She let him pull her up. On the horizon, the light had become malt-colored. A dark, backlit figure was walking along the dirt road toward them, a man in denim and a hat. In the sidelong evening rays he appeared to be surrounded by a halo.
—
THE FARMER’S HOUSE WAS only a mile south, and he soon returned with his truck and a tow chain for the Chevy.
She sat on the farmer’s porch step, a chunk of wrapped ice tucked in her armpit. Like the car, she’d suffered sunstroke. Now the ice, and the sugar water she was sipping, were restoring her back to herself. In the ginger-colored field, Sergey and the farmer worked over the engine. Soot had gummed under the seat of a valve and sprung the leak. Florence watched Sergey scrape off carbon deposits from the cylinders. He removed his shirt and placed it delicately over the valves, to protect them from the carbon’s dust. The amber light gave a deep tan to the flexed muscles of his back, a blond sheen to the hair on his chest and stomach. She could never respond indifferently to his body.
Shadows cast by the clouds moved down the earth. A bird flew over her head, trailed by its reflection. She could hear the farmer chattering while he handed Sergey tools. He was telling Sergey about the way things had changed since the war. How people used to help out one another, lending corn if someone’s crop was low. “A handshake was as good as an IOU. No more.” The farmer lifted his hat to reveal his balding, closely cropped head. “Now it’s only the bank, making you sign twenty pages for a bag of seed.” Sergey, bent over the open hood, murmured something that made the farmer laugh. Even here he could find a common language with people. How was this so simple for him, she wondered, yet so complicated for her? Did it have to do with coming from a place where egalitarianism was lived and not just talked about?
A murky little creek wound through the farmer’s front property. That was what she felt like—that nameless little rivulet. To the surface of her memory now rose a line from Middlemarch: “Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.” She had copied it into her notebook at sixteen, moved by the tragic poignancy of a mighty river forced to expend its energies into nameless streams. Even at sixteen, she had nursed visions of a great destiny for herself. Had she realized that Eliot was simply mourning the tragedy of being a woman? If she had, then she, Florence, believed she’d be spared. All around her, women were bobbing their hair, raising their hemlines, enrolling in universities, blowing cigarette smoke at a whole lot of stuffy Victorian commandments. Feminine disobedience was in vogue, and she had been too young, she saw now, to understand that vogue was all it was. She had mistaken style for matter, fashion for progress. America had not changed at all. The promise that had been dangled before her at sixteen—the possibility by which a free-spirited girl might grow up into a free woman—had, in the years since she’d actually become a woman, been withdrawn so gradually that she’d barely noticed its passing.
In her lap lay Sergey’s jacket. He’d asked her to hold it, along with the documents he kept there. She dug into the cool lining of the pocket and removed his passport. It was heavier than she expected. She cracked open the booklet and unfolded the tissue-thin “Zagran passport” stapled to one of the pages. A portrait of him, serious and pale, was glued to the bottom. A part of his face was branded by one of three identical purple stamps, applied to the page at various pressures. The paper was cool and brittle to the touch. Here it was—the engine of his mobility. Holding it made her feel landlocked. She slipped it back in his pocket. Out in the field, she watched Sergey turn the motor over a few times. It came to life with the sound of an artillery round. He climbed out of the car and strode toward her, wiping his grease-stained hands on a rag. “Princess,” he announced, “your carriage is ready.”
—
FLORENCE RETURNED HOME A week later, while the passport she’d cradled accompanied its owner on a steamer to Europe. At the Finnish border, it was thumbed and inspected by a Soviet official whose spectacles gleamed with sedate hostility. Sergey was taken into a small penal room and questioned ab
out his voyage. His answers did not matter. There was nothing he could say that could dispel the permanent cloud of suspicion he had earned for his service to his country. This was the price he would pay, forever, for his American summer. On the table between Sergey and his interrogator lay the items he had brought back: a set of fine drafting tools, a Gillette shaving kit, bone cufflinks, cologne. They had been vigorously picked out of his bloated suitcase. In America, each purchase had beckoned to him with its promise of sophistication and quality, but on the table, the items seemed to be coated with shame, proof of his lust for the gaudiness of a decadent nation. The customs agent had him sign for them. “Something’s missing,” Sergey said suddenly. It was a carved Lucite brooch he would not have dared to mention had he not bought it for his mother. “File a complaint,” the agent said, his eyes radiant with mockery.
Clouds began to storm as his train crossed into Russia. It was late September, the intimate warmth of summer erased by a cold haze of rain. He shut his eyes. The thunder above was like the sound of an enormous door closing shut behind him.
In March, while snows were still falling on the half-excavated hills of Magnitogorsk, Sergey received a letter from Florence. This was not a complete surprise. He had written her first himself, care of the Soviet Trade Mission in New York, a holiday greeting timed to arrive just before New Year’s. He had discovered that he missed her after all, or at least missed their Cleveland summer, the heat and abandon of it, Florence’s careless daring and outspokenness. In Magnitogorsk, things were not going well; construction of the rolling mill had been bedeviled by delays and breakages, thanks to the new management’s cutting corners to appease Moscow’s unrealistic norms. He had made the mistake of speaking up openly about this and run afoul of the wrong people. None of this did he report to Florence in his letter.
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