The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  “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.”

  On a hot morning in the summer of 1934, as Florence was stumbling through Magnitogorsk and the American economy was still stumbling through the Depression, President Roosevelt sat upright to take breakfast in his mahogany bed and to light the first of the day’s forty Camel cigarettes in their ivory holder. It was a fact widely known among FDR’s advisers that the best time to seek the president’s audience was in the early morning, between the time the maid delivered his hash and eggs and the arrival of the valet, at ten o’clock sharp, to dress the president and strap him into his braces. A lesser-known fact was that the first person to enter Roosevelt’s private chambers each morning was not Mrs. Roosevelt but the stiffer and more morose figure of Henry Morgenthau, his secretary of the treasury. Were a casual viewer to catch a glimpse inside the presidential bedroom, he might take the balding man in the clerically high collar to be a priest administering last rites, for there was an unmistakable air of solemnity to Roosevelt’s meetings with Morgenthau. The president, having recently failed to raise food prices with his agrarian reforms, and facing another farmers’ revolt, had of late undertaken a more radical strategy: raising prices by rapidly devaluing the dollar. The ritual Morgenthau was performing that morning, and every morning that summer, was the more profane rite of setting the day’s bid price for gold.

  It was an elementary game of supply and demand: having snipped the dollar’s link to gold, the government was employing its enormous new powers to buy up gold on the world market, in order to drive down the value of the dollar and raise the price of everything else. There was but one wrench in this elegant mechanism. For some time now, inexplicable surpluses of gold were swelling the markets in London, Paris, and New York. And not corrupted gold, but ingots so pure that biting into one was like sinking your teeth into hardened fudge. The ingots were stampless, anonymous. Only their smoothness distinguished them—a gravy softness identical to that of imperial tsarist coins. Gold, in other words, that could come only from the prison mines of the Russian Arctic.

  “What do these Russians think they’re playing at, street dice?” inquired the president. “Are they stupid enough to kill their own market by dumping so much gold?”

  “I’m inclined to believe so, sir,” replied Morgenthau dyspeptically. “Their understanding of the commodities markets is quite primitive.”

  “Nonsense, Henry! These Bolshies are ready to saw off their snouts to spite their faces. It’s pure sabotage!”

  “Or it may simply be that…”

  “What?”

  “That they need the cash, and fast.”

  “Well, then, someone ought to tell them that, if they want to spend their easy cash on our American machines and in our American factories, they’d best put an end to these shenanigans.”

  “Received and understood, sir.”

  Departing the president’s quarters, Morgenthau began to pen a letter in his head. He had no authority to stop American firms from doing business with Russia, and neither did the president. Even at the top, power consisted not of a single giant switch but of a myriad of delicate levers that needed to be pulled discreetly.

  —

  THE LETTERS THAT BEGAN arriving at the Foreign Currency Department of the Soviet State Bank in Moscow were confounding in their tone of obscure threat and even vaguer appeal. A sentence teetering on the edge of solicitude might turn abruptly to blackmail, or vice versa. The task of reading this cavalcade of memos from the U.S. Treasury, Russia’s various creditors, and foreign export firms fell on the shoulders of one Grigory Grigorievich Timofeyev, director of the Foreign Currency Desk. Responding to so much hostile correspondence required, in Timofeyev’s view as a former diplomat, a certain aggressive delicacy, and much more time than he had to spare. But one clear and chilly afternoon in September, his answer walked in the door. The pretty, serious-looking woman who entered his office made a clumsy effort to smile as she adjusted her ruffled blouse. But it wasn’t her overdressed appearance that gave her away as a foreigner so much as her walk, an athletic stride that even her flouncy clothes couldn’t hide. Her complexion was still burnished pink from the summer’s sun. Bu
t her eyes, blue and downsloping, announced her industriousness and eagerness to please. She’d been sent by the Office of American Trade, formerly Amtorg.

  Timofeyev motioned for her to sit.

  “You worked at the Soviet Trade Mission in New York?” He was reading a letter from the Mission signed by one Scoop Epstein.

  “Yes. My specialization was in trade contracts,” the young woman replied in stiff but serviceable Russian, “steel, industrial machinery, special equipment….”

  “You don’t need to summarize. What is your intention in coming to the Soviet Union?”

  Florence had been asked this question many times over in Magnitogorsk and found that, whatever her answer, it did not satisfy the Russians. Since her motives would always be suspect, she settled at last on flattery. “I’m very impressed with everything that’s been accomplished in the Soviet Union in such a short time. I want to contribute my labor to a society that’s moving forward, not stagnating like—”

  Timofeyev cut her off. “There are many people who come to the U.S.S.R. with no intention of living and working here other than to denounce us to the bourgeois press as soon as they leave. As you know, there have already been plenty of such slanderous so-called eyewitnesses.”

  “Respectfully, Comrade Timofeyev, most of these people are deceived by their unrealistic expectations. My decision to come to Russia was not a light decision. I have no illusions.”

  “No illusions, eh?” He seemed to like this, but raised a hand to keep her from talking as one of the two telephones on his desk began ringing. While Timofeyev took the call, Florence let her eyes settle on different points around his office. A glass-fronted mahogany bookcase occupied one wall, and a large blue globe stood on a tripod in the corner. On a green blotter beside Timofeyev’s elbow, a tea glass in a filigree holder caught the morning sun arriving through the open curtain. Under her shoes the floor was polished to a high gloss. Everything about the balding, dapper Timofeyev seemed as elegant and polished as his office. He had calm, intelligent eyes, a long bony nose, and a neat, somewhat pointy beard. The look he was emulating might have been V. I. Lenin’s, but the person he actually resembled, Florence realized with a start, was Shakespeare. Above Timofeyev hung an enlarged portrait of Comrade Stalin, also seated and working at his desk. Florence compared the two mentally and found Stalin lacking. Timofeyev laid down the receiver and regarded her with sharp, tired eyes. “Your references allege you are sincere and reliable,” he remarked in an unconvinced, flattering way that made Florence glance down modestly. “What about your eyesight?”

  “Pardon me?” She was still thinking about whether Timofeyev meant “reliable” professionally or politically.

  “Do you wear glasses, Miss Fein?”

  “I’ve never had the need.”

  “Good. Then you can read this.” He slid across the desk a scrap that looked like a freshly printed dollar. “In the corner,” he said, pointing.

  “This note is legal tender for all debts private and…”

  “What kind of stupidity is this—‘legal tender’?”

  “Here it says ‘redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve bank.’ ”

  “Is it some kind of word game? Paper money redeemable in…paper money! This is what they write above Mr. Washington’s head. An English economist called Keynes has convinced your government and half of Europe to float their currencies. But America wants it both ways, as usual: your treasury sets a new price for the dollar every day and then demands to know how much gold we have in reserve.” He pointed to a pile of envelopes on his desk. “You can write these excellent people and tell them politely that we await this information every morning as eagerly as they do. I assume you can type, Comrade Fein. Very good, then.”

  The questions on the employment forms Grigory Grigorievich gave her started simply enough—“name,” “patronymic,” “date and place of birth,” “nationality” (she wrote “American”), “education,” “foreign languages”—before, like a sudden drop in the seafloor, they became utterly confusing.

  “What should I say for ‘social origin’?” she asked Timofeyev. She hadn’t come from “peasants” or “workers” or “gentry” or “clergy.” Her father was an insurance man. Was that a trade or a speculation activity?

  “Write ‘middle-class,’ ” said Timofeyev impatiently, then frowned, thinking better of it. “Lower-middle-class.” But before she had the chance, he took the papers from her hand and told her it was better if he completed the questions on her behalf. “The important thing is not to cross anything out,” he explained mysteriously. In addition to her class origins, the State Bank seemed to be interested in Florence’s marital status, every place she had lived since birth, what political groups she had ever belonged to, whether anyone in her family had been to jail, her height, her hair color, and any distinguishing characteristics she had, such as moles, limps, or a low hairline. Had she not known better, she would have thought she was filling out her own criminal docket. Hearing her uncertain, complicated replies, Timofeyev stopped consulting with her altogether and wrote out his own answers.

  “Place of residence.”

  “I’m staying in a dormitory at the Foreign Languages Institute, on the condition that I start teaching there next week. But with this job, I thought I’d get another—”

  “I’m sorry to tell you that Gosbank can’t provide you with housing. Approval for another room normally takes months. You can rent something in a communal flat.”

  “You mean a speculation rental? I don’t want to do anything…improper.”

  Timofeyev rolled his eyes. “Who teaches you foreigners this bunk? Open the papers; they’re full of advertisements. Price set by the square meter. Whatever else you work out with your host is your business. All right, don’t look so terrified. I’ll have my Klavdia Alekseyevna call around. Heaven knows, if they hear you talk, they’ll charge you more than your salary.”

  Once the paperwork was completed, he walked with her out into the common hall. All around, bank clerks and bookkeepers were busy typing and blotting, clicking abacus beads with a speed she’d only seen in Chinese laundries. Timofeyev’s Shakespearean eyes twinkled in a benevolent mockery of her anxiousness. He put out his hand. “Welcome to Gosbank.”

  For Florence there now began a time of such permanent motion, such epic hustle, that she could never recall afterward how many weeks had passed before the numberless obstacles of her days began at last to take the shape of a familiar routine. Eight A.M. found her running along Solyanka Street to catch the overcrowded trams rolling down to Kuznetsky Most. By nine she was at her desk, surrounded by ringing telephones and chattering typewriters. Once more she felt the reassuring proximity of the immense and inscrutable levers of Power. Her morning hours were spent reading through the world financial papers, keeping abreast of the prices of precious metals and making reports on their movements to Timofeyev. After lunch in the canteen with the other clerks, she ascended the marble steps back to Timofeyev’s tobacco-fragrant office and organized her boss’s correspondence with foreign treasuries and banks, then typed up his dictations in her good English—not so much translating the words themselves (simple enough with the aid of a financial dictionary) as transmogrifying his tone (Soviet, autocratic) into the more cheerful and paternalistic American style that Scoop Epstein had taught her while conducting business with Midwestern executives.

  —

  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 commun
al 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.