The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  —

  “He’s truly something else,” Essie said, tossing off her shoes and falling backward onto Florence’s bed. For a moment, Florence thought she was talking about Leon, but then Essie said, “The way he speaks, it’s like he’s talking…right to you.”

  It was past midnight. Florence pointed to the door to remind Essie that they weren’t alone, that she had neighbors on every side.

  “At least you’ve got your own four walls,” Essie said. “Try living with twenty-eight others on a dormitory floor.” She gathered her dress and pulled it up over her head. Florence unrolled a stocking and held one leg in a pose in front of the mirror before unrolling the other one.

  “It’s all the rest of it,” Florence said, “the handkerchief waving and fainting spells. Everyone trying to outdo each other with the clapping when he speaks. I can do without it.” From the wardrobe Florence removed a set of sheets along with a spare nightgown and handed them to Essie.

  “But that isn’t Stalin’s fault,” Essie objected. “He doesn’t want the adulation. He ridicules it in all his own speeches. He makes fun of people who idolize him instead of getting on with their work.”

  “I’m not disagreeing,” Florence said, taking the sheets back and spreading them on the bed. She was annoyed at Essie’s inability to perform simple tasks while talking.

  “And anyway,” Essie pursued, “he knows perfectly well that it isn’t ‘Stalin the man’ they’re celebrating—it’s what he represents, the Party and everything that’s been done for the people—the way the whole country has been united.”

  A clean, starched odor rose up from the linens as they turned over the comforter. They sidled into the narrow bed, toe to head, like jacks on a playing card. Essie giggled in the darkness as Florence grabbed hold of the cold flesh of her foot. “Oh no you don’t, not without socks.”

  “My shoes were soaked through,” Essie protested.

  “It’s not the cold! Your little piggies are sharp as clamshells.” Florence turned on the shaded lamp and slid out. From a locked drawer in her desk where she kept dollars and valuables, she removed a small sewing bag, then laid Essie’s dimpled toes across her lap. “No one sees my feet in the winter,” Essie said.

  “No one sees your bloomers, either. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t wear clean ones.”

  Essie winced but kept her mouth shut while Florence went on clipping with terrifying concentration.

  “I can’t find a pair of good scissors in any of the stores,” Essie said defensively. “And I’ve looked too. Not even embroidery scissors. All I can find is fabric shears; the girls at the dorm use them, but I’m afraid to. They say the hairdressers’ union works some deal under the table to get all the scissors first, so there’s none left for anyone else.”

  “You can get a pair at the Torgsin shops. They take foreign currency, you know that.”

  “I can’t squander my dollars on vanity, Florie.”

  Florence stopped cutting and looked up. “Suit yourself. I’ve always said: there’s no such thing as a Plain Jane, only a Cheap Jane.”

  “And I think it’s a bit unfair,” Essie said, “that we can buy imported goods at those stores, but no one else can.”

  But Florence had been down this road of reasoning and knew where it led. “What’s so unfair about it?” she said now. “The country needs foreign currency, and I need nail clippers. All I’m saying is, the Party Committees have their special shops, and so do the Kremlin doctors, and so on down the line. We aren’t the only ones.” She laid down her scissors. “These people’s labor is valuable to the state. Maybe they don’t have time to stand in lines. Our labor is special too, Essie. We should take pride in it, not turn ourselves into aesthetes.”

  “I think you mean ascetics.”

  “Whatever.” Florence was aware that there was, perhaps, a capitalist strand in the fabric of her logic. Still, she felt justified in her reasoning. The work she was doing was valuable, and important. Why shouldn’t it entitle her to an occasional bar of chocolate?

  “I guess you’re right,” Essie intoned sleepily and settled back on her pillow. Florence turned off the light and the two lay in bed quietly, kneading each other’s tired feet. From Essie’s side of the bed came a hum Florence recognized as the swaying, Gypsyish melody of “Ochi Chornye.” “Black and burning eyes,” Essie hummed. “Black as midnight skies…”

  Softly, Florence joined her, “Burn-with-passion eyes, how you hypnotize.”

  “I’m in love with you, I’m afra-yd of you!” they sang in unison. “Day that I met you, made me sad and blue.”

  Then Essie was quiet, and Florence knew why.

  “Whose black eyes were you singing about?”

  From Essie’s side came more silence. But in the tension of her instep, Florence got her answer. Encouragingly, she said, “You danced well together.”

  “He made it easy; any girl would have looked good dancing with him.”

  “Mr. Dragged Up sure can drag a hoof, even if he’s a little full of himself.”

  “Why full of himself?” said Essie, sitting up slightly.

  “Oh, I don’t know—maybe a little mouthy, is all I mean.”

  “That’s funny. He asked me if he’d said something that upset you.”

  “He asked you?”

  “He might have asked you to dance, Florie, if he thought you’d’ve let him.” Essie’s toes seemed to be at a kind of stiff attention again. “Do you like him?”

  “Oh, please, Essie.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with him. I’m not saying he’s bad-looking.” Florence was suddenly unsure if she was admitting that Leon was attractive to hide the fact that she thought he was. “He’s just not my type.”

  “What’s your type?”

  “Not American, for starters.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t….It just seems silly for me, you know, to have come all the way here just to…”

  “To what?”

  “To get all keyed up about some guy from across the East River.”

  If hurt or relief flickered on Essie’s face, the darkness hid it. After a while, Florence felt Essie curling herself toward the wall.

  “ ’Night, Essie.”

  “ ’Night,” she heard in return, and lay staring into the darkness for some time before falling asleep.

  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!”

  “I’ve seen caviar in the grocery stores.”

  “Grocery stores? Oh yes! I remember those too. We used to have places by that name before they were converted.”

  “Converted?”

  “Yes, to museums.”

  “What museums?”

  “Museums dedicated to the memory of taste! You don’t think I’m serious? Last week, I walked into one of these…museums. They had cheese in the window—just like this cheese. I went in and asked for half a kilo, and the store clerk—pardon me, the tour guide—told me it wasn’t for sale, only for show.”

  He took a whiff of bread and tossed back a drink. “How long will you be in Moscow?”

  “A year. Who knows? Maybe longer.”

  A crease appeared between his brows. Lest he think she’d come to hang on his neck, Florence added quickly: “I have my own four walls. I have a job. Beyond this, I have no plans. Though I’m taking classes.”

  But he seemed uninterested in that. “And your visa?”

  “That’s a simple matter. An overnight train to Helsinki, and the embassy there extends it another six months or a year.”

  “So you really mean to stay?” he said.

  “Is that so strange? I feel like I’m a part of everything here. What was I doing at home that was so tremendous?” There seemed to be no way for her to talk about what she was doing in Moscow without coming across as discontented and defensive. “Here I get letters on my desk from some of the most important people in the world,” she continued. “Economic advisers, prime ministers. Did you know that I’ve helped raise funds for the building of the new House of Culture? I’m helping build socialism.”

  In the vacuum of Sergey’s amused silence, her earnestness sounded hollow and boastful. Sergey was trying to do a good impression of looking impressed, but his friendly effort was starting to irritate her. It was time to change the subject. “I’m not going to ask if you missed me,” she said, more irritably than she’d aimed for.

  Sergey tipped back another brandy. “Disastrously,” he said, in a tone both avid and ironic. “It has not been an easy year.”

  Before she could stop herself, she said, “And did you drown your sorrow with many girls, or just one?”

  He wiped the corner of his mouth thoughtfully with the back of his hand. “I’m not a monk, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “What does it matter, really? Even if you’re married…”

  “I’m not married.”

  “But you have someone.”

  His silence suggested an affirmative answer.

  “I didn’t expect you to clear your evenings for me,” Florence resumed. “You’re here now, and that’s good. Co
me when you want.”

  He examined the shot glass in his hand, turning it between his thumb and forefinger. He set it down, refilled her cup with wine, and offered it to her.

  “No more. This wine is making my head spin.” She brushed a moist strand of hair off her face. She felt cold suddenly. Anyhow, she was glad she’d said what she’d said. Glad it was out in the open. Let him be the one to think about it now.

  Sergey shook his head sympathetically. “For a headache, only one cure.” Delicately he tipped a porcelain pot to pour tea into Florence’s cup, before raising his brow in disappointment at the contents. “What is this piss? Are we rationing?”

  “I always make it like this.”

  “Florentsia, my dear, in Russia you must know two things: how to drink vodka and how to brew tea. Where is it?”

  Florence found the black lacquered box in which she kept her loose tea leaves. Sergey took a generous pinch to demonstrate. “Tea has to be thick, like blood, and dark, like the soul.” He closed the box, and turned it over in his hand. “This is where you keep tea?”

  “Yes, why not?”

  As the tea steeped, he turned over the object in his hand, as amused by its prosaic use as he might be by a child wearing a stethoscope. Florence had bought the oval box at an outdoor market, picking it from among similarly gorgeous items. In tiny brushstrokes on its black lacquer veneer, a young man clutched the tail feathers of a flame-colored bird. “It’s the Firebird, right?” she said.

  “Zhar-ptitsa,” Sergey corrected. “Not Firebird. It means Heatbird. You know the story?”

  She poured herself the darkened tea and reclined in her chair, ready to listen. Sergey scraped his chair closer to Florence and, with a breath warmed up with spirits, began to tell her the legend of the Heatbird.

  “In a faraway kingdom,” he began, “there lived a brave prince named Ivan. He’d been chosen by the king to guard the tree of golden apples that stood in the center of his father’s orchard. Ivan’s lazy brothers had already failed at the task by falling asleep. So, when Ivan’s turn came, he tied bells to the branches so he’d be woken up when an intruder approached. In the middle of the night the bells sounded. Ivan opened his eyes and thought the sun must be shining. A great flame-colored bird with a hawk’s talons was picking the apples. Ivan, leaping to grab at its tail, caught hold of a single feather before the bird flew away. Captivated by this glorious animal and hypnotized by his still-warm souvenir, Ivan vowed to follow after the Zhar-ptitsa.