When she closed her eyes, Aurora could almost believe she was back in Montana. Deep, dry snow snuffed out all sound, save the squeaking footfalls of thick felt valenki. Stung by the coldness and dryness of the air, her numb nose smelled nothing. The clenching of her empty stomach was familiar enough from her days spent roaming America. Only the swaying of the scaffold beneath her feet proved she was not on the hard-frozen earth of the High Plains.
She couldn’t keep her eyes closed for more than a few seconds, though, lest they freeze shut. The steam escaping from her lungs—for clambering up the scaffold was hard work—puffed up out of the scarf wrapped around her neck and face to solidify on her lashes and brows. She had more in the way of the former and less in the way of the latter than the other members of the Workers’ Shock Brigade, all of whom were men. In the quarter of an hour since they’d filed out of the warming shed and begun scaling the bird’s nest of twine, lumber, and baling wire wrapped around the two-hundred-foot tower of Blast Furnace #4, those men’s brows had become thick with white frost. The effect was mildly inconvenient and mostly comical.
Less funny and more perilous was the ice on the scaffold. The Industrial Lake—a dammed-up stretch of the Ural River—was of course frozen solid, and had been for months. Thick enough to host a sparse suburb of ice-fishing shacks. But near the reinforced-concrete plinth of the blast furnace was the cooling basin for the water that came boiling out of the open-hearth furnaces. Fat columns of steam rose from them when there was a heat under way, and when the wind bent them in this direction, ice grew inches thick on the ropes, boards, and bark-covered tree branches that constituted the scaffold. This had not been sturdy to begin with, for it had been built recently, in cold weather, when the labor force of Magnitogorsk pilfered trainloads of wood, or anything else combustible, from railway sidings and the open-air supply dumps that spilled out around them. Every stick of wood that made it up here unburned, and contributed its feeble strength to the scaffold, was a little miracle. But miracles no longer belonged in the Soviet Union, so ice and gravity were doing their best to tear it all down.
Any sane person would now be asking whether the shock brigade’s collective weight might be the straw that broke this camel’s back. Comrade Fizmatov had tried to reassure them on this point by performing a quick mental calculation of the total mass of ice on this structure and then letting them know that the brigade’s mass—six underfed men plus one comparatively healthy and robust Aurora—was trivial in comparison.
The brigade had paused for a moment. Just ahead, the scaffold jogged up a rustic ladder and ducked through a sort of armpit where a ten-foot-diameter conveyor system angled up from below. This had captured an eddy in the vapor and so their way forward was blocked by a wall of icicles gleaming red in the light of a river of molten pig iron flowing out of Blast Furnace #3. Comrade Griaznov was going ahead, clambering up the ladder, then crawling on hands and knees to a place where he could lie on his back and hammer at the encrustation. The others—half a dozen workers strung out along a span barely wide enough to plant their valenki—leaned back against the riveted iron plates of the stack and lit huge cigarettes, which, before setting out, they had fashioned out of loose tobacco and old copies of Pravda.
Earlier this year, when Aurora had been pretending to live the life of a normal American teenager in Chicago, she and her then boyfriend, Dick, had gone to a couple of movies. Dick’s taste ran to gangsters, so they saw a James Cagney feature. For Aurora, all of that tommy-gun action was a little too close to home, and so, to even the score, she had made Dick suffer through State Fair—a sunny tale of American kulaks. In any case, the features had been preceded by short animated films meant to amuse more punctual moviegoers as late arrivals filed in. The style of the artwork in these productions tended toward humorous exaggeration, with heads, feet, and hands drawn at double life size. Looking at her fellow shock workers in their big ushanka hats and big valenki boots, pinching their sausage-sized cigarettes in their bulky mittens and exhaling vast clouds of mixed smoke and vapor into the moonlight—all of this, combined with the rambling and improvised nature of the scaffold, put her in mind of those cartoons. It would have been funny had she not been here.
Fizmatov, who at his age shouldn’t have volunteered, was laboring to catch up, snorts of breath bursting from his nostrils to be whipped away by the wind.
“That’s it—chop-chop—move along smartly, Comrade!” Tishenko shouted down to him. “The brigade must stay in close formation lest we incur unnecessary casualties!”
Aurora glared at him, but even if Tishenko were the type to notice, the gesture would have been lost in the burst of vapor that escaped from her scarf as she let out an exasperated sigh. She took advantage of the respite to have a look around. She’d never been this high above Magnitogorsk, except for when she took a turn at the parachute-jumping tower, and when you were parachute jumping you had other things to be thinking about. She knew from maps that the Ural Mountains were off to the west, but in general they were not visible from here save as a white thickening of the horizon when the moon was in the east. This—the fact that they were east of the Urals—meant that they were technically in Siberia. But having recently ridden a train across Siberia she knew that many thousands of miles of it separated them from the Pacific, while Europe was only a short distance farther.
The Industrial Lake formed a hard western boundary to the complex—“city” seemed the wrong word yet. This occupied a four-kilometer-wide swath of former steppe between the Industrial Lake and the freak deposit of high-grade iron ore that gave Magnetic Mountain its name. The northern end of the swath was where the MMK, the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex, was plugged into the rest of the Soviet Union—for, as inconceivable as it was on a night as cold as this one, most of the USSR lay well to the north. At any rate, up thataway were the airstrip and the railyard, including a “train station” that turned out to be an open-air siding out on the steppe where trains that carried people had been known to stop. To detrain there, as Aurora and her party of American pilgrims had learned, involved a bit of a leap of faith.
From there you could walk to the posh cottages of Magnitogorsk’s revolutionary vanguard, if you didn’t mind trudging through a fertilizer plant. The main rail line continued south, cutting through the huddle of huts and tents where the convicts like Fizmatov were obliged to live, then feeding an industrial complex modeled after Gary, Indiana, but bigger. For Gary was the world’s biggest, and Comrade Stalin wanted to overtop it.
Even if, like Aurora, you came into Magnitogorsk not knowing a thing about steel production, you’d have a sense of how it worked by the time you’d followed the line down to the Socialist City at the southern end of the complex. Coal was brought in on trains from other parts of the USSR and delivered to coke ovens. There it was cooked to make the high-grade fuel demanded by the blast furnaces, of which Numbers 1, 2, and 3 were operational. A blast furnace worked on gravity, with iron ore and coke delivered into the top by conveyors. The material sank gradually into the base of the furnace, undergoing various transformations along the way, until it descended into the zone, down near ground level, that gave the blast furnace its name: superheated air was blown into it to complete its transformation into pig iron. This then flowed south to the open-hearth furnaces where it became steel, and thence to rolling mills, where it was shaped into whatever forms were deemed most desirable by the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, filtering its diktats down, like so much ore in a blast furnace, through the Main Administration of the Metallurgical Industry and the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex. In any case, the row of blast furnaces was dead in the middle of the complex, the first thing the visitor’s eye was drawn to, and so Aurora’s vantage point, cold and precarious as it might be, gave her the best possible view.
A few low hills rose out of the steppe a kilometer south of the rolling mills, and that was where the State Institute for the Planning of Cities was trying to show its fine qualities. A welter of settlements—shantytowns improvised by various ethnic minorities and political prisoners in different phases of rehabilitation, plus a whole village that had walked here from Poland—was being shouldered aside by apartment superblocks designed by Western architects enthralled by the radiant promise of socialism. At this hour, the place was as close as it would ever come to a Christmassy “Silent Night” scene. Big machines like the blast furnaces and the open hearths ran at all hours, but very few people or vehicles were on the move down below. The most notable exception was a penal brigade of Russian Orthodox priests, supervised by a couple of rifle-toting boys no older than Aurora. The priests were working through the night, attacking a long mound of frozen dirt with picks and sharpened iron bars. This feature ran between a railway siding and a ditch that connected to the shore of the lake.
Fizmatov, seeing utter confusion on Aurora’s face, had told her the story of it: two years ago, when Magnitogorsk was just getting started, some of the Western engineers who were planning it had ordered some turbines from Siemens, and paid for them with Soviet gold. The equipment had duly been shipped out here from Germany and hoisted up off of flatbed railcars and set down next to this railway siding, only to sit out in the snow and rain all through 1932 and 1933 as various delays meant that there was no place to install them. Meanwhile the requirement for this ditch had arisen and some newly arrived laborers had been put to work digging it. They had to put the dirt somewhere. Gradually the level of the earth around the Siemens turbines had risen until they had disappeared altogether. Now they were needed in order to get Blast Furnace #4 working, and so the job of digging them out had been assigned to this gang of gaunt, forlorn priests, jobless in the religion-free Soviet Union but stubbornly refusing to cut off their long beards and long hair. Those were frost-matted and swinging heavily as they drove their makeshift tools into the rock-hard ground. Aurora, who had actually been baptized into their church—against the wishes of her parents, but that was another story—felt some sympathy for their having to work on Christmas Eve. But they still followed the Julian calendar, so for them the holy night was still two weeks in the future.
Up ahead, Griaznov cried out and cursed. The rhythmic crash of his hammer stopped.
“What’s the matter, Comrade?” Tishenko demanded. “We are all waiting for you.”
“Hammer broke,” Griaznov moaned. “I got a piece of it in the eye.”
“Well, bring the head of it along in your pocket and we’ll have it fitted to a new handle later.”
“That’s the hell of it,” Griaznov said, “the handle is fine. The head is what’s broken.” He had been inching back along the catwalk toward the top of the ladder. He now descended this with great care, as the numbness of his hands and the thickness of his mittens made it difficult to really know whether he had a firm grip on the rungs. He handed the evidence to Tishenko, then took the extraordinary step of removing one mitten so that he could dab at his eye. One didn’t want tears streaming down a cheek in these conditions.
“What did you hit?!” Tishenko demanded. “This damage can’t have been inflicted by mere ice.”
“Must have broken through to the frame of the conveyor,” Griaznov answered. “Those big rivets are work-hardened.” Then it seemed to penetrate his awareness that he was being interrogated. That he was under suspicion for being a wrecker. “It was an accident!”
Fizmatov had finally caught up, and now excused himself past Aurora with a courtly nod of his ushanka. He was twice as old as anyone else and had lost four toes so far to frostbite. “Comrade Tishenko, if I may?” he said. He had a gravelly voice, low and settled, with no trace of the defensive anxiety that men like Tishenko were accustomed to hearing. Aurora had learned to recognize his accent as Ukrainian.
Tishenko handed over some metal fragments after a short, irritable pause. “It could be a serious matter—a matter for the OGPU,” he said, “if the conveyor were to be damaged by a careless blow—or a malicious act.”
Griaznov stiffened.
“Not that I am making any such allegation,” Tishenko continued, in what he probably supposed was a soothing and reasonable tone, “but others might. There’s a saying nowadays, down there—” And his ushanka tipped to one side as he nodded in the direction of the Socialist City. But as everyone here understood, he was alluding to the OGPU headquarters, which loomed over it from the top of a hill. “In every backward department there is a wrecker!”
“Fortunately, the responsible authority in these parts is the Commissariat of Ferrous Metallurgy.” Fizmatov chuckled. “And I can assure you, Comrade Tishenko, or anyone else who expresses curiosity on this matter, that what we have here”—he lifted the fragments of the hammerhead, pillowed on the palms of his mittens—“is a purely metallurgical phenomenon! I can express it using technical language, but in plain terms it is this: when steel becomes very cold, it becomes brittle. Comrade Griaznov, may I assume that this tool was stored out in the open overnight?”
Griaznov thought about his answer.
“In a very cold place?” Comrade Shaimat prompted him. He was standing between Fizmatov and Tishenko. A Tatar who had never seen so much as a ladder, let alone a blast furnace, when he had arrived in Magnitogorsk. But now, thanks to the Komsomol Campaign for the Liquidation of Illiteracy, he could read and write. And he could read people, and situations, better than most.
“Yes indeed!” Griaznov said. “Extremely cold, as we all know!”
“Meanwhile the vapor from below, condensing on the frame of the conveyor, warms it,” Fizmatov said.
“Warms it?!” Tishenko scoffed. “You call that warm?”
“No, but if we bring a thermometer up from the assay lab, I can assure you it will read many tens of degrees warmer than this,” Fizmatov said, again raising his mittens. “When the bitterly cold and embrittled hammerhead struck the warmer steel of the conveyor frame, it shattered, as glass would shatter if you struck it against an iron railing.”
“You have me at a disadvantage, Comrade,” Tishenko admitted. Which was putting it mildly given that Fizmatov had a PhD from the University of Paris and Tishenko was a jumped-up peasant. Fizmatov, of course, had the good sense not to point this out. Neither did he mention that the disadvantage, in a sense, went deeper. He’d already been sentenced to death. This had been commuted to ten years at Magnitogorsk. Tishenko might be asking himself: If the Sword of the Revolution had already made up its mind to spare Comrade Fizmatov’s neck, who was Tishenko to denounce him?
“You believe that this … theory would pass muster with the OGPU?”
“I am quite sure of it,” Fizmatov assured him, “if they really have nothing better to do than investigate a broken hammer.”
“That’s settled, then!” Shaimat exclaimed. He shouldered past Tishenko and Griaznov to the base of the ladder and began climbing it as if he were not freezing and it were not icy. “Myself, I never saw such a thing as a hammer until I came here! When we had to pound tent stakes into frozen ground, we used these! Cheaper than hammers, and plenty of them!”
He reached into the pocket of his coat and proudly displayed a rock.
IN A FEW MINUTES’ VIGOROUS BASHING, SHAIMAT CLEARED THE WAY. TISHENKO FILLED the time by developing an analogy between their situation and things he had seen—or perhaps only heard about?—during the Civil War, when the advancing Red forces—they were always advancing—had encountered some barrier in the earthworks thrown up by the (always-retreating) Whites and been obliged to bide their time for a short while as they sent sappers ahead to clear the obstruction. Shaimat, of course, was, in this analogy, the valiant sapper. But the blockage to be liquidated was not merely a lot of ice but some entirely logical to Tishenko, but difficult for Aurora to make out, complex of foreign capitalists, cliquism, Jews, inherited rural backwardness, opportunists, hooligans, ineradicable counterrevolutionary tendencies in the Russian Orthodox Church, wreckers, diversionaries, kulaks, Petliurite scum, national deviationists, backsliders, actively malevolent foreign agents, ex-bourgeois and White Guard elements, and their witting or unwitting accomplices. Occasional mistrustful glances at Fizmatov during all of this, and imploring gestures directed toward Aurora, as if she were just on the verge of being brought around. For her part, she was bemused by the man’s sheer energy, and beginning to suspect that all of this talking was really just a strategy that Tishenko made use of to stay warm. Tishenko was the Agitator: an actual job title here. You probably couldn’t get that job unless you were agitated to begin with.
Mercifully, Shaimat broke through with a triumphant crash of shattering ice, followed by merry tinkling noises as falling icicle fragments chimed against bits of scaffolding far below. Probably the closest thing to Christmas bells that would reach Aurora’s ears in 1933. “Ura!” Tishenko exclaimed, bolting toward the ladder, then seemed crestfallen when the others seemed more interested in finishing their cigarettes and idly rubbing snow on parts of their faces that had begun to show signs of frostbite.
“Ura!” Aurora shouted. “Let’s storm the front, Comrades!”
The comrades in question had been taken aback when she had materialized in the warming shed at two o’clock in the morning, saying it was no place for a girl. But now that they were all up here they seemed to have accepted her as a sort of mascot or cheerleader, and so finally they grumbled out “Ura!” and made a collective move for the ladder.
This brought them up into the complex of massive plumbing and equipment that crowned the blast furnace. Part of it was there to dump very large quantities of heavy ingredients—coke, iron ore, various mineral additives—into the furnace, and part of it was to draw off the hot gases that erupted from the top while the thing was in operation. For to prevent those from setting fire to the conveyors and other material-handling equipment up here, they needed to be contained and diverted along ducts as big around as subway tunnels. The fabrication of those ducts, which had to be welded together from curved steel plates, had become a sticking point in the campaign to get Blast Furnace #4 back on schedule—hence Tishenko’s remark about this being a “backward department,” and hence the need to assemble workers’ shock brigades at two in the morning. Of this brigade, half—Griaznov, Ivanov, and Myshkin—were welders. The others were there to support them.
They reached the “front”—the end of the duct, projecting out into space like a snapped-off tree limb, where the welding needed to happen—only half an hour behind the schedule that had been plotted out by their Agitator. But it was too late for one member of the previous shift who, as became immediately obvious when Shaimat tried to shake him awake, had frozen to death. In his last minutes he had embraced his electric welding machine, trying to steal some of its warmth. Now he had stiffened up around it. In trying to pry the body loose, Shaimat yanked a little too hard, tore the body suddenly loose, lost his balance, and began to slide down the duct toward the unfinished end. He let go of the body and saved himself by grabbing the welder’s power cable. A few seconds later the body made impact on the concrete foundation of Blast Furnace #4, where it broke up.
“SOMETHING SEEMED TO BE WRONG WITH AMERICA,” AURORA SAID, “AND SO I CAME HERE.”
“America must be very bad then,” Shaimat said, looking around significantly at Dining Room #30 and then down at his serving of bread. “Fifty grams, Aurora. You have a card for the Engineers’ Dining Room, don’t you? There you could get a hundred.”
“I’m not hungry,” Aurora said with a long glance in the direction of Blast Furnace #4, where she, Shaimat, and Fizmatov had just spent half an hour collecting the remains of the frozen welder. Fizmatov had then trudged off to his lodgings in the penal colony. Run-of-the-mill prisoners would be lucky to get fifty grams there. Fortunately Fizmatov was so obviously important to the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex that mysterious workarounds had been put in place enabling him to eat as well as any commissar.
Shaimat took her meaning, then nodded. “I was worried you had taken ill,” he said, then pantomimed scratching in the vicinity of his armpit.
Aurora recognized the gesture, which transcended all linguistic barriers. She smiled and shook her head, indicating that she did not have lice—the carriers of typhus. The women’s dormitory she’d been living in was relatively clean. “In America I got in the habit of sleeping on the floor if there were any questions about the bedding.”
Shaimat nodded. “Some of the guys in the Kazakh settlement sleep outside on wooden benches.”
Aurora raised her eyebrows—which had thawed, and which had enough sensation returning that she was pretty sure no frostbite had set in.
“It’s not that much colder than indoors,” Shaimat added reassuringly.
Having satisfied himself that this new arrival from America knew the ropes where basic typhus prevention was concerned, Shaimat began to spoon soup into his mouth. “Your Russian is very good,” he remarked. “Oh, I’d have no way of knowing, since mine is so bad! But the others say that if they didn’t know you came from America they would think you had been brought up in St. Petersburg.”
It was called Leningrad now, but you could get away with using the old name in a historical context.
“But I was,” Aurora said.