“Have they already had the tournament of flowers?” she asked her partner quietly, breathing quickly.
“It just finished a little while ago. Why were you so late?” the assistant engineer asked her meaningfully, just as if he had loved Frosya forever, and pined for her all the time.
“Ah, what a shame!” Frosya said.
“Do you like it here?” her partner asked her.
“Well, yes, of course,” Frosya answered. “It’s so lovely.”
Natalya Bukova did not know how to dance, and she stood next to the wall, holding her friend’s hat in her hands.
In the intermission, while the orchestra was resting, Frosya and Natalya drank lemonade, and they finished two bottles. Natalya had been in this club only once, a long time ago. She looked at the clean, decorated dance floor with a shy happiness.
“Fros, Fros!” she whispered. “When we have socialism, will all rooms look like this, or not?”
“How else? Of course, they’ll look like this,” Frosya said. “Well, maybe they’ll be a little better!”
“That would be something!” Natalya Bukova agreed.
After the intermission, Frosya danced again. The dispatcher in charge of shunting asked her. They were playing a fox-trot, “My Baby.” The dispatcher held his partner tightly, trying to press his cheek against her hair, but this hidden caress didn’t affect Frosya, she loved a man who was far away, and her poor body was all tight and hollow.
“Tell me, what’s your name?” her partner said into her ear while they were dancing. “I know your face, but I’ve forgotten who’s your father.”
“Fro!” Frosya answered.
“Fro?… You’re not Russian?”
“Well, of course not.”
The dispatcher thought about this.
“Why aren’t you?… After all, your father’s Russian: Yevstafyev.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Frosya whispered. “My name’s Fro.”
They danced on in silence. People stood along the walls and watched the dancers. Only three couples were dancing, the others were shy or didn’t know how. Frosya leaned her head closer to the dispatcher’s chest, he could see her fluffy hair in its old-fashioned hair-do right under his eyes, and this relaxed trustingness was dear and pleasant to him. He preened himself before those who were watching. He even wanted stealthily to stroke her head, but he was afraid people might notice it. Besides, his fiancée was there, who might pay him back later for his closeness to this Fro. So the dispatcher moved a little away from her, for appearance’s sake, but Fro leaned on to his chest again, onto his necktie, and the tie shifted to one side under the weight of her head, showing a strip of his naked body in the middle of his shirt. The dispatcher continued to dance, in terror and awkwardness, waiting for the music to stop. But the music grew more agitated and energetic, and the woman did not move away from his arms. He could feel little drops of dampness on his chest, which was bare under his necktie, right where the hair grew on his man’s chest.
“Are you crying?” the dispatcher asked, frightened.
“A little,” Fro whispered. “Take me over toward the door. I don’t want to dance any more.”
Without stopping his dancing, her partner steered Frosya to the exit, and she went out into the corridor quickly, where there were few people and she could recover herself.
Natalya brought her friend’s hat to her. Frosya went home, while Natalya went off to the cooperative warehouse where her husband was the watchman. Right next to the warehouse was a building materials yard, and a pleasant-looking woman was the watchman there. Natalya wanted to find out if her husband did not have a certain affection for this woman guard.
The next morning Frosya received a telegram from a station in Siberia, beyond the Urals. Her husband telegraphed her: “Dear Fro I love you and I see you in my dreams.”
Her father wasn’t home. He had gone to the station, to sit and talk in the Red Corner, to read the railroadmen’s paper, to find out how the night had gone in the traction department, and then to go into the buffet where he could drink a beer with some friend he might find there and talk briefly about their spiritual concerns.
Frosya didn’t even start to brush her teeth; she hardly washed, just throwing a little water on her face, and paid no more attention to what she looked like. She didn’t want to waste time on anything except her feeling of love, and this now had no connection with her body. Through the ceiling of Frosya’s room, on the third floor, the short notes of a mouth organ could be heard, then the music would stop, and start again. Frosya had wakened in the dark early morning and had then gone back to sleep, and this was when she had heard this modest melody above her, like the singing of some gray bird working in the fields without enough breath for real singing because all its strength was spent in work. A little boy lived above her, the son of a lathe operator at the depot. The father had probably gone out to work, and the mother was doing the laundry —it was pretty boring for him. Without eating her breakfast, Frosya went off to her classes—she was taking courses in railroad communication and signals.
Frosya had not been to class for four days, and her friends had probably missed her, but she was going off to join them now without any real desire. Frosya was excused a great deal in class because of her capacity to learn and her deep understanding of the subjects of technical science; but she herself never understood how this could be—in many things she lived only in imitation of her husband, a man who had finished two technical institutes and who felt the mechanisms of an engine as if they were part of his flesh.
At first, Frosya had been a bad student. Her heart was not attracted by Pupin’s induction coils, relay gears, or figuring the resistance of metal wires. But her husband’s lips had once pronounced these words and, what’s more, he had showed her the vital functioning of these objects which were dead for her, and the mysterious quality of the delicate calculations thanks to which machines live. Frosya’s husband had the capacity to feel the strength of an electric current like a personal passion. He could animate everything that engaged his hands or his mind, and so he had a real sense of the direction of forces in any mechanical construction, and he could feel directly the patient, suffering resistance of the metal structure of a machine.
Since then induction coils, Wheatstone bridges, contractors, and illumination units had become sacred objects for Frosya, as if they were spiritual parts of the man she loved; she began to understand them, and to cherish them in her mind as in her heart. In difficult times Frosya would come home and say humbly: “Fedor, that microfarad and those wandering currents, they bore me!” But embracing his wife after their daytime separation, Fedor would transform himself temporarily into a microfarad and a wandering current. Frosya almost saw with her own eyes what, until then, she had wanted to understand but could not. These were just the same simple, natural, attractive things as different-colored grasses growing in the fields. Frosya often grieved at night because she was only a woman and could not feel herself to be a microfarad or a locomotive, or electricity, while Fedor could—and she would carefully move her finger along his hot back; he slept, and didn’t wake. Somehow he was always hot, strange, and he could sleep through loud noise, eat any kind of food—good or bad, he was never sick, he loved to spend money on trifles, he was getting ready to go to Soviet China and become a soldier there…
Fro sat in class now with weak, wandering thoughts, mastering nothing of the assigned lesson. She despondently copied from the blackboard into her notebook a vector diagram of the resonance of electric currents and listened sorrowfully to the teacher’s lecture on the influence of the saturation of steel on the appearance of higher harmonics. Fedor wasn’t there, now communications and signals no longer attracted her, electricity had become something alien to her. Pupin’s induction coils, Wheatstone bridges, microfarads, iron cores had all dried up in her heart, and she could not understand a thing of the higher harmonics of electric current; in her memory there sounded all the time the monotonous little song of a child’s mouth organ: “The mother is washing clothes, the father’s off at work, he won’t come back soon, it’s lonely and boring all alone.”