The Last Paradise

by Antonio Garrido

  But those were Walter’s thoughts, not his own.

  Still, he wanted to believe that his friend was right. And, now he had blat. He didn’t know how it might help him, but he had it, even if it had cost him a pair of new shoes.

  He looked out of the train window. Walter had spoken to him of the breathtaking beauty of Saint Basil’s Cathedral, the formidable walls of the Kremlin citadel, and the impressive expanse of Red Square, but compared to the decadent majesty of Leningrad, the outskirts of Moscow were a gigantic suburb of crude gray buildings, which, far from belonging to a state capital, seemed to Jack like a drab industrial installation, crammed with warehouses that had been haphazardly converted into homes. Walter pointed out that the most iconic buildings were still to come, but at this stage of the journey, all Jack could see were the silent streams of workers whose features and clothing were as gray and as dirty as the districts they wandered through. Finally, at 11:00 a.m., the train arrived at the old Leningradsky Station in Moscow.

  Walter was the first to get off. He left his luggage behind, leapt onto the platform, and gazed at everything around him as if laying eyes on the sea for the first time. He smiled, his chest swelling with satisfaction. At last his dream was coming true. Yet for Jack, seeing the station brought no excitement. The same giant portraits of Stalin and Lenin were on the façade of the train station, a carbon copy of the one he’d seen in Leningrad. The building had the same monotone bossage, the same Risorgimento-style windows, and the same central tower with its French clock, the ever-present five-pointed star in its center. Even the cold was the same. As far as he could tell, the only thing differentiating Moscow from Leningrad was the Muscovites. Wherever he looked, crowds of people in fur coats, scarves, and hats walked in silence like automatons whose routes, occupations, and expressions were inalterably fixed.

  He noticed a poor woman, bent under a bale the weight of which even a cart would struggle to bear. She walked barefoot, asking for change without anybody so much as looking at her, while what appeared to be her children followed her with gaunt faces and frightened eyes. A little farther on, he saw two soldiers dragging away a crippled beggar who was blaming his misfortune on the revolution, a sign around his neck asking for money to help him survive the winter. Jack clenched his jaw. Too many people and too much poverty.

  He was forced to look away. In his adopted role as guide, he had to be on alert in case any of his fellow travelers went astray, so he directed them as they unloaded their luggage, and informed his group that, as soon as they left the station, they would head to the Intourist offices, where those who didn’t yet have lodgings could make arrangements. For ten cents a head, he would help them do all the necessary paperwork. They all accepted his suggestion, but Walter approached quietly and interrupted him.

  “It’s impressive how you can turn a little information into profit,” he chided him.

  Jack took the comment to be the product of jealousy and didn’t bother to reply. It was true that his friend had provided all the details on Intourist, but Jack had offered to share the earnings with him, and Walter had refused.

  “And I suppose you’ll charge them for taking them to the People’s Commissariat?” Walter added.

  Jack remained silent. He hadn’t intended to charge them, but he couldn’t understand why Walter objected so much. Ultimately, he was providing a useful service that the American travelers could accept or reject with no obligation.

  “You didn’t pay me for the information,” Walter insisted.

  “You didn’t ask me to,” answered Jack, and in a bad temper pulled down one of the suitcases jammed into an overhead rack.

  “These people have no money.”

  “Nor do I.”

  Walter grabbed hold of him. “But don’t you see, Jack? This is a different world we’re in now. In the Soviet Union, people share their resources and dreams with everyone else. And unlike all of them, you’ve been promised a good contract.”

  Jack looked around him. “You know what, Walter? All I see them sharing is their poverty. As for my contract, you’ve just described it perfectly. It’s been promised. Just promised.” He turned away and carried on unloading the suitcases.

  On the way back from the Intourist office, Jack regretted the way he had spoken to Walter. Perhaps the Soviet Union wasn’t the paradise that his friend had prophesied, but that didn’t make the fact that Walter had risked his life in New York to save Jack from prison any less true.

  He looked at his friend with remorse. Walter, wearing his broken spectacles, was walking in front of him, with Sue close by. He was full of excitement as they headed to a guesthouse. He didn’t seem to need anything else. Just the air he breathed, the company of the girl he loved, and the knowledge that he was in a world where there was no place for selfishness.

  Jack clenched his fists and looked down at himself. He no longer wore the faded jacket he’d begun the journey with, or the worn, patched-up shirt, or even the tattered boots that the corrupt policeman had given him in Leningrad. With the profits from his activities as a guide, and from the sale of the ground clove, he’d managed to persuade every fellow traveler to sell him his best clothes, until he had an outfit that, altogether, and compared to the rest of his group, made him look like a man of some means.

  The situation made him uncomfortable, but he had no regrets. What he’d gained was through his own hard work, like everything he had achieved in life. For as long as he could remember, he had slogged away, worked diligently, and made sacrifices. His life had always consisted of making the effort that would enable him to progress, to climb out of the misery that his father seemed to have predetermined for him. He had gotten up every morning, lamenting his fate and envying others for what they had achieved. His uncle Gabriel, the banker, had been his model. That was why he had continued to grind away when he left his native New York for Detroit. It was why he had fought there to build a future for himself, sweating blood for long, exhausting days, studying every screw, analyzing every cog, and memorizing every process. It was why he had enjoyed the little privileges with which his sacrifice had been rewarded: a car to go out in, a tailored suit, and a beautiful apartment. It was why he hated those responsible for the economic crisis that had snatched from him everything he had worked for. And it was why he was prepared to do whatever it took so that, as little as he might achieve in the Soviet Union, nobody would ever take it away from him.

  He looked up and contemplated the buildings in front of him, their façades and balconies cracked as if they were open wounds left by the violence of the revolution. Jack likened them to a cast of old actresses, their beauty faded by time. He looked to the horizon. Everything was strange. To the eyes of someone accustomed to the defiant skyscrapers and tumultuous avenues of New York, Moscow was an inexplicable mixture of antiquity and decadence, vast and provincial at the same time, like an immense medieval town where the fairy-tale palaces and gleaming churches had been forced to breathe in to make room for the gigantic, monstrous new socialist constructions.

  It was getting dark and the cold was growing worse.

  While they waited for the arrival of the tram that was to take them to the guesthouse they’d organized through Intourist, Jack berated himself for his distrust. For a moment, he saw himself as a bitter man directing all his resentments at the Soviets. He took a deep breath. The air was icy but clean. He could feel that he needed it. The group of Americans that accompanied them had been reduced to five: the four members of the Daniels family and Joe Brown, one of the few black passengers who had traveled on board the SS Cliffwood. The rest of the immigrants had decided to hire an official Intourist guide to take them to their lodgings. In total, a party of eight—eight Americans lost in the Soviet Union. Perhaps they were nothing more than a bunch of paupers staying in second-rate guesthouses and traveling third class, but if Jack stopped to think about it, in reality they were privileged. They had traded a miserable life without hope for a new one. Different, perhaps, but new, n
onetheless. A life in a country that had opened its doors to them, and whether those doors were older, or more modern, was of little consequence. The most important thing was what waited for them behind those doors: work, prosperity, and hope.

  Jack wanted to believe that was how it would be, even though the tram they had to cram into like sardines reminded him that the prosperity he longed for might still be far away.

  “Do you really expect us to sleep in this room? It’s colder in here than it is outside.” Sue turned to Walter in disbelief.

  “It is best room, miss,” the building’s upravdom said with a smile, taking off his hat and revealing teeth as black as charred kernels of corn.

  Walter dropped his suitcases on the floor of the filthy room for which they’d just paid ten rubles each. It certainly wasn’t what he’d expected for that price, but apparently the high cost was due to overpopulation in the Soviet capital. Jack raised an eyebrow. He looked at the crumbling walls, the chipped windows, the panes of glass that looked as if they’d never been cleaned, and an old bed that made sleeping on the floor seem preferable.

  “What a pigsty,” Walter finally mumbled.

  “You shouldn’t be surprised. You cried out to the heavens when I told you about the cost of hotels like the Moscow, Lux, or Europa,” Jack responded, using his foot to push aside a rug and revealing a hole through which the floor below could be seen. “Could you show me my room now, please?” he asked the upravdom.

  “This. This is room.” He gestured at the dilapidated spring sofa against one of the walls.

  As much as Jack tried to make the upravdom understand that they’d paid for separate rooms, there was no persuading him. The man explained that he’d had to make last-minute arrangements for a Ukrainian family that had been transferred to Moscow, and there were only two rooms available in the entire building. “If you want, you use this,” he said, pointing at a blanket hanging from the ceiling and indicating that it could be drawn like a curtain.

  Jack nodded and helped the upravdom spread out the blanket. The Daniels family would sleep in another room of the same size, while Joe Brown would spend the night on a mattress that the upravdom had set up in the corridor between the two rooms. I don’t mind, Joe had assured them. You should see some of the places where I’ve had to sleep in my life.

  “Well, at least we have a heater in the middle of the room,” said Walter, and he gestured at a strange copper contraption standing on the tiled floor.

  When the upravdom went away, they all sat around what seemed like an old heater, waiting for Jack to light it. He examined it closely, until suddenly he burst into hysterical laughter. “Oh hell! It’s a samovar! A goddamned tea urn!” It had taken him a while to identify the device because the tap was missing, but it was similar to one he’d seen as a boy at his uncle Gabriel’s house. Fortunately, it contained some remnants of tea, which Jack judged to be enough to make a brew. He also found a broken electric stove, which he quickly repaired with a splice and used to heat the samovar and warm the room. Before long, they were sharing a couple of cups of watery tea, while Sue cobbled together a dinner with the supplies that Jack had bought at the border.

  They savored it. Jack watched the food that he’d worked so hard to earn disappear. But he didn’t care. “Tomorrow we’ll have a feast using the meal tickets Intourist gave us,” he announced, and they both responded with a smile.

  Nobody imagined how short-lived that smile would be.

  The next morning, Jack and Walter turned up first thing at the People’s Commissariat to have their employment contracts authenticated, as Amtorg had instructed them to do. However, after they had waited two hours in the line, the official responsible for approving foreigners’ contracts shook his head and returned them to Walter without even looking at them.

  “I am sorry, citizens. Quota of foreign personnel assigned to Avtozavod is filled. You must wait three months for next quota.”

  Jack looked at Walter, hoping it was some kind of joke, but his friend’s stunned expression said otherwise. The man must have made a mistake, he thought. At the Soviet office in New York, they had been assured that they would be accepted at the Avtozavod immediately upon arrival. When Jack told the official that they barely had the means to subsist for a week, the man repeated the same sentence without so much as blinking. Jack demanded to see his superior, but the official’s only response was to signal to an armed guard, who ordered them to leave the line to make way for the next applicants.

  As they left, Jack, filled with indignation, demanded an explanation from Walter.

  “There must’ve been a misunderstanding,” answered Walter.

  “A misunderstanding? Did you not hear him? The guy basically told us that our contracts are worthless. We have to wait three months. What’re we gonna do in the meantime? Starve, or freeze to death? Forget it. I already know the answer: we are going to starve and freeze to death.” Jack cursed himself for trusting the Soviets. He was beginning to wonder whether Wilbur Hewitt’s offer of work would be worth nothing as well.

  “Your pessimism won’t solve anything. We don’t know how any of this works. Let me think . . . I know a Muscovite I’ve been corresponding with since I was a trade unionist; he has contacts at the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Maybe he can help us.”

  “Oh really? Well, he’d better. Or I can see us competing with the beggars for space on the sidewalk.”

  It took them the entire afternoon to find Walter’s friend Dmitri, whom they finally located at his home overlooking the Moskva River. The man, a timid Georgian who spoke crude English, said he was sorry for their situation and offered them a cup of hot tea. As they warmed up, he promised them he’d be able to arrange for them to be seen by the commissar for industrial contracts within a couple of days as the man was a great friend of his. One way or another, they’d resolve the matter. Walter hugged the man in celebration. Jack remained unconvinced.

  Back at the guesthouse, Walter told Sue what had happened and reassured the Danielses that his contact would find them jobs soon. Jack remained silent. When they finally turned off the light, he lay on the wooden sofa and tossed and turned. He couldn’t believe what was happening to them. As much as Walter refused to accept it, they were alone, halfway across the world, cowering in an icebox with their pockets half empty and nothing but unemployment on the horizon. He took a deep breath, which only made him even colder. He wanted to think, at least, that he still had Hewitt’s offer up his sleeve. He wondered what the industrialist and his niece were doing. Then he conjured the image of Elizabeth in his mind. With his eyes closed, he felt as if her face were glowing next to his and in some way dissipating the icy cold that penetrated the cracks in the windows. He tried to get to sleep—he wanted to be up early and go out in search of a nice gift. After all, he could hardly attend Miss Hewitt’s birthday party empty-handed.

  After two hours going from stand to stand, suffering the noise and jostling of the crowds, Jack came to the conclusion that, in Moscow’s markets, you could buy any trash that a person was able to extract from a dunghill and deposit on a counter. Scattered all over the market floors were splintered picture frames, scraps of fabric, tattered shoe soles, the completely unusable remains of furniture, dented pots, loose crockery, army uniforms, and pieces of lead piping. In other words, he could search for a year and would never find anything fit for a lady.

  He decided to take a break and find a teahouse where he could warm up. The boiling tea burned his lips, but he welcomed it. He thawed his fingers over the steam from the cup and looked around to find that all eyes were on him. A trader with a ruddy complexion approached and offered Jack half his stock of cheese in exchange for his American clothes. In other circumstances he’d have accepted, but he’d worn rags for too long and wasn’t going to give up his outfit even for a ton of genuine French Roquefort. However, he took the opportunity to ask the man where he could buy flowers. The cheese seller looked at Jack as if one of his goats had spoken t
o him. “Flowers? In Moscow? In winter? Nobody sells flowers here.” When Jack asked him why, his answer was that nobody would buy something that served no purpose.

  Jack shrugged and finished his cup of tea. He was about to leave, when one of the waitresses stopped him. “Ignore him. It’s true no one sells flowers at the market, but two blocks on, heading toward the river, you’ll find a few stands that practically give them away.”

  Fortunately, Jack arrived minutes before the sellers gathered up their goods to flee the imminent blizzard. For a couple of rubles he bought a little bunch of violets and white wallflowers that they wrapped up for him in a sheet of the Pravda. He looked at the flowers and smiled. The wrapping might not be the best, but at least he could read the newspaper on his way back. Now he just needed to leave the flowers in some water, dress up like a dandy, and head to the Metropol to ask Wilbur Hewitt’s niece for a dance.

  12

  Perhaps Jack Beilis lacked the glamour he would need for a liveried doorman to let him into a hotel just by looking at him, but he certainly knew how to bluff it. Wearing a perfect smile, he got out of the droshky, paid the coachman, and sauntered idly through the snow-covered gardens that led to the Hotel Metropol’s entrance, endeavoring to make sure that when the doorman caught sight of him, he’d think that the newcomer arriving with an aristocratic manner had come to close an important deal. As he reached the doorman, Jack stopped to take in the beautiful mosaic that adorned the building’s façade. “Spectacular! The Princess of Dreams surpasses any of Mikhail Vrubel’s previous work!” he said, waving his bunch of flowers and addressing the sky. And without giving the doorman time to speak, he strode confidently into the building.