The Last Paradise

by Antonio Garrido

  Some might be saddened by my fate, but I feel lucky. Few men are able to say that, even if their life turned out to be short, it was really worth living. I have been lucky. Lucky to find you. Lucky to learn that, even if fate leads us into the abyss, there is always hope.

  Today, for the first time in my life, I can be the master of my own destiny. And that’s why I choose you.

  Promise me that you’ll never change. That way I’ll know that, when you can no longer hear my voice, you will still listen to me in your heart.

  When the phonograph let out its final sound, Natasha smiled. Though he was gone, she carried his love with her, so deep inside that nobody would ever be able to take it away.

  EPILOGUE

  Leonid Varzin set aside the plans for the heat engine and puffed on his papirosa as if there were no pleasure more intense. Smoking was one of the two privileges that differentiated him from the other inmates of the Kharkov Prison Camp. The other consisted of staying alive, which was feasible for as long as he and his cellmates successfully developed the prototypes they were working on. While he savored the smoke, Leonid observed the willowy prisoner hammering the fixtures of a frame in the workshop. One after the other, the blows were angry, relentless, each stroke seemingly aimed at the chains of his captivity.

  “You should save your strength. At that pace you won’t last another six months, and I asked them to keep you alive because we need your skills,” he called out.

  The prisoner didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on the fixture and continued hammering. Leonid and his pals might find respite from the monotony of imprisonment in developing their projects, but for the man with the hammer, helping them was only a means to survive another day, as he had been doing for two years.

  When he finished with the rivet, he stood and fixed his blue eyes on the bars over the windows. Outside, it was snowing hard, and the cold numbed his chest in the place where a dagger had once been lodged. He rubbed the scar, and without intending to, brushed his hand against the medallion that still hung from his neck. When he gripped it, the bars slowly vanished.

  He kept hammering, with the same determination as on the first day he arrived. For him it was just another day. But when the sun went down, it would be one fewer day until he was reunited with Natasha. One fewer day until, finally, he could enjoy the last paradise.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In the summer of 2011, I began to draft the first pages of this novel. At the time, I was in New York, where I’d traveled in search of rest and inspiration. Each morning, before sitting in front of my laptop, I’d go for a walk in Columbus Park, two blocks from the apartment where I was staying. During one of those walks, I stopped at a colorful market where books were sold by the pound at a price so ridiculous it was as if they were giving them away. I had been browsing for a while when an old essay entitled “Working for the Soviets” caught my attention; it was about the large numbers of Americans who had immigrated to Russia during the Great Depression. I bought it without hesitation. That night, for the first time in many years, I thought of my grandma Bienvenida.

  My siblings and I enjoyed a fortunate childhood. Perhaps we didn’t have the best toys or go on vacation every summer, but we always had two adorable old ladies by our side, with their curled white hair and their felt slippers, with which they’d briefly threaten us when they grew sick of our mischief. There were two of them, Bienvenida and Sara, and they were twins—twin sisters and twin grandmas.

  Bienvenida never married. When Sara was widowed, Bienvenida went to live with her to help her with her small children. Many years later, when we were born, Sara and Bienvenida cared for us with that love and tenderness that only grandparents know how to give. Bienvenida was actually my great-aunt, but in my heart, she was my grandmother, and I only ever thought of her as Grandma Bienvenida.

  Sara had her favorite grandchildren, and Bienvenida had hers. I was Bienvenida’s.

  As I grew up, I became ever more intrigued as to why Grandma Bienvenida never married. She was a sweet and caring woman, with a pleasant face and an enormous heart, and at ten years old, I couldn’t understand why she’d remained alone. One winter’s night while she rubbed my joints with alcohol to bring down my fever, I dared to ask her. She replied that she’d never found the right man. However, there was a sadness in her face that I’d never seen before, and without knowing why, I knew she was lying to me.

  I wasn’t wrong. Years later, I caught her crying while she read an old letter. When I approached to console her, she pressed the letter against her heart, and holding back tears, she told me that if I ever fell in love, and however difficult the circumstances, I must fight for that love as if my life depended on it.

  We never spoke about it again. Bienvenida died at age ninety-three, when I was seventeen, and it was one of the saddest days of my life.

  Years later, my father told me about the fleeting relationship that had marked Grandma Bienvenida. He revealed to me that she once met a young man with whom she fell hopelessly in love. He was a livestock trader and had just returned from the Soviet Union. During the months they spent together, the young man captivated her with his amazing tales of the nation of the Bolsheviks. He described the places where he worked, the immigrants from other countries he met, the wonders he discovered, and the horrors that forced him to flee Russia.

  When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he enlisted with the Republicans, and their paths separated. The last Bienvenida heard of him was a letter from the Ebro front, in which her sweetheart repeated that he loved her more than ever, and bemoaned the absurdity of war.

  This story was archived in my memory, and remained there until the day I stopped at that colorful market in New York.

  That night, in my rented apartment in Brooklyn Heights, I imagined the thousands of desperate people who, like that livestock trader, immigrated to Russia in search of a better future. Those who embarked on a journey to a place where everyone had the right to be happy, without suspecting that they were heading toward their ruin. The lives and deaths of all of those people inspired me to write this story about hope and egotism, about innocence and evil, about ideals and love—a tale of the consequences of fanaticism and poverty, but also, at the same time, a tribute to the sacrifice and fortitude of a group of courageous people who, thrown into an alien world, fought to be the masters of their own destinies.

  I didn’t want to end this reflection without borrowing the words of an old writer friend, who once assured me that if you search deeply enough, every life contains the inspiration for a beautiful novel. I don’t know whether he was right, but what I can say without fear of being mistaken is that this novel was inspired by a beautiful person, my beloved grandma Bienvenida.

  A GENUINE STORY

  Regardless of the necessary degree of truthfulness required from any novel inspired by real events, determining the balance of reality versus fiction on each of its pages always puts the writer in a predicament. When I embarked on writing this novel, the options I toyed with brought uncertain rewards. If the documented facts outweighed the fiction, it would enjoy the credibility bestowed by historical rigor, but at the risk of infecting the book with the dryness of a novelized essay. Conversely, if the emotions of the characters took precedence over the facts, it could arouse the suspicion of historians.

  For the layperson, an approach based entirely on the facts seems the less risky alternative. However, I was preparing to spend three years of my life writing a novel, so the choice could not be based so much on these considerations as on what I honestly felt the reader deserved. And the reader deserved not so much a true story as a genuine one.

  The macroeconomic data that politicians bombard us with does not reflect the reality of an economic depression. A depression is the poor woman whose desperation leads her to throw herself from a balcony because she cannot see a future for her children, or the thousands of destitute people rummaging through waste containers in search of something to eat. Equally, love is not the
pleasure of a passing conquest, or a Valentine’s Day gift wrapped at the last minute. Love is a widow’s gaze as she caresses the photograph of her sweetheart and longs for the embraces they shared, or the throb you feel when you are near the person who makes you want to live every second as if it were your last.

  This is why, instead of writing about historical figures, I preferred to tell a story about characters. After all, all I knew about the real figures were their deeds; I knew nothing of their feelings, their fears, their ambitions, the hatred they harbored in their hearts, or their darkest desires. In which case, what should I do? Invent their thoughts, fictionalize their feelings, and fabricate their actions? Would that be honest? Would it be right to put words that they never said in the mouths of historical figures, or describe feelings they never had? Rather than lie, would it not be preferable to create fictitious people of flesh and bone, whose actions could be shaped by those exceptional circumstances that really did change the lives of millions? How would I make readers more realistically experience the terrible events that took place, and what, in short, would be more real?

  The decision meant choosing between reason and emotion. The judicious me said, Play it safe, but my heart compelled me to lay myself open. In the end, the decision was dictated by feeling. I wanted to write a novel, and a novel is, by definition, fiction. And why do we love fiction? For its unique ability to trigger emotions, to captivate, to make us dream of characters who love and feel just like we do. Their problems interest us because they are our problems, and we are moved by their lives because they are our lives. And because if reason is what makes us human, then feelings are what make us people.

  The process

  Though this was to be a novel, the complexity of the historical setting of the 1930s required me to redouble my research efforts to ensure that every last detail of my depiction of a period as enthralling as it was heartrending was imbued with plausibility. It was arduous and treacherous work, hindered by the contradictory nature of the records, which varied substantially depending on the source. As clear as the water from a spring may seem, it always carries sediment from the place from which it emerges.

  To determine the accuracy of the facts, I classified the documentation according to the political affiliation of its authors, weeding out any documents of a propagandist nature produced by biased factions on whatever side. I did this with the large number of essays and chronicles published in Europe at the time—the contents of which reflect the sentiments of those who saw Russia as a beacon of freedom and hope—and with those who viewed her only as an imminent threat. It is also worth mentioning the large collection of reports, essays, and analyses produced after the advent of glasnost, which were a ray of light in this long and murky tunnel.

  As for the thousands of immigrants who, without intending to, became the protagonists in a horror movie not of their making, we can differentiate between three groups. First, the technicians and specialized workers who provided their services in exchange for advantageous remuneration. Second, the handful of idealists who, identifying with the principles of equality and solidarity that underpinned the Soviet Union, left behind everything they had to begin a new life that was as hard as it was altruistic. And finally, the largest contingent and the one that suffered the most hardship as a result of the events that unfolded: the legion of dispossessed Americans who, dazzled by the promises of prosperity advertised in the New York Times, left the United States in search of the work and sustenance that their own country denied them.

  For this dispossessed group, the adventure proved particularly painful. Most of the Americans who traveled to the Soviet Union did so before the United States established diplomatic relations, which in practice meant that, when their visas expired, they were left with a choice between being expelled from the country or renouncing their US citizenship and accepting Soviet nationality. Faced with this predicament, many decided to return to their homeland, but when they tried, the Soviet authorities stopped them. The Stalinist purges put an end to the exploits of these workers who went in search of prosperity and ended up the scapegoats of Soviet totalitarianism.

  In some of them I found inspiration for the protagonists of my novel.

  Wilbur Hewitt’s alter ego is found in Charles Sorensen, the Ford production manager in Detroit responsible for the contract that bound the Soviet state corporation for the motorization of the nation, the Avtostroy, to Henry Ford. To set up the Avtozavod, Sorensen traveled to the Soviet Union, where he studied the specifics of the construction of the factory in Gorky on-site alongside Joseph Stalin and Valery Mezhlauk. Later, back in the United States, he requested authorization from Henry Ford to return to the Soviet Union and solve the problems plaguing the Avtozavod, but Henry Ford didn’t allow it. His very words were, “Charlie. Don’t you do it! They need a man like you. If you went over there, you would never come out again. Don’t take that chance!”

  In the case of Sergei Loban, I drew inspiration from the figure of Valery Mezhlauk, the engineer and vice chairman of the State Planning Committee who was responsible for the agreement for the construction of the Avtozavod, signed in Dearborn on May 31, 1929, in the presence of the president of the American corporation, Henry Ford, and the Amtorg chairman, Saul Bron. A few years later, both Mezhlauk and Bron were summarily executed under the unfounded accusation of “enemy of the people” during the secret police’s reign of terror.

  Viktor Smirnov could be seen as a reflection of the sinister director of the secret police Genrikh Yagoda, a figure described by his contemporaries as vain, corrupt, and sycophantic, a lover of luxuries and women. During his early years as a member of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, he formed a network of spies and hired killers that infiltrated the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, until they gained total control. After allegedly murdering his immediate superior, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, Genrikh Yagoda was appointed People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs. It is thought that he then ordered the death of the celebrated Bolshevik leader Sergei Kirov, and unleashed a political bloodbath that would later be named the Great Purge, in which thousands were executed. During his time in power, Yagoda set up a secret laboratory in which he experimented with chemical products, poisons, and other instruments of torture that he used against his enemies. With the money taken from the accounts of the deceased, he built himself a sumptuous home with a private swimming pool in the center of Moscow. Ultimately, Yagoda met the same fate as his adversaries, and was shot in the back of the head in the same prison that was the site of many of his own horrific crimes.

  Finally, Jack Beilis, though distinct in personality, shared some traits with Walter Reuther, who began his career with the Ford Motor Company, where he became an expert in molds. In 1932, he was fired as a result of the Great Depression, and traveled to the Soviet Union to work as an expert at the Avtozavod factory in Gorky. During the two years during which he offered his services, Walter Reuther experienced many of the blessings and evils of the Soviet political machinery. In the end, he made it back to the United States, where after a long period as an activist for workers’ rights, he joined the Democratic Party.

  Soon after the Soviet factory was opened, commercial relations with Ford began to deteriorate, until in 1935 they completely broke down. In the words of Natalia Kolesnikova, director of the Gorkovsky Avtomobily Zavod Museum of History, it is highly likely that, had the Reuther brothers, who were managers at the time, remained in the Soviet Union, they would have been victims of Stalin’s purges. In 1938, the first director of the Gorkovsky Avtomobily Zavod (GAZ), Sergei Dakonov, was executed. All of the workshop managers were arrested. Numerous foreign workers, primarily Americans, suffered reprisals, and some disappeared forever into concentration camps or gulags.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  During the time I devoted to writing this book, many people were kind enough to share their knowledge and affection with me. To all of them I owe my sincere thanks, for without their selfless help, it would
not have been possible to write this novel.

  First, I would like to mention Professor Boris Mikhailovich Shpotov, member of the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and a Fulbright-Kennan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Professor Shpotov was kind enough to reply in great detail to many questions on the existence of sabotage, sporadically attributed to the foreign workers posted to the Avtozavod factories. I am equally grateful for the generous contribution of Dr. Heather D. DeHaan, associate professor of history, director of the Russian and East European Program, and academic vice president of the Binghamton Chapter, UUP, Binghamton University of New York, with whom I had in-depth conversations about the location and peculiarities of the American village in Gorky. I would also like to extend my thanks to Dr. Edward Jay Pershey, project manager at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, and Natalia Kolesnikova Vitalievna, director of the Gorkovsky Avtomobily Zavod Museum of History in Nizhny Novgorod (renamed Gorky in late 1932) for their help answering similar questions. Finally, I must also thank industrial design engineer Bernardo Tórtola, an expert in concept car styling and design, and a passionate collector of historical vehicles, who conscientiously advised me on the various specifications of the immaculately maintained Ford Model A that he owns.

  As for those who have supported me day to day with their warmth and affection, I would like to mention my parents, of whom I am tremendously proud. Together with my siblings, my daughter, and my grandchildren, they are the people who complete my happiness and provide the stability that I need to write for such long periods without once feeling dispirited. These special individuals complete my happiness, but this happiness would not exist were it not for my wife, Maite, an exceptional person whom I love deeply and whom I consider to be the most wonderful woman on earth.