Once he’d gotten over his surprise, Jack observed the newcomers. The woman looked like an enormous rag doll that someone had stuffed with wool until its seams had split. As for her husband and sons, they obviously enjoyed the same diet. Fortunately, they were as friendly as they were obese, and not long after leaving Helsinki, they offered around some boiled corncobs and cardamom cake, which, to Sue, Walter, and Jack, tasted like heaven itself.
The villagers had proved to be open and talkative. Between mouthfuls, Konstantin, as the head of the family said he was called, asked about the customs of the United States, and was amazed to hear that Americans could travel from state to state freely without authorization. Then, between bellows of laughter that revealed gums dotted with gold, he bragged that he knew all about the Americans from the documentaries they showed in certain Soviet cinemas. He summarized his wisdom in two clear sentences: baseball was a ridiculous game consisting of whacking a ball with a stick, and the cowboys conquered the Wild West because the Indians always attacked them by running around and around in circles so they could be more easily shot down. Jack listened obligingly, astonished at the speed by which Konstantin emptied the bottle of vodka down his throat. Meanwhile, his wife, Olga, who seemed to be paying particular attention to Sue’s clothes and shoes, asked the younger woman about the most fashionable Hollywood stars.
Jack interpreted as well as he could.
“She’s fascinated,” Jack translated for Sue. “Now she’s asking whether you’d trade your skirt for her fur coat.”
“Seriously?” Sue replied, unconvinced. “It’s worn-out.” She looked down at it. “And anyway, I don’t know if he’d approve . . .” She gestured at the space that Walter had left when he had gone off to have a cup of tea in the buffet car at the rear of the train.
“Nonsense! You’ve been complaining about the cold since we left. Go for it!” Jack encouraged her.
“You think?” Her tone was like a naughty girl’s. “That coat doesn’t exactly look my size.”
“Ha! And your skirt isn’t hers. What does it matter? You can trim off the extra and use it to make a hat.”
Despite not understanding the conversation, the Soviet peasant woman took off the fur coat and held it out to Sue with a smile. Sue carefully stroked the garment, marveling at the soft fur. “Will you help me try it on outside?” she asked Jack. “There’s no space in here.”
“Sure.” He took the coat and followed Sue out into the corridor. In a swift movement, she slid an arm into the sleeve and let Jack help her with the other one.
“How does it look?” She posed like a vaudeville showgirl.
“They’re going to see you,” Jack replied, gesturing at the passengers crowding the corridor. He went to return to the compartment, but Sue stopped him.
“Wait. I still have to give her the skirt.”
Without letting Jack respond, she turned toward him, and using him as a screen, she took off the skirt, revealing pale legs topped by tight-fitting white panties. Sue’s brazenness made Jack feel uncomfortable, but he couldn’t prevent a stab of desire.
“Hurry up,” he said, looking away.
Sue quickly buttoned up the coat, and they went back into the compartment, where Olga, mumbling, “Krasivy, krasivy,” impatiently snatched her new acquisition.
“What’s she saying?” Sue asked.
“That even if it doesn’t fit, it’s beautiful,” Jack translated as he took his seat.
Sue slumped back onto the wooden bench, and her half-open coat allowed Jack to see her thighs. He took a deep breath to shake off the discomfort that was making him flush red, and tried to distract himself by looking at the chickens in their cages. But his eyes disobeyed him, lured by the whiteness of Sue’s firm, slender legs, contrasted against the dark of the coat. It had been months since he’d enjoyed the company of a woman. As his breathing accelerated, he forgot his reserve and fixed his eyes on Sue’s legs. Nobody seemed to notice what was happening; the two Soviet children dozed, and their parents were absorbed in exploring every last stitch of the American skirt. Jack squirmed in his seat, discomforted by an intense heat that he didn’t know whether to attribute to the crude radiator at the window or Sue’s exposed skin. He thought of Walter. Finally, he unbuttoned his shirt neck and stood.
“I can’t stand this heat. I’m going to see what your fiancé’s up to,” he said, and left the compartment.
On the way to the buffet car, Jack had to fight his way through the dozens of passengers who filled the corridors, some wrapped in so many rags that they were barely distinguishable from the bags in which they transported their meager belongings. He looked at them with pity. Unlike him, none of them had paid the provodnik the five rubles that it cost to reserve a seat, or the five extra for blankets. However, as the train clattered along, what surprised him most was the smell that came from many of the compartments, even the first-class ones, occupied by Russians and Finns.
As he made his way through the rearmost cars, wondering what caused the pungent aroma, he came across Walter, who was returning from the buffet.
“Hey, Jack! I was on my way to let you know. Some locals just told me we’ll be arriving in Vyborg any moment now; it’s the last stop in Finland. Isn’t that incredible? We’ll go through customs, and in a couple of hours, we’ll be in Leningrad.” He took off his spectacles to wipe the mist from the lenses. His face was a picture of happiness.
“That’s great.” Jack was relieved that Walter, who’d been silent since their falling-out at the station, was speaking to him again. “But we should wait here. Sue’s sleeping, and the compartment stinks,” he said in an attempt to delay being reunited with the young woman. He was still flustered by the image of her thighs.
At that moment, the locomotive’s brakes screeched and the cars shuddered. Slowly, puffing and snorting, the train ground to a halt at Vyborg Station. When the provodnik finally blew his whistle, a stampede of Finns alighted and ran toward the food stalls that some peasants had set up on the platform. Jack and Walter braved the cold of the night and got out to stretch their legs. While they walked, Jack marveled at the trails of breath emanating from the crowd of passengers, like dozens of puffs of smoke whitening the night air.
“What’re they doing?” Walter asked.
“I don’t know. Looks like they’re buying food,” said Jack, stiff with cold.
Jack saw Konstantin, the man who shared their compartment, haggling with a farmer over the price of a sack of potatoes. He left Walter for a moment and went to speak to him.
“What did he say?” Walter asked on his friend’s return, blinking behind the lenses of his spectacles.
“That unless we want to starve to death in Russia, we should spend every last ruble we have on meat and vegetables.”
When Sue saw Walter, Jack, and Konstantin returning to the compartment loaded to the hilt, she was speechless. Jack had bought smoked venison sausages, rice pudding, and cinnamon cookies, as well as a packet that smelled as bad as the interior of the car. When she asked Jack what it contained, Konstantin cut in.
“Klavo, Gvozd.” He showed her some brown powder and smiled.
“It’s ground clove,” Jack explained. “That’s what the strange smell was. Take some and spread it over yourself. It seems the Russians use it to scare the lice away.” As they packed up the food, he explained to them that Konstantin had assured him that it would keep them safe from typhus. “So I bought enough to resell to the other passengers,” he added proudly.
Walter gave Jack a disapproving look. “I don’t understand where you got the money for all these supplies. How much did Hewitt offer you?”
“What offer’s this?” Sue asked.
Jack cleared his throat. The border police were about to come on the train, and he didn’t want the officials to find them arguing. “If you must know, it has nothing to do with Hewitt’s proposal.”
“It doesn’t? So where did you get it from? Because as far as I can see, you just bought
up half the market.”
Jack sat in silence for a moment, weighing whether to let Walter in on the source of his profits. He knew he wouldn’t be happy about it, but he had to come clean. “It was from the tickets.”
“The tickets?”
“The train tickets I bought in Helsinki. For buying them all together, they gave me a twenty-five percent discount.”
“And you took advantage of your fellow countrymen to turn a profit?”
“Oh, don’t give me that crap, Walter. I gave them a five percent discount, and as for you two, well, until a second ago, you seemed perfectly happy wolfing down my profits.” He gestured at the packages of food he’d shared with them.
Sue looked at Jack, then turned to Walter. “Jack’s right. We need food, and he hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“He hasn’t? He cheated the others and kept their money.”
“I didn’t cheat anyone!” Jack’s expression darkened.
“Don’t get like that, Walter,” said Sue. “Jack’s right. He just offered to buy the tickets for the passengers at a certain price. If he then got a bigger discount and profited from it, I don’t think—”
“Damn it, Sue! Whose side are you on?”
Sue was about to respond, when the compartment door was flung open. A flashlight shone in their eyes. The three of them fell silent.
“There is problem?” the officer finally asked in thickly accented English.
Jack and Sue remained silent. Only Walter defied the beam of light that dazzled him. “No, sir. There’s no problem. Not yet.”
Jack ignored the persistent rapping of knuckles on the lavatory door and continued the task of hiding bills in his secret pocket. In total, he had seventy dollars, including his meager savings, the profits from buying the train tickets, and those he’d just made from the sale of ground clove to the terrified Americans. He kept out a few notes and the handful of rubles he’d exchanged at the railroad station. He was buttoning himself up when they hammered on the door again. Jack yelled to them to leave him in peace. His hands were as muddled as his mind. He wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing. They’d reach the border at Beloostrov at any moment.
He washed his face with a sprinkling of icy water. When he opened the door, he found himself face-to-face with an angry old man who threatened to urinate on him. Jack pushed past him and headed to his compartment, doubt eating away at his insides.
Hours before, the foreign exchange clerk at Helsinki Central Railway Station had warned him that the ruble was not yet a recognized currency, so its value depended on what the international banks chose to pay for it at a given time. The value of the ruble was therefore impossible to predict, let alone guarantee. Konstantin had confirmed as much.
Between swigs, the peasant farmer had explained how he’d been personally hit hard by the frequent devaluations that had depreciated his savings until they were worth less than a handful of snow. That was why he advised Jack to hide his money. The border guards would give him two rubles per dollar, but on the Russian black market, he could receive up to forty-five.
“I’ve seen you’re carrying dollars. I could help you. For a small fee, of course. You just have to know the right people,” he’d proposed, before his wife upbraided him for it with an elbow to the ribs.
Jack had been interested. He treated the couple to some of the delicacies he’d bought, and encouraged Konstantin to say more. The man’s words exuded the honesty of someone who had nothing to lose because he’d already lost everything. Jack remembered that, after emptying the first bottle, the peasant farmer had told him about his former status as a kulak, a prosperous landowner who inherited the land that his parents inherited from his grandparents. Konstantin had taken pride in being an honest employer who treated his workers with respect. Even so, the Bolsheviks branded him an exploiter. He was lucky to survive. He hated the Bolsheviks so much that, given the opportunity, he would have killed them all with his bare hands. Halfway through the second bottle, he explained to Jack that, after the expropriations of the revolution of 1917, he and his family subsisted by working like slaves on a collective farm. For years, they endured the threats and mockery of their former serfs, until in 1921, President Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, the NEP, that would steer the Soviet Union toward prosperity. For Konstantin, those bland initials offered a glimmer of hope, because, overnight, private property was granted legal status once more. Motivated by rage and determination, he slept little and managed to save enough to invest in a small plot of land. Gradually, suffering immense hardship, he began to flourish again, without understanding that the Bolsheviks would never tolerate individual prosperity, even if earned with blood and sweat. Stalin demonstrated as much when, within three years of coming into power, he abolished the concept of private property that Lenin had approved. However, on this occasion, when the Bolsheviks came to plunder his smallholding, his eldest son fought back, pelting them with stones. He now lay buried under the same land he had plowed.
That was why Konstantin drank, and why he hated them. Since then, his family had made a living selling contraband, traveling from time to time, disguised as peasants, to visit relatives in Finland.
Before returning to his compartment, Jack adjusted his pants. Walter might have justified the actions the Bolsheviks had taken against Konstantin, but he wasn’t Walter, and he knew nothing about politics. What he knew well was the language of desperation. He guessed Konstantin must have heard the same language in him when he shared his secrets with him.
Inside the compartment, they were all dozing. Jack settled into his seat opposite Walter and looked at Sue, resting her head on his friend’s shoulder, her new overcoat carefully buttoned down to the knees. He tried to forget her legs and once again questioned whether it was a good idea to hide his dollars from customs. Given that he was about to begin secure employment, perhaps it was reckless, but his decision wasn’t just about the desire to enrich himself. The reality was they didn’t know what they’d find in Russia, or what terms their contracts would have. In fact, the position promised by Wilbur Hewitt was nothing more than that: a promise. The industrialist’s condition might deteriorate, and he could be forced to stay in Helsinki or return to the United States, and even if he did recover as expected, he could easily forget his offer as soon as he arrived in Gorky. Equally, if the customs officers discovered his money, Jack could always feign ignorance. After all, it was only obligatory to declare the dollars he was going to bring into the country; he didn’t have to exchange them. Konstantin had explained that, if he decided to keep them, customs would give him a receipt indicating the amount of currency he had decided to hold on to, which he would then have to show each time he went to a Soviet bank to exchange them. With each transaction, he’d be given another receipt indicating the dollars exchanged, so that the government had a record of every last cent.
And that he didn’t like.
Walter’s whisper tore him from his thoughts. “Give me your passport,” he said, sitting up with a yawn. Jack handed it to him. The three of them had agreed that Walter would deal with immigration control, since it would take place in English and they trusted that his enthusiasm, ease of manner, and most important, his knowledge of the Soviet regime would help smooth the process. Walter took the document, put it together with Sue’s and his own, and looked out of the window. Lights blinked in the distance. “Our first Soviet city! Let’s wake Sue.” He did so by kissing his fiancée on the cheek.
Jack thought that the Soviet customs officials in Beloostrov performed their duties with the bored efficiency of operatives on an assembly line. As soon as the passengers were on the platform, they separated the immigrants by nationality, read out a list of banned items in poor English, checked their visas, and conducted a thorough search without any scope for objections of any kind.
They appeared well trained. Noble McGee, a Quaker from Arizona whose deafness prevented him from understanding the instructions, was almost arrested when he refused
to allow a female officer to frisk him. Fortunately, his wife’s shouting alerted Walter, who persuaded the old man that in the Soviet Union, women performed the same work as men. Perhaps it all had its logic, Jack thought, though, to his mind, there were other cases more difficult to understand. Berthold Finns, a California physician who had embarked on the SS Cliffwood driven by a thirst for Communist solidarity, found it inconceivable that the customs officers had confiscated his phonendoscope simply because they did not know what it was. Jack was just as surprised when they forced Richard Barnes, the lawyer of socialist convictions, ahead of him in the line, to relinquish his law books because they were written in English. But what shocked him the most was one of the officers requisitioning a scooter from a small child and explaining that such a toy would make less-fortunate Soviet children envious.
When it was Jack’s turn, Walter went in front as agreed, their passports in his hand.
Jack observed the young Soviet official while he performed his duties. About twenty years of age and with a shepherd’s red cheeks, he examined their documents with exasperating thoroughness.
“Wait one moment,” he said in something vaguely like English. Then he went away with the passports and whispered something to a man who appeared to be the head of the unit. Jack noticed that the young man was pointing at his passport.
“Is there a problem?” Walter asked.
The older officer who had retained the documents returned with an expression that was far from friendly. “I’m sorry, but it will be necessary we make some verifications.” He waved Jack’s counterfeit passport in the air.
Jack fell silent. When they performed the relevant checks, they’d discover that he was a fugitive accused of murder. For a moment, he considered trying to escape, but he was in the middle of nowhere and would compromise his friends. Walter seemed to read his mind.
The Last Paradise Page 11
