“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.