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 fa?ades 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, nonetheless. 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.