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 to 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.
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