“Fifty!” Joe Brown blurted out in the end, spitting on the floor. “Fifty dollars.”
“What do you expect for half days? It’s better than nothing!” Walter yelled. “What did you get, Jack? What have you got for us?”
Jack looked at them all one by one before replying. “Two hundred. Two hundred dollars a month, for each of you.”
The transfer to Gorky by railway was much the same as the other train journeys they’d experienced: the same packed third-class cars, the same delays, the same insufferable jolting, and the same snow-covered horizon. The only difference was that Walter wasn’t traveling with them. Jack looked at the chipped wooden bench where he’d spent ten hours. Pressed shoulder to shoulder with Sue, he asked her why, in a country that glorified the equality of all citizens, they had three classes of accommodation on trains.
“I guess it’s because these cars are from the age of the tsars,” Sue replied, trying to rationalize in the same way that Walter would have.
Jack scratched his head. “I doubt it. If that was the case, it could easily be remedied. They could have a single price and allocate the best seats first come, first served.”
“Oh, Jack!” She smiled. “I don’t understand politics. I bet Walter would have given you a better answer. I don’t know. Perhaps they’ve kept the higher classes for rich foreign tourists. Anyway, what do you care? The important thing is we’re about to arrive at the gateway to the Urals!” She stood up to gesture toward the impressive pair of transmission towers visible in the distance.
Jack wiped some condensation from the glass and looked through it at the gigantic twin towers. A shiver ran down his spine. They were just over twelve miles from Gorky and their new life. And though he didn’t fear destiny, for the first time, Walter’s absence unnerved him. He still couldn’t understand why his friend had not gone with them.
The night before they left, Walter had been defiant, declaring that he would never accept handouts from a capitalist pig. It had been no use insisting to him that Wilbur Hewitt had been hired by Stalin himself to help the Soviet Union. Sue said that Walter hadn’t grasped just how good a deal it was that Jack had managed to get from Hewitt, and that was why he had decided to stay in Moscow for a few days and find his own opportunities in Gorky through his Muscovite contact. To avoid any trouble, Walter hadn’t wanted her to stay with him. He’d given himself a time limit of one week, he told Sue. If he didn’t get results, he’d travel to Gorky and accept Hewitt’s offer.
Just after midday, the train came to a halt in Gorky Station.
As they alighted, the sixty-eight American immigrants heard the Intourist official responsible for guiding them to the blocks where they would be housed suggest that they load their luggage onto the carts that waited for them by the river, but nobody moved a muscle. After coming halfway around the world, they were not about to separate themselves from what little they still possessed.
Jack rubbed himself in an attempt to retain some of the heat that seemed to be escaping through his mouth with every breath. He looked around. The avenue on which the snow buried both the roadway and the houses was almost deserted. On the station fa?ade, the thermometer showed thirty-five degrees Celsius below zero. He put his arm around Sue, who was shivering like a puppy. No one had warned them that the last paradise would be so cold.
Like a herd of reindeer, the American immigrants followed the Intourist official to the tram stop on line eight, where they were told that it would take them forty-five minutes to travel the seven and a half miles from the center of the city to the suburb where the factory was located. Once they were squeezed in like livestock, the driver rang the bell, and the tram dragged its two cars through Gorky’s desolate streets. As they huddled together, Jack could not imagine how the city’s freezing inhabitants could know the meaning of the word happiness.
Gradually, the last buildings made way for a monotonous, snow-covered upland, interrupted from time to time by lampposts sunk into the snow like harpoons protruding somberly from a great white whale. After half an hour, the tram approached a gigantic complex of industrial buildings protected by dozens of wire fences. Murmurs were suddenly replaced with words of admiration when the passengers saw the impressive size of a site that, at first glance, seemed bigger than the city itself.
Jack was impressed. The Ford factory where he’d worked in Dearborn had comprised assembly and power plants, a foundry, a bodyworkers’ shop, an engine factory, and countless warehouses and auxiliary buildings spread over a thousand acres. The Avtozavod not only housed similar installations, but behind the fences there seemed to be an army of armed guards.
When the tram reached the final stop, signposted “Eastern District,” Jack was one of the first to enter the registration office that the Soviets appeared to have set up for the occasion in a timber hut. He was received by a guard with slanting eyes under a fur hat almost as large as the overcoat that covered his body. The man shivered behind a little counter upon which lay a cap similar to the one Elizabeth’s partner at the dance had been wearing. He wondered to which section of the army the cap belonged. When it was his turn and the employee asked him to identify himself, Jack placed the letter of recommendation from Amtorg and the contract that Wilbur Hewitt had provided on the counter. The man ignored the letter and concentrated on the contract, verifying that, alongside Hewitt’s signature, Sergei Loban’s appeared. He stamped the document and added Jack’s name to a registration book. When the Soviet asked him for his passport, Jack informed him that it had been requisitioned at the Finnish border.
“The officer who retained it assured me they’d send it on to the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry in Moscow, but when I went to collect it, they told me that they’d forward it directly to this factory.”
The guard turned his slanted eyes toward Jack. He looked at the name that appeared on the contract again and searched in his drawer. Jack noticed that it was filled with American passports.
“Jack Beilis. Yes. Here it is.” He took it out of the drawer, compared the photograph to Jack’s face, and set it down next to the cap. “You come with family?”
Jack remembered that he had shown his fake marriage certificate at customs. At that moment he was glad that Walter had decided to stay in Moscow; otherwise there would no doubt have been a quarrel. “Yes, I’m traveling with my wife.” He gestured to Sue to come forward. “She has a contract, too.” He showed it to the man.
Sue smiled and gripped Jack as if he belonged to her, making a face when she had to let go to hand the guard her passport.
“All right. Fill out questionnaire, sign, and wait outside until accommodation assigned to you,” he said.