A Russian Journal, Page 21

  We waved heavily to our hosts of Tiflis. They had been very kind and hospitable to us, and we had been of considerable nuisance to them. And our friend the cavalryman-driver waved violently. Nothing tired him out.

  It was close in the plane, for the air-conditioning system, as usual, was out of order, and the smell of attar of roses was overwhelming. Our plane lumbered into the air and began to climb rapidly to get through the Caucasus. On the ridges we could see the castles and fortifications of antiquity.

  It is a magical place, Georgia, and it becomes dream-like the moment you have left it. And the people are magic people. It is true that they have one of the richest and most beautiful countries in the world, and they live up to it. And we understood thoroughly now why Russians had always said to us, “Until you have seen Georgia, you have seen nothing.”

  We flew over the Black Sea, and stopped again at Sukhum, and this time our crew did not go swimming. The line of women was still there selling fruit, and we bought a great box of peaches to take to the correspondents in Moscow. We purposely got them firm, so that they would not all ripen at once. The sad thing was that they did not ripen at all. They simply rotted in the condition in which we got them.

  We flew over the secondary range of the Caucasus and came down into the interminable flat lands. We did not land at Rostov, but flew directly on to Moscow. And it was cold in Moscow, for the winter was approaching very fast.

  Mr. Chmarsky was a very nervous man. This time we had nearly finished him off. And even Chmarsky’s gremlin was tired. There were no difficulties at the airport. We were met. The car was waiting, and we got into Moscow without any difficulty at all. We were very happy to see our room in the Savoy, with the crazy monkey, the insane goats, and the impaled fish. The bust of Crazy Ella winked and nodded to us as we walked up the stairs to our room, and the stuffed bear on the second floor drew himself up and saluted us.

  Capa got into the bathtub with an old British financial report, and I went to sleep while he was still there. For all I know he spent the night in the tub.

  CHAPTER 9

  MOSCOW WAS IN A STATE of feverish activity. Great gangs of men were covering the buildings with gigantic posters and portraits of the national heroes, acres in extent. The bridges were strung with electric light globes. The walls of the Kremlin and its towers, and even its battlements, were outlined in electric lights. Every public building was floodlighted. In every public square dance stands had been put up, and in some of the squares little booths, made to look like Russian fairy-tale houses, had been erected for the sale of sweets, and ice-cream, and souvenirs. A special little dangling metal buttonhole ornament was official, and everyone wore one of them.

  Delegations from many countries were arriving almost hourly. The busses and trains were loaded. The roads were full of people coming into the city, carrying not only their clothes, but food for several days. They have been hungry so often that they take no chances when they move, and everyone carries a few loaves of bread. Bunting and flags and paper flowers were on every building. The individual commissariats had their signs on the buildings housing their offices. The subway trust put up a huge map of the subways of Moscow, and at the bottom a little subway train that ran back and forth. This attracted crowds, who stared at it all day and late into the night. Wagons and trucks loaded with foodstuffs, with cabbages, with melons, with tomatoes, with cucumbers, rolled into the city—the gifts of the collective farms to the city on its eight-hundredth anniversary.

  Everyone in the street wore some medal, or ribbon, or decoration reminiscent of the war. The city boiled with activity.

  I went over to the Herald Tribune office and found a note from Sweet Joe Newman. He was held up in Stockholm, and he asked me to cover the party for the Herald Tribune, since he couldn’t get back to do it.

  Capa was working feverishly over his films, criticizing his work himself, the quality of the developing, everything. He had an enormous number of negatives by now, and he spent hours in front of the window, looking through the negatives, and bitching badly. Nothing was correct, nothing was right.

  We called Mr. Karaganov at the Voks office and asked him to find out exactly what we had to do to get the films out of Russia. We thought there might be some censorship, and we wanted to know what it was enough in advance so that we could make preparations for it. He assured us that he would go to work on it immediately and would let us know.

  On the night before the celebration we were invited to the Bolshoi Theater, but we weren’t told what it would be. By some fortunate accident we were unable to go. We heard later that it was six hours of speeches, and no one could leave, for there were members of the government in the government box. It was one of the happiest accidents that ever happened to us.

  The restaurants and cabarets were packed with people, and many of them were set aside for the delegates who had come from the other republics of the Soviet Union and from other countries, so that we couldn’t get in at all. As a matter of fact it was very difficult to get dinner that night. The city was simply mobbed with people, and they walked slowly about the streets, stopping in one square to listen for a while to the music, and then trudging on to another square. They looked, and trudged, and looked. The country people were wide-eyed. Some of them had never seen the city before, and no one had ever seen the city so lighted up. There was some dancing in the squares, but not a great deal. Mostly the people trudged and stared, and trudged on and stared at something else. The museums were so packed that you couldn’t get in at all. The theaters were mobbed. There was no building on which there was not at least one huge picture of Stalin, and the picture second in size was that of Molotov. Then there were huge portraits of the presidents of the different republics, and of the other heroes of the Soviet Union, their size graduated down.

  Late in the evening we went to a little party at the house of an American Moscow correspondent who has been in Russia for many years. He speaks and reads Russian easily, and he told us a great many stories about some of the difficulties of running a house in present-day Russia. And just as with hotel serving, most of the difficulties came from the inefficiency of a bureaucratic system—so many records and so much bookkeeping made it almost impossible to get any repairs done.

  After dinner he took a book from his shelves. “I want you to listen to this,” he said, and began reading slowly, translating from Russian. And he read something like this—this is not an exact transcription, but it is close enough.

  “The Russians of Moscow are highly suspicious of foreigners, who are watched constantly by the secret police. Every move is noticed and sent into central headquarters. A guard is placed on all foreigners. Furthermore, Russians do not receive foreigners in their houses, and they seem to be afraid even to talk to them very much. A message sent to a member of the government usually remains unanswered, and a further message is also unanswered. If one is importunate, one is told that this official has left the city or is sick. Foreigners are permitted to travel in Russia only after great difficulty, and during their travels they are very closely watched. Because of this general coldness and suspicion, foreigners visiting in Moscow are forced to associate with each other exclusively.”

  There was a good deal more in this vein, and at the end our friend looked up and said, “What do you think of it?”

  And we said, “We don’t think you can get it past the censor.”

  He laughed. “But this was written in 1634. It is from a book called Voyages in Muscovy, Tartary and Persia, by a man named Adam Olearius.” And he said, “Would you like to hear an account of the Moscow conference?”

  And he read from another book something like this: “Diplomatically the Russians are very difficult to get along with. If one submits a plan, they counter it with another plan. Their diplomats are not trained in the large world, but are mostly people who have never left Russia. Indeed, a Russian who has lived in France is considered a Frenchman; one who has lived in Germany is considered a German, and these ar
e not trusted at home.

  “The Russians cannot go diplomatically in a straight line. They never get to the point, they argue in circles. Words are picked up, and bandied, and tossed, until in the end a general confusion is the result of any conference.”

  After a pause he said, “And that was written in 1661 by a French diplomat, Augustin, Baron de Mayerburg. These things make one much less restless under the present setup. I don’t think Russia has changed very much in some respects. Ambassadors and diplomats from foreign countries have been going crazy here for six hundred years.”

  Quite late in the night our host tried to drive us home, but halfway there his car ran out of gasoline. He got out and stopped the first motorist who came by. There was a quick exchange of Russian. He gave the man a hundred roubles, and we got in and were driven home by this stranger. And we found that this can nearly always be done. Almost any car becomes a taxi late at night, for a very high price. This is very fortunate, for there are practically no regular taxis on run. The taxis usually cover a route and take the car full. You must say where you are going, and the taxi driver will tell you whether he is going in that direction. They operate a little like streetcars.

  In addition to all the decoration a great deal of new equipment was coming out in celebration of the anniversary. Big new electric streetcars, trackless streetcars, were put on the streets for this celebration. The Ziss automobile plant released many beautiful new cars, which were almost exclusively put to the use of the big delegations from foreign countries.

  Although it was only September 6, it was becoming very cold in Moscow. Our room was freezing, and the heat would not be turned on for a month. We wore our overcoats when we were not in bed. The other correspondents in the Metropole Hotel were unpacking their electric heaters which had been put away for the summer.

  Almost at dawn on the day of the celebration Capa was out raging through the streets with his cameras. He had a Russian cameraman with him now to facilitate his movements about the city and to explain to policemen that he was all right. And in Red Square he had a militia man assigned to him to make things easy and to stop any unpleasantness. He photographed buildings, and displays, and crowds, and faces, and groups of trudging people, and he was as happy as it is possible for him to be when he is working.

  In many streets little sidewalk restaurants were set up—one directly across from our hotel—two little tables, with white cloths on them, and vases of flowers, and a big samovar, and a glassed-in display counter for little sandwiches (open-face sandwiches with sausage and cheese), jars of pickles, and small pears and apples, all for sale.

  It was a brilliant cold day. The elephants from the circus paraded through the streets, preceded by clowns. There was not to be any military parade on this day, but there was a big show scheduled for the stadium, and to that we went in the afternoon.

  It was a show of mass formations of factory workers in brilliant costumes. They did group calisthenics and marches. They made figures on the field. There were races, some for women and some for men, competitions in shot-putting and in volley ball. There was a showing of dancing horses, beautifully trained horses, which waltzed, and polkaed, and bowed, and pirouetted.

  Someone important in the government was there, but we couldn’t see him, whoever he was, for the state box was on our side of the stadium. In fact we have almost a record. In the whole time we were in Russia we didn’t see one single important person. Stalin had not come up to the celebration from his place on the Black Sea.

  The show in the stadium went on all afternoon. There were parades of bicycles, and races of motorcycles, and finally there was a last show that required a great deal of preparation. A line of motorcycles rode around the track. In the seat was the motorcycle driver, and standing on each motorcycle was a girl in tights, and each girl held a great red flag, so that when the motorcycles went at full speed, the huge flag flapped behind. This parade circled the track twice, and that was the end of the show.

  We started back from the Dynamo Stadium because I had to do my Tribune piece for Joe Newman, and Capa had to get back into the crowds to keep his camera clicking. And halfway back we blew a tire, and we had to walk the rest of the way. Capa got caught in the crowd, and I didn’t see him until much later. I finally made it to the Tribune office, did my piece, and sent it over to the censor.

  We had dinner that night with Mr. and Mrs. Louis Aragon, who were at the National Hotel. They had a room with a balcony that overlooked the huge square in back of the Kremlin. From there we could see the fireworks which went off almost constantly, and we could hear the salutes of artillery that continued at intervals all evening. The square in front of us was one packed mass of people. There must have been millions of them, milling slowly and eddying back and forth across the square. In the middle of the square there was a bandstand where speeches were made, and music played, and there were singers and dancers. The only place we have ever seen people so closely packed together is in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

  It was very late at night before we could even force our way through the people back to our hotel. And many hundreds of thousands of peoples still trudged through the streets, back and forth, looking at the lights and watching the electrical displays.

  I went to bed, but Capa put his hundreds of rolls of film away, and got out his negatives, and when I went to sleep he was still staring at the light through his negatives, complaining bitterly that nothing had gone well. He had discovered that one of the cameras he had been using all day had developed a light leak, and he thought that all of his films were probably ruined. This did not make him a very happy man, and I was so sorry for him that I determined not to ask him a single intellectual question the next morning.

  Our time was getting very short, and we still had many things that we wanted to do. We wanted to see the Russian writers who when we had first arrived had all been out of town, on the Black Sea, or in Leningrad, or in the country. And we wanted to see theater and ballet and ballet schools. Capa had many pick-up shots to make. And every day or two we called Voks and asked whether our pictures had been cleared, because this was becoming a worry to us. We couldn’t get any information about what we had to do about the pictures, and we knew that some kind of request was bound to be made. And no information came back, except that they were working on it. Meanwhile the drawers in our room were crowded with rolls and strips of developed film.

  The deep fall had arrived, and the winter was fast approaching. In the country around Moscow a blue mist hung close to the fields, and everywhere the people were digging potatoes and storing cabbages.

  A kind of coldness was creeping up between Capa and me, for an odor had come into our room, and it seemed to each of us that it was the odor of not quite clean clothing. We thought we were clean, we bathed a great deal, we sent our laundry out regularly, and yet this smell increased. We began looking at each other with narrowed eyes, and making slightly disparaging remarks about each other. The smell got worse and worse. We had to keep a window open. It was only after the third day that we discovered what it was. General Macon had given us some D.D.T. bombs, and one of these bombs had not been quite tightly screwed down, so that a tiny vapor of it was impregnating the room with its odor. And because we did not expect an odor, each of us thought it was the other. The smell of Aerosol, if you know what it is, is a rather pleasant clean smell, but if you don’t know what it is, it is rather disgusting. We were very glad when we discovered the source of the evil and closed it off, and the room soon regained its beauty.

  On the night after the celebration Ed Gilmore, who with time had forgiven Capa for stealing his Ellery Queen, invited us to dinner. And his wife is not only beautiful, she is also a beautiful cook. We spent an evening of happy, well-fed, mildly alcoholic decadence, for Ed Gilmore had a number of newly arrived swing records from America. We drank Martinis and ate crisp little piroschki, and late in the night we danced a little. It was a good evening, and we honor Ed Gilmore for his ability to
forgive Capa’s crime against him. The next day Sweet Joe Newman got back from Stockholm with very delicate gifts. He brought a fountain-pen, and some cigarette lighters, and cigarettes, and canned delicacies, and a few bottles of Scotch whisky, and a suitcase full of toilet paper. It was very good to have him back.

  Moscow was settling into its winter stride. The theaters were opening, the ballet would begin, the shops were beginning to sell the thick cotton quilted clothing and the felt boots that people wear in winter. Children appeared in the streets in caps with earflaps, and with fur-lined collars on their thick coats. At the American Embassy technical sergeants who were experts in electricity were busily rewiring the whole building. Last winter the wiring burned out, and without the electric heaters they were used to, the Embassy staff had to work in overcoats.

  We went to dinner at a house where five young American officers of the Military Attaché’s staff lived. It was a very good dinner, but they do not live very happy lives, for they even more than the others are restricted in their movements, and they must live the most circumspect of lives. I presume that the Russian Military Attaché in America is rather carefully watched too. In front of their house stands a permanent militia man in uniform, and every time they leave their house they are accompanied by invisible followers.

  Inside the pleasant house we sat at dinner with the American officers, and we had American food—a leg of lamb, and green peas, and a good soup, and salad, and little cookies, and black coffee. And we thought how four hundred years ago, perhaps in a house like this, British and French officers, young men in gold and red uniforms, had sat over their port, while outside in front of the gate the

  Russian guard in a helmet carried a pike and watched over them. These things do not seem to have changed very much.