Harpo Speaks! (39 page)

“Let me see,” I said. “Where will I be ten days from now? Might be at the beach house in Malibu. Might go down the coast for a little fishing. Or I might just sit right here and watch the broads go by in their bathing suits. Anyhow, I’ll send you a postcard.”

Ten days later, of course, I was in New York City. Forty days later I was in Moscow. Woollcott had spoken.

Unknown

CHAPTER 18

Exapno Mapcase,

Secret Agent

GETTING INTO RUSSIA in the fall of 1933 was not easy, unless you knew somebody who knew somebody in the Soviet government. In my case, Woollcott had reporter friends in Moscow who were on good terms with Maxim Litvinov, the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union. Knowing somebody who knew somebody in the White House didn’t hurt either, and my visa came through two weeks after I arrived in New York.

I had been busy in the meantime getting together a complete set of costumes and props-not knowing which of my acts they’d go for in Russia-and trying to work out an itinerary with the New York office of Intourist. After a couple of days of haggling, the Russians decided that everything should be worked out after I got to Russia. They gave me a letter to the director of the Moscow Art Theatre and wished me luck.

It was like heading for Texas to play one-night stands–no itinerary, no bookings, no dates, no guarantees. But also, this time, no Minnie either.

Aleck came to see me off, and gave me another letter of introduction, to the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty. I couldn’t be in more capable hands in Russia, he assured me. Aleck also had a piece of “miraculous news.” I knew he was bursting to tell me something, but he saved it until the very last, as a sort of going-away present.

“Harpo,” he said, “I’ve come to the end of the search. I’ve found her at last. I’ve found Miss Flatto, your female warden from P.S. 69 or whichever school it was whose second grade you escaped from.”

“Yah?” I said. “No kidding? Does she remember me?”

“Can your ego suffer a blow?” he said. “Miss Flatto, alas, does not remember Adolph Marx. But she will. We have a date for tea, the three of us, the day you get back from Muscovy.”

And so, with that to come home to, I headed for the Soviet Circuit, aboard the S.S. Albert Balin.

It was a rough crossing, stormy all the way to Hamburg. Of the eleven passengers on board, only three, including me, turned up regularly at mealtime. It was hard to tell whether the others were sicker from the rough seas or from having watched the captain eat. The captain of the Albert Balin was a big Prussian with a droopy mustache. His favorite food was sauerkraut cooked in champagne, which he slurped up by the ton for breakfast, lunch and dinner. When he got going good you couldn’t distinguish the sauerkraut from the mustache, and he was noisier than a leaky bilge pump. It was enough to keep a sensitive passenger below on the smoothest voyage.

I passed the ten days noodling on the ship’s piano, playing solitaire, and wondering what the hell I was doing headed for Russia alone, with a harp, a trunk full of props, and letters to two people I had never met. Naturally, I was mighty curious about the place. As it was to most Americans, the U.S.S.R. was as much of a mystery to me as the other side of the moon. It was there. It had to be there. But what it was like, I had no idea.

Old Russia had produced Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Irving Berlin, and Chico’s mother-in-law. You got the impression it was a country where everybody sat around between sleigh rides, drinking tea with raspberry jam, playing guitars and having friendly, loud arguments about which steppe or which swamp was the Garden Spot of the Earth. But New Russia? The impression was vague, from the little you could read in the papers-Bolsheviks looting palaces, driving tractors, and being shot by firing squads for making dirty looks at the Commissar.

Well, I consoled myself, Shaw had been there and so had Woollcott, and they’d come back in good shape.

I had planned to take my time getting to Moscow after we reached Hamburg, sort of mosey through Germany and see the sights. I did not mosey, however. In Hamburg I saw the most frightening, most depressing sight I had ever seen-a row of stores with Stars of David and the word “Jude” painted on them, and inside, behind half-empty counters, people in a daze, cringing like they didn’t know what hit them and didn’t know where the next blow would come from. Hitler had been in power only six months, and his boycott was already in full effect. I hadn’t been so wholly conscious of being a Jew since my bar mitzvah. It was the first time since I’d had the measles that I was too sick to eat.

I got across Germany as fast as I could go.

On the train out of Warsaw I found another American, a guy who could speak Russian. He’d been back and forth from New York to Moscow several times, trying to drum up an export business in radios and spark plugs, and he knew the ropes. He asked me how light I was traveling. When I told him, he tipped me off that I’d have to pay for excess baggage at the Russian border.

Then he did me a favor. He lent me a hundred rubles, which I could repay when we got to Moscow. The Russians were itching to get their hands on American money, he said. He had a hunch I could save a lot of dough if I insisted on paying in rubles instead of dollars.

Some favor. Some hunch.

It was night when we got to the Polish-Russian town of Negoreloye, where we had to change to a Russian train. Everybody was ordered off and lined up by the border inspection station. It was freezing cold outside. It must have been thirty below and wasn’t much warmer inside the station, a wooden shed with newspapers tacked over the cracks in the walls. When it came my turn at the Inspector’s desk, everything seemed to be in order: passport okay, visa likewise. Good. I was dying to get on the train. Then the inspector handed me a form. It had my name on it, a lot of figures, and at the bottom, “Twenty-five dollars.”

“Bog-gosh,” said the inspector, which I interpreted to mean “baggage.”

“How many rubles is twenty-five bucks?” I said, hauling out my roll of Russian bills. The inspector jumped to his feet and grabbed the money out of my hand. He yelled orders and pushed buttons. Bells rang. Buzzers sounded. Boots clomped all over the place as guards came running.

They hauled me off to another shed. The officer-in-charge, a goon with so low a brow that his nose seemed to grow out of his hairline, questioned me through an interpreter. Where did I get the rubles? A guy on the train lent them to me. What was his name? I didn’t know his name. I was lousy at remembering names. I was lying, the Russian colonel said. Tell the truth now: where did I get the rubles? I gave him the same answer.

A squad of guards lugged my trunk and harp into the shed. “Open the trunk, please,” said the officer. I unlocked it and the Russians began unloading it. When at first they only found a raincoat and an assortment of pants, shirts and ties, they were obviously disappointed.

Then they hit the jackpot. From the trunk they removed four hundred knives, two revolvers, three stilettos, half a dozen bottles marked POISON, and a collection of red wigs and false beards, mustaches and hands. More bells rang. More buzzers sounded. Whistles blew. More officials and more guards came clomping into the shed.

They started grilling me again. Would I please explain why I was transporting weapons and disguises? I told then they were all props for my act. Act? What act? I said I had come to Russia to put on a show. Americans do not entertain in Russia, they said. I had better tell the truth. And I had better tell the truth about where I bought my rubles too. The law was that dollars and rubles could only be exchanged in Moscow. Illegal exchange was a serious offense. It undermined the economy of the Soviet Union.

Then they asked me what was in the harp case. When I told them, they ordered me to open the case and play something, to prove I was a harpist. This would have been my salvation any other time, any other place, but not in an open shed when it was thirty below zero. I was so stiff from the cold that I couldn’t get my gloves off. All I could do was run my gloved hands up the strings a couple of times and pray that somebody there would recognize the professional touch.

There wasn’t much to recognize. One of the guards ran his hands up the strings and got exactly the same music out of the harp that I had. The officials shook their heads and smirked. Then they got into a hot argument. I didn’t need an interpreter to get the drift of it. They were debating whether to have me shot now or wait for morning, when the firing squad would have clearer aim and would waste fewer bullets.

I didn’t know what the hell to do. This was one spot that no crazy stunt could get me out of. Besides, I didn’t have any burnt cork on me to start a game of Pinchie Winchie with. So I began to yell. I knew my rights! Take me to the American consul! Was this a free country or wasn’t it? I knew of course that I had no rights here and that there were no American consuls anywhere in Russia, which was not a free country, but I kept on yelling, because I didn’t know what else to do and because it made me feel a little warmer.

Then things got a lot warmer. The officials settled their argument. They turned on me, scowling, and Colonel Low Brow said, “Take all your personal belongings and come with us, please.” I shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant, but my knees began to wobble. The only personal belonging I cared about right then was my skin.

“Where are we going?” I said.

I never got the answer. My friend from the train, who’d been looking for me, walked into the shed. He quickly explained, in Russian, about the rubles. Yes, he had lent the money to me. No, I had not given him any American money for it. It was simply a loan to be repaid in Moscow. And where did he get his rubles? In Moscow, through legal exchange, during his last trip to Russia.

The officials accepted his explanation. Only at one point did they look suspicious, like they might throw the guy’s story out the window. That was when he told the Russians I was a great popular artist in the United States. They had heard me play the harp. This was a great artist?

I paid the twenty-five bucks, American money, and got on the Moscow express. The train was unbelievably crowded, ten and twelve people to each six-passenger compartment, and it stank of disinfectant, but I thanked God I was lucky enough to be on it.

I woke up as we were coming through the outskirts of Moscow the next morning, and had my first real look at Russia. It was all gray-the city, with its acres and acres of unpainted wooden shacks, the wisps of smoke rising from each shack, the sky, and the snow that covered everything. It did look like the other side of the moon should look-gray, flat, and spooky. The spooky part of it, I realized, was not seeing tall buildings or telephone poles anywhere, only the occasional skeleton of a tree between the train and the horizon.

We began to pass factories, and electric lines appeared as we came closer in. It looked more like a city, yet it didn’t look like a city at all. I couldn’t figure out what was still missing, which made it seem spookier than ever.

Two minutes after the train came to a stop in the station, a Russian dame showed up in my compartment looking for me. “Mr. Marx, please?” she said. I identified myself and she shook my hand. “I am Comrade Malekinov,” she said. “I am your guide and interpreter for the duration of your visit to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Welcome. This way, please, for inspection of passport and visa.” Her English was pretty good.

I had to look at her twice to be convinced she was a dame. She wore a man’s double-breasted overcoat, which hung below the tops of her galoshes, a gray fur hat, steel-rimmed glasses, and not a smidgin of make-up. The only color on her face was the blue of the rings under her eyes. Her eyebrows were unplucked and so was a patch of whiskers growing around a mole on her chin. I had to study her for quite a while before I decided she was very young, probably not more than twenty-five.

While I was getting my things off the rack she said, “Any questions, please?”

“Yah,” I said. “Do you mind if I call you Miss Benson?” She thought for a minute, then closed her eyes and nodded and said, “That is a joke.”

“No joke, honey,” I said. “I’m going to have trouble with a name like yours.”

“My name is Com-rade Mal-e-kee-noff,” she said, one syllable at a time, like a teacher talking to an idiot pupil.

We compromised. For the next six weeks I called her “Melachrino,” which I could remember because it was the brand of cigarettes I was smoking at the time. On one thing she never compromised. In my presence she never once laughed or cracked a smile. Later, when I had Russians rolling in the aisles with my pantomime bits, I used to sneak a look at Melachrino, watching from the wings. She would be nodding her head with her eyes shut. I couldn’t hear her but I knew she was saying to herself, “That is a joke.” The nicest thing I can say about the Russians is that Melachrino wasn’t a typical one.

We rode to the hotel in a government limousine that must have been a reject from the Stanley Steamer assembly line. Melachrino acted like it was her first ride in a car. She kept rubbing the cracked upholstery and saying, “Beautiful! Beautiful, beautiful machine!” I was more interested in Moscow itself, but the springs of the seat were shot and I was sunk way below window-level. The windows were frosted over solid anyway. So all the way to the hotel I admired the back of Comrade Driver’s head, which was shaved to the bone, and the cone-shaped vases of artificial flowers on the door posts-something I hadn’t seen in a car since Frenchie’s old Chevy.

I had been in a lot of crummy little hotels in my time, but the Moscow Nationale was the first crummy big hotel I ever checked into. The guy behind the desk saw that I was not too impressed by the looks of the joint. He apologized, explaining that a new hotel for international guests was being built, but wasn’t ready yet. Ah, but it was going to be magnificent!

Nothing worked in the Nationale except the people. The heat was always going off, along with the hot water. The elevator was always “temporarily out of commission,” and the telephone system kept breaking down. The only thing you could be sure of getting was ice water, usually out of both taps. But the service was overwhelming. While a Comrade Mechanic scratched his head and banged at the elevator mechanism with a monkey wrench, six women, all built like brick backhouses, carried my things up five flights of stairs, trunk, harp and all.