Portraits and Observations (17 page)

Coldness woke me. Snow was blowing through the window’s opening. Enough had settled at the foot of my berth to scoop into a snowball. I got up, glad I’d gone to bed with my clothes on, and closed the window. It was blurred with ice. I rubbed a part of it until I could peer out. There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink. We were on the outskirts of a city. Rural lamplighted houses gave way to cement blocks of forlorn, look-alike apartment dwellings. The train rumbled over a bridge that spanned a street; below, a frail streetcar, jammed with people on their way to work, careened round a curve like a rickety bobsled. Moments later we pulled into a station, which by now I realized must be Warsaw. On a dim, snow-deep platform gangs of men stood clustered together stamping their feet and slapping their ears. I noticed our car attendant, the tea-maker, join one of the groups. He gestured toward the train and said something that made them laugh. An explosion of breath-smoke filled the air. Still laughing, several of the men approached the train. I slipped back into bed, for it was obvious that they intended to peek in the windows. One after another, distorted faces mashed themselves against the glass. Presently I heard a short scream. It came from a compartment farther ahead and sounded like Dolores Swann. Screams were understandable if she’d wakened to see, looming at the window, one of these
frosty masks. Though it roused none of my own companions, I waited, expecting a commotion in the car, but quietness resumed, except for Twerp, who started barking with a regular rhythm that sent me off to sleep again.

At ten, when I opened my eyes, we were in a wild, crystal world of frozen rivers and snowfields. Here and there, like printing on paper, stretches of fir trees interrupted the whiteness. Flights of crows seemed to skate on a sky hard and shiny as ice.

“Man,” said Earl Bruce Jackson, just awake and sleepily scratching himself as he stared out the window. “I’m telling you. They don’t grow oranges here.”

The washroom in Car 2 was a bleak, unheated chamber. There was a rusty washbasin with the customary two faucets, hot and cold. Unfortunately, they both leaked a frigid trickle. That first morning a long queue of men waited at the washroom door, toothbrushes in one hand, shaving tackle in the other. Ducky James had the notion of asking the attendant, who was busily stoking the little coal fire under his samovar, to part with some of his tea water and “give us blokes a chance at a decent shave.” Everyone thought this a splendid idea except the Russian, for when the request was translated to him, he looked at his samovar as though it were bubbling with melted diamonds. Then he did a curious thing.

He stepped up to each man and brushed his fingertips against their cheeks, examining their beard stubble. There was a tenderness in the action that made it memorable. “Boy,” said Ducky James, “he sure is affectionate.”

But the attendant concluded his researches with a headshake. Absolute no,
nyet
, he would not give away his hot water. The condition of the gentlemen’s beards did not justify such a sacrifice, and
besides, when traveling, the “realistic” man should expect to go unshaven. “My water is for tea,” he said. “Hot and sweet and good for the spirit.”

A steaming glass of it went with me into the washroom. I used it for brushing my teeth, and then, combining it with soap, transformed it into a shaving cream. Rather sticky, but not bad at all.

Afterward, feeling spruce, I commenced a round of visits. The occupant of Compartment 1, Leonard Lyons, was having a professional tête-à-tête with Earl Bruce Jackson. Clearly Jackson had overcome his fear that Lyons might not possess the “right vibrations,” for he was describing to him the details of his forthcoming Moscow marriage.

“That’s great. Just great, Earl,” said Lyons, scribbling away. “Brown tails. Champagne satin lapels. Now—who’s going to be your best man?”

Jackson told him he’d invited Warner Watson to serve in that capacity. Lyons seemed reluctant to approve the choice. “Listen,” he said, tapping Jackson on the knee, “did you ever think of asking somebody, well, important?”

“Like you, you mean?”

“Like
Khrushchev
,” said Lyons. “Like
Bulganin
.”

Jackson’s eyes narrowed, as though he couldn’t decide whether Lyons’s suggestion was serious or a leg pull. “But I already asked Warner. But maybe, under that kind of circumstance …”

“Sure,” said Lyons, “Warner would understand.”

Still, Jackson had one last vestige of doubt. “You think Mr. Breen can arrange it, to get me one of those cats?”

“He could try,” said Lyons. “And just trying, see, that could land you on the front page.”

“
C’est
ooble-ee-do,” said Jackson, gazing at Lyons with perfect admiration. “Really crazy, man. Gone.”

Farther along the corridor, I called on the Wolferts, who were sharing their compartment with Herman Sartorius and Warner Watson, the pair Lyons had evicted, the latter in more ways than one. But Watson was still asleep, unaware of his impending dismissal as Jackson’s best man. Sartorius and Ira Wolfert were sitting with an immense map spread across their collective lap, and Mrs. Wolfert, bundled in a fur coat, was hunched over a manuscript. I asked if she were keeping a journal.

“I
do
. Only this is a poem. I’ve been working on it since last January. I thought I might finish it on the train. But the way I feel …” she said dismally. “I didn’t sleep a wink last night. My hands are cold. My head’s whirling with impressions. I don’t know where I am.”

Sartorius placed a fastidious finger on his map. “I’ll tell you where we are. We’ve passed Lidice. Now we’ve got about five more hours of Poland before Brest Litovsk.”

Brest Litovsk was to be the first stop in Russia. A good deal was scheduled to happen there. The wheels of the train would be changed to fit Russia’s wide-gauge tracks; a dining car would be attached, and, most importantly, representatives from the Ministry of Culture were to meet the company and travel on with them to Leningrad.

“Know what this reminds me of,” said Ira Wolfert, pointing a pipe at the severe landscape. “Parts of America. The West.”

Sartorius nodded. “Wyoming in the winter.”

Returning to the corridor, I encountered Miss Ryan, still wearing her bed costume, a red flannel nightshirt. She was hopping on one foot, her other foot having made contact with a sample of Twerp’s misbehavior.

I said, “Good morning.”

She said,
“Don’t speak to me,”
and hopped away toward the washroom.

Next, I went to Car 3, where the family groups, children and their parents, were installed. School had just let out; that is, the children had finished their morning lessons and were consequently in sportive spirit. Paper planes sailed through the air. Caricatures were being finger-drawn on the frosted windows. The Russian attendant, who looked even more mournful and harassed than his colleague in Car 2, was kept at such a hop protecting Soviet property that he hadn’t noticed what was happening to his samovar. Two little boys had taken it over and were roasting hot dogs. One of them, Davy Bey, offered me a bite. “Good, huh?” I told him it was indeed. Well, he said, if I liked it that much, then I could have the rest of it; he’d already eaten fifteen.

“You see the wolves?” he asked.

An older friend, Gail Barnes, told him, “Stop making stories, Davy. They weren’t wolves. They were plain dogs.”

“Was wolves,” said Davy, who has a snub nose and a wicked tilt to his eyes. “Everybody saw them. Out the window. They
looked
like dogs. Police dogs, only littler. And what they were up to, they were chasing each other round and round in the snow. Like they were having a grand time. I coulda killed one dead. Woooooolves,” he howled, and poked me in the stomach with a cowboy pistol.

Gail said that she hoped I understood. “Davy’s only a child.” Gail, whose father, Irving Barnes, alternates in the role of Porgy, is eleven, the oldest of the company’s six children, most of whom play minor parts in the show. Because of her seniority, she has developed a sense of big-sister responsibility toward all the children, and handles them with mature good nature, a firm politeness that could set
any governess an example. “Excuse me,” she said, glancing down the corridor where several of her charges, by managing to open a window, were letting in blasts of Arctic wind. “I’m afraid I’ll have to put a stop to that.”

But before she had completed her mission, Gail herself was swept away into being a child again. “Oh, look,” she cried, hanging out the very window she’d gone to close. “Look, kids
 … People!
”

The people were two small children ice-skating on a long ribbon of pond at the edge of a white wood. They skated fast as they could, trying to keep up with the train, and as it sped beyond them they stretched out their arms, as though to catch the shouted greetings, the blown kisses of Gail and her friends.

Meanwhile, the Russian attendant had discovered smoke billowing from his samovar. He snatched charred hot dogs off the fire, and tossed them on the floor. Then, sucking blistered fingers and employing a vocabulary that must have been, to judge from its tone, on the blistery side itself, he rushed to pry the children away from the window and slam it shut.

“Aw, don’t be a sorehead,” Davy told him. “We’re just having a grand time.”

The remnants of a cheese and fruit lunch were scattered on the table (and the carpet) of Compartment 6. Midafternoon sunlight sparkled in a glass of Chianti Miss Ryan was revolving in her hand. “I adore wine,” she said fervently. “I began drinking it when I was twelve. Heavily. It’s a wonder I’m not a wino.” She sipped and sighed with a contentment that reflected the general mood. Miss Thigpen and her fiancé, who’d had their share of Chianti, were nestled together in a corner of their seat, her head resting on his shoulder. The drowsy, dreaming spell was broken by a knock at the door, and someone saying, “This is it. Russia.”

“Places, please,” said Miss Ryan. “Curtain going up.”

The first signs of an approaching frontier came into view: stark wooden guard towers, not unsimilar to those that encircle Southern convict farms. Spread at wide intervals, they marched across the wastes like giant telephone poles. In the nearest of them I could see a man watching the train through binoculars. The train slowed round a curve and slackened to a stop. We were in a switch yard, surrounded by a maze of tracks and halted freight cars. It was the Soviet border, forty minutes from Brest Litovsk.

Along the tracks, herds of women with shawl-wrapped heads, like a woolly version of purdah, were swinging picks, shoveling snow, pausing only to blow their noses into naked, raw-red hands. The few who even glanced at The Blue Express risked sharp looks from various militiamen lounging about with their hands stuffed in their coat pockets.

“If that’s not a
shame
,” said Miss Thigpen. “Ladies doing all the work, while the men just stand around. How disgraceful!”

“That’s what it is here, honey,” said Jackson, puffing on one of his ruby rings, and polishing it against his lapel. “Every man a Sportin’ Life.”

“I’d like to see somebody treat
me
that way,” replied Miss Thigpen, warningly.

“But I must say,” said Miss Ryan, “the men are pretty divine.” Her interest was fixed on a pair of officers pacing below the window, tall-strong-silent types with thin lips and rugged, windburned faces. One of them looked up and, catching sight of Miss Ryan’s blue eyes and long golden hair, lost step with his partner. Miss Ryan whimpered, “Oh, wouldn’t it be awful!”

“Awful what, honey?” said Miss Thigpen.

“If I fell in love with a Russian,” said Miss Ryan. “Wouldn’t that be the absolute
fin
? Actually, my mother’s afraid that I might. She
said if I fell in love with any Russians, I needn’t bother coming home. But,” she added, her gaze again drifting toward the officer, “if they’re all like
that …
”

Quite suddenly Miss Ryan’s admirer had no time for flirtation. He became part of a small Russian army chasing round the yard after Robin Joachim. Joachim, an overly avid photographer, had broken the rules by getting off the train, then compounded that error by attempting to take pictures. Now he was racing zigzag across the tracks, narrowly avoiding the wrathful swipe of a woman worker’s shovel, barely eluding the grasp of a guard.

“I hope they catch him,” said Miss Ryan coldly. “Him and his goddamn cameras. I knew he’d get us into trouble.”

Joachim, however, turned out to be a resourceful young man. Slipping past his pursuers, he hurled himself onto the train, rushed into a compartment, threw his coat, his camera and cap under the seat, and to further alter his appearance, whipped off his horn-rimmed glasses. Seconds later, when the angry Soviets came aboard, he calmly assumed his role of company translator and helped them hunt the culprit, a search that included every compartment. Warner Watson, roused from his slumbers, was the person least amused by the situation. He promised Joachim a good talking-to. “This,” he said, “is
not
the way to begin a cultural exchange.”