Portraits and Observations (18 page)

The incident caused the train to be delayed forty-five minutes and had other repercussions as well, one of them involving Twerp, for the Russians, in the course of their search, had been appalled by certain conditions in Car 2 attributable to the puppy. Twerp’s owner, Marilyn Putnam, said later, “I put it to them straight. I said, since we’re never allowed off the train, what the hell do you expect? That shut ’em up.”

We reached Brest Litovsk in a luminous twilight. Statues of political heroes, painted cheap-silver like those souvenir figures sold at Woolworth’s, saluted us along the last mile of track leading to the station. The station was on high ground that afforded a partial view of the city dim and blue and dominated, far-off, by an Orthodox cathedral, whose onion-domes and mosaic towers still projected, despite the failing light, their Oriental colors.

Among the company it had been rumored that we would be allowed off the train here, and perhaps, while the wheels were changed and the dining car added, permitted to tour the city. Leonard Lyons was most anxious that this should happen. “I can’t write a thousand words a day just sitting on a train. I need action.” Lyons had gone so far as to discuss with the cast the kind of action he would like. He wanted them to traipse around Brest Litovsk singing spirituals. “It’s a good story and it’s good showmanship. I’m surprised Breen didn’t think of it.” When the train stopped, the doors opened all right, but were immediately closed again, after admitting a five-man delegation from Moscow’s Ministry of Culture.

One of these emissaries was a middle-aged woman with straying dishwater hair and, except for her eyes, what seemed a kind, motherly face. The eyes, dull gray and flecked with dots of milky white, had an embalmed glaze that did not blend with the cheerful contours of her expression. She wore a black cloth coat and a rusty black dress that sagged at the breasts from the weight of an ivory rose. In introducing herself and her colleagues, she ran the names together so that it sounded like a patter song. “You will please to meet Sascha​Menasha​Tiomken​Kerinsky​Ivors​Ivanovich​Nikolai​Savchenko​Plesitskya​Grutchenko​Ricki​Somanenko …”

In due time, the Americans were to sort and simplify these names until their owners became familiar as Miss Lydia, Henry, Sascha and Igor; the latter, young underlings from the Ministry
who, like the middle-aged Miss Lydia, had been assigned to the company as translators. But the fifth member of the quintet, Nikolai Savchenko, was not the man you call Nick. An important official in the Ministry, Savchenko was in charge of the
Porgy and Bess
tour.

The victim of a slightly receding chin, mildly bulging eyes and a tendency toward fat, he was nevertheless a formidable figure—well over six feet, with a stern, no-nonsense attitude and a handshake like a nutcracker. Beside him, his young assistants looked like sickly children, though two of them, Sascha and Igor, were strapping boys whose shoulders were too broad for their fur-collared coats; and Henry, a spidery mite with huge ears so red they were purple, made up by personal vividness what he lacked in stature.

It seemed natural that Miss Lydia and the young men should react awkwardly to this, their first encounter with Westerners; understandable that they should hesitate to test their English, so tediously learned at Moscow’s Institute of Foreign Languages but never before practiced on bona fide foreigners; forgivable that they should, instead, stare as though the Americans represented pawns in a chess problem. But Savchenko also gave an impression of being ill at ease, of preferring, in fact, a stretch in Lubyanka to his present chores. Which was excusable, too; though rather odd when you consider that for two years during the war he served as Counsel at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Even so, he seemed to find Americans such a tongue-tying novelty that for the moment he affected not to speak English. He delivered a small speech of welcome in gruff Russian, then had it translated by Miss Lydia. “We hope each and all have had a pleasant journey. Too bad you see us in the winter. It is not the good time of year. But we have the saying, Better now than never. Your visit is a step forward in the march toward peace. When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent; when the cannons are silent, the muses are heard.”

The muse-cannon metaphor, which was to prove a Savchenko favorite, the starring sentence of all future speeches, was an instant hit with his listeners (“A beautiful thing.” “Just great, Mr. Savchenko.” “That’s cool cookin’, man”), and Savchenko, warmed by success and beginning to relax, decided there was perhaps no reason to keep the company cooped up in the train. Why not step out on the platform and watch the changing of the wheels?

Outside, Lyons canvassed the group, trying to work up a song fest. But the temperature, ten below zero, was not conducive to a musical mood. Moreover, a large percentage of those who had been grateful to escape The Blue Express were, after the briefest exposure, shoving each other to get back in. The hearties who remained watched in the nightfall as workers of both sexes uncoupled the cars and jacked them to the height of a man. The old wheels, spraying sparks, were then rolled from under the train, while from the opposite direction the new wide-gauge wheels came gliding into place. Ira Wolfert called the operation “very efficient”; Herman Sartorius considered it “most impressive”; but Miss Ryan thought it was a “damned bore” and said that if I’d follow her into the station, she would buy me a vodka.

No one stopped us. We crossed a hundred yards of track, walked down a dirt lane between warehouses, and arrived at what appeared to be a combination of a parking lot and a marketplace. Brightly lighted kiosks circled it like candles burning on a cake. It was puzzling to discover that each of the kiosks sold the same products: cans of Red Star salmon, Red Star sardines, dusty bottles of Kremlin perfume, dusty boxes of Kremlin candy, pickled tomatoes, hairy slabs of raw bacon slapped between thick slices of grime-colored bread, weird liqueurs, cross buns (without the cross) that one somehow felt had been baked last July. And though the kiosks were attracting a brisk trade, the most sought-after item was not on sale at
any of them. It was in the private hands of a peddler, an elderly Chinese who carried a tray of apples. The apples were as shriveled and miniature as himself, but his waiting line of customers appeared disconsolate when the last of them evaporated. At the far end of the area a flight of steps led to the main entrance of the station, and the Chinese, folding his empty tray, wandered over to them and sat down next to a friend. The friend was a beggar bundled in an old army coat and with a pair of crutches sprawled beside him like the wings of a wounded bird. Every third or fourth person going by dropped a coin into his hand. The Chinese gave him something, too. An apple. He’d saved one for the beggar, and one for himself. The two friends gnawed their apples and leaned against each other in the cutting cold.

The constant wailing of a train whistle seemed to fuse the apple-eaters and the kiosks and the batlike passings of fur-shrouded faces into a smoky, single image of its woeful sound. “I’ve never been homesick. Never in my life,” Miss Ryan informed me. “But sometimes, for God’s sake. Sometimes,” she said, running up the steps and pushing open the doors of the station, “you do feel a long
way
from home.”

Since Brest Litovsk is one of Russia’s most strategic railroad centers, its station is among the country’s largest. Looking for somewhere to buy a drink, we explored lofty corridors and a series of waiting rooms, the principal one furnished with handsome oak benches occupied by many passengers with very few suitcases. Children and paper bundles filled their laps. The stone floors, soggy with black slush, made slippery walking, and there was an odor in the air, a saturation so heavy it seemed less a smell than a pressure. Travelers to Venice often remark on the vivid scents of that city.
The public places of Russia, terminals and department stores, restaurants and theaters, also have a reek instantly recognizable. And Miss Ryan, taking her first sniff of it, said, “Boy, I wouldn’t want a bottle of this. Old socks and a million yawns.”

In the search for a bar, we began opening doors at random. Miss Ryan sailed through one and out again. It was a men’s room. Then, spotting a pair of dead-drunks as they emerged from behind a small red door, she decided, “That’s the place we’re looking for.” The red door led into an extraordinary restaurant. The size of a gymnasium, it looked as if it had been done over for a school prom by a decorating committee with Victorian tastes. Plush crimson draperies were looped along the walls. Other-era chandeliers distributed a tropic glare that beat down on a jungle of borscht-stained tablecloths and withering rubber plants. The maître d’hôtel seemed appropriate to this atmosphere of grandeur gone to seed. He was at least eighty years old, a white-bearded patriarch with ferocious eyes that peered at us, through a sailor’s-dive haze of cigarette smoke, as though questioning our right to be there.

Miss Ryan smiled at him and said, “Vodka,
pjolista
.” The old man stared at her with more hostility then comprehension. She tried varying pronunciations, “Woedka … Wadka … Woodka,” and even performed a bottoms-up pantomime. “The poor thing’s deaf,” she said, and shouted, “
Vodka
. For God’s sake.”

Although his expression remained unenlightened, the old man beckoned us forward and, following the Russian custom of seating strangers together, put us at a table with two men. They both were drinking beer, and the old man pointed at it, as if asking if this was what we wanted. Miss Ryan, resigning herself, nodded.

Our companions at the table were two very different specimens. One, a beefy boy with a shaved head and wearing some sort of faded uniform, was well on his way to being drunk, a condition shared by
a surprising lot of the restaurant’s clientele, most of whom were male, many of them either boisterous or slumped across their tables mumbling to themselves. The second man was an enigma. In appearance he might have been a Wall Street partner of Herman Sartorius, the kind of person better imagined dining at the Pavillon than sipping beer in Brest Litovsk. His suit was pressed, and one could see that he hadn’t sewn it himself. There were gold cuff links in his shirt, and he was the only man in the room sporting a tie.

After a moment the shaven-headed soldier spoke to Miss Ryan. “I’m afraid I don’t speak Russian,” she told him. “We’re Americans.
Amerikansky
.” Her declaration had a somewhat sobering effect. His reddened eyes slowly came into semifocus. He turned to the well-dressed man and made a long statement, at the end of which the man answered him with several chiseled, cold-sounding sentences. There followed between them a sharp repartee, then the soldier took his beer and stalked to another table, where he sat glowering. “Well,” said Miss Ryan, glowering back, “not
all
the men are attractive, that’s for sure.” However, she considered our apparent defender, the well-dressed man: “Very attractive. Sort of Otto Kruger. Funny, I’ve always liked older men. Stop staring. He’ll know we’re talking about him. Listen,” she said, after calling attention to his shirt, his cuff links, his clean fingernails, “do you suppose there’s such a thing as a Russian millionaire?”

The beer arrived. A quart bottle and two glasses. The maître d’hôtel poured an inch of beer into my glass, then waited expectantly. Miss Ryan saw the point before I did. “He wants you to
taste
it, like wine.” Lifting the glass, I wondered if beer-tasting was a Soviet commonplace, or if it was a ceremony, some confused champagne-memory of Czarist elegance that the old man had revived to impress us. I sipped, nodded, and the old man proudly filled our glasses with a warm and foamless brew. But Miss Ryan
said suddenly, “Don’t touch it. It’s dreadful!” I told her I didn’t think it was that bad. “I mean, we’re in dreadful trouble,” she said. “I mean, my God, we can’t pay for this. I completely forgot. We haven’t any rubles.”

“Please, won’t you be my guests?” inquired a soft voice in beautifully accented English. It was the well-dressed man who had spoken, and though his face was perfectly straight, his eyes, a bright Nordic blue, wrinkled with an amusement that took full measure of our discomfort. “I am not a Russian millionaire. They
do
exist—I know quite a few—but it would give me pleasure to pay for your drink. No, please, there is no cause to apologize,” he said, in response to Miss Ryan’s stammered efforts, and openly smiling, “It’s been the keenest enjoyment. Very unusual. Very unusual to run across Americans in this part of the world. Are you Communists?”

After disabusing him of that notion, Miss Ryan told him where we were going, and why. “You are fortunate that you go to Leningrad first. A lovely city,” he said, “very quiet, really European, the one place in Russia I could imagine living, not that I do, but still … Yes, I like Leningrad. It’s not the least like Moscow. I’m on my way to Warsaw, but I’ve just been two weeks in Moscow. That’s equal to two months anywhere else.” He told us that he was Norwegian, and that his business, lumber, had required him to visit the Soviet Union several weeks of every year, except for a gap during the war, since 1931. “I speak the language quite well, and among my friends I don’t mind passing as a Russian authority. But to be honest, I can’t say I understand much more about it now than I did in 1931. Whenever I go to your country—I’ve been there, oh, I guess a half-dozen times—it always strikes me that Americans are the only people who remind me of Russians. You don’t object to my saying that? Americans are so generous. Energetic. And underneath all that brag they have such a wishing to be loved, they want to be
petted, like dogs and children, and told that they are just as good and even better than the rest of us. Well, Europeans are inclined to agree with them. But they simply won’t believe it. They go right on feeling inferior and far away. Alone. Like Russians. Precisely.”