Portraits and Observations (19 page)

Miss Ryan wanted to know the substance of his dialogue with the soldier who had left the table. “Oh, silly rot,” he said. “Alcoholic bravado. For some foozled reason he thought you had insulted him. I told him he was being
nye kulturni
. Remember that:
nye kulturni
. You’ll find it extremely useful, because when these chaps are rude and you feel obliged to tick them off, it means not a whit to call them a bastard, a son of a dog, but to tell him he’s
uncultured
, that really strikes home.”

Miss Ryan was growing anxious about the time. We shook hands with the gentleman and thanked him for the beer. “You’ve been very
kulturni
,” she said. “And by the way, I think you’re
more
attractive than Otto Kruger.”

“I shall certainly tell my wife,” he said, grinning. “
Dazvedanya
. Good luck.”

An hour out of Brest Litovsk, the first call to the dining car was announced. It was an event the company had looked forward to with appetites excited by both genuine hunger and the conviction that the Soviet hosts were bound to make this, the company’s first Russian meal, a “real spread”; or, as another of the cast forthrightly phrased it, “a bust-gut.”

Miss Thigpen’s desires were the most modest. “Five spoons of caviar and a piece of dry toast. That’s one hundred and thirty calories.” Calories were Mrs. Gershwin’s last concern. “Don’t think I’m not going to tear into the cavy, darling. It cost thirty-five dollars a pound in Beverly Hills.” The dreams of Leonard Lyons centered
around hot borscht and sour cream. Earl Bruce Jackson planned to “stone” himself with vodka and “slay” himself with shashlik. Marilyn Putnam hoped that everyone would save little tidbits for Twerp.

The first sitting, fifty strong, marched into the dining car and took their places at linen-covered tables, each seating four, that ran down either side of the aisle. The tables were set with white crockery and smoothly worn silver. The diner itself seemed as old as the silver, and the smell of cooking, a half-century’s worth, hung in the air like a visible steam. Savchenko was absent, but Miss Lydia and the three young men from the Ministry played host at different tables. The young men kept gazing round, as though silently calling to each other from separate islands of exile and misery.

Miss Lydia shared a table with Lyons, Miss Ryan and myself. One sensed that for this middle-aged woman, who said that her ordinary life was translating articles and living in a room in Moscow, the unique experience, the one that brought such a flush to her cheeks, was not that she was talking to foreigners, but that she was sitting in a dining car riding on a train. Something about the silver and the clean cloth and a little basket of puckered apples, like those the Chinese man had sold, made her fuss with her ivory rose and tuck up the straying ends of her hair. “Ah, we eat!” she said, her eyes shifting toward a quartet of chunky waitresses who came waddling down the aisle with trayloads of the first course.

Those whose palates had been anticipating iced caviar and chilled carafes of vodka were a bit chagrined to see, set before them, yogurt accompanied by bottles of raspberry soda. Miss Thigpen, seated behind me, was the sole voice expressing enthusiasm: “I just could kiss them! More proteins than a steak and only half the calories.” But across the aisle, Mrs. Gershwin warned Miss Putnam not to ruin her appetite by eating it. “Don’t, darling, I’m sure the cavy will come along next.” The next course, however, consisted of stiff noodles
lying like sunken logs in a watery broth. The entree that followed featured breaded veal cutlets, boiled potatoes, and peas that rattled on the plate like gunshot; to wash this down, there were further provisions of raspberry soda. Miss Putnam said to Mrs. Gershwin, “It’s not
my
stomach I’m worried about. It’s Twerp’s,” and Mrs. Gershwin, sawing at her cutlet, said, “Do you suppose they could be saving the cavy for dessert? You know, with little pancakes?”

Miss Lydia’s cheeks bulged, her eyes popped, her jaws pumped like pistons, a trickle of sweat ran down her neck. “Eat, eat,” she urged, “it’s good, yes?” Miss Ryan told her it was wonderful, and Miss Lydia, swabbing her plate with a quarter loaf of black bread, nodded vehemently: “You will not obtain better in Moscow itself.”

During the lull between entree and dessert, she went to work on the basket of apples; as the cores piled up, she paused occasionally to answer questions. Lyons was anxious to learn at what hotel the company would be staying in Leningrad. Miss Lydia was startled that he didn’t know. “The Astoria. For weeks the rooms have been reserved,” she said, and went on to describe the Astoria as “very old-fashion but exquisite.” “Well,” said Lyons, “what about the night life in Leningrad, any action there?” Miss Lydia replied by saying that perhaps her English was not all it should be, and proceeded, from her Muscovite point of view, to discuss Leningrad rather as a New Yorker might Philadelphia; it was “old-fashion,” it was “provincial,” it was “not the same like Moscow.” At the end of this recital, Lyons said glumly, “Sounds like a two-day town to me.” Miss Ryan thought to ask when was the last time Miss Lydia had visited Leningrad. Miss Lydia blinked. “The last time? Never. I have never been there. It will be interesting to see, yes?”

Presently she had a question of her own. “I would appreciate you to explain to me. Why is Paul Robeson not in with the players?
He
is a colored person, yes?”

“Yes,” said Miss Ryan; and so, she added, were sixteen million other Americans. Surely Miss Lydia didn’t expect
Porgy and Bess
to employ them all?

Miss Lydia leaned back in her chair with a cunning, I’m-no-fool expression. “It is because
you
,” she said, smiling at Miss Ryan, “
you
do not permit him his passport.”

The dessert arrived. It was vanilla ice cream, and it was excellent. Behind me, Miss Thigpen said to her fiancé, “Earl, honey, I wouldn’t touch it. Maybe it’s not pasteurized.” Across the aisle, Mrs. Gershwin observed to Miss Putnam, “It’s my theory they send it all to California. It cost thirty-five dollars a pound in Beverly Hills.”

Coffee followed, and with it an altercation. Jackson and several of his friends had taken over a table and were dealing out a game of Tonk. The two huskiest of the Ministry’s young men, Sascha and Igor, converged on the card players and informed them, their voices struggling to sound firm, that “gambling” was illegal in the Soviet Union. “Man,” said one of the players, “nobody’s gambling here. We got to do
something
. We don’t have a friendly game, we blow our stacks.” Sascha insisted, “It’s illegal. Not allowed.” The men threw down their cards, and Jackson, tucking them into a case, said, “Old Squareville. Home for dead cats. The number to play is zero. Tell the boys back in New York.”

“They are unhappy. We regret,” said Miss Lydia. “But we must remember our restaurant workers.” Her stubby-fingered hand motioned elegantly toward the waitresses, whose blear-eyed, solid faces glistened with perspiration as they shambled down the aisle balancing a hundred pounds of dirty dishes. “You understand. It would not look well for them to see the laws disenforced.” She gathered the last few apples, and stuffed them into a cloth handbag. “Now,” she said cheerfully, “we go to dream. We unravel the sleeve of care.”

On the morning of December 21, The Blue Express was twenty-four hours from Leningrad, another day and night, though the difference
between the two seemed, as the train crawled deeper into Russia, tenuous indeed, so little did the sun, a gray ghost rising at ten and returned to its grave by three, help to divide them. The fragile span of daylight continued to reveal winter at its uncrackable hardest: birches, their branches broken from the weight of snow; a log-cabin village, not a soul in sight and the roofs hung with icicles heavy as elephant tusks. Once, a village cemetery, poor plain wooden crosses, wind-bent and all but buried. But here and there haystacks, standing in deserted fields, were evidence that even this harsh ground could, in distant spring, grow green again.

Aboard, among the passengers, the emotional pendulum had settled at that nirvana point between the strains of departure and the tensions of arrival. An on and on timeless nowhere that one accepted as perhaps lasting forever, like the wind that swept white cauldrons of snow-spray against the train. At last, even Warner Watson relaxed. “Well,” he said, lighting a cigarette with hands that scarcely trembled, “I guess maybe I’ve got my nerves fenced in.” Twerp snoozed in the corridor, pink stomach upturned, paws awry. In Compartment 6, by now a welter of unmade berths, orange peelings, spilled face powder and cigarette butts floating in cold tea, Jackson practiced card-shuffling while his fiancée buffed her nails, and Miss Ryan, pursuing her Russian studies, memorized a new phrase out of the old army textbook: “
SLOO
-
sha eess-ya ee-lee ya
BOO-
doo streel-
YAHT!
Obey or I’ll fire!” Lyons alone stayed faithful to the pressures of a workaday world. “Nobody gets in my tax bracket looking at scenery,” he said, sternly typing the heading for a new column:
“Showtrain to Leningrad.”

At seven that evening, when the others had gone off to the day’s third round of yogurt and raspberry soda, I stayed in the compartment and dined on a Hershey chocolate bar. I thought Twerp and I
had the car to ourselves until I noticed one of the Ministry’s interpreters, Henry, the child-sized young man with the large ears, pass my door, then pass again, each time giving me a glance that quivered with curiosity. It was as though he wanted to speak, but caution and timidity prevented him. When finally, after another reconnoiter, he did come into the compartment, the approach he’d designed was official.

“Give me your passport,” he said, with that bluntness shy people often assume.

He sat on Miss Thigpen’s berth, and studied the passport through a pair of spectacles that kept sliding to the tip of his nose; like everything he wore, from his shiny black suit with its bell-bottom trousers to his brown worn-down shoes, they were much too big for him. I said if he would tell me what he was looking for, possibly I could help him. “It is necessary,” he mumbled, his red ears burning like hot coals. The train must have traveled several miles while he fingered through the passport like a boy poring over a stamp album; and though he carefully examined the mementos left on its pages by immigration authorities, his attention lingered longest on the data that states one’s occupation, height and color, date of birth.

“Here is correct?” he said, pointing to my birth date. I told him it was. “We are three years apart,” he said. “I am youngest—
younger?
—I am younger, thank you. But you have seen much. So. I have seen Moscow.” I asked him if he would like to travel. His anger began as a physical action, a queer sequence of shrugs and flutterings, shrinking inside his fat man’s suit that seemed to mean yes and no, perhaps. He pushed up his spectacles, and said, “I have not the time. I am a worker like him and him. Three years, it could also happen my passport has many imprimaturs. But I am content with the scenic—no,
scenery
—scenery of the mind. The world is the same, but here,” he tapped his forehead, struck it really,
“here,”
he spread a hand over
his heart, “are changefuls. Which is correct; chang
ings
or change
fuls
?” I said either one; as used, they both made sense.

The effort of shaping these sentences, and an excess of feeling behind them, had left him breathless. He leaned on his elbow and rested a spell before suddenly observing, “You resemble Shostakovich. That is correct?” I told him I wouldn’t have thought so, not from the photographs of Shostakovich that I’d seen. “We have discuss it. Mr. Savchenko has also the opinion,” he said, as though this were final, for who were we, either of us, to challenge Savchenko? Shostakovich’s name led to mention of David Oistrakh, the great Soviet violinist who had recently played concerts in New York and Philadelphia. He listened to my report of Oistrakh’s American triumphs as if I were praising him, Henry; his hunched shoulders straightened, all at once he seemed to fill out his flapping suit, and the heels of his shoes, dangling over the side of the berth, swung together and clicked, clicked and swung, as though he were dancing a jig. I asked him if he thought
Porgy and Bess
would have a success in Russia comparable to Oistrakh’s American reception. “It is not my ability to say. But we at the Ministry hope more than you hope. A real man’s job for us, that
Porgy-Bess
.” He told me that although he’d worked at the Ministry for five years, this was the only time his job had taken him outside Moscow. Usually, he said, he spent six days a week at a desk in the Ministry (“I have my own telephone”), and on Sundays he stayed home reading (“Among your writers, the powerful one is A. J. Cronin. But Sholikov is more powerful, yes?”). Home was an apartment on the outskirts of Moscow, where he lived with his family and, as he was unmarried (“My stipend is not yet equal to the aspiration”), shared a bedroom with his brother.

The conversation moved with an increasing ease; he ate a piece of Hershey, he laughed, his heels clicked; and then I offered him some books. They were stacked on the table, and his eyes continually
strayed toward them, a gaudy collection of twenty-five-cent thrillers mixed in with Edmund Wilson’s
To the Finland Station
, a history of the rise of Socialism, and Nancy Mitford’s biography,
Madame de Pompadour
. I told him he could have them, if he liked.

At first, he was pleased. Then, as he reached for the books, his hands hesitated, withdrew, and his personal tic started; more shrugs, shrinkings, until he was swallowed again in the looseness of his clothes. “I have not the time,” he said regretfully. Afterward there seemed nothing left to say. He informed me that my passport was in order, and left.

Between midnight and two in the morning, The Blue Express stood still in a railroad siding near Moscow. The exterior coldness had stolen into the cars, forming lenses of ice on the inside surface of the windowpanes; looking out, one saw merely spectral diffusions, as if your vision were deformed by cataracts. As soon as the train left Moscow, a restless mood rippled through the compartments; those who had been asleep wakened, began to flutter about like chickens tricked by a false dawn. The stay-ups poured another drink and breathed a second wind. Already the pendulum was swinging toward the tensions of arrival.