Portraits and Observations (24 page)

The so-called Eastern is a restaurant attached to the Hotel Europa, just off the Nevsky Prospekt. Unless a few desiccated potted palms connote the Orient, I am at a loss to explain Orlov’s contention that the place had a slant-eyed atmosphere. The atmosphere, if any, was a discouraging one of yellow-walled drabness and sparsely occupied tables. Orlov was self-conscious; he picked at his tie and smoothed his dark hair. While we crossed an empty dance floor, an ensemble, four musicians as spidery as the palms they stood among, were scratching out a waltz. We climbed a flight of stairs that led to a balcony where there were discreet dining booths. “I’m sure you think the Astoria is more elegant,” he said, as we were seated. “But that is for foreigners and large snobs. Here is for smaller snobs. I am
very
small snob.”

It worried me that he probably couldn’t afford the Eastern at all. His overcoat featured a luxurious sable collar and he had a hat of gleaming sealskin. Still, his suit was a poor, thin plaid and the laundered freshness of his white shirt somehow made more apparent its frayed cuffs and collar. But he gave sumptuous instructions to the waiter, who brought us a 400-gram carafe of vodka and a huge helping of caviar heaped in silver ice-cream dishes, toast and slices of lemon on the side. With a passing thought for Mrs. Gershwin, I dispatched every soft, unsalted, gray, pearly bead of it, and Orlov, marveling at the speed of my accomplishment, asked if I would like another serving. I said no, I couldn’t possibly, but he saw that I could, and sent the waiter for more.

Meanwhile, he proposed toasts in honor of Miss Ryan. “To Nancy,” he said, draining his glass, then, with a refill, “To Nancy. She is a beautiful girl”; and, again pouring, “That beautiful Nancy. Beautiful girl. Beautiful.”

The succession of fast-gulped vodka flushed his pale, almost handsome face. He told me he could drink “a fool’s fill” and not get drunk, but a gradual dimming of intelligence in his fine blue eyes belied the boast. He wanted to know if I thought Miss Ryan was partial to him. “Because,” he said, leaning forward in an attitude of excessive confidence, “she is a beautiful girl, and I like her.” I said yes, I gathered he considered her highly. “But you think I’m an idiot? Because I’m nearly forty and I’m married five years?” He spread his hand on the table to show me a plain gold wedding ring. “I would never do harm to my marriage,” he said piously. “We have two babies, little girls.” He described his wife as “not beautiful, but my principal friend,” and told me that aside from the children, the mutual interests they shared made the marriage “a serious composition.” Among professional classes in Russia, it can be observed that persons seldom make alliances with anyone outside their own field of work. Doctors marry doctors; lawyers, lawyers. The Orlovs, it seemed, were both mathematicians who taught at the same Leningrad school. Music and the theater formed their main pleasures; they had taken turns, he said, waiting in line to buy tickets for the
Porgy and Bess
first-night, but in the end they had been allowed just one ticket. “Now my wife pretends she doesn’t want to go. That is so I can go.” The previous year they had bought a television set as a New Year’s present to each other, but now they regretted having spent the money on something “so boring and childish.” He expressed himself with equal harshness on the subject of Soviet films. His wife, however, was fond of going to the
kino
, but he himself would only be enthusiastic if ever again they showed American pictures. (“I should like to know. What has happened to that beautiful girl, Joan Bennett? And the other one, Ingrid Bergman? And George Raft? What a wonderful actor! Is he still alive?”) Apart from this disagreement on the merits of movie going, his wife’s tastes coincided
with his at every point; they even, he said, enjoyed the same sport, “boating,” and for several years had been saving to buy a small sailboat, which they intended docking at a fishing village near Leningrad where each summer they spent two months’ vacation. “That is what I live for—guiding a boat through the poetry of our white nights. You must come back when the white nights are here. They are a true reward for nine months’ dark.”

The vodka was exhausted, and Orlov, after calling for a replenishment, grumbled that I wasn’t keeping pace with him. He said it “disgusted” him to watch me “just tasting,” and demanded that I “drink like a decent fellow or leave the table.” I was surprised how easy it was to empty a glass in one swallow, how pleasant, and it appeared not to affect me except for a tickling warmth and a feeling that my critical faculties were receding. I began to think that after all Orlov was right, the restaurant did have an Oriental atmosphere, a Moorish coziness, and the music of the orchestra, scraping like cicadas among the palms, seemed to acquire a beguiling, nostalgic lilt.

Orlov, at the stage of repeating himself, said, “I’m a good man and I have a good wife,” three times before he could reach the next sentence, which was, “But I have strong muscles.” He flexed his arms. “I’m passionate. A lusty dancer. On hot nights, with the window open, and the Vic playing loud as we like … and the Vic playing loud as we like. One of them always comes by. And we dance like that. With the window open on hot nights. That’s all I want. To dance with Nancy. Beautiful. A beautiful girl. You understand? Just to dance. Just to … Where is she?” His hand swept the table. Silverware clattered on the floor. “Why isn’t Nancy here? Why won’t she sing for us?” With his head tilted back he sang, “Missouri woman on the Mississippi with her apron strings Missouri woman drags her diamond rings by her apron strings down the bad Missouri on the Mississippi
blues …” His voice grew louder, he lapsed into Russian, a hollering still obscurely associated with the tune of “St. Louis Blues.”

I looked at my watch. To my astonishment it was nine o’clock. We’d been sitting in the Eastern almost five hours, which meant I couldn’t be as sober as I reckoned. The realization and the proof of it struck simultaneously, like a pair of assassins who had been lying in wait. The tables seemed to slide, the lights swing, as though the restaurant were a ship riding a rough sea. At my request, insistence, Orlov asked for the check, but he went on singing while he counted out his rubles, sang his way down the stairs and waltzed by himself across the dance floor, ignoring the orchestra for his own accompaniment, “Missouri woman you’re a bad Missouri woman on the Mississippi blues …”

In front of the Eastern there was a vendor selling rubber animals. Orlov bought a rabbit and handed it to me. “Tell Nancy from Stefan.” Then he pulled me along a street that led away from the Nevsky Prospekt. As mud lanes replaced pavement it became clear that our destination was not the Astoria. For this was no neighborhood of palaces. Instead it was as though I were walking again through the slums of New Orleans, a district of dirt streets and broken fences, sagging wooden houses. We passed an abandoned church where wind wailed round the domes like a widow at the grave. Not far from the church, sidewalks resumed, and, with them, the city’s imperial façade. Orlov headed toward the lighted windows of a café. The cold walk had quietened, somewhat sobered him. At the door, he said, “Here it is better. A workingman’s place.”

It was as if one had fallen into a bear pit. The body heat and beery breath and damp-fur smell of a hundred growling, quarreling, pawing customers filled the bright-lighted café. Ten and twelve men huddled around each of the room’s half-dozen tables.

The only women present were three look-alike waitresses,
brawny girls, wide as they were tall, and with faces round and flat as plates. In addition to waiting, they did duty as bouncers. Calmly, expertly, with an odd absence of rancor and less effort than it takes to yawn, they could throw a punch that knocked the stuffings out of men double their size. Lord help the man who fought back. Then all three girls would converge on him, beat him to his knees, literally wipe the floor with him as they dragged his carcass to the door and pitched it into the night. Some men, would-be customers decidedly persona non grata, never got into the café, for as soon as any of these undesirables appeared at the door the ladies of the establishment formed a flying, flailing wedge to drive him out again. Yet they could be courteous. At least they smiled at Orlov, impressed, I think, by his sable collar and expensive hat. One of them showed us to a table where she told two men, young jut-jawed bruisers wearing leather coats, to get up and give us their chairs. One was willing, the other argued. She settled his objections by snatching his hair and twisting his ear.

For the most part, only upper-strata restaurants are licensed to sell vodka, and since the café was not in that category, Orlov ordered Russian cognac, a brackish liquid that came in large tea glasses overflowing their brim. With the blitheness of a man blowing foam off a beer, he emptied a third of his glass and asked if the café “pleased” me, or did I think it “rough.” I answered yes, and yes. “Rough, but not hooligan,” he differentiated. “On the waterfront, yes, that is hooligan. But here is just ordinary. A workingman’s place. No snobs.” We had eight companions at the table and they took an interest in me, picked at me like magpies, plucked a cigarette lighter out of my hand, a scarf from around my neck, objects they passed from one to the next, glaring at them, grinning over them, and showing, even the youngest, rows of rotted teeth, wrinkles for which age could not account. The man nearest was jealous
and wanted all my attention. It was impossible to guess how old he was, anywhere from forty to seventy. He had an eye missing, and this circumstance enabled him to do a trick which he kept forcing me to watch. It was meant to be a parody of Christ on the Cross. Taking a swallow of beer he would stretch his arms and droop his head. In a moment a trickle of beer came crying out the gaping redness of his hollow eye socket. His friends at the table thought it was an uproarious stunt.

Another favorite of the café was a boy who roamed around with a guitar. If you bought him a drink, he’d sing you a song. He played one for Orlov, who translated it to me, saying it was the kind of song “we” like. It was the lament of a sailor longing for the village of his youth and a lost love called Nina. “The green of the sea is the green of her eyes.” The boy sang well, with plaintive flamenco waverings in his voice. I sensed, though, that he was not concentrating on the lyrics. His thoughts and his gaze too were directed toward me. His white face had a sadness that seemed to be painted on, like a clown’s. But it was his eyes that bothered me. Then I knew why. It was because they reminded me of the expression, the deaf-mute pleadings, in the eyes of the man left lying on the cathedral sidewalk. When he stopped playing, Orlov told him to sing another song. Instead the boy tried to speak to me.

“I … you … mother … man.” He knew about ten words of English and he struggled to pronounce them. I asked Orlov to interpret, and as they talked together in Russian it was as though the boy were singing again. While his voice wove some sorrowful prose melody, his fingers tinkered with the strings of the guitar. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he rubbed them away with the flat of his palm, leaving grimy smudges like a child. I asked Orlov what he was saying. “It’s not so much interesting. I’m not interested in politics.” It seemed inconceivable the boy was talking politics, and when I
persisted, Orlov was annoyed. “It’s nothing. A nuisance. He wants you to help him.”

Help was a word the boy understood. “Help,” he said, nodding vigorously. “Help.”

“Isn’t he a nuisance?” said Orlov. “He says his father was English and his mother Polish, and because of this he says he’s very badly treated in our country. He wants you to write the British Ambassador. Something like that. He wants to go to England.”

“English man,” said the boy, pointing at himself proudly. “Help.” I didn’t see how I could, and as he looked at me, despair began to shade the hopeful shine of his wet eyes. “Help,” he repeated reproachfully. “Help. Help.”

Orlov gave him a coin and told him the name of a song he wanted to hear. It was a comedy song with unending choruses, and though the boy drudged through it listlessly, even the waitresses laughed and roared out the key lines, which everybody seemed to know. The one-eyed man, angry that there should be such laughter for anything except his trick, climbed on his chair and stood like a scarecrow Jesus, beer oozing from the empty socket and dribbling down his cheek. At five minutes to midnight, closing time, the waitresses began to switch the lights on and off, warningly. But the customers kept the song going, clung to these last minutes, as though they loathed to trade the café’s camaraderie for cold streets, the fierce lonely journeys homeward. Orlov said he’d walk me to St. Isaac’s Square. But first, a final toast. He proposed, “To a long life and a merry one. Is that what they say?” Yes, I told him, that’s what they say.

The boy with the guitar blocked our path to the door. Exiting customers were still warbling his song; you could hear their voices echoing down the street. And in the café the waitresses were shooing out the last die-hards, darkening the lights in earnest. “Help,” said the boy, gently catching hold of my sleeve. “Help,” he said, his
eyes full on me, as a waitress, at Orlov’s request, pushed him aside to let us by. “Help, help,” he called after me, a door between us now, and the words a muted sound fading into nothing like the night-falling snow.

“I think he’s a crazy person,” said Orlov.

“New York could’ve been bombed, for all we know,” said Leonard Lyons to the financier Herman Sartorius, who was sitting next to him in a bus that was taking the company on a morning visit to the Hermitage Museum. “I’ve never been in a place I couldn’t read a newspaper, find out what’s going on in the world. A prisoner, that’s how I feel.” Sartorius, a tall, graying, solemnly courteous man, confessed that he too missed Western newspapers and wondered aloud if it would seem “not quite the correct thing” if he inquired at a Leningrad bank for the current New York Stock Exchange quotations.

As it happened, there was a passenger seated behind them who could have supplied any information they wanted. It was his business to know what went on beyond the iron curtain, especially in America. A Russian, his name was Josef (“Call me Joe”) Adamov, and he was in Leningrad to tape-record interviews with the
Porgy and Bess
cast for Radio Moscow, the station that beams broadcasts to countries outside the Soviet orbit. Adamov’s talents are devoted to programs intended for American, or English-speaking, consumption. The programs consist of news reports, music, and soap operas sudsy with propaganda. Listening to one of these plays is a startling experience, not for the content, which is crude, but for the acting, which isn’t. The voices pretending to be “average” Americans seem precisely that: one has absolute belief in the man who says he’s a Midwest farmer, a Texas cowhand, a Detroit factory worker. Even
the voices of “children” sound familiar as the crunch of Wheaties, the crack of a baseball. Adamov bragged that none of these actors had ever left Russia, their accents were manufactured right in Moscow. Himself a frequent actor in the plays, Adamov has so perfected a certain American accent that he fooled a native of the region, Lyons, who said, “Gee, I’m dumfounded, I keep wondering what’s he doing so far from Lindy’s.” Adamov indeed seems to belong on the corner of Broadway and Fifty-first, a copy of
Variety
jammed under his arm. Although his slang needs dusting off, it is delivered with a bizarrely fluent side-of-the-mouth technique. “Me, I’m no museum-type guy,” he said, as we neared the Hermitage. “But if you go in for all that creepy stuff, they tell me this joint’s okay, really loaded.” Swart, moon-faced, a man in his middle thirties with a jumpy, giggling, coffee-nerves animation, his shifty eyes grow shiftier when, under duress, he admits that his English was learned in New York, where he lived from the ages of eight to twelve with an émigré grandfather. He prefers to skate over this American episode. “I was just a kid,” he says, as though he were saying, “I didn’t know any better.”