Portraits and Observations (25 page)

A foreign resident in Moscow, who knows Adamov well, described him to me as “no fool. An opportunist with two fingers in every pie.” And an Italian correspondent, another old Moscow hand, said, “Ah,
si
. Signor Adamov. The smiler with the knife.” In short, Adamov is a successful man, which means, as it does elsewhere, though far more so in Russia, that he enjoys privileges unknown to the ordinary citizen. The one he values most is a two-room bachelor apartment in Moscow’s Gorky Street, where he lives, to hear him tell it, the life of a Turk in his seraglio. “Gimme a buzz you come to Moscow, you wanta meet some cute kids.” Meanwhile, he thought some members of the
Porgy and Bess
company were “pretty cute kids,” particularly the saucer-eyed singer in the chorus named Dolores (“Delirious”)
Swann. At the museum, when the sightseers were separated into battalions of twelve, Adamov made a point of joining Miss Swann in a group that included, among others, the Wolferts, Mrs. Gershwin, Nancy Ryan, Warner Watson and myself.

The Hermitage is part of the Winter Palace, which in recent years has been repainted the imperial color, a frosty chartreuse-
vert
. Its miles of silvery windows overlook a park and a wide expanse of the Neva River. “The Winter Palace was started working 1764 and took seventy-eight years to finish,” said the guide, a mannish girl with a brisk, whip-’em-through attitude. “It consists of four buildings and contains, as you see, the world’s greatest museum. This where we are standing is the Ambassadorial Staircase, used by the ambassadors mounting to see the Czar.”

In the ectoplasmic wake of those ambassadors our party followed her up marble stairs that curved under a filigree ceiling of white and gold. We passed through a splendid hall of green malachite, like a corridor under the sea, and here there were French windows where a few of us paused to look across the Neva at a misty-hazy view of that celebrated torture chamber, the Peter-Paul fortress. “Come, come,” the guide urged. “There is much to see and we will not accomplish our mission if we linger at useless spectacles.”

A visit to the treasure vault was the mission’s immediate objective. “That’s where they keep the ice, the
real
stuff, crown jools, all that crap,” Adamov informed Miss Swann. A dragoon of stunted Amazons, several of them in uniform and wearing pistols strapped round their waists, guard the vault’s bolted doors. Adamov, jerking a thumb toward the guards, told Warner Watson, “I’ll bet you don’t have any female cops in America, huh?”

“Sure,” said Watson timidly. “We have policewomen, sure.”

“But,” said Adamov, his moist moon-face going scarlet with laughter, “not as fat as these, huh?”

While the vault’s complicated steel doors were being unlocked, the guide announced, “Ladies will please leave their pocketbooks with the custodians.” Then, as though to circumvent the obvious implication, “It is a matter of ladies causing damage dropping their pocketbooks. We have had that experience.”

The vault is divided into three small, chandelier-lighted rooms, the first two entirely occupied by the museum’s most unique display, a sophisticated panorama of Scythian gold, buttons and bracelets, cruel weapons, papery leaves and wreath garlands. “First-century stuff,” said Adamov. “
B.C. A.D
. all that crap.” The third room is intellectually duller, and much more dazzling. A dozen glass-enclosed cabinets (bearing the metal marker of their maker, Holland and Sons, 23 Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, London) afire with aristocratic souvenirs. Onyx and ivory walking sticks, musical birds that sing with emerald tongues, a lily bouquet made of pearls, another of ruby roses, rings and boxes that give off a trembling glare like heat waves.

Miss Swann sang, “But dee-
imonds
are a girl’s best friend,” and someone who shouted, “Where’s that Earl Jackson?” was told, “Oh, Earl—you know that cat wouldn’t be up this hour of the day. But he’s sure going to be sorry he missed this. Him feeling the way he does about sparkles.”

Adamov planted himself in front of the cabinet containing one of the collection’s few examples of Fabergé, a miniature version of the Czar’s symbols of power: crown, scepter and orb. “It’s gorgeous,” sighed Miss Swann. “Don’t you think it’s gorgeous, Mr. Adamov?” Adamov smiled indulgently. “If
you
say so, kid. Personally, I think it’s junk. What good does it do anybody?”

Ira Wolfert, chewing on an unlit pipe, was rather of Adamov’s opinion. At least, “I hate jewelry,” he said, glowering at a tray of blazing froufrou. “I don’t know the difference between a zircon and
a diamond. Except I like zircons better. They’re shinier.” He put an arm around his wife, Helen. “I’m glad I married a woman who doesn’t like jewelry.”

“Oh, I like
jewelry
, Ira,” said Mrs. Wolfert, a comfortable-looking woman prone to expressing decisive notions in a tentative tone. “I like
creations
. But
this
, this is all trickery and show-off. It makes me ill.”

“It makes me ill, too,” said Miss Ryan. “But in quite a different way. I’d give anything for that ring—the tiger’s eye.”

“It makes me ill,” Mrs. Wolfert repeated. “I don’t call these things creations. This,” she said, indicating a brooch of her own, a straightforward design in Mexican silver, “is what
I
call a creation.”

Mrs. Gershwin was also making comparisons. “I wish I’d
never
come here,” she said, forlornly fingering her diamonds. “I feel so dissatisfied, I’d like to go home and crack my husband on the head.” Miss Ryan asked her, “If you could have any of this you wanted, what would you take?”

“All of it, darling,” replied Mrs. Gershwin.

Miss Ryan agreed. “And when I got it home, I’d spread it on the floor and rip off my clothes and just
roll
.”

Wolfert desired nothing, he simply wanted to “get the hell out of here and see something interesting,” a wish he conveyed to the guide, who acquiesced by herding everyone to the door and counting them as they left. Some six kilometers later, the group, its ranks thinned by fatigue cases, stumbled into the last exhibit hall, weak-legged after two hours of inspecting Egyptian mummies and Italian Madonnas, craning their necks at excellent old masters excruciatingly hung, poking about the sarcophagus of Alexander Nevsky, and marveling over a pair of Peter the Great’s Goliath-large boots. “Made,” said the guide, “by this progressive man with his
own
hands.” Now, in the last hall, the guide commanded us to “go to the window and view the hanging garden.”

“But where,” bleated Miss Swann, “where
is
the garden?”

“Under the snow,” said the guide. “And over here,” she said, directing attention to the final item on the agenda, “is our famous The Peacock.”

The Peacock, an exotic mechanical folly constructed by the eighteenth-century clockmaker James Cox, was brought to Russia as a gift for Catherine II. It is housed in a glass cage the size of a garden gazebo. The focus of the piece is a peacock perched among the gilded leaves of a bronze tree. Balanced on other branches are an owl, a cock rooster, a squirrel nibbling a nut. At the base of the tree there is a scattering of mushrooms, one of which forms the face of a clock. “When the hour strikes, we have here a forceful happening,” said the guide. “The peacock spreads her tail, and the rooster cackles. The owl blinks her eyes, and the squirrel has a good munch.”

Adamov grunted. “I don’t care what it does. It’s dopey.” Miss Ryan took him to task. She wanted to know why he should feel that way about an object of such “imaginative craftsmanship.” He shrugged. “What’s imaginative about it? A lot of jerks going blind so milady can watch a peacock fan her tail. Look at those leaves. Think of the work went into that. All for nothing. A nonutilitarian nothing. What’cha up to, kid?” he said, for Miss Ryan had started scribbling in a notebook. “What’cha doing? Putting down all the dumb things I say?” Actually, as Miss Ryan was surprised into explaining, she was writing a description of the clock. “Uh-huh,” he said, his voice not as genial as his smile, “you think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you? Well, put this down. I’ll tell you a good reason I don’t like it. Because that peacock’s gonna go on fanning her tail when I’m dust. A man works all his life, he ends up dust. That’s what museums are, reminders of death. Death,” he repeated, with a nervous titter that expanded into mirthless guffaws.

A gang of soldiers, part of another tour, approached The Peacock just as the hour chimed, and the soldiers, country boys with
their heads shaved bald, their drab uniforms sagging in the seat like diapers, had the double enchantment of gaping at foreigners and watching the golden-eyed winkings of an owl, a peacock flash its bronze feathers in the wan light of the Winter Palace. The Americans and the soldiers crowded close to hear the rooster crow. Man and art, for a moment alive together, immune to old mortality.

It was Christmas Eve. The translators from the Ministry of Culture, under the supervision of their chief, Savchenko, had personally set up a skinny fir tree in the center of an Astoria dining room and decorated it with hand-colored paper cards, wisps of tinsel. The members of the company, sentimental over their fourth Christmas together, had gone on spending sprees: a razzledazzle of cellophane and ribbon spread in a knee-deep, twenty-foot circle round the tree. The presents were to be opened at midnight. Long past that hour, Miss Ryan was still in her room wrapping packages and rummaging through suitcases selecting from her possessions trinkets to take the place of gifts she’d neglected to buy. “Maybe I could give the bunny to one of the kids,” she said, meaning the rubber rabbit sent her by Stefan Orlov. The rabbit nestled among her bed pillows. She’d inked whiskers on its face and on its side printed
STEFAN—THE BUNNY
. “I guess not,” she decided. “If I gave him away, no one would ever believe I’d snagged a Russian beau.
Almost
did.” Orlov had not telephoned again.

I helped Miss Ryan carry her presents down to the dining room, where she was just in time for the end of the gift-distributing. The children had been allowed to stay up for the party, and now, hugging new dolls and squirting water pistols filled with raspberry soda, they cycloned through the gaudy wrapping-paper debris. The grown-ups danced to the music of the Russian jazz band, which could be heard
playing in the connecting main restaurant. Mrs. Breen whirled by, a bit of holiday ribbon floating round her neck. “Isn’t it bliss?” she said. “Aren’t you happy? After all, we don’t spend
every
Christmas in Leningrad!” The waitresses, young English-language students who had volunteered to tend table for the American troupe, demurely refused invitations to dance. “Oh, come on, honey,” one waitress was urged, “let’s you and me melt that curtain together.” Vodka, abetting the spirit of the occasion, had already melted the reserve of the Ministry of Culture representatives. They each had received presents from the company, and Miss Lydia, who had been given a compact, wanted to kiss everyone in sight. “It is too kind, so kind,” she said, tirelessly examining her pudgy face in the compact’s mirror.

Even the aloof Savchenko, a dour, glacial Santa Claus, or Father Frost, as the fellow is known in Russia, seemed after a while willing to forget his dignity, at any rate was unprotesting when a girl in the cast plumped herself on his lap, threw her arms around him and, between kisses, told him, “How come you want to look like a grumpy old bear when you’re just a doll? A living doll, that’s what you are, Mr. Savchenko.” Breen, too, had affectionate words for the Ministry of Culture executive. “Let’s all drink to the man we can thank for this wonderful party,” he said, hoisting a tumbler of vodka, “one of the best friends we have in the world, Nikolai Savchenko.” Savchenko, wiping away lipstick, responded by proposing another toast. “To the free exchange of culture between the artists of our countries. When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent,” he continued, quoting his favorite maxim. “When the cannons are silent, the muses are heard.”

The radio man from Moscow, “Joe” Adamov, was busily tape-recording aspects of the party on a portable machine. Eight-year-old Davy Bey, solicited for a comment, said into Adamov’s microphone, “Hello, everybody, happy Christmas. Daddy wants me
to go to bed, but we’re all having a grand time, so I’m not going. Well, I got a gun and a boat, only what I wanted was an airplane and not so many clothes. Any kids would like it, why don’t they come over and play with us. We got bubble gum, and I know some good places to hide.” Adamov also recorded “Silent Night, Holy Night,” which the cast, gathered round the tree, sang with a volume that drowned the next-room thumping of the dance band. Ira Wolfert and his wife added their voices to the choir. The Wolferts, parents of adult children, had booked a telephone call to America. “All our children will be together tonight; tomorrow they go different ways,” said Mrs. Wolfert when the caroling ended. “Oh, Ira,” she squeezed her husband’s hand, “that’s the only present I want. For our call to come through.” It never did. They waited till two, then went to bed.

After two, the Christmas party infiltrated the adjoining room, the Astoria’s “night club,” which is permitted to operate later than twelve on Saturdays, the only night of the week when patrons outnumber personnel. The Soviet habit of seating strangers together does not encourage uninhibited conversation, and the cavernous restaurant, occupied to near capacity by Leningrad’s elite, was unreasonably subdued, the merest few, mostly young army and naval officers with their sweethearts, taking advantage of the orchestra’s respectable rhythms. The rest, artists and theatrical personalities, groups of military Chinese, jowly commissars accompanied by their uncorseted, gold-toothed wives, sat around bored and uncaring as castaways on a Pacific atoll.

Earl Bruce Jackson took one look, and said, “What-cha say, cats, let’s get the snakes crawlin’, put some hotcha in the pot, skin the beast and sprinkle pepper in his eyes.” Whereupon five members of the company commandeered the bandstand. The hotel musicians had not the least objection to being ousted. They all were fans of American jazz, and one of them, a devotee of Dizzy Gillespie, had
accumulated a large record collection by listening to foreign broadcasts and recording the music on discs made from old X-ray plates. Junior Mignatt spit into a trumpet, banana-fingered Lorenzo Fuller struck piano chords. Moses Lamar, a powerhouse with sandpaper lungs, stomped his foot, opened his mouth wide as an alligator. “Grab yo’ hat ’n grab yo’ coat, leave yo’ worry on de do’step …” It was as though the castaways had sighted rescue on the horizon. Smiles broke out like an unfurling of flags, tables emptied onto the dance floor. “… just direct yo’ feet …” A Chinese cadet tapped his foot, Russians packed close to the bandstand, riveted by Lamar’s scratchy voice, the drumbeat riding behind it. “… to de sunny
sunny
SUNNY …” Couples rocked, swayed in each other’s arms. “… side ah de streeeet!”