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.” H
er 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.”
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 SaschaMenashaTiomkenKerinskyIvorsIvanovichNikolaiSavchenkoPlesitskyaGrutchenkoRickiSomanenko …”
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.