“Ohhhh,” moaned Miss Ryan, “if only I could get my coat.”
A man in his late thirties, clean-shaven, dignified, an athletic figure with a scholar’s face, stepped up to Miss Ryan. “I should like to shake your hand,” he said respectfully. “I want you to know how much my friends and I are looking forward to Porgy and Bess. It will be a powerful event for us, I can assure you. Some of us have obtained tickets for the first night. I,” he said, smiling, “am among the fortunate.” Miss Ryan said she was pleased to hear that, and remarked on the excellence of his English, which he explained by saying that he’d spent several of the war years in Washington as part of a Russian Purchasing Commission. “But can you really understand me? It’s been so long since I’ve had the opportunity of speaking—it makes my heart pound.” One sensed, in the admiring intensity of his attitude toward Miss Ryan, that the pounding of his heart was not altogether due to the English language. His smile slackened as a fluttering light signaled the end of intermission; and urgently, as though spurred by an impulse he couldn’t resist, he said, “Please let me see you again. I’d like to show you Leningrad.” The invitation was directed to Miss Ryan, but by polite necessity included Lyons and myself. Miss Ryan told him to call us at the Astoria, and he jotted our names on a program, then wrote out his own and handed it to Miss Ryan.
“Stefan Orlov,” Miss Ryan read, as we returned for the last act. “He’s quite sweet.”
“Yeah,” said Lyons. “But he won’t call. He’ll think it over and get cold feet.”
Arrangements had been made for the company to go backstage and meet the ballet artists. The final scene of Corsair is partly played on the deck of a ship hung with rope nets, and at the end of the performance, when the Americans came behind the curtain, there was such a congestion onstage that half the dancers had to stand on the ship’s deck or climb the rope nets to get a glimpse of the Western colleagues whose entrance they cheered and applauded a full four minutes before enough quiet could be summoned for Breen to make a speech, which began, “It is we who should applaud you. Your thrilling artistry has produced an evening none of us will ever forget, and we only hope on Monday evening we can a little repay you for the pleasure you have given us.” While Breen finished his speech, and the director of the Mariinsky made another, the little ballerinas, sweat seeping through their make-up, crept close to the American performers, and their painted eyes rolled, their lips ohd-ahd as they gazed at the visitors’ shoes, shyly, then boldly, touched the dresses, rubbed bits of silk and taffeta between their fingers. One of them reached out and put her arm around a member of the company named Georgia Burke. “Why, precious-child,” said Miss Burke, a warm, happy-natured woman, “hug me all you like. It’s good to know somebody loves you.”
It was nearer one than midnight when the company started the bus ride back to the Astoria. The buses, rolling refrigerators, had the same seating plan as those that operate on Madison Avenue. I sat on the long back seat between Miss Ryan and the interpreter, Miss Lydia. Street lamps, yellowing the snows of empty streets, flashed at the windows like wintry fireflies, and Miss Ryan, looking out, said, “The palaces are so beautiful in the lamplight.”
“Yes,” said Miss Lydia, stifling a sleepy yawn, “the private homes are beautiful.” Then, as though suddenly awake, she added, “The former private homes.”
The next morning I went shopping on the Nevsky Prospekt with Lyons and Mrs. Gershwin. Leningrad’s principal street, the Nevsky is not a third the length of Fifth Avenue, but it is twice as wide; to get across its skidding aisles of traffic is a perilous chore and a rather pointless one, for the stores on either side of the street are all government-owned emporiums selling, in their different classifications, the same stock at the same prices. Bargain hunters, buyers on the lookout for “something a little different” would find shopping on the Nevsky a discouraging experience.
Lyons had set out with starry hopes of picking up “a nice piece of Fabergé” to take home to his wife. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks sold to French and English collectors almost all the jeweled eggs and boxes that Fabergé had created for the royal amusement; the few known examples of his work left in Russia are on display in Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum and in the Armory at the Kremlin. Today, on the international market, the beginning price of a small Fabergé box is over two thousand dollars. None of this information impressed Lyons, who felt he was going to locate his Fabergé quickly and quite cheaply at a Commission Shop. Which was right thinking as far as it went, for if such an item existed, then a Commission Shop, a state-controlled pawn brokerage where a comrade can turn the last of his hidden heirlooms into spot cash, is probably the only place you would discover it. We visited several, drafty establishments with the going-gone sadness of auction halls.
In one, the largest, a glass cabinet ran the length of the room, and the spectacle its contents presented, the conglomeration of spookily diverse objects, seemed a dadaist experiment. Rows of secondhand shoes, so worn the spectral shape of the previous owner’s foot could be pathetically discerned, were neatly set forth under glass like treasures, which indeed they were at $50 to $175 a pair; a selection of headgear flanked the shoes, flapper cloches and velvet cartwheels; after the hats, the surrealistic variety and value of the cabinet’s contents spiraled: a shattered fan ($30), a soiled powder puff ($7), an amber comb with broken teeth ($45), tarnished mesh handbags ($100 and up), a silver umbrella handle ($340), an unexceptional ivory chess set with five pawns missing ($1,450), a celluloid elephant ($25), a pink plaster doll cracked and flaked as though it had been left in the rain ($25). All these articles, and yards more, were placed and numbered with a care that suggested an exhibition of mementos, the possessions of some dead beloved figure, and it was this, the reverence of the display, that made it poignant. Lyons said, “Who do you s’pose buys this stuff?” But he had only to look around him to see that there were those who, in lieu of anything else, found the moth-nibbled fan and the silver umbrella handle still fetching, still desirable, quite worth their quoted costs. According to the Russian calendar, Christmas was two weeks off, but Russians prefer to give gifts at New Year’s and the Commission Shops, like all the stores along the Nevsky, were packed with spenders. Though Lyons failed to flush any Fabergé, one pawnbroker came up with a unique nineteenth-century snuffbox, an immense topaz, hollowed and split in half. But the price, $80,000, was more than the customer had in mind.
Mrs. Gershwin, who intended giving a “really good” Christmas present to every member of the Porgy and Bess cast (“After all, darling, it’s the company’s fourth Christmas together, and I do want to show the darlings my appreciation”), still had a few odds and ends to finish off, though she’d carted a trunkload of gifts from Berlin. And so, struggling through the Nevsky crowds (“You can’t deny there’s a lot of vitality around here,” said Lyons), we visited a furrier where the cheapest sable was a short jacket selling, or rather not selling, for $11,000. Then we stopped at an antique shop declared by Intourist to be Leningrad’s most “elegant.” The antiques turned out to be used television sets, an icebox, an old American electric fan, some battered pieces of Biedermeier and a colossal number of oil paintings depicting scenes of historical event if not value. “What did you expect, darling?” said Mrs. Gershwin. “There’s no such thing as Russian antiques. If there are, they’re French.” Inquiring for caviar, we went to two fancy-food stores, the local Vendômes; there were pineapples from Africa, oranges from Israel, fresh lichee nuts from China; but no caviar. “Where, where did I get the idea it was the butter on the workingman’s bread?” lamented Mrs. Gershwin, who said she’d settle for a cup of tea, a desire that shortly drove us into a Soviet version of Schrafft’s. It was in a cellar, a dungeon where waitresses, wearing knee boots and tiaras made of doily paper, waded across slush-flooded floors carrying trays of ice cream and improbable pastry to gloomy groups of middle-aged women. But Mrs. Gershwin had to do without her tea, for there were no tables available, nor even
space to stand.
So far, no one had made a single purchase. Mrs. Gershwin decided to try a department store. On the way, Lyons, who had a camera, paused often to take photographs, of match women and cherry-cheeked girls dragging Christmas trees, of street-corner flower stalls that in winter sell artificial roses, paper tulips stuck in flowerpots, as though they were real. Each of his photographic forays caused pedestrian traffic jams, a gallery of silent spectators who smiled, and sometimes scowled, when he took their pictures, too. Presently I noticed that there was one man who continuously showed up among the onlookers, yet did not seem part of them. He always stood at the rear, a chunky man with a crooked nose. He was bundled in a black coat and astrakhan cap and half his face was hidden behind the kind of windshield dark glasses skiers wear. I lost track of him before we reached the department store.
The store was reminiscent of a carnival alley, consisting, as it did, of counters and alcoves whose shelves seemed mostly stocked with shooting gallery prizes, the cheap familiar dolls, ugly urns, plaster animals, the toilette set bedded in a crumpling of white casket silk. Mrs. Gershwin, overcome by an odor of rancid glue, felt swift necessity to leave the “leather-goods” department, a swifter one to flee the perfume counter.
A crowd began trailing us through the store, and when, in an alcove devoted to hats, I started trying on caps of ersatz Persian lamb, a good thirty grinning, jostling Russians ganged around demanding I buy this one, that one, themselves whisking models on and off my head and ordering the clerk to bring more, more, until hats were toppling off the counter. Someone bent to retrieve one from the floor; it was the man wearing ski glasses. The hat I bought, chosen at desperate random, proved later not to fit. A fake astrakhan, it cost $45; and because of the complicated payment system that operates in all Soviet stores, from the humblest grocery to GUM’s in Moscow, it required another forty minutes to complete the transaction. First, the clerk gives you a sales slip, which you carry to a cashier’s booth, where you cool your heels while the cashier does her computations on an abacus, an efficient method no doubt, still, some clever Soviet should invent the cash register; when the money has been paid, the cashier stamps the sales slip, and this you take back to the clerk, who by now is attending five other people; eventually, though, the clerk will accept the slip, go to check it with the cashier, come back, hand over your purchase, and direct you to a wrapping department, where you join another queue. At the end of this process, I was given my hat in a green box. “Please, darling,” Mrs. Gershwin begged Lyons, who was tempted to buy a hat himself. “Don’t make us go through all that again.”
Ski-glasses was nowhere in sight when we left the store. He turned up soon enough, however, at the edge of a group watching Lyons photograph peddlers selling Christmas trees in a snowy courtyard. It was there in the courtyard that I left the hatbox; I must have put it down to slap my numbed hands together. I didn’t realize it was missing until many blocks later. Lyons and Mrs. Gershwin were game to go back and look for it. But that wasn’t necessary. For as we turned around, we saw Ski-glasses coming toward us, and dangling in his hand was the green hatbox. He gave it to me with a smile that twitched his crooked nose. Before I could think to say thank you, he’d tipped his cap and walked away.
“Well, ho ho—call that a coincidence?” crowed Lyons, a joyous shine livening his shrewd eyes. “Oh, I’ve had him spotted!”
“So have I,” admitted Mrs. Gershwin. “But I think it’s darling. Adorable. Simply adorable of them to take such good care of us. It makes you feel so protected. Well, darling,” she said, as though determined Lyons should be persuaded to adopt her view, “isn’t it a comfort to know you can’t lose anything in Russia?”
At the Astoria, after lunch, I rode up in the elevator with Ira Wolfert, the former war correspondent who supposedly intended writing an article on Everyman Opera’s tour for the Reader’s Digest. “But I’m still looking for a story. What it seems to me is, is repetitious,” Wolfert told me. “And you can’t talk to anybody around here. Russians, I mean. It’s giving me claustrophobia, every time I get into a political talk I keep getting the same old line. I was talking to Savchenko, he’s supposed to be an intelligent guy, and I said to him, since this is a private talk, do you honestly believe all these things you’re saying about America? You know, he was saying how Wall Street runs the country. But you can’t talk to them. There’s no realism in this social realism. Yesterday I was talking to a Russian—I won’t define him, one of the guys we’ve met around here—and he slips me a note. This note asking me to call his sister in New York. He has a sister living there. Later on I see this guy on the street. I pull him down a side street and say, ‘What the hell goes on here?’ And he says, ‘Everything’s fine. Only it’s better to be careful.’ Everything’s fine, but the guy’s slipping me notes!” Wolfert bit hard on his pipe, and shook his head. “There’s no realism. I’m getting claustrophobia.”
Upstairs, I could hear the telephone ringing inside my room as I unlocked the door. It was the man I’d met during an intermission at the ballet, Miss Ryan’s admirer, Stefan Orlov. He said he’d been calling Miss Ryan but there was no answer. I suggested he try the Breens’ suite, one room of which Miss Ryan was using as an office. “No,” he said, sounding nervously apologetic. “I must not call again. So soon. But when may I see Nancy? And you?” he added, tactfully. I asked him if he would like to come by the hotel for a drink. There was a pause that lasted until I thought we’d been disconnected. Finally he said, “That would not be convenient. But could you meet me, say, in an hour?” I said yes, where? He told me, “Walk around the cathedral. St. Isaac’s. Keep walking. I will see you.” He rang off without saying good-bye.
I went down to the Breens’ suite to tell Miss Ryan of the invitation. She was delighted, “I knew he’d call,” but crestfallen, “I’m stuck with six copies of a rush item,” she said, inserting layers of paper and carbon into a portable typewriter. The rush item was a two-page letter written by Robert Breen and addressed to Charles E. Bohlen, the American Ambassador to Russia. It began by expressing gratitude over the fact that Ambassador and Mrs. Bohlen were coming to Leningrad for the Porgy and Bess première; but the bulk of the letter was in a tone of grieving complaint. Although the production’s Soviet tour had the blessings of the U.S. State Department, it was not, contrary to the popular impression, under their official sponsorship. Indeed, the trip had been made financially possible by Russia’s own Ministry of Culture. Nevertheless, Breen felt it was “a crying shame” no member of Ambassador Bohlen’s staff had been permanently assigned to the company to observe “the day-to-day and minute-to-minute happenings, the individual contacts, and the spontaneous, warm incidents” that Breen considered necessary if the Embassy intended to “prepare properly the sort of full and valid report which rightfully should be expected on this unprecedented project.” Breen wrote, “The need for such documentation concerns not only this goodwill tour, important as it is, but also possible future cultural exchanges. No one can imagine the extreme lengths to which we have gone to provide smooth running—or the infinite amount of details which have to be foreseen and arranged if this type of exchange is to bear the fruit of its promise. The documentation should record not only our successes, but also those facets of public relations which might be improved, and the possible failures.”
“Give my love to Stefan,” Miss Ryan instructed, as I left to keep the appointment. “And if it turns out to be a spontaneous, warm incident, be sure and tell me so I can put it in the Porgy and Bess log,” she said, referring to an official journal of that title maintained by her employers.
It’s a stone’s throw from the Astoria to the semi-Gothic mass of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. I left the hotel at exactly three-thirty, the time Orlov had said he would meet me. But on stepping out the door, I found myself confronting a pair of ski glasses. There was an Intourist Ziv parked at the curb, and the man was sitting in the front seat talking to a chauffeur. For a moment I thought of retu
rning to the hotel; it seemed the sensible course if Orlov was concerned that his rendezvous be off the record. But I decided to stroll past the car and see what happened; as I went by, nerves and an unreliable sense of etiquette prompted me to nod at the man. He yawned and averted his face. I didn’t look back until I’d crossed the square and was in the shadows of St. Isaac’s. By then, the car was gone. I walked slowly around the cathedral, pretending to admire the architecture, though there was no reason to pretend anything, for the sidewalks were deserted. Still, I felt conspicuous, and not quite lawful. Night swept the sky like the black crows that wheeled and cawed overhead. On the third lap around, I began to suspect Orlov had changed his mind. I tried to forget the cold by counting my steps, and had ticked off two hundred and sixteen when, turning a corner, I came on a scene that made the flow of numbers stop like the hands of a dropped watch.
It was this: four men in black had a fifth man backed against the cathedral wall. They were pounding him with their fists, pushing him forward and hitting him with the full weight of their bodies, like football players practicing on a dummy. A woman, respectably dressed and carrying a pocketbook tucked under her arm, stood on the sidelines as though she were casually waiting while some men friends finished a business conversation. Except for the cawing of crows, it was like an episode from a silent film; no one made a sound, and as the four attackers relinquished the man, leaving him spread-eagled on the snow, they glanced at me indifferently, joined the woman and walked off without a word between them. I went over to the man. He was fat, too heavy for me to lift, and the drink on his breath would have killed scorpions. He was not bleeding and he was not unconscious, but he wanted to speak and couldn’t; he gazed up at me like a deaf-mute attempting to communicate with his eyes.