The ugly woman took aim at Alexei and said with great acerbity, “How many women construction workers are there in the Soviet Union?”
Alexei tried to answer. “Is construction worker training in mostly male, men I am meaning, but is also some girls if. . .” He got no further.
“Girls?!” shrieked the old bitch. “Girls?! We don’t call women girls! That’s an insult!” The Russian kids stared at her, mystified. The hag turned on Marya. “You explain to them that calling women girls is a demeaning thing to do.”
Marya said something placating in Russian. The president tried a halting apology, but the ugly woman interrupted. “One thing I’d like to know.” She glared at Alexei’s denim trousers. “Why do young people all over Europe, even in the socialist countries, pick up that awful American popular music and those sloppy blue jeans?”
Marya made what sounded like a pained verbatim translation. All the Russian faces in the room froze into the great Russian public face—serious but expressionless, part poker face and part the face the troops made on You’ll Never Get Rich, when Phil Silvers asked for volunteers.
It isn’t easy to get a sober Russian to do anything on impulse, but I took Marya by the cuff and convinced her we’d better get some beer from the bar. The room was still silent when we returned. The president wouldn’t take a drink, but the rest of the Russians seemed glad enough to bury their faces in beer. The ugly woman sat smugly, still waiting for a reply. The other Americans were getting embarrassed. Finally, the woman’s husband spoke up. He was wearing his running shorts and Kenneth Patchen T-shirt again. “What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a . . .”
Something had to be done. I stood up. “I think it’s very unfair for us to monopolize the comradeship and international goodwill of these Soviet young people,” I said. “There is another group of Americans in the lounge who are eager to discuss Soviet-American relations with our guests, and—”
“Oh, yes!” said Marya, and she began to point to the hallway and chatter in Russian. The New Mexicans were a little surprised to see us, but their hospitality didn’t falter.
“We are thankfully welcomed of being here,” said the president. “English ours is not so—”
“The hell with that,” said Tom. “Play us a song on that thing.” And it was a pretty good song, and Sue Ann even got him to have a drink when he finished.
SATURDAY, JULY 24
There was another peace conference under the shade deck, and this time it was the Russians’ turn to speak. I was slightly late, due to sheer reluctance. Mrs. Pigeon was opening the session. “It is better to get these answers from Soviet experts than from our press,” she was saying as I walked in. I walked back out again and had a beer. Actually, I had three.
When I returned, Guvov, the buffoon, had wound up his speech and was answering a question about whether Solzhenitsyn was just a bad writer or a spy too. He was wearing a hilarious pair of ersatz Levi’s with TEXAS JEAN printed on a salad-plate-sized plastic patch on the ass. “Solzhenitsyn painted the Soviet Union only in dark colors,” he said. The leftists clapped vigorously. “Criticism,” said Guvov, “leads to the problems of democracy.”
Time for more beer.
It seemed to be dawning on a few of the peaceniks that something was askew. When I returned from the bar the second time, one of them was addressing Guvov. “A lot of the Americans on this trip have admitted the errors of American foreign policy. How come none of the Soviets have admitted any Soviet errors?”
“We don’t criticize the foreign policy of our government,” said Guvov, “because we hundred-percent agree with it and approve of it.” The questioner gasped. But the leftists all clapped, and so did quite a few of the peaceniks.
That was it for me and peace conferences. I apologize, but this reporter did not attend any more peace functions of any kind.
LOATH BOAT
The leftists and peaceniks spent most of every day talking. They were not arguing. They were not analyzing. They were not making observations. What they were doing was agreeing with each other—in feverish spasms of accordance, mad confabs of apposition, blathers of consonance. On Reagan, on the weapons freeze, on the badness of Israel, on the dangers of war, on the need for peace, they agreed.
I finally decided these people were crazy.
I watched my cabin mate write a letter to his wife. It was a political exhortation. “We Americans must repudiate the Reagan administration . . .” This to his wife of thirty years.
Crazy. And stupid too.
One, who was from the deep Midwest and looked like Millicent Fenwick, told me, “You know, if the people who put Reagan in office prevail, they’re going to take the vote from women.”
As we were going through the locks of the Don-Volga canal the woman with the direct connection between her cerebral cortex and her mouth came nattering up beside me at the rail. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she said, staring at a gigantic blank wall of concrete. “They’re such wonderful engineers in the Soviet Union.” I agreed it was an impressive piece of work. “Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous, marvelous,” she said. She peeked over the side. “And where do they get all the water?”
The Intourist guides were at wits’ end, the Soviet experts were becoming testy, and the crew was clearly disgusted and getting into the grog ration earlier each day.
The ship’s doctor, a blowsy, mottle-eyed, disbarred-looking fellow, had taken to experimenting on the diarrhea symptoms half the Americans were suffering. Marya gave an elaborate burlesque of accompanying him as the translator on his rounds. The Russians would not explain the joke, but I know one peacenik had gone to him with the malady and received a laxative and a glass of 200-proof neutral grain spirits. I did not see that person again for thirty-six hours.
SUNDAY, JULY 25
Sunday I was drunk.
WHAT WAS GOING ON IN THE
SOVIET CAPITAL AND HEARTLAND
AS WE JOINED THE NATION THIS
SUMMER ON AN EXCITING AND
AFFORDABLE SOVIET EXCURSION?
I know I’ll never understand what the Americans thought they were doing in Russia, but I’m almost as confused about what the Russians thought they were letting them do.
Obviously the Volga Peace Cruise was approved. Unapproved things unhappen in the USSR. But though the Soviets had approved it, they didn’t seem very interested. In one of the cities where we docked, a local reporter came aboard and talked to Nick Smarm. When Nick finished excoriating the U.S. and began pointing out that the Soviet Union was also engaged in the arms race, the reporter simply stopped writing. This was the total media attention given us.
I suppose we were under surveillance. I noticed that Sonya took complete notes during the conferences, but it seemed to me she was paying most attention to what her countrymen said. Some peaceniks suspected their rooms had been searched. One woman had found her bags a little too neatly closed and zipped. Another woman had her copy of Peter the Great disappear.
“Do not bother to look for it,” said one of the Intourist guides, when the woman made a stink. “It has doubtless slipped behind the folding bunk when the steward lady has been making the bed. It is most difficult to look under there so steward lady will do it for you during dinner.” This sounded suspicious. But the book did not mysteriously reappear after dinner, not even with certain pages torn out, so maybe it was just lost.
Neither I nor the outspokenly pro-American New Mexicans were bothered. One day Nikolai and Sonya took me on a nice but pointless speedboat ride up the Volga, and I assumed this was when my cabin was to be searched. But I’d used the old Ian Fleming trick of fastening a human hair with spit across my locker door and it was still there when I got back.
If anything was happening to the leftists, they weren’t talking. But one of them, the woman who was embarrassed to have left the Soviet Union as a child, had relatives in Moscow, whom I know she visited. When we went through customs at the end of the tour, she was searched completely and q
uestioned so long that the plane had to be held for her. Our tour leader claimed it was because she’d lost one of her currency exchange receipts.
Whatever the official Soviet attitude toward us may have been, the private Russian attitude was manifestly clear. The Russians, when they’d had a few drinks, would repeatedly make declarations starting, “I am not an anti-Semite, but. . .” And, at least to judge by last names, many of our tour members were Jewish.
One of the crew, in the most confidence-imparting stage of drunkenness, told me, “You know Brezhnev is married to a Jew. Many members of the Presidium are married to Jews. This is why we cannot be so firm with the Israelis.”
But the peaceniks and the leftists were blind to this, or passed it off as anti-Zionism only. Their only serious concern was with the CIA. They were convinced there must be a CIA agent aboard. I suggested the fat man, surely an agent provocateur. But they’d decided he was okay, since he’d apologized to Nick. Someone said the leftists suspected me—that coat and tie. I asked Nikolai who he thought it was. “All of them,” he laughed.
MONDAY, JULY 26
I think the Russians had decided both privately and officially that these Volga peace cruisers were inconsequential people, unable to influence American policy in any important way.
When we docked in Togliatti, the leftists were very eager to see the Lada automobile plant there, one of the most modern factories in the Soviet Union. They were swooning to meet genuine “workers.” But it wasn’t on the schedule. Our Intourist guides made a halfhearted attempt to convince the local Intourist office to allow a tour, but it was too big a group, too many officials would have to be contacted, it would take too long to arrange, and so on. The leftists were pretty sore, and went so far as to make no excuses for the Soviet system this time.
But meanwhile Nikolai had somehow got in touch with the Lada plant management and informed them that I worked for Car and Driver magazine. I’m only a contributing editor there, and even if I were editor in chief I wouldn’t have much sway over the FTC, DOT, and Reagan administration executive orders that keep the Russians from exporting cars to us. But I was a representative of the real world nonetheless. And that afternoon there was a big chauffeured car waiting at dockside to take me, the only admitted Republican on board, for a personal tour of the Lada plant.
ALL THE REST OF THE DAYS ON
THE TRIP
By Tuesday the 27th I’d come to the end of the tour, at least as a sentient being. There were still two days left to the cruise and six days left in Russia, but I was gone.
The place just wears you out after a while. There is not a square angle or a plumb line in all the country. Every bit of concrete is crumbling from too much aggregate in the mix, and everything is made of concrete. I saw buildings with the facades falling off that were still under construction. And everything that’s well built turns out to be built by somebody else. Moscow Airport was built by West Germans, the Grand Hyatt knockoff by the French, the Lada plant by Italians, the very boat was made in Austria.
The air pollution in the cities is grotesque. No machine seems to run well. And the whole of commerce visible on the Volga consisted of carting sand and phone poles from one port to the next.
The New Mexicans had a contest: a bottle of champagne to be won by the first person who saw a crane with an operator in it. No one won. Every building site we saw was three-fourths deserted. I asked Orlonsky where the workers were, but he turned sly on me. “Perhaps they are at lunch.” It was 10:30 in the morning.
What little of the old and charming architecture is left is rotting, sitting neglected, waiting to be torn down for its lack of modernism. Russia stinks of dirty bodies and evil Balkan tobacco and a disinfectant they must distribute by the tank car daily, some chemical with a moldy turned-earth stench as though vandals had been at it in the graveyard or mice had gotten into the mushroom cellar.
In the end, every little detail starts to get to you—the overwhelming oppressiveness of the place, the plain godawfulness of it.
We put in at Ulyanovsk, birthplace of Lenin. Not an easy city to find your way around in. Take Lenin Avenue to Lenin Street; go straight to Lenin Square, then left along Lenin Boulevard to Lenin Place and Lenin Lane. Don’t miss the monument to Lenin’s sister’s dog.
And there’s no reason to find your way around. There’s nothing there, anyway. We were shitfaced drunk in the bar by noon. The New Mexicans and I were crazed now with the desire for a cheeseburger, mad for the sound of a pedal steel guitar, would have killed for a six-pack of Budweiser and a ride down the interstate at 100 miles an hour in a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. But there was nothing to be done, nothing to do but drink. So we drank and told jokes: old jokes, bad jokes, dirty jokes.
We were interrupting the progressives’ dinner now. The leftists and the peaceniks were mad. But only Mrs. Pigeon had the courage to approach. What were we laughing about?
“Sex,” said Sue Ann.
“Now, what’s so funny about sex?” said Mrs. Pigeon.
“Well, if you don’t remember, honey . . .” And Mrs. Pigeon retreated. We began to sing. We sang “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” and “Danny Boy” and:
My mother sells rubbers to sailors,
My dad pokes the heads with a pin,
My sister performs the abortions,
My God how the money rolls in.
The progressives could not get the Russians to stop us. Instead, the Russians came back from the fantail and began to sing too, loud Russian songs with stamping and pounding of glasses. Then some of the peaceniks came up and then a few more, and they began to sing along. They sang “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America” and every verse to “The Star Spangled Banner,” a most cacophonous sound. We danced, and the ship’s band tried to play jitterbug. And the Russians gave toasts, and we gave toasts:
To the American Eagle,
The higher she goes, the louder she screams,
And who fucks with the eagle best learn how to fly!
And the Russians said:
To Mother Russia,
Who comes here with the sword
Dies by the sword!
And someone said, “From one bunch of sons of a bitches to another.” And we drank everything that came to hand, the doctor’s neutral grain spirits included, and sang and danced and drank some more until we passed out on top of the tables in a triumph of peace and Soviet-American relations.
There’s nothing at all to the rest of the trip except a huge gray-and-green hangover with a glimpse of the White Kremlin making my head ache in Kazan and the band piping us ashore in the morning with, most appropriately to my mind, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Then a flight to Moscow, rough weather all the way, and back to that Grand Hyatt hotel.
There was a Russian disco band in the lounge, balalaika music played on electric guitars and set to a Donna Summer beat. The New Mexicans went on to Leningrad, and I was left sitting alone in the bar waiting for my plane home a day and a half hence. An English tourist sat down next to me. “Been here long, have you?” he said. “Been all around the country?”
“I’ve been to the fucking back of the moon!” I said. “Scotch,” I said to the bartender. He gave me vodka.
Goons, Guns, and
Gold
On the day before the 1986 Philippine presidential election, a Manila bartender tells me this one: President Marcos and General Ver find themselves in hell. General Ver is up to his neck in boiling tar. President Marcos is up to his knees. General Ver says: “Look, I’ve been your right-hand man for twenty years, and I’ve done some terrible stuff, but it’s nothing compared to what you’ve done. How come you’re only up to your knees?”
President Marcos says, “I’m standing on Imelda’s shoulders.”
A taxi driver tells me this one: Imelda and her kids, Irene, Imee, and Bongbong (this is, no kidding, what Marcos’s twenty-seven-year-old son, Ferdinand Jr., is called), are flying over the Philippines in their jet. Iren
e says: “Mommy, the Philippine people really hate us. Isn’t there something we can do?”
“I’ve got an idea,” says Bongbong. “We’ll drop ten thousand packages out of the airplane. Each package will have fifty pesos in it. The people can buy rice and fish, and they’ll love us.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” says Imee. “We’ll only drop five thousand packages out of the airplane. But each package will have one hundred pesos in it. The people can buy chicken and pork, and they’ll love us even more.”
“I’ve got the best idea,” says Imelda. “We’ll drop just one package out of the airplane, and the people will love us forever.”
“What’s in that package, Mom?” say the kids.
“Your father.”
In Tondo, Manila’s largest slum, I see a cigarette boy with a picture of President Marcos on the front of his vending tray. My companion, who speaks Tagalog, the local dialect, asks him, “Why do you have a picture of Marcos there?”
The boy runs his thumbnail across the president’s profile and says, “I like to scratch his face off.”
In a bar on Pilar Street, in the red-light district, some fellow journalists and I are surrounded by B-girls. Liquor cannot be served to Filipinos the night before an election, and the place is dead. A dozen smooth-skinned, peanut-butter-colored girls in tiny white bikinis are rubbing against us like kittens. Somebody orders them a round of $5 orange juices. In an attempt to somehow get this on my expense account, I ask, “Who are you going to vote for?” The girls make an L sign, thumb out, index finger up. It’s the symbol of UNIDO/PDP-LABAN, the coalition backing Corazon Aquino.
My favorite B-girl, Jolly, who has the face of a pouty Hawaiian beauty queen and a body that could cause sins of commission at a hundred yards, takes a playful punch at my nose. “Laban!” she says. It means “struggle” in Tagalog. “I vote for Cory.”