A Russian Journal Part 8

We finally were permitted in the plane, and the Turks-they were well-rounded, well-upholstered Turks-settled in their seats with grunts of distaste at our presence. They glanced suspiciously at our luggage. We must say that they were the nicest-smelling Turks we have ever encountered. Everyone of them smelled like a two-dollar haircut. And I have a feeling that while we waited at the hot airport they had been bathing in attar of roses.

We waved heavily to our hosts of Tiflis. They had been very kind and hospitable to us, and we had been of considerable nuisance to them. And our friend the cavalryman-driver waved violently. Nothing tired him out.

It was close in the plane, for the air-conditioning system, as usual, was out of order, and the smell of attar of roses was overwhelming. Our plane lumbered into the air and began to climb rapidly to get through the Caucasus. On the ridges we could see the castles and fortifications of antiquity.

It is a magical place, Georgia, and it becomes dream-like the moment you have left it. And the people are magic people. It is true that they have one of the richest and most beautiful countries in the world, and they live up to it. And we understood thoroughly now why Russians had always said to us, "Until you have seen Georgia, you have seen nothing."

We flew over the Black Sea, and stopped again at Sukhum, and this time our crew did not go swimming. The line of women was still there selling fruit, and we bought a great box of peaches to take to the correspondents in Moscow. We purposely got them firm, so that they would not all ripen at once. The sad thing was that they did not ripen at all. They simply rotted in the condition in which we got them.

We flew over the secondary range of the Caucasus and came down into the interminable flat lands. We did not land at Rostov, but flew directly on to Moscow. And it was cold in Moscow, for the winter was approaching very fast.

Mr. Chmarsky was a very nervous man. This time we had nearly finished him off. And even Chmarsky's gremlin was tired. There were no difficulties at the airport. We were met. The car was waiting, and we got into Moscow without any difficulty at all. We were very happy to see our room in the Savoy, with the crazy monkey, the insane goats, and the impaled fish. The bust of Crazy Ella winked and nodded to us as we walked up the stairs to our room, and the stuffed bear on the second floor drew himself up and saluted us.

Capa got into the bathtub with an old British financial report, and I went to sleep while he was still there. For all I know he spent the night in the tub.

CHAPTER 9.

MOSCOW WAS IN A STATE of feverish activity. Great gangs of men were covering the buildings with gigantic posters and portraits of the national heroes, acres in extent. The bridges were strung with electric light globes. The walls of the Kremlin and its towers, and even its battlements, were outlined in electric lights. Every public building was floodlighted. In every public square dance stands had been put up, and in some of the squares little booths, made to look like Russian fairy-tale houses, had been erected for the sale of sweets, and ice-cream, and souvenirs. A special little dangling metal b.u.t.tonhole ornament was official, and everyone wore one of them.

Delegations from many countries were arriving almost hourly. The busses and trains were loaded. The roads were full of people coming into the city, carrying not only their clothes, but food for several days. They have been hungry so often that they take no chances when they move, and everyone carries a few loaves of bread. Bunting and flags and paper flowers were on every building. The individual commissariats had their signs on the buildings housing their offices. The subway trust put up a huge map of the subways of Moscow, and at the bottom a little subway train that ran back and forth. This attracted crowds, who stared at it all day and late into the night. Wagons and trucks loaded with foodstuffs, with cabbages, with melons, with tomatoes, with cuc.u.mbers, rolled into the city-the gifts of the collective farms to the city on its eight-hundredth anniversary.

Everyone in the street wore some medal, or ribbon, or decoration reminiscent of the war. The city boiled with activity.

I went over to the Herald Tribune office and found a note from Sweet Joe Newman. He was held up in Stockholm, and he asked me to cover the party for the Herald Tribune, since he couldn't get back to do it.

Capa was working feverishly over his films, criticizing his work himself, the quality of the developing, everything. He had an enormous number of negatives by now, and he spent hours in front of the window, looking through the negatives, and b.i.t.c.hing badly. Nothing was correct, nothing was right.

We called Mr. Karaganov at the Voks office and asked him to find out exactly what we had to do to get the films out of Russia. We thought there might be some censorship, and we wanted to know what it was enough in advance so that we could make preparations for it. He a.s.sured us that he would go to work on it immediately and would let us know.

On the night before the celebration we were invited to the Bolshoi Theater, but we weren't told what it would be. By some fortunate accident we were unable to go. We heard later that it was six hours of speeches, and no one could leave, for there were members of the government in the government box. It was one of the happiest accidents that ever happened to us.

The restaurants and cabarets were packed with people, and many of them were set aside for the delegates who had come from the other republics of the Soviet Union and from other countries, so that we couldn't get in at all. As a matter of fact it was very difficult to get dinner that night. The city was simply mobbed with people, and they walked slowly about the streets, stopping in one square to listen for a while to the music, and then trudging on to another square. They looked, and trudged, and looked. The country people were wide-eyed. Some of them had never seen the city before, and no one had ever seen the city so lighted up. There was some dancing in the squares, but not a great deal. Mostly the people trudged and stared, and trudged on and stared at something else. The museums were so packed that you couldn't get in at all. The theaters were mobbed. There was no building on which there was not at least one huge picture of Stalin, and the picture second in size was that of Molotov. Then there were huge portraits of the presidents of the different republics, and of the other heroes of the Soviet Union, their size graduated down.

Late in the evening we went to a little party at the house of an American Moscow correspondent who has been in Russia for many years. He speaks and reads Russian easily, and he told us a great many stories about some of the difficulties of running a house in present-day Russia. And just as with hotel serving, most of the difficulties came from the inefficiency of a bureaucratic system-so many records and so much bookkeeping made it almost impossible to get any repairs done.

After dinner he took a book from his shelves. "I want you to listen to this," he said, and began reading slowly, translating from Russian. And he read something like this-this is not an exact transcription, but it is close enough.

"The Russians of Moscow are highly suspicious of foreigners, who are watched constantly by the secret police. Every move is noticed and sent into central headquarters. A guard is placed on all foreigners. Furthermore, Russians do not receive foreigners in their houses, and they seem to be afraid even to talk to them very much. A message sent to a member of the government usually remains unanswered, and a further message is also unanswered. If one is importunate, one is told that this official has left the city or is sick. Foreigners are permitted to travel in Russia only after great difficulty, and during their travels they are very closely watched. Because of this general coldness and suspicion, foreigners visiting in Moscow are forced to a.s.sociate with each other exclusively."

There was a good deal more in this vein, and at the end our friend looked up and said, "What do you think of it?"

And we said, "We don't think you can get it past the censor."

He laughed. "But this was written in 1634. It is from a book called Voyages in Muscovy, Tartary and Persia, by a man named Adam Olearius." And he said, "Would you like to hear an account of the Moscow conference?"

And he read from another book something like this: "Diplomatically the Russians are very difficult to get along with. If one submits a plan, they counter it with another plan. Their diplomats are not trained in the large world, but are mostly people who have never left Russia. Indeed, a Russian who has lived in France is considered a Frenchman; one who has lived in Germany is considered a German, and these are not trusted at home.

"The Russians cannot go diplomatically in a straight line. They never get to the point, they argue in circles. Words are picked up, and bandied, and tossed, until in the end a general confusion is the result of any conference."

After a pause he said, "And that was written in 1661 by a French diplomat, Augustin, Baron de Mayerburg. These things make one much less restless under the present setup. I don't think Russia has changed very much in some respects. Amba.s.sadors and diplomats from foreign countries have been going crazy here for six hundred years."

Quite late in the night our host tried to drive us home, but halfway there his car ran out of gasoline. He got out and stopped the first motorist who came by. There was a quick exchange of Russian. He gave the man a hundred roubles, and we got in and were driven home by this stranger. And we found that this can nearly always be done. Almost any car becomes a taxi late at night, for a very high price. This is very fortunate, for there are practically no regular taxis on run. The taxis usually cover a route and take the car full. You must say where you are going, and the taxi driver will tell you whether he is going in that direction. They operate a little like streetcars.

In addition to all the decoration a great deal of new equipment was coming out in celebration of the anniversary. Big new electric streetcars, trackless streetcars, were put on the streets for this celebration. The Ziss automobile plant released many beautiful new cars, which were almost exclusively put to the use of the big delegations from foreign countries.

Although it was only September 6, it was becoming very cold in Moscow. Our room was freezing, and the heat would not be turned on for a month. We wore our overcoats when we were not in bed. The other correspondents in the Metropole Hotel were unpacking their electric heaters which had been put away for the summer.

Almost at dawn on the day of the celebration Capa was out raging through the streets with his cameras. He had a Russian cameraman with him now to facilitate his movements about the city and to explain to policemen that he was all right. And in Red Square he had a militia man a.s.signed to him to make things easy and to stop any unpleasantness. He photographed buildings, and displays, and crowds, and faces, and groups of trudging people, and he was as happy as it is possible for him to be when he is working.

In many streets little sidewalk restaurants were set up-one directly across from our hotel-two little tables, with white cloths on them, and vases of flowers, and a big samovar, and a gla.s.sed-in display counter for little sandwiches (open-face sandwiches with sausage and cheese), jars of pickles, and small pears and apples, all for sale.

It was a brilliant cold day. The elephants from the circus paraded through the streets, preceded by clowns. There was not to be any military parade on this day, but there was a big show scheduled for the stadium, and to that we went in the afternoon.

It was a show of ma.s.s formations of factory workers in brilliant costumes. They did group calisthenics and marches. They made figures on the field. There were races, some for women and some for men, compet.i.tions in shot-putting and in volley ball. There was a showing of dancing horses, beautifully trained horses, which waltzed, and polkaed, and bowed, and pirouetted.

Someone important in the government was there, but we couldn't see him, whoever he was, for the state box was on our side of the stadium. In fact we have almost a record. In the whole time we were in Russia we didn't see one single important person. Stalin had not come up to the celebration from his place on the Black Sea.

The show in the stadium went on all afternoon. There were parades of bicycles, and races of motorcycles, and finally there was a last show that required a great deal of preparation. A line of motorcycles rode around the track. In the seat was the motorcycle driver, and standing on each motorcycle was a girl in tights, and each girl held a great red flag, so that when the motorcycles went at full speed, the huge flag flapped behind. This parade circled the track twice, and that was the end of the show.

We started back from the Dynamo Stadium because I had to do my Tribune piece for Joe Newman, and Capa had to get back into the crowds to keep his camera clicking. And halfway back we blew a tire, and we had to walk the rest of the way. Capa got caught in the crowd, and I didn't see him until much later. I finally made it to the Tribune office, did my piece, and sent it over to the censor.

We had dinner that night with Mr. and Mrs. Louis Aragon, who were at the National Hotel. They had a room with a balcony that overlooked the huge square in back of the Kremlin. From there we could see the fireworks which went off almost constantly, and we could hear the salutes of artillery that continued at intervals all evening. The square in front of us was one packed ma.s.s of people. There must have been millions of them, milling slowly and eddying back and forth across the square. In the middle of the square there was a bandstand where speeches were made, and music played, and there were singers and dancers. The only place we have ever seen people so closely packed together is in Times Square on New Year's Eve.

It was very late at night before we could even force our way through the people back to our hotel. And many hundreds of thousands of peoples still trudged through the streets, back and forth, looking at the lights and watching the electrical displays.

I went to bed, but Capa put his hundreds of rolls of film away, and got out his negatives, and when I went to sleep he was still staring at the light through his negatives, complaining bitterly that nothing had gone well. He had discovered that one of the cameras he had been using all day had developed a light leak, and he thought that all of his films were probably ruined. This did not make him a very happy man, and I was so sorry for him that I determined not to ask him a single intellectual question the next morning.

Our time was getting very short, and we still had many things that we wanted to do. We wanted to see the Russian writers who when we had first arrived had all been out of town, on the Black Sea, or in Leningrad, or in the country. And we wanted to see theater and ballet and ballet schools. Capa had many pick-up shots to make. And every day or two we called Voks and asked whether our pictures had been cleared, because this was becoming a worry to us. We couldn't get any information about what we had to do about the pictures, and we knew that some kind of request was bound to be made. And no information came back, except that they were working on it. Meanwhile the drawers in our room were crowded with rolls and strips of developed film.

The deep fall had arrived, and the winter was fast approaching. In the country around Moscow a blue mist hung close to the fields, and everywhere the people were digging potatoes and storing cabbages.

A kind of coldness was creeping up between Capa and me, for an odor had come into our room, and it seemed to each of us that it was the odor of not quite clean clothing. We thought we were clean, we bathed a great deal, we sent our laundry out regularly, and yet this smell increased. We began looking at each other with narrowed eyes, and making slightly disparaging remarks about each other. The smell got worse and worse. We had to keep a window open. It was only after the third day that we discovered what it was. General Macon had given us some D.D.T. bombs, and one of these bombs had not been quite tightly screwed down, so that a tiny vapor of it was impregnating the room with its odor. And because we did not expect an odor, each of us thought it was the other. The smell of Aerosol, if you know what it is, is a rather pleasant clean smell, but if you don't know what it is, it is rather disgusting. We were very glad when we discovered the source of the evil and closed it off, and the room soon regained its beauty.

On the night after the celebration Ed Gilmore, who with time had forgiven Capa for stealing his Ellery Queen, invited us to dinner. And his wife is not only beautiful, she is also a beautiful cook. We spent an evening of happy, well-fed, mildly alcoholic decadence, for Ed Gilmore had a number of newly arrived swing records from America. We drank Martinis and ate crisp little piroschki, and late in the night we danced a little. It was a good evening, and we honor Ed Gilmore for his ability to forgive Capa's crime against him. The next day Sweet Joe Newman got back from Stockholm with very delicate gifts. He brought a fountain-pen, and some cigarette lighters, and cigarettes, and canned delicacies, and a few bottles of Scotch whisky, and a suitcase full of toilet paper. It was very good to have him back.

Moscow was settling into its winter stride. The theaters were opening, the ballet would begin, the shops were beginning to sell the thick cotton quilted clothing and the felt boots that people wear in winter. Children appeared in the streets in caps with earflaps, and with fur-lined collars on their thick coats. At the American Emba.s.sy technical sergeants who were experts in electricity were busily rewiring the whole building. Last winter the wiring burned out, and without the electric heaters they were used to, the Emba.s.sy staff had to work in overcoats.

We went to dinner at a house where five young American officers of the Military Attache's staff lived. It was a very good dinner, but they do not live very happy lives, for they even more than the others are restricted in their movements, and they must live the most circ.u.mspect of lives. I presume that the Russian Military Attache in America is rather carefully watched too. In front of their house stands a permanent militia man in uniform, and every time they leave their house they are accompanied by invisible followers.

Inside the pleasant house we sat at dinner with the American officers, and we had American food-a leg of lamb, and green peas, and a good soup, and salad, and little cookies, and black coffee. And we thought how four hundred years ago, perhaps in a house like this, British and French officers, young men in gold and red uniforms, had sat over their port, while outside in front of the gate the Russian guard in a helmet carried a pike and watched over them. These things do not seem to have changed very much.

Like all tourists, we made the trip to the little town of Klin, seventy kilometers from Moscow, to visit the home of Tchaikovsky. It is a pretty house, set in a large garden. The lower floors are now used as library, as storehouse for music ma.n.u.scripts, and as a museum. But the upper floor where the composer lived has been left just as it was. His bedroom is as he left it-a big dressing gown hanging beside the narrow iron cot, a small writing table under a window. The ornate dressing table and mirror with the drape of heavy paisley presented to him by a feminine admirer stands in a corner, with his hair tonic still on it. And his living-room with the grand piano, the only one he ever owned, has not been changed. Even his desk has his little cigars in a bowl, and his pipes, and stubs of pencil. The pictures of his family are on the walls, and out on a little gla.s.s porch where he took his tea there is a clean sheet of music ma.n.u.script paper. His nephew is the curator-a handsome old man now.

He said, "We want to make Tchaikovsky's house seem as though he has just stepped out for a walk and would soon return."

This old man lives mostly in the past. He spoke of the musical giants as though they were still alive-of Moussorgsky, and Rimski-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky, and the rest of the great group. And the house was indeed full of the presence of the composer. The piano is tuned and played once a year. It is played by the best pianist available, and the music is recorded. Mr. Tchaikovsky, the nephew, played for us for a while, and the piano was mellow and a little out of tune.

We looked at the ma.n.u.scripts in the library. The notes are stabbed on the paper, cutting into the staffs with a terrible haste, and whole sections are crossed out. And on some pages only eight bars remain, and the rest are viciously eliminated with a destroying pencil. And then we looked at the ma.n.u.scripts of other composers, neatly inked, no note crossed out. But Tchaikovsky wrote as though every day might be his last, and every note. He was frantic to get his music down.

The old man sat with us in the garden later, and we spoke of the composers of the present day, and he said a little sadly, "Competent men, yes; good craftsmen, yes; honest and intelligent men, yes; but not genuises, not genuises." He looked down the long garden where Tchaikovsky had walked every day, winter or summer, after he had finished his daily work.

The Germans had come to this pleasant house, and they had made a motor pool of it, and tanks were in the garden. But the nephew had moved the precious ma.n.u.scripts in the library, and the pictures, even the piano, safely away before the Germans came. And now it is all back-a strange, haunted place. From the window of the caretaker's cottage came the notes of someone practicing on a piano, the exercises of a child, hesitant and stumbling, and the strange and pa.s.sionate loneliness of the frantic little man who lived exclusively for music filled the garden.

Our time was growing very short. Our lives had become jerky. We rushed from one thing to another, trying to see everything in our last few days. We visited the University of Moscow, and the undergraduates did not look unlike ours. They congregated in the halls, and laughed, and rushed from cla.s.s to cla.s.s. They paired off, boy and girl, just as ours do. The university was bombed during the war, and the students rebuilt it while the war went on, so that it was never closed.

The ballet had opened, and we went nearly every night-the loveliest ballet we have ever seen. It started at seven-thirty and did not finish until after eleven. The casts were huge. A commercial theater could not support such ballet. Such performance, and training, and sets, and music, must be subsidized or they cannot exist. There is no way to make the sale of tickets pay for this kind of production.

We also went to the Moscow Art Theater, and saw Simonov's play The Russian Question. And perhaps we made a mistake in seeing this play, or perhaps this production was not of the best. We found it, for our taste, overacted, overemphasized, unreal, and stylized-in a word, hammy. The character of the American publisher would have reduced an American audience to helpless laughter, and the Russian idea of American newspapermen was only slightly less fantastic than Ben Hecht's. But this play has been unbelievably successful. And its picture of American journalism is taken as absolute truth by nearly all of its audiences. We wish we could have seen other plays, and other casts, to see whether overemphasis is general, but there was no time. We can only say that by New York standards The Russian Question is not good.

Mr. Simonov is without question the most popular writer in the Soviet Union today. His poems are known and recited by the whole population. His war reporting was as generally read as Ernie Pyle's was in America. And he himself is a very charming man. He invited us to his country house. It is a simple, comfortable little house, set in a large garden. There he and his wife live quietly. His house is not luxurious, it is very easy. We had an excellent lunch. He loves fine cars, and he has a Cadillac and a jeep. His vegetable garden, orchard, and poultry-yard furnish his table. He seems to live a good, simple, comfortable life. He has his enemies of course, of the kind drawn against him by his popularity. He is the darling of the government, and has been decorated many times, and he is generally beloved by the Russian people.

He and his wife were charming and kind. We liked them very much. And as with all professionals, our criticism of his play had no personal emphasis. We played darts later on, and danced, and sang. And we went back to Moscow very late at night.

Moscow was still in a flurry of activity, for all of the great portraits, and the flags, and the buntings had to come down quickly, before rain should set in, or the color would run. They had to be used again for the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the November Revolution. This is a big year for celebration in Moscow. The lights on the buildings, and on the Kremlin, and on the bridges were left up, because the rain could not hurt them, and they too would be needed again on the seventh of November.

We had wanted to see the inside of the Kremlin, everyone does, and we had even wanted to photograph it, and finally our permission came through, but the permission to photograph could not be arranged. No pictures could be taken, no cameras could be carried inside. We did not get the special tour, but only the usual tourists' route. However, that was what we wanted. Mr. Chmarsky was our guide again, and oddly enough Mr. Chmarsky had never been inside the Kremlin either. It is not a permission readily granted.

We approached the long, heavily guarded causeway. There were soldiers at the entrance. Our names were taken, and our permissions scrutinized, and then a bell rang and a military escort went with us through the gate. We didn't go to the side where the government offices are. We walked inside the huge place, past the old cathedrals which have been there for so long, and we went through the museums in the giant palace which was used by so many czars, from Ivan the Terrible on. We went into the tiny bedroom that Ivan used, and into the little withdrawing rooms, and the private chapels. And they are very beautiful, and strange, and ancient, and they are kept just as they were. And we saw the museum where the armor, the plate, the weapons, the china services, the costumes, and the royal gifts for five hundred years are stored. There were huge crowns covered with diamonds and emeralds, there was the big sledge of Catherine the Great. We saw the fur garments and the fantastic armor of the old boyars. There were the gifts sent by other royal houses to the czars-a great silver dog sent by Queen Elizabeth, presents of German silver and china from Frederick the Great to Catherine, the swords of honor, the incredible claptrap of monarchy.

It became apparent, after looking at a royal museum, that bad taste, far from being undesirable in royalty, is an absolute necessity.

We saw the painted hall of the warriors of Ivan where no woman was permitted to enter. We climbed miles of royal staircases, and looked into the great halls of mirrors. And we saw the suite where the last czar and his family had lived, uncomfortably amidst too much furniture, too much decoration, and too much dark polished wood. For a child to have to grow up and live with all of this monstrous collection of nonsense must have made a certain kind of adult out of him, and one can understand more readily the character of princes after seeing the kind of life they must have lived in the midst of all this mess. When the little czarevitch wanted a gun, could he have a twenty-two rifle? No, he had a little blunderbuss handmade of silver, with pieces of ivory driven into it, with jewels for sights-an anachronism in the twentieth century. And he couldn't go out and hunt rabbits, he sat on the lawn and swans were driven by for him to shoot at.

Just two hours in this royal place so depressed us that we couldn't shake it all day. What must a lifetime in it have done! Anyway, we saw it, and I suppose we are glad, but horses couldn't drag either of us back. It is the most gloomy place in the world. And it was easy to imagine while walking through these halls and these staircases how murder could rise so easily, how father could kill son and son father, and how any real external life could become so remote as to be nonexistent. From the windows of the palace we could look over the walls of the Kremlin, out to the city, and we could imagine how these imprisoned monarchs must have felt toward the city. Directly below us in Red Square was the great marble stand where they used to cut off the heads of their subjects, probably out of their own terror. We walked down a long ramp and out of the heavily guarded gate with a sense of relief.

We ran away from that place and back to the Metropole Hotel, to the Herald Tribune offices, and we grabbed Sweet Joe Newman, and went down to the cabaret, and ordered four hundred grams of vodka and a huge lunch. But it took a long time to get over the feeling the Kremlin had put upon us.

We never did see the government offices which are on the other side. That is a place where tourists are never taken, and we don't even know what it looked like, except for the tops of the buildings which could be seen over the wall. But we were told that a whole community lives in there. Some of the high government officials have apartments there, and their servants; and the caretakers, the maintenance crews, and the guards, all live inside the walls. Stalin, however, we were told, does not live in the Kremlin, but has an apartment somewhere, and no one seems to know where it is, and no one seems to pay much attention to where it is. Mostly now though, it is said, he lives on the Black Sea, in a climate of perpetual summer.

One of the American correspondents told us that he had seen Stalin driven through the street one day, and he said he was sitting in the jump seat, and he was leaning back at a curious angle, and he looked very stiff. "I wondered at the time," he said, "whether it was Stalin or whether it was a figure. He did not look natural."

Capa brooded over his films every morning, and nearly every day we called Voks and asked what the procedure was going to be to get our films out, and every day we were told that they were working on it and we were not to worry. But we did worry, for we had heard all of the stories of how films are confiscated, and how none is ever allowed out. We had heard them, and I suppose unconsciously we believed them. On the other hand, Mr. Karaganov of Voks had not let us down once, and had not told us an untruth once. And so we depended upon him.

And now the Moscow Writers' Union asked us to a dinner, and this worried us, for here would be all the intellectuals, all the writers whom Stalin has called "the architects of the Russian soul." It was a terrifying prospect.

Our trip was almost done now, and we were a little frantic. We didn't know whether we had got all the things we came for. There is only so much that one can do and see. Language difficulties were maddening. We had made contacts with many Russian people, but were the questions we had wanted answered actually answered? I had made notes of conversations, and of details, even of weather reports, for later sorting out. But we were too close to it. We didn't know what we had. We knew nothing about the things American papers were howling about-Russian military preparations, atomic research, slave labor, the political skulduggery of the Kremlin-we had no information about these things. True, we had seen a great many German prisoners at work, cleaning up the wreckage their Army had created, and this did not seem too unjust to us. And the prisoners did not seem to us either overworked or underfed. But we have no data, of course. If there were large military preparations, we didn't see them. There certainly were lots of soldiers. On the other hand, we had not come as spies.

At the last we tried to see everything in Moscow. We ran to schools, we spoke to businesswomen, actresses, students. We went to stores where the queues formed to buy everything. An issue of phonograph records would be announced and a line would form, and in a few hours the records would be sold out. The same thing happened when a new book went on sale. It seemed to us that clothing improved even in the two months we had been there, and at the same time the Moscow papers announced the lowering of prices on bread, vegetables, potatoes, and some textiles. There was always a rush on the stores, to buy almost anything that was offered. The Russian economy which had been turned almost exclusively to war production was slowly clanking into peacetime production, and a people which had been deprived of consumer goods, both needed and luxurious, crowded the stores to buy. When ice-cream got to a store, a line formed many blocks long. A man with a box of ice-cream would be rushed, and his goods sold so quickly that he could hardly take the money fast enough. The Russians love ice-cream, and there never was enough of it to go around.

Every day Capa inquired about his pictures. He had nearly four thousand negatives by now, and he was worrying himself sick. And every day we were told that it would be all right, that the rule was in process of being arrived at.

The dinner given us by the Moscow writers was held at a Georgian restaurant. There were about thirty writers and officials of the Union there, among them Simonov and Ilya Ehrenburg. By this time I had reached a point where I could not drink vodka at all. My system revolted against it. But the dry Georgian wines were delicious. The kinds of wines had numbers. Thus one got to know that number sixty would be a heavy red wine, number thirty a thin white wine. These numbers are not correct, but we found that number forty-five, a dry, light, fine-tasting red wine was good for us, and we always ordered it. There was a comparatively dry champagne that was good too. The restaurant had a Georgian orchestra and some dancers, and the food was the same as in Georgia-for our taste, the best in Russia.

We were all dressed up in our best clothes, and ours were pretty beat up and sloppy. In fact we were a disgrace, and Sweet Lana was getting to be a little ashamed of us. There were no dinner clothes. In fact, in the circles we traveled in we never saw dinner clothes. Perhaps the diplomats have them, we don't know.

The speeches at this dinner were long and complicated. Most of the people at the table had some language beside Russian, either English, or French, or German. They hoped we had enjoyed our stay in their country. They hoped we had got the information we came to get. They drank our health again and again. We answered that we had not come to inspect the political system, but to see ordinary Russian people; that we had seen many of them, and we hoped we could tell the objective truth about what we had seen. Ehrenburg got up and said that if we could do that they would be more than happy. A man at the end of the table then got up and said that there were several kinds of truth, and that we must tell a truth which would further good relations between the Russian and the American people.

And that started the fight. Ehrenburg leaped up and made a savage speech. He said that to tell a writer what to write was an insult. He said that if a writer had a reputation for being truthful, then no suggestion should be offered. He shook his finger in his colleague's face and told him in effect that his manners were bad. Simonov instantly backed Ehrenburg, and denounced the first speaker, who defended himself feebly. Mr. Chmarsky tried to make a speech, but the argument went on and drowned him out. We had always heard that the party line was so strict among writers that no argument was permitted. The spirit at this dinner did not make this seem at all true. Mr. Karaganov made a conciliatory speech, and the dinner settled down.

My abandoning of vodka in the toasts and the subst.i.tution of wine made me much happier in the stomach, although I probably was regarded as a weakling, but I was a healthier weakling. Vodka just didn't agree with me. The dinner concluded about eleven o'clock in good feeling. No one else ventured to tell us what to write.

Our pa.s.sage was booked now. We were to leave in three days, and still there was no clearance of our pictures. Capa was a brooding ma.s.s of unhappiness. The people at the American Emba.s.sy and the correspondents had been so kind to us that we felt we ought to give a c.o.c.ktail party. Poor Stevens of the Christian Science Monitor had one of the few houses in Moscow. The rest lived in hotels. So Stevens got chosen to give the party. There was not much he could do about it, even if he had wanted to. We made a guest list and found that at least a hundred people had to be invited, and Stevens's living-room could comfortably hold about twenty. But there was no help for that. We thought perhaps some wouldn't come, but we were wrong. A hundred and fifty came. Parties are very desirable things in Moscow. It was a gay party too, but there wasn't much drinking. The room was so crowded that you could hardly get your arm up to your mouth, and once you did you couldn't get it down again. Stevens never got to see much of his party; quite early he got trapped in a corner, and he never escaped from it.

Our profound thanks are due to the Emba.s.sy staff and the correspondents. They gave us every possible help and encouragement. And we think they are doing a very good job under trying and difficult conditions. For one thing, they are not losing their heads as so many people are in the world. It is probably the touchiest political scene in the world today, and far from the most pleasant. Our compliments go to the whole group, from the Amba.s.sador to the T/5 who was rewiring the Emba.s.sy.

We were to leave on Sunday morning. On Friday night we went to the ballet at the Bolshoi Theater. When we came out there was a rush telephone call for us. It was Mr. Karaganov of Voks. He had finally got word from the Foreign Office. Our films had to be developed and inspected, every single one of them, before they could leave the country. He would put a crew to work developing the pictures-three thousand pictures. We wondered how it could have been done if we had had to do it at this last moment. They did not know that all the pictures had already been developed. Capa packed up all his negatives, and early in the morning a messenger came for them. He spent a day of agony. He paced about, clucking like a mother hen who has lost her babies. He made plans, he would not leave the country without his films. He would cancel his reservation. He would not agree to have the films sent after him. He grunted and paced the room. He washed his hair two or three times and forgot to take a bath at all. He could have had a baby with half the trouble and pain. My notes were not even requested. It wouldn't have made much difference if they had been, no one could have read them. I have trouble reading them myself.

We spent the day visiting and promising to send various scarce articles to various people. Sweet Joe was a little sad to see us leave, we think. We had robbed him of cigarettes and books, had used his clothes and his soap and his toilet paper, had outraged his slender stock of whisky, had violated his hospitality in every possible way, and still we think he was sorry to see us go.

Half the time Capa plotted counterrevolution if anything happened to his films, and half the time he considered simple suicide. He wondered if he could cut off his own head on the execution block in Red Square. We had a sad little party in the Grand Hotel that night. The music was louder than ever, and the bar girl we had named Miss Sicha.s.s (Miss Hurry-up) was slower than ever.

We got up in the dark to go to the airport for the last time. We sat for the last time under the portrait of Stalin, and it seemed to us that he was smiling satirically over his medals. We drank the usual tea, and Capa by now had the jerks. And then a messenger arrived and put a box in his hands. It was a tough cardboard box, and the lid was sewed on with string, and over the knots were little leaden seals. He was not to touch the seals until we had cleared the airfield at Kiev, the last stop before Prague.

Mr. Karaganov, Mr. Chmarsky, Sweet Lana, and Sweet Joe Newman saw us off. Our baggage was much lighter than it had been, for we had given away everything we could spare-suits, and jackets, some cameras, all the extra flash bulbs, and the unexposed film. We climbed into the plane and took our seats. It was four hours to Kiev. Capa held the cardboard box in his hand, and he was not allowed to open it. If the seals were broken it would not pa.s.s. He weighed it in his hand. "It is light," he said miserably. "It is only half heavy enough."

I said, "Maybe they put rocks in it, maybe there aren't any films in there at all."

He shook the box. "It sounds like films," he said.

"It could be old newspapers," I said.

"You son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h," he remarked. And he argued with himself. "What would they want to take out?" he asked. "It wasn't anything that could hurt."

"Maybe they just don't like Capa pictures," I suggested.

The plane flew over the great flat lands with their forests and fields, and the silver river winding and twisting. It was a beautiful day, and the thin blue mist of autumn hung close to the ground. The hostess took pink soda to the crew, and came back and opened a bottle for herself.

At noon we coasted into the field at Kiev. The customs man gave our baggage a cursory inspection, but the box of film was instantly picked up. They had a message concerning it. An official cut the strings while Capa looked on like a stricken sheep. And then the officials all smiled, and shook hands, and went out, and the door closed, and the engines turned over. Capa's hands shook as he opened his box. The films seemed to be all there. He smiled and put back his head, and he was asleep before the ship could get into the air. Some negatives had been taken, but not many. They had removed films that showed too much topography, and the telephoto picture of the mad girl of Stalingrad was gone, and the pictures which showed prisoners, but nothing that mattered from our point of view was withheld. The farms and the faces, the pictures of the Russian people, were intact, and those were what we had gone for in the first place.

The airplane crossed the border, and early in the afternoon we landed in Prague, and I had to awaken Capa.

Well, there it is. It's about what we went for. We found, as we had suspected, that the Russian people are people, and, as with other people, that they are very nice. The ones we met had a hatred of war, they wanted the same things all people want-good lives, increased comfort, security, and peace.

We know that this journal will not be satisfactory either to the ecclesiastical Left, nor the lumpen Right. The first will say it is anti-Russian, and the second that it is pro-Russian. Surely it is superficial, and how could it be otherwise? We have no conclusions to draw, except that Russian people are like all other people in the world. Some bad ones there are surely, but by far the greater number are very good.

end.