A Russian Journal (7 page)

what reason it was put in our hotel room. But we began to dream about it. And certainly it did have a quality of nightmare about it.

Three huge double windows overlooked the street. As time went on, Capa posted himself in the windows more and more, photographing little incidents that happened under our windows. Across the street, on the second floor, there was a man who ran a kind of camera repair shop. He worked long hours on equipment. And we discovered late in the game that while we were photographing him, he was photographing us.

Our bathroom, and we were the glory of Moscow for having a private one, had certain peculiarities. The entrance was difficult, for one could not open the door simply and go in, because the door was interfered with by the bathtub. One stepped inside, crouched back in the corner beside the washstand, closed the door, and then one was free to move about. The bathtub was not evenly set on its legs, so that once filled, if one moved suddenly, the whole thing swayed and water slopped out on the floor.

It was an old bathtub, probably pre-revolutionary, and its enamel had been worn off on the bottom, leaving a surface a little like sand-paper. Capa, who is a delicate creature, found that he began to bleed after a bath, and he took to wearing shorts in the tub.

This bathroom had a peculiarity which was true of all the bathrooms we experienced in the Soviet Union. There may be other kinds, but we did not find them. Whereas all the taps leaked-the toilet, the basin, the bathtub faucets-all the drains were completely watertight. Consequently, if you filled the basin, the water stayed there, and when you pulled the plug out of the bathtub drain, it had no effect at all in allowing the water to escape. And in one hotel in Georgia the roar of water escaping from the taps was so great that we had to close the bathroom door to get any sleep. It was from this that I made my great invention, which I offered to turn over to heavy industry. It is very simple. Reverse the process: put the taps where the drains are, and the drains where the taps are, and the whole thing would be solved.

But our bathroom did have one very fine quality. There was always plenty of hot water in it, sometimes mostly on the floor, but it was there when we wanted it.

It was here that I discovered an unpleasant quality in Capa's nature, and I think it only right to set it down in case some young woman should ever listen to any suggestion of matrimony from him. He is a bathroom hog, and a very curious one. His method is as follows: He rises from his bed and disappears into the bathroom and draws a tub of water. He then lies in that tub of water and reads until he becomes sleepy, whereupon he goes to sleep. This may go on for two or three hours in the morning, and it can be readily seen that the bathroom is immobilized for any more serious purposes while he is in there. I offer this information about Capa as a public service. With two bathrooms, Capa is a charming, intelligent, good-tempered companion. With one bathroom, he is a-

Already we had been subjected to the intricacies of Russian money. It had several values, official and non-official. The official rate was five roubles to one dollar. The American Embassy rate was twelve roubles to one dollar. But you could buy roubles on the black market for fifty roubles to one dollar, and certain South American legations bought roubles in other countries, like Poland or Czechoslovakia, for a hundred roubles to one dollar. The American Embassy, which maintained strict honesty in this matter of twelve to one, was criticized by some of its employees for making things very expensive. For example, if a member of our Embassy gave a party, it was vastly expensive at twelve to one, while a member of one of the aforementioned embassies could give a party at a hundred to one, and the party was incredibly cheap.

When we registered at the Savoy Hotel we were, issued ration tickets, three for each day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. By using these tickets in the ration restaurant in the hotel we could eat quite reasonably. If we wanted to eat in a commercial restaurant, the food was very expensive, and not very much better. The beer was sour, and very expensive. It averaged about a dollar and a half a bottle.

In the afternoon Voks sent a car to take us to the main office for an interview. It was our impression that there had been some battle about who was to be responsible for us, the Writer's Union or Voks. And Voks had lost and got us. The Voks offices are in a beautiful little palace, which was once the home of a merchant prince. We were received by Mr. Karaganov in his office, which is oak-paneled to the ceiling and has a stained-glass skylight-a very pleasant place to work. Mr. Karaganov, a young blond, careful man, who spoke a precise, slow English, sat behind his desk and asked us many questions. He doodled on a pad with a pencil, one end of which was blue and the other red. And we explained our project, which was to avoid politics, but to try to talk to and to understand Russian farmers, and working people, and market people, to see how they lived, and to try to tell our people about it, so that some kind of common understanding might be reached. He listened quietly and made angular marks with his pencil.

Then he said, "There have been other people who wanted to do this." And he named a number of Americans who have since written books about the Soviet Union. "They have sat in this office," he said, "and have spoken in one way, and then they have gone home and have written in another way. And if we seem to have a mild distrust, it is because of this."

"You must not think that we came either favorably or unfavorably," we replied. "We came to do a job of reporting, if it is possible to do it. We intend to set down and to photograph exactly what we see and hear, with no editorial comment. If there is something we don't like, or don't understand, we will set that down too. But we came for a story. If we can do the story we came for, we will do it. If we can't do it, we still have a story."

He nodded very slowly and thoughtfully. "This we could trust," he said. "But we are very tired of people who come here and are violently pro-Russian, and who go back to the United States and become violently anti-Russian. We have had considerable experience with that kind.

"This office, Voks," he continued, "has not very much power, nor very much influence. But we will do what we can to let you do the work that you want to do." Then he asked us many questions about America. He said, "Many of your newspapers are speaking of war with the Soviet Union. Do the American people want war with the Soviet Union?

"We don't think so," we answered. "We don't think any people want war, but we don't know."

He said, "Apparently the only voice speaking loudly in America against war is that of Henry Wallace. Can you tell me what his following is? Has he any real backing among the people?"

We said, "We don't know. But this we do know, that in one speaking tour Henry Wallace collected in paid admissions an unprecedented amount of money. We do know that this is the first time we have ever heard of that people paid to go to political meetings. And we do know that many people were turned away from these meetings, because there was no place for them to sit or stand. Whether this has any emphasis on the coming elections we have no idea. We only know that we, who have seen a little bit of war, do not favor it. And we feel that there are a great many people like us. We feel that if war is the only answer our leaders can give us, then we indeed live in a poverty-stricken time." And then we asked, "Do the Russian people, or any section of them, or any section of the Russian government, want war?"

At that he straightened up, put down his pencil, and said, "I can answer that categorically. Neither the Russian people, nor any section of them, nor any section of the Russian government, wants war. I can go further than that-the Russian people would do almost anything to avoid war. Of this I am certain." And he took up his pencil again and made round doodles on his pad.

"Let us speak of American writing," he said. "It seems to us that your novelists don't believe in anything any more. Is this true?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Your own most recent work seems to us cynical," he said.

"It is not cynical," I answered. "I believe one job of a writer is to set down his time as nearly as he can understand it. And that is what I am doing."

Then he asked questions about American writers, about Cald-Well, and Faulkner, and when would Hemingway have a new book.

And he asked what young writers were coming up, what new people. We explained that a few young writers were beginning to emerge, but that it was too soon to expect them to come out. Young men who should have been practicing their trade of writing had spent the last four years in the service. Such an experience was likely to shake them very deeply, and it might take some time for them to comb out their experience and their lives, and to settle down to writing.

He seemed a little surprised that writers in America do not get together, do not associate with one another very much. In the Soviet Union writers are very important people. Stalin has said that writers are the architects of the human soul.

We explained to him that writers in America have quite a different standing, that they are considered just below acrobats and just above seals. And in our opinion this is a very good thing. We believe that a writer, particularly a young writer, too much appreciated, is as likely to turn as heady as a motion-picture actress with good notices in the trade journals. And we believe that the rough-and-tumble critical life an American writer is subject to is very healthy for him in the long run.

It seems to us that one of the deepest divisions between the Russians and the Americans or British, is in their feeling toward their governments. The Russians are taught, and trained, and encouraged to believe that their government is good, that every part of it is good, and that their job is to carry it forward, to back it up in all ways. On the other hand, the deep emotional feeling among Americans and British is that all government is somehow dangerous, that there should be as little government as possible, that any increase in the power of government is bad, and that existing government must be watched constantly, watched and criticized to keep it sharp and on its toes. And later, on the farms, when we sat at table with farming men, and they asked how our government operated, we would try to explain that such was our fear of power invested in one man, or in one group of men, that our government was made up of a series of checks and balances, designed to keep power from falling into any one person's hands. We tried to explain that the people who made our government, and those who continue it, are so in fear of power that they would willingly cut off a good leader rather than permit a precedent of leadership. I do not think we were thoroughly understood in this, since the training of the people of the Soviet Union is that the leader is good and the leadership is good. There is no successful argument here, it is just the failure of two systems to communicate one with the other.

Mr. Karaganov's pad was covered with red and blue symbols. He said finally, "If you will write down a list of things you want to do and see, and send it through to me, I will see whether it can be arranged."

We liked Karaganov very much. He was a man who spoke straight and unconfusedly. Later we were to hear many flowery speeches and many generalities. But this we never heard from Karaganov. We never pretended to him that we were anything but what we were. We had a certain outlook, an American viewpoint, and possibly to him certain prejudices. Far from disliking us, or distrusting us because of this, he seemed to trust us more. During our stay in the Soviet Union he was of great help to us. We saw him a number of times, and his one request of us was, "Just tell the truth, just tell what you see. Don't change it, put it down as it is, and we will be very glad. For we distrust flattery." He seemed to us an honest and a good man.

The silent fight was still going on concerning our trip. At the present time one can go to the Soviet Union only as a guest of some organization, or to do some particular job. We were not sure whether the Writers' Union or Voks was sponsoring us, and we were not sure that they knew either. It may be that each was trying to move this dubious honor on to the other. One thing we were sure of, we did not want to become accredited as regular correspondents, with correspondents' credentials, for in that case we should have been under the sponsorship and control of the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office rules are very strict regarding correspondents, and if we once became their babies, we could not have left Moscow without special permission, which is rarely granted. We could not have traveled with any freedom, and our material would have been subject to Foreign Office censorship. These things we did not want, for we had already talked to the American and British correspondents in Moscow, and we had found that their reporting activities were more or less limited to the translation of Russian daily papers and magazines, and the transmission of their translations, and even then censorship quite often cut large pieces out of their cables. And some of the censorship was completely ridiculous. Once, one American correspondent, in describing the city of Moscow, said that the Kremlin is triangular in shape. He found this piece of information cut out of his copy. Indeed, there were no censorship rules on which one could depend, but the older correspondents, the ones who had been in Moscow a long time, knew approximately what they could and could not get through. That eternal battle between correspondents and censor goes on.

There is a famous story of a new ground mole, and it goes like this: A civil engineer invented a ditch-digging, or tunnel-digging, machine called a ground mole. Pictures of it and specifications appeared in a Soviet scientific magazine. This was picked up by an American magazine and was printed. A British newspaper, seeing the article, wired its correspondent in Moscow to get a story on the ground mole. Whereupon the British correspondent went to the Soviet scientific journal, dug out the material, and sent it to its paper, only to find the whole story killed by censorship. This happened a number of months ago, and, as far as I know, the story is still held up in censorship.