Buying the Night Flight (24 page)

That struck me as a monstrously ungrateful task, but I restrained myself -- and listened with considerable interest.

"We have now a new generation that has not experienced war and has not suffered the hardships of revolution," he said. "On the other hand, ideological subversion has increased. Some Western ideologists -- they are actually propagandists -- are trying to take youth away from the class struggle and from speaking of patriotism so they will not defend the country as they used to. Different sociologists of the West speak about the 'no-class society,' of societies divided only into good and bad. There is also the theory that capitalism and socialism are coming closer. That's why, in order to fight these ideas, we are trying to educate our young people in the spirit of 'Proletarian Internationalism.'"

Then he actually criticized Russian youth: "For example, the idea of free education -- they take it for granted," he said somberly. "They do not know how it was achieved, at the cost of how many lives and how much labor. The younger generation must know these things. Among the young there is very often the idea that all the exploits are over. In peacetime what can they do? Our task is to give young people the idea there is still heroism."

Just hints, but real hints? Youth was not as patriotic as it should be -- they were worried about it. Youth took too much for granted -- youth was not grateful. Youth was, even, disloyal? That was what I got out of that -- and that was an extraordinary revelation.

Despite everything, I was learning. I was learning how, in closed societies like this, you learn things. You learn, not by direct questions or comments, but by the inflections, by comparing innuendos with the types of innuendos the people used the last time. You learn what is real by pauses and coughs. You learn what is true through what people do not, will not, and above all psychologically cannot do or tell you.

Everywhere I went, the same journalistic and intellectual conundrum awaited me. You do not simply report on Russia: you can't. Here is a society where virtually everyone is living on a level of dishonesty, where interpretations are so different from ours as to be from a totally different world. How as a reporter do you deal with this? Do you look for any "window" or any slip and then grasp it -- or is
that
dishonest? Do you take them at their word -- that would
surely
be dishonest? You find yourself sifting every grain of talk and truth, trying to find out what is real, and in the end you wonder if you will ever know reality again, anywhere. Russia is a torment for an honest journalist, and the torment lasts long after one has closed the door on that isolated and strange land.

***

Henry, a fine photographer and friend, was also an anxious traveler. As we made our way across Russia that first month, he became more and more enraged by their idiosyncrasies and stupidities. "Tell me," he kept saying, sometimes almost desperate, "tell me that when we get to Moscow we'll go to a nightclub ... and have a good meal ... and dance...." I soothed him, as women have

always soothed men, and I told him we would -- I was actually far from sure.

It was a Friday and late when we got to Moscow and (one of the things people do
not
expect from Russia) no one met us. We could have escaped into that sea of mystery, but instead we went and checked into the vast Rossiya hotel. The rooms were nice. They awoke you with chimes playing "Moscow Nights." Promising.

Saturday morning we raced around getting things, arriving back at the hotel at noon for lunch. While waiting for Henry in my room, I felt a considerable sense of satisfaction: we had made it all the way across Russia; we had good material (considering the situation) and now it would be easy. Now we would find the nightclub. I could not have been
more wrong.

At noon, Henry came suddenly to my room with a look of stupefaction on his big, ruddy face. "They've stolen my cameras," he said as though he were sleepwalking. "I had them locked in the cupboard in my room and they've stolen my cameras." I told him it was impossible. We were in the workers' paradise where
there was no crime
-- was he perhaps imagining it? What would Hoffer say?

What would Saul say? I grinned, despite myself.

Although my Russian was not good at the time, I went immediately, not to the grisly floor woman who ruled over everything, but to the maids on the floor.

"Who was the person who went into Mr. Gill's room earlier?" I asked.

The women looked startled, disturbed. They began chattering like magpies.

"There was no one but him," one said.

"At what time?" I asked.

"He came in, oh, about ten o'clock," another offered.

After I had got a full description, and only then, I told them that this man standing with me was Mr. Gill. It took a while to convince them and all the while they grew more and more distressed. They had clearly let in a man who was not
"Gospodin
Gill." This information was to save us when we had to face down Russian officialdom.

In the manager's office downstairs we got a first look at officialdom -- and it was nasty. Henry, a big, square man, faced the woman manager, who was an almost equally big woman. She was unwilling to admit that the situation even existed. After all it was clearly "crime," and
there was no crime in the Soviet Union.

"Maybe, Mr. Gill," she said at one point, "you took the cameras yourself!"

I intervened just before Henry could take a swat at her. We then sat in her office, in a state of unmitigated confrontation that would make the Israelis and the Libyans look like allies, until five o'clock that evening. At that moment Henry scored what may have been the eventual breakthrough.

"I am not leaving this country," said Henry, who could be very mean, "I am not leaving until either I get my cameras back or I am paid for them." I seem to recall seeing her flinch at this suggestion of having Mr. Gill on Russia's hands in a state of perpetual care. Later I became convinced that this "promise" turned the tide.

From there we went to eat, if you can call what you do at mealtime in Russia eating. The Rossiya had an enormous -- but enormous -- dining room with all the charm and intimacy of a roller rink in The Bronx. It was exactly two blocks long. We entered at one end, exhausted from the rather full day, only -- naturally, for this is Russia -- to be placed at a table at the very other end of the hall and at the only table where people were sitting. Unwilling to argue any further, we sat down with the two others, who appeared to be workingmen, only to witness another extraordinary scene.

The man next to me was drunker than anyone I have ever seen (even in Chicago). He had his napkin in his shirt, like a baby, and his eyes were closed. I blinked as I realized he was asleep at the table, little lines of slaver trickling down both sides of his mouth.

Just then the other man took
his
napkin, spread it out on the table, and gathered everything into it, including the uneaten chicken, the bread and butter, the beer bottles, and the salt and pepper shakers. Carefully, never looking at us as we sat there spell bound (I was afraid finicky Henry might vomit), he tied it up like a bum's knapsack and staggered off through the front door. Just then he remembered his friend. So he staggered back in, jammed the friend in the ribs to wake him, and both staggered out.

That was the end of our first day in Moscow. The little episode also confirmed the impression that we were all too ready to accept that virtually the
only
pleasure people have here is drinking them selves into oblivion.

Henry was like a bulldog after the cameras. Daily he was atop the manager's desk, sitting there and staring her down for hours. They had detectives working, and it was clear that they were highly embarrassed not to find the cameras. Despite his threat Henry
was
going to leave a week later and we didn't really know what more to do. The afternoon of our departure he walked into my room with another stunned look on his face.

"They just called me," he said, "and I went down. She handed me five hundred rubles and said, 'Now, Mr. Gill, see what you can do with these.'"

We tried to think how -- legally -- we could get rid of the rubles for dollars since any such money transactions were totally forbidden. And I could not use them. Suddenly it dawned on me. I called our friend, Henry Bradsher, the bureau chief for Associated Press.

"Sure," Henry said, "bring them over. I can exchange them with no trouble."

At the airport they were waiting for Henry. "Don't you have some rubles, Mr. Gill?" the woman at the money exchange desk asked him, leading up to the wonderful moment when she would then tell him she could not exchange them.

"No, I don't," Henry said, "but I do have a check on the Chase Manhattan Bank." And then he strode forward ... out of Mother Russia.

***

Often, nights, after the interviews, after long days of fighting for every crumb and being constantly insulted by people who knew not the slightest thing about the outside world, I would retire gratefully to the foreign currency bars in the hotels, the only haven we had. These were places where foreign visitors like myself could buy drinks of all kinds, but only for foreign currency. It was a way to get the foreign exchange and to give all the foreigners a place to play -- together and alone. In Leningrad one night the Hotel Astoria bar -- in sharpest contrast to the tiresome order outside -- had the mood of a city besieged, where anything goes. It was the last night of the world, a kind of Soviet Babylon. People were falling out of chairs and sprawling across tables. Buxom and braless girls shook frenetically on the dance floor, and at the bar men pawed the women like un-tethered wild animals. Otherwise sedate and proper Europeans I had seen earlier in the hallways of the hotel were behaving as though they were in the Berlin bunker the night Hitler's Reich was falling.

We all got quite desperate.

Some nights this wildness would come over me the way a wildness suddenly overcomes my cat, Pasha, when his ears go back and his eyes get black and you just know he can't stop himself from biting you. One night in Kiev, after sitting and drinking with some African students, who were always in varying stages of desperation in the Soviet Union, I went out on the street and ran ... and ran ... and ran. I must have run for an hour, up and down hills, until finally I drained all the anger and frustration out of myself.

Another night, in Kiev the next trip in 1971, I met two young sculptors and their wives, all delightful people. One evening we got away from Nellie, my guide. They took me to an incredible party, one that could have come straight out of Dostoevsky, at the apartment of the famous Armenian movie director Sergei Paradjanov.

Here was a perfectly ordinary Soviet apartment: as boxlike and sterile as any other in the Soviet Union. But how they had transformed it! Paradjanov, a short stocky man with quizzical eyes, of tremendous personal assurance and a devilish beard, had made it into a lair of old Russia. I expected to see Rasputin any minute, stepping out, rolling his eyes, and licking his lips over some ripe peasant girl. In one room was a long, carved-wood banquet table, on which was spread every sort of fish, caviar, cold meat, and delicacy. Wine was served in hung animal skins. Icons, hand-woven cloths, and scabrous old crosses filled the room, while the young men and women who lolled insouciantly against the tables with their curious feline smiles seemed to be escapees into some strange netherworld. One young woman artist immediately showed me her sketches of Dante's
Inferno
and they seemed somehow appropriate.

The party, which started about 8:00 p.m., was just beginning to pick up in spirit and passion when I had to leave. Nellie and I were catching a plane to Odessa, the beautiful old French-designed city on the Black Sea, at the uncivilized hour of 1:00 a.m.

As I hurried to leave at about eleven (Nellie had not the slightest idea where I was) Paradjanov went about the apartment and plucked things off the walls: a hoary old cross and a beautiful piece of Ukranian handwork for me, an embroidered jacket which he asked me to deliver to the novelist John Updike, etc. ... He stuffed them all in a pillow slip and I went running out with all of this, like a furtive robber with a pack of treasures.

***

There
were
places to "have fun" ... if you knew someone. Another night in a central Russian city, after dining with a high-level party official, I agreed to go dancing. We walked into a nondescript building with a public restaurant in the front, crossed through the dining room, and came into another building in back. He flashed his party card at the door and we entered a type of nightclub that was about as common in the Soviet Union as a stock exchange.

"Can anyone come here?" I asked as we sat down at a table in a discreetly lit room with candles and a large dance floor.

"Why, yes, of course," he said as he ordered some Scotch, which you would never find in a Russian restaurant. A floor show (!) came on after midnight; girls in skimpy Western nightclub costumes began dancing to the theme from
Dr. Zhivago
(!), and couples began doing a clumsy Russian version of the twist without anyone's coming over and telling them it was immoral.

At the end of the evening, slightly tipsy, I turned to my escort and whispered again,
"Who
can come here?"