Travels with Myself and Another (34 page)

The entrance hall was as wide as the wooden interior stairs, and covered in worn soiled linoleum. I rang the doorbell on the ground floor. The door was opened on a chain. She peered out, undid the chain and was revealed as small, square, old, with thin grey hair untidily pinned up, a loose Mother Hubbard type garment, and an expression of wondering surprise. She let me into her hallway, not large enough for two people to stand side by side, and said, smiling,
“Marta.
They said you were not coming today.” Who, “they”? Tomtoms do not beat only in Africa. It is logical that rumour, accurate and inaccurate, must be the means of communication where you can never find out any facts for sure. Imagine a capital city
without a telephone directory!
Doesn’t that beat all in mad secretiveness?

A friend was with her; I think Mrs M. was rarely alone, except to sleep. The friend was in her mid sixties I guessed, tall, still handsome, with natural poise, presence, and fluent English. She wore the sort of faded cotton dress that black cleaning women wear to work in the U.S. I had brought some of my freight in a duty-free plastic bag, having planned to unload bit by bit every day to avoid suspicion, those unseen watching eyes. The goodies gave us a topic of conversation. Mrs M. handed over several pairs of stockings to her friend who was radiant as if receiving pearls not Peter Jones lower-grade hosiery. Mrs M. said in her soft voice that she had never had any scent, which made me feel tearful. I put some Arpège on her wrists. “It is
better
than French,” she said. “It is French,” I said, and wished I could learn to keep my mouth shut. Mrs M. was so delighted by the Menuhin records that she couldn’t speak; she just held them.

It was late. Mrs M. was tired and I had to cope with the problem of getting back to that charming caravanserai on the road to Minsk. Mrs M.’s friend helped me to find a taxi. This driver had never heard of my distant hotel and was not enthusiastic about heading for Minsk if in fact he knew where Minsk was. Money works wonders in the Soviet Union as elsewhere, perhaps more than elsewhere. It took two hours to return to my nasty little room. I would have been overjoyed to leave Moscow on the next plane.

In order to flummox the KGB, I scattered basic notes on the journey inside my engagement diary and wrote in such a scrawl that I can scarcely read them. But I decipher this comment on the first day: “the
happy
un-helpfulness.” That was the immediate and enduring impression: the people appointed by the government to assist foreign travellers took positive satisfaction in saying
Nyet.
Po-faced and rigid, they did their best to make everything as maddening as the law decreed.

I was wretched enough to be in Russia at all but to be a commuter was past bearing. I had to get a room inside Moscow and turned to the airport saviour, having no right to turn to him but knowing no one else and desperate. He wangled a room in the Hotel Ukraina. By ten o’clock I had moved to my new luxury quarters; the switchboard of the Hotel Ukraina denied to the last day that I was in residence because officially I must still be in the pine woods, as assigned.

The Hotel Ukraina is high Stalin-Gothic. If I hadn’t been dripping sweat, close to heatstroke, and unceasingly enraged by the sheer stupidity of life in the capital of the Soviet Union, I would have found it funny. Alas, I took an almost total leave of absence from laughter for seven days. This hotel, Moscow four star, has three cathedral spires with a red star in lights on the highest spire. The front is covered with an acne of stone ornamentation. It is a skyscraper, twenty-nine floors high, one thousand rooms, but there are only four lifts, two to each side in the entrance lobby, and of these only one was working, hand operated and always by a blonde whose posture and face were the very picture of hate-filled bitterness. You queued to get to your room. People fought like tigers for a place in the lift. Then were stuck together in the stifling heat of the airless box, as it slowly rose. After waiting half an hour, I would willingly have climbed to my room but there were no stairs.

On one’s room floor, where the corridors met, sat the floor wardress, like the Medusa. Her job was to give you your key and collect it when you left the floor. This is convenient for searching rooms. I wondered if the police, alerted by that grim woman, broke in on illicit couples. Or whether the grim woman nipped love in the bud before a couple could reach a room. In fact, I never saw any travellers who looked cheerful enough for a sexual bash. They all looked as if they too were counting the days, yearning for release from coaches and lectures by Intourist guides.

My room, aside from being as hot as everywhere else, was merely dingy with grey plush, in want of a good clean. The window was opposite one of the foreigners’ ghettos where my new American friend and his wife lived. This ghetto was a row of yellow brick apartment houses, with a guardhouse and soldiers at the gate into the compound and barbed wire strung about. Short of shooting them, there could be no clearer warning to Russians to keep away from foreigners. The main streets in Moscow can only have been built for six tanks in line abreast. You could cross through long tunnels at specified points or run like hell; the traffic was scant but always practising for the Monte Carlo Rally. There may be many crooked old cobbled streets of small wood houses and assorted nooks and crannies of picturesque charm. I saw only the tourist high points and the outskirts and, believe me, it’s Depression City.

Since my residence problem was settled my remaining problem was hunger, having eaten nothing after plastic lunch on the plane the day before. Dinner was lost due to finding Mrs M., breakfast was lost due to telephoning to escape from the pine woods. Moscow is not a town where you can stroll to a Hamburger Heaven or a Wimpey’s or a sandwich shop or a drugstore and get a quick snack; nothing of the sort exists. The only food recommended by everyone and available on the street is ice cream but owing to the heat ice cream had disappeared.
Nyet.

This was July the fourth and on July the fourth American Embassies give receptions and my new friends had offered to take me along so all I had to do was survive another hour or so and decide which unsuitable winter piece of give-away clothing I would wear. I raced across the tremendous street and argued past the ghetto guards. The entrance to these superior apartments looked like a scruffy service entrance anywhere else. In marked contrast, my new friends, tall man tiny wife, looked lovely and elegant, as did their American car, now transformed into a symbol of untold riches. After less than twenty-four Moscow hours, my standards of value were somersaulting.

I don’t own a car because I don’t need one. I regard the getting and keeping (and the upkeeping) of possessions as a waste of life. No one can be wholly free but one can be freer, and the easiest trap to open is the possessions trap. I have the things I require and neither covet nor collect from choice. Or rather I only covet airfares and would not say no to a season pass on all airlines. Now I saw that fewer and simpler needs is an idea that comes from living in an Affluent Society, up to its ears if not half-drowned in excess things.

Plunged into the Squalor Society, I thought it just dandy that people in our part of the world earn enough to shop like lunatics for any things they fancy. And dandy too that there was so much nonsense to buy, so much low-price ornamentation, plenty of pleasing junk. The jolly Spaniard who favours me with six hours a week of her valuable time to clean my flat had been consulting me lately about silver-gilt candlesticks. I thought she had lost her marbles; why on earth did she want silver-gilt candlesticks? How times change. I was delighted that she could treat herself to silver-gilt candlesticks and feed and clothe and spoil two schoolchildren and buy a long evening dress for a wedding, on her wages and the government disability pension of her husband.

These profound thoughts occupied me until we reached the American Embassy Residence, a rather French medium-sized mansion built in 1914 by a Moscow merchant. It was the first pretty building I had seen. Edward parked the car. At once a man in uniform began to bark and bawl.

“What’s that about?” I asked, bristling at the tone.

“He wants me to park somewhere else.” Edward twisted the wheel to move. We were all sweating gently in the front seat.

“Why?”

“He doesn’t have to have a reason why.”

I would get an ulcer in this country in a week and not only in spring and autumn either.

The house was sparsely and nicely furnished, cool pale colours, dark polished wood, an oasis of civilization. I intended to throw myself on the mercy of the ambassadress, Mrs Beam. Mrs Beam didn’t give me time to apologize for gate-crashing before she spoke of our meeting twelve years ago in Warsaw as if it had been yesterday. The altogether en-viable courteous diplomatic memory. This emboldened me to describe my gnawing hunger. Mrs Beam led me to the garden where a crowd stood under trees, holding glasses and making polite party sounds.

The sun was high and hot overhead at noon, not the best time for drinking but the Kremlin protocol people had stated that, on this one day in the whole year, no single Russian guest would be able to come at the scheduled hour in the late afternoon. Hence the inconvenient noon hour. If foreigners are prone to ulcers, obviously they cannot live in Moscow. Mrs Beam stationed me by a door into the house, saying that all the trays had to pass this way. There I made a hearty lunch off canapés and little sausages and nuts, not forgetting the drink. When I felt restored, I looked around to see what I could see.

The guests were chiefly Russians since there are few Americans in Moscow. Men in uniform, men in lamentable suits, a couple of Orthodox priests strolling by themselves. Apart in a summer-house, four diminutive men in skull caps stood silently in a row. I didn’t know about anybody else here but I knew about them, an oppressed minority, and bounced over, shook hands all round and told them that Israel was a great country, one of the finest in the world. They recoiled as they spoke no English and I was twice their size, a towering blonde, smiling and chattering. I got the impression that I was spreading dismay and alarm instead of goodwill so thought I might as well eat some more but came across Mr Beam and asked who was the man with a laughing lively face and an ill-fitting electric blue suit. He looked different from other people; he didn’t look careful. Rostropovich. Oh, good, then I’ll go and congratulate him on helping Solzhenitsyn. Mr Beam felt that it would be better to wait for a less public occasion.

Back to the hotel to get into nice hot jeans and collect the day’s offerings for Mrs M. I had heard that everyone connected with foreign tourists was obliged to report to the KGB and taxi drivers, whose beat was the tourist hotels, were regular police informers. It is not my imagination that you feel you are living inside a spy thriller in Moscow; it is only that I am used to reading not living this atmosphere and it fussed me badly while resident foreigners’ nerves are better adjusted. With a big bottle of airport whisky, the manila envelope of clippings and orange marmalade, I walked in the Saharan sun searching for a safe non-reporting taxi. Again the driver could not find Mrs M.’s street in the outskirts far beyond the University. By day her building looked worse, a scabby cement box, five or six storeys high, one in a huge congeries of identical cement boxes, a recent housing development already in a marked state of disintegration. Not a tree, not a flower, scrub grass and wasteland.

I rang the doorbell twice; that was the rule. One ring meant a stranger, she opened the door on the chain while guests inside got ready to leave through the windows. By day the flat looked worse too. A door in the microscopic hall led into a room never entered but glimpsed as windowless and repellent, the bathroom. Mrs M. had written me that having a bathroom made her “almost happy.” The kitchen-sitting room was about eight feet wide by twelve feet long, furnished with an old cooker and fridge, a small sink, a kitchen cabinet, a high-backed carved dark wood bench, a round table and metal folding chairs. The bedroom was also twelve feet long but only wide enough for a less than single bed and small bedside table. Bookshelves were nailed high on the wall in a corner, a chest of drawers and a small round table filled the end by the window.

Except for the cooker and round table in the kitchen, every surface was covered with a flotsam of books, papers, objects, clothes, food, and to top it all there were glass jars of dead dry colourless flowers. Mrs M. owned this cheerless dwelling, for you can buy property in the Soviet Union, just like us capitalists. It was her first privacy, her first separate home in thirty years. Not that she ever had an assured home since the Revolution; her life with her husband was happily pillar to post until it became tragic pillar to post.

Outside in gay mad Moscow, the temperature wavered between ninety and ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit; inside Mrs M.’s flat it was much hotter.

There were always visitors, whatever the hour. Sometimes they stayed all day, sometimes for a short call like three hours. The talk never slackened. Mrs M. chain-smoked and coughed. The long choking cough of emphysema. You felt that shreds of lung were going to be coughed up. Then she lit another cigarette. She is much loved. The telephone rang constantly, brief chats, everyone making sure she was all right. No names were spoken over the phone, recognition by voice. The same people see each other, year in and year out. Friendship cells, the small human answer to the huge hostile bureaucracy of the state.

Mrs M.’s friends were of course the intelligentsia, scientists, writers, translators, professors. Manners maketh man, not clothes; the men dressed in rough work clothes, the women not much better. In the Soviet Union power brings wealth, not like us where wealth brings power. Nobody here was a Party member, none had any power. By our standards they were painfully poor except in spirit. They were not “activists,” they were liberals, which simply meant they thought for themselves but that is not tolerated by the Kremlin. What seemed to me the mildest criticism, jokes, dissenting views, are unsafe except in a trusted circle.