Saul Steinberg

by Deirdre Bair

  For the next two days they wandered wherever the urge took Steinberg, from agricultural exhibitions to the university to hear local poets and see contemporary paintings. They went to a nearby village, Lavra, famed for its museum of Ukrainian folk art and its fine collection of prerevolutionary painting. The town was also known for its local handicrafts market, and Steinberg bought many for himself and Hedda. Back in Kiev, he was touched by a huge monument to an ordinary gardener, which moved Victor enough to look the other way while Steinberg photographed the city streets. Despite the freedom, Steinberg was certain they were being followed and made the note “Private Detective? Impossible.” He shrugged it off and went shopping, adding vodka and more Russian books on architecture and photography to the duffel bag, which had mysteriously shown up.

  That night he took the overnight train to Odessa, sleeping fully dressed and sitting up. It seemed that the further he got from Moscow, the closer he was able to get to the people and the local culture. The man across from him was an artillery colonel who asked Steinberg if he was a Communist. He said no and the man turned away, even though Steinberg kept trying to engage him in conversation. He showed his camera, offered a ballpoint pen, pointed to a book on Russian art he was reading. The colonel’s only response was “Dollar bills?” Steinberg wisely said that he had none to sell and the man replied “America nyet.” That ended his conversation with “Colonel Big Hands,” as he dubbed the man. Fat girls with garish makeup came through with tea trolleys that also held vodka, and they were more eager to chat than the colonel. Several tried to explain the virtues of “the Marxist equation,” and when they left, Steinberg felt “effusion, peace, friendship.”

  His hotel room in Odessa overlooked the frozen harbor and was furnished in “old fashioned, fancy” style with an enormous bathroom. In Odessa he had a “clever guide” who took him to the former home of a Polish count that was now a museum of Russian art. At the market he bought condiments (more weight for the duffel bag) and then asked the guide to take him to the countryside. He saw houses made of mud and also the local sanatorium, a building so grim that he drew it directly in his datebook. He did not like the food in Odessa and “ate little to sorrow of waitress.” Once again he had to sit through Don Quixote, this time watching “heavy girls, bellies.” Halfway through the shoddy stage set “blundered” but the well-trained audience sat silently as the stage crew tried to set it right, not knowing who might be watching if they booed or hissed.

  The next day Steinberg went to the local airport, where bad weather rerouted his plane to Sukhumi, a small town in the midst of a bog of mud. There were no taxis, so he found someone to load his luggage onto a small crowded bus for the long ride into the town. When he checked into his hotel, there was great agitation in the lobby, which may have been connected to his unexpected arrival but was never explained, not even after his interpreter came, a “woman biologist who works with monkeys.” He had already had more than enough of Sukhumi, so he made the guide take him straight back to the station, where he caught the overnight train to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. He almost missed it because he could not manage his luggage without a porter. He found a “poor old man” to carry his bags into a gloomy compartment, which he shared with a silent, sleeping army man.

  His guide in Tbilisi was a young boy, a “beginner” who was only too happy to take Steinberg wherever he wanted to go. Finally he was able to see what he had come to see, an old town with “Turkish verandas on art nouveau or neoclassical houses, a narrow street bordered with trees, beautiful small piazzas.” There was a funicular that took him to the top of a mountain, where he saw a “splendid” cathedral, a castle, and a bustling university. There were “more shops, restaurants, and sweets than anywhere,” and he bought accordingly. He loved the food, which had smells and flavors that reminded him of Bucharest—lamb shashlik, olives, cheeses, and delicious local white wine—and he was entranced by the market’s “rich variety, old smells.” Unfortunately, the guide became a “bore, embarrassed, timid,” but Steinberg knew what he wanted to see and made the reluctant fellow take him to the old capital of Mtskheta.

  Some of the holiest places in the country were there, all of them with architectural significance. He saw the Cathedral of Sveti-Tskhoveli, built between 1010 and 1029 on the spot where, legend had it, Christ’s burial robe had been brought by a Jew who accidentally let it touch the ground. When a tree sprang up on the spot and could not be cut down with the sharpest ax, the place became one of the country’s holiest sites. Inside the cathedral, Steinberg studied everything so intently that an old woman who had helped to restore the exquisite old murals and icons hovered over him, fearing that he was a vandal, until the guide told her that he was a trained architect. They went on to the Ivari Monastery, filled with religious paintings and iconography, and afterward to the sixth-century Jvari Cathedral, generally considered the prototype for Georgian ecclesiastical architecture. Steinberg made a special effort to find and buy as many books as he could about the local architecture, for even though he had never practiced the profession for which he was trained, it held lifelong fascination.

  That afternoon, despite being “embarrassed” or perhaps even frightened by the liberties Steinberg took in walking anywhere he wanted in Mtskheta, the “bore” of a guide gave up trying to stop him from taking photographs, especially of people who wore the old-fashioned peasant dress and headgear. He ate shashlik at every lunch and dinner in Tbilisi, where his evening entertainment was the opera. This time it was “Turks, slave girls, nuns, monastery on fire, fights, murders, flags, scimitars, rugs, tent, castle, and the hairdo of the orchestra conductor.” It was so bad that he spent his time studying and sketching the opera house architecture onto his program, enjoying “style à la Caucasus.”

  The next morning he was at the airport for a 7 a.m. flight to Kharkov that made a stopover in Vladivostok. His seatmate was a naval officer who entertained him with his memories of wartime British and American airplanes, conversing through the Armenian cabin attendant, who spoke English. Steinberg was glad for the diversion, because the flight took the entire day. In Kharkov, his guide was another “young amateur,” who took him for a quick dinner and then on to the theater for a play distinguished only by “jumping, fighting.” He was “picked up by girl in intermission” and left early. The next morning, in a different-colored ink, he recorded a cryptic conversation in his diary wherein someone asks when the plane leaves and someone else responds “At five.”

  The next day he flew from Kharkov to Moscow, where his first order of business was to go to the American embassy to see about extending his visa. The plane arrived too late in the day to start the process, so he called one of the correspondents he had met earlier and joined him for a single drink. He went to bed early to read The Brothers Karamazov, and was delighted to read in the introduction that Dostoevsky’s father had been assassinated during a peasant revolt. Early the next morning he began the visa extension process, saying that he needed to stay longer because he had not seen enough of the country’s variety. He wanted to go to Asiatic Russia, particularly to Samarkand, a city that had long intrigued him because of its history as an ancient crossroads between East and West.

  Since he was a schoolboy he had been interested in how one civilization superimposed itself on another, and especially in how so many invading cultures had melded Romania into the modern state in which he had grown up. He wanted to compare traces of the conquest of the Ottoman Empire with what he had experienced in Romania, and because what he had seen of modern Russia thus far was primarily Slavic, he wanted to see the oriental countries that clustered on the southern and eastern borders.

  Steinberg was originally scheduled to spend his last week in Moscow and fly home from there on March 14, but instead of making preparations to leave, he was determined to see as much as he could of ordinary daily life while waiting to hear about his visa. To his surprise, it was issued the day after he submitted the application, so fast that he almost
missed it. He was directed to remain in Moscow until March 16, after which he had until March 22 to go wherever he wanted in Uzbekistan, where Samarkand was located. He set out with a vengeance to capture the life and spirit of Moscow.

  He was now allowed to move about the city without a full-time guide, so the first thing he did was to learn his way around the subway system, spending the better part of his first day joy-riding from station to station and making spontaneous stops to go out onto the streets and see what different neighborhoods looked like. He caught a bad cold in the process but pressed on, taking notes and making sketches. He bought more old books from a dealer one of his American contacts put him in touch with, and the old man told him where to go quietly and discreetly to see prerevolutionary paintings by Russian artists. He was most taken with the portraits but thought they and everything else were merely “good,” curiously dated, and severely limited by lack of contact with outside influences.

  He walked repeatedly through Red Square, even though he remained overwhelmed by “Russian scale,” because that was where he could see the greatest variety of people. When he drew it, he conveyed a slice of Russian life with deft subtlety, leaving vast stretches of empty white space at the center of the page with a fly speck here and there, meant to be ordinary people who clung to the edges of the mammoth plaza. In the background he drew a hodgepodge of onion-domed church architecture competing with brutalist Communist buildings for domination of the skyline.

  Steinberg was so engaged by the historical museums holding treasures that dated from the eighteenth-century reigns of the two empresses, Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, that he returned to them several times to study the “Napoleonic uniforms, poetic peasant art, wood relief ornaments on houses (lion & siren),” and particularly the gates of an old monastery. He got to see ordinary daily life when he walked alone on the foggy streets and took photographs and made sketches. On one of his subway forays, he found an unnamed “beautiful old street in dark popular neighborhood,” but Gorky Street (which his guides told him he was supposed to praise) was “depressing, out of scale.” The little side streets provided better material. He noticed the paucity of goods in food shop windows and described the meager displays as having “dignity.” He used a different-colored pencil in his diary to note how Russians pronounced English words: “They have shit (for sheep); burned (for buried). I am Joe (Jew).”

  On his earlier stay in Moscow, he had been such a charming raconteur that all the bored American correspondents clamored for his company. On his return, he learned quickly which invitations to avoid, particularly after a disastrous drunken dinner with “a mean vulgar couple” who engaged in “public screaming.” News of his wartime service with the OSS had gotten around, and he thought that might be the reason for some of his invitations. He enjoyed the company of Jack Raymond of the New York Times, who taught him how to navigate various Russian bureaucratic intrigues and who introduced him to the young historian Priscilla Johnson, whom he liked and whose knowledge of Russian political history impressed him. Steinberg accepted invitations to parties at the British and Danish embassies because it would have been impolite to refuse, and he went to lunch with the French, Canadian, and Swedish ambassadors, who were eager to hear about what he had seen and what he had learned about Russia.

  At a time when it was not prudent for Russian artists and intellectuals to fraternize with Americans, Ambassador Bohlen quietly arranged for Steinberg to meet some of the leading dissidents. On a frigid Monday afternoon when all the stores and museums were closed, Steinberg stood outside his hotel and waited for a car bearing the ambassador and his wife to take him to an apartment where a half-dozen people had gathered surreptitiously. There he saw “sensitive and brutal faces” with one belonging to the dissident writer Vladimir Maximov, the only name he confided to his diary. He was careful to describe the others with coded phrases: an architect who traveled to Egypt, the architect of a wooden arch built in 1942, another architect who spoke English, and a painter. His interpreter, “Natasha,” was sympathetic to Americans, and she translated rapidly and fluently. He was not surprised to learn of the difficulties these people endured to practice their professions, for he had been hearing much the same from his sister for many years. Exchanging stories gave Steinberg and the Russians much in common and the conversation continued until well after midnight. As he was leaving, they presented him with copies of the satirical magazine Krokodil, which he added to the overloaded duffel bag.

  The next day Ambassador Bohlen arranged for Steinberg to meet the opposites of the dissidents, the government officials who oversaw culture and the arts. Among them were the minister of culture, the director of the Moscow Puppet Theater, and the manager of the Bolshoi Ballet. Bohlen also arranged an interview with the editor of the official Soviet journal for cultural relations, G. A. Zhukov of Voks, and it became one of the more bizarre interviews Steinberg ever gave. He was ushered into “an enormous Empire room, longest table, piano, easel,” where he faced a “mute specialist, ashen, writing all the time, taking notes.” Zhukov silently pushed a list of questions written in English across the table for Steinberg to read, after which his translator turned what he said into acceptable propagandistic answers, whether he actually gave them or not.

  His evening entertainments were varied: Sol Hurok invited him to the Moiseyevich troupe of folk dancers, and unnamed diplomats took him to the theater and the opera. He left La Traviata after the second act: “Girl from Swedish embassy,” he wrote in his diary.

  On March 15, before his visa could be officially extended, Steinberg had the required conference with an Intourist representative. The man could not understand why he wanted to go to Samarkand and kept repeating, “There are no toilets there.” Steinberg insisted that he knew what he was doing, and the next day he was at the airport for the 4:30 a.m flight to Tashkent via a long stopover in Aktyubinsk, where an interpreter who was “in a panic” for reasons he never explained was waiting. He made Steinberg sit in an airport shed at one of the longest tables he had ever seen, plunked down several little plates, and commanded that he eat his breakfast, which Steinberg dutifully did. Afterward the fussy little man loaded him onto a sledge pulled by a donkey and drove him into the town for a quick tour.

  He arrived in Tashkent in the early evening and found the weather much warmer than anywhere else he had been. He had another “scared” interpreter, but the hotel was pleasant enough. He knew what the Intourist interviewer had meant about plumbing when he saw the “horrible toilet in the corridor.” When he stood on the balcony outside his room and looked down at the street, he realized that the town had no plumbing or sanitation except for a steep gutter that divided the sidewalk from the road and ran deep with sludge and effluvium.

  He took an evening walk and found a mob in front of the town’s only movie theater. A man was beating a woman who held a crippled baby; another man, whose legs had been amputated at the knee, walked on two sticks and begged. A Black Maria police wagon was leaving as he arrived, sent on its way by “screams, whistles, loud speaker, moaning.” That night he had a nightmare that his head had been shot so repeatedly that it flew off his shoulders. Still, all of this was exactly what he had come for, and he sprang out of bed the next morning, eager to meet his guides and get under way.

  There were two of them, an unnamed guide and “Mary, a girl from Omsk,” who “together try hard.” He told them what he wanted to see and they more or less tagged along, first to the bazaar, the old town, and the other parts of the town that were, in his words, the “slumming” sections. He hoped to see camels but there were none, so he shopped and bought two of his favorite things in the market, a cap in the local style and all the primitive old postcards that were for sale. For lunch he ate a meal reminiscent of his Romanian childhood: green onion, radishes, sour cream, and thick slices of black bread. He was leaving for Samarkand the next morning, but his most lasting memory of Tashkent was its smells and the “hotel toilet incredible.”

&nb
sp; In Samarkand it was much the same. His interpreter was a distinguished middle-aged gentleman who said he was a former professor of history and “teacher of English.” Steinberg found his attempts to be erudite comic, but he enjoyed the man’s company and never corrected him. He was amused when the guide insisted they had to make a courtesy call at the local university and his hosts, as a sign of respect, offered to let him use the ladies’ toilet. The rest of his days passed in a blur as the guide took him to towns and villages where he saw cemeteries, parks, bazaars, cathedrals, churches, mosques, and ruins. In bazaars he bought more souvenir caps and watched men hammering teapots out of sheets of copper. Everywhere he went, he was frightened by people running up and shouting in his face “Harry Manchu.” Steinberg had no idea what they wanted until his interpreter found the words to tell him they were asking “whether [Averell] Harriman was Jewish,” a subject of general interest since the war, when Harriman had been the American ambassador.

  Steinberg was intrigued by the local interest in all things Jewish. He stole the telephone directory, convinced that he had taken a great risk by stealing sacred state property. After he found the name Goldberg, the only Jewish one among the hundred or so citizens lucky enough to possess a phone, Steinberg told his guide that he was Jewish and wanted to see the Jewish quarter, where he learned a new expression for the Yiddish word goy (gentile): to the Jews of Samarkand, they were all “Uzbek.”