“Nyet deutsch,” I said, “American.”
He beamed, I mean just beamed. “Ally!” he said. It was his only English word. He pulled out a wallet with what I guess were commendations and an honorable discharge. “Amerikanskii ally!” he said and slapped my shoulder. Eight-ounce glasses of brandy must be bought for Ivor and me.
I toasted him with my only Russian word—“Tovarishch!” He brought forth a tiny grandson and had him shake hands with me.
“Now the little one can say he met an American,” Ivor more or less explained. I toasted the big guy again. He pledged a long toast in return, and, as I understood Ivor’s translation, we’d drunk to the hope that America and Russia would be allies again in a war against China.
I bought more cognac. Ivor bought beer. The big fellow bought even more cognac.
When the boat docked Ivor and I went to a beer hall, a basement where they lined up half-liter mugs and squirted them full with a rubber hose from four feet away. Everyone grabbed half a dozen mugs at a time and drank one after the other while standing at long wooden tables. There was no communication problem now. We discussed women (“Ah, beautiful. Oh, much trouble”), international politics (“Iraq—poo. Iran—poo”), the relative merits of socialism versus a free-market system (“Socialism—enough responsible, nyet fun. Captialism—nyet enough responsible, plenty fun”), and, I think, literature (“And Quiet Flows the Don—poo, too long”). Then we went to another bar on top of a Russian tourist hotel and had even more to drink. I didn’t want to let my side down. And there were Ivor’s father’s feelings to be considered.
Ivor and I embraced, and I staggered back to my stinking cabin to pass out. The woman with her brains between her teeth was standing at the top of the gangplank. “I hope you’re not one of those people who’s going to see the Soviet Union through the bottom of a vodka glass,” she said.
THE ENEMY AMONG US
Of course, we had plenty of Russians aboard the boat too. There were five of the advertised experts. I’ll change their names in case some reconstructed quote or poetic exaggeration of mine is misconstrued to mean that one of these Soviets might be “turned” by the CIA. No one deserves to be pestered by surreptitious Yalies who couldn’t get into law school.
Two of the experts were really journalists. Natalia was a pleasant blond woman of about forty. She didn’t have much to say. Nikolai was a sturdy guy in his mid-thirties, completely western in dress and manner. He had lived as a foreign correspondent in Switzerland and Austria for seven years, wore a bush jacket like any other foreign correspondent, and was as bluff and hard-drinking as any newspaper man. I gathered this wasn’t much of an assignment. Nikolai took no notes at the peace confabs, and Natalia took only a few.
A third expert, Orlonsky, was a sinister-looking type with a half-Russian, half-Tartar face and slitlike eyes. He turned out to be a bored economist from the Soviet Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies who was along to brush up on his English in preparation for some academic conference he was going to visit in San Francisco. The Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies is supposed to have subscribed to the Village Voice for six years in an attempt to find out about life in America’s rural areas. But Orlonsky seemed to be a look-alive fellow. He wanted to talk about America’s marvelous demand-side goods-distribution system and did our Reagan administration economic institutes have screws loose or what? Also, where did our automobile industry go? But the Americans wanted to talk about peace and Soviet-American relations.
Two more official-expert types were Dr. Bullshovich from the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of World Economy and International Relations and Professor Guvov from the department of philosophy and sociology at Moscow U. Dr. Bullshovich was a lean, dry character with a Jesuitical wit that was lost on his audience. Between formal peace activities he hid somewhere. Guvov was a doctrinaire buffoon who looked like a Hereford cow and was a big favorite with the leftists. “He is not a professor,” one of the crew members told me later. “He is, you would call it, instructor. He should be teaching military schools.”
Besides the experts there were thirty or more officers, sailors, waitresses, stewards, and cruise personnel. Some of the higher-ranking crew members spoke English but usually didn’t let on. They preferred to stare blankly when the Americans began to complain. And the Americans did complain, the leftists worst of all. Between praise of the Soviet Union it was “It’s too noisy, too rough, too breezy. The chair cushions are too hard. And what’s that smell? This food is awful. Too greasy. Can’t I order something else? I did order something else. Didn’t someone say I could order something else? I’m sure I can order something else if I want to, and, young lady, the laundry lost one of my husband’s socks. They’re expensive socks and one of them is lost.”
Translating the complaints, or pretending to, were a half-dozen Intourist guides. They began to have a haunted look before we were two days out of port.
VERY EARLY WEDNESDAY
MORNING, JULY 21
When I came to, after the Ivor expedition, I stumbled into the ship’s bar. We’d cast off while I was asleep, and motion of the boat combined with motion of my gullet. I couldn’t have looked well. Nikolai was sitting on a stool next to one of the Intourist guides, a dark, serious type named Sonya. I gripped the bar with both hands and tried to decide which of the impossible Russian soft drinks would be easiest to vomit. “You need vodka,” said Nikolai, motioning to the barmaid. I drank the awful thing. “Now,” said Nikolai, “how did you get that President Reagan?”
“I voted for him,” I said. “How did you get Brezhnev?”
Nikolai began to laugh. “I do not have this great responsibility.”
“How are you liking the Soviet Union?” asked Sonya.
“I’m not,” I said.
She was worried. “No? What is the matter?”
“Too many Americans.”
Sonya kept a look of strict neutrality.
“I have not met many Americans,” said Nikolai. “They are all like this, no?” He made a gesture that encompassed the boat, winked, and ordered me another vodka.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Perhaps they are just old, a bit,” said Sonya with the air of someone making an obviously fallacious argument. “But,” she brightened, “they are for peace.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “They are progressive. They are highly progressive. They are such great progressives I think I have almost all of them talked into defecting.”
“No, no, no, no, no,” said Nikolai.
MUCH LATER WEDNESDAY
MORNING, JULY 21
We docked on a scruffy island somewhere up near Volgadonsk. One of the U.S. peace experts, a pacifist from the American Friends Service Committee, got up a volleyball game against the crew. “Now let’s play and let’s play hard,” he told the American team. “But don’t forget we’re playing for fun.” The Russians trounced them.
That night the Russians took me out onto the darkened fantail, where they had dozens of bottles of beer, cheese, bread, and a huge salted fish.
Sonya was concerned about my Republicanism. “You are not for peace?” she asked.
“I during Vietnam War struggle for peace very much [talk with the Russians for a while and you fall into it too], rioting for peace, fighting police for peace, tear-gassed for peace,” I said. “I am tired of peace. Too dangerous.”
Orlonsky began to laugh and then shook his head. “Vietnam—too bad.”
“Land war in Asia,” I said, “very bad. And some countries do not learn from an example.” All of them laughed.
“And in Middle East,” said Sonya, mirthfully pointing a finger at me, “some people’s allies do not learn also.”
“War is very bad,” said Nikolai. “Maybe U.S. and Soviet Union go to war over Lebanon—ha, ha!” This seemed to be a hilarious idea. The Russians all but fell out of their chairs.
“With all of Middle East how do you pick only ally without oil?” said Orlonsky.
“You wish to make trade?” said Nikolai.
“Also, in deal, you can have South Africa,” I said.
“We will tell Reagan you are a progressive,” said Orlonsky.
“P. Cheh. [P.J.] was making faces at the Pravda news today. I do not think he is a progressive,” said Sonya.
“Oh, he is a progressive,” said Nikolai. “You remember, Sonya, he has almost all Americans on ship ready to defect.”
Marya made a strangled noise in the back of her throat. Sonya turned very sober. “Progressives,” she sighed. “Everything must be made perfect for them.”
THURSDAY, JULY 22
Our first scheduled conference took place while we sailed through the remarkably scum-filled Tsimlyansky Reservoir. The conference coordinator was a short, broad, overvigorous American woman in her sixties. Let’s call her Mrs. Pigeon, so she won’t sue, and also because too much truth doesn’t go with travel writing. Mrs. Pigeon was an authority on the education of children, and, in fact, had the personality of a teacher—the sort of teacher who inspires any feeling child to sneak back in school at night and spray-paint the halls with descriptions of the human love act.
Mrs. Pigeon introduced the Soviet experts and their two American counterparts, Reverend Bumphead (not his real name) and the volleyball coach, Nick Smarm (not his real name). Nick was a politician, but the sort who would run for city council in Youngstown on an antidevelopment, proecology ticket. He smiled too much. The Reverend Bumphead was a young man of Ichabod Crane lank. I never caught his denomination. My guess is Zen Methodist. He was either growing a beard or didn’t know how to shave.
Mrs. Pigeon opened the proceedings in a patronizing tone that propelled me back through twenty-five years to the vile confines of the fourth grade. It was a beautiful afternoon, hot sun, clear sky, and just the right crisp breeze. The conference was being held on top of the cruise boat, but the 120 or so participants had jammed themselves in under the shade deck, where they were surrounded by superstructure on three sides and the air was stifling.
The peaceniks took notes. I had a vision of newsletters, reams and reams of misstapled copier paper Xeroxed when the boss wasn’t looking, vomiting forth from the tepid organizations these people represented. “My Interesting Peace Voyage Through the Soviet Union”; “An Interesting and Enjoyable Visit to the USSR with Peace in Mind”; “Not War and Peace but Peace and Peace” (one of the clever ones); “Peace in the Soviet Union and an Interesting Trip There Too.” Maybe America could be bored into nuclear disarmament.
Nick Smarm began to speak. It was the standard fare. He laid the greater part of the blame for a potential international nuke duke-out on the American doorstep. What he was saying wasn’t wrong, at least not in the factual citations he made. But suddenly and quite against my will I was angry. To stand in front of strangers and run your country, my country, down—I didn’t care if what Nick said was generally true, I didn’t care if what he said was wholly, specifically, and exactly true in every detail. I haven’t been that mad in years. I had to leave, go below. I was ashamed of the man. And it occurred to me that I would have been ashamed if he were Russian and we were on the Mississippi. That big fellow with the medals down his suit coat, my ally, he wouldn’t have done such a thing on the Delta Queen.
I had a drink and went back. Reverend Bumphead from the Princeton Coalition for Disarmament was speaking now. He said exactly the same thing.
“Now it’s time for all of us to ask Nick Smarm and Reverend Bumphead some interesting questions,” said Mrs. Pigeon.
“Mr. Smarm,” said a fat man, “now this is just a hypothetical question, but the way you were describing how the arms race is mostly the fault of the United States, couldn’t I, if I were a red-baiter type, say—just hypothetically now—that you were a paid Soviet agent?” And he hastily added, “Please don’t anybody take my question literally!” They took his question literally. The fat man was smothered in literalism. Squeals of indignation wafted toward the banks of the Don.
“What a terrible thing to say!” shrieked one of the leftist ladies. I’ll bet she was pissed—all those friends of hers acting as Soviet agents for years, and no one ever offered to pay them.
I was about to put in a word for Pudgy, but it was too late. He was already overapologizing to Nick.
“What is the cost of housing in the Soviet Union as a percentage of worker wages?” asked a leftist. Reverend Bumphead didn’t know the answer to that, so Mrs. Pigeon answered the rest of the questions.
VERY EARLY FRIDAY MORNING,
JULY 23
I tried to explain my patriotic seizure to Nikolai. “Wouldn’t you feel the same?” But I didn’t seem to be getting through.
I gave up. We had more drinks. About twenty minutes later Nikolai said to me, “I did not think Nick’s speech was so interesting.” He pulled a deadpan face. “I can read Pravda.”
FRIDAY, JULY 23
Ashore in Volgograd we were taken to Momayev Hill, where umpteen million people died defending the place when it was still named after Stalin. One of the leftists chaffed me for wearing a suit and tie again. I mean, we were going to visit a mass grave.
The leftists had their wreath, but watching them present it in their bowling shirts was more than I could bear. Besides, there was a fifty-two-meter-high statue of “Mother Russia” on top of the hill, and it’s pretty interesting if you’ve never seen a reinforced-concrete nipple four feet across.
It wasn’t until that afternoon, after four days on the boat, that I discovered there were real Americans aboard. Some ordinary tourists had stumbled into this morass of the painfully caring and hopelessly committed. By price or by accident they had picked this tour, and they were about as happy as if they’d signed up for a lemming migration.
When I came back from Momayev Hill, I saw a normal-looking, unagitated person stretched out on the sundeck in a T-shirt from Air America, the old CIA-run Southeast Asia airline. “What got you on this tour?” he asked, when I stared at the logo.
“I guess masochism,” I said and looked again at the T-shirt.
He puffed out his chest. “This ought to shake the bastards up.”
He was one of a dozen New Mexicans, all friends, traveling together on a private tour. Until now they’d had a wonderful time in the USSR. They said it was a fine place as long as you could drink like a Russian and leave like an American. But they’d taken this cruise without any idea of the peace that lay in store for them, and since they’d come on board they’d barricaded themselves in the promenade-deck lounge and had kept the leftists out with loud western accents and the peaceniks away by smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes seems to alarm peace activists much more than voting for Reagan does.
The New Mexicans had become special pets of the barmaid. They were allowed to take glasses, ice, bottles, and china forward to the lounge. She wouldn’t take tips from them, but Billy, a Santa Fe architect, had gone to the market in Rostov and brought the girl an armload of flowers. She blushed to the clavicle.
The New Mexicans were amazed at their fellow passengers, not in the matter of politics, but because the passengers were so rude to the crew. “And to each other,” said Sue Ann, a real-estate developer. “I’ve never heard husbands and wives crap at each other like that in my life.”
When it came to politics, Tom, a former AID officer with the State Department in Vietnam, said, “After all, there hasn’t been a great big war since the A-bomb was invented.”
“I live in Alamogordo,” said Sue Ann. “I’ll bet that shakes the bastards up.” Indeed, that did bother some of the peaceniks, though the Air America T-shirt didn’t—not one knew what it was.
SOVIET-AMERICAN RELATIONS IN
ACTION
That evening at dinnertime, seven or eight young Russians from the local Soviet-American friendship club were ushered on board by Mrs. Pigeon. I noticed they gobbled the meat. Their president was a s
tiff young fellow, a future first secretary of the Committee for Lies About Grain Production if ever there was one. He had a guitar about two times bigger than normal and a watchful mien. But the others were okay. I sat between Alexei, a construction foreman who looked to be twelve, and Boris, an engineer (practically everyone in Russia is an engineer, just like our sanitation engineers are).
Alexei wanted to talk about rock V roll. His English was no worse than the average Rolling Stone reviewer’s. “Abba—too nothing. Hard rock! Yay! Led Zeppelin! Yay! And Kiss!! I most like—hard, hard rock! You know of Time Machine?” He was very excited that an American recognized the name of the top Russian rock group. “Good like Beatles. But is best hard rock America, yay! Is only too bad always rock stars so many dying of too much liquor and”—he shot a glance at the president—“and of other things.”
Boris wanted to talk about cars. In his opinion Russia needed much, much faster cars. “I want fast car,” he said.
The Americans wanted to talk about peace and Soviet-American relations.
We went to the boat-deck music room after dinner with about ten Americans, mostly leftists, and Marya to help translate. There was one lady among the leftists I had not noticed before, though she was markedly ugly. It was not the kind of ugliness that’s an accident of birth but the kind that is the result of years of ill temper, pique, and petty malice. These had given a rattish, shrewish, leaf-nosed-bat quality to her face.
The president said, “We are thankfully welcomed of being here. English ours is not so well. But is practicing now you with more.” Then each of the Russian kids introduced himself and said his profession as best he could.
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