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 b
oxes, 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.
Up to the age of sixty everyone must have a job; four months unemployment classifies the unemployed as a “parasite,” which is a felony. If you are intelligentsia thrown out of work, you are deeply out of luck; you can’t get a job as unskilled labour because the unskilled labourers don’t want you around. The obvious suspicion is that jobless intelligentsia must have dangerous ideas or why did they lose their jobs. This system is special hell for Jews who are dismissed from their work immediately upon applying to emigrate to Israel and are then in limbo, doubly unwanted as Jews due to endemic anti-Semitism and as traitors. What more disloyal than to wish to leave this Eden where all is well and all men are equal?
Mrs M.’s kitchen in that tiny tenement flat was a salon. Her entourage had read her book in Samizdat and revered it but she was also the widow of a great man. Fame and position do not depend on interior decoration and real estate. Russians take literature far more seriously than we do, the proof being that Stalin thought it advisable to kill so many writers, while his successors send writers to concentration camps or insane asylums or deport them. Total censorship also shows how the state fears the independent power of words. The makers of the words are honoured. Mrs M. had the important rewards and didn’t mind the appalling conditions in her tenement, nor did her friends. I was the only one who minded.
At three-thirty in the afternoon, T-shirt wet against my back, I showed up with the airport whisky. Mrs M. sketched introductions to six visitors. I can’t remember names in English let alone name and patronymic in Russian. My name was easy: Marta. I was accepted as if I had been coming to the flat for years like the rest of them. Mrs M. distributed cups as she had no glasses and poured the nicely warmed whisky which they all drank neat, saying it was better than vodka. I shuddered and said I would wait.
Private talks were held in the bedroom. Mrs M. and I withdrew so I could give her the manila envelope. I don’t know if she used spectacles to read; I never saw her wearing them. She spread the clippings on top of the mess on the bedroom table, seeing her photograph and her husband’s because there had been new translations of his poetry and I think a biography. She could see the size of the reviews but I doubt if she understood what that meant in terms of success in our papers and magazines; she could see the quantity. She touched all this with her fingertips and smiled uncertainly and said, “I did not know, I did not know. Is it true?”
We returned to the kitchen-sitting room. Small helpings of greasy fried mushrooms were passed. It was four-thirty. I wondered if this meal could be tea, the mushrooms a special Russian twist, but mushrooms were the beginning and the end. To keep me partially in contact a mishmash of German, French, and English served. Mrs M. heard all the conversations and would turn from one person to join in another conversation. Everyone talked at once; a mystery, how anyone heard anything.
At 5.30, without warning, small helpings of fried aubergines appeared. I had been listening to a partly translated fierce argument about mushrooms. Mrs M. said, “Do you believe in Paradise, Marta?”
I thought the subject was mushrooms. I said, “Well no, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Lena is absolutely sure she will meet her mother in Paradise,” said Mrs M.
“Sa mère est morte il y a neuf jours,” said a young man beside me, whom I saw every day, a surrogate son or grandson I suppose.
Lena, the subject of this talk, spoke only Russian but did not speak at all. She was nice-looking, fair, young. Mrs M. had introduced her lovingly as “my adopted daughter.”
Mrs M. said, “What is that name you said about my cough?”
“Emphysema.”
Mrs M. talked rapidly across the table to a man of about forty; he had a big unruly head of black hair, a two-day beard, heavy hot workman’s clothes: her doctor. “No,” Mrs M. said with assurance. “In Russia we do not have this disease.” Then she coughed until I thought she would choke. Her doctor was finishing his share of aubergines and arguing loudly, above the horrendous noise of Mrs M.’s cough, with the surrogate son.
More visitors arrived; more folding chairs were opened. As I felt I might faint from heat, I moved to the bedroom where I met again the lady of last night. She had been telephoning. She said she had known Mrs M. for fifty years and “I do not like this new religiosity. It is all due to Lena. No, Lena is not a girl; she is forty and has been married three times.” She greeted in Russian a woman who must just have come. “Sit down, sit down, you don’t look well.”
Indeed the newcomer didn’t; she was white as chalk and breathed shallowly. This lady was recovering from her third severe heart attack. She was in a dangerous state of tension because her son had applied to emigrate to Israel and was now threatened by conscription into the army, a common form of punishment and imprisonment for Jews. Her telephone had been cut off for months and a KGB agent, stationed in the hall, escorted visitors to her flat.
“Why?”
The tall lady said, “So no one will go to visit her and she will be more alone.”
You want to scream. And feel suffocated. What in God’s name did the Soviet government have to fear from an ailing elderly lady or from her son, a youngish ordinary Jew?
The tall lady said without emphasis, “My friend’s husband was killed in Stalin’s purge of the doctors.”
The white-faced lady s
miled a sad ironic smile and said, “Her husband was an ambassador. He was killed in Stalin’s purge of the diplomats.”
Stalin widows. Three in one small flat. There must be millions of them in the Soviet Union. It is not a safe category either: guilt by association with the dead.
I returned to the kitchen-sitting room. Small helpings of fried potatoes and mushrooms were being passed. The whisky was finished. It was seven o’clock. The surrogate son said, “Tout est beaucoup pire depuis Nixon.”
“Yes,” Mrs M. said, with her alert ear, “for the Nixon visit many Jews were arrested and many telephones cut off; it is much worse. He asks [pointing at a new face] if you like strawberries.”
Strawberries were put on a plate in the middle of the table. I wasn’t quick enough; I got two.
Mrs M. said, “They are talking of . . . ,” a name I didn’t catch. She laughed and coughed. “Marta, when seven or eight people made the demonstration in Red Square about Czechoslovakia, one and half are Russians, the rest are Jews.” She repeated this in Russian, I assume, and they all laughed gaily.
A man began to explain something partly in German, partly in English. Mrs M. took over. “He says if you are Jew criminal or feeble-minded or tuberculosis or cancer or unskilled or very old, they will let you go to Israel. Most from Georgia. But if young or professional Jew, no.”
Small helpings of tomatoes and cucumbers were passed. It was eight-thirty. Ten people sat around the table. Apparently visitors brought contributions of food and as it was brought it was eaten. Mrs M. laughed very hard, coughing more. “It is about . . . ,” again the name I didn’t catch. “She is a poetess. She was the only woman in Red Square. They let her alone for a year and then put her in a mental asylum for three years. She has come back. She said the doctors treated her well, something not previously known, you understand. But I think that she is pretty crazy all the same, always running after men.”
Travels with Myself and Another Page 29