She would see. The touring schoolgirl remembered mostly hurry, sickness, and drabness, and falling asleep at the opera. Tatty the mature, worldly woman should find more. She would try.
She saw a sweep of trees as the ground rush came. The airplane landed roughly, bumped along for a great distance, then swerved sharply as it headed for the terminal. There were a few other aircraft about, some military, but none moving. At last theirs rolled to a stop.
“Flight is over,” said one of the stewardesses, in a gruff, thickly uttered monotone over the intercom. “Good, bye.”
They opened the cabin door, revealing a soldier in fur hat with a submachine gun standing just outside.
The terminal building was poorly lit and drafty, the customs and passport clearance procedures confusing and inefficient. One of the aimless porters took Tatty’s luggage and disappeared with it. After finally escaping the suspicious stare of the soldier in the passport control booth, she had to spend many minutes frantically searching for the porter, finding him at last trying to load her bags onto one of the buses assigned to a tourist group. A Russian word came back to her, the word for idiot.
“Idyot!” she shouted. The porter, smiling, continued piling them in. Obviously, there were no idiots here. Just him. “Idyot! Eto moi bagazh!”
It was then that she was joined by her welcoming committee of one, a youngish man who looked very American and very State Department, complete to his chesterfield topcoat. He introduced himself as Dixon Meadows from the embassy, then hurried off to deal harshly with the porter, who, submissive in the face of authority, even American authority, began to pull Tatty’s bags off again.
Once they were in the back seat of Meadows’s embassy car, the driver departing the airport at great speed, Meadows reintroduced himself, this time more elegantly and comprehensively. He was with the USIA section at the embassy in Moscow, and specialized in being “nanny” to visitors such as herself. He would be at her service from beginning to end of her tour, as much or as little as she wished. The Russians had also assigned her an Intourist guide, a woman named Raya Postnikova, who would accompany her during her free periods, but he was to be her escort at all official functions, of which there would be a great many. That night, after she had rested from her journey, there was a small dinner at the American consulate in Leningrad. The following morning, there was a press conference for the Russian media, and afterward a small one for a few American reporters who had come up from Moscow. That evening, after her performance, the Soviets were giving a party for her at the Union of Societies for Friendship and Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries.
“And, as the Russians love to say, and so on and so forth,” he said. “When we shift to Moscow, it will start all over again, only on a much grander scale. The ambassador is planning a dinner for you, and I’m sure the Soviets will reciprocate handsomely. Oh, my dear, you’ll find yourself treated quite like a princess.”
“Or grand duchess.”
“Yes, all the same, my dear. You’ll be pleased.”
He kept patting her hand in reassurance. He had curly brown hair he wore combed over his ears, light, darting eyes, and a mouth as feminine as Ramsey’s. She guessed Dixon was a family middle name he used in State Department affectation as a first. Mischievously but unrealistically, she hoped his first name might be Moe.
“You say you’re the assistant cultural attaché?” she said, as though she had expected a higher rank.
“Yes, quite the junior man,” he said, “although I often report directly to Washington, frequently to the man who recruited you for this tour. He’s quite concerned that this be a success and that you have a pleasant time of it.” He patted her hand again. “He’s threatened dire consequences for me if things go awry.”
Meadows might as well have written it out in neon lights. He was an Agency man, working for Ramsey, and the cultural job was cover.
He handed her a small but surprisingly heavy package. “He sent you this little gift. Chocolates. Chocolates you cannot get in the Soviet Union. Your favorite kind, in fact.”
She glanced at the package and then quickly back at Meadows. She didn’t have a favorite kind of chocolates. As Ramsey certainly must know, she never ate them. She started to speak.
Meadows put a finger to his lips. “He remembered the brand from France. When he sent this package in the diplomatic pouch, he told me he had memories of France and you very much in mind.”
The weight of the package now frightened her. Watching her eyes, he put his finger to his lips once more then patted her hand. “I’m sure you’re going to have a lovely time.”
“What, what about make-up? Rehearsals? A stage manager?”
“The Russians are taking care of everything, my dear. You’ve only to show up at the recital hall two hours before your first performance. Don’t worry. Theater is what the Russians do best.”
He then prattled on about the city, as she was sure the woman Raya would prattle on about it the following day. She turned and looked at it out the window, recalling schoolgirl memories, not of her first trip but of her readings of Dostoyevsky. Modern times and autos or no, Leningrad with its eighteenth-century buildings and dimly lit streets still seemed the St. Petersburg of droshkies and troikas, gentlemen’s carriages and Cossack patrols, hereditary aristocrats replaced with Bolshevik ones, but still a city of the elite. They were driving north toward the Neva River, skirting the center city, but at one point they crossed the grand boulevard that was the Nevsky Prospekt. Tatty remembered Mathilde’s many descriptions of it, and now found it quite the same. She had a sudden feeling of kindredness for this place. She was being absurd, of course. She was only a quarter Russian, after all, and that very Russian grandmother of hers was as much Prussian as anything else. But however much Russian she was, she now felt at last very glad of it.
“I tried to get you into the Astoria,” Meadows said, as they crossed the dark river. “It’s down by the Winter Palace and by far the most elegant hotel in town. Did you know Hitler once issued invitations for a victory banquet there that the fortunes of war never permitted him to hold? But the Soviets insisted on putting you up at the Hotel Leningrad, where they like to put all foreigners. It’s deluxe. More modern than chic. Built by the Finns. The plumbing works. I got you a suite on the river side. It has a sunken tub and a view of the Winter Palace. I’m sure you’ll find it charming.”
He patted her hand again as she left the car, then handed her the package of chocolates she had left behind.
“Tonight’s dinner isn’t formal. Cheerie bye.”
The suite looked high-class Cleveland, the bath only high-class Toledo, but it was warm and comfortable in its wood-paneled, contemporary way, and the view was extraordinary, even at night.
She then discovered a reason to be very fond of the Russians indeed. On top of her bureau was a basket of fresh fruit and cheeses. Next to it was a bucket of ice in which had been set a large carafe of vodka. She ate and drank somewhat greedily, then remembered the package of chocolates, opening it with some difficulty. As she expected, its second layer contained not candy but a small white-handled automatic pistol. And a note, from Ramsey, written in his cryptic style:
To spare you a fate worse than death.
She presumed that, once she was out, someone would search her room, someone certainly practiced enough to find a gun. What they would make of that, and do with her, she could only imagine with a shudder. She would take it with her to the dinner, and return it to the solicitous Dixon Meadows.
Pouring more vodka, she wearily took off her travel clothes and drew her bath. There was indeed a commodious sunken tub—she wondered if this was the honeymoon suite—that she quickly filled with hot, steamy water. Soon she was enjoying the happiest moment of her long day, although her pleasure was somewhat dampened when she reached for her towel. It had the consistency of facial tissue and the texture of fine-grained sandpaper.
To her surprise, she slept only fitfully, her body’s tim
e clock apparently knocked completely askew. Putting on her dinner clothes, including the czarist pin Ramsey had given her, she pulled a chair to the window and had one more glass of vodka.
“Grandmother,” she said, lifting it in toast to the Winter Palace. “I am home.”
She had said “Grandmother.” What she had meant was “Cousin.” Cousin Tatiana Nicolyevna Romanov.
By the time Meadows rang from the lobby, she had little interest in going to the consul’s dinner. She was in fact half tipsy and quite content to sit by the extraordinary window and become entirely so. But she was a dutiful person more than anything else, and dinner with the consul was precisely the kind of duty her family had brought her up to honor.
Meadows seemed impatient. When she realized she had left the box of chocolates and their interesting surprise back on her dresser, he refused to let her fetch them, insisting that they were too late. So she left a pistol on her dresser. The hotel had taken her passport. She wondered if she might be dragged into some horrid prison that very night.
But she wondered that frivolously. She was in a surprisingly good mood, and did manage to get entirely tipsy at the dinner party. Relying on the reflexes of breeding and social discipline to prevent herself from behaving too embarrassingly, she hoped the consul—a pleasant, circumspect man in his mid-forties—would attribute her conversational excesses to jetlag and theatrical bohemianism. He seemed not to mind in any event, although Meadows got quite sharp with her when she began going on about Valeri Griuchinov, asking if he wasn’t a monster like Stalin and hadn’t he committed all sorts of war crimes in Asia. The consul said only that he thought Griuchinov to be a very nice man, and then Meadows changed the subject.
Upon her return, she found that the maid had come to turn down her bed and take away the uneaten fruit and cheese, but otherwise the room seemed perfectly unmolested, the package of chocolates untouched. She put it, the pistol still inside, into her make-up case.
She attempted some reading before going to sleep, choosing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the easiest, but slipped off into the dreamiest of states after only a few pages.
There was a call sometime in the dead of night, a silence on the other end at first, and then the voice of a Russian man speaking angrily and quickly. Not quite awake, she could not understand his words, but a moment later he hung up.
PART TWO
You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.
—Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Joseph Stalin)
7
Raya the Intourist guide arrived promptly at eight A.M., finding Tatty most unpromptly still abed. Apologizing, Tatty told her she would be down in the lobby in fifteen minutes. She arrived in twenty-five. Raya, who did not need to identify herself, was standing in front of the elevators, arms folded, looking as though she was there to prevent Tatty’s escape.
Raya was a magnificent blend of things. A very large woman, with a square face and button nose, she was nonetheless quite attractive; by Soviet standards, glamorous. She had red hair and green eyes that would have been Irish in another face. She wore a red suit, thick red coat, and the most fashionable Russian high-heeled red vinyl boots. Tatty was dressed not dissimilarly. She had chosen a black suit and red silk blouse, black boots and a black Russian fur hat from Bergdorf Goodman’s, but her Christian Dior coat was as bright a red as Raya’s, except for the black fur cuffs and collar. Bolshevik chic.
“It is bad to be late for breakfast,” Raya said. “The waitress girls are very slow.” She smiled, a brief revelation of a secret friendly nature, then shifted her face into its customary gruffness. “Come.”
Breakfast included smoked sturgeon, sausage, herb cheese, thick dark bread, mineral water, and eggs. Tatty took a few bites of each. Smoking constantly, Raya managed to finish everything on her plate. Despite her commanding presence, she wasn’t as old as Tatty had first thought, perhaps only thirty or thirty-five. Meadows had told her Raya was a member of the party, one of the elite, a Soviet aristocrat. She certainly acted it, reminding Tatty of not a few actresses in New York. She quickly explained she was a guide only to celebrities like Tatty—“Veeps,” as she pronounced the term “VIPs.” She said she had been in charge of handling the American press for the Vice President Bush visit. She was entrusted with and had a special license for escorting Russians privileged enough to travel to Paris and London. She had access to special stores.
The press conference was to start at ten-thirty. Tatty asked if they could go across the river for a visit to the Winter Palace first.
“When you are with me,” Raya said, lighting another cigarette, “you can do anything you want.”
Raya had a car, a small red Zhiguli that was cramped and confining but, according to Raya, no more so than the taxis. It would be hers as long as she held her Intourist job, which she said would be forever, as her brother was a general in the Soviet army. She drove very rapidly, and with great assurance. When they pulled up at the palace and Raya parked near one of the grand entrances, a soldier—Raya called them militiamen and said they were the same as police—tried to make her move on. No doubt dropping names, she bullied him down without even showing identification.
Tatty paused a moment, looking out at the broad square that adjoined the palace. Mathilde had told her of this bloody place, Dvortsovaya Square. She had read of it and seen photographs taken of it that day in 1905 when a hundred thousand people bearing petitions for the czar had been fired on by soldiers, Cossacks, and hussars. More than a thousand men, women, and children had been cut down. It had been in a way the first Russian revolution, and the wisest of the aristocrats and czarist officialdom began to leave the country soon after. The czar had not ordered the shooting, had not been in the city; but ultimately that had made no difference.
“Come,” said Raya, opening the car door. “Here we have all the best paintings. Rembrandts, Impressionists, El Greco, da Vinci. Hermitage is best museum in the world.”
“I’d like to see those, yes. But mostly I’d like to see it as it was when it was a house.”
“A house,” said Raya, contemptuously. “It has one thousand forty-seven rooms, all built for one parasitical family.”
“It wasn’t the only such house,” said Tatty.
Raya snorted and swept on with her tour, moving through the endless rooms and endless corridors at a speed that rendered any lingering contemplation of a painting or exhibit impossible. Raya knew all there was to know about all the paintings, about all the czars. She went on lengthily about Czarina Catherine the Great’s sex life with horses.
“There was a throne room,” said Tatty. “I was here once before, more than ten years ago, on a school tour.”
“I know. That is recorded on your visa papers.”
“I remember that throne room. I didn’t pay much attention to it then. I’d like to see it now.”
“Of course. There are no longer thrones, you know. They were removed in 1917. What is enthroned there now is all of Soviet Union.”
It was called the Saint George Hall in Mathilde’s time, and served as the large throne room, a chamber lined with forty-eight Italian marble columns and so huge Tatty could not distinguish the faces of the tourists at the other end. She could certainly distinguish the enormous map, however. Made of semiprecious Ural stone and rare jewels, it was, according to Raya, three hundred square feet in area. It showed all of the Soviet empire, with Moscow marked by a hammer and sickle made of diamonds. Tatty tried to imagine it with thrones there instead, and the hall filled with elegant people in court dress.
“My grandmother was here once,” she said.
“Yes. Thousands of people visit Winter Palace and Hermitage every week.”
“No. I mean when the czar ruled.”
Raya made a face. “You should not talk of such things.”
The press conference was held at the House of Friendship and Peace, in a room too small for the two dozen or so Soviet journalists. She presumed they were
journalists, though a number of them might have been some sort of police. There was only one television camera unit there, with an old-fashioned sound-on-film camera. She laughed. This was more press attention than she had ever received in the United States.
The questions were odd: Did she think Thoreau antisocial? Could Uncle Tom’s Cabin be published today? Wasn’t Lincoln a traitor to the proletariat from which he had come?
Then one of them really got down to business. With so much economic and police violence against black people in the United States, did she not think these writings just as appropriate now as before the American Civil War? Did she not think it would be more appropriate for her to read them in American cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., instead of in the Soviet Union, where all races lived together as brothers?
In the Soviet Union, journalists and police were much the same thing.
“I am here as a guest of the Soviet Union,” she said, as icily as she could. “I am here as an actress, to read the words of these fine Americans, to share them with the Soviet people. I do so without any political consideration, just as I would not intrude such political matters as your forced labor camps when I am performing Chekhov. I should make the observation, however, that the works I am going to read from were written when both of our nations practiced slavery.”
Meadows looked extremely pleased with her response, but the Soviets did not. They ended their segment of the news conference. After the Russians were cleared from the room, four American reporters were brought in. Meadows had briefed her on who they would be. Two were from wire services, one was from Newsweek magazine, and the fourth needed no introduction.
Blood of the Czars Page 10