Although his expression remained unenlightened, the old man beckoned us forward and, following the Russian custom of seating strangers together, put us at a table with two men. They both were drinking beer, and the old man pointed at it, as if asking if this was what we wanted. Miss Ryan, resigning herself, nodded.
Our companions at the table were two very different specimens. One, a beefy boy with a shaved head and wearing some sort of faded uniform, was well on his way to being drunk, a condition shared by a surprising lot of the restaurant’s clientele, most of whom were male, many of them either boisterous or slumped across their tables mumbling to themselves. The second man was an enigma. In appearance he might have been a Wall Street partner of Herman Sartorius, the kind of person better imagined dining at the Pavillon than sipping beer in Brest Litovsk. His suit was pressed, and one could see that he hadn’t sewn it himself. There were gold cuff links in his shirt, and he was the only man in the room sporting a tie.
After a moment the shaven-headed soldier spoke to Miss Ryan. “I’m afraid I don’t speak Russian,” she told him. “We’re Americans. Amerikansky.” Her declaration had a somewhat sobering effect. His reddened eyes slowly came into semifocus. He turned to the well-dressed man and made a long statement, at the end of which the man answered him with several chiseled, cold-sounding sentences. There followed between them a sharp repartee, then the soldier took his beer and stalked to another table, where he sat glowering.
“Well,” said Miss Ryan, glowering back, “not all the men are attractive, that’s for sure.” However, she considered our apparent defender, the well-dressed man: “Very attractive. Sort of Otto Kruger. Funny, I’ve always liked older men. Stop staring. He’ll know we’re talking about him. Listen,” she said, after calling attention to his shirt, his cuff links, his clean fingernails, “do you suppose there’s such a thing as a Russian millionaire?”
The beer arrived. A quart bottle and two glasses. The maître d’hôtel poured an inch of beer into my glass, then waited expectantly. Miss Ryan saw the point before I did. “He wants you to taste it, like wine.” Lifting the glass, I wondered if beer-tasting was a Soviet commonplace, or if it was a ceremony, some confused champagne-memory of Czarist elegance that the old man had revived to impress us. I sipped, nodded, and the old man proudly filled our glasses with a warm and foamless brew. But Miss Ryan said suddenly, “Don’t touch it. It’s dreadful!” I told her I didn’t think it was that bad. “I mean, we’re in dreadful trouble,” she said. “I mean, my God, we can’t pay for this. I completely forgot. We haven’t any rubles.”
“Please, won’t you be my guests?” inquired a soft voice in beautifully accented English. It was the well-dressed man who had spoken, and though his face was perfectly straight, his eyes, a bright Nordic blue, wrinkled with an amusement that took full measure of our discomfort. “I am not a Russian millionaire. They do exist—I know quite a few—but it would give me pleasure to pay for your drink. No, please, there is no cause to apologize,” he said, in response to Miss Ryan’s stammered efforts, and openly smiling, “It’s been the keenest enjoyment. Very unusual. Very unusual to run across Americans in this part of the world. Are you Communists?”
After disabusing him of that notion, Miss Ryan told him where we were going, and why. “You are fortunate that you go to Leningrad first. A lovely city,” he said, “very quiet, really European, the one place in Russia I could imagine living, not that I do, but still … Yes, I like Leningrad. It’s not the least like Moscow. I’m on my way to Warsaw, but I’ve just been two weeks in Moscow. That’s equal to two months anywhere else.” He told us that he was Norwegian, and that his business, lumber, had required him to visit the Soviet Union several weeks of every year, except for a gap during the war, since 1931.
“I speak the language quite well, and among my friends I don’t mind passing as a Russian authority. But to be honest, I can’t say I understand much more about it now than I did in 1931. Whenever I go to your country—I’ve been there, oh, I guess a half-dozen times—it always strikes me that Americans are the only people who remind me of Russians. You don’t object to my saying that? Americans are so generous. Energetic.
And underneath all that brag they have such a wishing to be loved, they want to be petted, like dogs and children, and told that they are just as good and even better than the rest of us. Well, Europeans are inclined to agree with them. But they simply won’t believe it. They go right on feeling inferior and far away. Alone. Like Russians. Precisely.”
Miss Ryan wanted to know the substance of his dialogue with the soldier who had left the table. “Oh, silly rot,” he said. “Alcoholic bravado. For some foozled reason he thought you had insulted him. I told him he was being nye kulturni. Remember that: nye kulturni. You’ll find it extremely useful, because when these chaps are rude and you feel obliged to tick them off, it means not a whit to call them a bastard, a son of a dog, but to tell him he’s uncultured, that really strikes home.”
Miss Ryan was growing anxious about the time. We shook hands with the gentleman and thanked him for the beer. “You’ve been very kulturni,” she said. “And by the way, I think you’re more attractive than Otto Kruger.”
“I shall certainly tell my wife,” he said, grinning. “Dazvedanya. Good luck.”
An hour out of Brest Litovsk, the first call to the dining car was announced. It was an event the company had looked forward to with appetites excited by both genuine hunger and the conviction that the Soviet hosts were bound to make this, the company’s first Russian meal, a “real spread”; or, as another of the cast forthrightly phrased it, “a bust-gut.”
Miss Thigpen’s desires were the most modest. “Five spoons of caviar and a piece of dry toast. That’s one hundred and thirty calories.” Calories were Mrs. Gershwin’s last concern. “Don’t think I’m not going to tear into the cavy, darling. It cost thirty-five dollars a pound in Beverly Hills.” The dreams of Leonard Lyons centered around hot borscht and sour cream. Earl Bruce Jackson planned to “stone” himself with vodka and “slay” himself with shashlik. Marilyn Putnam hoped that everyone would save little tidbits for Twerp.
The first sitting, fifty strong, marched into the dining car and took their places at linen-covered tables, each seating four, that ran down either side of the aisle. The tables were set with white crockery and smoothly worn silver. The diner itself seemed as old as the silver, and the smell of cooking, a half-century’s worth, hung in the air like a visible steam. Savchenko was absent, but Miss Lydia and the three young men from the Ministry played host at different tables. The young men kept gazing round, as though silently calling to each other from separate islands of exile and misery.
Miss Lydia shared a table with Lyons, Miss Ryan and myself. One sensed that for this middle-aged woman, who said that her ordinary life was translating articles and living in a room in Moscow, the unique experience, the one that brought such a flush to her cheeks, was not that she was talking to foreigners, but that she was sitting in a dining car riding on a train. Something about the silver and the clean cloth and a little basket of puckered apples, like those the Chinese man had sold, made her fuss with her ivory rose and tuck up the straying ends of her hair. “Ah, we eat!” she said, her eyes shifting toward a quartet of chunky waitresses who came waddling down the aisle with trayloads of the first course.
Those whose palates had been anticipating iced caviar and chilled carafes of vodka were a bit chagrined to see, set before them, yogurt accompanied by bottles of raspberry soda. Miss Thigpen, seated behind me, was the sole voice expressing enthusiasm: “I just could kiss them! More proteins than a steak and only half the calories.” But across the aisle, Mrs. Gershwin warned Miss Putnam not to ruin her appetite by eating it.
“Don’t, darling, I’m sure the cavy will come along next.” The next course, however, consisted of stiff noodles lying like sunken logs in a watery broth. The entree that followed featured breaded veal cutlets, boiled potatoes, and peas that rattled on the plate like gunshot; to wash this down, there were further provisions of raspberry soda. Miss Putnam said to Mrs. Gershwin, “It’s not my stomach I’m worried about. It’s Twerp’s,” and Mrs. Gershwin, sawing at her cutlet, said, “Do you suppose they could be saving the cavy for dessert? You know, with little pancakes?”
Miss Lydia’s cheeks bulged, her eyes popped, her jaws pumped like pistons, a trickle of sweat ran down her neck. “Eat, eat,” she urged, “it’s good, yes?” Miss Ryan told her it was wonderful, and Miss Lydia, swabbing her plate with a quarter loaf of black bread, nodded vehemently: “You will not obtain better in Moscow itself.”
During the lull between
