“Well,” said Lyons, “what about the night life in Leningrad, any action there?” Miss Lydia replied by saying that perhaps her English was not all it should be, and proceeded, from her Muscovite point of view, to discuss Leningrad rather as a New Yorker might Philadelphia; it was “old-fashion,” it was “provincial,” it was “not the same like Moscow.” At the end of this recital, Lyons said glumly, “Sounds like a two-day town to me.” Miss Ryan thought to ask when was the last time Miss Lydia had visited Leningrad. Miss Lydia blinked. “The last time? Never. I have never been there. It will be interesting to see, yes?”
Presently she had a question of her own. “I would appreciate you to explain to me. Why is Paul Robeson not in with the players? He is a colored person, yes?”
“Yes,” said Miss Ryan; and so, she added, were sixteen million other Americans. Surely Miss Lydia didn’t expect Porgy and Bess to employ them all?
Miss Lydia leaned back in her chair with a cunning, I’m-no-fool expression. “It is because you,” she said, smiling at Miss Ryan, “you do not permit him his passport.”
The dessert arrived. It was vanilla ice cream, and it was excellent. Behind me, Miss Thigpen said to her fiancé, “Earl, honey, I wouldn’t touch it. Maybe it’s not pasteurized.” Across the aisle, Mrs. Gershwin observed to Miss Putnam, “It’s my theory they send it all to California. It cost thirty-five dollars a pound in Beverly Hills.”
Coffee followed, and with it an altercation. Jackson and several of his friends had taken over a table and were dealing out a game of Tonk. The two huskiest of the Ministry’s young men, Sascha and Igor, converged on the card players and informed them, their voices struggling to sound firm, that “gambling” was illegal in the Soviet Union. “Man,” said one of the players, “nobody’s gambling here. We got to do something. We don’t have a friendly game, we blow our stacks.” Sascha insisted, “It’s illegal. Not allowed.” The men threw down their cards, and Jackson, tucking them into a case, said, “Old Squareville. Home for dead cats. The number to play is zero. Tell the boys back in New York.”
“They are unhappy. We regret,” said Miss Lydia. “But we must remember our restaurant workers.” Her stubby-fingered hand motioned elegantly toward the waitresses, whose blear-eyed, solid faces glistened with perspiration as they shambled down the aisle balancing a hundred pounds of dirty dishes. “You understand. It would not look well for them to see the laws disenforced.” She gathered the last few apples, and stuffed them into a cloth handbag. “Now,” she said cheerfully, “we go to dream. We unravel the sleeve of care.”
On the morning of December 21, The Blue Express was twenty-four hours from Leningrad, another day and night, though the difference between the two seemed, as the train crawled deeper into Russia, tenuous indeed, so little did the sun, a gray ghost rising at ten and returned to its grave by three, help to divide them. The fragile span of daylight continued to reveal winter at its uncrackable hardest: birches, their branches broken from the weight of snow; a log-cabin village, not a soul in sight and the roofs hung with icicles heavy as elephant tusks. Once, a village cemetery, poor plain wooden crosses, wind-bent and all but buried. But here and there haystacks, standing in deserted fields, were evidence that even this harsh ground could, in distant spring, grow green again.
Aboard, among the passengers, the emotional pendulum had settled at that nirvana point between the strains of departure and the tensions of arrival. An on and on timeless nowhere that one accepted as perhaps lasting forever, like the wind that swept white cauldrons of snow-spray against the train. At last, even Warner Watson relaxed. “Well,” he said, lighting a cigarette with hands that scarcely trembled, “I guess maybe I’ve got my nerves fenced in.” Twerp snoozed in the corridor, pink stomach upturned, paws awry.
In Compartment 6, by now a welter of unmade berths, orange peelings, spilled face powder and cigarette butts floating in cold tea, Jackson practiced card-shuffling while his fiancée buffed her nails, and Miss Ryan, pursuing her Russian studies, memorized a new phrase out of the old army textbook: “SLOO-sha eess-ya ee-lee ya BOO-doo streel-YAHT! Obey or I’ll fire!” Lyons alone stayed faithful to the pressures of a workaday world. “Nobody gets in my tax bracket looking at scenery,” he said, sternly typing the heading for a new column: “Showtrain to Leningrad.”
At seven that evening, when the others had gone off to the day’s third round of yogurt and raspberry soda, I stayed in the compartment and dined on a Hershey chocolate bar. I thought Twerp and I had the car to ourselves until I noticed one of the Ministry’s interpreters, Henry, the child-sized young man with the large ears, pass my door, then pass again, each time giving me a glance that quivered with curiosity. It was as though he wanted to speak, but caution and timidity prevented him. When finally, after another reconnoiter, he did come into the compartment, the approach he’d designed was official.
“Give me your passport,” he said, with that bluntness shy people often assume.
He sat on Miss Thigpen’s berth, and studied the passport through a pair of spectacles that kept sliding to the tip of his nose; like everything he wore, from his shiny black suit with its bell-bottom trousers to his brown worn-down shoes, they were much too big for him. I said if he would tell me what he was looking for, possibly I could help him. “It is necessary,” he mumbled, his red ears burning like hot coals. The train must have traveled several miles while he fingered through the passport like a boy poring over a stamp album; and though he carefully examined the mementos left on its pages by immigration authorities, his attention lingered longest on the data that states one’s occupation, height and color, date of birth.
“Here is correct?” he said, pointing to my birth date. I told him it was. “We are three years apart,” he said. “I am youngest—younger?—I am younger, thank you. But you have seen much. So. I have seen Moscow.” I asked him if he would like to travel. His anger began as a physical action, a queer sequence of shrugs and flutterings, shrinking inside his fat man’s suit that seemed to mean yes and no, perhaps. He pushed up his spectacles, and said, “I have not the time. I am a worker like him and him. Three years, it could also happen my passport has many imprimaturs. But I am content with the scenic—no, scenery—scenery of the mind. The world is the same, but here,” he tapped his forehead, struck it really, “here,” he spread a hand over his heart, “are changefuls. Which is correct; changings or changefuls?” I said either one; as used, they both made sense.
The effort of shaping these sentences, and an excess of feeling behind them, had left him breathless. He leaned on his elbow and rested a spell before suddenly observing, “You resemble Shostakovich. That is correct?” I told him I wouldn’t have thought so, not from the photographs of Shostakovich that I’d seen. “We have discuss it. Mr. Savchenko has also the opinion,” he said, as though this were final, for who were we, either of us, to challenge Savchenko?
Shostakovich’s name led to mention of David Oistrakh, the great Soviet violinist who had recently played concerts in New York and Philadelphia. He listened to my report of Oistrakh’s American triumphs as if I were praising him, Henry; his hunched shoulders straightened, all at once he seemed to fill out his flapping suit, and the heels of his shoes, dangling over the side of the berth, swung together and clicked, clicked and swung, as though he were dancing a jig.
I asked him if he thought Porgy and Bess would have a success in Russia comparable to Oistrakh’s American reception. “It is not my ability to say. But we at the Ministry hope more than you hope. A real man’s job for us, that Porgy-Bess.” He told me that although he’d worked at the Ministry for five years, this was the only time his job had taken him outside Moscow. Usually, he said, he spent six days a week at a desk in the Ministry (“I have my own telephone”), and on Sundays he stayed home reading (“Among your writers, the powerful one is A. J. Cronin. But Sholikov is more powerful, yes?”). Home was an apartment on the outskirts of Moscow, where he lived with his family and, as he was unmarried (“My stipend is not yet equal to the aspiration”), shared a bedroom with his brother.
The conversation moved with an increasing ease; he ate a piece of Hershey, he laughed, his heels clicked; and then I offered him some books. They were stacked on the table, and his eyes continually strayed toward them, a gaudy collection of twenty-five-cent thrillers mixed in with Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, a history of the rise of Socialism, and Nancy Mitford’s biography, Madame de Pompadour. I told him he
