The Astoria, situated on the impressive expanse of St. Isaac’s Square, is an Intourist hotel, which means that it is run by the Soviet agency in control of all hotels where foreigners are permitted to stay. The Astoria justifiably claims to be the best hotel in Leningrad. Some think it the Ritz of all Russia. But it contains few concessions to Western ideas of a deluxe establishment. Of these, one is a room off the lobby that advertises itself as an Institut De Beauté, where guests may obtain Pedicure, and Coiffeur pour Madame.
The Institut, with its mottled whiteness, its painful appurtenances, resembles a charity clinic supervised by not too sanitary nurses, and the coiffure that Madame receives there is liable to leave her hair with a texture excellent for scouring pans. There is also on the lobby floor a trio of restaurants, each leading into the other, cavernous affairs cheerful as airplane hangars. The center one is Leningrad’s smartest restaurant, and in the evenings, from eight till midnight, an orchestra plays Russian jazz for a local haut monde who seldom dance but sit morosely counting the bubbles in syrupy glasses of Georgian champagne.
The hotel’s Intourist office is located behind a low counter in the main lobby; its dozen desks are so arranged that the employees have a broad view, which simplifies their task of keeping tabs on the comings and goings of the guests. It is a job they have made still simpler, or foolproof, by stationing dormitory matrons on each of the residential floors, vigilantes who are on duty from dawn to dawn, never allowing anyone to leave his room without giving her the key, and constantly, like human punch-clocks, recording ins and outs in a bulky ledger. Perhaps Houdini could’ve eluded them, but it is hard to see how, since they sit at desks that face both the staircase and the elevator, an ancient birdcage that creaks on its cables.
Actually, there is a rear, unguarded staircase connecting the upper floors with a remote side-lobby; and for the clandestine visitor, or the resident wishing to depart unnoticed, this would make the ideal route. Would, except that it is barricaded top to bottom with wooden fences reinforced by old settees and armoires. It might be that the management can find nowhere else to stash these pieces of furniture.
Certainly there is no more room in the rooms. For the average Astoria abode is like the annex in a Victorian attic where some poor relation lives buried among the family discards: a miasma of romantic marble statuary, weak-bulbed lamps with tulle shades like ballerina skirts, tables, several of them, covered with Oriental carpeting, chairs galore, plush settees, armoires that could store steamer trunks, flower-papered walls kaleidoscopic with gilt-framed paintings of fruit and country idylls, beds concealed in cavelike alcoves behind dank velvet curtains: all this crammed into a tomb-dark, unventilated area (you can’t open the windows in winter, and wouldn’t want to if you could) quadruple the size of a train compartment. The hotel has grander quarters, of course, suites with five and six rooms, but the effect of the décor is the same, merely more abundantly so.
Nevertheless, the majority of the Porgy and Bess company were most approving of the Astoria, many because they had anticipated “something so much worse” and, instead, found their rooms “cozy,” “kind of atmospheric” or, as the production’s sophisticated publicist, Willem Van Loon, put it, “Full of art-nouveau charms. Really me!” But when the troupe first entered the lobby of the hotel, already milling with Chinese dignitaries and high-booted Cossacks, actual occupancy of these rooms was, in some instances, distant and debatable.
The Astoria’s assigning of the rooms and, particularly, the suites seemed to be governed by a protocol, or lack of one, that embittered rather a few. Nancy Ryan volunteered a theory that the Russians had arrived at their system of room distribution by consulting Everyman Opera’s payroll: “The less you get the more they give you.” Whatever the reason, several of the leading players and prominent personalities, who were traveling as guests of the company, thought it “grotesque” and “crazy, man, crazy” that stagehands and wardrobe mistresses, carpenters and electricians were being led straight-away to the V.I.P. apartments, while they, the “real people,” were supposed to content themselves with the hotel’s backwater leftovers. “Are they kidding?” said Leonard Lyons. Another company guest, the New York financier Herman Sartorius, had valid cause to complain; he’d been assigned no room at all. Nor had Mrs. Gershwin, who sat on her luggage in the lobby being soothed by Wilva Breen and Warner Watson.
“Don’t you worry, baby,” said Mrs. Breen, who had arrived the night before by plane and was ensconced with her husband in six rooms of Astorian splendor. “The Russians may be slow, they may get things a little mixed up, but everything comes out straight in the end. Look what happened when I went to Moscow,” she added, referring to a visit she had made to Moscow the previous October in connection with the present tour. “It took me nine days to do two hours’ work. But everything came out fine in the end.”
“Sure, Lee,” said Warner Watson, brushing down his graying crew-cut with an agitated hand. “Sure, honey, we’ll get this room business fenced in.”
“Darling, I’m perfectly happy, darling,” Mrs. Gershwin assured them. “I just think it’s so wonderful being here.”
“To think we really made it,” said Mrs. Breen, beaming round her. “And what sweet, kind, adorable people. Wasn’t that adorable when the train arrived?”
“Adorable,” said Mrs. Gershwin, glancing at the mass of wilting bouquets that had been given her at the station.
“And the hotel’s simply beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Wilva,” said Mrs. Gershwin blankly, as though her friend’s enthusiasm was beginning to tire her.
“You’ll have a beautiful room, Lee,” said Mrs. Breen, and Warner Watson added, “If you don’t like it, you can change it. Anything you want, Lee, we’ll get it fenced in.”
“Darling, please. It’s not important, not the tiniest bit. If they’ll just put me somewhere, I wouldn’t dream of moving,” said Mrs. Gershwin, who was destined, in the course of the next few days, to insist on changing her accommodations three times.
The Ministry of Culture’s delegation, headed by Nikolai Savchenko, the businesslike, formidable six-footer, were now in a whirl of pacifying, rectifying, promising everyone they would get the rooms they deserved. “Patience,” pleaded one of them, the middle-aged Russian interpreter called Miss Lydia. “Do not contribute to the misery. We have plenty rooms. No one will stride the streets.” Nancy Ryan said she wouldn’t mind striding the streets, and suggested to me that we escape the confusion in the lobby by taking a walk.
St. Isaac’s Square is hemmed on one side by a canal stemming from the Neva, a river that in winter threads through the city like a frozen Seine, and on the other by St. Isaac’s Cathedral, which is now an antireligious museum. We walked toward the canal. The sky was sunless gray, and there was snow in the air, buoyant motes, playthings that seethed and floated like the toy flakes inside a crystal. It was noon, but there was no modern traffic on the square except for a car or two and a bus with its headlights burning. Now and then, though, horse-drawn sleds slithered across the snowy pavement.
Along the embankments of the Neva, men on skis silently passed, and mothers aired their babies, dragging them in small sleds. Everywhere, like darting blackbirds, black-furred schoolchildren ice-skated on the sidewalks. Two of these children stopped to inspect us. They were twins, girls of nine or ten, and they wore gray rabbit coats and blue velvet bonnets. They had divided a pair of skates between them, but by holding hands and pushing together, they managed very well on one skate apiece.
They looked at us with pretty brown puzzled eyes, as though wondering what made us different: Our clothes? Miss Ryan’s lipstick? The soft waves in her loose blond hair? Most foreigners in Russia soon become accustomed to this: the slight frown of the passer-by who is disturbed by something about you that he can’t at once put his finger on, and who stops, stares, keeps glancing back, even quite often feels compelled to follow you. The twins followed us onto a footbridge that crossed the Neva, and watched while we paused to look at the view.
The canal, no more than a snow ditch, was a sporting ground for children whose laughing shrillness combined with a ringing of bells, both sounds carrying on the strong, shivery winds that blow from the Bay of Finland. Skeleton trees, sheathed in ice, glittered against the austere fronts of palaces that lined the embankments and stretched to the distant Nevsky Prospekt.
Leningrad, currently a city of four million, the Soviet Union’s second largest and northernmost metropolis, was built to the taste of the Czars, and Czarist taste ran to French and Italian architecture, which accounts not only for the style but also for the coloring of the palaces along the Neva and in other old quarters. Parisian blacks and grays predominate, but suddenly, here and there, the hot Italian palette intervenes: a palace of bitter green, of brilliant ocher, pale blue, orange. A few of the palaces have been converted into apartments, most are used
