“What’cha doing? Putting down all the dumb things I say?” Actually, as Miss Ryan was surprised into explaining, she was writing a description of the clock. “Uh-huh,” he said, his voice not as genial as his smile, “you think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you? Well, put this down. I’ll tell you a good reason I don’t like it. Because that peacock’s gonna go on fanning her tail when I’m dust. A man works all his life, he ends up dust. That’s what museums are, reminders of death. Death,” he repeated, with a nervous titter that expanded into mirthless guffaws.
A gang of soldiers, part of another tour, approached The Peacock just as the hour chimed, and the soldiers, country boys with their heads shaved bald, their drab uniforms sagging in the seat like diapers, had the double enchantment of gaping at foreigners and watching the golden-eyed winkings of an owl, a peacock flash its bronze feathers in the wan light of the Winter Palace. The Americans and the soldiers crowded close to hear the rooster crow. Man and art, for a moment alive together, immune to old mortality.
It was Christmas Eve. The translators from the Ministry of Culture, under the supervision of their chief, Savchenko, had personally set up a skinny fir tree in the center of an Astoria dining room and decorated it with hand-colored paper cards, wisps of tinsel. The members of the company, sentimental over their fourth Christmas together, had gone on spending sprees: a razzledazzle of cellophane and ribbon spread in a knee-deep, twenty-foot circle round the tree. The presents were to be opened at midnight.
Long past that hour, Miss Ryan was still in her room wrapping packages and rummaging through suitcases selecting from her possessions trinkets to take the place of gifts she’d neglected to buy. “Maybe I could give the bunny to one of the kids,” she said, meaning the rubber rabbit sent her by Stefan Orlov. The rabbit nestled among her bed pillows. She’d inked whiskers on its face and on its side printed STEFAN—THE BUNNY. “I guess not,” she decided. “If I gave him away, no one would ever believe I’d snagged a Russian beau. Almost did.” Orlov had not telephoned again.
I helped Miss Ryan carry her presents down to the dining room, where she was just in time for the end of the gift-distributing. The children had been allowed to stay up for the party, and now, hugging new dolls and squirting water pistols filled with raspberry soda, they cycloned through the gaudy wrapping-paper debris. The grown-ups danced to the music of the Russian jazz band, which could be heard playing in the connecting main restaurant. Mrs. Breen whirled by, a bit of holiday ribbon floating round her neck. “Isn’t it bliss?” she said. “Aren’t you happy?
After all, we don’t spend every Christmas in Leningrad!” The waitresses, young English-language students who had volunteered to tend table for the American troupe, demurely refused invitations to dance. “Oh, come on, honey,” one waitress was urged, “let’s you and me melt that curtain together.” Vodka, abetting the spirit of the occasion, had already melted the reserve of the Ministry of Culture representatives. They each had received presents from the company, and Miss Lydia, who had been given a compact, wanted to kiss everyone in sight. “It is too kind, so kind,” she said, tirelessly examining her pudgy face in the compact’s mirror.
Even the aloof Savchenko, a dour, glacial Santa Claus, or Father Frost, as the fellow is known in Russia, seemed after a while willing to forget his dignity, at any rate was unprotesting when a girl in the cast plumped herself on his lap, threw her arms around him and, between kisses, told him, “How come you want to look like a grumpy old bear when you’re just a doll? A living doll, that’s what you are, Mr. Savchenko.”
Breen, too, had affectionate words for the Ministry of Culture executive. “Let’s all drink to the man we can thank for this wonderful party,” he said, hoisting a tumbler of vodka, “one of the best friends we have in the world, Nikolai Savchenko.” Savchenko, wiping away lipstick, responded by proposing another toast. “To the free exchange of culture between the artists of our countries. When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent,” he continued, quoting his favorite maxim. “When the cannons are silent, the muses are heard.”
The radio man from Moscow, “Joe” Adamov, was busily tape-recording aspects of the party on a portable machine. Eight-year-old Davy Bey, solicited for a comment, said into Adamov’s microphone, “Hello, everybody, happy Christmas. Daddy wants me to go to bed, but we’re all having a grand time, so I’m not going. Well, I got a gun and a boat, only what I wanted was an airplane and not so many clothes. Any kids would like it, why don’t they come over and play with us. We got bubble gum, and I know some good places to hide.” Adamov also recorded “Silent Night, Holy Night,” which the cast, gathered round the tree, sang with a volume that drowned the next-room thumping of the dance band. Ira Wolfert and his wife added their voices to the choir.
The Wolferts, parents of adult children, had booked a telephone call to America. “All our children will be together tonight; tomorrow they go different ways,” said Mrs. Wolfert when the caroling ended. “Oh, Ira,” she squeezed her husband’s hand, “that’s the only present I want. For our call to come through.” It never did. They waited till two, then went to bed.
After two, the Christmas party infiltrated the adjoining room, the Astoria’s “night club,” which is permitted to operate later than twelve on Saturdays, the only night of the week when patrons outnumber personnel.
The Soviet habit of seating strangers together does not encourage uninhibited conversation, and the cavernous restaurant, occupied to near capacity by Leningrad’s elite, was unreasonably subdued, the merest few, mostly young army and naval officers with their sweethearts, taking advantage of the orchestra’s respectable rhythms. The rest, artists and theatrical personalities, groups of military Chinese, jowly commissars accompanied by their uncorseted, gold-toothed wives, sat around bored and uncaring as castaways on a Pacific atoll.
Earl Bruce Jackson took one look, and said, “What-cha say, cats, let’s get the snakes crawlin’, put some hotcha in the pot, skin the beast and sprinkle pepper in his eyes.” Whereupon five members of the company commandeered the bandstand. The hotel musicians had not the least objection to being ousted. They all were fans of American jazz, and one of them, a devotee of Dizzy Gillespie, had accumulated a large record collection by listening to foreign broadcasts and recording the music on discs made from old X-ray plates.
Junior Mignatt spit into a trumpet, banana-fingered Lorenzo Fuller struck piano chords. Moses Lamar, a powerhouse with sandpaper lungs, stomped his foot, opened his mouth wide as an alligator. “Grab yo’ hat ’n grab yo’ coat, leave yo’ worry on de do’step …” It was as though the castaways had sighted rescue on the horizon. Smiles broke out like an unfurling of flags, tables emptied onto the dance floor. “… just direct yo’ feet …” A Chinese cadet tapped his foot, Russians packed close to the bandstand, riveted by Lamar’s scratchy voice, the drumbeat riding behind it. “… to de sunny sunny SUNNY …” Couples rocked, swayed in each other’s arms. “… side ah de streeeet!”
“Look at them zombies go!” said Jackson, and shouted to Lamar, “They’re skinned, man, skinned. Throw on the gasoline and burn ’em alive. Ooble-ee-do.”
Mrs. Breen, a smiling shepherd gazing at her flock, turned to Leonard Lyons. “You see. We’ve broken through. Robert’s done what the diplomats couldn’t.” A skeptical Lyons replied, “All I say is fiddles play while Rome burns.”
At one of the tables I noticed Priscilla Johnson, the college friend of Miss Ryan’s who was studying Russian law, and writing, so she said, articles on Soviet love life. She was sitting with three Russians, one of whom, a gnarled unshaven gnome with frothy black hair, splashed champagne into a glass and thrust it at me. “He wants you to sit down, and, gosh, you’d better,” Miss Johnson advised. “He’s a wild man, sort of. But fascinating.” He was a Georgian sculptor, responsible for the heroic statuary in the new Leningrad subway, and his “wild man” quality came out in sudden rash assertions. “You see that one with the green tie?” he asked in English, pointing at a man across the room. “He’s a rotten coward. An MVD. He wants to make me trouble.” Or, “I like the West. I have been to Berlin, and met Marlene Dietrich. She was in love with me.”
The other couple at the table, a man and wife, were silent until Miss Johnson and the sculptor left to dance. Then the woman, a death-pale brunette with Mongolian cheekbones and green almond eyes, said to me, “What an appalling little man. So dirty. A Georgian, of course. These people from the South!” She spoke English with the spurious elegance, the strained exactness of Liza Doolittle.
“I am Madame Nervitsky. You of course know my husband, the crooner,” she said, introducing me to the gentleman, who was twice her age, somewhere in his sixties, a vain, once-handsome man with an inflated stomach and a collapsing chin line. He wore make-up—powder, pencil, a
