Mr. Lyons paced the lobby, impatient for the bus to arrive. “I’m excited. I can’t sleep. Just before I left New York, Abe Burrows called me up. We live in the same building. He said you know how cold it is in Moscow? He heard on the radio it was forty below. That was day before yesterday. You got on your long underwear?” He hiked up his trouser leg to flash a stretch of red wool. Ordinarily a trim-looking man of average size, Lyon had so well prepared himself for the cold that, resplendent in a fur hat and fur-lined coat and gloves and shoes, he seemed to bulge like a shoplifter. “My wife, Sylvia, bought me three pairs of these. From Saks. They don’t itch.”
The financier, Herman Sartorius, attired in a conservative topcoat and business suit, as though he were setting off for Wall Street, said that no, he was not wearing long underwear. “I didn’t have time to buy anything. Except a map. Did you ever try to buy a road map of Russia? Well, it’s the damnedest thing. Had to turn New York upside down before I found one. Good to have on the train. Know where we are.”
Lyons agreed. “But,” he said, lowering his voice, and with his alert black eyes snapping from side to side, “better keep it out of sight. They might not like it. A map.”
“Hmm,” said Sartorius, as though he could not quite follow the drift of Lyons’s thought. “Yes, well, I’ll keep that in mind.” Sartorius has gray hair, a height, a weight, a gentlemanly reserve that inspire the kind of confidence desirable in a financier.
“I had a letter from a friend,” continued Lyons. “President Truman. He wrote me I’d better be careful in Russia because he was no longer in any position to bail me out. Russia! What a dateline!” he said, glancing around as if hunting some evidence that his elation was shared by others.
Mrs. Wolfert said, “I’m hungry.”
Her husband patted her on the shoulder. The Wolferts, who are the parents of grown children, resemble each other in that both have pink cheeks and silvering hair, a long-married, settled-down calm. “That’s all right, Helen,” he said, between puffs on a pipe. “Soon as we get on the train, we’ll go right to the dining car.”
“Sure,” said Lyons. “Caviar and vodka.”
Nancy Ryan came racing through the lobby, her blond hair flying, her coat flapping. “Don’t stop me! There’s a crisis!” She stopped, of course; and, rather as though she enjoyed imparting the bad news, said, “Now they tell us! Ten minutes before we leave! That there isn’t a dining car on the train. And there won’t be, not until we reach the Russian border. Thirty hours!”
“I’m hungry,” said Mrs. Wolfert plaintively.
Miss Ryan hurried onward. “We’re doing the best we can.” By which she meant the management of Everyman Opera were out scouring the delicatessens of Berlin.
It was turning dark, a rain-mist was sifting through the streets when the bus arrived, and with a joking, shouting full load of passengers, rumbled off through West Berlin toward the Brandenburg Gate, where the Communist world begins.
In the bus I sat behind a couple, a young pretty member of the cast and an emaciated youth who was supposed to be a West German journalist. They had met in a Berlin jazz cellar, presumably he had fallen in love, at any rate he was now seeing her off, amid whispers and tears and soft laughter. As we neared the Brandenburg Gate, he protested that he must get off the bus.
“It would be dangerous for me to go into East Berlin.” Which, in retrospect, was an interesting remark. Because several weeks later who should turn up in Russia, grinning and swaggering and with no plausible explanation of how he’d got there, but this selfsame young man, still claiming to be a West German and a journalist and in love.
Beyond the Brandenburg Gate, we rode for forty minutes through the blackened acres of bombed-out East Berlin. The two additional buses, with the rest of the company, had arrived at the station before us. We joined the others on the platform where The Blue Express waited. Mrs. Gershwin was there, supervising the loading of her luggage onto the train. She was wearing a nutria coat and, over her arm, carried a mink coat zippered into a plastic bag. “Oh, the mink’s for Russia, darling. Darling,” she said, “why do they call it The Blue Express? When it’s not blue at all?”
It was green, a sleek collection of dark green cars hitched to a diesel engine. The letters CCCP were painted in yellow on the side of each car, and below them, in different languages, the train’s cities of destination: Berlin-Warsaw-Moscow. Soviet train officers, elegantly turned out in black Persian lamb hats and flaring princess-cut coats, were stationed at the entrances to every car.
Sleeping-car attendants, more humbly dressed, stood beside them. Both the officers and the attendants were smoking cigarettes in long vamp-style holders. As they watched the confusion around them, the excited milling about of the troupe, they managed to preserve a stony uninterest despite the bold attentions of those Americans who approached and stared at them as though amazed, and rather peeved, to discover Russians had two eyes correctly located.
A man from the cast walked over to one of the officers. “Tell me something, kid,” he said, indicating the lettering on the side of the train, “what’s that mean, CCCP?”
The Russian pointed his cigarette holder at the man. Frowning, he said, “Sie sind Deutsch?”
The actor laughed. “I’d make a kind of funny-looking German. Seems to me I would.”
A second Russian, a car attendant, spoke up. “Sind sie nicht Deutsch?”
“Man,” said the actor, “let’s us settle this misery.” He glanced down the platform and beckoned to Robin Joachim, a young Russian-speaking New Yorker whom Everyman Opera had hired to go along on the trip as a translator.
The two Russians smiled with pleasure when Joachim began to talk to them in their own language; pleasure gave way to astonishment as he explained that the passengers boarding their train were not Germans, but “Amerikansky” on their way to perform an opera in Leningrad and Moscow.
“Isn’t that peculiar?” said Joachim, turning to a group of listeners that included Leonard Lyons. “Nobody told them a thing about us being on the train. They never heard of Porgy and Bess.”
Lyons, the first of the Americans to recover from the shock of this news, whipped out a notebook and pencil. “Well, what do they think? What’s their reaction?”
“Oh,” said Joachim, “they couldn’t be happier. They’re delirious with joy.”
It was true that the Russians were nodding and laughing. The officer gave the attendant a hearty slap on the back and shouted an order.
“What did he say?” asked Lyons, pencil poised.
Joachim said, “He told him to go put some tea on the samovar.”
A station clock said six-five. There were signs of departure, whistle sounds, a clanging of doors. In the corridors of the train a radio began blaring martial music, and the company, now all aboard, were hanging out the windows waving at dispirited German luggage porters, none of whom had received the “capitalist insult,” as we’d been warned the People’s Democracies consider it, of a tip. Suddenly, at every window, a cheer went up.
It was for the Breens, Robert and Wilva, who were plunging along the platform, followed by a wagonload of food supplies, cardboard cases of beer and wine, frankfurters, rolls and sweet buns, cold cuts, apples and oranges. There was only time to carry the cases onto the train before the radio’s military fanfare reached a crescendo, and the Breens, watching with brave parental smiles, saw their “unprecedented project” slide away from them into the night.
The space to which I’d been assigned was in Car 2, Compartment 6. It seemed larger than an ordinary wagon-lit compartment, and had a certain prettiness about it, despite the presence of a radio loudspeaker that could not be completely turned off, and a blue light bulb, burning in a blue ceiling, that could never be extinguished. The walls were blue, the window was framed with blue plush curtains which matched the seat upholstery. There was a small table between the seats, and on it a lamp with a rosy silk shade.
Miss Ryan introduced me to our companions in Compartment 6, Earl Bruce Jackson and his fiancée, Helen Thigpen, whom I’d not met before.
Jackson is tall and lean, a live-wire with slanting eyes and a saturnine face. He affects a chin goatee, and his hands are radiant with rings, diamonds and sapphires and rubies. We shook hands. “Peace, brother, peace. That’s the word,” he said, and resumed peeling an orange, letting the hulls drop on the floor.
“No, Earl,” said Miss Ryan, “that’s not the word. The word is, keep things tidy. Put your orange hulls in the ashtray. After all,” she said, looking out the window where the lonely last lights of East Berlin were fading, “this is going to be our home for a hell-uva long time.”
“That’s right, Earl. Our home,” said Miss Thigpen.
“Peace, brother, peace. That’s the word. Tell the boys back in New York,” said Jackson, and spit out some seed.
Miss Ryan began to distribute part of the last-minute picnic the Breens had provided. With a sigh, Miss
