“Darling, you haven’t been out,” said Mrs. Gershwin, whose compartment I passed in returning. “Well, you shouldn’t. It isn’t safe.” Mrs. Gershwin was one of the two people occupying compartments to themselves. (The other was Leonard Lyons, who had obtained privacy by threatening to leave the train unless his erstwhile roommates, Herman Sartorius and Warner Watson, were removed. “It’s nothing personal,” he said, “but I’m a working man. I’ve got to turn out a thousand words a day.
I can’t write with a lot of characters sitting around.” Sartorius and Watson had therefore been forced to move in with the Ira Wolferts. As for Mrs. Gershwin, she’d been allotted her solo status because, in the view of the management, “She deserves it. She’s a Gershwin.”) Without discarding her diamonds, Mrs. Gershwin had changed into slacks and a sweater; she’d tied ribbons in her hair and slippered her feet in bits of fluff. “It must have been freezing out there. I see snow on the ground. You ought to have some hot tea. Mmmmm, it’s lovely,” she said, sipping dark, almost black tea from a tall glass set in a silver holder with a silver handle. “That darling little man is brewing it on his samovar.”
I went to look for the tea-maker, who was the attendant for Car 2; but when I found him, at the end of the corridor, he was contending with more than a blazing samovar. Twerp, the boxer puppy, was yapping between his legs and snapping at his trousers. Moreover, he was undergoing an intense interview, Lyons asking the questions and Robin Joachim acting as translator. Small and haggard, the Russian had a pushed-in, Pekingese face creased with wrinkles that seemed to indicate nutritional defects rather than age.
His mouth was studded with steel teeth, and his eyelids drooped, as though he were on the verge of sleep. Between dispensing tea and fending off Twerp, he answered Lyons’s quick-fire queries like a wilted housewife talking to the censor. He said he was from Smolensk. He said his feet hurt him, his back hurt him, that he always had a headache from overwork. He said he only made two hundred rubles a month ($50, but much less in actual buying power) and considered himself underpaid. He said yes, he’d very much appreciate a tip.
Lyons paused in his note-taking and said, “I didn’t know they were allowed to complain like this. The way it sounds, I get the impression this guy is a discontent.”
The attendant gave me my tea, and at the same time offered me, from a crumpled pack, one of his own cigarettes. It was two-thirds filter and one-third tobacco, good for seven or eight harsh puffs, though I didn’t enjoy that many, for as I started back to my compartment the train lurched forward with an abruptness that sent both tea and cigarette flying.
Marilyn Putnam poked her head into the corridor. “Holy mackerel,” she said, surveying the wreckage, “did Twerp do that?”
In Compartment 6 the berths had been made for the night, indeed for the whole journey, since they were never remade. Clean coarse linen, a crunchy pillow that smelled of hay, a single thin blanket. Miss Ryan and Miss Thigpen had gone to bed to read, having first turned the radio as low as it would go and opened the window a finger’s width.
Miss Thigpen yawned, and asked me, “Did you see Earl, honey?”
I told her that I had. “He’s teaching Ducky to play Tonk.”
“Oh,” said Miss Thigpen, giggling sleepily, “that means Earl won’t be home till dawn.”
I kicked off my shoes, and lay down in my berth, thinking in a moment I’d finish undressing. Overhead, in the berth above mine, I could hear Miss Ryan muttering to herself, as though she were reading aloud. It developed that she was studying Russian, using for the purpose an old English-Russian phrase book the U.S. Army had issued during the war for the benefit of American soldiers who might come in contact with Russians.
“Nancy,” said Miss Thigpen, like a child asking for a bedtime story, “Nancy, say us something in Russian.”
“The only thing I’ve learned is Awr-ga-nih-ya raneen …” Miss Ryan faltered. She took a deep breath “… V-pa-lavih-yee. Wow! I only wanted to learn the alphabet. So I can read street signs.”
“But that was nice, Nancy. What does it mean?”
“It means, ‘I have been wounded in the privates.’ ”
“Really, Nancy,” said Miss Thigpen, bewildered, “why on earth would you care to memorize something like that?”
“Go to sleep,” said Miss Ryan, turning off her reading light.
Miss Thigpen yawned again. She pulled the covers up to her chin. “I’m about ready to.”
Soon, lying there, I had a sense of stillness traveling through the train, seeping through the cars like the wintry color of the blue light bulb. Frost was spreading at the corners of the window; it seemed like a web-weaving in reverse. On the muted radio an orchestra of balalaikas made shivery music; like an odd and lonely counterpoint, someone somewhere nearby was playing a harmonica.
“Listen,” whispered Miss Thigpen, calling attention to the harmonica. “That’s Junior,” she said, meaning Junior Mignatt, a member of the cast still in his teens. “Don’t you know that boy is lonesome? He’s from Panama. He’s never seen snow before.”
“Go to sleep,” said Miss Ryan. The northern roar of wind at the window seemed to echo her command. The train shrieked into a tunnel. For me, fallen asleep fully clothed, the tunnel lasted all night long.
Coldness woke me. Snow was blowing through the window’s opening. Enough had settled at the foot of my berth to scoop into a snowball. I got up, glad I’d gone to bed with my clothes on, and closed the window. It was blurred with ice. I rubbed a part of it until I could peer out. There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink. We were on the outskirts of a city. Rural lamplighted houses gave way to cement blocks of forlorn, look-alike apartment dwellings.
The train rumbled over a bridge that spanned a street; below, a frail streetcar, jammed with people on their way to work, careened round a curve like a rickety bobsled. Moments later we pulled into a station, which by now I realized must be Warsaw. On a dim, snow-deep platform gangs of men stood clustered together stamping their feet and slapping their ears. I noticed our car attendant, the tea-maker, join one of the groups. He gestured toward the train and said something that made them laugh. An explosion of breath-smoke filled the air. Still laughing, several of the men approached the train.
I slipped back into bed, for it was obvious that they intended to peek in the windows. One after another, distorted faces mashed themselves against the glass. Presently I heard a short scream. It came from a compartment farther ahead and sounded like Dolores Swann. Screams were understandable if she’d wakened to see, looming at the window, one of these frosty masks. Though it roused none of my own companions, I waited, expecting a commotion in the car, but quietness resumed, except for Twerp, who started barking with a regular rhythm that sent me off to sleep again.
At ten, when I opened my eyes, we were in a wild, crystal world of frozen rivers and snowfields. Here and there, like printing on paper, stretches of fir trees interrupted the whiteness. Flights of crows seemed to skate on a sky hard and shiny as ice.
“Man,” said Earl Bruce Jackson, just awake and sleepily scratching himself as he stared out the window. “I’m telling you. They don’t grow oranges here.”
The washroom in Car 2 was a bleak, unheated chamber. There was a rusty washbasin with the customary two faucets, hot and cold. Unfortunately, they both leaked a frigid trickle. That first morning a long queue of men waited at the washroom door, toothbrushes in one hand, shaving tackle in the other. Ducky James had the notion of asking the attendant, who was busily stoking the little coal fire under his samovar, to part with some of his tea water and “give us blokes a chance at a decent shave.” Everyone thought this a splendid idea except the Russian, for when the request was translated to him, he looked at his samovar as though it were bubbling with melted diamonds. Then he did a curious thing.
He stepped up to each man and brushed his fingertips against their cheeks, examining their beard stubble. There was a tenderness in the action that made it memorable. “Boy,” said Ducky James, “he sure is affectionate.”
But the attendant concluded his researches with a headshake. Absolute no, nyet, he would not give away his hot water. The condition of the gentlemen’s beards did not justify such a sacrifice, and besides, when traveling, the “realistic” man should expect to go unshaven. “My water is for tea,” he said. “Hot and sweet and good for the spirit.”
A steaming glass of it went with me into the washroom. I used it for brushing my teeth, and then, combining it with soap, transformed it into a shaving cream. Rather sticky, but not bad at all.
Afterward, feeling spruce, I commenced a round of visits. The occupant of Compartment 1, Leonard Lyons, was having a professional tête-à-tête with Earl Bruce Jackson. Clearly Jackson had
