«Shall I grow a beard to cross the fronder?» muses homesick General Gurko in Chapter Six of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus.
«Better than none,» said Harley Q., one of my gayest advisers. «But,» he added, «do it before we glue on and stamp O.B.’s picture and don’t lose weight afterwards.» So I grew it—during the atrocious heartracking wait for the room I could not mock up and the visa I could not forge. It was an ample Victorian affair, of a nice, rough, tawny shade threaded with silver. It reached up to my apple-red cheekbones and came down to my waistcoat, commingling on the way with my lateral yellow-gray locks. Special contact lenses not only gave another, dumbfounded, expression to my eyes, but somehow changed their very shape from squarish leonine, to round Jovian. Only upon my return did I notice that the old tailor-made trousers, on me and in my bag, displayed my real name on the inside of the waistband.
My good old British passport, which had been handled cursorily by so many courteous officers who had never opened my books (the only real identity papers of its accidental holder), remained, after a procedure, that both decency and incompetence forbid me to describe, physically the same in many respects; but certain of its other features, details of substance and items of information, were, let us say, «modified» by a new method, an alchemysterious treatment, a technique of genius, «still not understood elsewhere,» as the chaps in the lab tactfully expressed people’s utter unawareness of a discovery that might have saved countless fugitives and secret agents. In other words nobody, no forensic chemist not in the know, could suspect, let alone prove, that my passport was false. I do not know why I dwell on this subject with such tedious persistence. Probably, because I otlynivayu—«shirk»—the task of describing my visit to Leningrad; yet I can’t put it off any longer.
2
After almost three months of fretting I was ready to go. I felt lacquered from head to foot, like that naked ephebe, the bright clou of a pagan procession, who died of dermal asphyxia in his coat of golden varnish. A few days before my actual departure there occurred what seemed a harmless shift at the time. I was to wing off on a Thursday from Paris. On Monday a melodious female voice reached me at my nostalgically lovely hotel, rue
Rivoli, to tell me that something—perhaps a hushed-up crash in a Soviet veil of mist—had clogged the general schedule and that I could board an Aeroflot turboprop to Moscow either this Wednesday or the next. I chose the former, of course, for it did not affect the date of my rendezvous.
My traveling companions were a few English and French tourists and a goodish bunch of gloomy officials from Soviet trade missions. Once inside the aircraft, a certain illusion of cheap unreality enveloped me—to linger about me for the rest of my trip. It was a very warm day in June and the farcical air-conditioning system failed to outvie the whiffs of sweat and the sprayings of Krasnaya Moskva, an insidious perfume which imbued even the hard candy (named Ledenets vzlyotnyy, «take-off caramel,» on the wrapper) generously distributed to us before the start of the flight. Another fairy-tale touch was the bright dapple—yellow curlicues and violet eyespots—adorning the blinds. A similarly colored waterproof bag in the seat pocket before me was ominously labeled «for waste disposal»—such as the disposal of my identity in that fairy-land.
My mood and mental condition needed strong liquor rather than another round of vzlyotnyy or some nice reading matter; still I accepted a publicity magazine from a stout, unsmiling, bare-armed stewardess in sky blue, and was interested to learn that (in contrast to current triumphs) Russia had not done so well in the Soccer Olympics of 1912 when the «Tsarist team» (consisting presumably of ten boyars and one bear) lost 12-0 to a German side.
I had taken a tranquilizer and hoped to sleep at least part of the way; but a first, and only, attempt at dozing off was resolutely thwarted by a still fatter stewardess, in a still stronger aura of onion sweat, asking me nastily to draw in the leg that I had stuck out too far into the aisle where she circulated with more and more publicity material. I envied darkly my windowside neighbor, an elderly Frenchman—or, anyway, scarcely a compatriot of mine—with a straggly gray-black beard and a terrible tie, who slept through the entire five-hour flight, disdaining the sardines and even the vodka which I could not resist, though I had a flask of better stuff in my hip pocket. Perhaps historians of photography could help me some day to define how, by precisely what indices, I am enabled to establish that the recollection of an anonymous unplaceable face goes back 1930-1935, say, and not to 1945-1950. My neighbor was practically the twin of a person I had known in Paris, but who? A fellow writer? A concierge? A cobbler? The difficulty of determination grated less than the riddle of its limits as suggested by the degree of perceived «shading» and the «feel» of the image.
I got a closer but still more teasing look at him when, toward the close of our journey, my raincoat fell from the rack and landed upon him, and he grinned amiably enough as he emerged from under the sudden awakener. And I glimpsed again his fleshy profile and thick eyebrow while submitting for inspection the contents of my only valise and fighting the insane urge to question the propriety of the phrasing in the English form of the Customs Declaration: «…miniature graphics, slaughtered fowl, live animals and birds.»
I saw him again, but not as clearly, during our transfer by bus from one airport to another through some shabby environs of Moscow—a city which I had never seen in my life and which interested me about as much as, say, Birmingham. On the plane to Leningrad, however, he was again next to me, this time on the inner side. Mixed odors of dour hostess and «Red Moscow,» with a gradual prevalence of the first ingredient, as our bare-armed angels multiplied their last ministrations, accompanied us from 21:18 to 22:33. In order to draw out my neighbor before he and his riddle vanished, I asked him, in French, if he knew anything about a picturesque group that had boarded our aircraft in Moscow. He replied, with a Parisian grasseyement, that they were, he believed, Iranian circus people touring Europe. The men looked like harlequins in mufti, the women like birds of paradise, the children like golden medallions, and there was one dark-haired pale beauty in black bolero and yellow sharovars who reminded me of Iris or a prototype of Iris.
«I hope,» I said, «we’ll see them perform in Leningrad.»
«Pouf!» he rejoined. «They can’t compete with our Soviet circus.» I noted the automatic «our.»
Both he and I were billeted in the Astoria, a hideous pile built around World War One, I think. The heavily bugged (I had been taught by Guy Gayley a way of finding that out in one gleeful twinkle) and therefore sheepish-looking room «de luxe,» with orange curtains and an orange-draped bed in its old-world alcove, did have a private bath as stipulated, but it took me some time to cope with a convulsive torrent of clay-colored water. «Red Moscow’s» last stand took place on a cake of incarnadine soap. «Meals,» said a notice, «may be served in the rooms.» For the heck of it I tried ordering an evening snack; nothing happened, and I spent another hungry hour in the recalcitrant restaurant. The Iron Curtain is really a lampshade: its variety here was gemmed with glass incrustations in a puzzle of petals. The kotleta po kievski I ordered took forty-four minutes to come from Kiev—and two seconds to be sent back as a non-cutlet, with a tiny oath (murmured in Russian) that made the waitress start and gape at me and my Daily Worker. The Caucasian wine was undrinkable.
A sweet little scene happened to be enacted as I hurried toward the lift, trying to recall where I had put my blessed Burpies. A flushed athletic liftyorsha wearing several bead necklaces was in the act of being replaced by a much older woman of the pensioned type, at whom she shouted while stomping out of the lift: «Ya tebe eto popomnyu, sterva! (I’ll get even with you, dirty bitch)»—and proceeded to barge into me and almost knock me down (I am a large, but fluff-light old fellow). «Shtoy-ty suyoshsya pod nogi? (Why do you get underfoot?)» she cried in the same insolent tone of voice which left the night attendant quietly shaking her gray head all the way up to my floor.
Between two nights, two parts of a serial dream, in which I vainly tried to locate
