Riding the Iron Rooster Read online

  "You lose," I said.

  At the border, the train was searched by customs officials. One of my champagne bottles blew its cork while the customs woman was in my compartment, but she didn't blink. She was looking for guns, books, money, jewelry. "No guns," I said, and showed her what I had.

  In the meantime the wheels of all the railway cars were changed—the wheel assemblies unhitched and wide-gauge ones attached.

  'They took two of our guys!" It was Morris Least, yelling. He complained to the tour leader. "The Russians just marched them away." Morris was breathless and frightened. And yet he had been expecting this.

  "I'm keeping my head down," Kicker said.

  They had taken Bud Wittrick for questioning. He had apparently been flaunting a copy of The Economist. Was that a crime? And Rick Westbetter had been cleaning the windows of his compartment with the squeegee he had brought from Maryland. He had to be a spy—why else would he want clean windows?

  Just before we set off for Moscow, Wittrick and Westbetter were returned to us, and over dinner they told stories of their captivity and interrogation.

  I drank the last of my Polish champagne and read more of Old Goriot, and then went to sleep. We passed through Minsk and Smolensk in the night. I woke to snow on the fields and ice in the ditches beside the tracks. The dwellings were wooden huts and bungalows, and the bumpy roads showed wheel tracks through the mud-splashed ice crust.

  "That's what Ohio looked like when I was growing up," Rick Westbetter said. "That's the nineteen thirties."

  "No sight-seeing for me," I told the tour leader, when we arrived in Moscow. I decided to walk in the city, for in a few days we would be on the Trans-Siberian Express and unable to walk. In any case, the sights in Moscow were limited: the Kremlin Museum was closed, many of the churches were shut, because of restoration work, and what my fellow tourists were faced with was nothing more than a long bus ride around the city. I went to the Intourist hotel and bought tickets for The Nutcracker at the Bolshoi and a modern ballet at the Stanislavski Theatre. When I remarked that it seemed easy to get tickets, the clerk said, "Because you have dollars."

  I walked to Saint Basil's, and to the Metropole Hotel, where I had stayed in 1968—it was now a sort of monument—and strolled through the GUM store, looking at the merchandise.

  While I was staring at some very inferior-looking alarm clocks, I realized that the woman on my right and the one on my left were sidling nearer to me.

  "Is nice clock? You like clock?"

  I said, "Alarm clocks wake you up. That's why I hate them."

  "Is funny," the woman on my right said. She was dark, in her early twenties. "You want to change rubles?"

  The surprising thing to me was that one of these young women was pushing a little boy in a baby carriage, and the other had a bag of what looked like old laundry. They were pretty women, but obviously preoccupied with domestic chores—airing the baby, doing the wash. I invited them to the ballet—I had bought pairs of tickets. They said no, they had to cook dinner for their husbands and do the housework, but what about changing some money? The official rate was seventy-two cents to the ruble: they offered me ten times that.

  "What would I do with all those rubles?"

  "So many things."

  The dark one was Olga, the blonde Natasha—a ballet dancer, she said. Olga spoke Italian; Natasha only Russian, and had a dancer's slimness and pallor, and china-blue eyes with a Slavic slant and an expressive Russian mouth.

  I said I was walking—I needed the exercise.

  "We will go with you!"

  That was why, about ten minutes later, I came to be walking with a Russian woman on each arm, carrying Natasha's laundry—Olga pushing little Boris in his pram—down Karl Marx Prospekt. Olga was chatting to me in Italian and Natasha was laughing.

  "You seem to be doing all right for yourself, Paul!"

  It was a group of people from the tour, heading back to the bus. I was delighted that they saw me—what would they make of it?

  The women and I stopped at a café and had a hot chocolate, and they said they wanted to see me again—"We can talk!" They made a fuss about the time, probably because they were deceiving their husbands, but we agreed on a time when they would call me.

  That evening I went to the circus and was reminded of how much I hate circuses, especially communist ones. Everyone says: Rumanians are wonderful acrobats! Bulgarians are brilliant jugglers! You haven't lived until you've seen a Russian on a tightrope—and a Chinese performer can balance a whole set of crockery on a chopstick he's holding in his teeth! Why is this so? Why all the flying humans, and people tumbling like ferrets, and doing amazing things with stools?

  This Moscow Circus had bears that walked and danced—big hairy things, slavering and pirouetting; and dogs that balanced on one leg, and seals that gleamed and manipulated balls with their flippers. All the animals looked human in their frightened way—walking stiffly and unnaturally on their hind legs, and giving pleading glances to their trainers, as if they were going to be kicked or electrocuted if they did the wrong dance step.

  It all made me very uneasy; it seemed to me funless and frantic. Was I taking it too seriously in thinking that it was the most vulgar expression of peasant entertainment? It was what poor people did to get kopecks thrown at them in the bazaars and market squares. It was open-air amusement, and it made me think of serfs and slaves and gypsies: men leaping like dogs, dogs goose-stepping like men. And virtually all the interest in the women performers was inspired by their scanty costumes—so shocking in the puritan society of political commissars.

  It is hard to imagine a well-educated and fair-minded society producing circus performers, or any sensitive person training a bear to dance. Circuses may flourish in some prosperous countries, but the artists, so-called, come from elsewhere. The Ringling brothers were Wisconsin farmboys—very poor—who liberated themselves by learning to juggle and tumble. Rudolf Ringling could balance a plow on his chin. Today, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus gets most of its stars from either Eastern Europe or China.

  The simplest explanation of the circus's popularity is that most people like a spectacle—music, tumbling, noise, sex, patriotism and cheap thrills. They enjoy watching white dwarfs riding elephants or one of the more popular acts that Ringling Brothers presents: twenty-five black people playing basketball on unicycles. There is another side to this. "The desire to turn men into animals was the principal motive for the development of slavery," Elias Canetti wrote in the chapter entitled "Transformation" in Crowds and Power. "It is as difficult to overestimate its strength as that of its opposite desire: to turn animals into men ... popular amusements like the public exhibition of performing animals."

  The spectacle of the Moscow Circus supported the truth of that statement. Nothing was more revealing of Soviet thought than a Russian lion tamer, and the process that lay behind that big brown bear's clumsy jig or the lobster quadrille said a great deal about the political system.

  I also thought: What a stupid man I am to be sitting alone at a circus in Moscow. I could not imagine why I wasn't doing something vastly more enjoyable, like sailing off East Sandwich, Massachusetts. And then I remembered that I was on my way to Mongolia and China.

  There was a message waiting for me when I got back to the Hotel Ukraine: Olga will call tomorrow at 12. She called on the stroke of noon the next day to say she would call again at two. At two she said she and Natasha would meet me at three-thirty. These phone calls had the effect of making our meeting seem necessary and inevitable. It was only when I was waiting on the hotel steps that it occurred to me that I had no idea why I was seeing them at all.

  Natasha walked by but did not greet me. She was wearing old clothes and carrying a shopping basket. She winked at me; I followed her to a taxi in which Olga was already sitting and smoking. When I got in, Olga gave the driver an order and he drove off. After that they intermittently quarreled over whether this was the right direction o
r the quickest way.

  After twenty minutes of this—we were now deep in the high-rise Moscow suburbs—I said, "Where are we going?"

  "Not far."

  There were people raking leaves and picking up trash from the streets. I had never seen so many street sweepers. I asked what was going on.

  Olga said that this was the one day in the year when people worked for nothing, tidying up the city. The day was called subodnik and this work was given free to honor Lenin—his birthday was two days away.

  "Don't you think you should be out there with a shovel, Olga?"

  "I am too busy," she said, and her laugh said: Not on your life!

  "Are we going to a house?"

  "We are going to my girfriend's apartment."

  Olga gave more directions to the driver. He turned right, entered a side street and then cut down a dirt road and cursed. That bad road connected one housing estate with another. He kept driving on these back roads among tall, bare apartment houses and then he stopped the car and babbled angrily.

  "We can walk the rest of the way," Olga said. "You can pay him."

  The driver snatched my rubles and drove off as we walked towards a sixteen-story building, through children playing and their parents sweeping the pavements in a good subodnik spirit.

  No one took any notice of me. I was merely a man in a raincoat following two women down a muddy sidewalk, past walls that had been scribbled on, past broken windows and through a smashed door to a hallway where three baby carriages were parked and some of the floor tiles were missing. It could have been a housing estate in south London or the Bronx. The elevator had been vandalized but it still worked. It was varnished wood, with initials scratched onto it. We took it to the top floor.

  "Excuse me," Olga said. "I couldn't get my friend on the phone. I must talk to her first."

  But by now I had imagined that we had come to a place where I was going to be threatened and probably robbed. There were three huge Muscovites behind the door. They would seize me and empty my pockets, and then blindfold me and drop me somewhere in Moscow. They didn't go in for kidnapping. I asked myself whether I was worried, and answered: Kind of.

  I was somewhat reassured when I saw a surprised and sluttish-looking woman answer the door. Her hair was tangled, she wore a bathrobe. It was late afternoon—she had just woken up. She whispered a little to Olga and then she let us in.

  Her name was Tatyana and she was annoyed at having been disturbed—she had been watching television in bed. I asked to use the toilet and made a quick assessment of the apartment. It was large—four big rooms and a central hall with bookshelves. All the curtains were drawn. It smelled of vegetables and hair spray and that unmistakable odor that permeates places in which there are late-sleepers—the smell of bedclothes and bodies and feety aromas.

  "You want tea?"

  I said yes, and we all sat in the small kitchen. Tatyana brushed her hair and put on makeup as she boiled water in a kettle and made tea.

  There were magazines on the table—two oldish copies of Vogue, and last month's Tatler and Harper's Bazaar. Seeing them in that place gave me what I was sure would be a lasting hatred for those magazines.

  "My friend from Italy brings them for me," Tatyana said.

  "She has many foreign friends," Olga said. "That is why I wanted you to meet her. Because you are our foreign friend. You want to change rubles?"

  I said no—there was nothing I wanted to buy.

  "We can find something for you," Olga said, "and you can give us U.S. dollars."

  "What are you going to find?"

  "You like Natasha. Natasha likes you. Why don't you make love to her?"

  I stood up and went to the window. The three women stared at me, and when I looked at Natasha she smiled demurely and batted her eyelashes. Beside her was her shopping basket with a box of detergent, some fresh spinach wrapped in newspaper, some cans of food, a pack of plastic clothespins and a box of disposable diapers.

  "Here?" I said. "Now?"

  They all smiled at me. Out the window I saw people sweeping the sidewalks, raking leaves and shoveling up piles of rubbish—a little unselfish demonstration of civic pride for Lenin's birthday.

  "How much will it cost me to make love to Natasha?"

  "One hundred and seventy U.S. dollars."

  'That's rather a precise figure," I said. "How did you arrive at that price?"

  'That's how much a cassette recorder costs at the Berioska shop."

  "I'll think about it."

  "You have to decide now," Olga said sternly. "Do you have a credit card?"

  "You take credit cards?"

  "No, the Berioska shop can."

  'That's an awful lot of money, Olga."

  "Hah!" Tatyana jeered. "My boyfriends give me radios, tape recorders, cassettes, clothes—thousands of dollars. And you're arguing about a few hundred dollars."

  "Listen, I'm not boasting—believe me. But if I like someone I don't usually buy her before we go to bed. In America we do it for fun."

  Olga said, "If we don't have dollars we can't buy radios at the Berioska. It closes at six o'clock. What's wrong?"

  "I don't like being hurried."

  "All this talk! You could have finished by now!"

  I hated this and had a strong desire to get away from the nagging. It was hot in the kitchen, the tea was bitter, all those people raking leaves sixteen floors down depressed me.

  I said, "Why don't we go to the Berioska shop first?"

  Tatyana dressed and we found a taxi. It was a twenty-minute ride and well after five by the time we arrived. But for me it was simply a way of saving face—and saving money. I had been disgusted with myself back there at the apartment.

  Before we went into the shop the three women started bickering. Olga said that it was all my fault for not making love to Natasha when I should have. Tatyana had to meet her daughter at school, Natasha was due home because she was going to the Black Sea tomorrow with her husband and small child—and was counting on having a cassette recorder; and Olga herself had to be home to rook dinner. Vremya, Natasha said, vremya. Time, time.

  I had never seen such expensive electronic equipment—overpriced radios and tape decks, a Sony Walkman for $300.

  "Natasha wants one of those."

  Olga was pointing to a $200 cassette machine.

  "That's a ridiculous price."

  "It's a good cassette. Japanese."

  I was looking at Natasha and thinking how thoroughly out of touch these people were with market forces.

  "Vremya," Natasha said urgently.

  "These are nice," I began trying on the fur hats. "Wouldn't you like one of these?"

  Olga said, "You must buy something now. Then we go."

  And I imagined it—the cassette recorder in a Berioska bag, and the dash to Tatyana's, and the fumble upstairs with Natasha panting vremya, vremya, and then off I'd go, saying to myself: You've just been screwed.

  I said, "Tatyana, your daughter's waiting at school. Olga, your husband's going to want his dinner on time. And Natasha, you're very nice, but if you don't go home and pack you'll never make it to the Black Sea with your husband."

  "What are you doing?"

  "I have an appointment," I said, and left, as the Berioska shop was closing.

  I went to the Bolshoi, and I noticed at the coat check and the buffet and the bar, Russian women gave me frank looks. It was not lust or romance, merely curiosity because they had spotted a man who probably had hard currency. It was not the sort of look women usually offered. It was an unambiguous lingering gaze, a half smile that said: Alay be we can work something out.

  Moscow had a chastening effect on the tour group. They became very quiet and rather wary. They seemed actually afraid—something I had not expected. Was it the glowering soldiers and police? Or perhaps the repeated security checks, and having to show your hotel ID card before you were allowed into the lobby? Or was it the big bare buildings and wide streets? Ashley said he fe
lt very small in Moscow.

  Kicker winked and told me that in his three days in Moscow he had not left the hotel. He said he was afraid of being picked up and never heard of again.

  "Why would they do that?"

  "I was a Marine," he said. "They kill you for things like that in Russia. Let's get out of here. That's what I say."

  It was a dark rainy afternoon when we set off from Yaroslav Station on the Trans-Siberian. The people in the group were nervous and chatty—glad to be going but apprehensive about what it would be like. Some had never spent a night on a train. They were faced with four nights to Irkutsk, living at close quarters—Americans in one compartment, British in another, Australians in a third, the nameless French foursome together. From the moment I was assigned to my compartment I knew it would be a splendid trip: I was alone. I had my Polish provisions, and chocolate and champagne that 1 had bought in Moscow. 1 had books, and my shortwave radio. I was looking forward to four days of bliss.

  It is an unusual feeling in the Soviet Union, because they do not cater to the individual—they hardly seem to notice that the solitary traveler exists. If a person enters a Russian restaurant alone, it takes ages for him to be served; but the group of thirty-five drunken Finns chanting "Suomi! Suomi!" (Finland! Finland!) are fussed over and fed and are back on their tour bus in less than an hour. The Soviets prefer to feed large groups of people; they like herding them and lecturing them and counting them and sending them on their way. The individual is often dangerous and always a nuisance. Why bother with individuals when it is so much easier to bully a whole mob of tourists? The solitary traveler is despised and feared, and if he manages to triumph over the bureaucracy, he will find it twice as expensive as traveling with a group. Soviet society does not recognize the individual. The answer is simple: travel with a group and, when it suits you, drop out.

  Traveling on my own I would never have had a sleeping compartment to myself. But two whole coaches had been allotted to this tour, and as the tour only filled one and a half coaches, some of us lucked out and were on our own.