“Now it’s time for all of us to ask Nick Smarm and Reverend Bumphead some interesting questions,” said Mrs. Pigeon.
“Mr. Smarm,” said a fat man, “now this is just a hypothetical question, but the way you were describing how the arms race is mostly the fault of the United States, couldn’t I, if I were a red-baiter type, say—just hypothetically now—that you were a paid Soviet agent?” And he hastily added, “Please don’t anybody take my question literally!” They took his question literally. The fat man was smothered in literalism. Squeals of indignation wafted toward the banks of the Don.
“What a terrible thing to say!” shrieked one of the leftist ladies. I’ll bet she was pissed—all those friends of hers acting as Soviet agents for years, and no one ever offered to pay them.
I was about to put in a word for Pudgy, but it was too late. He was already overapologizing to Nick.
“What is the cost of housing in the Soviet union as a percentage of worker wages?” asked a leftist. Reverend Bumphead didn’t know the answer to that, so Mrs. Pigeon answered the rest of the questions.
VERY EARLY FRIDAY MORNING,
JULY 23
I tried to explain my patriotic seizure to Nikolai. “Wouldn’t you feel the same?” But I didn’t seem to be getting through.
I gave up. We had more drinks. About twenty minutes later Nikolai said to me, “I did not think Nick’s speech was so interesting.” He pulled a deadpan face. “I can read Pravda.”
FRIDAY, JULY 23
Ashore in Volgograd we were taken to Momayev Hill, where umpteen million people died defending the place when it was still named after Stalin. One of the leftists chaffed me for wearing a suit and tie again. I mean, we were going to visit a mass grave.
The leftists had their wreath, but watching them present it in their bowling shirts was more than I could bear. Besides, there was a fifty-two-meter-high statue of “Mother Russia” on top of the hill, and it’s pretty interesting if you’ve never seen a reinforced-concrete nipple four feet across.
It wasn’t until that afternoon, after four days on the boat, that I discovered there were real Americans aboard. Some ordinary tourists had stumbled into this morass of the painfully caring and hopelessly committed. By price or by accident they had picked this tour, and they were about as happy as if they’d signed up for a lemming migration.
When I came back from Momayev Hill, I saw a normal-looking, unagitated person stretched out on the sundeck in a T-shirt from Air America, the old CIA-run Southeast Asia airline. “What got you on this tour?” he asked, when I stared at the logo.
“I guess masochism,” I said and looked again at the T-shirt.
He puffed out his chest. “This ought to shake the bastards up.”
He was one of a dozen New Mexicans, all friends, traveling together on a private tour. Until now they’d had a wonderful time in the USSR. They said it was a fine place as long as you could drink like a Russian and leave like an American. But they’d taken this cruise without any idea of the peace that lay in store for them, and since they’d come on board they’d barricaded themselves in the promenade-deck lounge and had kept the leftists out with loud western accents and the peaceniks away by smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes seems to alarm peace activists much more than voting for Reagan does.
The New Mexicans had become special pets of the barmaid. They were allowed to take glasses, ice, bottles, and china forward to the lounge. She wouldn’t take tips from them, but Billy, a Santa Fe architect, had gone to the market in Rostov and brought the girl an armload of flowers. She blushed to the clavicle.
The New Mexicans were amazed at their fellow passengers, not in the matter of politics, but because the passengers were so rude to the crew. “And to each other,” said Sue Ann, a real-estate developer. “I’ve never heard husbands and wives crap at each other like that in my life.”
When it came to politics, Tom, a former AID officer with the State Department in Vietnam, said, “After all, there hasn’t been a great big war since the A-bomb was invented.”
“I live in Alamogordo,” said Sue Ann. “I’ll bet that shakes the bastards up.” Indeed, that did bother some of the peaceniks, though the Air America T-shirt didn’t—not one knew what it was.
SOVIET-AMERICAN RELATIONS IN
ACTION
That evening at dinnertime, seven or eight young Russians from the local Soviet-American friendship club were ushered on board by Mrs. Pigeon. I noticed they gobbled the meat. Their president was a stiff young fellow, a future first secretary of the Committee for Lies About Grain Production if ever there was one. He had a guitar about two times bigger than normal and a watchful mien. But the others were okay. I sat between Alexei, a construction foreman who looked to be twelve, and Boris, an engineer (practically everyone in Russia is an engineer, just like our sanitation engineers are).