Time for more beer.
It seemed to be dawning on a few of the peaceniks that something was askew. When I returned from the bar the second time, one of them was addressing Guvov. “A lot of the Americans on this trip have admitted the errors of American foreign policy. How come none of the Soviets have admitted any Soviet errors?”
“We don’t criticize the foreign policy of our government,” said Guvov, “because we hundred-percent agree with it and approve of it.” The questioner gasped. But the leftists all clapped, and so did quite a few of the peaceniks.
That was it for me and peace conferences. I apologize, but this reporter did not attend any more peace functions of any kind.
LOATH BOAT
The leftists and peaceniks spent most of every day talking. They were not arguing. They were not analyzing. They were not making observations. What they were doing was agreeing with each other—in feverish spasms of accordance, mad confabs of apposition, blathers of consonance. On Reagan, on the weapons freeze, on the badness of Israel, on the dangers of war, on the need for peace, they agreed.
I finally decided these people were crazy.
I watched my cabin mate write a letter to his wife. It was a political exhortation. “We Americans must repudiate the Reagan administration . . .” This to his wife of thirty years.
Crazy. And stupid too.
One, who was from the deep Midwest and looked like Millicent Fenwick, told me, “You know, if the people who put Reagan in office prevail, they’re going to take the vote from women.”
As we were going through the locks of the Don-Volga canal the woman with the direct connection between her cerebral cortex and her mouth came nattering up beside me at the rail. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she said, staring at a gigantic blank wall of concrete. “They’re such wonderful engineers in the Soviet union .” I agreed it was an impressive piece of work. “Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous, marvelous,” she said. She peeked over the side. “And where do they get all the water?”
The Intourist guides were at wits’ end, the Soviet experts were becoming testy, and the crew was clearly disgusted and getting into the grog ration earlier each day.
The ship’s doctor, a blowsy, mottle-eyed, disbarred-looking fellow, had taken to experimenting on the diarrhea symptoms half the Americans were suffering. Marya gave an elaborate burlesque of accompanying him as the translator on his rounds. The Russians would not explain the joke, but I know one peacenik had gone to him with the malady and received a laxative and a glass of 200-proof neutral grain spirits. I did not see that person again for thirty-six hours.
SUNDAY, JULY 25
Sunday I was drunk.
WHAT WAS GOING ON IN THE
SOVIET CAPITAL AND HEARTLAND
AS WE JOINED THE NATION THIS
SUMMER ON AN EXCITING AND
AFFORDABLE SOVIET EXCURSION?
I know I’ll never understand what the Americans thought they were doing in Russia, but I’m almost as confused about what the Russians thought they were letting them do.
Obviously the Volga Peace Cruise was approved. Unapproved things unhappen in the USSR. But though the Soviets had approved it, they didn’t seem very interested. In one of the cities where we docked, a local reporter came aboard and talked to Nick Smarm. When Nick finished excoriating the U.S. and began pointing out that the Soviet union was also engaged in the arms race, the reporter simply stopped writing. This was the total media attention given us.
I suppose we were under surveillance. I noticed that Sonya took complete notes during the conferences, but it seemed to me she was paying most attention to what her countrymen said. Some peaceniks suspected their rooms had been searched. One woman had found her bags a little too neatly closed and zipped. Another woman had her copy of Peter the Great disappear.
“Do not bother to look for it,” said one of the Intourist guides, when the woman made a stink. “It has doubtless slipped behind the folding bunk when the steward lady has been making the bed. It is most difficult to look under there so steward lady will do it for you during dinner.” This sounded suspicious. But the book did not mysteriously reappear after dinner, not even with certain pages torn out, so maybe it was just lost.
Neither I nor the outspokenly pro-American New Mexicans were bothered. One day Nikolai and Sonya took me on a nice but pointless speedboat ride up the Volga, and I assumed this was when my cabin was to be searched. But I’d used the old Ian Fleming trick of fastening a human hair with spit across my locker door and it was still there when I got back.
If anything was happening to the leftists, they weren’t talking. But one of them, the woman who was embarrassed to have left the Soviet union as a child, had relatives in Moscow, whom I know she visited. When we went through customs at the end of the tour, she was searched completely and questioned so long that the plane had to be held for her. Our tour leader claimed it was because she’d lost one of her currency exchange receipts.