There was only one faint thrill when we handed in our passports to the officer in the little glass passport-control booth. He was maybe seventeen with a tunic too large around the neck and a hat too big by half. He made an awful face and shouted, “Num? Fuss num? Plas oaf burf? Dat oaf burf?”
One of my tour group members had been born in Kiev. She said her “plas oaf burf” was Russia.
“Dat oaf burf?”
“1915,” she said.
“When leaf?” hollered the passport officer.
“1920.”
“Reason leaf?” he yelled.
I swear she sounded embarrassed. “I don’t know. My parents did it.”
Then we got on a smoky, gear-stripped bus and rode past blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings and blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings and blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings; through the smoggy Moscow twilight, through half-deserted streets. No neon lights, no billboards, no commotion, not much traffic, everything dusty-looking and slightly askew, and everything the same for an hour and a half.
“Some people,” said a leftist lady with orange hair and earrings the size of soup tureens, “say the Soviet union ’s depressing. I don’t know how they can say that.”
We pulled up in front of an immense glass-curtain-walled modern hotel, a perfect Grand Hyatt knockoff, and I headed for the bar. It was pretty much like any bar in a Grand Hyatt. There was a big drunk man there, red-faced and bloated. He seemed to speak English. At least he was yelling at the bartender in it. “A glass of schnapps,” he said. He got vodka.
“How long you been here?” I said.
“Hahahahahahaha,” he said, “I’m from Frankfurt!”
“Scotch,” I said to the bartender. “Where’ve you been?” I asked the drunk. The bartender gave me vodka.
“Fucking Afghanistan!” said the drunk. Afghanistan? Here was some excitement.
“Afghanistan?” I said, but he fell off his stool.
SUNDAY, JULY 18
My tour group of leftists met with another three or four groups in the Moscow hotel. The others were mostly peaceniks. I don’t know how my group got involved in the peace cruise or how I got put in with them. They certainly weren’t from The Nation. “The Nation prints too much anti-Soviet propaganda,” said a potbellied man smoking a pipe with a stupid bend in the stem.
In fact, there was no one from The Nation on the cruise except one assistant editor in the book-review department. The excursion ad had run, I found out later, in large part because The Nation received a commission for each passenger it signed up. The ad had listed a number of other sponsors: Fellowship of Reconciliation, National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, Promoting Enduring Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and World Fellowship League. A few passengers in the other tour groups were from those organizations, but most seemed to be representing tiny peace organizations of their own. And if you didn’t stick socks in their mouths right away, they’d tell you all about it.
First, however, a visit to Lenin’s tomb. It’s real dark and chilly in there, and you march around three sides of the glass case, and it’s like a visit to the nocturnal-predators section at the Reptile House with your grade-school class—no talking!
“He has the face of a poet,” said our beautiful Intourist guide, Marya. He certainly does, a nasty, crazed, bigoted face just like Ezra Pound’s.
None of the leftists so much as sniffled. This offended me. I can get quite misty at the Lincoln Monument. And I had to explain who John Reed was when we walked along the Kremlin wall. “Oh, that’s right,” said the orange-haired lady, “Warren Beatty in Reds.” Today she wore earrings that looked like table lamps. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, presenting Red Square as if she’d just knitted it. “No crowds!” The square was cordoned off by soldiers.
Back to the hotel for another big drink.
We spent the rest of the day on a Soviet version of a Gray Line tour, visiting at least thirty places of no interest. For the uninitiated, all Russian buildings look either like Grand Army of the Republic memorials or like low-income federal housing projects without graffiti. There are a few exceptions left over from the czars, but they need to have their lawns mowed. Every fifteen feet there’s a monument—monuments to this, monuments to that, monuments to the Standing Committee of the Second National Congress of Gypsum and Chalk Workers, monuments to the Mothers of the Mothers of War Martyrs, monuments to the Inventor of Flexible Belt Drive. “In the foreground is a monument to the monument in the background,” Marya narrated.—