Republican Party Reptile(9)
TUESDAY, JULY 20
Fortunately there were other people to talk to. Actually, you couldn’t talk to most of them because they were Russians and didn’t speak English—what you might call a silent majority. On the plane to Rostov I’d sat next to a fellow named Ivor. He spoke only a bit of English but was a good mime. He got it across that he was an engineer. I got it across that I was an American. He seemed very pleased at that. I should come and stay with his family. I explained about the cruise boat, showing him a picture of it on the brochure. I did a charade to the effect that I’d better stick close to the boat. He gave me an engineering trade magazine (in Russian, no illustrations), and I gave him some picture postcards of New York. We parted in a profusion of handshakes at the Rostov airport.
The boat stayed at the dock in Rostov until midnight Tuesday. They have plenty of monuments in Rostov, too, and tour buses were lined up on the quay. I could hear someone asking inside one of them, “What is the cost of housing in the Soviet union as a percentage of worker wages?”
I was just being herded into that bus when someone grabbed my arm. It was Ivor. “Come on,” he gestured. I escaped down the embankment. We got on a boat packed to the scuppers with Russians and went for a two-hour excursion on the Don. Ivor bought a bottle of champagne and began a labored explanation punctuated with hand-wavings and flurries of picture-drawing in my reporter’s notebook.
His father had been on the front lines when the armies of the East and West had met in Germany in 1945. Apparently the Americans had liberated every bottle of alcoholic beverage between Omaha Beach and the Oder-Neisse Line and really made the welkin ring for their Red comrades in arms. “Anglish—poo,” said Ivor, “Francis—poo,” but the Americans, they were fine fellows, plenty of schnapps, plenty of cognac, plenty of vino for all. And they could drink, those American fine fellows. So Ivor’s “vada” had made him promise (point to self, hand on heart) if (finger in air) Ivor ever met American (handshake, point to me) he must buy him much to drink. Da? (Toast, handshake, toast again, another handshake.)
Standing behind Ivor was a giant man well into his sixties, a sort of combination Khrushchev and old Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was staring hard at me, cocking an ear to my foreign language. He wore an undershirt and a suit coat with a line of medals out across the breast pocket. “Deutsch?” he asked me sternly.
“Nyet deutsch,” I said, “American.”
He beamed, I mean just beamed. “Ally!” he said. It was his only English word. He pulled out a wallet with what I guess were commendations and an honorable discharge. “Amerikanskii ally!” he said and slapped my shoulder. Eight-ounce glasses of brandy must be bought for Ivor and me.
I toasted him with my only Russian word—“Tovarishch!” He brought forth a tiny grandson and had him shake hands with me.
“Now the little one can say he met an American,” Ivor more or less explained. I toasted the big guy again. He pledged a long toast in return, and, as I understood Ivor’s translation, we’d drunk to the hope that America and Russia would be allies again in a war against China.
I bought more cognac. Ivor bought beer. The big fellow bought even more cognac.
When the boat docked Ivor and I went to a beer hall, a basement where they lined up half-liter mugs and squirted them full with a rubber hose from four feet away. Everyone grabbed half a dozen mugs at a time and drank one after the other while standing at long wooden tables. There was no communication problem now. We discussed women (“Ah, beautiful. Oh, much trouble”), international politics (“Iraq—poo. Iran—poo”), the relative merits of socialism versus a free-market system (“Socialism—enough responsible, nyet fun. Captialism—nyet enough responsible, plenty fun”), and, I think, literature (“And Quiet Flows the Don—poo, too long”). Then we went to another bar on top of a Russian tourist hotel and had even more to drink. I didn’t want to let my side down. And there were Ivor’s father’s feelings to be considered.
Ivor and I embraced, and I staggered back to my stinking cabin to pass out. The woman with her brains between her teeth was standing at the top of the gangplank. “I hope you’re not one of those people who’s going to see the Soviet union through the bottom of a vodka glass,” she said.
THE ENEMY AMONG US
Of course, we had plenty of Russians aboard the boat too. There were five of the advertised experts. I’ll change their names in case some reconstructed quote or poetic exaggeration of mine is misconstrued to mean that one of these Soviets might be “turned” by the CIA. No one deserves to be pestered by surreptitious Yalies who couldn’t get into law school.