A Russian Journal (17 page)

even Western, unless the viewing point is Moscow. Simonov goes back to Russia and secretly writes his conviction that America is not a decadent democracy. He submits his manuscript to
Pravda.
He is promptly removed from the Writers' Union. He loses his country house. His wife, a good Communist girl, deserts him, and he starves to death, just the same as the American must in his play.

At the end of this synopsis, there were usually some chuckles among our questioners. We would say, "If you find this ridiculous, it is no more ridiculous than Mr. Simonov's play
The Russian Question
is about America. Both plays are equally bad, for the same reasons."

While once or twice our synopsis precipitated a violent argument, in most cases it caused only laughter and a change of subject.

In Kiev there is a place called the Cocktail Bar. It is spelled in Russian letters so we couldn't read it, but that is the way it is pronounced, Cocktail Bar. And it is like an American cocktail bar. There is a round bar with stools, and little tables, and some of the young people of Kiev go there in the evening. They have tall drinks which are called cocktails, and they are wonderful drinks. There is the Kiev cocktail, and the Moscow cocktail, and the Tiflis cocktail, and oddly enough they are always pink in color and they always taste strongly of grenadine.

The Russians, when they make cocktails, seem to believe that the more ingredients, the better the cocktail. There was one that we tasted which had twelve different liquors in it. We forgot what it was called. We didn't want to remember. We were a little surprised to find cocktail bars in Russia, since the cocktail is a very decadent drink. And surely the Kiev cocktail and the Moscow cocktail are the most decadent of cocktails that we have ever tasted.

Our time in Kiev was up, and we prepared to fly back to Moscow. The people here had been most hospitable, and most kind and generous, and besides that we had liked them very much. They were intelligent, laughing people, people with a sense of humor, and people with energy. In the ruins of their country they had set out doggedly to build new houses, new factories, new machinery, and a new life. And they said to us again and again, "Come back in a few years and see what we will have accomplished."

BACK IN MOSCOW we indulged a hunger for our own language and our own people, for, kind and generous as the Ukrainians had been to us, we were foreigners. We felt good about talking to people who knew who Superman was, and Louis Armstrong. We went out to Ed Gilmore's pleasant house and listened to his swing records. Pee Wee Russell, the clarinetist, sends them to him. Ed says he does not know how he could spend the winter without Pee Wee's contribution of hot records.

Sweet Joe Newman got some Russian girls, and we went dancing in Moscow night clubs. Sweet Joe is a wonderful dancer, but Capa uses long rabbit leaps, amusing but dangerous.

The Embassy people were very kind to us. General Macon, the Military Attache, contributed D.D.T. bombs to protect us from the flies when we left Moscow, for in some of the bombed and destroyed areas the flies are troublesome. And in one or two of the places where we had slept, there were other troublesome little visitors. Some of the people in the Embassy had not been home for a long time, and they wanted to know about simple little things like baseball prospects, and how the football season was likely to go, and elections in various parts in the country.

On Sunday we went to the war trophy display, near Gorki Park, along the edge of the river. There were German airplanes of all kinds, German tanks, German artillery, machine guns, weapon-carriers, tank-destroyers, specimens of the German equipment taken by the Soviet Army. And walking among the weapons were soldiers with their children and their wives, explaining these things professionally. The children looked with wonder at the equipment their fathers had helped to capture.

There were boat races on the river, little water-scooters with outboard motors, and we noticed that many of the motors were Evinrudes and various other American makes. The races were among clubs and workers' groups. Some of the boats were raced by girls. We bet on one particularly beautiful blond girl, simply because she was beautiful, but she didn't win. If anything, the girls were tougher and more competitive racers than the men. They took more hazardous turns, and they handled their boats with a fine recklessness. Sweet Lana was with us, and she was dressed in a navy blue suit, and a hat with a little veil, and she wore a silver star in her lapel buttonhole.

Later we. went to Red Square, where a queue of people at least a quarter of a mile long stood waiting to go through Lenin's tomb. In front of the door of the tomb two young soldiers stood like wax figures. We could not even see that they blinked their eyes. All afternoon, and nearly every afternoon, a slow thread of people marches through the tomb to look at the dead face of Lenin in his glass casket; thousands of people, and they move past the glass casket and look for a moment on the domed forehead and the sharp nose and the pointed chin of Lenin. It is like a religious thing, although they would not call it religious.

At the other end of Red Square there is a round marble platform, where the czars used to execute people, and now it supports gigantic bouquets of paper flowers and a little colony of red flags.

We had only come in to Moscow for the purpose of getting transportation to Stalingrad. Capa made a contact for developing his films. He would have preferred to bring the films home undeveloped, for facilities and controls in the United States are better. But he had a sixth sense about it, and his hunch turned out to be a very good idea in the end.

As usual we left Moscow hot under the best circumstances, for again there had been a late party and we had had very little sleep. Again we sat in the V.I.P. room under the portrait of Stalin, and drank tea for an hour and a half before our plane was ready to leave. And we got the same kind of plane we had had before. The ventilation did not work on this plane either. The baggage was piled about in the aisles, and we took off.

Mr. Chmarsky's gremlin was very active on this trip. Almost everything he laid out or planned did not come off. There was no chapter or committee of Voks in Stalingrad, consequently, when we arrived at the little wind-blown airport building, there was no one there to meet us, and Mr. Chmarsky had to get on the phone to call Stalingrad for a car. Meanwhile we went outside, and we saw a line of women selling watermelons and cantaloupes, and very good ones. We dripped watermelon juice down our shirt fronts for an hour and a half, until a car arrived, and since we used it quite a bit, and it had a certain individuality, we must describe this car. It was not a car but a bus. It was a bus designed to hold about twenty people, and it was a Model A Ford. When the Ford Company abandoned the Model A, the Russian government bought the machinery with which it had been made. Model A Fords were manufactured in the Soviet Union, both for light automobiles and for light trucks and busses, and this was one of them. It had springs, I suppose, but it couldn't have had many or they would have been broken. There was no physical evidence of any springs at all. The driver who was assigned was a fine co-operative man, with an almost holy attitude toward automobiles. Later, when we sat alone with him in the bus, he would simply go over the list of cars that he loved.

"Buick," he would say, "Cadillac, Lincoln, Pontiac, Studebaker," and he would sigh deeply. These were the only English words he knew.

The road to Stalingrad was the roughest area in the whole country. It was miles to the city from the airport, and if we could have gone off the road it would have been comparatively easy and smooth riding. This so-called road was a series of chucks and holes and great deep gushes. It was unpaved, and the recent rains had translated part of the road into ponds. On the open steppe, which stretched away as far as you could see, there were herds of goats and cows grazing. The railroad track paralleled the road, and along the track we saw lines of burned-out gondolas and freight cars which had been fired and destroyed during the war. The whole area for miles, on all sides of Stalingrad, was littered with the debris of war: burned-out tanks, and half-tracks, and troop carriers, and rusting pieces of broken artillery. The salvage crews went about the country to draw in this wreckage and cut it up to be used as scrap in the tractor factory at Stalingrad.

We had to hold on with both hands while our bus bumped and leaped over the country. We seemed to go on endlessly across the steppe, until at last, over a little rise, we saw Stalingrad below us and the Volga behind it.

On the edges of the city there were hundreds of new little houses growing up, but once in the city itself there was little except destruction. Stalingrad is a long strip of a city along the bank of the Volga, nearly twenty miles long, and only about two miles wide in its widest part. We had seen ruined cities before, but most of them had been ruined by bombing. This was quite different. In a bombed city a few walls stand upright; this city was destroyed by rocket and by shell fire. It was fought over for months, attacked and retaken, and attacked again, and most of the walls were flattened. What few walls stand up are pitted and rotted with machine-gun fire. We had read, of course, about the incredible defense of Stalingrad, and one thing occurred to us in looking over this broken city, that when a city is attacked and its buildings knocked down, the fallen buildings offer fine shelter to the defending army-shelter, and holes, and nests out of which it is almost impossible to drive a determined force. Here, in this raving ruin, was one of the great turning points of the war. When, after months of siege, of attack and counterattack, the Germans were finally surrounded and captured, even their stupidest military men must have felt somewhere in their souls that the war had been lost.

In the central square were the remains of what had been a large department store, and here the Germans had made their last stand when they were surrounded. This is where Von-Paulus was captured and where the whole siege crumbled.

Across the street was the repaired Intourist Hotel where we were to stay. We were given two large rooms. Our windows looked out on acres of rubble, broken brick and concrete and pulverized plaster, and in the wreckage the strange dark weeds that always seem to grow in destroyed places. During the time we were in Stalingrad we grew more and more fascinated with this expanse of ruin, for it was not deserted. Underneath the rubble were cellars and holes, and in these holes many people lived. Stalingrad was a large city, and it had had apartment houses and many flats, and now has none except the new ones on the outskirts, and its population has to live some place. It lives in the cellars of the buildings where the apartments once were. We would watch out of the windows of our room, and from behind a slightly larger pile of rubble would suddenly appear a girl, going to work in the morning, putting the last little touches to her hair with a comb. She would be dressed neatly, in clean clothes, and she would swing out through the weeds on her way to work. How they could do it we have no idea. How they could live underground and still keep clean, and proud, and feminine. Housewives came out of other holes and went away to market, their heads covered with white headcloths, and market baskets on their arms. It was a strange and heroic travesty on modern living.

There was one rather terrifying exception. Directly behind the hotel, and in a place overlooked by our windows, there was a little garbage pile, where melon rinds, bones, potato peels, and such things were thrown out. And a few yards farther on, there was a little hummock, like the entrance to a gopher hole. And every morning, early, out of this hole a young girl crawled. She had long legs and bare feet, and her arms were thin and stringy, and her hair was matted and filthy. She was covered with years of dirt, so that she looked very brown. And when she raised her face, it was one of the most beautiful faces we have ever seen. Her eyes were crafty, like the eyes of a fox, but they were not human. The face was well developed and not moronic. Somewhere in the terror of the fighting in the city, something had snapped, and she had retired to some comfort of forgetfulness. She squatted on her hams and ate watermelon rinds and sucked the bones of other people's soup. She usually stayed there for about two hours before she got her stomach full. And then she went out in the weeds, and lay down, and went to sleep in the sun. Her face was of a chiseled loveliness, and on her long legs she moved with the grace of a wild animal. The other people who lived in the cellars of the lot rarely spoke to her. But one morning I saw a woman come out of another hole and give her half a loaf of bread. And the girl clutched at it almost snarlingly and held it against her chest. She looked like a half-wild dog at the woman who had given her the bread, and watched her suspiciously until she had gone back into her own cellar, and then she turned and buried her face in the slab of black bread, and like an animal she looked over the bread, her eyes twitching back and forth. And as she gnawed at the bread, one side of her ragged filthy shawl slipped away from her dirty young breast, and her hand automatically brought the shawl back and covered her breast, and patted it in place with a heart-breaking feminine gesture.

We wondered how many there might be like this, minds that could not tolerate living in the twentieth century any more, that had retired not to the hills, but into the ancient hills of the human past, into the old wilderness of pleasure, and pain, and self-preservation. It was a face to dream about for a long time.

Late in the afternoon Colonel Denchenko called on us and asked if we would like to see the area of the fighting for Stalingrad. He was a fine-looking man, with a shaved head, a man of about fifty. He wore a white tunic and belt, and his breast was well decorated. He took us around the city and showed us where the Twenty-First Army had held, and where the Sixty-Second Army had supported it. He had brought the battle maps. He took us to the exact place where the Germans were stopped, and beyond which they had been unable to move. And on the edge of this line is Pavlov's house, which is a national shrine and will probably continue to be one.