Parachutes and Kisses (55 page)

The first hotel they were taken to was reminiscent of
Anna Kare nina:
a huge nineteenth-century pile with long windows, old, high ceilinged rooms, large wooden armoires, and creaky beds. It seemed she had been there before in another life.

They were given an afternoon to rest and change clothes, and when Isadora found herself alone in her cavernous room, she looked around in wonderment at the brocaded walls and dark wooden furniture, expecting to see “bugs” and other evidence of KGB activity. They were nowhere to be found. Ah, she had been in the USSR too short a time to understand the precise nature of the spying that goes on there. (Later she came to understand that all of Russia was a sort of army base where everybody worked for the same employer. In that context, the word
spy
took on a new meaning, a different one than it might have in the West.)

In Moscow, they were given their first celebratory meal—divine greasy grayish caviar served in little butter blossoms, icy vodka served cold and neat to ease the pain of passportlessness, cabbage soup, blini, stewed beef and rice with endless glasses of Georgian wine served throughout. At the postprandial toast (with Georgian champagne), several of them were called upon by Cochran, their delegation leader, to assay a politically correct greeting.

The waggish novelist of manners (whose name was Quentin Lawrence) safely toasted the Moscow sunset. Isadora herself carefully lifted a glass to Pushkin, and the
Commentary
intellectual (whose name was Clarissa Cornfeld and who sported those clunky negative-heel shoes so beloved by traveling American hippies) topped them all in the leftier-than-thou department by proposing a toast to the kitchen staff that prepared the meal. Isadora could already see that delegations were a tricky business. It was not only your opposite numbers among the Reds who were shifty—but your own compatriots, who were scoring points for future literary football matches.

After dinner, they were shepherded to the railroad station where the overnight train to Kiev awaited.

A midnight departure, a rocking compartment with sliding glass doors. Red plush, antimacassars, feather pillows,
chai
(tea) in glasses, and everywhere the faces of her people: high cheekbones, curly hair, liquid tongues that spoke the language of her dreams.

Crammed into a sleeping compartment with the immense lady poet (who was named Rya Dubinsky and who mercifully—and doubtless inevitably—took the lower berth), she drank vodka from a gift bottle to get to sleep and listened to the mournful balalaika music from the next compartment (where the critic of contemporary mores was wooing Clarissa Cornfeld to let down her primly pinned-up hair, remove her wire-rimmed glasses, and perhaps sweeten the Russian night for him—but whether he succeeded or not Isadora never found out, for the train—and the vodka—put her to sleep long before that).

They were awakened brusquely at six with a sharp rap on the door of their compartment, which then flew open to reveal a white-sleeved arm and at the end of it a glass of tea. Another glass followed; then two boiled eggs; then hunks of bread and cheese all served contrapuntally to the clacking of the train against the track.

“My goodness,” said Rya, seizing the first glass of tea. “A feast.”

More Writers' Union dignitaries with wilted roses and faded rubles greeted them at the Kiev train station. They were transferred
en masse
to another rambling hotel (this one sleazy and modern as a West German airport hostelry), where hydrant-shaped women in white coats guarded each floor, officially dispatching elevators and garnering clanking bouquets of keys.

Isadora remarked to herself how impossible it was to get in or out of one's room without witnesses in the form of these matrons of key and elevator. Another dimension of the notorious Russian spy system was revealed to her. It seemed that all the citizens of this country had been reduced to the status of elementary-school classroom monitors, as she had known them in her youth. They were spies in the sense that all ten-year-olds are spies. What secrets of hers could they hope to gather? Her life was an open book. (Although, like Nabokov, she sometimes thought she had lived her whole life in the margins of a volume she had never been able to read.)

Kiev proved to be beautiful—the wide gray-green Dnieper bisecting a gracious tree-lined city where golden domes glistened above pastel-candy churches. The conference was held in the powder-blue palace of an eighteenth-century prince, which was now claimed by the Soviet state. The dark-suited delegates assembled on the candy parapets of a pale-blue wedding cake with white icing. All the Soviet delegates were male; most were over sixty. Little women in colored dresses—translators, editors, journalists —fluttered around them, attending to their needs. In the USSR, as in the USA, women were prized for utility and decorativeness, not so much (apparently) for the practice of literature. There were three women writers on the American side, none on the Soviet.

A U-shaped conference table, a glass translator's booth, high blue candy walls, white candy swags and gold rosettes. Isadora was painfully aware of the time lag in translation. A wall of frozen faces greeted her across the U-shaped table. And then the faces unfroze and the poets' features succumbed to the spring thaw of language.

The conference began with dozens of long, boring speeches on the part of the Soviet delegates. They spoke (from prepared texts) about “The Great Patriotic War,” “The War Against Fascism,” “The Growing Nuclear Threat.” They spoke as if they expected every word to be monitored by the Party, as if no impromptu remarks could be risked, as if every word were a potential coffin nail. But at night, walking along the banks of the Dnieper, under the influence of Georgian champagne, the poets boozily recited their verses (and Pushkin's), the novelists confessed their frustrations, and all the round and
zaftig
translator ladies (many of whom were divorced) unburdened themselves to Isadora about the dire difficulties of being a woman in Russia. Of course they all had children (usually
one
cosseted child) that they had to raise alone, and they dreamed of a world in which women could stay home with their babies and be taken care of by men. The irony of it! The revolution had come full circle. These women lusted for the dependency that Isadora's baby-boom generation had been struggling
against
for twenty years! And Isadora herself empathized with them. Raising a child and making a livng were no easy feats. One always felt divided. One always felt that one's vital organs were being torn apart.

“We have been liberated to work twenty-four hours a day,” one Russian woman said.

“We, too, have been liberated to be eternally exhausted,” Isadora agreed.

The American men and the Russian men had politics to argue about. The American women and the Russian women were wholly united in their common concern about raising children while also managing to earn their bread. There were no political disputes between the women—just a mutual recognition of mutual problems. Meanwhile, the world of men spun pointlessly onward, building bombs and arguing abstractions. They argued the insane logic of competing death machines and seemed wholly oblivious of the problems the women confronted. They saw the women sentimentally, as monuments to abstractions called “Womanhood,” “Motherhood,” and “Love.”

 

There was one poet in particular—a chap called Anatoly Klimov who had flat Tartar features, eyes so slitty they almost disappeared into his cheeks, and grimacing gold teeth—who kept grabbing Isadora at official receptions, gazing into her eyes, and reciting acres of poetry, poods of poetry, steppes of poetry in Ukrainian and Russian. His breath was as powerful as Soviet missiles, and his English so limited that he and Isadora could only converse by means of sporadic “thank you”s and “you're welcome”s, but he seemed to have this burning need to grab her and recite poetry to her whenever he passed her. As she heard the rhythmical but unintelligible words tumble out, as she saw the yearning look in his slitty Asiatic eyes, she felt she was receiving a message from her grandfather, but what message she did not know.

Prompted by the rigid formality of the Russian delegation, Isadora became gayer and gayer, freer and freer in her speech. She wanted to smash this blasted bureaucracy, shake up these official stone faces, to make the conference somehow human, a real exchange of loves and fears. She began to realize that she was seen as a faintly fabulous figure at the conference—even though her time to speak had not yet arrived. (Nor was it hard for a stylish Western woman to seem fabulous in Russia, where everything was so drab.) The Russian ladies marveled at her designer clothes, her shoes, her perfumes. The poets kept courting her with unintelligible verses. Since her works were prohibited in Russia, but word of their supposed scandalousness had traveled, she was viewed as a colorful presence—the youngest member of her delegation and the most enigmatic. The elderly Soviet poets did not know whether to court her as a sort of demimondaine or treat her as a figure of literary eminence. How could she be “literary” when she smelled of French perfume, had blond ringlets, and wore brightly colored dresses? Wasn't literature a dusty thing whose true practice was revealed by the drabness of one's dress?

“My dzear lady,” they would say, wagging an admonitory finger, “my dzear lady, you must read us your poems.”

And so she did. After making her own formal speech on the status of women in the USA (which all translator ladies cheered but the men received with stony or flirtatious faces), she read to the Soviet delegation the very same poem about her grandfather that she had read at Papa's funeral all those many months ago. She had even titled it: “The Horse From Hell,” it was now called, and she spoke informally about her grandfather and his life before she propelled it—on the winds of her breath—into the heart of her audience. She felt that by speaking about her grandfather here, in the country of his birth, she was bringing his spirit home to rest in the land of his ancestors.

Here no rabbi sucked in his breath, but clearly the audience was moved. They were with her. Even the translators in the glass booth were charmed. Feeling her audience's intensity, warmth, even love, Isadora went on, drawing them in, drawing them toward her. Suddenly she remembered, in its entirety, the very first poem for her grandfather she had written, as a freshman at Barnard. She recited it to her Russian colleagues with all the passion she could summon.

When she finished, the dour, dark-suited Russian writers burst into applause. Poetry had taken them from generalization about “Soviet Man” and “The Nuclear Threat” to the singular life of one singular artist. This was something they could understand.

From then on the conference became a torrent of poetry readings. Not an hour passed when someone did not stand up at that U-shaped table and declaim reams of poetry (while the simultaneous translators in the glass booth scrambled madly to translate all the similes, all the metaphors, just as fast as they could be uttered).