A Russian Journal

anything, a little higher than the prices in the commercial shops.

There is always a great crowd in these shops, people who are not there to buy, but to watch others buy. If you look at an article, you are immediately overwhelmed by people who want to see, and want to see whether you will buy. It is a kind of theater to them, we think.

We went back to our green bedroom with its insane mural, and we were conscious of being depressed. We couldn't figure out exactly why, and then it came to us: there is very little laughter in the streets, and rarely any smiles. People walk, or rather scuttle along, with their heads down, and they don't smile. Perhaps it is that they work too hard, that they have to walk too far to get to the work they do. There seems to be a great seriousness in the streets, and perhaps this was always so, we don't know.

We had dinner with Sweet Joe Newman, and with John Walker of Time, and we asked them if they had noticed the lack of laughter.

And they said they had. And they said that after a while the lack of laughter gets under your skin and you become serious yourself. 'They showed us a copy of the Soviet humorous magazine, called Krokodil, and translated some of the jokes. But they were not laughing jokes, they were sharp jokes, critical jokes. They were not for laughter, there was no gaiety in them. Sweet Joe said he had heard that outside of Moscow it was different, and this we subsequently discovered to be true. There is laughter in the country, in the Ukraine, and on the steppes, and in Georgia, but Moscow is a very serious city.

One of the correspondents was having trouble with his car and his chauffeur. He needed a car, and it is well for a foreigner in Moscow to have a Russian chauffeur. And it did not do him any good to change chauffeurs. His problem was this: his chauffeur drove him very well, but when he was not driving him, he was driving anyone else who was willing to pay a hundred roubles for a short trip. His chauffeur was getting very rich, and the car was taking a beating. There was nothing to do about it, for if he complained his chauffeur was likely to sulk a little bit, and when his chauffeur sulked, something went wrong with his car, and when something went wrong with his car, it was laid up in a garage for two or three weeks. It was better to keep his chauffeur happy if he wanted to be driven in his own car at all. He had tried getting other chauffeurs, but always the same thing happened.

In some cases the chauffeur problem becomes a little ridiculous. Ed Gilmore's chauffeur has a chauffeur of his own who drives him to work.

We wondered if these stories could be entirely true, and we were only finally convinced one day when a man rented us a whole bus. We had to get in from the airport quickly, and we had no choice but a bus. The trip cost us four hundred roubles. It was rather grand riding in from the airport, the two of us, in a bus made to seat thirty people.

It is possible that the chauffeurs of Moscow are very rich and happy people, but they are necessary, since it is difficult for a foreigner to get a driver's license. One correspondent took his examination for a license, but he failed on the question, 'What does not belong on an automobile?' He could think of many things that did not belong on an automobile and finally picked one, but he was wrong. The proper answer was 'mud.'

That evening we saw the American picture Rhapsody in Blue at the Embassy. We had seen it before, but this version of it was much more amusing, because the reels got mixed up, and the picture opened with everybody dead; gradually they came to life, until at the end of the picture George Gershwin was a little boy. We liked it much better this way.

Capa constantly used the window of our hotel as a place from which to photograph people in the street. And he lurked behind the curtains with a long lens on his camera, taking portraits of people walking through the rain, and of people shopping at the little place across the street. And he and the man in the repair shop across the street continued their duel of snapping at each other with their cameras.

Neither of us had heard from home for a long time. Letters did not come through, and we decided we would try to telephone New York. This was very difficult, and we finally gave it up. One can telephone New York only if money is deposited to the Russian account in New York, in dollars. This would require that we telegraph someone in New York, say exactly the time we wanted to telephone, and exactly how long we wanted to talk. The cost of this would be computed and the dollars deposited in New York, at which time our telephone call could be put in from Moscow. But since this would take about a week or ten days to accomplish, we decided the simplest thing was just to continue to write letters, and to hope eventually to receive some.

When letters finally did begin to arrive, we found that airmail from New York to Moscow takes from ten days to three weeks. We do not know why it takes so long, for New York to Stockholm is two days, and the rest of the time is from Stockholm to Moscow. This delay of delivery adds to the foreigner's sense of being cut off, of being all alone.

We had begun to brood a little bit, for we had been a week in Moscow and our permits to leave the city had not come through. We thought we might spend the summer waiting for them when suddenly they materialized, and our plan was under way.

Sweet Joe Newman gave us a cocktail party that lasted far into the night. Our plan was to leave at dawn for Kiev. The cocktail party picked up our spirits, and the spirits of about fifty other people.

We found that there was one difficulty about traveling in the Soviet Union. You cannot go from Kiev to Stalingrad, or from Stalingrad to Stalino. You must come back to Moscow every time and go out again, for the transportation system operates out of Moscow like the spokes of a wheel; and the roads are so torn up by the war that to travel laterally is nearly impossible, besides taking more time than we thought we had. Another difficulty is that since the planes fly only in the daytime, and there is no night flying, they leave very early in the morning. And after Sweet Joe's cocktail party, it seemed very early to us indeed.

CHAPTER 4

SWEET LANA COULD NOT go to Kiev withi us. Instead, Mr. Chmarsky went as interpreter and guide. A nice little man, and a student of American literature. His knowledge of English was highly academic. Capa, as usual, took liberties with his name and played tricks with it.

Chmarsky again and again would correct him, saying, 'Mr. Capa, it is Chmarsky, not Chumarsky.'

Whereupon Capa would say, 'All right, Mr. Chomarsky.'

'No, Mr. Capa, Chmarsky, not Chumarsky, not Chomarsky!'

That went on and on, and Capa joyfully found new pronunciations of his name everyday. Chmarsky was always a little worried by our speech, the curious kind of American double talk that we used. For a while he tried to track it down, and eventually just gave up and did not listen. On certain occasions his plans for us did not materialize-cars ordered did not meet us, planes we met did not fly. And we came to call him the Kremlin gremlin.

'What are gremlins?' he asked.

We explained in detail the origin of gremlins, how they started in the R.A.F., and what their habits were. How they stopped engines in mid-air, iced wings, fouled gas lines.

He listened with great intent, and at the end he held up one finger and said, 'In the Soviet Union we do not believe in ghosts.' Perhaps we played too hard with him. We hope we did not hurt his feelings.

There is one thing that you can never tell, and that is what time a plane is going to fly. It is impossible to know in advance. But one thing you can know is that it will leave some time early in the morning. Another thing you can be sure of is that you must be at the airfield long before it does fly. Any time you are to take a trip, you must arrive at the airfield in the chilly dark before the dawn, and sit and drink tea for several hours before the plane leaves. At three o'clock in the morning the bell in our room rang, and we were not happy about getting up, for we had been to Sweet Joe's cocktail party, and what we needed was about twelve hours' sleep, and we had had about one hour. We piled the equipment into the back of the car and drove through the deserted streets of Moscow into the country.

We now observed something that was to happen again and again. Drivers in the Soviet Union speed their cars, and then take them out of gear and let them coast. They take advantage of all hills to disengage their gears and coast. We were told that this saved gasoline, and that it is a part of the training of every driver. He is assigned gasoline which is computed to cover a certain distance, and he must make it cover that distance. Consequently he uses every possible trick he can to make his gasoline last. It is just another part of the huge bookkeeping system which is the Soviet Union. It compares with the bookkeeping in the restaurants. The wear and tear on clutch and