every seat was taken. They had come prepared in the way of food. They had suitcases full of it.
When we got in, and the doors were shut, the plane became stifling, for, like most bucket-seat airplanes, there was no insulation, and the sun beating on the metal walls heated the inside. The smell was frightful,- of people, of tired people. We sat in the metal bucket-seats, which looked like, and were not much more comfortable than cafeteria trays.
At last the plane took off, and as it did, a man sitting next to me opened his suitcase, cut off half a pound of raw bacon which was melting in the heat, and sat chewing it, the grease running down his chin. He was a nice man, with merry eyes, and he offered me a piece, but I didn't feel like it at that moment.
The plane had been hot, but as soon as we made a little altitude the reverse was true. The beads of perspiration on the metal turned to ice and frost. We became freezing cold in the plane. We spent a miserable trip to Moscow, for we had nothing but light clothing, and the poor Georgians in the plane huddled together, for they were from the tropics, and this cold was something they were not used to.
Chmarsky bundled into his corner. We thought he was beginning to hate us, and that he wanted only one thing, to get us into Moscow and to get rid of us. We spent a bad four hours freezing before we landed in Moscow. And Chmarsky's gremlin followed him to the end. The telegrams he had sent for a car to meet us had been misread and there was no car. It would be a matter of two hours' waiting for a car to come for us. But a Greek showed up. In times of stress a Greek always shows up, anywhere in the world. This Greek could make an arrangement for a car, and he did, for a very high price, and we drove in to the Savoy Hotel.
We spoke of how the leaders of a communist or socialist regime must get very tired of the long-living quality of capitalism. Just when you have stamped it out in one place, it comes to life in another. It is like those sandworms which if cut in two go on living, each a separate individual. In Moscow the little clots and colonies of capitalism squirm to life everywhere: the black-market people, the 'chauffeurs who rent their employers' cars, and the inevitable Greek who shows up with something to rent or sell. Wherever there is a Greek, there is going to be capitalism. Three hundred roubles it cost us to get into Moscow. Our Greek had a fine sense of how much the traffic could stand. I have no doubt that he made a quick estimate of our weariness, our irritation, and our finances, and he set an inexorable price of three hundred roubles, and we paid it.
We had a violent lust for cleanliness, for there had been no bathing in Stalingrad, except with a washcloth, and we yearned for the hot tub, the soak, the shampoo. The statue of Crazy Ella was an old friend to us, and we practically embraced the stuffed bear on the second floor. He didn't look fierce at all to us any more. And our bathtub which rocked on three legs was the most beautiful and luxurious article we had ever seen. In our new- found passion for cleanliness we washed off two or three layers of skin, and Capa shampooed his hair over and over again. He has nice hair, very thick and very black, and because I was still feeling a little mean, when he came out after his third shampoo I remarked that it was rather sad that he was getting a little bald in back. He leaped in the air, and whirled on me, and denied it vehemently. And I took his finger, and placed it down among the hair next to the scalp, and he seemed to feel that there was a bald spot. It was a cruel thing to do, because I had put his finger in a place where he could not possibly see it in the mirror. He went about for a long time secretly feeling the back of his head with his finger. I only did it because I felt mean.
Later Sweet Joe came over and we had a light dinner, and hit the bed, and died. The air of Moscow was strong and cool and made for sleeping, and we didn't get up for many hours.
Mail had come in at last; we had been in Russia only twenty-five days, and it seemed that we had been cut off for years. We read our letters avidly. And although we thought we had been away for so long, people at home who had written didn't think we had been away a long time at all. It was a kind of a shock. We got our equipment together, and our dirty clothes off to be washed, and Capa put his films in order and sent them out to be developed.
He looked at the negatives that had been returned and began to complain bitterly. I might have known it. They were not right. Nothing was right. There was too much grain, this had been left in the developer too long, and this roll had been left in too little. He was furious. And because I had been cruel to him, I tried to reassure him that they were the most wonderful pictures in the world, but he only sneered at me. And because I had been cruel to him, I fixed all of his non-camera equipment: filled his lighter, sharpened his pencils, filled his fountain-pen.
Capa has one curious -quality. He will buy a lighter, but as soon as it runs out of fluid he puts it aside and never uses it again. The same is true of fountain-pens. When they run out of ink, he never fills them. A pencil he will use until the point breaks, and then it too is laid aside, and he will buy another pencil, but he will never sharpen a pencil. I flinted and filled his lighters, sharpened all his pencils, filled his pen, and got him generally ready to face the world again.
Before we had gone to Russia, we had not known what kind of equipment would be available, so in France we had bought a wonderful pocketknife, a pocketknife that had a blade to take care of nearly all physical situations in the world, and some spiritual ones. It was equipped with blades that were scissors, with blades that were files, awls, saws, can-openers, beer-openers, corkscrews, tools for removing stones from a horse's foot, a blade for eating and a blade for murder, a screw driver and a chisel. You could mend a watch with it, or repair the Panama Canal. It was the most wonderful pocketknife anyone has ever seen, and we had it nearly two months, and the only thing that we ever did with it was to cut sausage. But it must be admitted that the knife cut sausages very well.
We went to the
We even went to a cocktail party, given by the press division of the British Embassy, and to which an invitation had been only reluctantly issued to us. We conducted ourselves badly. We begged,: and borrowed, and whined for cigarettes from everybody we knew, and made outrageous promises about the numbers of cartons we would send once we got home again. Each of us took three baths every day, and we used up all of our soap, and had to beg soap from the other correspondents.
A LEGITIMATE COMPLAINT
I AM NOT HAPPY at all. Ten years ago when I began to make my living by taking pictures of people being bombed by airplanes with little swastikas on them, I saw a few small planes with little red stars shooting down the swastika ones. This was in Madrid during the Civil War, and this made me very happy. I decided then that I wanted to go and see the place where the snub-nose planes and pilots came from. I wanted to visit and take pictures in the Soviet Union. I made my first application then. During these last ten years my Russian friends were often irritating and impossible, but when the shooting became serious they somehow ended up on the side where I was plugging, and I made a great many other applications. The applications were never answered.
Last spring the Russians succeeded in becoming spectacularly unpopular with my side, and considerable plugging was going on to make us shoot this time at each other. Flying saucers and atomic bombs are very unphotogenic, so I decided to make one more application, before it was too late. This time I found a certain support in a man of wide reputation, considerable thirst, and gentle understanding for the gay underdog. His name is John Steinbeck, and his preparations for our trip were very original. First he told the Russians that it was a great mistake to regard him as a pillar of the world proletariat, indeed he could rather be described as a representative of Western decadence, indeed as far west as the lowest dives in California. Also he committed himself to write only the truth, and when he was asked politely what truth was, he answered, 'This I do not know.' After this promising beginning he jumped out of a window and broke his knee.
That was months ago. Now it is very late at night, and I am sitting in the middle of an extremely gloomy hotel room, surrounded with a hundred and ninety million Russians, four cameras, a few dozen exposed and many more unexposed films, and one sleeping Steinbeck, and I am not happy at all. The hundred and ninety million Russians are against me. They are not holding wild meetings on street corners, do not practice spectacular free love, do not have any kind of new look, they are very righteous, moral, hard-working people, for a photographer as dull as apple pie. Also they seem to like the Russian way of living, and dislike being photographed. My four cameras, used to wars and revolutions, are disgusted, and every time I click them something goes wrong. Also I have three Stein- becks instead of one.
