sandwiches (open-face sandwiches with sausage and cheese), jars of pickles, and small pears and apples, all for sale.
It was a brilliant cold day. The elephants from the circus paraded through the streets, preceded by clowns. There was not to be any military parade on this day, but there was a big show scheduled for the stadium, and to that we went in the afternoon.
It was a show of mass formations of factory workers in brilliant costumes. They did group calisthenics and marches. They made figures on the field. There were races, some for women and some for men, competitions in shot-putting and in volley ball. There was a showing of dancing horses, beautifully trained horses, which waltzed, and polkaed, and bowed, and pirouetted.
Someone important in the government was there, but we couldn't see him, whoever he was, for the state box was on our side of the stadium. In fact we have almost a record. In the whole time we were in Russia we didn't see one single important person. Stalin had not come up to the celebration from his place on the Black Sea.
The show in the stadium went on all afternoon. There were parades of bicycles, and races of motorcycles, and finally there was a last show that required a great deal of preparation. A line of motorcycles rode around the track. In the seat was the motorcycle driver, and standing on each motorcycle was a girl in tights, and each girl held a great red flag, so that when the motorcycles went at full speed, the huge flag flapped behind. This parade circled the track twice, and that was the end of the show.
We started back from the Dynamo Stadium because I had to do my
We had dinner that night with Mr. and Mrs. Louis Aragon, who were at the National Hotel. They had a room with a balcony that overlooked the huge square in back of the Kremlin. From there we could see the fireworks which went off almost constantly, and we could hear the salutes of artillery that continued at intervals all evening. The square in front of us was one packed mass of people. There must have been millions of them, milling slowly and eddying back and forth across the square. In the middle of the square there was a bandstand where speeches were made, and music played, and there were singers and dancers. The only place we have ever seen people so closely packed together is in Times Square on New Year's Eve.
It was very late at night before we could even force our way through the people back to our hotel. And many hundreds of thousands of peoples still trudged through the streets, back and forth, looking at the lights and watching the electrical displays.
I went to bed, but Capa put his hundreds of rolls of film away, and got out his negatives, and when I went to sleep he was still staring at the light through his negatives, complaining bitterly that nothing had gone well. He had discovered that one of the cameras he had been using all day had developed a light leak, and he thought that all of his films were probably ruined. This did not make him a very happy man, and I was so sorry for him that I determined not to ask him a single intellectual question the next morning.
Our time was getting very short, and we still had many things that we wanted to do. We wanted to see the Russian writers who when we had first arrived had all been out of town, on the Black Sea, or in Leningrad, or in the country. And we wanted to see theater and ballet and ballet schools. Capa had many pick-up shots to make. And every day or two we called Voks and asked whether our pictures had been cleared, because this was becoming a worry to us. We couldn't get any information about what we had to do about the pictures, and we knew that some kind of request was bound to be made. And no information came back, except that they were working on it. Meanwhile the drawers in our room were crowded with rolls and strips of developed film.
The deep fall had arrived, and the winter was fast approaching. In the country around Moscow a blue mist hung close to the fields, and everywhere the people were digging potatoes and storing cabbages.
A kind of coldness was creeping up between Capa and me, for an odor had come into our room, and it seemed to each of us that it was the odor of not quite clean clothing. We thought we were clean, we bathed a great deal, we sent our laundry out regularly, and yet this smell increased. We began looking at each other with narrowed eyes, and making slightly disparaging remarks about each other. The smell got worse and worse. We had to keep a window open. It was only after the third day that we discovered what it was. General Macon had given us some D.D.T. bombs, and one of these bombs had not been quite tightly screwed down, so that a tiny vapor of it was impregnating the room with its odor. And because we did not expect an odor, each of us thought it was the other. The smell of Aerosol, if you know what it is, is a rather pleasant clean smell, but if you don't know what it is, it is rather disgusting. We were very glad when we discovered the source of the evil and closed it off, and the room soon regained its beauty.
On the night after the celebration Ed Gilmore, who with time had forgiven Capa for stealing his Ellery Queen, invited us to dinner. And his wife is not only beautiful, she is also a beautiful cook. We spent an evening of happy, well-fed, mildly alcoholic decadence, for Ed Gilmore had a number of newly arrived swing records from America. We drank Martinis and ate crisp little
Moscow was settling into its winter stride. The theaters were opening, the ballet would begin, the shops were beginning to sell the thick cotton quilted clothing and the felt boots that people wear in winter. Children appeared in the streets in caps with earflaps, and with fur-lined collars on their thick coats. At the American Embassy technical sergeants who were experts in electricity were busily rewiring the whole building. Last winter the wiring burned out, and without the electric heaters they were used to, the Embassy staff had to work in overcoats.
We went to dinner at a house where five young American officers of the Military Attache's staff lived. It was a very good dinner, but they do not live very happy lives, for they even more than the others are restricted in their movements, and they must live the most circumspect of lives. I presume that the Russian Military Attache in America is rather carefully watched too. In front of their house stands a permanent militia man in uniform, and every time they leave their house they are accompanied by invisible followers.
Inside the pleasant house we sat at dinner with the American officers, and we had American food-a leg of lamb, and green peas, and a good soup, and salad, and little cookies, and black coffee. And we thought how four hundred years ago, perhaps in a house like this, British and French officers, young men in gold and red uniforms, had sat over their port, while outside in front of the gate the Russian guard in a helmet carried a pike and watched over them. These things do not seem to have changed very much.
Like all tourists, we made the trip to the little town of Klin, seventy kilometers from Moscow, to visit the home of Tchaikovsky. It is a pretty house, set in a large garden. The lower floors are now used as library, as storehouse for music manuscripts, and as a museum. But the upper floor where the composer lived has been left just as it was. His bedroom is as he left it-a big dressing gown hanging beside the narrow iron cot, a small writing table under a window. The ornate dressing table and mirror with the drape of heavy paisley presented to him by a feminine admirer stands in a corner, with his hair tonic still on it. And his living-room with the grand piano, the only one he ever owned, has not been changed. Even his desk has his little cigars in a bowl, and his pipes, and stubs of pencil. The pictures of his family are on the walls, and out on a little glass porch where he took his tea there is a clean sheet of music manuscript paper. His nephew is the curator-a handsome old man now.
He said, 'We want to make Tchaikovsky's house seem as though he has just stepped out for a walk and would soon return.'
This old man lives mostly in the past. He spoke of the musical giants as though they were still alive-of Moussorgsky, and Rimski-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky, and the rest of the great group. And the house was indeed full of the presence of the composer. The piano is tuned and played once a year. It is played by the best pianist available, and the music is recorded. Mr. Tchaikovsky, the nephew, played for us for a while, and the piano was mellow and a little out of tune.
We looked at the manuscripts in the library. The notes are stabbed on the paper, cutting into the staffs with a terrible haste, and whole sections are crossed out. And on some pages only eight bars remain, and the rest are viciously eliminated with a destroying pencil. And then we looked at the manuscripts of other composers, neatly inked, no note crossed out. But Tchaikovsky wrote as though every day might be his last, and every note. He was frantic to get his music down.
