Art Troitsky was Martin's best friend in Moscow, which was not surprising. It was a very tight circle, the foreign journalists who were loving it because the stories just exploded, dozens every day, the Muscovites telling it, stuff pouring out of them, stuff they'd been saving up to tell for years, even decades. Martin and I went down to the hotel bar to meet Leslie Woodhead and Jo Durden-Smith.
The second-floor bar at the National drew the gossips and the high rollers and it had a chancy edge-of-the-world feel. At night it throbbed with possibility. I sat with Martin and we gossiped and Jo and Leslie joined us. East German businessmen in green loden coats and gray leather shoes exchanged business cards. There was a chatty textile man from Atlanta, and a "professor" from Bloomington, Indiana, with a wispy chin beard. Professor of what? I asked, and he turned away, no longer garrulous.
Behind the bar, a pair of young waiters with the sullen, smooth, empty faces the Soviets sometimes had, played an interminable game of chess. Near them was a glass case, which held two chocolate buns and a pyramid of Pepsi Cola cans and next to it an ancient babushka, her head encased in a cotton scarf, her body, draped in a dress or coat - it was hard to tell which - her broom in her hand, frozen in time.
At a table in the corner was a pair of hookers, one in a red satin top, the other in a yellow angora sweater with glitter on the shoulders, which were padded out like a quarterback's. Ignoring the East Germans, waiting for customers with hard currency, the women ate chocolate-covered cherries from a large box on the table, reaching into the frilly papers with a steady rhythm and popping the candies whole into their big, red mouths.
Martin, who was taking it all in - you could tell that the bar at the National would be a column in the Guardian by the following week - scribbled a list of people for us to see. His contacts were astonishing. Then we all went out to eat Chinese food at the Mei Hua, where we met up with Julia Watson, who was married to Martin. Art and Svetlana joined us.
At night, a minor form of tourism in early Glasnost was making the rounds of the cooperative restaurants. We ate Indian food at the Delhi, where Mr. Rajneesh Kumar Verma had the spices and the rice flown in regularly. A Russian band played eerie covers of Dire Straits and a fat bride shook her bosoms to the impeccably mimicked lyrics of "Money for Nothing."
With Art and Svetlana one night, we went to the Skazka, a club for tourists and apparatchiks, where there was a floorshow and a gypsy fiddler.
He played everything, he played "Hava Nagila," he played the "Mull of Kintyre." Afterwards, a male exotic dancer, his pectorals oiled to a shine, began his routine. He jumped around, then posed on a bed of nails.
"A representative of the Soviet Socialist Sado-Masochistic Republic," Art said sarcastically, but the audience was wild for it.
A magician coaxed golden coins from behind Art's ears, and then stole his watch. Svetlana and I shared a pear the size of a melon. I hadn't seen much fresh fruit in Moscow, but as the juice ran down our chins, I understood that, for a price, you could get almost anything in the Soviet Union.
The Skazka would have been a perfect venue for one of Dean's impromptu concerts. He would have held Svetlana's hand, looked into her eyes and sung "Yiddishe Momma" to her, then treated the tourists to one of his comic songs. "Old Cowboys Never Die (They Just Smell That Way)," he would have sung. I was suddenly so sorry that Dean Reed was dead.
Like Dean, in my first week in Moscow, I was a tourist. I went to the museums. I went to the public parts of the Kremlin. I went to the Ukraina Hotel, a Stalinist wedding-cake of a building that towered over the river. In the lobby, where tourists stomped their feet in brown puddles of slush. Here Dean encountered a black Ukrainian girl singer who appeared later on his television specials. While the astonished tourists watched, he grabbed her hand and on the spot they did a rendition of "La Bamba."
I also went to GUM, where, astride the rococo fountains, among the beautiful galleries made of glass, Dean had once played his guitar. There was nothing much to buy at Moscow's biggest department store except ugly underwear and plastic gilt models of the Kremlin. At the Museum of Musical Instruments, on Fadeyev Street, I saw Dean's guitar. It had a little yellow smiley face pasted on to it and it was signed.
"Dean was very popular; he had a beautiful voice," said Anatoly D. Paniushkin, the director of the museum. "He gave a concert for us here in the museum. It was so sad he could not go to America, where they rejected him."
Later, in Red Square, I waited in the snow in the long line for Lenin's tomb. Some of the comrades, their ears bare - for only tourists and wimps turned down the earflaps on their square fur hats - ate ice cream.
Alongside gruff Bulgarians and impenetrable Albanians, were a group of smiling Cubans, who spoke lilting Spanish. As the line was halted in its progress at regular intervals by the arrival of official delegations, the Cubans chatted happily, although their shoes were very thin and they must have been very cold.
Inside the red granite mausoleum in the very center of Red Square, Lenin, stuffed, lay in a plastic box. The small, shriveled man, with a bald head and the familiar pubic beard, wore an utterly bourgeois black suit. His was a face completely without humanity or humor. Backlit, he resembled a plastic doll. His skin had a curiously orange cast and his hands were twisted, like an arthritic's.
A brain surgeon I met in Moscow was obsessed with the idea that Lenin had had a peculiar malformation of the cerebellum - for years, slices of his brain were kept in jars in scientific labs and studied - that resulted in the deformation of his hands. It also killed him, although for years his enemies gleefully circulated the rumors that syphilis killed Lenin.
In his airless tomb, the crowds shuffled past, prodded on by men in uniforms. Some years earlier, a tourist observing the mummified man in the plastic box, drew back, startled by something he saw.
"My God, Lenin's lost an ear," he shouted.
Lenin's ear had fallen off. The tomb had to be shut up for days while officials searched for it.
"Have you ever been to Lenin's tomb?" I asked Art that evening over dinner at his apartment. He barely raised his urbane eyebrow as he said, "Have you ever been to the Statue of Liberty?"
9
"Rada set out her stall to get Dean Reed," said Alla and blew her nose. She accepted a beer and a cigarette and sat down, cross-legged, on the floor of the Troitskys' flat on the Horoshovskoje Chausee near the Begovaya subway station.
"Alla's best friend, Rada, was a friend of Dean's," Svetlana explained, translating for Alla, who spoke a sexy, cooing Russian. "A close friend," she said, gravely.
Across the room, Art pulled at the front of his pullover to remind me we were talking of the page-three girl with big breasts. "Very big." Art mouthed it.
"She set out her stall to get him," repeated Alla.
Alla wore a little Lenin badge, tight jeans, and a homemade pinafore. Red lips, big dark eyes, and frizzy hair, she was a gypsy girl from Moldavia, half Hungarian, half Romanian. Her husband was a filmmaker. He was away in Sweden.
She wept for her dead friend for a while that night at Art and Svetlana's place, the friend who had loved Dean Reed. Then she lit up a Marlboro.
Svetlana whispered, "She is very emotional about this."
Alla rearranged herself, blew some smoke into the air, sipped her beer and launched eagerly into her friend's unhappy story, stopping only to wipe away the tears that brimmed up in her big eyes and ran down her pink cheeks. All it needed was the violinist from the Skazka.