The icon is now in two trunks: mine and the car's. The bulbous Chaika cradles me as if I were one of the potentates for whom it was designed. We circle the Hotel Moscow, its heavy suspension cushioning the lean. We accelerate after a red light on Prospekt Marx, the front end dipping down before we surge ahead of lesser machines. Ours is from Intourist: I was instructed to go to the airport in their car rather than make my own way—and to be ready three hours before flight time.
These arrangements are a dead giveaway. Why the pointed gesture of sending a car for me? A Chaika limousine, the Central Committee's handmade chariot, for which policemen clear the way through ordinary traffic like Cossacks whipping their way through the rabble? Alyosha once showed me a leaflet distributed to Moscow drivers.
comrades! From Time to Time, You Will See "Chaika" Automobiles on the Streets of our capital. They Are In Use for Elected Officials of our party and Government, and the Soviet Union's Foreign Guests. Whenever You See a "Chaika," Pull to the Curb Immediately, Waiting Until It Has Completely Passed.
The driver's explanation—that the party of tourists scheduled to go with me canceled at the last minute—was clearly rehearsed. Loading my things, he scrutinized my face with an agent's curiosity about his quarry that dissolved the last uncertainty about what's waiting at the airport. Yet the trip out has already become one whose end can't be imagined, so perhaps won't come. I settle back to enjoy it. The seat nap smells like my father's new Buick when he first drove it home in 1950. I've had a fine snack of mushroom soup, pirozhki, and vodka in a
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restaurant called The Central. What's so serious about a four-hour flight?
The ironies alone are worth the ride. The intrepid explorer of Backstreet Moscow leaving in a Chaika limousine. And accompanied not by the Russian friends in whom he's invested his emotion but by an American bachelor returning from his Christmas vacation to a London bank, who tries to strike up a conversation about the best hard-currency bargains.
The strange thing is that I don't resent this buttondown stranger as I would have a year ago. Unassumingly, he forces me to think about what I ought to. In the real world where I'll be tonight, who cares that in the Central Post Office we're now passing on the left, a dead man called Alyosha and I composed comic telegrams to each other while waiting for likely girls to waft into sight. My fellow passenger has usable know-how—in contrast to my inside knowledge of Moscow, which is worth far less than I pretend. I'm tired of being a bigger deal here than on the outside, just because I don't belong.
Besides, it's his chance to discover Russia. He's the type of American who's moving in and taking over. Moscow offices—of the First National City Bank, Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, Univac and the rest—are opening everywhere, their expense-account staffs reserving the best restaurant tables. Beneath Lenin's portrait, the Minister of Foreign Trade contracts with Pepsi-Cola to produce millions of bottles annually. Comrade Brezhnev boasting he'll drink the first one. The Russian people will stand on line all day, and with Pepsi and chewing gum—yesterday's arch symbols of American vulgarity and imperialism—finally in their grasp the new revolution will be postponed another fifty years. They'll have made it; Orwell was right.
The penetration of the organization men started that day last May with the visit of Richard Nixon, former counsel to Pepsico International. Very soon "my" Moscow won't be the same.
The pleasant young banker moves closer to his window as I to mine. The street lights are on: evening at four o'clock. The Chaika's plush ride conspires to isolate me from the passing blur of shops and shoppers, but I concentrate on this last chance for refreshing my memories. The joyful moment when Anastasia and
Come Again?^435
I pressed against each other in that doorway over there, the labyrinthine entrance to the Bookshop Number One. "Let's get a taxi to Sokolniki Park," she said, instantly aroused. "I know a place for standing up."
Up the hill of Gorky Street, a favorite site for strolls. Past Mayakovsky Square and the Hotel Peking, where my bottle of scotch last winter for Ivan Petrovich, the restaurant manager, will always get me the table I no longer need. The driver's in a hurry to take me to his leader. Past the fortress doors of a store called "Armenia," where a hundred yards of well-dressed customers wait in thick sidewalk slush for baklavah to adorn their New Year's tables.
The line curls past massive facades and pathetic shop windows, gloomier than ever in the afternoon dark. The sodden snow soaks shoulders as it lands. Suddenly the key to this scene comes to me in a monologue of Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky's "Idiot," who explains that Russians subject themselves to extremes because they are driven
by fever, by burning thirst. ... As soon as we Russians reach a shore, as soon as we're certain it is a shore, we're so happy that we lose all sense of proportion. . . . It's not only we who are surprised by our passionate intensity in such cases, but all Europe. If a Russian converts to Catholicism, he's sure to become a Jesuit, and a rabid one at that. If he becomes an atheist, he'll surely demand that belief in God be eradicated by force. . . . Why such sudden fury? Because he has found his motherland at last, the motherland he has never had here; and he is happy. He's found the shore, the land; and rushes to kiss it. . . . Socialism too is the child of Catholicism. . . . Like its brother atheism, it too was begotten of despair ... In order to replace religion's lost moral power, to quench parched humanity's spiritual thirst and save it not by Christ, but by violence . . . "Don't dare believe in God! Don't dare own property! Don't dare have a personality of your own. Fratemite ou la mort/'^
This is the explanation for the willingness to wait two hours for the Armenia's sweets. No matter how small-minded some of their outward goals, no mere material comfort has ever driven Russians. Ten times more intense than the American dream, the
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Russian one is laced with religious notions of suffering for spiritual salvation. This world's meanness prompts fantasies of a braver one, for which they allow mad tyrants to starve and shoot them in their striving to attain it. I know because I feel this fever in me.
But as we stop for a light, the vulgar exaggeration in this turns me off. For every Dostoyevsky analyzing the anguished Russian soul and Solzhenitsyn demanding repentance, ten million Pavel Ivanovichs are troubled only by what movie to see on Saturday. Just off this very Gorky Street, I know an engineer more typical of the new urban masses than anything—by Russia-lovers or Soviet-haters—I've read. He cares about his children and his car, not guilt for the purges.
"All the brain-fucking, what's it for?" he once challenged me. "It's a myth that we go around agonizing. Talk of old troubles may precipitate new."
His truth cut me short. Only people who are themselves disturbed work at probing this country's hackneyed riddles and enigmas. Muscovites pick their noses, haggle over prices, steal everything not nailed down. At evening parties, so-called intellectuals take personal afTront over matters of "principle"— Gorky's real nature; Dali's motives—about which they know next to nothing. They argue sullenly or lunge with ignorant blows.
I had enough of this, and of the "soul-searching." The Russian people themselves don't really care; the endless contemplating of Great Questions—Who am I? What is Society? Whither Russia, and therefore the world?—is camouflage for their indolence. For their inability to cope with the simple things—unpolluted bathrooms, zippers on trouser flies—that the normal majority wants. The truth is that only against the poverty of my own emotions, as against that of daily Russian life, did the spiritual rummaging appear exhilarating. And this final hot-air discharge has me robbed of my last look at the Hippodrome and Alyosha's cluster of hospitals.