It was true that the living room had patches of crumbling plaster on the walls, and the parquet floor was scored and scratched as though heavy furniture had been dragged across it. But it also had arched windows of colored glass and a fireplace decorated with sky-blue ceramic tiles. Elkin had also thrown in some extra pieces of furniture—a piano in need of tuning, a divan, and a ladies’ dressing table with candlesticks in the shape of giraffes.
There were a great many giraffes in the apartment; they adorned everything in sight, from the door handles to the lace curtains.
“What do you think?” Klim asked Kitty. “Would you like to live here?”
“Yes!” Kitty was staring wide-eyed at the bronze heads and horns on the light fitting. “Look at all the funny horses!”
Elkin asked for an astronomical sum in rent—two thousand American dollars for eleven months. “At present, I am in some financial difficulty,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t take any less.”
In the course of the next few days, he and Klim haggled over the rent in a series of telephone calls.
“I’d be better off in the Grand Hotel,” Klim protested. “It’s cheaper there, and the plaster isn’t falling off the walls.”
“I’m asking a reasonable price,” Elkin kept repeating in a tedious voice. “You won’t find a private apartment anywhere else in Moscow. The house has a telephone, a stove in the kitchen, a storeroom, and a bathroom. You’ll need a bathroom for your daughter.”
“But you’re asking more in rent than I earn!”
Eventually, Klim knocked the price down to a thousand dollars. United Press agreed to give him an advance on his future salary, and he moved into the apartment on Chistye Prudy.
That evening, a tousle-headed old man dressed in a torn padded jacket appeared at Klim’s door and introduced himself in a deep voice, “My name’s Afrikan. I’m the yard keeper here. And this old girl is Snapper.” He pointed to a fat white dog skulking at his felt boots. “She’s our guard dog. We’ve brought you a present, see? We thought you might need something to sit on to play the piano.” He held out a stool cobbled together from pieces of birch wood.
Klim gave the yard keeper a ruble, and Afrikan promised he would make three more stools for “his excellency” so that Klim could receive visitors.
“Did you see our new tenant, Snapper?” he muttered admiringly as they went downstairs. “A prince—a Soviet prince! I thought there were no more of his kind left.”
The dog whined as if in agreement. The new tenants had won her respect straight away as Kitty had treated Snapper to the skin from her salami.
United Press has more than a thousand clients throughout the world, and every day, I have to send dispatches to New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo. Then my cables are sorted and sent out to the local papers—our subscribers.
It turns out that, as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, finding a story is a devil of a job. All the material sent out by the Press Department consists of dull accounts of government sessions and decrees, so I have to rely on my own wits.
I was wrong to think that Soviet citizens would be happy to speak to me if I showed them a press pass. Foreigners in Moscow are kept apart from the local population not only by the language barrier but also by the fear of the OGPU. After all my years abroad, I have developed a slight foreign accent, and besides that, my clothes give the game away completely, so people here are wary of me as they are with any “guest from overseas.”
The only Soviet citizens prepared to talk to me are the simplest souls. Yesterday, I interviewed a delegate to the All-Union Communist Party Congress from the Yakutia in the east of Siberia. I asked him what they were voting on, and it turned out he knew nothing about politics whatsoever but was so grateful to the Party that he was willing to approve anything.
“Before the revolution, I was nothing but a reindeer herder,” he explained. “The Party brought me up in the world. I’ve come to Moscow! Why would I go against them?”
He wandered around the gilded corridors of the Tsar’s palace that had once played host to royal receptions, putting out a finger to touch the huge mirrors and laughing in delight.
“Now I’ve seen everything!” he said as we parted. “I can go to my grave happy.”
The censor didn’t like my interview with the reindeer herder.
“What is this?” Weinstein said, frowning when I brought him the papers to sign. “We sent you a communiqué. Isn’t that enough for you?”
The communiqué had been on the subject of “the fight against political bias in the interests of improving the organizational work of the Party.”
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get Weinstein to pass my article.
“We don’t know yet if we can count on you,” he said. “Don’t think of taking any liberties before you have our trust.”
There are around forty foreign correspondents in Moscow. We visit each other often to dance, play poker, and exchange gossip. The strict censorship and the dearth of information only heighten the thrill of the chase for us. We all compete to see who can be the first to dig up some story and send it out to a foreign press office.
It may not be as prestigious to work in the USSR as in Europe, but my journalist colleagues all agree that they wouldn’t change Soviet Russia for anything. We enjoy unheard-of privileges here: we earn huge salaries by local standards, live in private apartments, and have access to embassy doctors and cooperative stores of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs where you can buy coffee, cocoa, different cheeses, and even exotic fruits. We’re not afraid of all the local petty tyrants or the secret police. After all, we can leave the country at any moment.
There’s a word for what we have—FREEDOM, the same freedom that was a cherished dream for several generations of Russian revolutionaries. Oddly enough, since 1917, the only people in the USSR who enjoy any sort of freedom are the foreign diplomats and journalists.
Even high-ranking Party officials are not immune to high-handed treatment from those at the top. A few days ago, I rang the former Central Committee member, Grigory Zinoviev, who, like Trotsky, has been placed under house arrest. When I asked him how he was, he said in a trembling voice, “Wait a minute. I need to have a word with my comrades.”
Without permission from his superiors, he can’t even complain of a cold. Outside his gilded cage, he has nowhere to run.
No other job I have had has aroused such a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. Soviet Russia is an extraordinary amalgam of the most benighted superstition and ignorance and the most advanced ideas, inspired creativity, and belief in the future. Despite everything, many people believe that here, in the USSR, it will be possible to build a new world, a world in which all the dreams of mankind will somehow be realized.
I am going to public lectures at the university, and I am struck by the intelligence and inventiveness of Soviet scholars. Architects are designing extraordinary buildings, Sergei Eisenstein is making astonishing films, and meanwhile, the crudest, most vile propaganda is being disseminated on all sides. The disenfranchised are being hounded mercilessly, and nobody seems capable of an ounce of fellow feeling. There’s a lot of talk of a “sacred struggle” or a “sacred war,” and it seems that the majority of the population approve.
My biggest problem though is that I have no time to search for Nina. Life here is a constant mad rush: my telephone never stops ringing, couriers from the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs are always bringing new communiqués, and I keep having to run off somewhere to attend some event or other.