E. Delafield - The Collected Works of E. M. Delafield (Illustrated Edition)

V

One morning Peter and I go to Kolominsky escorted by the Little Monster. She says it is an ancient monastery, and when we get there it looks like an ancient monastery but she recants and says it was a Palace of Ivan the Terrible. I don't know which she means. Prefer to think of it as a monastery.

Much the most peaceful spot I have seen in Russia—no Comrades, no reconstruction, not even a picture of Lenin with outstretched arm and clenched fist.

Just as I am sitting on a stone wall under the lime trees and looking down at the fields and the river, the guide tells me that on this exact spot Ivan the Terrible used to watch the peasants being flogged.

It is a great pity she cannot let well alone. However, it is to-day that we hear her, for the first and last time, make a joke. On the way back to the tram, passing through a tiny village, we see a little calf lying on the roadside, with a small pig nuzzling affectionately against it, both of them fast asleep in the sunshine.

Even the swivel eye of the Little Monster softens as she gazes down at them and she says:

"Look! In a Socialist state—no prejudice!"

For the moment, as we all three laugh, she seems quite human.

It doesn't last. She becomes as hortatory and tiresome as ever long before the tram has lurched back into Moscow with us, and makes us get off at the wrong stop, so that we have to walk several additional miles to Peter's hotel.

"It still seems odd to be lunching at four o'clock."

"Yes, doesn't it? Shall you have Bortsch again to-day?"

"Yes, I like it."

"How fortunate you are. But their fish is better than their meat, and the ice cream is good."

"Excellent. Much, much better than the compote ."

"Oh, the compote !"

We do not describe the compote to each other. It is not necessary, as we have met it, both here and in Leningrad, at every meal. We know all about the rather tough, acid little fruits in the top of the glass dish and the sliced apple below and the two rather consoling little bits of tinned apricot at the very bottom. Curious, how very much one seems to think and talk about one's food in Moscow.

Also one's drink. The mineral water is good but expensive. The ordinary, plain water—what, in any other country, would be the drinking-water—arrives on the table boiled. And very well-advised too. But either the boiling or its own natural properties have turned it pale yellow and given it a strange smell and a very peculiar taste. The remaining alternative, since neither of us drinks wine, and the beer—which is excellent—is a ruinous price—is tea in a glass.

Meals, it is scarcely necessary to say, take a very long time in Russia. Hours elapse between the moment of sitting down, and detaching from its book the coupon that represents food, and the moment when the waiter comes to take one's order. Hours more between each course. (The coupon entitles one to three courses. I have never tried to ask for a second helping, but I don't think the coupon would run to it.)

The tea comes at the very end, and is always much too hot to drink, and so necessitates another long wait.

Sometimes Peter and I talk like the thoughtful and intelligent people we really are, and discuss Socialism, and Communism, and tell each other that we really ought to have seen Russia before the Revolution in order to judge of the vast improvement effected. (When Peter says this to me it is very reasonable. When I say it to him it is simply idiotic, as before the Revolution he was an infant in the nursery.)

Sometimes we discuss our neighbors.

"I saw that man over there when I was in Batum. He speaks Dutch."

"Does he? Yes, he looks as though he might. There are some Germans at my hotel. They've made friends with Mrs. Pansy Baker and she went with them to see an abortion clinic—and a boot-factory."

"What fun. Have you seen a single pretty woman yet in Russia?"

"No. Have you?"

"No."

Once, when a blonde with black eyelashes and a tightly fitting white frock comes in and sits down all by herself at the table next to ours, Peter hisses at me through his teeth:

"If ever there was one, I'll take my oath that's one of what we know there aren't any of in Russia!"

I understand him perfectly.

In Russia now, we have repeatedly been told, there are no prostitutes.

They have all been collected and placed in a sort of Home of Rest, like aged horses in England.

It is, I believe, possible to go and visit them. I suppose if we ever do, they will be expected to answer any indiscreet question that any of us may, through the guide, elect to ask them.

I think, on the whole, I won't visit the prostitutes.

Sometimes Peter and I just talk about England, and Hartland Quay, and the Fourth of June at Eaton, and people we both know in London or Devonshire. It feels like looking back into another life, and on those occasions—which are generally in the small hours of the morning after a gruelling day of trams, comrades, museums, clinics, and factories—I go past the Kremlin, the fir trees, and the Mausoleum without so much as noticing them. I go on down the hill, and past the reconstruction on the river-bank, where the drill is hard at it, and into my hotel.

The dining room is brightly lit and full of people, and a little orchestra is playing " Sous les Toits de Paris "—as it does nightly.

I look in as I go by.

Mrs. Pansy Baker, the American communist, it at a table with her Germans, talking to them very earnestly. She is saying: "I have had a sad life."

I think this must be the beginning of a reference to Mr. Baker. Very likely he too has had a sad life.

In my bedroom is one cockroach. I don't like it at all. But it is headed toward the door, which I civilly hold open for it, and out it goes. A lull in the reconstruction work has set in, and I think what a good moment this will be in which to go to sleep.

The orchestra, now playing something very odd that I keep on thinking I know but can't identify, is nothing. Sometimes I win this nightly race with the reconstruction, sometimes I don't.

To-night it has only reculé pour mieux sauter , And they have got quite a new tool to work with—something like a hammer, dropping slowly down a flight of steps, over and over again, one step at a time. At last it drops once too often, and they don't pick it up again.

We are back once more at " Sous les Toits de Paris." Sur les lits de Moscou...

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There is no unemployment in the Soviet Union: everybody can, and indeed must, work; and so far as I know, everybody does. As a kind of offset to this universal activity, everybody—when not working—sits about and waits.

At the Leningrad Hotel I also sit about and wait. I wait for the Intourist Bureau to telephone the people to whom I have brought letters of introduction. I wait for the lift, which has just taken three Comrades upstairs, to come down again—which it never does. I wait for my ten o'clock supper—ordered at nine, and brought—with any luck—at about eleven. I sit in the hall and wait, for nothing in particular. I am becoming Russianized.

A very old man comes in, wearing a fur cap and a coat. ( Ancien régime , like a picture in an old nurserybook.) He sits down on a fraction of a bench which is already occupied by two French ladies, a girl in a blouse and skirt, and a Comrade smoking a cigarette.

There are never enough seats to go round in the hotel. Most of the people who come in and wait have to wait on their feet, leaning against walls. They do it fatalistically, obviously inured. The enormous shabby portfolios they all carry—like degraded music-cases—lie at their feet.