John Steinbeck - A Russian Journal

Wanda Wasilewska had prepared the luncheon. It was delicious, and there was a great deal of it. There was a vegetable caviar made of eggplant, a fish from the Dnieper cooked in a tomato sauce, strange-tasting stuffed eggs, and with this an aged vodka, yellow and very fine. Then came strong, clear chicken soup, and little fried chickens, rather like our Southern-fried chicken, except that they w«re dipped in bread crumbs first. Then there was cake, and coffee, and liqueur, and last Korneichuk brought out Upmann cigars in aluminum cases.

It was a beautiful lunch. The sun was warm, and the garden was lovely. And as we sat with the cigars and liqueur, the talk turned to relations with the United States. Korneichuk had been part of a cultural delegation to the United States. On their arrival in New York he and his delegation had been fingerprinted and made to register as agents of a foreign power. The fingerprinting had outraged them, and so they had returned home without carrying out the visit. For, as Korneichuk said, "With us, fingerprinting is only for criminals. We did not fingerprint you. You have not been photographed or forced to register."

We tried to explain then that according to our rule the people of a communist or a socialist state are all employees of the government, and that all employees of foreign governments are required to register.

And he answered, "England has a socialist government, and you don't make every Englishman register, nor do you fingerprint them."

Since both Korneichuk and Poltarazki had been soldiers, we asked them about the fighting which had gone on in the area. And Poltarazki told a story which is very hard to forget. He told of being with a Russian patrol which was sent to attack a German outpost. And he said that they had been so long getting there, and the snow had been so deep, and the cold so severe, that when they finally made their attack, their hands and their arms and their legs were stiff.

"We had nothing to fight with, except one thing," he said. "That was our teeth. I dreamed about that afterward. It was so horrible."

After luncheon we went to the river, and hired a little motor-boat, and cruised about under the cliff of Kiev and across to the flat sandy beach where hundreds of people were bathing and lying in the sun. Whole families in colored bathing suits were turning brown on the white sand. And there were many little sailboats on the river, tacking back and forth. There were excursion boats too, loaded with people.

We took off our clothes, and jumped over the side of the boat, and swam around in our shorts. The water was warm and pleasant. It was Sunday and very gay. In the gardens on the cliffs, and in the town, people swarmed. Music was playing in the orchestra shells on top of the cliff. And many young couples walked arm in arm along the river.

In the evening we went back to the Riviera, the dancing place on the cliff, and we watched the night come down over the huge level Ukraine with the silver river twisting away.

There were many more dancers this evening because it was Sunday. And some of them danced almost professionally well. The orchestra played its usual gypsy, and Georgian, and Russian, and Jewish, and Ukrainian songs. In our honor they did a version of "In the Mood," which was a shattering affair. It was two-thirds over before we recognized it at all. But it was played with great vigor.

The open-air dancing platform was surrounded by a rich hedge of some flowering plant. And in a little cave in this hedge a small boy hid-a little beggar. He would creep out of his cave of flowers and come to the table and beg a little money to go to the movies.

The manager came over and said, "He is our steadiest customer, and he is very rich."

He drove the little boy away gently, but the moment the manager had moved away, he came back and got his money for the movies.

More and more people came to the club, and it was quite crowded. At about ten o'clock a fight started, a rushing, striking, running fight, among a number of young men. But it was not about a girl. It was about soccer, which is a very serious business for the Ukrainians. The men of Kiev feel as strongly about their soccer team as do the Brooklynites about their baseball. The fight raged over the platform for a moment, and then it settled down, and everyone went to a table and had a drink and settled the problem.

We walked back through the parkway. Hundreds of people were still sitting and listening to the music of the orchestras. Capa begged me not to ask him any questions in the morning.

There is an institution here which would be good for us. In the hotels and restaurants, well displayed, there is a complaint book with a pencil on it, and you can write any complaint that you want against the service, or the management, or the arrangements, and you needn't sign it. At intervals an inspector comes around to look over the restaurants, and all public services, and if there are enough complaints against any one man, or against the manager, or against the service, there is a reorganization. One complaint is not taken very seriously, but if the same complaint is repeated a number of times, it is.

And there is another book in the Soviet Union, which we were coming to view with a certain amount of terror. It is the impression book. Whether you have visited a factory, a museum, an art gallery, a bakery, or even a building project, there is invariably an impressions book in which you must set down what you think about what you have seen. And usually, by the time you come to the book, you don't know what you have seen. It is a book obviously intended for compliments. The shock would be great if the remarks and the im-pressions were not complimentary. Impressions, with me at least, require a little time to cook up. They are not full grown immediately.

We had asked to go to another farm, one on richer land than the one we had seen, and one that had not been as badly destroyed by the Germans. And the next morning we started for it, in another direction from Kiev than the first farm we had visited. Our car was a pre-war Ziss. And as we had driven in it, it had grown progressively more decrepit. Its springs no longer sprang very much, its gears groaned and clattered, its rear end howled like a dying wolf.

We had become interested in the drivers we got. Being a chauffeur is not a servant's job in the Soviet Union at all, but a well-paid and dignified position. The men are mechanics, and nearly all of them have been soldiers-either tank-drivers or pilots. Our driver in Kiev was a serious man who was nursing his dying automobile like a child. None of the new cars had come in from Moscow yet, and no one knew when they would arrive. Every piece of rolling stock had to be kept going long after it should have been sent to the junk heap.

As a car, our vehicle in Kiev didn't amount to much, but as a water heater it was magnificent. We stopped every three miles and filled the radiator from ditches, from little streams, from water holes, and the car promptly turned it into steam. Our driver finally left his water bucket on the front bumper, ready for use.

We went about twenty kilometers on a mildly paved road, and then turned left into gently rolling country. The road was no road at all, but a series of wheel tracks, and since it had rained, the trick was to find the wheel tracks least recently used. In the depressions between the rolls of land there were small ponds, with white herons and storks strolling around their edges. We nursed our boiling car between the ponds, and at each one stopped and let it steam a while, and filled it with fresh water.

Our driver said he had been a pilot during the war as well as a tank-driver. He had one very great gift, he could sleep at any time, and for any length of time. If we stopped the car for five minutes, he went to sleep, and immediately awakened when he was called, wide awake and ready to go. He could sleep for twelve hours and awaken the same way. I remembered the gunners in our bombers who had developed the same gift by sleeping on the way to their targets and on their way home.