Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow

by Paul Gallico

  Ada said, ‘Maybe we ought to ’ave a Seeing Eye Dog, too.’

  The guide stared, ‘Eye seeing dog?’

  ‘To ’elp us find the way to our room.’

  Praxie let that one go and led the way down the corridor. As they neared their number, a man popped out of the service door further down and then hurriedly popped back but not before Mrs Harris had seen him as well as something else. Auntie Praxie had seemed to stiffen momentarily.

  They reached the door and Mrs Butterfield unlocked it. Auntie still hung about. Something that Mrs Harris did not understand but which she had felt as a kind of growing irritation snapped and she asked, ‘You sleeping with us, dearie? That’ll be a fair treat but no extra charge I’ope.’

  The guide said impassively, ‘I just like to see everything all right for you.’

  ‘Everything will be tickety-boo.’

  ‘I come in the morning and show you breakfast. Sleep nice.’

  They entered their quarters. Mrs Harris’s eyes did a hundred and eighty degrees about the room like the sweeping of a lighthouse beam. She said, ‘Well at least the maid’s been ’ere, turned the beds down and done a bit of tidying up. They’ve learned something. It’s been a day, ’asn’t it? I can do with a bit of shut-eye.’

  This slightly useless chatter she continued for another moment or two in order to distract Mrs Butterfield from what Ada had noticed almost as soon as she had entered the room and hoped that her friend would not. The premises and their belongings had been thoroughly and meticulously searched.

  It was only then that she realized what had been biting her ever since their arrival. They had been under constant watch, never left alone for a minute except for their temporary escape into the dispensary of Mr Rubin.

  She pressed her hand to her side and felt the reassuring crackle of Mr Lockwood’s letter to Liz. But it was reassuring no longer. Was Violet right and there was really some danger connected with it? Was that why Liz had not been there? Had she, Ada, got herself involved in something better left alone? Was Liz already in trouble? She was remembering the photo and Mr Lockwood’s expression. A feeling of sadness rather than fear pervaded her.

  However, the discovery that they were being shadowed was disturbing, sufficiently so that she removed the letter from its hiding place on her person and while Mrs Butterfield was wrestling with the bathroom amenities Ada took certain precautions with regard to the missive and returned it to her handbag.

  Mrs Butterfield in blessed innocence of what was going on appeared at the bathroom door. She said, ‘The water’s ’ot now. Scalding. From all the taps.’

  12

  The next day Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield with the rest of the visitors were swept away on the inflexible and inexorable routine of Package Tour Number 6A. The guide had duly appeared to lead them to breakfast, the chambermaid had been about, so had a man in a raincoat. When the tourist party was assembled at the entrance to the hotel to board the bus Ada’s sharp eyes and powers of observation plus the warning of the discovery of the search the night before led her to an examination of their fellow travellers. Two of them were a man and a woman she had not seen before, and there was a subtle distinction in the cut of their clothes which just wasn’t right for foreigners. Were these then watchers? And if so what on earth were they being watched for?

  Almost for a moment she was tempted to excuse herself, go back to her room and do what Violet had bidden her so long ago: tear up the letter if that was what it was all about and flush it down the loo, until she remembered that the loo didn’t flush. But there was something else that prevented this and that was the thought that perhaps somehow and in some way before her return she might yet encounter Liz, by accident even see that lovely melancholy face somewhere in a crowd.

  Marvelling, they paraded across the cobbled stones of the Disneyland of Red Square dwarfed by the breathtaking giantism of the walls, towers and cupolas.

  They gawked dutifully at the Czar’s cannon which was so huge that it couldn’t shoot the three-foot calibre cannonball for the power needed to move this mass would have blown up half the Kremlin, and they were also suitably impressed by the Czar of Bells which had never been rung since its two hundred tons’ weight had broken the eighteenth-century scaffolding and knocked a piece out of it big enough to let the tourists wander around inside.

  Mrs Harris said, ‘What good are they if they don’t work?’

  Mrs Butterfield said, ‘Just as well they don’t. They’d blow your ears off if they did. But they make nice decorations.’ And then she added, ‘Ain’t them churches fancy? We got nothin’ like them at ’ome.’

  ‘They don’t work either,’ Mrs Harris remarked. ‘Leastwise not any more.’ She was aware that the odd-pair-out who had seemed just that much slightly off-beat to be real tourists were always managing to be close behind them within listening distance wherever they went. Circling the square, the fabulous coloured, turban-topped pile of St Basil’s Cathedral just out of the line of fire of the modern touch of the stainless steel statues of missiles of the peace-loving Muscovites, they traipsed past the Gum state department store which didn’t look like a store but like a palace, the 3,200 room Hotel Rossia which didn’t look like a hotel but like a store, were dizzied by one Technicolor cathedral after another throwing their bulbous towers into the Russian sky. Ultimately they approached the pièce de résistance of the morning’s tour, the Tomb of Lenin, strangely squat and square built after all the curves and peaks of churches and towers, a solid low edifice of red basalt with a single band of black marble across the front bearing the name Lenin in Cyrillic lettering with above it balconies cut from Ukrainian granite.

  As though it were bleeding internally it trailed a long dark line of figures, patient men and women in rough, lumpy clothes who had been standing for hours waiting to get in.

  The guide said, ‘We will now go and visit the tomb of the great Lenin, our most glorious hero. Because you are tourists you will be permitted to go in before the others. You will please go quietly and after you have paid your respects, move along for many people are waiting.’

  ‘Cor,’ said Mrs Harris, ‘do they do this every day?’

  ‘Yes, Madam, even in the winter.’

  Violet said, ‘ ’Oo did she say it was?’

  ‘Lenin. ’E’s the one made the revolution. They got ’im buried ’ere, but you can ’ave a look at ’im.’

  They filed through the entrance porch between two immaculately gleaming soldiers standing on guard with bayonets fixed and then down a flight of stairs by barely enough light to see.

  ‘Phew!’ remarked Violet, ‘smells like people around ’ere don’t wash very much.’

  Ada poked her and said, ‘ ’Ush. It’s a bit pongie but we’re guests and it ain’t perlite to pass comment on the personal ’abits of yer ’osts.’

  Somewhere in the darkness there was a guard who whispered, ‘Ssssshhh!’

  They found themselves in an underground chamber that appeared to be lit only by the glow emerging from the glass case of Lenin’s transparent coffin.

  ‘Lor’ luv ya,’ said Mrs Butterfield sotto voce, ‘they ’aven’t arf got ’im laid out.’

  On the same note Mrs Harris said, ‘Just like my hubby when ’e passed on, in ’is best suit except I wouldn’t let nobody look at ’im because he wouldn’t ’ave liked it. “Shut the box,” I said to the undertaker and …’

  Again came the warning, ‘Ssssshhh!’

  They were now at the sarcophagus where they could pause and look down upon the extraordinary figure of the little man with the high brow and small pointed beard, clad in a black suit, his eyelids closed as if in sleep.

  Mrs Butterfield, of course, had to say it, or rather sibilate it, since a loud voice in that catacomb would have been a sacrilege. ‘Don’t ’e look natural?’

  ‘No, ’e don’t,’ replied Mrs Harris and felt a sudden sadness and pity gripping her heart. ‘He looks like ’e’s from Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks. In
fact, the figure I saw of ’im there looked better.’ And then Mrs Harris found she could not bear lingering there and her whisper was too audible as she said, ‘It’s a rotten shyme. Why does ’e ’ave to be looked at by every Tom, Dick and ’Arry after ’e’s dead and gone and can’t ’elp ’imself? Why couldn’t they give the little man a decent burial if they thought so much of ’im? Tarting ’im up and everyone staring down at ’im through the glass cover and ’im not bein’ able to say so much as “bugger off”.’

  She felt herself pushed from behind and a voice commanding, ‘Go please, move along.’

  ‘Narsty for the poor little feller,’ was Ada’s final comment as she did so.

  Moscow, Mrs Harris was finding, was a constant and rather exciting and often delightful series of prize packages like reaching into a bran tub. You never knew what you were going to get or what anything was going to be like. Driving through the streets where she was depressed by the drab, uniform, ill-cut clothing of the inhabitants, shapeless suits for men, sweaters, shawls and headscarves for the women, and even more dispirited by the sight of the old women in black, yes, and young ones too, sweeping the streets with brooms made of twigs like the witches rode in old-fashioned fairy tales. She did not fail to notice the big black saloon cars, chauffeur driven with well-padded men lounging comfortably in the back and in the bus she whispered to Mrs Butterfield, ‘Looks like some are more Communist than others around ’ere. They ain’t no different from us. Women gets the dirty work.’

  ‘Someone’s got to do it,’ replied Mrs Butterfield philosophically.

  In spite of the grandiose architecture and Russian gigantomania, new and old, Mrs Harris sniffed the sour aroma of universal poverty.

  And then the next minute they were shuffling through the confines of the fabulous Kremlin museum, deep inside the red walls, called the Armoury and literally blinded by the glitter of the display of swords, scabbards, crowns, thrones, icons, Bibles, robes, turbans and head-gear, solid gold encrusted with diamonds, emeralds, amethysts and rubies, copes embroidered with pearls, strings of pearls, chains of pearls, a crown blazing with twenty-five hundred diamonds, another covered with diamonds and emeralds, a sceptre and orb, shapeless with the rough setting of ancient rubies. Here was such wealth as defied the imagination, from the delicate Fabergé jewelled Easter eggs and miniature flowers to the imperial coaches glittering with gold paint, some of them literally houses on wheels. Icons were so encrusted with pearls and precious stones that they seemed to have lost all shape or meaning. Even the bridles, saddles and saddle bags of the long-defunct royal horses were thick with turquoise, gold filigree, lapis lazuli, topaz and diamonds.

  The effect was staggering. The gems splintered into bouquets of stabbing flames of colour. Ada said, ‘Lor’, Violet, makes our Crown Jewels in the Tower look like Woolworth’s, don’t it?’

  Mrs Butterfield said, ‘I thought they was supposed to be poor over ’ere. ’Oo owns all this stuff?’

  Mrs Harris replied, ‘I wouldn’t know, but maybe if they sold it and divvied it up so everybody ’ad a share like they talk about there’d be enough for everyone to ’ave a decent suit of clothes and maybe get things workin’ in the barfroom as well.’

  The guide appeared at their elbow. She intoned, ‘These are the property of the People’s Republic.’

  A voice from the crowd said, ‘I thought you people had done away with all that stuff of the Czars.’

  The guide said, ‘No more the Czars, but we show you examples of wonderful Russian workmanship.’

  Ada and Violet found themselves transported to a drab hotel dining-room that reminded them of a railway station where they were served a grey and almost inedible meal by rude and surly waiters and waitresses who practically threw the dishes at them or disappeared completely into the kitchens for three-quarters of an hour at a time. From thence they were wafted to the Baroque splendours and warmth of the exquisite Bolshoi Theatre and the fairy tale ballet that blossomed on the stage. The Sleeping Beauty was being performed, but even here Ada was aware of the weird contrast between the audience, the square-bodied men and women who looked as though they had all been chiselled out of the same blocks of granite, the men in open necked shirts, the women with hardly a ribbon or a bit of finery to set off their colourless garments, and the grace, the beauty, the flowing, limpid motion on stage, the dancers in their glowing costumes and above all their slender figures and the ease with which they seemed to float through the air. While she could not put it into words, indeed for any foreigner to reconcile that these were the same people on either side of the proscenium arch, Russians all, was difficult. Those beautiful, airy people had sprung Phoenix-like from the thick-set masses watching them.

  Again they were taken from the open spaces of the city which, once one had left Red Square and the Kremlin area behind, consisted of grim, identical, harsh and undecorated blocks of flats and plunged into the subterranean palace of the underground stations of the famous Moscow subway system where each stop along the line was brightly decorated with statuary, paintings, bas reliefs, coloured tiling and mosaics mostly put together with a vulgarity of design coupled with a certain childish and innocent lavishness.

  Mrs Butterfield said, ‘What’s the good of all of this if they ’ide it away down under ground?’, but Mrs Harris who was curiously beginning to get a feeling of these strange, incomprehensible people into whose midst she had been aviated, said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, Vi, if we couldn’t use a bit of this back ’ome. It wouldn’t do any ’arm if we ’ad some life in our own tube stations.’

  So interesting, exciting and novel was their prize package tour to Moscow turning out to be that the affair of Mr Lockwood and his lost lady love was beginning to dim and even the fact that their luggage had been searched and that a couple of tecs seemed obviously to be keeping a watch over them faded rather into the picture of what this marvellous city and astonishing people were really like. If one took notice and observed constantly one could not escape the feeling that even the most ordinary citizens walking the streets or going about their daily work seemed to be looking over their shoulders as though any moment they expected the tap of the policeman’s finger. It couldn’t actually be so, Mrs Harris thought, that an entire nation was constantly under suspicion of being up to something, but the number of police, militia and obvious plainclothes operatives coupled with a furtive and half-guilty air of the citizens and their reluctance to say as much as half a dozen words to a stranger gave one the feeling that it might be so. Whatever, it was their business and none of hers as a foreigner and she even forgot about the letter once more crackling in a compartment of her handbag.

  If there had been one total disappointment to the exciting trip neither Mrs Harris nor Violet had seen fit to mention it. This was the matter of Mrs Butterfield’s fur coat. Ada kept quiet because up to that moment they had not seen so much as a glimmer of such an article on the horizon or anywhere else and Mrs Butterfield refrained from calling attention to it since as a lifelong pessimist she was thoroughly inured to disappointment and never expected anything important, exciting or greatly desired to happen to her.

  The occasional furs they encountered on their tour through the environs of Moscow were tattered, shabby and usually filthy garments to be seen on the backs of peasants from the northern regions. It wasn’t wintertime anyway but the chilly nights brought out no more than rough cloth coats or series of shawls and cardigans. Not even of the most modest musquash, an inferior and less important rodent in the fur business, was there any sign, neither in the great Gum department store or the scattered shops. Fur hats peeled from some nondescript quadruped were seen worn by most Russian men and that was that.

  There was gossip amongst the tour members that the Berjozka was stocked with treasures which could be bought with foreign currency. However, none of the members of this particular package tour having appeared to show any signs of the necessary affluence, no visit to this super emporium was scheduled. And also the tour wa
s drawing to a close. They were due to go home the next day.

  Ada Harris, who wished to make certain that there was actually nothing in the pelt line within her friend’s reach, had asked whether they might be let off for a visit to this mart and an afternoon’s shopping.

  The reply from the guide had been a stern ‘Nyet. Impossible. It is not scheduled in this tour. Besides which, you would find the articles are far too expensive.’

  Praxevna Lelechka had her orders. Never for a moment were either of the two women to be allowed out of sight. And so, with regret at the disappointment she had caused her friend, Ada was compelled to admit defeat. But this was before a telephone conversation which took place between Comrade Colonel Gregor Mihailovich Dugliev, Chief of Foreign Division Internal Security, and Vaslav Vornov, Inspector Foreign Division Internal Security, in which the Chief, having demanded a report on the activities of the two English women and having received it from his subordinate, gave Comrade Vornov seven different kinds of Russian hell and issued orders for an immediate change in the type of security clamped down upon the pair.

  Translated, the exchange would have gone somewhat like this:

  GREGOR MIHAILOVICH DUGLIEV: Comrade Inspector Vornov, have you a report upon the two English women spies, Harris and Butterfield?

  INSPECTOR VORNOV: Right here before me, Comrade Chief.

  DUGLIEV: Well?

  VORNOV: Nothing. Outside of the regrettable incident in the room of the paper merchant from which time surveillance was increased there has not been so much as a fraction of a second when they have not been with the group or under even heavier observation.

  DUGLIEV: What do you mean when you say there has not been so much as a fraction of a second when they have not been with a group or under even heavier observation?

  VORNOV: Exactly that, Comrade Gregor Mihailovich. The orders left no interpretation that from the instant they descended from the plane they were not to be given so much as a moment to themselves and the reports before me are complete from the time they arose until the …