Even Art, even this stylish, sophisticated, traveled Muscovite, when he recalled what the West had meant, came alive. His handsome face just lit up like a bulb and he seemed to purr with pleasure when he said the word "West." It was the most potent insight into how ripe the Soviet Union was for Dean Reed when he arrived.
Then he said, "The West was something good. I mean, everything Western, was right. And Dean Reed came and he wore cowboy boots and he came from the land of the free and the home of the brave. And Chuck Berry," Art continued. "He meant everything."
"Come for dinner on Friday," Svetlana said, as she got up to leave. "We will introduce you to this girl who had a friend who loved Dean Reed," she added, while Art tugged at the front of his sweater to remind me it was the girl with the big breasts.
I got a room with a view in the end. Outside my window, in the distance, beyond the Lenin Museum, was Red Square, and at night, from this angle, it somehow resembled the landing pad in Close Encounters. Suspended by day in frozen sunlight, at night it was backlit by those clouds that drifted in from a power station. The red neon star - 5000 watts of it - on top of the Kremlin's Borovitsky tower, blazed among the real winter stars.
I couldn't get enough. I couldn't spend enough time looking or walking across it or thinking up metaphors for this - I didn't know what to call it - awesome place. Across Red Square, St. Basil's looked rich and whimsical, a Spielbergian starship just touching down after a trip to the Arabian Nights, a pile of red and green striped pineapples, of squashed onion domes and spires, and gold, all filigree and inlay. My metaphors collided and crashed, none of them any good. I just looked at St. Basil's and thought: such a pretty thing!
Make me something unique, Ivan the Terrible said to his architects, and they made him St. Basil's, and he asked if they could they make him another. Yes, they said, and thought about a new arrangement of striped pineapples and golden onions. Yes, we can, they said, and Ivan had their eyes put out because he didn't want anyone else to have one.
I liked Moscow best at night. I liked it in the snow, winter obviously its natural element, its grandeur underscored by the sweep of empty squares, vast plazas as burnished and forsaken as the uninhabited ballroom of a tsar's palace. Night hid the cracks in the buildings. The hard-currency hustlers stamped their feet in the snow outside the hotel and in the shadows of the Bolshoi Theater.
Fur hats? Rubles? Sex?
I sat in my window at the National Hotel and somehow it all seemed oddly familiar. The American Revolution always appeared in my mind as a remote woodcut of tiny eighteenth-century figures in wigs in a formal landscape. The Russian Revolution was always a movie. Sergei Eisenstein's fictional footage had shown up so often as documentary evidence of the events that finally everyone just believed his version was fact.
* * *
There was a knock on my door. It was Martin Walker. He was wearing very tight jeans and a fur hat a foot high. It had been awarded to him for extraordinary feats of macho fishing by some Siberian tribe.
Martin was the Guardian's correspondent in Moscow and he had written brilliantly about the coming of Gorbachev and Perestroika and Glasnost, rediscovering the Soviet Union for his readers as a place where people had sex and permanent waves, listened to rock and roll, ate Chinese food, and did not have Tampax. There were no sanitary napkins anywhere in the country.
Art Troitsky was Martin's best friend in Moscow, which was not surprising. It was a very tight circle, the foreign journalists who were loving it because the stories just exploded, dozens every day, the Muscovites telling it, stuff pouring out of them, stuff they'd been saving up to tell for years, even decades. Martin and I went down to the hotel bar to meet Leslie Woodhead and Jo Durden-Smith.
The second-floor bar at the National drew the gossips and the high rollers and it had a chancy edge-of-the-world feel. At night it throbbed with possibility. I sat with Martin and we gossiped and Jo and Leslie joined us. East German businessmen in green loden coats and gray leather shoes exchanged business cards. There was a chatty textile man from Atlanta, and a "professor" from Bloomington, Indiana, with a wispy chin beard. Professor of what? I asked, and he turned away, no longer garrulous.
Behind the bar, a pair of young waiters with the sullen, smooth, empty faces the Soviets sometimes had, played an interminable game of chess. Near them was a glass case, which held two chocolate buns and a pyramid of Pepsi Cola cans and next to it an ancient babushka, her head encased in a cotton scarf, her body, draped in a dress or coat - it was hard to tell which - her broom in her hand, frozen in time.
At a table in the corner was a pair of hookers, one in a red satin top, the other in a yellow angora sweater with glitter on the shoulders, which were padded out like a quarterback's. Ignoring the East Germans, waiting for customers with hard currency, the women ate chocolate-covered cherries from a large box on the table, reaching into the frilly papers with a steady rhythm and popping the candies whole into their big, red mouths.
Martin, who was taking it all in - you could tell that the bar at the National would be a column in the Guardian by the following week - scribbled a list of people for us to see. His contacts were astonishing. Then we all went out to eat Chinese food at the Mei Hua, where we met up with Julia Watson, who was married to Martin. Art and Svetlana joined us.
At night, a minor form of tourism in early Glasnost was making the rounds of the cooperative restaurants. We ate Indian food at the Delhi, where Mr. Rajneesh Kumar Verma had the spices and the rice flown in regularly. A Russian band played eerie covers of Dire Straits and a fat bride shook her bosoms to the impeccably mimicked lyrics of "Money for Nothing."
With Art and Svetlana one night, we went to the Skazka, a club for tourists and apparatchiks, where there was a floorshow and a gypsy fiddler.
He played everything, he played "Hava Nagila," he played the "Mull of Kintyre." Afterwards, a male exotic dancer, his pectorals oiled to a shine, began his routine. He jumped around, then posed on a bed of nails.
"A representative of the Soviet Socialist Sado-Masochistic Republic," Art said sarcastically, but the audience was wild for it.
A magician coaxed golden coins from behind Art's ears, and then stole his watch. Svetlana and I shared a pear the size of a melon. I hadn't seen much fresh fruit in Moscow, but as the juice ran down our chins, I understood that, for a price, you could get almost anything in the Soviet Union.
The Skazka would have been a perfect venue for one of Dean's impromptu concerts. He would have held Svetlana's hand, looked into her eyes and sung "Yiddishe Momma" to her, then treated the tourists to one of his comic songs. "Old Cowboys Never Die (They Just Smell That Way)," he would have sung. I was suddenly so sorry that Dean Reed was dead.
Like Dean, in my first week in Moscow, I was a tourist. I went to the museums. I went to the public parts of the Kremlin. I went to the Ukraina Hotel, a Stalinist wedding-cake of a building that towered over the river. In the lobby, where tourists stomped their feet in brown puddles of slush. Here Dean encountered a black Ukrainian girl singer who appeared later on his television specials. While the astonished tourists watched, he grabbed her hand and on the spot they did a rendition of "La Bamba."
I also went to GUM, where, astride the rococo fountains, among the beautiful galleries made of glass, Dean had once played his guitar. There was nothing much to buy at Moscow's biggest department store except ugly underwear and plastic gilt models of the Kremlin. At the Museum of Musical Instruments, on Fadeyev Street, I saw Dean's guitar. It had a little yellow smiley face pasted on to it and it was signed.
"Dean was very popular; he had a beautiful voice," said Anatoly D. Paniushkin, the director of the museum. "He gave a concert for us here in the museum. It was so sad he could not go to America, where they rejected him."
Later, in Red Square, I waited in the snow in the long line for Lenin's tomb. Some of the comrades, their ears bare - for only tourists and wimps turned down the earflaps on their square fur hats - ate ice cream.
>
Alongside gruff Bulgarians and impenetrable Albanians, were a group of smiling Cubans, who spoke lilting Spanish. As the line was halted in its progress at regular intervals by the arrival of official delegations, the Cubans chatted happily, although their shoes were very thin and they must have been very cold.
Inside the red granite mausoleum in the very center of Red Square, Lenin, stuffed, lay in a plastic box. The small, shriveled man, with a bald head and the familiar pubic beard, wore an utterly bourgeois black suit. His was a face completely without humanity or humor. Backlit, he resembled a plastic doll. His skin had a curiously orange cast and his hands were twisted, like an arthritic's.
A brain surgeon I met in Moscow was obsessed with the idea that Lenin had had a peculiar malformation of the cerebellum - for years, slices of his brain were kept in jars in scientific labs and studied - that resulted in the deformation of his hands. It also killed him, although for years his enemies gleefully circulated the rumors that syphilis killed Lenin.
In his airless tomb, the crowds shuffled past, prodded on by men in uniforms. Some years earlier, a tourist observing the mummified man in the plastic box, drew back, startled by something he saw.
"My God, Lenin's lost an ear," he shouted.
Lenin's ear had fallen off. The tomb had to be shut up for days while officials searched for it.
"Have you ever been to Lenin's tomb?" I asked Art that evening over dinner at his apartment. He barely raised his urbane eyebrow as he said, "Have you ever been to the Statue of Liberty?"
9
"Rada set out her stall to get Dean Reed," said Alla and blew her nose. She accepted a beer and a cigarette and sat down, cross-legged, on the floor of the Troitskys' flat on the Horoshovskoje Chausee near the Begovaya subway station.
"Alla's best friend, Rada, was a friend of Dean's," Svetlana explained, translating for Alla, who spoke a sexy, cooing Russian. "A close friend," she said, gravely.
Across the room, Art pulled at the front of his pullover to remind me we were talking of the page-three girl with big breasts. "Very big." Art mouthed it.
"She set out her stall to get him," repeated Alla.
Alla wore a little Lenin badge, tight jeans, and a homemade pinafore. Red lips, big dark eyes, and frizzy hair, she was a gypsy girl from Moldavia, half Hungarian, half Romanian. Her husband was a filmmaker. He was away in Sweden.
She wept for her dead friend for a while that night at Art and Svetlana's place, the friend who had loved Dean Reed. Then she lit up a Marlboro.
Svetlana whispered, "She is very emotional about this."
Alla rearranged herself, blew some smoke into the air, sipped her beer and launched eagerly into her friend's unhappy story, stopping only to wipe away the tears that brimmed up in her big eyes and ran down her pink cheeks. All it needed was the violinist from the Skazka.
"Rada loved Dean from the age of thirteen," Alla said. "Rada was a big girl [Art pulled his sweater again] whose ambition was to become famous or to meet famous people, and when she saw Dean on television, she loved him to death, even from afar, even when she was only thirteen years old." Alla drew breath.
Years and years passed. Rada collected all of Dean's records, went to his concerts, watched him on television, bought pictures of him, daydreamed about his slim waist and the way he moved. All the other girls she knew felt the same way. Unlike the others, Rada had a plan.
When Rada was sixteen, she went to work as a model for the painter Victor Kropotkin. She heard that Dean Reed was in Moscow, and she borrowed a nude portrait of herself from Kropotkin's studio. She hired a taxi and tied the big canvas on to the roof. She went with the taxi to the airport to greet Dean. Huge crowds were waiting to meet Dean and, with them, was Rada with her taxi and the picture of herself, naked, on the roof.
After the incident with the picture, according to Alla, Rada and Dean were inseparable. Or so she thought, because Rada was a very unstable sort of girl and everyone knew Dean had lots of women. Rada thought Dean would leave his wife and marry her, even though, during some years, they only saw each other once or twice, if Dean was in Moscow and had the time. She covered her ears when people told rumors about Dean. Rumors that he had an illegitimate child in Moscow, for instance. The truth was even worse. The truth was he loved his wife.
Maybe Dean did see other girls, but he told Rada that he could give himself entirely to two or three women a day. That's how it was for him. He could give that much. Rada was sure Dean loved her best. She was sure that he would marry her.
Then Dean died. There was hardly anything in the official press, but the news was known in Moscow. Rada took many pills. She drank a lot. She ended up in a mental hospital, where she had been before.
"The hospital was on the outskirts of Moscow, but Rada managed to escape." Here, Alla paused for effect and added: "Rada had her pockets full of pills! Next day," she whispered, "Rada's body was found, sprawled on a garbage dump on the edge of town. All that she left behind were her diaries."
Alla drank the vodkas that Svetlana handed her for comfort. She implored us to help her: Rada's mother wanted to sell her daughter's diaries, Alla said. Could I not help?
Art said: "Alla says Rada kept very good diaries. Her mother wants to get them published, not for the money, but because her daughter was the friend of a big star, which was almost like being a star."
"Rada was in love with Dean," said Alla.
"But he treated her so badly," I said.
Alla said, "He was a big star. He was a man. He had the right," said Alla.
Quietly now, Alla sat, crying. I wondered how many other girls he had left behind him, bruised, in Moscow, convinced that he had the right because he was a star. I wondered how much the diaries would, in the end, cost me.
After Alla finished her sad tale and had another good cry, she went home and we sat down to dinner. There was chicken and pickled garlic, cucumbers and cheese, chocolate cake and red wine.
"Stalin's favorite vintage," Art said examining the label.
At the end of the meal we had tea; Svetlana put cherry jam in hers and it was the only time in Russia I ever had what could pass for a race memory: my father liked to eat cherry jam with his tea. He said it was a Russian custom. Otherwise, I had never once felt Russian, never.
My grandparents had been among the Jews of the Pale of Settlement, an area of parts of what are now Belarus and Ukraine. From 1791, it was a kind of vast ghetto. Peasants and villagers like my own grandparents often did not speak Russian, only Yiddish. They were obviously not baptized, so there were no church records. They were barred from going to university and there were restrictions on what trades they could enter. Then came the murderous pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those who could fled to avoid being killed by the Cossacks.
What was there for me to feel? When people asked where my ancestors came from, I would say, "Fiddler on the Roof without the music." I felt nothing. But I knew that for my great-grandparents it had been much, much worse than I could imagine and even the jokes were often bitter.
Svetlana, long legs stretched out in front of her, was preoccupied. We were all delighted by the onset of Glasnost and Perestroika: the restaurants that had suddenly opened, the way people talked with increasing candor about the system. In Moscow there was real excitement, a sense of drama, a lot of intellectualizing about the new revolution and its possibilities. The nascent free press, the sheer exuberance of free speech. Svetlana wanted action. Her vision of a better life was born in long lines at the butcher and waiting rooms at the doctor's office. If it was tough for her, for a well educated, urban, sophisticated Muscovite, what was it like for ordinary people?
"Did you ever believe in Communism?" I asked.
"Not for one single day in my entire life," she said. "When I was a little girl, I drew wigs on Lenin in my schoolbooks and my mother had to be called in to discuss the problem."
She did not believe in any of it, not even now. In the Soviet Unio
n things would deteriorate, Svetlana believed. The lines would get longer. The meat would get scarcer. Everyone would get meaner, more vicious. And the men would keep on talking.
Maybe it was OK for the men, who sat around Moscow's restaurants with their Western pals, arguing, drinking, laughing. Boy, did they talk. Sometimes you felt Moscow's intellectuals would talk the whole enterprise to death. Maybe glorious Glasnost was OK for them, Svetlana said, but she saw no reason to stick around just to stand in food lines. If she could get out, if she could go to the West, she would go and happily.
"What good is this Glasnost if I have to wait in line for a chicken four hours?" she said.
"Why do we need a chicken?" asked Art.
"I don't care about a chicken. But you would care if our friends had nothing to eat. I don't want to wait for a chicken. I want to be doing my work," she said.
Svetlana turned to me. "Can I say this in Russian and Art will translate?"
"Yes, of course."
Eyes blazing, fists clenched, Svetlana suddenly let out a torrent of Russian.
"Well, the first thing I must say is that Svetlana is absolutely wrong, now I will translate what she says," said Art.
Svetlana turned away. She wanted to leave the country and her husband didn't get it.
Art, of course, did not want to leave. It was his moment. He was much in demand by visiting Westerners and anyhow things in the music business were jumping. He told me about his conceptual punk band. it was called Vladimir Illych.
"We wore Komsomol outfits and we had several big hits such as 'Lenin is Alive' and 'Lenin, Come Back', after Lassie Come Home. There was also 'Brezhnev is Knocking at Your Door'." Art picked up his glass of Advocaat liqueur. "Of course, the band only exist in our heads," he added. Then he looked at Svetlana and said, suddenly, "I think I will send Svetlana to the West."
Comrade Rockstar Page 8
