"What? Like a parcel?" Svetlana banged her fists on the table; the plates jumped. "You don't understand," she said. This was addressed to Art. He looked bemused.
In her way she was much less sentimental and more astute about the world than Art. A year or so later, when they came to New York for the first time, I took her to Macy's. I asked if she was surprised.
"No," she said. "I think this is the normal way to live."
It was tough times in New York, plenty of homeless all over the city, crime, crack, poverty.
"I understand," she said. "But at least there is the possibility to live a better life. In the Soviet Union there was none. Everything was arranged for you: where to live, how to live, what job to do. Nothing. No chance."
There was a New York City subway map on the wall of Art and Svetlana's flat and, in the living room where we ate, a large Sony Trinitron monitor. It didn't work as a television set, of course, because the broadcast standards were different in Moscow. But it was the only set Art found stylistically interesting, so he used it as a monitor for his video player.
"You know," he said, "when Dean Reed first arrived, he did numbers like 'Blue Suede Shoes'. This meant something to us. There was nothing in Soviet culture that reminded me of my dreams, and rock was a concentration of all good things." He polished off his Advocaat. It was late. I asked what records he wanted from New York when I got back.
"Cab Calloway," he said and grinned sardonically. "And early Louis Prima."
10
On the night I was to meet Dean Reed's Soviet translator, we - Leslie, Jo, and I - went to a bar on the third floor of the National Hotel.
The hotel was like a little city, with many restaurants, bars, meeting rooms. I thought of the third floor bar as the Carpet Bar because it had what resembled old carpet on the wall. There was a friendly bartender and you could get plates of smoked fish and hard-boiled eggs and caviar. The bartender would also sell you jars of caviar, for about seven bucks. It was the blue and white china, though, that I was obsessed with.
The bar had a set of china on which it served snacks and which was also decorative, propped up on shelves among the vodka bottles. Somehow I got it into my head that this was the original National Hotel china, that it dated from the 1920s, a wonderful period in Soviet decorative arts, and that, in the course of history, Lenin had probably eaten his sandwiches off it.
Everything in the Soviet Union on that first trip was interesting, everything had an exotic glitter for me, and if there were few souvenirs, there was, nonetheless, the history.
I began to barter with the bartender for the plates. Pantyhose changed hands, and so did ballpoint pens, but the thing he seemed to desire most were music cassettes. He was willing, for instance, to trade a blue and white teapot for a James Taylor, a large serving plate for Paul Simon, and for the Rolling Stones I was able to acquire four nice soup bowls.
And so it went, not just then, but for the several trips to Moscow that followed. I carried the blue and white china wrapped in newspaper, smuggled along with the seven dollar caviar, out of Moscow, convinced the china was more or less national treasure. And then once, on a TV program, I saw a reporter interview some very poor people in a remote region of the USSR; they lived in what appeared to be a hut. But in the hut, when they invited the reporter in for tea, was a set of blue and white china. The same blue and white china. It didn't matter though; the dishes I bartered in the Carpet Bar of the National never lost their luster.
After a snack and a drink, we took the subway to meet Art and Svetlana at the appointed station. In the subway train, the Muscovites stood and sat, behind books and newspapers, secret and unsmiling and blank. One beanbag of a woman, who seemed to have been stitched permanently into her overcoat, clutched a string bag triumphantly. It held a rush of yellow oranges. Fruit was more precious than gold in a Moscow winter and there must have been a special on somewhere. All over town that day I had seen oranges spilling from suitcases or stuffed into net bags, bright yellow and orange balls of fruit, like jewels caught in nets.
The Moscow subway stations were everything that had been promised. The walls were marble and granite; there were chandeliers and stained-glass windows; there were stations like Las Vegas hotels and stations as streamlined as Rockefeller Center, where the Art Deco bronzes glittered just for the pleasure of the strap-hangers. In the subways, the imperial ambitions of Mother Russia had been passed on to the working classes and I would not have been surprised to find walls made of solid silver. For five kopeks, you could ride forever.
Warm, efficient, safe, the subway was one of the few institutions in Moscow that worked. Above ground things were changing every five minutes. Here, amid the subterranean splendors, was the only place that Art Troitsky felt on firm ground.
At the Gorky Park Station, Art was waiting with Svetlana. Outside, a light snow was falling. The black iron gates to Gorky Park glittered with gold filigree. Inside the park was a silvery, moon-shaped ice-rink on which skaters raced, twirled, stumbled. From the loudspeaker system came the insistent strains of "Volare." .
"Nel blu di pinto di blu," Domenico Modugno warbled. The skaters circled. The music changed to the "Skater's Waltz" and the show-offs spun on to the rink, dancing, spinning, jumping. Millions of distant little stars twinkled coldly overhead, and we trudged off into the park, Leslie in a Russian-style hat made of monkey fur, the earflaps down, Jo in a newly acquired caracal, his huge leather bag over his shoulder, Svetlana graceful and surefooted. The ground was frozen and occasionally skaters suddenly sped out from among the stands of trees. I thought as we walked, alone, silent, in the empty frozen park, even the music fading and distant, about Gorky Park, the novel, and the dead man left in the park, his face flayed.
In a clearing, near the embankment of the Moskva River, was a building painted the same blue as the cafe in East Berlin, and I wondered if there was an oversupply of duck-egg blue paint in the Eastern Bloc. An old man without any teeth was its gatekeeper. He pulled open the door and followed us in.
Waving a filthy handkerchief at us, he blew his nose on it and stuffed it up his coat sleeve. He did a little Charlie Chaplin dance and snatched our coats, locking them away in a sealed cupboard.
It was useless to try to hang on to your coat in Moscow - perhaps it was bad manners, or bad luck. Perhaps the doormen were afraid the pockets concealed something dangerous, maybe it was only for the tips.
I was hungry. On Mondays, Moscow's restaurants closed for cleaning and I'd had only a minuscule portion of bootleg caviar to eat since early morning when, with the take-it-or-leave-it look that came with the breakfast, a sullen waiter in the hotel dining room tossed a couple of limp hot-dogs on my plate. Art had promised dinner, and somewhere, from the bowels of the building, came the delicious meaty smell of lamb cooking.
We followed Art down a long corridor and I heard music from behind closed doors. In the hidden maze of ramshackle rehearsal rooms, Moscow's rock bands practiced their liberation. In the basement was a cooperative restaurant. It was very dark.
The building belonged to Stas Namin. A rock star, he was also the grandson of Anastas Mikoyan, a former premier of the Soviet Union, and politics ran in Stas's blood; so did commerce.
He was the quintessential promoter - wily, political, charming. As a young cadet at the Military Academy, he had formed his first band and, curiously, no one seemed to mind. Stas used his talents and connections so cunningly that, long before Glasnost, he was recording for Melodiya in Russian. Stas even had a line on foreign equipment; once, apparently, Cat Stevens had given him a synthesizer, presumably before Cat became a devout Muslim.
Now, Stas was Mr. Rock and Roll and he presided over the building in Gorky Park, where there was an outdoor theater at the back and this restaurant in the basement.
Pictures by local artists were just visible in the faint glow from the candles in the Chianti bottles; in one of them, Stas was depicted as a fat, naked woman. Loudspeakers were stacked up like c
ubist sculptures. The music was by Stas's own band, the Gorky Park. Stas's sister did the cooking.
We all shook hands, made rock and roll small talk and sat down at a table in the corner. I felt like crying, because on the table was more good food than I'd seen in all of Moscow: tomatoes, cucumbers, stuffed vine leaves, fish salad, hot meat pies. We stuffed ourselves while Stas Namin asked our advice about a name for this new venture.
"What would sell it to foreign visitors?" he asked.
Inevitably, it became the Hard Rock Cafe.
We began to eat and Art Troitsky drifted away, as Russian men always did. In the smoky distance, at a table where there were only men, he sat and talked with them. They formed a circle. They crouched over their cigarettes and vodkas and beers. As far as I could tell, they were rock musicians: they were young, hip, and thin, and they dressed in black, what I always thought of as the international brotherhood of black clothing. Somehow they resembled all other Russian men I'd seen in the way they formed a closed circle. Dissidents, miners, musicians, it didn't matter; the circle was closed. I watched as they whispered among themselves and smoked the cigarettes as if they wanted to eat them.
After a while, Art returned. With him was a young man in glasses.
"This is great!" Art said in English. "The guy I wanted you to meet happens to be here, tonight. Surprise. We have had good luck. This," he added, "is Oleg Smirnoff."
"What do you mean, 'happens to be here'? I thought that's why we came," I said.
Looking at me gravely, Svetlana shook her head. I kept on talking. She seemed to want me to shut up, but why? Hadn't we come to meet Oleg, the interpreter? Why the secrecy? Still, it was clear that for whatever reason the meeting was supposed to be accidental. This really was a foreign country.
Oleg Smirnoff, who wore round rimless glasses, had a row of ballpoint pens in the breast pocket of his plaid button-down shirt. He wore a blue pullover. He spoke nearly perfect English.
"So. Dean Reed," he said after sitting down next to me. "Dean was a great guy. He was as American as an apple pie."
"How did you meet Dean Reed?' I asked.
"Dean Reed is the first singer for my generation. First time, I am sixteen, in front row at concert. Dean Reed jumps down and together we sing 'When The Saints Go Marching In'. It was great."
"Great," I said.
Oleg was not listening. "Ten years ago - 1978? - I was a student translator. I got a call to work for Dean, but I said, No thanks. Who is this guy who's telling us how to run our lives? Dean did that. But I was wrong. He was an emotional Democrat. What I didn't see for a while was that he was an idealist in a wilderness. He taught kids here to believe in the possibility of idealism even when it was impossible."
Oleg talked fluently about Dean Reed, eager to get the story out.
"Dean's words were important. That's why he needed an interpreter. I would sit on a stool on stage, just next to him. Talking to the audience was as important as the songs. We each had our own spotlight," Oleg said.
"Every song was a page from Dean's book of life," he added. "He wasn't complicated or well read, but he believed. He was an innocent. He had a minder in the East German Politburo who was responsible for him there; here Mr. Arbatov was Dean's Godfather. Dean wrote about socialism. He made one big mistake, though, and he regretted it. He criticized Solzhenitsyn and then wanted to apologize, but he would have to acknowledge he had been used. He knew it, though. Anyhow, you couldn't apologize."
In 1971, Dean wrote to Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
"Dear Colleague in Art Solzhenitsyn:
"Mr. Solzhenitsyn, the society of my country, not yours, is sick. The principles on which your union relies are healthy, pure, and just, at a time when the principles on which our union are built are cruel, selfish, and unjust."
That night in the cafe in Gorky Park, his elbows on the table, Oleg Smirnoff talked and talked. For ten years, he said, he and Dean had worked together. They had worked together in Siberia, where Dean sang "Tutti Frutti" for a handful of loggers and in Kiev; in Minsk, Mongolia, Tashkent, and Moscow, Oleg translated for Dean. "I believe in music," Dean sang and everyone adored him, Oleg reported.
Girls followed Dean everywhere. Girls tried to rip his clothes off. The stage-door Ninas pursued him relentlessly. Dean could have any woman he wanted in the Soviet Union, said Oleg, savoring the memory. Everyone wanted to possess a little piece of Dean.
"But he was a very shy guy," Oleg said, pleased with the little rhyme he'd made and he repeated it. "A shy guy," he said again.
"Did Dean speak Russian?" I asked.
"Not much. A few words only," said Oleg.
Then, unaccountably, Oleg went silent. He sucked his drink from the bottom of the glass and averted his eyes. For half an hour, I'd been drawn in: we were in a club in a basement which, if it smelled of burned lamb, nonetheless had the black walls, the loud music, the lank-haired kids that were the universals of rock clubs. But in Moscow this was still a half-secret venue. An underground club in a still secret country where a million half-facts made up a forgotten history as hidden as the little wooden dollies you bought in the souvenir shops.
I wanted more from Oleg. I wanted everything he knew about Dean Reed. I sensed he had been as close to Dean for a decade as anyone in the Soviet Union. I wanted it and I thought of the woman at the front desk in the National Hotel and how she tried to help and then drew back. I wanted but I didn't necessarily get, not right away, not the room with a view or secret things that Oleg knew about Dean Reed.
Intellectually, I got it, but it was still hard for me to grasp in my gut that one way or another pretty much everything in this enormous country was a function of officialdom. An American I met later said of a guide who helped her in Moscow, "Well, who does she work for?" And by then I had learned enough to say, "For the state, of course. Everyone works for the state. There isn't anything else."
Now, in the restaurant in Gorky Park, his face suddenly seizing up in anger, Oleg removed his glasses and put his twisted features close to mine.
"How do I know who you really are?" Oleg said.
"I've told you, we're planning a drama-documentary about Dean," I began patiently, looking at Leslie, who was deep in conversation with Jo and Svetlana at the other side of the table. He turned around and confirmed what I'd said. Oleg was not convinced.
"Oh yeah? Yeah? How do I know? How do I know you're going to preserve the memory of Dean properly?" Oleg asked.
Christ! I thought, he's going to leave. He had videotapes of Dean's concerts and I wanted to see them. I looked around for Art, but Art had gone with Stas and the boys into the maze of little rooms at the back of the Gorky Park Hard Rock Cafe.
I tried to suck up to Oleg. "So, did you play an instrument as well?"
"It wasn't my job."
"No, of course not. I mean, why should you? So when did you last see Dean?"
"I can't remember," he said. "I stayed in his house the last Christmas. Dean took Renate to London, and I stayed in the house in East Berlin to look after the dog and have a holiday. Germans! In Germany, when you went for a walk, people said hello to the dog but never to you. I don't know how Dean stood it," Oleg said.
"If you took down the Berlin Wall, half of the people would fight for the system; the other half would rush to the other side. Here, everyone would fight for the Fatherland," Oleg added.
"Who do you think killed Dean?" I said, exhausted finally, not much caring if Oleg defected from the conversation or not.
He drew himself up and fingered the row of pens in his pocket.
"He was killed by the forces of evil," Oleg said.
"Which forces?" I asked.
"You decide," he said, and the evening was over. We paid and got up and went upstairs and out into the black, cold night.
It was after one and the subway was shut up. There were no taxis in Gorky Park. The only way back to town was in Oleg's car, and we piled in. Looking straight ahead, he drove silently until he pu
lled his car up to the front door of the National Hotel.
The next morning, I was going down in the elevator at the National to meet Art and Svetlana, when a couple of Romanians - they looked like father and son - got in on the second floor. They wore Sergio Valente jeans and they spoke English quite well. They smiled delightfully.
"First floor?" I asked.
"Ground floor, please," they said.
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"Romania. Maybe you have heard of it. Bucharest?"
I had heard of it, all right. Ceausescu and his wife had turned the country into a Stalinist nightmare - this was long before the crowds rooted them out and shot them. What could I say about Romania? It was home to the men in the elevator. Dean Reed had made movies in Romania and he claimed to know the Ceausescus. These men in their fancy jeans were probably officials, but they smiled nicely and I was a sucker. Romania, Romania... I had it.
"Yes, of course, I've heard of it. Very good food," I beamed back. "Pastrami!"
They beamed back.
"You speak very good English," I said, and they smiled some more.
"Where are you from?" asked the younger Romanian.
"New York City."
Oz! You could see it written on their faces: that they knew I had come from a magical planet. Oz or Shangri-La or Eden, it didn't matter. Satisfied, the Romanians nodded at one another, and I knew I had become a postcard from the trip to Moscow - a real New Yorker in an elevator in the National Hotel. For a minute, I was their American. For a moment, I was their Dean Reed.
As I got out of the elevator, I saw Oleg Smimoff. In a nice gray suit, he was coming through the revolving door of the hotel. The front hall porter, the one who looked like Leonid Brezhnev, did not challenge him.
Comrade Rockstar Page 9
