182
LI LLIAN HEllMAN
I said, "Is it so terrible? You told me only last week about the
trouble Akhmatova has had-"
She ran toward me, pulling up her sweater as she came. "There
are scars here," she shouted, "although they were not made with a
knife. Allover me,
all
over
all
of us. But I don't show them to
strangers, I don't sip cognac at tables and lift my clothes to show the
long scar called Akhmatova, my friend Akhmatova, or the scar
called Mandelstam - You will not hurt my scars. But
he
wanted to
put his fingers in them so they would bleed again."
Russians puzzle us, we puzzle them. Their pride is the pride
of poor people, the manners they require from others must be more
elegant than ever could have been known at Versailles. And in so
many ways their recent social customs have run counter to ours:
they are, for example, romantic and dawn-fogged about sex, and I
often find the talk about love and fidelity too highminded for my
history or my taste.
But it
is
easier for me than for most foreigners. Two plays,
The
Little Foxes
and
Watch on the Rhine,
are in rehearsal. (Rehearsals
have been going on for six months.) Certainly there are other for–
eigners who have good relations with Russians, but most of the
journalists, diplomats, military and trade commissions live on is–
lands of each other, cut off from all Russians except waiters, cooks,
translators and various forms of bribe-takers such as whores and
telephone operators.
The largest of these islands is the Metropole Hotel, teasing
close to the walls of the Kremlin. It was built in the nineteenth
century, and while it is often referred to as run-down elegant, it
could never have been more than large and ostentatious with the
carved gewgaws and marble that the Russian rich liked so much.
(It was in the Metropole that the last holdout aristocracy of Moscow
barricaded itself during the revolution, but that story has too many
versions to believe any of them.) Now the hotel is in a state of dis–
repair and smells of cabbage, but its vast corridors burst with the
kind of international high jinks that should attract a magazine
novelist, except that the high jinks are not very high and always
have an aimless, frivol-out quality.
Most of the foreign journalists live at the Metropole and they
have a long list of understandable grievances: the press censors are
