~ETROPOLE
HOTEL
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suspicious, irrational, arbitrary; they have never been allowed to
visit the front lines, seldom been allowed to travel anywhere; they
see few important government people and must get information out
of Russian newspapers or on the rumor circuit; there is nothing to
buy with money they would like to spend; Moscow winter weather
is terrible and darkness comes depressingly early in the afternoon and
moves into lonely nights.
Journalists cannot, therefore, do a proper job and it is a bad
life for them, but with the exception of Alexander Werth, John
Hersey and a few others, they are men used to bullying their way
around the world and their daily defeats turn dinner into a sour
stew of complaints unless one turns off the ears and plays the game
of who is that at the next table or across the room.
Who is that, on a recent evening, was a trade commission from
Iceland; two unidentified men from Mongolia; a repatriated Rus–
sian tenor and his family who had been living in Shanghai; an
American who is here to sell farm machinery and who plays the
piano very well; part of the English military mission whose chief
had been a spy in the Fust World War and author of a famous
book about his experiences as a foreign agent - but who considers
it unjust, or pretends to, that the Russians think he is possibly still
spying; and four young, and one not so young, whores, accompanied
hv a very small Russian man. We were joined at dinner that night
by a magazine writer who had arrived only a week before and had
;l1St
been through his
first
rough days of Russian press censor of–
ficials. When he had had enough to drink he talked very loud about
all Russians being savages, and when I had had enough to drink I
said I didn't think so, and he said he did, and I said what differ–
ence did that make, and he said something else, and I said lots of
neople who had just learned not to sleep in their underwear thought
that other people were savages, and it was all high-class talk like
that until the American farm-machine gentleman got up to drown
us with the piano.
I can't seem to stay away from the Metropole: it is a highly
colored small station in the somber world of the embassy where I
live, and a relief from the painful world of my Russian friends. It's
a grubby joint but it's lively and I have taken to dropping over al-
