184
LILLIAN HELLMAN
most every day to listen to the stories about the night before, or
the
ones that Alex Werth remembers from the first year of the war, or
Henry Shapiro remembers from even further back. Then I wander
up and down the corridors, looking for people to talk to.
The third floor is the most interesting: two Turkish diplomats
who never seem to be at home have the rooms opposite the elevator;
across the hall from them are two Japanese military attaches and,
in
an adjoining cubicle, their Japanese chauffeur. Next to him is a
journalist of a neutral country who is very proud that his mistress
was once the mistress to a group of Uzbeks. This lady laughs too
loud and too much and
is
the reason why the repatriated Russian
tenor, who lives next door with his family, spends
his
mornings de–
manding a new suite of rooms. Next to the Russian tenor is a re–
cently arrived middle-aged American who works in our consulate.
He is disturbed by the almost nightly arrival of a big Russian girl
who pushes into his room, looks around and screams. The Ameri–
can knows no Russian, the big girl no English, and nobody
will
tell
him that the girl is called Dempsey because she once, when hitting
a man, reminded somebody of Jack Dempsey. Now she mourns the
former occupant of the room who left Moscow without telling her
and she thinks the middle-aged American had something to do with
her lover's disappearance.
Across the hall lives a lady called Miss Butter Fingers, radical
in the politics of her own country and most sympathetic to the So–
viet Union, except on the day, long before my arrival, when she
stole an icon on a visit to a German-destroyed monastery near Mos–
cow. Her journalist colleagues were disturbed and forced her to re–
turn the loot with the threat of a kangaroo trial in the lobby of the
hotel. Since then she does not often appear in the dining room.
Yesterday the Russian tenor spoke to me. Shanghai had taught
him a little English, I knew a little French, but I did not know until
the end of our half hour that he greeted me so warmly because he
thought I was Australian and had been sent by the British Embassy
to help him arrange a larger and quieter hotel apartment with what
he called
un piano propre.
I have no idea why he thought the Brit–
ish would be willing to tangle with anything like that, but by the
time I got around to asking, the tenor had given me up as an im–
poster. In any case, he loves his homeland with all his heart, he
