M ETR 0 POL E
HOTEL
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wishes to sing once again for his peoples but how practice without
un piano propre
and with four children? I tried, occasionally, to
speak, to ask why and how he had come back to Moscow, but his
handsome wife appeared about that time and he introduced her,
adding the information that she was his first wife and his fourth wife
and his cousin.
Down the hall from the tenor, in two apartments, live the fur
buyers. The fur buyers are three men of no age except vague middle
age, interchangeable in color and size. They interested me more than
anybody in the hotel and so I tried to do a little research on them.
But any research was limited because they have been in the hotel
so much longer than anybody else that nobody is sure of anything
about them except "the trouble."
The fur buyers are American by citizenship. This was established
by the embassy, and so Mr. Harriman invited them, along with
all
other Americans in Moscow, to a Christmas party. I did my best to
speak with them, to bring them food and drink, even to ask one of
them if he would dance with me. We did dance for a few minutes,
but I got nothing more than nods and what I guess were smiles,
and my attempts at conversation produced little except an occasional
half-recognizable sound in English, and other sounds in a language
I could not identify. (Russians say the fur buyers speak very little
Russian, but seem to understand the language.)
Some of their hotel-mates claim they are Latvians, others insist
they are Bessarabians, but the information at our consulate is that
they were employed by United States merchants as experts on the
raw fur pelts that were, before the war, sold at giant auctions. Evi–
dently, they used to spend six or eight months a year traveling around
the Soviet Union and were caught in Moscow by the outbreak of the
war. But none of this explains why they are still here: they are
American citizens and they could have gone home long ago. When
I asked Alex Werth about this he said, "Where's home for them?" I
guess that's the answer, although another man I know feels that they
wish to stay here in the belief that the war will end any minute and
they will be the first on the scene to bid for the valuable wild minks
and chinchillas who, unlike the hunters, must have grown fatter and
more beautiful during the war.
"The trouble" involved the transshipment of a Russian prosti-
