186
LILLIAN HELLMAN
tute. (Each fur buyer has a girl, but they are men who believe in
class distinctions, because the girls never appear at their dining room
table and nobody has ever seen them with the girls in the lobby or
in the corridors.) I first heard of "the trouble" from a British Third
Secretary, but the very mention of it caused him to choke with gig–
gles and I could make little sense of what he was saying. Last week
I went to a large official Russian party and spent most of the eve–
ning talking to Maxim Litvinov who had recently returned to Mos–
cow. [1968 - I knew Litvinov first when he was Ambassador to
Washington and liked and admired him. Mrs. Litvinov had been
the very British Ivy Low. I found Ivy - a combination of Blooms–
bury and Russian Revolution - charming, but Hammett didn't.
She had come for a weekend visit to the Pleasantville farm. On the
second night Dash didn't appear for dinner. I went upstairs to find
him
reading on
his
bed. He shook
his
head. I nodded mine. He shook
his and I knew that no amount of arguing would bring him to din–
ner. Angrily I said, "Why?" He said, "Because she's the biggest
waste of time since the parcheesi board."] Litvinov and I sat at a
table watching the dancers, who were mostly diplomats. Maxim
doesn't
think
well of diplomats and spoke of them as buyers and
sellers of world herring. One passing dancer was, he said, "the high–
est-ranking pederast"
in
Moscow, and when another gentleman, too
tall and too handsome, went by Litvinov laughed and said, "It was
the custom in
his
time to choose for foreign service on the basis of
length of body and bone in nose, as with butlers. You can imagine
their surprise when they first saw small, fat me." Then he raised
his finger, pointed to a young, very blond man and said sharply,
"That one tries too many tricks. We
think
he managed the girl
in
the
trunk
for the fur buyer. But why did he do it?" Before I could
ask about the girl in the trunk, Litvinov was called to the phone and
did not appear again that night.
The next
day
I pinned down the British Third Secretary who
had had the giggles. There had been a long box in the lobby of the
Metropole marked, in Russian,
COFFIN OF A CHILD FOR TRANSSHIP–
MENT.
The box carried whatever are the proper papers for a coffm
and a Stockholm receiving address. It got through the Leningrad
customs until a train official got curious about some odd-looking
holes in the box. He poked into them with some kind of poking
