The Provincial Lady in Russia ebook

Contents

THE PROVINCIAL LADY IN MOSCOW

I

II

III

IV

V

THEY ALSO SERVE: THE PROVINCIAL LADY IN LENINGRAD

TO SPEAK MY MIND ABOUT RUSSIA: THE PROVINCIAL LADY IN ODESSA

I

II

III

IV

THE PROVINCIAL LADY IN MOSCOW

Published in Harpers Magazine, January 1937

I

Tourists in all the Intourist hotels in all the principal towns of Soviet Russia exchange the same fragments of conversation.

“Have you done Moscow yet?”

“No, I’m going there to-morrow night. I came in by Odessa. I’ve done Kharkov and Rostov and Kiev.”

“Ah, then you’re going out by sea from Leningrad. Unless you’re flying from Moscow?”

“No, I shall be going by sea. Have you done Odessa and the south?”

“No, I’ve done the Caucasus. You should do the Caucasus. What is Odessa like?”

“Odessa is delightful. The hotel at Rostov was good except for the cockroaches. The food was bad at Kharkov.’

“Ah, there was a Frenchman here yesterday who had just come from Kharkov, and hesaid the food wasn’t good.”

And at this gratifying coincidence everybody looks pleased.

Sometimes it is a little like the survivors of a shipwreck meeting on a fragment of desert island.

“Are you still all right for soap?”

“Yes, I shall just last out till Kiev. What about you?”

“Oh, I’m all right. I brought a great deal. But my ink is pretty low.”

“There’s an American lady who can let you have ink. She gave me some in Leningrad and she’s coming on here. She had safety-pins too.”

“How marvelous! Perhaps she’d like some soda-mints or aspirins. I have heaps of those.”

“I dare say. Or Keatings. Or perhaps you could lend her a book.”

People part at Moscow and meet again, sometimes most unwillingly, at Yalta. They ask one another how they have been getting on, and if they met the French astronomer and the English journalist and the noisy young Finns with the portable gramophone. Those who met at Leningrad, and were in the same train coming from Moscow, and parted gracefully at Tillls only to be once more confronted with one another at Gorki, are bound by some unwritten law to sit at the same table for meals. At first, I often wondered whether they really like to do this, or if they just feel obliged to do it for old sake’s sake. Later on I fall under the same spell, and the question is answered.

In Moscow I meet Peter–but not as one meets stray French astronomers and English journalists and gramophone-playing Finns. It is a meeting that was arranged–incredibly, as it now seems–in Bloomsbury, some four months ago. I have had the name of his hotel and the dates when he expects to be there in my diary ever since I left England.

His dates have been altered–so have mine–all knowledge of him is denied at the Metropole Hotel, where he ought to be–and Intourist tells me: (1) That there are no letters for me and no messages, (2) That if there were I couldn’t have them because it is a Day of Rest.

It is anything but a Day of Rest for me, whatever it may be for Moscow.

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