The Unwitting (14 page)

“I can’t share a room with those three!”

She sat for a moment staring at me, then straightened. “Oh, lordy, what was I thinking? Putting a white woman in with three negroes. These last-minute arrangements really have sent me off my rocker. I’ll put one of the chorus girls who isn’t feuding with the Delaneys in your place, move Stella the wardrobe lady, and you can bunk with the two Bobs and me. They’re safe as houses and, more to the point, so lily-white they could pass for Hitler Youth.”

I told her I’d bunk with Woody and the Delaneys.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She pulled herself up out of the chair, reclaimed her bottle, and headed for the door. “You’re a sport,” she said on her way out.

After she left, I wrapped the pamphlets back in the brown paper and put them in a bottom drawer. I would have liked to take them with me, but I knew I couldn’t risk trying to get them past the Russian border guards. Then I opened the case of my portable typewriter and started a letter to Charlie. If the rumors were true, this was the last uncensored communication I’d be able to send him. I told him about the city and the aura that hung over it, the troupe, and the discussion of what to tell the Soviets when they asked what it was like to be a negro in America. I gave an account of Woody’s answer, though I didn’t identify Woody as the old boyfriend he’d heard a little, but not all, about. I didn’t mention the sleeping arrangements either. I saw no point in worrying him.

Nine

B
Y THE TIME
the buses came to collect us the next evening, the rain had turned to a heavy mist. We climbed aboard, noisy and excited as schoolchildren on an outing. I took a seat next to the window in front of Vera Bailey and a German journalist who had taken one look at her and fallen hard, or so he said. Certainly the giggling, sighing, and silences behind me indicated that something was going on. A moment later, Woody dropped down beside me.

The caravan of three buses threaded its way along the streets of West Berlin. Beyond the windows, hunched figures hurried through the night, their faces turned down against the weather, their worn shoes scuffling over the wet pavement. The word
martinis
, written in neon, flashed in a window, a mark of American optimism that sent a current of homesickness through me. I glanced at my watch. It was a little after two in New York. Abby would be going down for her nap. Charlie would be on his way back from lunch, cutting through the crowd of holiday shoppers, sidestepping the Salvation Army saviors and the sidewalk Santas. It was another world, bright, polished, and somehow innocent, and for a moment I wondered what I was doing in this bleak wounded country, traveling through the night beside a part of my past I had no desire to remember.

The Brandenburg Gate came lumbering toward us, a dark behemoth crowned by bronze statues. Woody leaned across me to get a better view, and I drew back in my seat so our faces didn’t touch.

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” he said.

Ahead of us, the streets were even darker than behind. Uninterrupted night lay like a shroud over the broken buildings and jagged stones.

Gradually I made out a group of guards standing in the road. The treaty that had divided the city specified open access between sectors, but I’d heard that the East Germans frequently stopped vehicles to check for papers, currency violations, and dubious characters. We had been warned that three busloads of Americans might arouse their suspicions, or at least their curiosity, despite our invitation from the Soviets.

“Bloody hell! The bloody Volpos are doing their bloody checks again,” Vera’s journalist said, and I wanted to tell him he was overdoing the British vernacular. “This is where I get off, sweetheart. The East is too dangerous for me.” I turned in time to see him kiss Vera goodbye, stand, and begin hurrying down the aisle. He said something in German to the driver, the driver stopped and opened the door, and a gust of frigid air blew through the bus as the journalist disappeared into the darkness.

The driver closed the door, started up again, passed through the gate, and came to a halt on the other side. When he opened the door, I felt another blast of icy wind. Two guards stepped aboard. After they checked the driver’s papers and the forms Faith handed them, one remained in front while the other walked slowly up the aisle, looking back and forth from one side to the other, studying the passengers. His expressionless face belonged in a wax museum. He stopped beside Woody and me.

“Der Reisepass.”

Faith came hurrying down the aisle with the interpreter in tow. She explained to the interpreter, who explained to the guard, that our passports were in the hands of the Soviets waiting for visas. She had been told both would be delivered to the train.

The guard’s face did not crack, but I saw his eyes dart to the front
of the bus where his colleague stood. He would have to get himself out of this without losing face.

“I have a driver’s license,” I said to Faith.

Woody must have had the same idea, because he had already taken his wallet from his breast pocket and was extracting his license. I took mine out of my handbag, and we forked them over.

The guard studied them for a long time. Finally, he handed them back. It wasn’t until three days later, when we reached Leningrad, that we realized we were walking around with each other’s licenses. We had been too nervous to look at them when he handed them back.

The guards got off the bus and waved us through. The driver must have been nervous too, because he shifted gears too abruptly, and the bus bucked like a bronco.

We drove through mile after mile of crumbling church steeples, buildings with gaping holes where windows and doors used to be, steps leading to nowhere, and apartments torn open and bared to the world. Here and there, shadows moved about the exposed rooms in the light of a single candle or small fire.

“It’s like living on a stage set,” Woody said.

“The perfect metaphor for a society where everyone is under surveillance.”

“Don’t forget to put that in one of your articles,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me or being serious.

The station was bedlam. People found their luggage, misplaced it, found it again; called to one another about sleeping arrangements; looked for places to buy cigarettes, gum, and candy.

As we made our way onto the platform, collective sighs of relief rose like echoes into the damp night. The Blue Express was a series of sleek green cars. Second class would not be a hardship.

“Why do they call it the Blue Express when the cars are green?” a girl in the chorus said to no one in particular.

Faith came running up, shouting about another crisis. “The dining
car won’t be hooked on until we cross the border. That’s thirty hours from now. I’ve got the Bobs and some of the cast combing the shops and delicatessens. So much for caviar and vodka,” she called over her shoulder, as she kept going. “We’ll be lucky to have bread and water.”

Officials in Persian lamb hats and flaring coats stood beside the entrance to each car, as impassive and unhelpful as the guards at Buckingham Palace. Woody took my suitcase from me, heaved it up the steps to the train, and lifted his own after it. I climbed aboard, he followed, and we made our way down the aisle searching for our compartment.

It was in the middle of the car and looked much like the
wagonslits
compartments of the trains Charlie and I had ridden in Western Europe. Two plush seats ran along the sides with closed berths above them and a table with a small silk-shaded lamp between. A man and girl sat on one side of the table. She was painting her nails; he was shuffling cards with the exaggerated finesse of a magician or a cardsharp. When they looked up, I read the surprise on their faces. Clearly, like Faith, they hadn’t expected a lone white woman in their compartment.

As Woody stowed my suitcase, Miss Delaney’s eyes darted to my left hand, and it occurred to me that she was trying to figure out if Woody and I were married. She looked curious but not disapproving, and I was relieved. I still remembered the unforgiving stares I had gotten the few times we had strayed north of Columbia into Harlem. Of course, they were nothing compared to some of the looks Woody had received when we were together on campus.

He must have noticed her glance too. “Just old friends,” he said. “From our misspent youth.”

A small radio loudspeaker in the wall was playing martial music.

“Do you mind if I turn that off?” I asked.

“It doesn’t go off,” she answered.

“The light doesn’t neither.” Mr. Delaney pointed to a single blue bulb in the ceiling.

“Do you suppose the radio’s a bug and the lightbulb’s a camera?” Miss Delaney whispered.

“In that case, we’ll have to get up to some high jinks,” Woody said and winked at me. He never used to wink. I know because men who wink make me nervous. They always seem to be about to play some joke I’m not in on.

Through the compartment window I saw Faith, several men, and a few porters coming down the platform at a brisk clip, carrying boxes and bags.

“Salvation,” she cried, and they began handing the supplies up to the train. When they finished, they climbed aboard, leaving the three porters standing on the platform eyeing us morosely.

Woody reached into his pocket, took out a handful of coins, and began rolling down the window.

“You’re not supposed to tip,” I said. “They call it a capitalist insult.”

As he leaned from the window, passing out the money, he glanced back over his shoulder at me. “They sure do look insulted.”

The porters were bowing, and smiling, and thanking him.

I took a handful of change from my handbag and leaned out the window beside him.

“Welcome to the real world, Slim.”

I had forgotten. Before Red, for a brief few months there was Slim.

From a loudspeaker somewhere in the distance, martial music blared, then a whistle blew, the train lurched forward, and the station began moving past the windows, inching at first, then picking up speed, until the brightly lit platform dropped behind us, and the world outside the windows turned black. One of the prop boys came by the compartment and announced they were setting up a canteen
in the next car. “Compartment three for martinis, manhattans, and scotch. Four for cold cuts, potato salad, and anything else we could get our hands on.”

“Come on, Slim, I’ll buy you a drink,” Woody said.

I wanted to ask him to stop calling me Slim, but the act of asking him not to call me something struck me as more intimate than the nickname.

THE TRIP FROM
East Berlin to Leningrad by way of Warsaw and Moscow took three days and three nights. I did not sleep well on those nights. How do you sleep well when your husband is thousands of miles away and an old lover is tossing and turning in the berth above you? Apparently, Woody was not sleeping well either.

When I did doze off, my dreams ambushed me. In my debauched unconscious, Charlie and Woody slipped in and out of each other’s skin with unsettling ease, leaving me sweaty, miserable, and unreasonably guilty the next morning. I could barely face Woody when he came back from the men’s washroom, freshly shaved and smelling of the American soap he had borrowed from me. Both the borrowed soap and the close shave demonstrated his knack for survival. Neither the men’s nor the women’s washrooms had hot water, but he had bribed the samovar man to give him a glassful.

I learned something about intimacy on that trip, not the polite forced intimacy of four strangers living cheek by jowl, but the intense intimacy of my shared life back in New York. The lesson was instructive, if not particularly pretty. At home, I feared the unlikely bugging of the apartment because I dreaded hearing the pettiness in my voice when I was annoyed at Charlie. But if I had listened to the wiretaps of me in that railroad compartment, I would have heard nothing but affability. Even when Woody woke me in the morning banging around the compartment, looking for his shaving kit, I didn’t allow myself to appear annoyed. If it had been Charlie, I would have asked, my voice
as chilly as the water in the washroom, why it never occurred to him to take it out the night before. But I loved and trusted Charlie. I was too wary of Woody to let down my guard.

BY THE EVENING
of the second day, we were aching from confinement and on edge with one another. Except for a brief moment in Brest Litovsk, we had not been permitted off the train. One of the stagehands, who had climbed down at another stop, was brought back by two guards with fixed bayonets. Then on the afternoon of the third day, when the sky behind us had turned a red so intense it seemed to vibrate, and darkness was rushing toward us from the east, word ran through the cars that we would be in Leningrad in an hour.

We began putting away books and crossword puzzles and decks of cards. The men yanked their ties into place and buttoned their jackets. The women took out their compacts, powdered their faces, and ran tubes of lipstick over their mouths. Half an hour later, we started bundling up. By the time we pulled into the station, we were sweating.