as in a serial production of vacuum cleaners or adding machines.
A small soundless rain fell on the street. But had there been a storm with thunder and lightning it would not have been heard.
New York itself thunders and gleams much more thoroughly than any storm. It is an excruciating city. It constantly rivets all attention to itself. It makes your eyes ache.
Yet it is impossible not to look upon it.
6. Papa and Mamma
BEFORE DEPartING from Moscow we had collected numerous letters of introduction. It was explained to us that America was the land of letters of introduction. Without them you could not turn around.
Americans of our acquaintance whom we visited before departure at once and in silence sat down at their typewriters and began to pound out:
“Dear Sir: My friends, whom I commend to your attention…”
And so on and so forth. “Regards to your wife”—and in brief all that is proper to write on such occasions. They knew beforehand what we had come for.
The correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, wrote with incredible speed, taking the cigarette out of his mouth only in order to swallow some Crimean Madeira. We carried away from him a dozen letters. In farewell he told us:
“Go, go to America! It is much more interesting there now than here in your Russia. With you everything goes up.” He indicated with his hand the rising steps of a stairway. “With you here everything is clear. But with us everything is not yet clear. And no one knows what may happen.”
A colossal catch awaited us at Louis Fischer’s, a journalist well known in American left-wing circles. He spent at least half of his working day on us.
“You are threatened in America,” he said, “with the danger of finding yourself at once in radical and intellectual circles, getting lost there, seeing nothing, and returning home with the conviction that all Americans are very progressive and intellectual people. Yet it is far from the truth. You must see as many different kinds of people as possible. Try to see rich people, the unemployed, officials, farmers. Look for average people, because it is they who make up America.”
He regarded us with his black and kindly eyes and wished us a happy and fruitful journey.
We were in the throes of greed. Although our suitcases were bulging with letters, it seemed to us that we did not have enough of them. We recalled that Eisenstein had at one time been in America, so we went to see him at Potylikha.
This famous cinema village is laid out on the picturesque shores of the Moskva River.
Eisenstein lived in a small apartment in the midst of chandeliers and huge Mexican hats. In his workroom was a good grand piano and the skeleton of a child under a bell glass. In the reception-rooms of famous physicians bronze clocks usually stand under such bell glasses. Eisenstein greeted us in his green-striped pajamas. He spent the whole evening writing letters, told us about America, regarded us with his childlike, crystal-clear eyes, and treated us to jam.
After a week of hard labour we were the possessors of hundreds of letters addressed to governors, actors, editors, senators, a woman photographer, and simply kind people, including a Negro minister and a dentist from Proskurov.
When we showed all this harvest, garnered after arduous labour, to Jean Lvovich Arens, our consul-general in New York, he turned pale.
“In order to see every one of these people separately… you will need two years.”
“What shall we do, then?”
“The best thing you could do would be to put all these letters back into the suitcase and go back to Moscow. But since you are already here, we’ll have to think up something for you.”
Subsequently we convinced ourselves more than once that the consul could always think up something whenever it was necessary. On this occasion he thought up something grandiose: to send all these letters to their proper addresses and to arrange a reception for all at once.
Three days later, on the corner of Sixty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, in the salons of the consulate, a reception was held. We stood on the landing of the stairway at the second floor. Its walls were hung with immense photographs of the Dnieper Hydro-electric Station, the harvesting of grain with combines, and children’s creches. We stood beside the consul and with undisguised fear looked at the ladies and gentlemen who were walking up from below. They moved in an uninterrupted flow for two hours. These were the spirits called forth by the united efforts of Duranty, Fischer, Eisenstein, and a score of other of our benefactors. The spirits came with their wives – and were in excellent spirits. They were full of eagerness to do everything they had been asked to do in the letters, and to help us learn what the United States was like.
The guests greeted us, exchanged a few remarks, and passed into the salons, where there were bowls of claret cup and small diplomatic sandwiches.
In the simplicity of our souls we thought that when all would come together we, the reason for the occasion, if one may so, would follow into the salon and also raise cups and eat small diplomatic sandwiches. But that is not what happened. We learned that we were supposed to stand on the landing until the last guest departed.
From the salons came gay laughter and noisy exclamations, while we stood endlessly, greeting the late-comers, seeing off those who were departing, and in every other way fulfilling the function of hosts. More than a hundred and fifty guests had gathered, and in the end we did not even manage to find out which of them was a governor and which the native of Proskurov. It was a notable company of grey-haired ladies in spectacles, pink-cheeked gentlemen, broad-shouldered young men, and tall thin young ladies. Since every one of the spirits conjured out of our envelopes represented an indubitable point of interest, we deeply regretted the impossibility of talking at length with each and every one of them.
Three hours later the stream of guests was directed down the stairway.
A fat little man with a clean-shaven head on which glistened large beads of icy sweat came up to us. He regarded us through the magnifying lenses of his spectacles, shook his head, and with much feeling said in fairly good Russian:
“Oh, yes, yes! That’s all right! Mr. Ilf and Mr. Petrov, I have received a letter from Fischer. No, no, don’t tell me anything. You don’t understand. I know what you need. We’ll meet again.”
He disappeared, small, compact, with a remarkably strong, almost an iron body. In the confusion of bidding farewell to guests we could not talk with him and puzzle out the meaning of his words.
Several days later, when we were still lounging in our beds, thinking about where at least we would find the ideal creature so indispensable to us, the telephone rang and the voice of a stranger told us that Mr. Adams was speaking and that he wanted to come right up to see us. We dressed quickly, wondering who Mr. Adams was and what he wanted of us.
Into our hotel room entered the same fat little man with the iron body whom we had seen at the reception in our consulate.
“Gentlemen,” he said, without any preliminaries, “I want to help you. No, no, no! You don’t understand. I regard it as my duty to help every Soviet person who comes to America.”
We asked him to sit down, but he refused. He ran through our small hotel rooms, pushing us now and then with his hard, protruding stomach. The three lower buttons of his vest were unbuttoned and the tail of his necktie stuck out.
Suddenly
