Not only that, even the foreigners will sing:
‘Down the river Volga, sur notre mere Volga, down our Mother Volga . . .’”
Indignant, Lavoisian brandished his typewriter at the prophet.
“You’re just envious!” he said.
“We won’t sing.”
“Oh yes, you will.
There’s no way around it.
Trust me, I know . . .”
“No, we won’t.”
“Yes, you will.
And if you have any honor, you will immediately send me a postcard to that effect.”
At this moment, they heard a stifled cry.
A photojournalist named Menshov had fallen off the roof of the baggage car.
He had climbed up there in order to photograph their departure.
Menshov lay on the platform for a few seconds, holding his camera above his head.
Then he got up, checked the shutter carefully, and headed back to the roof.
“Falling?” asked Ukhudshansky, sticking his head out the window, newspaper in hand.
“That wasn’t much of a fall,” said the photojournalist disdainfully. “You should have seen me fall off the spiral slide in the amusement park!”
“Well, well . . .” remarked the representative of the union paper, disappearing through the window.
On the roof, Menshov kneeled down and got back to work.
A Norwegian writer, who had already put his luggage in his compartment and gone outside for a stroll, watched him with a look of whole-hearted approval.
The writer had light boyish hair and a large Varangian nose.
The Norwegian was so impressed by Menshov’s photoheroism that he felt an urgent need to share his excitement with someone else.
He marched up to an elderly worker from the Trekhgorka Factory, pointed a finger at the man’s chest, and belted out in Russian:
“You!!”
Then he pointed at his own chest and exclaimed with equal force:
“Me!!”
Having thus used every single word of his Russian, the writer smiled amicably and rushed back to his car as the station bell rang out for the second time.
The worker hurried to his own car.
Menshov descended to the ground.
Heads began to nod, the final smiles flashed, a satirist in a coat with a black velvet collar rushed by.
As the train’s tail was bouncing over the exit switch, two journalist brothers—Leo Shirtikov and Ian Benchikov—bolted out of the station’s diner.
Benchikov was clutching a Wiener schnitzel in his teeth.
Leaping like young dogs, the two brothers raced down the platform, jumped off onto the oily ground, and only then, amid the ties, did they realize that they had actually missed the train.
The train, in the meantime, was rolling out of construction-filled Moscow and had already struck up its deafening tune.
It pounded with its wheels and laughed diabolically under the overpasses, only quieting down a bit when it had attained full speed in the woods outside the city.
It was going to trace a sizable arc on the globe, run through several climate zones —from the coolness of central Russia to the hot desert, travel past many cities and towns, and advance four hours ahead of Moscow time.
Toward the end of the first day, two envoys from the capitalist world appeared in the Soviet journalists’ car. They were Mr. Heinrich, who represented a liberal Austrian newspaper, and Hiram Berman, an American.
They came to introduce themselves.
Mr. Heinrich was rather short.
Mr. Berman wore a hat with its brim turned up.
Both of them were quite fluent in Russian.
At first, everybody just stood in the corridor silently, eyeing each other with curiosity.
To break the ice, they brought up the Moscow Art Theater.
Heinrich praised the theater, while Mr. Berman evasively remarked that, as a Zionist, what most interested him in the Soviet Union was the Jewish question.
“We no longer have this question,” said Palamidov.
“How is that possible—no Jewish question?” asked Hiram, surprised.
“No. None whatsoever.”
Mr. Berman became agitated.
All his life, he’d been writing about the Jewish question for his paper, and it would have been hard for him to let it go.