Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [38]
In the bough of one tree, he had drawn a lone partridge no more than half an inch tall, yet so detailed we could see the notch on its head and follow the sweep of its feathers. This artist could not afford any sophisticated etching tools to produce these remarkable effects; he accomplished them with nothing more than a sewing needle dipped in ink. I gladly paid him $150 for the etching. It hangs on the wall of my Vermont home today.
We did not play any games during the first two days of our visit, so a matched pair of cultural attachés took us sightseeing. Our guides resembled Soviet espionage agents straight out of central casting: blond flat-tops, opaque gray eyes, broad features, broad shoulders, broad everything. Neither of them subscribed to GQ. They dressed in ill-fitting black suits, too tight in the chest and too slack at the waist. Fresh white shirts but no ties. The cuffs of their pants stopped an inch shy of their ankles. They wore heavy white athletic socks with sandals. I had seen this look before, on undercover cops working the streets of South Boston during the seventies. They wore the same white socks and short pants, then wondered why drug dealers vanished before the police could get within a mile of them.
The Moscow our hosts showed us appeared dreary, a city in monochrome. Nearly every modern building fit the same mold, a gray concrete rectangle as inviting as any dungeon. The gilded church spires, the crimson walls of the Kremlin, and the bright murals depicting the workers’ revolution provided the few splashes of color. On the Moscow streets, vendors sold cigarettes, milk, bread, vodka, and flowers in glass-enclosed kiosks, some no larger than cubicles. Everywhere the city felt cramped.
You will never see a place so crowded yet so bereft of life. Most Russian passersby appeared grim-faced and slow to smile at strangers. We detected no giddyap in their steps. They dragged themselves along the avenue, which made us think they had little enthusiasm for wherever they were heading.
Arbat Street, a five-block-long commercial district, resembled Rodeo Drive with staid upscale stores and the only McDonald’s in town. Unlike Manhattan, Moscow had no hot strip, no Forty-second Street with its looming, intrusive brand names and all the frenzied neon that makes that stretch of town resemble the inside of a demented jukebox. I missed that kitsch. When I want the utterly unadorned, I have Craftsbury, Vermont, and other quiet rural spots. Every big city, though, needs a touch of the garish and the outsized to balance its more refined side. Otherwise no matter where you’d go, you would always be in Des Moines.
We moved about freely, but the attachés had structured the tour so that the team had little chance to interact at length with the average Muscovite. Our guides took us to art museums, cathedrals, an armory, and a bustling communal store that had far more customers than inventory. At one counter, seven customers jostled against each other while competing to buy the same pair of tweezers.
On the second day, we traveled nearly an hour into a rural setting east of Moscow to visit a crumbling Romanov fortress. Terwillinger and I had seen enough of icons, armor, and other inanimate objects. Longing to meet some typical Russians, we split from the group at lunchtime to explore the countryside.
We found a time warp after a quarter-mile hike to a village with a name so long I cannot pronounce or spell it, in a place so obscure Anastasia could have been hiding there. No one would have known to look. There were no asphalt streets, no pavement of any kind. Only a muddy dirt