And there is another book in the Soviet Union, which we were coming to view with a certain amount of terror. It is the impression book. Whether you have visited a factory, a museum, an art gallery, a bakery, or even a building project, there is invariably an impressions book in which you must set down what you think about what you have seen. And usually, by the time you come to the book, you don’t know what you have seen. It is a book obviously intended for compliments. The shock would be great if the remarks and the impressions were not complimentary. Impressions, with me at least, require a little time to cook up. They are not full grown immediately.

We had asked to go to another farm, one on richer land than the one we had seen, and one that had not been as badly destroyed by the Germans. And the next morning we started for it, in another direction from Kiev than the first farm we had visited. Our car was a pre-war Ziss. And as we had driven in it, it had grown progressively more decrepit. Its springs no longer sprang very much, its gears groaned and clattered, its rear end howled like a dying wolf.

We had become interested in the drivers we got. Being a chauffeur is not a servant’s job in the Soviet Union at all, but a well-paid and dignified position. The men are mechanics, and nearly all of them have been soldiers—either tank-drivers or pilots. Our driver in Kiev was a serious man who was nursing his dying automobile like a child. None of the new cars had come in from Moscow yet, and no one knew when they would arrive. Every piece of rolling stock had to be kept going long after it should have been sent to the junk heap.

As a car, our vehicle in Kiev didn’t amount to much, but as a water heater it was magnificent. We stopped every three miles and filled the radiator from ditches, from little streams, from water holes, and the car promptly turned it into steam. Our driver finally left his water bucket on the front bumper, ready for use.

We went about twenty kilometers on a mildly paved road, and then turned left into gently rolling country. The road was no road at all, but a series of wheel tracks, and since it had rained, the trick was to find the wheel tracks least recently used. In the depressions between the rolls of land there were small ponds, with white herons and storks strolling around their edges. We nursed our boiling car between the ponds, and at each one stopped and let it steam a while, and filled it with fresh water.

Our driver said he had been a pilot during the war as well as a tank-driver. He had one very great gift, he could sleep at any time, and for any length of time. If we stopped the car for five minutes, he went to sleep, and immediately awakened when he was called, wide awake and ready to go. He could sleep for twelve hours and awaken the same way. I remembered the gunners in our bombers who had developed the same gift by sleeping on the way to their targets and on their way home.