After midnight his innocence gets coupled with strength. This he demonstrates with one finger. He asks innocent husbands if they know anything about the finger game. The two gentlemen sit down, facing each other across a table, put their elbows firmly on the tablecloth, and clinch their middle fingers. After a certain amount of twisting, Mr. Steinbeck usually gets the husband’s fingers down on the table-cloth, and excuses himself volubly. Sometimes, late at night, he tries the game on anybody. Once even on a Russian gent who looked obviously like a general to everybody else but him.

After a certain amount of gentle coaxing, and a long dissertation about dignity, we get home. Now it is past three in the morning. The evening Steinbeck is metamorphosed into his late night version. He is on his bed, holding firmly a thick volume of poetry from two thousand years ago, called The Knight in the Tiger Skin. His face is fully relaxed, his mouth is open, and the man with the quiet low voice snores without restraint or inhibitions.

I fortunately borrowed a mystery story from Ed Gilmore, just because I knew that I would be unable to sleep, and would have to read till the morning.

I leave you, gentle American readers, and have to assure your Russian counterparts that everything that Mr. Chmarsky will write about us in Pravda is absolutely true.

END OF COMPLAINT

CHAPTER 7

WHEREVER WE HAD BEEN in Russia, in Moscow, in the Ukraine, in Stalingrad, the magical name of Georgia came up constantly. People who had never been there, and who possibly never could go there, spoke of Georgia with a kind of longing and a great admiration. They spoke of Georgians as supermen, as great drinkers, great dancers, great musicians, great workers and lovers. And they spoke of the country in the Caucasus and around the Black Sea as a kind of second heaven. Indeed, we began to believe that most Russians hope that if they live very good and virtuous lives, they will go not to heaven, but to Georgia, when they die. It is a country favored in climate, very rich in soil, and it has its own little ocean. Great service to the state is rewarded by a trip to Georgia. It is a place of recuperation for people who have been long ill. And even during the war it was a favored place, for the Germans never got there, neither with planes nor with troops. It is one of the places that was not hurt at all.

Inevitably we went in the early morning to the Moscow airport and sat an hour and a half in the V.I.P. room, under the portrait of Stalin, drinking tea. As usual there had been a party the night before, and we had had practically no sleep. We got on our plane and slept until we landed at Rostov. This airfield had been badly broken up, and a great number of prisoners were rebuilding the facilities. In the distance we could see the shattered city which had taken such a pounding during the war.