Only at night, when the vodka flowed even more freely…

An excerpt from Seducing The Demonby Erica Jong.  (Love this book: if you’re a woman and a writer you must read it).                              

The wonderful Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks and I shared a double-decker sleeping compartment from Moscow to Kiev, but we didn’t sleep.  We stayed up all night talking about poetry or reciting it to each other.  Robert Bly wandered from compartment to compartment, playing his balalaika. 

   When we arrived in Kiev, we were paired up with our translators, who were clearly also reporting to some lowly apparatichik at the KBG about everything we said and did.  That was also the standard in 1983.

    Matrons in black guarded each floor of the hotel and impounded our keys and passports. 

    For most of the day we sat in meetings wearing headphones in which we could listen to endless droning speeches in Russian or English.  Every hour or so we were summoned into the hallway for frozen shots of vodka, which I guzzled (not abstaining then), and gray greasy beluga in buds of butter, which we perched on toasted pumpernickel crescents or ate with spoons of abalone shell.  What beluga it was!  Could Marx have known that the best beluga would be reserved for Party members and their guests?

    At lunchtime, there was another three-hour food orgy with more beluga caviar, borscht, mystery meat and icy vodka.  For dessert, there were pastries and sweet Georgian champagne.

    Susan Sontag, who was nothing if not pragmatic about her career, toasted “the kitchen staff that prepared the meal.”  Clearly she had been here before and understood the full spectrum of appropriate Communist behavior. 

   Only at night, when the vodka flowed even more freely, did my sloe-eyed translator break down and weep.

   “Soviet Union no good place for momens,”  she whispered.   “Men drink too much wodka, become why-o-lent.”

   Studs Turkel would roam the city with his tape recorder trying to collect impressions of life under Communism, but an overenthusiastic comrade confiscated his machine. 

    During a performance of the opera The Bartered Bride, my translator lushly whispered to me, “Dat is fate of all Russian womens!”