Одноэтажная Америка / Little Golden America

In front of a ready-to-wear store a man walked calmly back and forth. On his back and on his chest he carried two identical placards: “This Place Is On Strike”. In the next street were a few more pickets. Over the large show window of a corner store, despite the sunny morning, gleamed the blue letters “Cafeteria” in electric lights. The cafeteria was large, bright, and clean. Along the walls were glass cases filled with beautiful, appetizing edibles. To the left of the entrance was the cashier’s booth. Onhe right was a metal stand with small slot athwart as in a coin bank. From the opening emerged the end of a blue pasteboard stub. Those who entered tugged at this end. We also tugged. The melodic clang of a bell resounded. One stub was in our hand, and through the slot of the coin bank another blue stub popped out. Then we did what all New Yorkers do when they dash into a cafeteria for a hurried bite. From a special table we each took a light brown tray, placed on it forks, spoons, knives, and paper napkins; and, feeling extremely awkward in our heavy overcoats and hats, went to the right end of a glass-enclosed counter. Down the entire length of this counter ran three rows of nickelled pipes on which we conveniently placed our trays and slid them along after placing each dish upon them. The counter itself was a tremendous camouflaged electric plate. Soups, chunks of roast, sausages of various lengths and thicknesses, legs of pork and lamb, meat loaves and roulades, mashed, fried, baked, and boiled potatoes and potatoes curiously shaped in pellets, globules of Brussels sprouts, spinach, carrots, and numerous other side dishes were kept warm here. White chefs in starched nightcaps, aided by neat but heavily rouged and marcelled girls in pink headdresses, were busy placing on the glass cover of the counter plates of food and punching that figure on the stub which indicated the cost of each dish. Then came salads and vinaigrettes, various hors d’oeuvres, fish in cream sauces and fish in jellied sauces. Then came bread, rolls, and traditional round pies with apple, strawberry, and pineapple fillings. Here coffee and milk were issued. We moved down the counter, pushing our trays. On the thick layer of chipped ice were plates of compotes and ice-cream, oranges and grapefruit cut in half, large and small glasses with various juices. Persistent advertising has taught Americans to drink juices before break-fast and lunch. In the juices are vitamins which are presumably beneficial to the customers, while the sale of juices is indubitably of benefit to fruit merchants. We soon succumbed to this American custom. At first we drank the thick yellow orange juice. Then we passed to the translucent green juice of the grapefruit. Then before eating we began to take the grapefruit itself (it is covered with sugar and is eaten with a spoon; its taste reminds one somewhat of the taste of an orange with a dash of lemon in it, although it is juicier than both these fruits). Finally, with some trepidation and not all at once, we began to imbibe the mundane tomato juice, peppering it a bit beforehand. That proved to be the tastiest of all and the most refreshing, and it best suited our South Russian stomachs. The one thing we did not learn to do in America was to eat melon before dinner. Yet that takes the place of honour among American hors d’oeuvres.

In the middle of the cafeteria stood polished wooden tables without tablecloths, and beside them coat-racks. Those who wished could put their hats under their chairs, where there was a special shelf for that purpose. On the tables were stands with bottles of oil, vinegar, catsup, and various other condiments. There was also granulated sugar in a glass flagon wrought in the manner of a pepper-shaker with holes in its metal stopper.

The settling of accounts with the customers was simple. No one could leave the cafeteria without sooner or later passing the cashier’s booth and presenting the stub with the total punched in it. Here also cigarettes were sold and one was free to take a toothpick.

The process of eating was just as superbly rationalized as the production of automobiles or of typewriters.

The automats have progressed farther along this road than the cafeterias. Although they have approximately the same outward appearance as the cafeterias, they differ from the latter in that they have carried the process of pushing food into American stomachs to the point of virtuosity. The walls of the automats are occupied throughout with little glass closets. Near each one of them is a slit for dropping a “nickel” (a five-cent coin). Behind the glass stands a dour sandwich or a glass of juice or a piece of pie. Despite the shining glass and metal, the sausages and cutlets deprived of liberty somehow produce a strange impression. One pities them, like cats at a show. A man drops a nickel, acquires the right to open the little door, takes out his sandwich, carries it to his table and there eats it, again putting his hat under his chair on the special shelf. Then the man goes up to a tap, drops his “nickel,” and out of the tap into the glass drips exactly as much coffee and milk as is supposed to drip. One feels something humiliating, something insulting to man in that. One begins to suspect that the owner of the automat has outfitted his establishment, not in order to present society with a pleasant surprise, but in order to discharge from service poor marcelled girls with pink headdresses and thereby earn a few more dollars.

But automats are not over popular in America. Evidently the bosses themselves feel that there must be some limit to rationalization. Hence, the normal little restaurants, for people of modest means, belonging to mighty trusts are always full. The most popular of these – Childs – has become in America a standard for inexpensive food of good quality. “He dines at Childs”: that means that the man earns $30 a week. In any part of New York one can say: “Let’s have dinner at Childs,” and it would not take him more than ten minutes to reach Childs. At Childs one receives the same clean handsome food as in a cafeteria or an automat. Only there one is not deprived of the small satisfaction of looking at a menu, saying “H’m,” asking the waitress whether the veal is good, and receiving the answer: “Yes, sir!”

Generally speaking, New York is remarkable because it has everything. There you can find the representatives of any nation, secure any dish, any object from an embroidered Ukrainian shirt to a Chinese stick with a bone handle in the shape of a hand, which is used for back-scratching, from Russian caviare and vodka to Chilean soup and Italian macaroni. There are no delicacies in the world that New York cannot offer. But for all of it one must pay in dollars. And we want to talk about the preponderant majority of Americans who can pay only cents and for whom exist Childs, cafeterias, and automats. When describing the latter establishments, we can boldly declare that this is how the average American is fed. Under this concept of the average American is presupposed a man who has a decent job and a decent salary and who from the point of view of capitalism is an example of the healthy prospering American, happy and optimistic, who receives all the blessings of life at a comparatively low price.

The splendid organization of the restaurant business seems to confirm that. Model cleanliness, good quality of produce, an extensive choice of dishes, a minimum of time lost in dining. All that is so. But here is the trouble. All this beautifully prepared food is quite tasteless— colourless in taste. It is not injurious to the stomach. It is most likely even of benefit to it. But it does not present man with any delights, any gustatory satisfaction. When you select in the closets of the automat or on the counter of the cafeteria an attractive piece of roast, and then eat it at your table, having shoved your hat under your chair, you feel like a buyer of shoes which proved to be more handsome than substantial. Americans are used to it. They eat fast, without wasting a single extra minute at the table. They do not eat; they fill up on food, just as an automobile is filled with petrol. The French gourmet who can sit four hours at a dinner, chewing each piece of meat in exultation, washing it down with wine and then smacking every mouthful of coffee with cognac – he is, of course, no model man. But the cold American eater, bereft of the natural human desire to get some satisfaction out of food, evokes amazement.

For a long time we could not understand why American dishes, so appetizing in appearance, are so unappealing in taste. At first we thought the Americans simply do not know how to cook. But then we learned that that alone is not the point: the crux of the matter is in the organization itself, in the very essence of the American economic system. Americans eat a blindingly white but utterly tasteless bread, frozen meat, salty butter, unripe tomatoes, and canned goods.

How does it happen that the richest country in the world, a country of grain growers and cattle raisers, of gold and remarkable industry, a country which has sufficient resources to create a paradise, cannot give the people tasty bread, fresh meat, real butter, and ripe tomatoes?

Near New York we saw waste places overgrown with weeds, forsaken plots of earth. No one sowed grain there, no one raised cattle there. We saw there neither setting hens with chicks nor truck gardens.

“You see,” we were told, “it simply would not pay. We cannot compete here with the monopolists from the West.”

Somewhere in Chicago, in the slaughter-houses, they kill cattle and transport the meat throughout the country in frozen form. From somewhere in California they ship frozen chickens, and green tomatoes which are supposed to ripen in transit. And no one dares to challenge the mighty monopolists to a fight.

Sitting in a cafeteria, we read Mikoyan’s speech, which said that food in a socialist country must be palatable – that it must bring joy to people – and it sounded like poetry to us.

While in America the business of feeding people, as any other business, is built on this single consideration: does it pay or does it not pay? It does not pay to raise cattle and to have truck gardens in New York. Therefore, people eat frozen meat, salty butter, and unripe tomatoes. Some business man discovers that it pays to sell chewing gum, so people are taught to chew this cud. Cinema pays better than theatre; therefore, cinema develops while the theatre is neglected, although from a cultural standpoint the American theatre is much more important than the cinema. The elevated brings an income to certain companies; therefore, New Yorkers become martyrs. Along Broadway, through all the crowded traffic, with a hellish screeching, a street-car hobbles along-only because it pays one man, the owner of an ancient street-car company. All the time we were there we felt an irresistible desire common to all Soviet people to complain and to offer suggestions. We wanted to write to the Soviet control and to the party control and to the Central Committee and to Pravda, but there was no one to complain to, and there is no such thing in America as “a book of suggestions”.

5. We Seek an Angel Without Wings

TIME PASSED. We were still in New York and did not know when or whither we should proceed. Yet, our plan included a journey across the entire continent, from ocean to ocean.

That was a fine, but essentially a quite indefinite, plan. We had made it up in Moscow and had discussed it ardently all the way to America.

We paced scores of kilometres over the decks of the Normandie damp with ocean spray, arguing about the details of that journey and dousing each other with geographic nomenclature. At dinner, drinking the pure but weak wine from the cellars of the General Transatlantic Company, we muttered almost senselessly, “Kahleeforneeya,” “Tyekhas,” or something equally beautiful and enticing.

The plan was astounding because of its simplicity. We were to arrive in New York, buy an automobile, and ride, ride, ride until we arrived in California. Then we would turn around and ride, ride, ride until we arrived in New York. It was all simple and wonderful, like an Andersen fairy-tale. “Tra-ta-ta” sounds the klaxon, “tru-tu-tu” sounds the motor, we ride across the prairie, we swing over mountain chains, we quench the thirst of our trusty machine with the icy water of the Cordilleras, and the great Pacific sun casts its blinding brilliance on our tanned faces.

In short, you can see for yourself that we were a bit “touched,” and roared at each other like chained dogs: “Sierra Nevada,” “Rocky Mountains,” and the like.

But when we stepped on American soil everything proved not so simple and not so romantic.

In the first place, Tyekhas is not called Tyekas, but Texas. But that was only half the trouble.

None of our new friends in New York offered any objections to our purchasing an automobile. Travel in one’s own automobile is the cheapest and most interesting means of transportation in the States. Railroad travel would cost several times as much. Besides, you cannot see America from a train window. It is not a writer’s business to do anything of the kind. So, as for the automobile idea, our suppositions met with approval. The difficulty was in finding a man who could go with us. We could not go by ourselves. We knew the English language well enough to engage a room in a hotel, to order a dinner in a restaurant, to go to a cinema and understand the meaning of a picture – knew it even to the extent of conversing about this or that or the other thing with some indulgent person who was not in a hurry to go anywhere— but we knew no more. Yet more was precisely what we needed. Besides there was one other consideration. The American automobile highway is the kind of place where, as the winged word of the chauffeur has it, you ride straight into the open grave. Here you need an experienced guide.

And so, quite unexpectedly, there opened before us an abyss. And we stood on its very edge. We actually needed a man, who:

could drive a machine to perfection;

knew America to perfection, in order to show it to us properly;

spoke English well;

spoke Russian well;

had sufficient cultural background;

had a good character, otherwise he would spoil the journey;

and

did not like to make money.

The last point was obligatory, because we did not have much money. We lacked it to such an extent that, to tell the truth, we had very little of it.

Thus, as a matter of fact, we needed an ideal creature, a rose without thorns, an angel without wings. We needed a complex hybrid: a guide-chauffeur-interpreter-altruist. Michurin himself would have given up. It would have taken scores of years to breed this hybrid.

There was no sense in buying an automobile until we found the appropriate hybrid, yet the longer we stayed in New York the less money we had left for an automobile. We solved this complex problem daily, and yet we could not solve it. Besides, there was almost no time for thinking about it.

On the way to America we did not take into consideration one thing: hospitality, American hospitality. It is limitless and far outstrips everything possible or conceivable of its kind, including Russian, Siberian, and Georgianhospitality. The first American you meet will not fail to invite you to his house or to a restaurant to drink a cocktail with him. At each cocktail party you will find ten friends of your new acquaintance. Each one of them will not fail to invite you to a cocktail party of his own, and each one of these will have ten or fifteen friends. in two days you suddenly acquire a hundred new acquaintances, and within a week several thousand. It is simply dangerous to spend a year in America, because you will be a confirmed drunkard and a kind of Gleb Uspensky tramp.

All the several thousands of our new friends were filled with one desire: to show us everything that we would want to see, to go with us wherever we’d like to go, to explain everything to us that we did not understand. Remarkable people are these Americans. It is pleasant to be friends with them, and it is easy to do business with them.

We were almost never alone. The telephone of our hotel began to ring in the morning, and it rang as regularly as that in an information bureau. In the rare and brief intervals between meetings with necessary and interesting people we dreamed of this ideal creature still out of our reach. Even our amusements were most businesslike, spurred on by such advice as:

“You must see it; otherwise, you will never know America!”

“What? You haven’t been in a burlesque? Well, but then you haven’t seen America! Why, that is the most vulgar spectacle in the world! You can see it only in America!”

“What? You haven’t been to the automobile races? Excuse me, but you don’t know what America is!”

It was on a bright October morning that we made our way by automobile out of New York to an agricultural exhibit in the little town of Danbury, in the state of Connecticut.

We will say nothing here about the roads on which we travelled. That would take time, inspiration, a special chapter.

The red autumnal landscape stretched on both sides of the road. The leafage was red-hot, and when it. seemed that nothing in the world could be redder there appeared another grove of maddeningly Indian colour. That was not the design of the forest around Moscow, to which our eyes were accustomed, where you will find red and bright yellow and soft brown. Here everything flamed as in a sunset, and this amazing conflagration around New York, this Indian sylvan gorgeousness, continued all through October.

A roar and a clatter was heard as we approached Danbury. The flock of automobiles rested on the slopes of a little valley that was still green. There the exhibit was laid out. Policemen stretched out their arms forbiddingly, chasing us from one place to another. We finally found a place for the automobile and went to the stadium.

At the round tribune the roar was heart-rending, and over the high walls of the stadium flew small stones and hot sand, thrown up by machines around the sharp turn. It would have been easy to lose an eye or a tooth. We hastened our footsteps, shielded ourselves with our arms, just as the Pompeians must have done when their native city was perishing in a volcanic eruption.

We had to wait in a small queue to buy tickets. Around us was the clatter of a drab, provincial fair. The vendors, who have been described more than once by O. Henry, loudly praised their wares: strange aluminium whistles, carved swagger sticks, sticks crowned with dolls, all the trash found at a fair. A cow with beautiful eyes and long eyelashes was being led away. The beauty swung her udder enticingly. The owner of the mechanical organ danced to the tune of the deafening music of his contraption. A swing in the shape of a boat attached to a green metallic rigging made a complete circle. When those who were swinging were high in the sky, their heads down, the pure-hearted and hysterical feminine scream that broke forth carried us at once from the state of Connecticut to the state of Moscow, to the Park of Culture and Rest. The vendors of salted nuts and cheese-cracker sandwiches yelled at the top of their voices.

An automobile race is an empty spectacle, dreary and morbid. Red, white, and yellow racing machines with straddling wheels and numbers painted on the sides, shooting out like rocket volleys, flew past us. One round was succeeded by the next. Five, six, sometimes ten,machines competed at the same time. The audience roared. It was frightfully boring. The only thing that could possibly amuse the public would be an automobile accident. As a matter of fact, that is what people came here for. At last it occurred. Suddenly, alarm signals were heard. Everyone jumped from his seat. One of the automobiles flew off the track while going full-speed. We were still pushing our way through the crowd which surrounded the stadium when we heard the frightful baying of the ambulance. Through its window-panes we managed to see the injured driver. He no longer wore his leather helmet. He sat there, holding on to his blue skull with both hands. He had an angry look. He had lost the prize for which he had risked his life.

In the intervals between heats, on a wooden platform inside the circle, circus comedians were playing a scene which portrayed four clumsy fellows building a house. Naturally, bricks fell on the four fools. They smeared each other with the cement mixture. They beat each other with hammers by mistake, and in sheer self-forgetfulness sawed off their own legs. All this concoction of tricks, which had its origin in the distant antiquity of Greece and Rome and is still brilliantly carried on by such great master clowns as Fratellini, was excellently done by the clowns of the Danbury fair. It is always pleasant to watch good circus work, and its ways, polished through ages, are never boresome.

The fair came to an end. The visitors in the wooden pavilions were few in number. On long tables in the pavilions lay large lacquered vegetables that seemed inedible. The orchestras performed farewell marches, and all the visitors en masse, raising clouds of dust over the clean dark yellow sand, made their way to their automobiles. Here were demonstrated (and sold, of course) trailers for automobiles.

Pairs of Americans, in most cases composed of man and wife, would go inside and exclaim for a long time, impressed by the trailers. They examined the enticing inside of the trailer, the comfortable beds, the lace curtains on the windows, the couch, the convenient and simple metal stove. What could be better? You attach a trailer like that to an automobile, drive out of the thundering city, and drive and drive to wherever your eyes may lead you. That is, you know where you are driving. The eyes “look into the forest,” and they see the Great Lakes, the beaches of the Pacific Ocean, the canyons, and the broad rivers.

Groaning, man and wife would crawl out of a trailer. It was too expensive. Here in Danbury were trailers at $350 and some at $700. But where can you get $700? Where can you get the time for a long trip?

The long columns of machines flew soundlessly back to New York, and after an hour and a half at a good clip we saw the flaming sky. Skyscrapers shone from top to bottom. Over the earth gleamed the flowing lights of the cinemas and the theatres?

Carried away by the storm of life, we decided to devote the evening to acquaintanceship with entertainment for common people.

A “nickel” is what Americans call a small nickel coin of five cents. With all its appearance nocturnal New York tells the pleasure-seeker:

“Give me your nickel! Drop your nickel! Part with your nickel and you will be happy!”

The clicking noise comes out of the large amusement stores. Here stand scores of pinball tables of all kinds. You drop a nickel in the proper slot; automatically a cue is liberated by a spring, and the pleasure-seeker, having decided to spend the evening in revelry, can shoot a steel ball five times. For a certain number of points won he receives a card-board certificate from the master of the establishment. A half-year spent at regular play and, in consequence of the regular dropping of nickels, the reveller has the necessary number of points to receive his prize – one of those beautiful prizes that stand on the shelf. That may be a glass vase or an aluminium cocktail-shaker, or a table clock, or a cheap fountain pen or safety razor. In brief, here are all the treasures at the mere sight of which the heart of a housewife, a child, or a gangster contracts with sweetness. Americans spend hours in such lonely entertainment, in a concentrated, indifferent manner, without anger and without exultation.

Having finished with the pinball, one may go to an automatic soothsayer. She sits in a glass case, yellow-faced and thin. Before her in semicircle lies cards. It is taken for granted that you must drop a nickel. Then the soothsayer comes to life. Her head begins to bob, her chest to heave, and a wax arm glides over the cards. This is no spectacle for impressionable people. It is all so stupid and so horrible that one is in danger of losing one’s mind. A half-minute later the fortune-teller freezes into her previous position. Now you must pull a handle. From the crack falls the prophecy of your fate. It is in most cases a portrait of your future wife and a short description of her attributes.