Around the World With Auntie Mame (24 page)

“What's the matter, Auntie Mame? Hasn't it got here
yet?
”

“Well, as a matter of fact, no. There's been a little labor trouble on the railroad. You and Ito are to go by boat, then by train, then by bus. You'll be met at Rostov and then . . .”

“I see,” I said. “And just how much luggage of yours do we have to carry with us?”

“Hardly anything,
dushka
. Just a trunk and two or three light hand pieces.”

Ito and I set off with a pound of Halvah, Hugo's Simplified Russian Grammar and Auntie Mame's extra baggage. Ito spoke quite a lot of Japanese and some English. I spoke quite a lot of English, some French and four years of Latin (with pony). All told, we were a linguistic washout on our long, long trip South from Moscow to Georgia. Even so, we finally arrived at the Mother Bloor Communal Farm (English Speaking).

Georgia is a very funny section of Russia. It's way down south, as the name implies, and it's also called Iberia, Caucasia and Armenia,
as well as
Georgia. Part of it borders the Black Sea, part the Caspian Sea, part Iran and part Turkey, if
that's
any recommendation. It's one of the oldest existing civilizations, if it can be called that and many of the structures are said to be more than twenty-five hundred years old. I believed it when I saw the Mother Bloor Communal Farm. However, it's one of the prettiest, most clement sections of Russia, although very mountainous. It is also one of the most peaceful, or was in 1937, as both Stalin and his chum Beria were Georgians.

I digress. The Mother Bloor Communal Farm was ten miles from a hamlet called Psplat, which was forty miles from a town called Lyuksemburgi, which was no distance at all from Tbilisi, or Tiflis. In other words, it was isolated. It had once been the
datcha
of a local bigwig who had been liquidated with Zinoviev, Kamenev and fifty-some other Trotsky sympathizers a year earlier. Unlike most of the Georgian limestone buildings nearby, the Mother Bloor Communal Farm was built of wood in a kind of turn-of-the-century fashion that reminded me of the tragedies of Chekov. It was a big, ungainly structure bristling with towers and turrets, cupolas and curlicues. Grimy mullion windows, dirty dormers and dim stained glass embrasures stared blindly out at us. The lawn looked as though it hadn't been mowed since the Mongol Invasion. While the house was less than fifty, it seemed a lot older and creaked a lot more than some of the local buildings that were in their thousands. It had been discovered, naturally, by Dr. Whipple.

Ito and I got out of the oxcart that had carried us on the last lap of our journey and dragged Auntie Mame's baggage up the rutted, overgrown driveway toward the old house. The whole place had a haunted, funereal air, but there was a battered Fiat truck in the driveway. From inside the house I could hear hammering and a throaty voice singing “The Internationale.” Wearily we hoisted the luggage and ourselves to the rickety verandah and collapsed on the steps.

The first person I saw was Natalie, a political science student from New York University, who called herself Natasha.

“Hello,” I said, “Is my Aunt Mame here?”

“Hello, Comrade,” Natalie-Natasha said heartily, “when did you turn up? Mame's coming with the Convoy. They should be here any day now. Well, don't just sit there. Come on, pitch in, lend a hand. We've all got to work together if the Experiment is going to amount to anything. Here, carry that stuff up to the third floor. It's pretty well cleaned up by now and I think we'll put you two up there. I suppose you've had lunch.”

We hadn't. Nor, for that matter, breakfast.

I dragged my kit up the tortuous golden oak staircase and dumped it dispiritedly into a little round room up in top of a tower. It was awfully stuffy. All afternoon Ito and I swept and scrubbed and mopped the house's incredible accumulation of filth. It was a big, gloomy old barracks and stifling. Natasha picked up a lot of lumpy old cots from somewhere, as well as some crates, folding chairs and sawhorse tables. There was also some quainty-dainty quasi-French furniture, presumably the chattels of the last owner, that had been set up in the Meeting Room. It looked as forlorn in the old mansion as I felt. I got a big splinter in my hand during that first day and Natasha snapped at me and said not to be so babyish and to stop complaining. My revenge, however, came a little while later when Natasha inadvertently punctured a wasp's nest in the upstairs drawing room.

It was nearly dark when she announced that we'd knock off work and eat. Natasha said she was on a diet so we'd just have a salad and something to drink. The salad was a gritty head of warm lettuce, unwashed and unadorned by dressing, salt or pepper. I drank some rusty-tasting water out of the kitchen tap.

I didn't sleep very well that night. The bed was hard and I could have sworn there were bugs in it. The room was suffocating. None of the windows would open. There were also a lot of scurrying noises inside the walls.

The next day we had some stale bread for breakfast and then dug in again. By nightfall Ito and I had got most of the windows open and three of the toilets to flush. Then we scrubbed all of the parquet on the first floor and when we were finished, Natasha said that the place was just the kind of monument that a decadent, blood-sucking Trotskyite swine would build for himself.

Dinner that evening was a silent affair. We ate beans and the rest of the bread. The house was quiet that night and so cool that I shivered under the scratchy old blanket on my cot. About two o'clock a terrible rainstorm started and I got out of bed to close the windows. I needn't have bothered. Once open, none of them would budge. The roof sprang leaks in six different places and Ito and I spent the rest of the night emptying pots and pans of dirty rain water down the bathroom drains, which all proved to be hopelessly clogged.

At eleven the next morning, a dilapidated old London bus chugged up the drive and stopped dead. A limp sign on its side read, “Mother Bloor Communal Farm.”

“Well, Comrades,
here
we are!” I heard the glorious voice of Auntie Mame carol. “And
isn't
it divine!”

Ito and I rushed out to the lawn to greet her. “
Dushka!
Oh, darling, I bet you've been having the most
heavenly
time!” She kissed me vivaciously. Dr. Whipple got down from the bus and jovially waved a clenched fist at Ito and me. “Greetings, ah comrades,” he wheezed. “And, ah, here are your, ah, brothers!”

One by one, our brothers descended limply from the old double-decker bus. There were about thirty in all. The group was mostly American and English with a Danish couple, three Canadians. (Dr. Whipple, in fact, called Montreal his home on the rare occasions when he was in it). There was a deserter from the Australian Army and three English-speaking Russians thrown in for good measure. The English contingent was made up of a bright-eyed young man from Oxford; two Liverpool dock workers; the black sheep (female) of a titled county family; and an anarchist who advocated lining up the English Royal Family and shooting them down, just as the Romanovs had been liquidated. He was considered rather extreme in his views.

The United States had offered up an economics instructor from the Rand School; several unemployed garment workers; a brace of public school teachers; an assistant professor who had been asked to leave Williams; two girls from Bryn Mawr who talked like Katharine Hepburn; a recent Bennington graduate, who might have been quite pretty if she only hadn't dressed like Raymond Duncan; a pair of shipwrecked merchant mariners; an intense young renegade priest from Holy Cross; a woman with a crew cut who taught handicrafts to Indians; a young interior decorator named Ralph who'd worked for Ruby Ross Wood “until he saw the light” as Auntie Mame put it; and an uneasy black couple named Johnson, who'd brought along two shy kids of around my age.

The Russians were named Boris and Soso (which is the Georgian diminutive of Joseph). They'd both lived in the United States for quite a while and they seemed kind of sinister to me. Soso had brought along a girl friend. She was named Masha and had once danced in the corps de ballet at the Bolshoi theatre. Masha was pretty and demure, except that her legs looked like totem poles.

In her red boots, full skirt and embroidered peasant blouse, there was a certain Muscovite
chicté
about Auntie Mame. In fact, she looked like a show girl from one of the Nikita Balief revues of the Twenties. Compared to her Slavic splendor, the rest of the followers of the Mother Bloor Communal Farm seemed seedy and ill-assorted, carsickness being their only common bond.

Auntie Mame stretched her lovely, long arms ecstatically and gulped in the mountain air. “Just
smell
it, Comrades! Isn't it
intoxicating?
Well, first a good hot tub and then to work!”

Natalie-Natasha snorted contemptuously.

“But, Auntie Mame,” I said, “the drains don't work.”

Auntie Mame looked as if she'd been slapped. “Nonsense, darling!” She smiled encouragingly. “Well, with all of us on the Project, we'll have the pipes working again in no time,
won't we! We're
not going to be dependent on the village artisans, are we?” The men looked a little dubious, but no one said anything. “It's a simple thing to do,” Auntie Mame said, with a little less self-assurance than usual. “You just pour a little Drano down the pipe.”

Boris, who never bathed anyhow, said it wasn't important. “What we must first do is assign the rooms and then hold a general meeting,” he said. Some anonymous mutineer in the crowd said, “when do we eat?” There was a rustle of general unrest. Gradually, however, Boris got everyone organized and satchels and suitcases, duffle bags and boxes began to cascade from the top of the second-hand bus. It had been agreed that each person could bring one piece of luggage and the rain from the night before had not treated the travelers' possessions gently. One pasteboard suitcase burst soggily open and Soso's balalaika was badly warped. Auntie Mame, true to her word, had come with just one piece: a large custommade Gilmore trunk, snug in a canvas slipcover, rakishly adorned with labels from smart hotels all over the world. It took three men to get it down. Natasha sneered unpleasantly and slouched into the house.

There was a lot of confusion about rooms and, even in so big a house, there didn't seem to be enough of them. The main floor was to be used for the Mess, Meeting Room, Library and Executive offices. The next two floors were for sleeping. Auntie Mame had her heart set on the upstairs drawing room, which had a stunning view of the hills, but Boris earmarked that for himself. The old nursery, her second choice, was taken for a six man dormitory on the grounds that it was so large. I could tell that she wasn't pleased to draw one of the servants' rooms across the hall from me, but she preferred it to sharing the college girls' dormitory.

Auntie Mame, who was always strong for atmosphere, had packed a lot more into her trunk than peasant smocks.

She'd brought an elaborate ikon; a hand-tinted lithograph of Trotsky, framed in passe partout; her Fabergé Easter egg, studded with semi-precious jewels; a big samover and a gay Ukranian shawl.

Ralph, the decorator, was only too happy to lend her a hand at arranging the bleak liver-colored room and by the time the votive lamp was lighted under the ikon, he was shrill with delight. “But it's too divine, Mame, dear! It's perfect, pure Casino Russe!”

She and Ralph were still ebulliating over her decor when Natasha's sullen face appeared at the door. Eyeing the triptych and the ikon, Natasha grumbled. “The opiate of the People! ” But when she saw the picture of Trotsky, she gasped and went to tell Boris.

Lunch was the first square meal I'd eaten since I left Moscow. The placid Mrs. Johnson, still wearing her hat, had unpacked the kitchen utensils and enough of the supplies to lay on a glorious spread. No one had asked her to, she just did. There was a big cold ham, stuffed eggs, hot biscuits, two kinds of pickles, jam, a wonderful salad and fruit for dessert. At that moment communal living looked pretty good. I was embarrassed to go back for a third helping, but when I finally summoned up the courage, Mrs. Johnson's pretty face split into a big, wide smile. She said she loved to see boys eat and she was going to try to fatten me up on this here com-mu-nal farm.

Dr. Whipple said there'd be a general meeting at four and we could do as we liked before then. Auntie Mame grabbed my arm and said, “
dushka
, do let me show you around.”

She put on a big straw hat, which she'd had copied from a photograph of Ukranian wheat threshers in the
National Geographic
, and off we went. Auntie Mame was a vivacious and fascinating talker, and as wearing and irritating as she can be, I've always been spellbound in her company. She showed me all over the place: the formal garden, which had long lost all traces of ever having been laid out in any pattern, and where a marble Pan lay pathetically on his side, as though he'd just been shot; the old kitchen gardens; the stables; the orchard. Her constant babble of commentary almost made the old place come to life again. After we'd walked and talked for a long while, she looked at her fragile diamond watch. “Goody,” she trilled, “it's just two o'clock. We'll still have time for a walk in the woods.” We headed into the forest and walked for a long way.

“You
do
like it here, don't you,
dushka?
” she asked anxiously.

“Y-yes,” I said, avoiding her eyes, “it's very nice, now that you're here.”

“I'm so glad you think so, my little love,” she sighed. “Oh, Patrick, it's going to be
wonderful!
Dr. Whipple and I and all of these people, too, have worked so hard planning and figuring. It's cost me an awful lot of money. But it was worth it, darling, worth it! The farm is going to be an ideal Socialist community, all of us out here living together, building together, producing together! Everyone happy, everyone equal! Work together, play together, share together! There are going to be no rich people, no poor people, everyone just alike; rich in each other!
Dushka
, do you know that you're living a little bit of history at this very moment! This tiny experiment of ours, this little handful of people, will soon show America what it's been missing. Do you follow me,
dushka?
”