She entered quietly on the arm of a periodic visitor to The Mile who lives a block away and occasionally comes in for a hot dog at lunch tme. The neighor’s name is Ingrid and we knew her to be Norwegian-born. The woman, a striking-looking woman with gray hair and sharp, clear features, was named Sigrid. I knew the neighbor well enough to be greeted by her as they entered and she saw me chatting with Deano at the bar. “Come meet my aunt,” she said.
I sat with them for a full hour, ordered a hamburger at the bar (no table service in The Mile) , and was so glad I’d stopped in and so glad I spent the time — for Sigrid, it turned out, is a very stalwart and healthy and beautiful 90-years-old and, as a small girl, visited all over Europe and Scandanavia and was speaking of her Russian was speaking sojourn — of having seen crowds at Lenin’s Tomb. She spoke perfect Englishthough she’lived in Oslo most of the year. She visits her neice, I learned, at least once a year and loves Boston.
“I did not see Lenin’s mummy,” she said. “But I saw the queque which stood for hours and waited to get into the mausoleum. And I have seen the Red Square lie as barren as the steppes, when the mausoleum was closed -but along the outskirts of the square the river of people would streeam. The side streets poured their tributaries into it, and people walked, walked, walked. I have never been down in the Moscow subway. But a time or two I tried to board with my mother the packed street-cars with people hanging in clusters inside and outside. It would be a hard ride, for at that time, the streets everywhare in Moscow were full of holes and humps, probably heaped and broken by the cold weather such as you here in the United States are having now, and by war.”
“What were you doing in Moscow?” I asked. “The Soviet Union at the time, of course. It could not have been easy to get in and there might have been a fear of getting out.”
“I believe my mother — Ingrid’s grandmother –was on some kind of a misison of charity for her church. She never spoke of the reason for her travel to me, a child, and I, sadly, lacked the curiosity to ask.”
“Was it a secret, why she was there?”
“I don’t believe so,” said Sigred, “but there were a great many secrets in those days in eastern Europe. And I believe the devil had come to visit that region and has never left. And my mother might have feared speaking of it so long as there might be agents, even in Norway. Communist agents, that is.”
A somber remark, to be certain. She went on.
“For a child, there was something hypnotic to find myself, a child, walking among streams of total strangers in the cold, for it was wiinter. I have not been a stranger to cold or to winter in my native Norway. But there was something cold about the people I saw. My aunt spoke to no one, and the faces I saw when I looked up were empty. I was perhaps nine-year-old. I did not see one Russian who smiled, except the attendants on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
“The English word ‘stolid’ might best describe the expressions on the faces of the Russians I encountered. Not ‘solid’ –though they were solid in a way, but ‘stolid.’ And there seemed to be no individual differences in the faces and demeanor. In an American or a Eurpean crowd, one encounters all manner of persons. This has been my experience during a long life. But my childhood impression of the Russians I saw was very bleak–and this was immediately after the end of hostilities in the World War when much of Russia had been ravaged by the German Armies whom Russia and the Allies ultimately defeated and drove off. There was rubble everywhere. But the weight of the dictator and the shadow of Lenin fell once a gain over the vast Russian territories. For Norway, under the heal of collaborators and for America and the West, victory meant freedom. Not so for the Russians. My mother later told me how she had been told stories of both glory and of wretchedness. But if you wish to know, I believe what my mother ultimately believed wwas that we were walking in a universe of miserable lies.”
I reminded myself of the definition of “stolid”: unemotional, expressing little or no sensibility.
And then, darkening my mood of this narrative, Sigred began to speak of what had perhaps most impressed her about the heart of the Soviet Union she experienced with her young senses: it was the unaccountable stench– that made her welcome, on the day she and her mother departed Moscow, the distant rumble of thunder somewhere distant from their hotel room, and the sight and sound of warm rain falling on the city of millions and hoping it was washing it clean.
And, as I sat there with aunt and daughter, I thought of the stinking darkness that closed over the vast Russian heartland after 1945 and that has yet to depart entirely, though I have not been there and dare not judge too harshly the Russian soul when we all know there to be good, brave, noble, pure souls in that nation always longing to be free either to defeat or escape, as we may — if we’re not careful –someday see New Yorkers , by degrees, escaping a kind of rancid socialist dream –New Yorkers and all of us.. Far-fetched? Maybe. Maybe not. I leave the likes of Solzhenetitsyn and Doestoyevsky and Tolstoy to warn us of the horror that crept up over that nation and that finally bloomed in 1917 and that keeps blooming in all manner of places doing horrible things — Vietnam and Cambodia come to mind — and constantly finding new iterations.
I thanked Sigred for that bracing hour of conversation at the little place called The Last Mile.
19 Cent Notebook 