Drawings by Olga Carlisle, 1961.

我在莫斯科的第二天打电话给Ilya Ehrenburg，希望呼唤他，也许是为了获得面试。我为每天收到的许多人添加了一个要求。“Ilya Grigoryevich必须随着时间的推移”厌恶“，”他的秘书在我打电话的时候说。“他被占用了......但我会向他传达你的要求。”后来，就像我回到了大都会，秘书回到了冰冻莫斯瓦河河沿着冰冻莫斯克河河的第一次散步，令人眼花缭乱，据局长回到说，Ehrenburg同意简要介绍我。在接下来的一周内设定了日期。我祝你好运：Ehrenburg是在莫斯科为最高苏维埃的会议，虽然他很快就在斯德哥尔摩。

Ehrenburg lives and has his office on Gorky Street, four or five blocks from the Red Square, right in the center of town. Gorky Street, once well known as the Tverskaya, is Moscow’s major thoroughfare. It is a wide, straight, commercial street where many of the city’s principal stores stay open late into the evening. Ehrenburg’s apartment is high up in a large modern building. Several other writers and artists live at the same address. The first floor of the building is occupied by a bookstore. On one side the store opens onto a tiny square where pigeons, seemingly undisturbed by the cold weather, surround a black bronze statue of Yuri Dolgoruki. They perch irreverently all over the modern oversized representation of the mythical founder of Moscow. In the middle of the small square he is riding a huge horse, his helmeted head bent. Across the square there is a café with a pink neon sign over the entrance—a good place to meet someone for lunch without getting involved in the slow service of the big Moscow hotels.

When I went to see Ehrenburg for the first time, there was a crowd of people both inside and around the bookstore, although it was quite late in the day. A book on Impressionism had gone on sale that week. The thick volume, with a Renoir lady holding a fan on the cover, was displayed in the store window.

Bookstores are numerous in Moscow but usually very informally run and overcrowded. The books are piled everywhere in seeming disorder and avid shoppers press against counters laden with volumes. I had seen classics sold from makeshift tables on the snowy sidewalks. Crowds of modestly dressed Muscovites would line up in the sub-zero weather to purchase newly published volumes still smelling of printer’s ink.

但在高尔基Stree书店t was more elaborate. Large and well-lighted, it had displays of books against a background of brightly painted pegboard. Inside, the various counters were clearly marked—Education, Sciences, Art—and the store was provided with an adequate number of salespeople. A vast assortment of art postcards filled an entire corner of the store. Most of them were genre paintings out of Russian museums. There were many all-time favorites, familiar even to me despite my alien education: Shishkin’sMorning in a Pine Forest,andPrincess Tarakanova在她的监狱里徘徊。（她是一个不幸的Empress elizabeth II的竞争对手，在尼沃的春天的洪水中淹死了彼得和保罗堡垒。随着水域周围崛起，她在她的地牢上摇摇晃晃地摇摇晃晃地摇摇欲坠。）但我也注意到了一项印象派工作的几种复制品。印象派，不再被当局被认为“颓废”，在苏联越来越受欢迎。莫斯科和列宁格勒博物馆的宏伟法国画布现在骄傲地展示。一群观众聚集在辉煌的莫斯特和贵宾群体面前，长时间站在那里，有时在困惑中看，但更常见于被抓住。

当我离开商店时，我意识到它晚于我的想法。它已经是预约的时间。太阳正在莫斯科。

Number 8 Gorky Street is a compound of buildings rather than one house. The layout is typical of Moscow, with several doorways off an inner courtyard. The courtyard was unlit and deserted, with only a few small paths dug through the snow, leading to several unmarked doors. A wall topped by an old rusted grillwork enclosed one side of the courtyard. I had a glimpse of a panorama—invisible from Gorky Street, like so many views of Moscow which one finds by accident—at the end of an old alley, between high fences. There were snowy roofs, tall reddish brick walls and suddenly an old log house, a vestige of another age. All this in irregular clusters broken by white spaces, houses set at strange angles, a feeling of casualness special to Moscow.

As is customary in this city, there was no listing of tenants or apartments to be seen anywhere. If one happens to know the number of the apartment for which one is looking, chances of finding it are fair. Otherwise one has to turn to the women wrapped in shawls who doze, sitting in the darkness, near the elevator. These somber old women seem deliberately to forget the names of the tenants. They are, or pretend to be, deaf to one’s questions. They refuse either to be wakened from their slumber or interrupted in their knitting. Perhaps their withdrawal is a vestige of earlier, darker days when people wanted to preserve their anonymity as much as possible. Or was it my slight foreign accent that put them on their guard?

If one does not know the stairway number of a particular apartment the best thing to do is to go out and telephone. Otherwise the search may turn into a Kafkaesque dream—dark stairways, cold unkempt landings, wrong doors, broken bells, crawling ancient elevators which these melancholy women in their many-layered grey shawls unwillingly operate with a special key.

我搜查了正确的入口，在ehrenburg迟到的想法中苦恼了。他的声誉是最繁忙的莫斯科作家。我没有足够的时间进行通常的搜索。

Taking a desperate guess, I selected at random one stairway entrance. To my relief, it turned out to be the right one, and soon a maid was letting me into Ehrenburg’s warm apartment. An irascible small dog inspected me and retired, after barking once or twice.

I found myself in an apartment whose decor was totally unlike the typical Moscow dwelling. It was simple, airy, and reminded me of the home of a well-to-do artistic Parisian intellectual. It was unencumbered, the furniture comfortable and inconspicuous. The drawings and paintings were mostly French. They bore friendly inscriptions to Ehrenburg from the artists. There were many black-and-whites by Picasso which gave the place an overall luminosity. Here and there a Chagall, a Léger, added a note of vibrant color, matched by the brightly patterned scatter rugs and the cushions on the sofa which were covered with handwoven folk materials—purple, deep blue, yellow. The pictures covered the walls of the living room and continued on into a hall and an adjoining room seen through a half-open door.

Mme. Ehrenburg, Lyubov Mikhaïlovna, greeted me. She is statuesque, dark-haired, and still beautiful, and was dressed with an understated elegance which is rare in Moscow. She is affable but reserved, and slow in her movements. She received me with friendliness. Years before, she had met my father in Berlin and remembered him as a handsome poet with black hair. Known for her painting, Mme. Ehrenburg once studied with the Russian “constructivist” Rodchenko. The two small canvases which she later showed at my insistence were painted not too long ago in an Expressionist manner and were quite charming. Sensing my interest, she led me around the place most readily. She took a few additional works out of a closet, several Léger lithographs from the series “Les Constructeurs.”