Chapter 24
The Soviet Connection
Well, that business trip has been no easy walk. Let alone that the latest official papers to be taken with us and consigned to my name caused me a trip to the nearest stop 30 miles away on the home train and back, as I mistook a train not stopping at our station, I would feel during that two weeks the forced authority of my boss, and it put a great stress on me. He was kind outside the talks, he helped me with his advice, he recounted their similar trips long before, when they had to ride 36 hours on train. But once at the table, with the partners at the other side, he would be changed.
The Soviets have been no Germans. After our arrival our salesman had to visit the hosts many times, until he could get a date for the talks. About four days we could spend on our city sightseeing. At the beginning there was cool weather, but clear sky. Since the spring of that year I had been wearing contact lenses and in dry weather, especially in the evening, when sunglasses could not be on, my eyes were sensitive to dust. I said one day at dusk:
"It is a riddle to me, how in this city this excellent dust-supply is solved.”
"Dust?” asked me our chief engineer astonished, "this is the cleanest city of the world. You can take on a white shirt three times without its collar getting dirty.”
He might have been right about the old times, but to that day the dense traffic made everything dirty. I would sense it even more 15 years later. And there was another aspect. My eyes have been sensitive to the small-sized quartz grains from the Moscow environment. They could have been clean, but painful under my lenses.
In a few days the weather turned ordinary. In December Moscow has a weather front of mild moist air coming from the north after the freezing of a great quantity of water. It is misty all day and drizzle comes frequently. A very unpleasant weather. Heavy cold comes in January and lasts to the middle of February. We could arrange our shopping for Christmas.
Our accommodation was awfully arranged. It was to be thanked to the hotel room distribution system of the city, but also to the attempts of our Commercial Division to economize the funds allocated for trips abroad and take the remaining sum as their own reward.
We have been placed in the Hotel Yaroslavskaya, actually no hotel, a hostel turned hotel after the 1949 Moscow World Youth Festival. It was on the northern outskirts of the city 40 minutes by METRO to our down-town partners, and in our rooms there were four beds each, with no bathroom. Only common showers in the corridor. The team leader, our chief engineer, told the company representative to get proper hotel rooms for us, otherwise we would book our tickets back home in two days.
Bargain has been in the blood of the man, he secured a room in the Hotel Rossiya near Red Square for him and my boss. He said, the "plebs” can stay. Actually our leader was softened after getting a better room for himself. After a fiery discussion with us he agreed, however, to finance our transfer by a bottle of brandy from our gift reserve. We succeeded in bribing the clerk in charge and moved to the Hotel Ukraine opposite the Comecon building across the river Moskva.
At that time the hotel was on a European level with two differences, the "dezhurnaya” system and its lifts. The first are women sitting at the entrances of corridors on every floor and keeping the keys – the reception in the lobby had other obligations, e.g. listening to phone conversations of the guests – and keeping an eye on incoming girls. The lifts were driven by authorized girls. They were slow as death and the staircases closed. A quarter of an hour was nothing to wait. That senseless lifts-only system caused so many deaths the next year in the Hotel Rossiya.
In our team we had a lady who was a born Russian. She had married a Hungarian student during their studies and had followed her husband to his homeland. Her father had been the architect of the northern town Norilsk in the ‘30s. She was speaking Hungarian well, she has been the ideal translator for our purposes. As soon as we moved into the Hotel Ukraine she went to the service bureau and ordered theatre tickets for all of us. It was my first time to see a performance in Moscow, but not the last. I became a ballet and opera addict, as soon as I would arrive any time in my hotel, my first route would lead to the service bureau to order tickets.
That time it was a ballet, Khachatouryan "The Fountain of Bakhchisaray”. The place of the performance has been the Assembly Palace in the Kremlin, but the dancers have been from the Bolshoi (Big) Theatre. I began to understand why the Russian ballet had been considered the classical performing art.
During our stay there was a figure-skating championship in the city. The East-German skaters lived in our hotel and behaved as East-Germans always do abroad, noisily and with bad manner (except our friends, it goes without saying).
That two days spent in the droughty hotel did wrong to my room-mate, head of our electric department. He came with us with cold and he would have fever soon. I never travel without a proper emergency package, there were anti-fever drugs with me, too. He would survive on my tablets and at home there would be no need for a doctor.
The first talks gave us a lot of work. An afternoon and half a night we translated the draft-contract of our partners. The company representative was surprised to have the text the next morning. He had to send it by telex. Our high speed resulted in a quick answer, and at the end of our two-week mission, in the contract.
Our return before Christmas was well timed. My family was happy, too, especially for the goods I took home. They were unimportant items, toys, souvenirs, except two: a necklace of amber for my wife and a small TV-set in the room of my son.
In February the next year again there was a business trip for the trio of my department head, my group leader and me, but this time without the lady, as they would be talks about technical details. We flew to Berlin, took the train to Schwerin – it was the line to Hamburg – and there we met our hosts from the Boizenburg shipyard. They took us there by car. Their yard lay on one shore of the river Elbe, where frontier was in the middle of the stream. The river is so narrow there, that every time they launched a boat from the launch-site, the western neighbours were pushing it back from the Bundesrepublik by poles.
Our talks were quick and convenient. We talked only about technical aspects, within the Comecon that time there were no licence fees, the member-countries provided each other with their inventions free of charge.
During the night a big snowfall occurred, and our return has been risky. Fortunately we caught our train back to Berlin. The afternoon Interflug plane would have left us behind for the late arrival of the train, but it waited still, not for us, but for the flight permit. There was a great fog at home. We have got our boarding passes and waited. It was dark as we got our boarding instruction. As we were ascending the stairs to the plane the front wheel has been corrected by a 50-pound hammer. Either there were highly religious people on board or somebody from the outside has sent effective prayers to heaven, we survived without any trouble.
Following our return the guides for building of the hull of the ship have been completed and building began. In two months the hull would be launched.
I went on the Russian course started by the company in September the previous year. Once a week we stole the last half hour of the working time and sat together to polish our skills. Actually the course has been useful, I would do better in another course at the Friendship Society. However, the accent of Soviet representatives has still been unintelligible to me and I needed the help of our translators as before.