During the next two months we flew a great deal in Russian transport planes, and there are points of likeness in all of them, so that this plane may as well be described as representative of all of them. All were C-47's, with brown war paint, remains of lend-lease stock. There are newer transport planes on the fields, a kind of Russian C-47 with a tricycle landing gear, but these we did not fly in. The C-47's are a little run down insofar as upholstery and carpeting go, but their engines are kept up and their pilots seem to be very fine. They carry a larger crew than our planes do, but since we did not get up into the control room we don't know what they do. When the door opened, there seemed to be six or seven people in there all the time, among them a stewardess. We don't know what
the stewardess does either. She seems to have no relation to the passengers. No food is carried by the plane for the passengers, but the passengers make up for this by carrying great quantities of food for themselves.
The air vents in the planes we traveled in were invariably out of order, so that no fresh breeze came in. And if the odor of food and occasional nausea filled the plane, there was nothing to do about it. We were told that these old American planes will be used until they can be replaced by the newer Russian planes.
There are customs which seem a little strange to Americans used to our airlines. There are no safety belts. Smoking is prohibited while in the air, but once the plane lands, people light up cigarettes. There is no night flying, and if your plane cannot make its port before sundown, it sits down and waits until the following morning. Except in times of storm, the planes fly much lower than ours. And this is comparatively safe because most of Russia is completely level. An airplane can find a forced landing field almost anywhere.
The loading of the Russian planes also seemed peculiar to us. After the passengers are seated, luggage is piled in the aisle.
I suppose what worried us most on this first day was the appearance of the plane. She was such a scratched and disreputable-looking old monster. But her engines were in beautiful condition and she was flown
magnificently, so we had nothing really to worry about. And I suppose the shining metal of our planes does not really make them fly any better. I once knew a man whose wife claimed that the car ran better whenever it had been washed, and maybe we have that feeling about many things. The first principle of an airplane is that it stay in the air and get where it is going. And the Russians seem to be as good at this as anyone else.
There were not many passengers on the Moscow run. A nice Icelandic diplomat and his wife and child, a French Embassy courier with his pouch, and four silent, unidentified men who never spoke. We don't know who they were.
Now Capa was out of his element, for Capa speaks all languages except Russian. He speaks each language with the accent of another. He talks Spanish with a Hungarian accent, French with a Spanish accent, German with a French accent, English with an accent that has never been identified. But Russian he does not speak. After a month he had picked up some words of Russian, with an accent which was generally considered to be Uzbek.
At eleven o'clock we took off and flew toward Leningrad. Once in the air, the scars of the long war were apparent on the ground- the trenches, the cut-up earth, the shell holes, now beginning to be overgrown with grass. And as we got nearer and nearer to Leningrad, the scars became deeper, the trenches more frequent. The burned farmhouses with black and standing walls littered the landscape. Some areas where strong fights had taken place were pitted and scabbed like the face of the moon. And close to Leningrad was the greatest destruction. Trenches and strong points and machine-gun nests were very visible.
On the way we were apprehensive about the customs we would have to go through at Leningrad. With our thirteen pieces of luggage, with our thousands of flash bulbs and hundreds of rolls of film, with the masses of cameras and the tangle of flashlight wires, we thought it might take several days to go through us. We thought also that we might be heavily assessed for all this new equipment.
At last we flew over Leningrad. The outskirts were shattered, but the inner part of the city seemed not very much hurt. The plane sat lightly down on the grass field of the airport and drew into the line. There were no airport buildings except maintenance buildings. Two young soldiers with big rifles and shining bayonets came and stood near our plane. Then the customs came aboard. The chief was a smiling, courteous little man with a glittering smile of steel teeth. He knew one word of English-"yes." And we knew one word of Russian-"da." So that when he said yes we countered with da, and we were right back where we started. Our passports and our money were checked, and then came the problem of our luggage. It had to be opened in the aisle of the plane. It could not be taken out. The customs man was very polite, and very kind, and extremely thorough. We opened every bag, and he went through everything. But, as he proceeded, it became clear to us that he was not looking for anything in particular, he was just interested. He turned over our shining equipment and fingered it lovingly. He lifted out every roll of film, but he did nothing about it and he questioned nothing. He just seemed to be interested in foreign things. And he also seemed to have almost unlimited time. At the end he thanked us, at least we think that's what he did.
Now a new problem arose, the stamping of our papers. From the pocket of his tunic he took a little parcel wrapped in newspaper and from it extracted a rubber stamp. But this was all he had, he did not have an inking pad. Apparently, however, he had never had an inking pad, because his technique was carefully designed. From another pocket of his tunic he brought out a lead pencil; then, after licking the rubber stamp, he rubbed the lead pencil on the rubber and tried it on our papers. Absolutely nothing happened. He tried it again. And nothing happened. The rubber stamp did not make even the suggestion of an imprint. To help him, we took out our leaking fountain-pens and dipped our fingers in the ink and rubbed it on his rubber stamp. And finally he got a beautiful impress. He wrapped his stamp up in his newspaper and put it back in his pocket, shook hands warmly with us, and climbed off the plane. We repacked our luggage and piled it up on one of the seats.
Now a truck backed up to the open door of the plane, a truck loaded with a hundred and fifty new microscopes in their boxes. A girl stevedore came aboard-the strongest girl I have ever seen, lean and stringy, with a broad Baltic face. She carried heavy bundles up forward, into the pilot's compartment. And when that was piled full, she stacked the microscopes in the aisle. She wore canvas sneakers and a blue coverall and a headcloth, and her arms were bunched with muscles. And she, like the customs man, had shining stainless steel teeth, which make the human mouth look so much like a piece of machinery.
I think we had expected unpleasantness; all customs are unpleasant anyway, a peculiar violation of privacy. And perhaps we had halfway believed our advisers who had never been here, and expected to be insulted or mistreated in some way. But it didn't happen.
Eventually the baggage-laden plane got into the air again and started toward Moscow over the endless flat land, a land of forests and of cut-out farmlands, of little unpainted villages and bright yellow straw stacks. The plane flew quite low until a cloud came down and we had to rise above it. And the rain began to pour down on the windows of the plane.
Our stewardess was a big, blond, bosomy, motherly looking girl, whose sole duty seemed to be to carry bottles of pink soda water, over the piled-up microscopes, to the men in the pilot's compartment. Once she took a loaf of black bread up to them.
We were beginning to starve, for we had had no breakfast, and there seemed to be no possibility of eating again. If we could have spoken we would have begged a slice of bread from her. We couldn't even do that.