A Frisbee over Moscow

By George Plimpton

"You think a lot about trajectories over here"

An author, a sportsman and TIME'S tourist-about-Moscow gives his own Olympian view of the XXII Games and offers his reflections on life and language, soldiery and circus acts in the Soviet capital.

The language barrier is what confounds the average tourist in Moscow. One is reduced to the most basic sounds and gestures to get around the city. Curious pidgin words, rather the way the Sioux talk in old western films, are produced--to no effect whatsoever. My first attempt at a conversation in Russian --just to say that I had tried--was with an elderly fisherman staring morosely at the tiny float of his line in the murk of the Moscow River. I rehearsed behind him, peering into my pocket dictionary, and when I thought I had the word right, I put on a bright smile and, leaning against the stone balustrade, I asked in an offhand way, "Bolshoye?" This is the word for big, and was a question in reference to the size of the fish he hoped to extract from the river. He turned very slowly and looked at me from under a crumpled hat as if I were daft. I backed up behind him and riffled the pages of the dictionary for small, just to keep things going, but he had turned back to his line, staring down at the float with such determination that I gave up and hurried down the quay.

It was a universal problem. One of the tourists came back from a water-polo match to report that the public-address system in its English version (Russian, French, and English are the official languages of the Games) would announce that such and such a player penalized with a time expulsion was being "exploded." "Vanderfleet of Australia has been exploded," a sepulchral voice would announce to the spectators.

Given such problems in communication, the visitors kept very much to the Intourist regimen when they first arrived --traveling to and from the Games or the city sights in the big-windowed Ikarus buses from Hungary that have a steel bar at the back with empty coat hangers swaying when the bus is in motion. The circus was a big favorite. The first act features the famous Filatov bears and the second, a troupe of huge and somewhat soporific seals who perform in a large water tank with a stage, Like an island, in the center. On the night I was there, one seal could not be persuaded to do anything at all. He swam around dreamily, often floating past the frantic ringmaster, his flippers folded across his stomach. The bears in their orange-and-blue sunsuits were much friskier--trained this year to imitate the Olympic athletes in various events. One bear kicked a goal and jumped around the ring in joy to have done it. Another, perhaps the most beguiling of them, stood on a Junglegym-like structure and endlessly got himself set for some wild gymnastic maneuver. His long feet shifted and trembled on the bar as he strained to find the will to launch himself--procrastinating for such an interminable, uproarious length of time that one wondered if he had been trained to teeter up there.

Apart from the theaters and the circus, the tourists could not find much to say about night life in the capital. The restaurants close at 11 p.m. The hotels offer a tour entitled "Moscow after Dark," which suggests the Muscovite equivalent of Paris' Crazy Horse Saloon or perhaps Uzbeks leaping to the ceiling in a gloomy candlelit cavern. But the trip turned out, in fact, to be the same as the "Morning Tour." In both cases, the Intourist guide begins: "Moscow is the largest city in the U.S.S.R."

Whatever preconceptions the American tourist had about Moscow began to disappear almost on arrival. I had been told there was no place in Moscow to sit. I was also told that the prostitutes chalk their prices on the soles of their shoes, so they could rub off the evidence by scuffling along if the police turned up. "Ten rubles and up," my seatmate on the plane had informed me. "They sit in the parks and lift their shoes to you as you pass."

"Unlikely," I said. "There's no place to sit in Moscow." Neither rumor checked out. There seemed to be enough benches to seat the entire population on a summer day, and none of them contained anyone flashing the soles of her shoes at me. It was hard to imagine a streetwalker in such a policed society.

That was what no visitor to the Games could get used to--what the Soviets call poryadok, the discipline of law-and-order. No graffiti. The hiss of the spray gun is not heard in the land. And the military! During the Games, it was almost as if a vast box of soldiery had been tipped up and its contents deposited over the city. Often one saw them in odd places--militiamen standing in a clump of shrubbery or on the side of a hill, as if wherever they had landed they were obliged to stand up and assume their duties. Around the athletic facilities, the constabulary and army were heavily concentrated. The first seats of the stands in Lenin Stadium were taken up with an unbroken oval of military personnel--the Soviets making sure that there would be no such shenanigans as Chrystie Tenner running out to embrace her husband after his decathlon win in Montreal, or the Finns getting onto the track with their flags to run with Lasse Viren, or especially the streaker who joined the closing ceremonies in Montreal.

A Wyoming rancher pointed out that, despite the massive press of uniformed personnel, he had noticed very few weapons. In fact, the only guns he had seen in Moscow were the rifles carried by the two soldiers goosestepping slowly to their posts at the door of Lenin's mausoleum.

The rancher went on to say that he had weapons on his mind because, at the edge of his Wyoming property, there were a number of silos with ICBMS in them. When he first arrived in the U.S.S.R. he thought kiddingly to himself: "Well, this is the place it's going to come from, the pre-emptives coming down on my ranch." After a while, he began thinking of the Moscow end of the trajectories. "I've had a great time here," he said. "In the stadium I look around, and it's a good, friendly crowd you could find anywhere. I guess you think a lot about trajectories if you have ICBMS next door. We're all at the end of trajectories."

Many tourists expected that the Games were going to be used as a Soviet showcase. In fact, the loudspeaker systems outside the stadiums, which could have been used for propaganda spiels, played pleasant medleys of international songs, the American representative being Sunny ("Thank you for that smile upon your face"). Thousands of flagpoles along the city boulevards and atop buildings bore the Olympic flag. In the stadiums themselves, the most persistent colors were those of the Finns, who waved their white-and-blue pennants, some on poles that telescoped up to 30 ft. or 40 ft., at the slightest indication of a Finn doing anything. To sit behind a Finnish contingent with one of their countrymen, say, lying sixth in the 1,500 meters, was to be given the impression, with the sailcloth whipping back against one's face, of wrestling with an errant spinnaker in a gale.

The only blatant instance of Soviet propagandizing was described to me by an English girl I met in Gorky Park. She told me that the Intourist guide on a tour bus from the Sevastopol Hotel where she was staying injected so much party rhetoric about American "hegemony," the CIA and so forth into her commentary that the passengers, swaying along sullen and uncomfortable, began shouting back at her from their seats. "She might have had the advantage of the microphone," the English girl said, her voice strong with the accents of West London, "but we had the numbers on her. People began shouting, 'Afghanistan! Get out of Afghanistan!' When the guide said the trouble was we didn't read anything about Russia, I found myself shouting at her, 'Solzhenitsyn!' I have read 16 pages of One Day in the Life of what's his name. It was boring, boring. But how many pages have you read?" The girl began laughing. Her voice was still hoarse from cheering on Britain's Allan Wells, the 100-meter champion, the day before. "We had such a goings-on in that bus that the driver got lost."

One morning, the magazine Track and Field News organized a race for American tourists on a 3 1/2 -mile course along the river. I wanted to try, carrying my small American flag on a stick, like a baton, so that during the slightest lull in conversations in years to come, I could say, "Ahem, during the Moscow Olympics in '80, I want you to know that ... etc., etc." I did some jogging to prepare, getting up to run when the sun came through the lace curtains of my room in the Hotel Ukraine. Summer sunrise is very early in these latitudes, 3:30 a.m. or so, which is a fine and relaxed time to feel a city and watch the building fronts glow as the dawn brightens.

I missed the race--got the day wrong, or the time. I heard enough about it --that Intourist had taken a hand and got permission for the 40 contestants to run in a restricted area along the river at the foot of the Lenin Hills where Premier Kosygin, slowly followed by a black limousine, walks his dog. The runners were followed by an ambulance.

It was disappointing to miss a chance for a symbolic gesture of sorts. That night in my hotel room, I took a Frisbee -- a red junior Olympics model I had packed in my suitcase -- and reckoning if I had not raced, why not the discus? I got a big running start, my back to the corridor door, and I scaled the Frisbee out the eleventh-floor window. I watched it, splendidly discus-like, sail into the darkness, until it turned in a big arc and disappeared around the corner of the building. From below an "Aawk" drifted up, the sort of sound one might make if either clipped or startled by an object dropping out of the night sky. I backed away from the window and turned out the light, reminding myself how often symbolic gestures get one into trouble. I looked around for the Frisbee the next morning. It was gone. I wondered what had happened to it, where it was after that long flight from my window. The Wyoming rancher was right. You think a lot about trajectories over here.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.