"Romania. Maybe you have heard of it. Bucharest?"
I had heard of it, all right. Ceausescu and his wife had turned the country into a Stalinist nightmare - this was long before the crowds rooted them out and shot them. What could I say about Romania? It was home to the men in the elevator. Dean Reed had made movies in Romania and he claimed to know the Ceausescus. These men in their fancy jeans were probably officials, but they smiled nicely and I was a sucker. Romania, Romania... I had it.
"Yes, of course, I've heard of it. Very good food," I beamed back. "Pastrami!"
They beamed back.
"You speak very good English," I said, and they smiled some more.
"Where are you from?" asked the younger Romanian.
"New York City."
Oz! You could see it written on their faces: that they knew I had come from a magical planet. Oz or Shangri-La or Eden, it didn't matter. Satisfied, the Romanians nodded at one another, and I knew I had become a postcard from the trip to Moscow - a real New Yorker in an elevator in the National Hotel. For a minute, I was their American. For a moment, I was their Dean Reed.
As I got out of the elevator, I saw Oleg Smimoff. In a nice gray suit, he was coming through the revolving door of the hotel. The front hall porter, the one who looked like Leonid Brezhnev, did not challenge him.
I got out of the elevator. Oleg got in. I really wanted his videotapes. I held the door open.
"Hi, Oleg," I said. "How's business?"
He grunted.
I said, "What are you doing here?"
"I am working," he said.
"Can I have those videotapes of Dean Reed's concerts? Can I have a look?"
"Maybe."
Suddenly, I was weary of his games. "Working?" I said. "What at?"
"I am working on cementing international relations," said Oleg, and the elevator doors shut.
There was something suspicious about this man supposedly having been killed. And I wondered, "Why would anyone want to kill Dean Reed?" Vladimir Pozner stood in the doorway of his apartment in the center of Moscow. He smiled and invited me in.
"You'll have to forgive me, but I thought Dean Reed was a terrible phony," he added. "I'm a folk music man myself. The music teacher at my school in New York was Pete Seeger."
"What school was that?" I asked.
"City and Country," he said.
"Really," I said. "Where did you grow up?"
"24 East 10th Street, in Greenwich Village," he said, "I don't know if you know it."
I knew.
We had grown up on the same block. We had gone to the same school. Although we were fifteen years apart in age, the particulars of our childhoods were identical. We reminisced about Bluie, the librarian, and Ottilie, the cook, and Al in Shop; City and Country was a school so progressive you could practically major in Shop.
Vladimir Pozner remembered Sam, the newspaper man on University Place, and Wannamakers Department Store, where he bought his first bike, and hootenannies with Pete Seeger. I had come 5000 miles to the heart of the formerly Evil Empire to find myself with a man who had... Bluie for library!
What's more, Pozner had mimeographed copies of the school newspaper from the 1940s. There we suddenly were, on the floor of Pozner's study, reading through the exploits of the "Eights" or "Nines" (no grades at City and Country, only "groups") in the school printing shop or on a trip to the country to try out milking cows or making parchment paper by hand.
My first week in the Soviet Union and I'd met a man who grew up on my block and went to my school and, more astonishing, spoke not just American, but in my exact accent, though his English was just slightly more New York than mine. He was a Greenwich Village boy. In his study, there was a glass model of the Empire State Building on his desk, and an American quilt on the wall.
The face was utterly familiar, of course; Pozner had appeared so often on television in America that he was the most famous Communist in the country, with the exception of Mikhail Gorbachev. Our commie, polished, witty, urbane, a man who knew his way around a soundbite.
When Pozner began turning up on TV in the early 1980s, in the middle of the Cold War, people were perplexed and intrigued by the anomalous Russian who spoke colloquial English, who rarely used the conventional dreary rhetoric of the Soviet hack, and who was very charming, very slick, very enigmatic.
He looked like one of us, but he was one of them, a member of the Soviet Communist Party, a man who had, for a time, at least, been a true believer. He understood the system and the culture and he could talk about it in a language I understood.
Like Art Troitsky, Pozner could talk about Dean Reed's dazzling career as a superstar in the USSR in terms of the country's obsession with everything American. It had started around the time JFK was shot, Pozner said, and affably poured out Scotch and settled onto a leather sofa. I took a chair.
In the early 1960s, Pozner said, people began to see America in a way that was different from that dictated by the Communist Party.
"The picture furnished by the media, by propaganda about America was false," Pozner said. When people began to understand the truth, really, what happened was that they did a 180 degree turn. Everything about America was great from that point on."
Pozner had been a young reporter when JFK was shot in November, 1963. That night he went door to door in Moscow to get a feel for what people thought about the American President's death. He found almost everyone in tears; they had adored the handsome young President and now he was dead.
When Soviet propaganda films about the horrors of the West were shown on TV - race riots, segregation, guns - teenagers simply turned off the sound and read these details: the clothes in shop windows, the shoes worn by people in the street, the names of movies playing at the cinemas, background details that gave them the information they craved about the West.
Pozner went on, "Dean represented the American man for most Soviet kids. And that was very attractive at a time when anything American was so much desired by most people, especially young people. He was a real living, breathing American."
Pozner held up the bottle, but I refused the Scotch; I was too busy scribbling down what he said.
"Also," Pozner added, "let's keep in mind that it wasn't just the Soviet authorities that gave Dean a big hello, but the so-called Socialist camp."
True enough, not only the Soviets and the Eastern Bloc embraced Dean. He went on playing in Latin America. He went to Chile and played for Salvador Allende and in Nicaragua he played for Daniel Ortega. He even played for Yasser Arafat.
There's a piece of film I found later, after I met Pozner, that showed Dean Reed, a checkered headscarf on his head, jogging with what I assumed were Palestinian troops, all carrying small missiles or AK-47s. And then it cut to Dean Reed, guitar on his knee, singing "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and when the camera pulled back, you saw he was singing it to Yasser Arafat, with Arafat tapping his fingers merrily on a table, and smiling and clapping for Dean Reed.
Pozner said, "So you see, Here's an American who's saying everything that we want him to say. And he's doing it in an American way. And that's very effective."
I asked, "Do you still have an American passport?"
"I never did," he said.
Vladimir Pozner's cultural coding was quintessentially cosmopolitan. Survival was bred in the bone. His father's family were originally Spanish Jews who migrated to Poznan' in Poland, and then to St. Petersburg. In order to enter a university, which was forbidden to Jews, they converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1922, Pozner's grandfather left St. Petersburg in the wake of the Revolution; in 1940, his father fled Paris as the Nazis marched in.
The family settled in Greenwich Village. Vladimir was six, and sometimes kids at school called him Bill because William was the nearest equivalent of Vladimir in English. He grew up during World War II, when America and Russia were allies, and his two heroes, he said, were Joseph Stalin and Joe Di Maggio. All his life, Pozner's father nurtured dreams about the romantic Revolution of his youth and the importance of the socialist enterprise, and he instilled them in his sons, Vladimir and his brother, Paul, too. Pozner's father worked in the movie business. With the onset of the anti-Communist frenzy that began in the late 1940s, his boss offered to obtain US citizenship for him. Otherwise, he was told, he would be fired. The father refused. He took the family East, first to East Berlin, where his job was to restore the film industry.
Vladimir, aged fifteen, hated Germany. It was gray and oppressive. In 1952 the family moved on to Moscow. Under Stalin, the Pozner family, part Jewish, part foreign, would almost certainly have been labeled Enemies of the State and sent to a gulag. But, in 1953, Stalin died.
Vladimir settled down with his family, but after a while he grew homesick for New York. A group of young Americans came to Moscow in 1959, when under Khrushchev things opened up a little, Pozner remembered.