A Russian Journal (12 page)

One part of the monastery still stands, a chapel where for centuries only the czar and the nobles were permitted to worship. It is heavily painted, a dark and gloomy place. And each worshiper had his little carven stall, for this was the place of a very select religion, and it was easy to see in one's mind the old nobility, sitting in gloomy concentration on a noble future and on a noble heaven, a heaven which was probably as gloomy as this church, with its incense-blackened ceiling and its glimmering gold leaf. And Capa said, "All good churches are gloomy. That's what makes them good."

There is an older church in Kiev, one of the oldest in the world, that was built by Jaroslav the Wise in 1034, and it is still standing, probably because there was nothing of value to steal in it, and so the Germans let it alone. But it, again, is a high, gloomy place.

In a little side chapel, in a small houselike sarcophagus of marble, is the body of Jaroslav the Wise. It is the tradition that Jaroslav had an accident in battle and broke his leg. And his body lay for over a thousand years in the little houselike sarcophagus, and recently the casket was opened, and it was found that the skeleton in the casket had indeed had a broken leg, and everyone was happy, for this was really Jaroslav the Wise. The gloom of the churches threw a gloom upon us.

At luncheon Mr. Poltarazki spoke of the acts of the Germans in the war, of the thousands of people killed. War is no new thing to Kiev. Starting with the raids of the savages from Tartary, it has been a place of war for thousands of years. But no savage tribe, no invader, ever was responsible for the stupid, calculated cruelties of the Germans. They raged through the country like frantic, cruel children. And now the lines of prisoners in their German army uniforms march through the streets, to work at cleaning up the destruction they caused. And the Ukrainian people do not look at them. They turn away when the columns march through the streets. They look through these prisoners and over them and do not see them. And perhaps this is the worst punishment that could possibly be inflicted on them.

In the evening we went to the theater to see the play
Storm,
a nineteenth-century drama enacted in the nineteenth-century manner. The scenery was quaint and old-fashioned, and the acting was old-fashioned too. It is odd that it should be played, but it is a Ukrainian play, and they love their own. The leading lady was very beautiful. She looked a little like Katharine Cornell, and she had great authority on the stage. The story was of a young wife, under the thumb of a powerful Russian mother-in-law, who fell in love with a poet. She went into the garden to meet him while she was still married to another man. All we could see that she did in the garden was to talk a great deal, and once to let the poet kiss the tips of her fingers, but it was crime enough, so that finally she confessed her sin in a church and threw herself into the Volga and was drowned. It seemed to us almost too much punishment for having the tips of her fingers kissed. The play had its secondary plot too. The chambermaid comically paralleled her mistress's tragedy. Her lover, instead of being a poet, was a country bumpkin. It was a traditional play all right, and the audience loved it. It took half an hour to change the sets, so that it was well after midnight when the leading lady finally dropped herself into the river. It seemed odd to us that the people in the audience, who had known real tragedy, tragedy of invasion, and death, and desolation, could be so moved over the fate of the lady who got her fingers kissed in the garden.

The next morning it rained, and Capa feels that rain is a persecution of himself by the sky, for when it rains he cannot take pictures. He denounced the weather in dialect and in four or five languages.

Capa is a worrier about films. There is not enough light, or there is too much light. The developing is wrong, the printing is wrong, the cameras are broken. He worries all the time. But when it rains, that is a personal insult addressed to him by the deity. He paced the room until I wanted to kill him, and finally went to have his hair cut, a real Ukrainian pot haircut.

That evening we went to the circus. Every Russian town of any size has its permanent circus in a permanent building. But, of course, the Germans had burned the Kiev circus, so that so far it is under canvas, but still it is one of the most popular places in the city. We had good seats, and Capa had permission to photograph, so he was comparatively happy. It was not unlike our circuses, a single ring and tiers of seats.

It started with acrobats. We noticed that when the acrobats worked on high trapezes there was a hook and line in their belts, so that if they fell they would not be killed or injured, for, as our Russian host said, it would be ridiculous to hurt a man just to give the audience a thrill.

The pretty ladies and the gallant men did their spins and turns on the high wires and on the trapezes. Then there were dog acts and tumblers, and trained tigers, panthers, and leopards performed in a steel cage that was let down over the ring. The audience loved it, and all the while a circus band played away at the universal circus music which does not change.

Best of all were the clowns. When they first came in, we noticed that the audience was looking at us, and we soon found out why. Their clowns are invariably Americans now. One is a rich Chicago woman, and the Russian idea of what a rich Chicago woman looks like is wonderful. The audience was waiting to see whether we would be annoyed at this satire, but it was really very funny. And just as some of our clowns wear long black beards, and carry bombs, and are labeled Russians, so the Russian clowns labeled themselves Americans. The audience laughed with delight. The rich woman from Chicago wore red silk stockings and high-heeled shoes covered with rhinestones, a ridiculous turban-like hat, and an evening dress covered with bangles, which looked like a long, misshapen nightgown, and she teetered across the ring, her artificial stomach wobbling, while her husband postured and danced about, for he was a rich Chicago millionaire. The jokes must have been very funny, although we couldn't understand them, for the audience howled with laughter. And they seemed to be greatly relieved that we did not resent the clowns. The clowns finished off rich Chicago Americans and then went into a violent and very funny version of the death of Desdemona, where Desdemona was not strangled, but was almost beaten to death with a rubber knife.

It was a good circus. The children, sitting in the front seats, were lost in circus dreams the way children are. The company is permanent, it does not move about, and the circus goes on all year long, with the exception of a little while in the summer.

The rain had stopped, so after the circus we went to a Kiev night club, called the Riviera. It is on the cliff above the river, with an open-air dance floor surrounded by tables, and the whole overlooking the river, which flows away across the plain. The food was excellent. Good shashlik, and the inevitable caviar, and wines from Georgia. And to our great relief the orchestra played Russian, and Ukrainian, and Georgian music rather than bad American jazz. And they played very well.

At our table we were joined by Alexander Korneichuk, the ranking Ukrainian playwright, a man of great charm and humor. He and Poltarazki began to tell old Ukrainian sayings, and the Ukrainians are famous for them. Almost our favorite is "The best bird is the sausage." And then Korneichuk told a saying which I had always believed was native to California. It is the description by a heavy eater concerning the nature of the turkey, in which he says, "The turkey is a very unsatisfactory bird, it is a little too much for one, and not quite enough for two." Apparently the Ukrainians have been saying it for hundreds of years, and I thought it was invented in my home town.

They taught us a toast in Ukrainian which we like: "Let us drink to make people at home happy." And they toasted again to peace, always to peace. Both of these men had been soldiers, and both of them had been wounded, and they drank to peace.

Then Korneichuk, who had been to America once, said rather sadly that he had been to Hyde Park, and there he had seen pictures of Roosevelt and Churchill, of Roosevelt and De Gaulle, but there he had seen no picture of Roosevelt and Stalin. And he said they had been together, and they had worked together, and why in Hyde Park had they removed the photographs of them?

The music grew faster and faster, and more and more people came to dance, and colored lights were thrown on the floor, and far below the river reflected the lights of the city.

Two Russian soldiers danced a wild dance together, a dance of stamping boots and swinging hands, a dance of the war fronts. Their heads were shaven, and their boots were highly polished. They danced madly, and red and green and blue lights flashed over the dance floor.

The orchestra played a wild Georgian melody, and from one of the tables a girl got up and danced all by herself. And she danced beautifully, and no one else was on the floor while she was dancing. Gradually a few people began clapping in rhythm to the music, and then more, until there was a soft beat of clapping hands to her dancing- And when the music stopped she went back to her table, and there was no applause. There had been no exhibitionism in it, she had simply wanted to dance.

With the soft music, the lights, and the peaceful river below, our friends again began to speak of the war, as though it were a haunting thing they could never get very far from. They spoke of the dreadful cold, before Stalingrad, where they had lain in the snow and had not known how it would come out. They spoke of horrible things they could not forget. Of how a man had warmed his hands in the blood of a newly dead friend, so that he could pull the trigger of his gun.

A poet came to our table, and he said, "I have a mother-in-law, and when the war came to Rostov she would not leave because she had an oriental rug that she treasured." And he said, "We retreated, and we fought the whole war, and we came back to Rostov. I went to her place, and she was still there, and so was the oriental rug."

"You know," he said, "when an army moves into a city there are many accidents, and many people are killed by mistake. And when I went to my mother-in-law's, and she came to the door, the thought flashed through my mind, why shouldn't she have an accident now? Why shouldn't my gun go off by mistake?" And he finished, "It didn't happen. And I have wondered why ever since."

Capa had set up his cameras on the roof of the little pavilion; he was photographing the dancers and he was happy. The orchestra played a sad song from one of Korneichuk's plays. It is the song of the sailors of the Baltic. When they had to retreat, they sank their ships, and this is a song of sadness and a requiem to their sunken ships.

IN THE MORNING WE looked up the date, and it was August 9. We had been just nine days in the Soviet Union. But so many had been our impressions and sights that it seemed like much more to us.

Capa awakens in the morning slowly and delicately, as a butterfly comes out of its chrysalis. For an hour after he awakens, he sits in stunned and experimental silence, neither awake nor asleep. My problem was to keep him from taking a book or a newspaper into the bathroom, for then he would be there for at least an hour. I began to prepare three intellectual questions for him every morning, questions in sociology, in history, in philosophy, in biology, questions designed to shock his mind into awareness that the day was come.

On the first day of my experiment I asked him the following questions: What Greek tragedian took part in the battle of Salamis? How many legs has an insect? And, finally, what was the name of the pope who sponsored and collected the Gregorian chants? Capa sprang from his bed with a look of pain on his face, sat staring at the window for a moment, and then rushed to the bathroom with a copy of a Russian newspaper which he could not read. And he was gone for an hour and a half.

Every morning, for two or three weeks, I prepared the questions for him, and he never answered one of them, but he got to muttering to himself most of the day, and he complained bitterly that he could not sleep in anticipation of the questions in the morning. However, there was no evidence, except his word, that he could not sleep. He claimed that the horror created in his mind by my questions had set him back intellectually forty years, or, roughly, to minus ten years.

Capa had stolen books in Moscow to bring along, three detective stories, the
Notebooks of Maxim Gorki, Vanity Fair,
and a report of the United States Department of Agriculture for 1927. All these books were returned to someone before we left Russia, but I am quite sure they were not returned to their owners.

On this day, August 9, we went to the farm village called Shevchenko. We called it in the future Shevchenko I, since another farm village we subsequently visited was also called Shevchenko, named after a much beloved Ukrainian national poet.

For a few miles our road was paved, and then we turned to the right and went along a dirt road, cut and torn to pieces. We went through pine forests and over a plain where vicious fighting had taken place. Everywhere there was evidence of it. The pine trees were ripped and ragged from machine-gun fire. There were trenches and machine-gun placements, and even the roads were cut and jagged by the tracks of tanks and pitted by shell fire. Here and there lay rusting bits of military equipment, burned-out tanks, and wrecked trucks. This country had been defended and lost, and the counterattack had fought slowly over every inch of territory.

Shevchenko I has never been one of the best farms because its land is not of the first quality, but before the war it was a fairly prosperous village, a village of three hundred and sixty-two houses, in other words, of three hundred and sixty-two families. It was a going concern.

After the Germans passed over it, there were eight houses left, and even those had the roofs burned off them. The people were scattered and many of them killed, and the men were in the forest, fighting as partisans, and God knows how the children took care of themselves.