Orient Express (5 page)

Mogador

3.
Proletcult

On the walls some crude squares of painting in black and white, a man with a pick, a man with a shovel, a man with a gun. The shadows are so exaggerated they look like gingerbread men. Certainly the man who painted them had not done many figures before in his life. The theater is a long tin shed that used to be a cabaret show of some sort, the audience mostly workmen and soldiers in white tunics open at the neck, and women in white muslin dresses. Many of the men and all the children are barefoot and few of the women wear stockings. When the curtain goes up romping and chattering stop immediately; everyone is afraid of missing a word of what is said on the stage. It's a foolish enough play, an Early-Victorian sob-story, about a blind girl and a good brother and a wicked brother, and a bad marquis and a frequently fainting marquise, but the young people who play it—none of them ever acted before the Red Army entered Batum three months ago—put such conviction into it that one can't quite hold aloof from the very audible emotion of the audience during the ticklish moments of the dagger-fight between the frail good brother and the wicked and hearty elder brother who has carried off the little blind girl against her will. And when at last all wrongs are righted, and the final curtain falls on felicity, one can't help but feel that the lives of these people who crowd out through the dilapidated ex-beergarden in front of the theater have somehow been compensated for the bareness of the hungry livingrooms and barracks they go home to. In the stamping and the abandon with which the two heroes fought was perhaps an atom of some untrammelled expression, of some gaudy bloodcurdling ritual which might perhaps replace in people's hopes and lives the ruined dynasty of Things.

4.
Bees

The secretary of the commission for schools recently set up in Batum was a blackhaired man, hawknosed, hollow-eyed, with a three-day growth of beard. Undernourishment and overwork had made his eyes a little bloodshot and given them a curious intense stare. He had a sheaf of papers in front of him among which he scribbled an occasional hasty word, as if pressed for time. He spoke French with difficulty, digging it up word by word from some long-forgotten layer of his mind. He talked about the new school-system the Bolsheviki were introducing in the new republic of Adjaria, of which Batum was the capital, explained how already children's summer colonies had been started in several villages, how every effort was being made to get equipment ready to open the primary and secondary schools at the end of September.

—All education is to be by work, nothing without actual touch; he spread his hands, that were angular tortured painful hands, wide, and closed them with a gesture of laying hold onto some slippery reality. The words he used, too, were concrete, dug out of the soil—From the very first, work.… In summer in the fields, the children must cultivate gardens, raise rabbits, bees, chickens, learn how to take care of cattle. They must go into the forests and learn about trees. Everything they must learn by touch. Then in the winter they must study their native languages and Esperanto.… Here there will be schools for Armenians, Greeks, Muslims, Georgians, Russians … and the rudiments of sociology, arithmetic, woodworking, cooking. For in our republic every man must be able to attend to his wants himself. That will be the primary education. You see, nothing by theory, everything by practice. Then the secondary education will be more specialized, preparation for trades and occupations. Then those who finish the high schools can go to the universities to do independent work in the directions they have chosen. You see, merit will be according to work, not by theories or examinations. And all through there will be instruction in music and gymnastics and the theater; the arts must be open to anyone who wants to work in them. But most important will be nature; the young children must be all the time in the fields and forests, among the orchards where there are bees.… It is in the little children that all our hope lies … among orchards where there are bees.

5.
Bedbug Express

Ce n'est pas serios, the tall Swede had said when he and I and an extremely evil-looking Levantine with gimlet-pointed whiskers had not been allowed to go down the gangplank at Batum. Ce n'est pas serios, he had said, indicating the rotting harbor and the long roofs of the grey and black town set in dense pyrites-green trees and the blue and purple mountains in the distance and the Red Guards loafing on the wharf and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Republic painted on the wharfhouse. The last I saw of him he was still standing at the end of the gangplank, the points of his standup collar making pink dents in his thick chin, shaking his head and muttering, Ce n'est pas serios.

I thought of him when, accompanied by a swaggering interpreter and by a cheerful man very worried about typhus from the N.E.R., I stood in front of the Tiflis express waving a sheaf of little papers in my hand, passes in Georgian and in Russian, transport orders, sleeping car tickets, a pass from the Cheka and one from the Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Adjaria. The Tiflis express consisted of an engine, three huge unpainted sleepers and a very gaudy suncracked caboose. One car was reserved for civil officials, one for the military and one for the general public. So far it was extremely serious, but the trouble was that long before the train had drawn into the station it had been stormed by upwards of seven thousand people, soldiers in white tunics, peasant women with bundles, men with long moustaches and astrakhan caps, speculators with peddlers' packs and honest proletarians with loaves of bread, so that clots of people all sweating and laughing and shoving and wriggling obliterated the cars, like flies on a lump of sugar. There were people on every speck of the roof, people hanging in clusters from all the doors, people on the coal in the coalcar, people on the engine; from every window protruded legs of people trying to wriggle in. Those already on board tried to barricade themselves in the compartments and with surprising gentleness tried to push the newcomers out of the windows again. Meanwhile the eastbound American ran up and down the platform dragging his hippopotamus suitcase, streaking sweat from every pore and trying to find a chink to hide himself in. At last recourse had to be had to authority. Authority gave him a great boost by the seat of the pants that shot him and his suitcase in by a window into a compartment full of very tall men in very large boots, six of the seven soldiers who occupied his seat were thrown out, all hands got settled and furbished up their foreign languages and sat quietly sweating waiting for the train to leave.

Eventually after considerable circulation of rumors that we were not going to leave that day, that the track was torn up, that a green army had captured Tiflis, that traffic was stopped on account of the cholera, we started off without the formality of a whistle. The train wound slowly through the rich jade and emerald jungle of the Black Sea coast towards tall mountains to the northeast that took on inconceivable peacock colors as the day declined. In the compartment we nibbled black bread and I tried to juggle French and German into a conversation. Someone was complaining of the lack of manufactured articles, paint and women's stockings and medicine and spare parts for automobiles and soap and flatirons and toothbrushes. Someone else was saying that none of those things were necessary: The mountains will give us wool, the fields will give us food, the forests will give us houses; let every man bake his own and spin his own and build his own; that way we will be happy and independent of the world. If only they would not compromise with industrialism. But in Moscow they think, if only we get enough foreign machinery the revolution will be saved; we should be self-sufficient like the bees.

Strange how often they speak to you of bees. The order and sweetness of a hive seem to have made a great impression on the Russians of this age. Again and again in Tiflis people talked of bees with a sort of wistful affection, as if the cool pungence of bees were a tonic to them in the midst of the soggy bleeding chaos of civil war and revolution.

By this time it was night. The train was joggling its desultory way through mountain passes under a sky solidly massed with stars like a field of daisies. In the crowded compartment, where people had taken off their boots and laid their heads on each other's shoulders to sleep, hordes of bedbugs had come out of the stripped seats and bunks, marching in columns of three or four, well disciplined and eager. I had already put a newspaper down and sprinkled insect powder in the corner of the upper berth in which I was hemmed by a solid mass of sleepers. The bedbugs took the insect powder like snuff and found it very stimulating, but it got into my nose and burned, got into my eyes and blinded me, got into my throat and choked me, until the only thing for it was to climb into the baggage rack, which fortunately is very large and strong in the Brobdignagian Russian trains. There I hung, eaten only by the more acrobatic of the bugs, the rail cutting into my back, the insect powder poisoning every breath, trying to make myself believe that a roving life was the life for me. Above my head I could hear the people on the roof stirring about.

At about midnight the train stopped for a long while at a station. Tea was handed round, made in great samovars like watertanks; their fires were the only light; you could feel that there was a river below in the valley, a smell of dry walls and human filth came up from some town or other. Huge rounded shoulders of hills cut into the stars. Enlivened by the scalding tea, we all crawled into our holes again, the bunches of people holding on at the doors reformed, and the train was off. This time I went very decently to sleep listening to the stirring of the people on the roof above my head, to the sonorous rumble of the broad-gauge wheels and to a concertina that wheezed out a torn bit of song now and then in another car.

In the morning we look out at a silver looping river far below in a huge valley between swelling lioncolored hills. The train casts a strange shadow in the morning light, all its angles obliterated by joggling, dangling figures of soldiers; on the roofs are the shadows of old women with baskets, of men standing up and stretching themselves, of children with caps too big for them. On a siding we pass the long train of the second tank division of the Red Army; a newpainted engine, then endless boxcars, blond young soldiers lolling in the doors. Few of them look more than eighteen; they are barefoot and scantily dressed in canvas trousers and tunics; they look happy and at their ease, dangling their legs from the roofs and steps of boxcars and sleepers. You can't tell which are the officers. Out of the big clubcar decorated with signs and posters that looks as if it might have been a diner in its day, boys lean to wave at the passing train. Then come flatcars with equipment, then a long row of tanks splotched and striped with lizard green—A gift of the British, says the man beside me. The British gave them to Denikin, and Denikin left them to us.

Our train, the windows full of travelgrimed faces and the seats full of vermin, gathers speed and tilts round a bend. The sight of the green tanks has made everybody feel better. The man beside me, who used to be a banker in Batum and hopes to be again, exclaims fervently: All these words, Bolshevik, Socialist, Menshevik, have no meaning any more.… Conscious of it or not, we are only Russians.

6.
The Relievers

Members of the N.E.R. sign a pledge not to drink fermented or distilled liquors. A private car full of members of the N.E.R. is in Tiflis trying to decide whether starving people or people with full bellies are more likely to become communists. In Tiflis twenty people a day die of cholera, forty people a day die of typhus, not counting those who die where nobody finds them. At the N.E.R. headquarters we all sleep on canvas cots and gargle with listerine to avoid infection and to take the vodka off our breaths. Headquarters swarms with miserable barons and countesses who naturally sigh for the old régime and color the attitude of even the honest men among the relievers. What American can stand up against a title, much less against a refugee title in distress? Why, she might be the Princess Anastasia in disguise! The Russian government understands all that but wisely argues that a live White child is better than a dead Red child; so it gives the relievers a free hand to decide what sheep shall live and what goats shall die.

But the real energy of the relievers goes into the relief of Things. To a casual eye Tiflis is bare of Things, nothing in the shopwindows, houses empty as the tents of arabs, but towards the N.E.R. there is a constant streaming of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, silver-encrusted daggers, rugs, Georgian, Anatolian, rugs from Persia and Turkestan, watches, filigree work, silver mesh bags, furs, amber, the Mustapha Sirdar papers, cameras, fountain pens. My dear, the bargains! For a suitcase full of roubles you can outfit yourself for life. I guess the folks back home'll be surprised when I tell 'em what I paid for that sunburst I bought the wife.

And, carrying the things, greyfaced people, old men and women terribly afraid of the Cheka of brigands of the cholera, of their shadows, débris of a wrecked world, selling for a few days' food, Things that had been the mainstay of their lives up to 1917; swaggering young men who had picked the winning team and were making a good thing of it; professional speculators, men who were usually but not always Greeks, Armenians, or Jews, men with sharp eyes and buzzard beaks, dressed in shabby overcoats, humpbacked with respect and politeness, rubbing their hands that never let go a banknote however depreciated the currency was, men who will be the founders of great banking houses in the future, philanthropists and the founders of international families. The bargains, the bargains!