I Can't Stay Long

by Laurie Lee

  On the last stretch, near Toluca, Indian families were everywhere, swarming in clusters along the sides of the road; the women brilliant in purples, blues, and scarlets, with silver brooches pinned to their hair. Dressed apparently for fiesta, each of their garments was a tradition, scrupulously correct according to tribe. And set against the great hot fields, with the blue volcanoes in the background, it seemed that no people better suited their landscape.

  I spent my last days in Mexico at Oaxaca in the south – down where the horn of the country grows narrowest. It stands on a mile-high plateau, completely surrounded by mountains, has houses built of soft, green stone, and nearby are the ruins of two imperial cities, those of Mítla and of Monte Albán.

  I arrived on the morning of market day, and Oaxaca market is one of the biggest in the south. Apart from the absence of slaves and human limbs and lizards, it might not have changed for a thousand years. There were stalls of black pottery and terra-cotta animals, delicate basketwork, shawls, and sarapes, spiced herbs in sacks, caged birds, live poultry, and enough flowers for the carnival of Nice.

  The people were as exotic as the merchandise, especially the women – Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Olmecs from the north, blanket-weavers from Mítla and Tehuantepec, their oyster-coloured veils worn with every variety of grace, sometimes piled on the head like Arabs, sometimes wrapping a child like a leaf round a lily. Some wove coloured ribbon in their plaited hair, while others wore mannish sombreros. One charming sight: a young Otomi mother breast-feeding her infant son, who sucked dreamily away with a small slouch hat tilted jauntily on the back of his head.

  The main square of Oaxaca was full of blossoming trees and had a pagoda-like bandstand in the middle. Black squirrels drop suddenly out of the branches to eat lemon peel out of your hand. In the evening the town gathered to listen to the band, arranging themselves in circles, the married with children sitting up near the bandstand, the teen-agers ranging the outside edges. In the shadows old men, with long Mayan faces, sat listening entranced to Strauss, while peddlers went round selling balloons and puppets, trays of jellies and toffeed fruits.

  Visiting Monte Albán, once the imperial city of the Zapotecs, I found it less a ruin than a monument to giants. Raised on its hilltop, which is itself an altar, it commands the plain and the glittering ring of mountains, and for its size and mystery, and the natural grandeur of its setting, it seemed as impressive as the Acropolis of Athens. Its buildings, including the two great pyramids, look as solid as they ever were – except for the wandering goats feeding on the steps of the priests and searching for grass around the sacred altars.

  Father south is Mítla, the Mixtec ‘City of the Dead’, unique for its abstract geometrical mosaics. Shaped columns, huge boulders, delicate tracery of tiles, tricks of perspective, refined weaving in stone – all were cut and fitted without metal tools or mortar and have stood for eight hundred years.

  Mítla and Monte Albán, like other old Mexican cities, show the Indians’ extraordinary architectural genius. They had a feeling for size, balance, and for Promethean gestures in stone, which could only have sprung from a precise mastery of materials. They were great artists, too, and understood the complexity of the stars, and were sophisticated when most of mankind were savages. Yet everything they did was like a gigantic piling-up of arms against one common enemy – the gods. Their religion and rituals showed them at the mercy of the spirits: they feared nature, time, and fate. Even the best of their art was less praise for life than supplication and bribery. Yet one cannot blame them; all civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

  I saw this again, in miniature, at a cock-fight on my last day in Oaxaca – the spectators emotionless, dark as stone, almost dreamlike around the ring; the steel-spurred cocks, feathered like warrior priests, slashing open each other’s breasts, and the Indian trainer snatching up his dying bird to suck the blood from its head and eyes.

  Then I was flying out of Mexico, looking down at the country and scarcely believing I’d been there, watching the small hot whirlwinds move over the fields, robbing and replenishing the land, the little ghosts of brown dust that gently cover the temples, and fill up the craters of the extinct volcanoes.

  A Wake in Warsaw

  In the month of their worst weather – and the month also of their most melancholy historical memories – the Poles were paying tribute to Adam Mickiewicz, national poet, patriot, romantic, and a hundred years dead. And in honour of this affair the Polish Government – displaying a romantical-political-mystical view of poetry which I from the West found quite unusual – invited, from all over the world, professors, scholars, and poets to join with them in these celebrations. Five such figures were invited from Great Britain, all expenses paid. But as it turned out, I was the only one able to accept.

  The invitation came to me in a warm and frantic voice over the telephone from the Polish authorities in London. It seemed that the other four had already made their apologies. The voice was that of a hostess determined to prevent the wreck of a dinner party. It invited me to fly straightway to Warsaw. But of course I was glad to go.

  For what could be more innocent than the celebration of a Byronic poet a hundred years dead? Besides I dearly wished to join the ranks of the behind-the-iron-curtain bores and so be protected from them for ever more. I also wanted to prove whether I could survive the Polish winter. And to find out who Mickiewicz was.

  But I decided not to fly. I wanted to taste, at the tempo of the train, the slow approach to Warsaw with all its frontiers. So tickets were provided, and I set off.

  On the dawn of the second day I entered Germany, changed trains at Stuttgart, and waited an hour for the Warsaw coach. I had not been to this country before, and I observed with interest the hurrying Germans, so long the bogies of my childhood. Brisk, raincoated, carrying briefcases like heraldic shields, they emptied themselves from their suburban trains and hastened like lovers to their work. Porters, inspectors, and ticket-collectors were uniformed and swagger as Luftwaffe pilots. Painters, even at that early hour, were painting the station like mad. The obsession seemed to be: never to be caught not working – as curious a conformity as its opposite which prevails elsewhere.

  My Warsaw coach, when it arrived, was labelled Second Class and Third Class – and it was explained to me that there was no official First Class, but that Second Class was in fact First Class though formally labelled Second (and, for that matter, Third was also Second). In my comfortable and super-heated compartment, I crossed that daylight Germany, through forests of conifers and hop-holes, across neat and banded landscapes striped like medieval England. Towards Nuremberg the sky darkened and it began to snow. One by one the American Army officers picked up their field-green luggage and left us. The restaurant car was taken off. The carriages on the train grew rapidly fewer. We were approaching Czechoslovakia.

  The formalities at Schirnding, the German frontier, were swift and easy. Nobody seemed to care where we were going, or why. There was just time to buy a last German beer. Girls waved from the country platform and shouted jovialities. Then the train, so small and quiet now, creaked slowly eastwards through a shallow snow-flecked cutting; the landscape was dark and wet and birchy, and I awaited with excitement the appearance of the Communist frontier. When it came, it did not disappoint.

  First, across the cabbagy fields, a broad band of tank-traps came into sight, black as liquorice in the driving sleet. Next, tall wooden watch-towers, with legs astride, stood at stern intervals about the horizon, observing, threatening, keeping their own grim council. Then a dozen soldiers, furry as rabbits, appeared from nowhere and trotted beside the train. With Russian-style hats and quilted coats, they looked as cuddly as children’s toys, except for the shining tommy-guns in their hands.

  The train halted in a dilapidated station, slate-dark, weedy, like a country halt in Wales. We were in Czechoslovakia. The sold
iers took up their positions on either side of the train and watched the windows. In the compartments all was still. There was a great silence, and for a while nothing happened.

  While we waited, I peered through the steaming windows to see what I could. Great black engines stood in the sidings, with rusty red stars fixed to their funnels. There were some silent military huts, as scruffy and homeless as anywhere in the world. The platforms were of wet, marshy gravel. There were no kiosks, buffets, paper-sellers, money-changers, or any of the usual business of frontier towns. I saw a troupe of about forty women marching across a muddy field. In the distance a country house, pink, florid, stood in ruins. The only new and polished objects in sight were the bayonets and tommy-guns of the sentinel soldiers.

  Suddenly the frontier inspectors arrived, as smart as guard’s officers, polite as head waiters, bowing, saluting, and talking all languages. They looked under the seats, took our passports away, and didn’t come back for two hours.

  At last, in the gathering, vaporous dusk, we moved out of the station. We crossed Czechoslovakia in darkness, and it is the darkness that I chiefly remember. Every so often we stopped at a large town, but the town and the station seemed half-lit and deserted, as though in a state of war.

  Towards nine o’clock we arrived in Prague, but the streets were empty, everybody seemed to have gone to bed, and there was nothing to be seen except the stars in the river. We were due for a three-hour wait here, and I was told that an official would meet me and give me dinner.

  I stepped from the train, feeling homeless and far away. The platform emptied and I was left alone with one small dark-suited man, who ignored me. We paced up and down for a while, then I heard a gasp: ‘But, Mr Lee?’ Yes, I said, and the small man whistled with astonishment, then sighed and shook my hand.

  We walked to a hotel nearby and had dinner. My companion said he had eaten already, but he had another one all the same. He was a thin young man, seen in the hotel light, with pale eyes and a desperate smile. He seemed very ill at ease, tapping his feet and drumming his fingers continuously. We ate goose, dumplings, and ice-cream, with Pilsen beer. The man, in his tuneless English, struggled hard to talk of culture. Towards the end of the meal I asked him what had become of Jiri Mucha, the Czech poet, who returned to Prague from London some years ago and of whom nothing had been heard since.* At my question the man paused abruptly in his fidgeting and looked at me in expressionless silence for a moment. Then he said, ‘Mucha? Mucha?’ and drew his fingertip across the tablecloth. ‘Do you know, that is very interesting. “Mucha” is our word for “fly”.’

  I left it at that, and we went back to the station. The Warsaw train was crowded with stalwart young men. I knew I would have to sit up all night, but there was nowhere to sit. ‘Do not worry,’ said my companion. He threw open a compartment door and in quiet, icy tones, addressed the travellers within. I caught the words ‘delegate’ and ‘poet’. Immediately everyone jumped to their feet. I selected a corner seat and sat down. The displaced person waved cheerily at me, said ‘Sleep well, Johnny’, in English, and went and sat in the corridor. But I slept badly, for the rest of my fellow travellers, either through habit or by design, ate apples throughout the night.

  Poland appeared next day in a grey veil of driving sleet. I had drugged myself, so I didn’t see much of it. I remember dimly a deterioration of landscape; flat, soggy flelds; dark, wood-walled villages; hovels with thatched, weed-sprouting roofs; peasants on muddy roads, heads down to the weather; steaming horses drawing long four-wheeled wagons; fat, trousered women working the stations and the level-crossings.

  Then, after a long, dozing, twilit day, we arrived in Warsaw. I expected ruins; instead I saw a city. The slow approach to the station took us through the rain-drenched suburbs, thickly inhabited but curiously unformed. What struck me immediately was the commercial chastity of the place. Factories, blocks of flats, institutes, rose squarely out of the suburban mud. But no hoardings, no shops, no cinemas, petrol stations or cosy cafés. No motor-cars – only wagons and huddled pedestrians about the streets. And at regular intervals along the track, hand-painted slogans on strips of wood, though rather worn and flaking.

  At Warsaw station I was received by a delegation of welcome – though we didn’t recognise each other immediately. It was rather reminiscent of Prague. The platform emptied and I walked up and down. By the barrier stood four women, plump, in mackintoshes, and wearing what looked like bathing caps on their heads. They fluttered with anxiety and peered around the platform, but when they saw that no one else was getting off the train they decided that I must be the one.

  They introduced themselves. Two were official porters, and they seized my bags. One was my interpreter. The older one was a famous Polish writer, chosen to honour me with a personal welcome. She gave me short shrift, however; she told me I was late, drove with me in silence to my hotel, shook hands sharply like a disappointed marriage-broker, then disappeared and I never saw her again.

  The biggest hotel in Warsaw had been set aside to house the foreign guests. ‘Hotel Bristol’ it said in large letters across the front, though I was told the name had since been changed. Flags of all nations fluttered from its shrapnel-pitted façade. Its great hall was dark and full of square, shaggy men in caps and padded coats whom I first took to be spies or secret police but who later turned out to be cab-drivers.

  The first thing that I had to do was to sign on at the reception desk of the Mickiewicz Committee. Their welcome was efficient and warm. They gave me a booklet of meal-coupons, to last me a week; an authority to make two free telephone calls to anywhere in the world; a guide to Warsaw; a guide to Mickiewicz, and a discreet white envelope stuffed with zloty for me to spend.

  But I had been travelling for three days; I was almost speechless with fatigue, self-pity, and the sense of distance I had come. I didn’t want to be just another honoured but self-sufficient visitor, to be ticked off on their list; I wanted to establish some special contact, as one in need of particular care. I was not as robust as I looked, I said. I was, in fact, very delicate, and could be carried off by the slightest breath of cruel air.

  The Committee at first looked at me with astonishment. Then they warmed to their responsibilities. Their eyes softened; they began to snap their fingers commandingly at each other. Before I knew what was happening they bore me upstairs, established me in a room next door to the First Aid Dispensary, introduced me to the pretty young nurse, shoved her bed hard against my wall, mine hard against hers, and bid me bang on the wallpaper – at any time – if I ever needed her help. It was an arrangement that worked like a charm and gave me lasting confidence and comfort.

  Meanwhile my interpreter, a charming, blue-eyed, but rather prim young woman, had ordered me high tea, and she sat with me while I ate it. During the meal she declared that it would be her happy privilege to remain by my side as long as I was in Warsaw. In fact, she would never leave me; it was her duty and her honour. She smiled brilliantly, and I began to buck up. We looked at one another in silence for a while, each examining the possible implications of her duty. Presently she began to ask questions about my work, taking notes of my replies. She frowned when I said lyric poetry and wrinkled her nose. But she gasped with delight when I said I had written a play about John Ball’s Peasant Revolt. ‘Is it progressive?’ she asked. ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘We will have it translated immediately,’ she said. Her eyes shone; mine shifted uneasily. I don’t suppose we were ever closer to each other than at that moment. Certainly we both soon proved unfaithful. She was disappointed by my liking for vodka and by what she called my ‘lack of cultural seriousness’. And I must say that her subsequent passion for a certain sober American professor irritated me no end.

  The next morning I breakfasted briskly at nine – pork and two eggs, jam, rolls, and coffee. My interpreter, fresh as a scrubbed lettuce, was at my side. We were joined by her colleague, a young, sadly humorous man who worked in the Palace of Culture. He told me that
his favourite reading was Webster’s Dictionary, and certainly his English, though fluent, was decorated with much unfamiliar bric-à-brac.

  As I sat there, warmed by their undivided attention, I felt again a distinction of strangeness, as one who had penetrated secret Tibetan frontiers and made friends with the monks. The light of the morning snowfall shone through the windows, the whisper and click of the Slav languages being spoken around me rustled like cicadas. I was pleased, after all, at being the unique lone traveller from Britain. Then I had a shock.

  Sitting quietly alone at a distant table, reading a propped-up book, and patiently awaiting his breakfast, was Graham Greene.

  My heart sank. I asked my hosts to excuse me and went across to speak to him. He received me with a detached warmth as though this place were the Savile Club. He looked ruddy and well. As the private guest of some Polish Catholics he had been given a room in the hotel, but he did not qualify for the meal-tickets accorded to State guests. He had, therefore, been waiting an hour for his private breakfast, and he didn’t think he would get any until we pampered poets had first been served. ‘In any case,’ he said rather testily, ‘shouldn’t you all be at meetings or something by now?’ As we spoke, his breakfast arrived; a glass of chilled vodka and two rolls. He put the rolls aside and drank the vodka. ‘I’ve lived on nothing else,’ he said, ‘since I got here.’ I was pleased to see him, yet chastened and slightly let down. Here, of all places; and after all the trouble I’d taken. It was like sharing Everest with Tenzing.