Orient Express

by John Dos Passos

  Further along a onelegged Russian soldier stands against a lamppost, big red hands covering his face, and sobs out loud.

  3. Massacre

  The red plush salon of the Pera Palace Hotel. The archbishop, a tall man in flowing black with a beautiful curly chestnut-colored beard and gimlet eyes, is pouring out an impetuous torrent of Greek. Listening to him a Greek lady elaborately dressed in rose satin, an American naval officer, a journalist, some miscellaneous frock-coated people. Clink of ice in highballs being brought to two British majors across the room. The archbishop lifts a slender Byzantine hand and orders coffee. Then he changes to French, lisping a little his long balanced phrases, in which predominate the words horreur, atrocité, œuvre humanitaire, civilisation mondiale. The Turks in Samsoun, the Kemalists, who some weeks since deported the men of orthodox faith, have now posted an order to deport the women and children. Three days’ notice. Of course that means … Massacre, says someone hastily.

  The archbishop’s full lips are at the rim of his tiny coffeecup. He drinks quickly and meticulously. In one’s mind beyond the red plush a vision of dark crowds crawling inland over sunshrivelled hills. The women were crying and wailing in the streets of Samsoun, says the officer. The news must be sent out, continues the archbishop; the world must know the barbarity of the Turks; America must know. A telegram to the President of the United States must be sent off. Again in one’s mind beyond red plush salons, and the polished phrases of official telegrams, the roads at night under the terrible bloodorange moon of Asia, and the wind of the defiles blowing dust among huddled women, stinging the dark attentive eyes of children, and far off on the heat-baked hills a sound of horsemen.

  In a big armchair beside the window a Turk with grizzled eyebrows and with eyes as soft and as brown as the archbishop’s beard looks unmovedly at nothing. One by one the oval amber beads of a conversation chaplet drop through his inscrutably slow white fingers.

  4. Assassination

  Extracts from a letter published under “Tribune Libre” in the Presse du Soir that comes out in Pera every evening with two pages of French and four of Russian:

  The eighteenth of June my husband, Bekhboud Djevanchir Khan, was murdered.

  I the undersigned, his wife, of Russian origin, trust to your kindness for the publication of certain facts which will put an end I hope to the false rumors that are attainting the dead man’s good name.

  I have never been separated from my husband and God has made me witness of all the horror of these last years.

  March 1918. The wreck of the Russian army crawling back from the Turkish front. At Baku the power is in the hands of Armenians who have adopted the Bolshevist platform. By order of no one knows who, according to a prearranged plan, there is organized a massacre of the Muslim population.

  Never till my last breath shall I forget those terrible days. They were tracking my husband; his name was on the list of the proscribed. By a miracle he escaped. We fled the town and after unbelievable privations, succeeded in getting to Elisabethpol.

  Months passed. Power changed hands, and my husband was called to the post of Minister of the Interior in the first Azerbaidjan cabinet. Turkish detachments draw near to Baku and again, before they reach the town, the bloody happenings of September are unrolled. It was the terrible reply of the Muslims to the March massacres.

  My husband hastens to Baku to put an end to these riots, but by the time he arrives the wave of national hatred has subsided. National hate gives way to class hate; the Bolsheviki aspire towards power and the local population, tired of national and religious strife, see in the Reds a neutral force.

  In the beginning of 1920, the Bolsheviki have control and start settling their scores with the representatives of the national parties. We are driven out of our house; everything we have is taken from us. My husband is arrested by the extraordinary commission and sentenced to death. But the particular conditions in Baku and his great influence oblige the Soviet powers to free him. In spite of his reiterated solicitations they refuse to let him leave the country, knowing that he is a mining engineer and one of the best specialists on the naphtha industry. Fate itself reserves for him the rôle of “spec.” He is offered a post in the commissariat of foreign affairs which offers possibilities of a foreign mission.

  My husband accepts and some time afterwards we leave for Constantinople. Here death awaited him: an assassin’s hand ended the life of my husband whose only crime was to love above all things his people and his country, to which he had consecrated his studies, his work and all his life.

  Two words more on the subject of the rumors that my husband had betrayed his companions of the “Moussavat” party, and that for this they had condemned him to death. In the eyes of those who have even slightly known the defunct, these rumors are so absurd that they are not worth the trouble of denying. Such gossip will not be able to tarnish, in the hearts of those who intimately knew him, the glorious memory of the defunct.

  I am, yours etc.

  5. The Crescent

  They sell amber beads and the notaries and scribes have their little tables and stools in the court of the mosque of Bayazid. Charitable people have left foundations for the feeding of the pigeons that circle among the dappled branches of its planes and perch, drinking, beaks tilted up, throats shimmering with each swallow, on the marble verge of its washing fountain. One flaring noon I stood against the cold granite of a column watching a Bedoueen in a stiff bournous of white wool dictate a letter to a scribe with the gestures of an emperor composing an edict to a conquered city, when I noticed that a constant string of people was going in under the high portal of the mosque. Adventuring inquisitively near, I was beckoned in by a young man who dangled a green silk tassel at the end of his string of amber beads. An old man obsequiously pushed big slippers over my shoes, and I stepped over the high threshold. The huge red-carpeted floor under the dome and the dais along the sides were full of men, beggars and porters and artisans in leather aprons and small boys with fezzes too large for their bullet heads and stately gentlemen in frock coats and white vests with festooned watch chains and gravebearded theological students in neatly wound white cotton turbans, all squatting close together with their shoes beside them. A yellowbright beam of sunlight striking across the pearly shimmer of the dome gave full on the bronze face and shining beard of the mollah who was reading the Koran and brought fierce magenta flame into the silk hanging that fell from the front of the pulpit platform. He read in a wooden staccato voice, swaying slightly with the rhythm, and in the pause at the end of each verse a soft Ameen growled through the crowd.

  —It is for the fall of Adrianople, this day every year, the young man with the green tassel on his beads whispered in French in my ear—Many of these people come from Adrianople, fled from the Greeks.… Commemoration.

  The man who had been reading climbed down clumsily across the magenta silk hanging and a taller man with full lips and dark cheeks flushed under hollow eyes took his place.

  —Now he will pray for the army in Anatolia.

  His body erect, his eyes staring straight into the sunlight, his hands raised level with his beard in the attitude of prayer, the new mollah shouted a prayer full of harsh ringing consonants and brazen upward cadences. His voice was like warhorns and kettledrums. And all through the mosque under the faintly blue dome men looked beyond the palms of their raised hands at the flaming magenta silk and the priest praying in the yellow shaft of sunlight, and the Ameen at every pause rose from a growl to a roar, grew fierce and breathless till the little glass lamps tinkled in the huge flat chandeliers above the turbans and the fezzes, rolled up the stucco walls, shook the great dome as the domes of the churches must have shaken with the shout of the fighting-men of Islam the day Constantine’s city was carried by assault and the last Constantine killed in his purple boots.

  At the door as they left everyone was presented with a card on which was a cut of the great mosque of Adrianople, and with a small tissuepaper ba
g of candies.

  6. Douzico

  A fragile savor comes from the tiny rounded leaves of the basil in a pot on the edge of the café table. Behind on a little platform fenced with red baize, musicians keep up a reiterant humming and twanging out of which a theme in minor climbs and skids in an endless arabesque. There is a kind of lute, a zither, a violin and a woman who sings. In the midst is a stool with coffeecups and a bottle of mastic. The zither is played by a grizzled man with a bottlenose and spectacles who occasionally throws his head back and opens his mouth wide and lets out happily a great Gregorian yodel which the other voices follow and lead back with difficulty into the web of sound. At the tables packed under the locusttree where they will get shade in the afternoon sit people with narghiles or cigarettes or German pipes or American cigars drinking mastic and beer and coffee and even vodka. There is a smell of tobacco and charcoal and anis from the mastic and douzico and grilled meat from the skewers of chiche kebab, and a discordance of many hostile languages and a shuffle of feet from the street under the terrace.

  Leaning my chin on my hands and looking down at the strip of cracked and dusty pavement between the bare feet of the boys who sell cakes and pistachio nuts and flyspotted candy along the terrace wall, and the row of autos for hire, of which the drivers, mostly Russians in various patched uniforms, loll and sleep and chat, waiting for a fare through the long afternoon hours.… Across that space shoes, feet, shambling legs, crossed arms, arms swinging vacantly, stoop shoulders, strongly moulded backs under thin cotton, chests brown, sweatbeaded, shawls, black veils of women, yakmaks, faces. All life is sucked into the expressiveness of faces. A boy, skin the color of an earthen pot, eyes and lips of a drunken Bacchus, swaggers by jauntily, on his head a tray of roasted yellow corn. A girl patters along, mouse-like, features droop white as a freesia behind a thin black veil. A whitebearded man in a blue gown, redrimmed eyes as bleared as moonstones, being led by a tiny brown boy. Two hammals, each strong enough to carry a piano alone, with deeplymarked mindless features, and the black beards of Assyrian bowmen. Three Russians, blond, thick-chested of the same height, white canvas tunics pulled down tight under their belts, blue eyes, with a freshwashed look and their hair parted and slicked like children dressed for a party. A stout Greek businessman in a Palm Beach suit. Tommies very pink and stiff. Aggressive thickjawed gobs playing with small maggotlike beggar-children. Pale-faced Levantines with slinking eyes and hooked noses. Armenians with querulous mouths and great gold brown eyes. In the bright sun and the violent shadows faces blur and merge as they pass. Faces are smooth and yellow like melons, steely like axes; faces are like winter squashes, like death’s heads and jack o’lanterns and cocoanuts and sprouting potatoes. They merge slowly in the cruel white sunlight, brown faces under fezzes, yellow faces under straw-hats, pale northern faces under khaki caps—into one face, brows sullen and contracted, eyes black with suffering, skin taut over the cheekbones, hungry lines about the corners of the mouth, lips restless, envious, angry, lustful. The face of a man not quite starved out.

  They are the notes, these faces, twanged on the trembling strings of this skein of frustrate lives that is Pera. So many threads out of the labyrinth. If one could only follow back into the steep dilapidated streets where the black wooden houses overhang, and women with thick ankles look down with kohl-smeared eyes at the porters who stumble under their huge loads up the uneven steps, sweating so that the red out of their fezzes runs in streaks down their knobbed and shaggy cheeks; through the sudden plane-shaded lanes that snatch occasional unbelievable blue distances of sea or umber distances of hills seen through the tilting and delicately-carved tombposts of Turkish cemeteries, and lead out into the pathless heaps of masonry of burnt-over places, where gapes an occasional caving dome with beside it a gnawed minaret, where sneakthieves and homeless people live in the remnants of houses or in shattered cisterns; or down through the waterfront streets of Galata with their fruitstands and their Greek women jiggling in doorways and their sailors’ cafés full of the jingle of mechanical pianos or the brassy trombone music of an orchestra, where the dancing of ill-assorted closehugged couples has a sway of the sea to it; or through the cool bazaars of Stamboul where in the half darkness under the azure-decorated vault Persian and Greek and Jewish and Armenian merchants spread out print cloths and Manchester goods which an occasional beam of dusty sunlight sets into a flame of colors; or into the ruined palaces along the Bosphorus where refugees from one place or another live in dazed and closepacked squalor; or into the gorgeous tinsel-furnished apartments where Greek millionaires and Syrian war-profiteers give continual parties just off the Grande Rue de Pera; or to the yards and doorways where the Russians sleep huddled like sheep in a snowstorm: somewhere some day one might find the core, the key to decipher this intricate arabesque scrawled carelessly on a ground of sheer pain.

  Teheran: The Bath of the Lion

  This afternoon I can only sit sipping douzico made opal white with water, ears drowsy with the strangely satisfying monotony of the Turkish orchestra’s unending complaint. The cool north wind off the Black Sea has come up and is making dust and papers dance in whirlwinds across Taxim Square.

  Along the line of taxis, abolishing them, abolishing the red trolleycars and the victorious puttees of Greek officers, his head in embroidered cap bowed against the wind, his almond eyes closed to black slits against the dust, taking little steps in his black embroidered slippers, the great sleeves of his flowing crimson silk gown flapping in the wind, walks a mandarin of China.

  Cathay!

  7. Constantine and the Classics

  Little Mr. Moscoupoulos threw up pudgy hands.

  —But the Turks have not studied the Greek classics. They are ignorant. They do not know Aristophanes or Homer or Demosthenes, not even the deputies. Et sans connaître les classiques grecs on ne peut être ni politicien, ni orateur, ni diplomate. Turkey does not exist. I assure you, sir, it is a mere question of brigandage. And this city—we peered out of the window of the Pera Palace at a passing Allied staffcar—you know the legend. A Constantine built it, a Constantine lost it, and a Constantine shall regain it.…

  Overhead bunches of green grapes hang down from the dense thatch of vineleaves and twined stems. A café outside one of the gates in the great wall of Heraclius. The dusty road dips into a low gateway that seems too small for the heavy dust-raising carts that clatter through it. On either side grey square towers timecrumbled at the top. Endlessly in either direction, grey walls occasionally splotched with the bright green of a figtree, and grey square towers. Towards the east a patch of the luminous aquamarine blue of the Sea of Marmora; westward bare umber-colored hills. In the purplish shadow of the vine arbor little tables and stools of unpainted wood and on each table a pot of rosemary or basil or thyme or a geranium in flower. In a group in one corner old men with grave gestures discuss some problem with quietly modulated voices. Their white turbans are almost motionless; now and then there is a flash of white when a head nods in a patch of sun, or a hand, lean and brown, is lifted to a grey beard. Beside me three young men in fezzes of new bright red are exchanging witticisms. An old gentleman with a puffy red face, dressed in the eternal white vest and broadtailed frock coat, listens, looks across his narghile with eyes sparkling and occasionally throws his head back and roars with laughter. A yellow slender man with green carpet slippers beside him is looking into vacancy with large yellowbrown eyes, in his hand a long amber cigarette-holder that is bright gold when the sun strikes it.

  Sans connaître les classiques on ne peut être ni diplomate, ni politicien, ni orateur.… But one can sit in the shade where the cool wind rustles the vineleaves, letting the days slip through the fingers smooth and decorously shaped as the lumps of amber of the conversation beads with which one hand or the other constantly plays.

  Out of the gate snorting and grinding in low gear comes a staffcar full of Allied officers, glint of gold braid and a chattering of voices. A cloud of dust hides it as i
t crawls up the uneven road.

  A flock of sheep forms bleating out of the dust, followed by two shepherds who shout and throw stones and beat with their sticks until the sheep begin to flow through the narrow gate like water through the outlet in a trough.

  Sans connaître les classiques.… A party of the Inter-Allied policeforce has come up and they stare searchingly in the faces of the Turks in the café. There are two Italian gendarmes with shiny threecornered hats and buttons on their coattails, some British M.P.s with hard red necks, French flics with the whiskers familiar to Paris cartoonists. They are all redfaced and sweaty from their rounds and there is dust on their highly polished shoes. When they have stared their fill at the people in the café they turn and go through the gate into town. Under the vines no one has noticed them. The voices of the old men continue, and the slow movement of a hand stroking a beard. In the upper bowl of the narghiles there is a little red glow at long intervals when the smoker pulls deeply. Above the grey towers and the wall, kites with black curved wings and hawk-beaks circle in the porcelain-blue sky.