Orient Express

by John Dos Passos

  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, danglin
g 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!

  And the pride and virtue of the members of the N.E.R. who had signed a pledge not to drink alcoholic or fermented liquors, who are relieving the sufferings of humanity at the risk of their lives, who are exposing themselves to the contamination of Bolshevism, communism, free love, nationalized women, anarchy and God knows what—their virtuous pride in the dollar king of the exchange as they paw over the bargains; rugs stolen out of the mosques, lamps out of churches; pearls off the neck of a slaughtered grand duchess; the fur coat of some poor old woman who sits hungry in her bare room looking out through a chink in the shutters at this terrible young people’s world, a world jagged and passionate and crude that she can never understand, an old woman looking out through the shutters with the eyes of a cat that has been run over by an automobile.

  7. Funicular

  The inevitable Belgian Company still runs the funicular. You pay your fare to a little Polish girl neat as a mouse in a white dress. On her legs a faint ruddiness of sunburn takes the place of stockings. She complains of the lack of talcum powder and stockings and wonders what she’s going to do when her shoes wear out. The car creaks jerkily up the hill. Above the shelter of the town a huge continual wind is blowing.

  Back from a walk over the hills, I sit at a table outside a little shanty, drinking a bottle of wine of Kakhetia no. 66. Old Tiflis, dustcolored with an occasional patch of blue or white on a house, is loosely sprinkled in the funnel out of which the copper-wire river pours into the plain. Out of the defile rises a column of steam from the sulphur springs. Farther down, the enormous grey buildings of the Russian town straggle over the plain. From the valley bulge row after row of vast stratified hills, ochre and olivecolor, that get blue into the distance until they break into the tall range of the Caucasus barring the north. The huge continual streaming wind out of Asia, a wind so hard you can almost see it streaked like marble, a wind of unimaginable expanses, whines in the mouth of my glass and tears to tatters the insane jig that comes out of the mechanical piano behind me. I have to hold the bottle between my knees to keep it from blowing over.

  We used to dream of a wind out of Asia that would blow our cities clean of the Things that are our gods, the knick-knacks and the scraps of engraved paper and the vases and the curtain rods, the fussy junk possession of which divides poor man from rich man, the shoddy manufactured goods that are all our civilization prizes, that we wear our hands and brains out working for; so that from being an erect naked biped, man has become a sort of hermit crab that can’t live without a dense conglomerate shell of dinnercoats and limousines and percolators and cigarstore coupons and eggbeaters and sewing machines, so that the denser his shell, the feebler his self-sufficience, the more he is regarded a great man and a millionaire. That wind has blown Russia clean, so that the Things held divine a few years ago are mouldering rubbish in odd corners; thousands of lives have been given and taken (from where I sit I can make out the square buildings of the Cheka, crammed at this minute with poor devils caught in the cogs) a generation levelled like gravel under a steamroller to break the tyranny of Things, goods, necessities, industrial civilization. Just now it’s the lull after the fight. The gods and devils are taking their revenge on the victors with cholera and famine. Will the result be the same old piling up of miseries again, or a faith and a lot of words like Islam or Christianity, or will it be something impossible, new, unthought of, a life bare and vigorous without being savage, a life naked and godless where goods and institutions will be broken to fit men, instead of men being ground down fine and sifted in the service of Things?

  Harder, harder blows the wind out of Asia; it has upset the table, taken the chair out from under me. Bottle in one hand, glass in the other, I brace myself against the scaring wind.

  8. International

  The eastbound American had dinner of caviar and tomatoes and Grusinski shashlik and watermelon washed down with the noble wine of Kakhetia in the pleasant gone-to-seed Jardin des Petits Champs, where nobody thinks of cholera or typhus or the famine along the Volga. Afterwards strolling through unlit streets, you met no old people, only crowds of young men in tunics and dark canvas trousers, some of them barefoot, young girls in trim neatly cut white dresses without stockings or hats, strolling happily in threes and fours and groups, filling the broad empty asphalt streets.

  The night was warm and a dry wind drove the dust. The Grusinski garden, that used to be the Noblemen’s Club, was crowded with the new softly laughing youngsters. A band was playing Light Ca
valry. A few colored electric bulbs hung among the waving trees. There was nothing particular to do. In spite of famine and cholera and typhus everybody seemed nonchalant and effortlessly gay. A certain amount of wine was being sold, illegally, I think, at a table in a corner, but nobody but the Americans seemed to have any roubles to buy it with. Gradually the crowd was trickling into a theater that had great signs in Russian and in Georgian over the door. The eastbound American found himself in a narrow corridor being addressed as Amerikanski Poait and before he knew what was happening he found himself being settled in a seat in a curiously shaped room; as he was reaching for someone who spoke a known language one wall of the room rose and he found that he was on a stage facing an enormous auditorium packed with people. In the front row were broad grins on the faces of certain companions he had been with earlier in the evening. Then somebody behind his chair whispered in French into his ear that it was an international proletarian poetry festival and that he was expected to recite something. At that news the E. A. almost fainted.

  The proceedings were splendid. Not more than ten people present ever understood any one thing. Poems were recited, chanted and sung in Armenian, Georgian, Turkish, Persian, Russian, German and God knows what else. Everything was received with the greatest enthusiasm. The E. A. managed to stammer out as his own a nursery rhyme by William Blake, the only thing he could remember, which revolutionary outburst was received with cheers. The E. A. retired in confusion and in a muck of sweat, feeling that probably he had mistaken his vocation. Certainly Oh Sunflower weary of time can never have been recited under stranger conditions. After a long poem in Russian by a thin young soldier with a conical head shaved bald that made everybody roar with laughter until the building shook, the meeting broke up amid the greatest international merriment and singing and everybody started streaming home through the pitchblack streets, young men in white tunics, bareheaded girls in white dresses, strolling about without restraint in this empty world like children playing in an abandoned house, gradually swallowed up by the huge black barracklike buildings.