The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  The southern slopes of the range are gentler. The setting sun seemed to conduct a symphony: the green staccato of the vineyards was followed by the adagio of golden foliage; then came a presto firrioso: the foaming gorges of the Kura racing towards the Asiatic lowlands: and finally the andante majestuoso of the great power dam, Zages. On both sides, the white dam is flanked by the spires of two crumbling, abandoned monasteries; in between, in line with the centre of the gorge, on a huge column of concrete stands a giant in bronze. His left hand tucked nonchalantly in his trouser pocket, an intelligent sharp smile on his lips, Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin stands on the doorstep of Asia and points with his right arm into the valley ...

  (From Red Days.)

  I loved Tiflis more than any other town in the Soviet Union. Perhaps because it was still so untouched by the drabness and monotony of Soviet life. The town has an irresistible charm of its own, neither European nor Asiatic, but a happy blend of the two. It has a carefree and leisurely rhythm of life which is bohemian rather than Oriental; but its fastidious architecture and the courteous poise of its citizens, make one constantly aware that it is the product of one of the oldest Christian civilisations. In the distance the Caucasus provides the town with a background of austere grandeur; but its immediate surroundings are gently undulating hills with the amiable profile of the vineyards of Tuscany; and the Kura River, daughter of glaciers, displays a Danubian mellowness under the handsome old bridges.

  (Having been brought up on the shores of the Danube, I have always felt sorry for towns without a river and consequently without bridges. A city without bridges is like a woman without necklace and adornments; and the citizens of riverless towns--Moscow and Berlin, for instance--seem to be tenser and harsher than those of typical river towns like Paris or Vienna.)

  The fortnight that I spent in Tiflis was a happy interlude during which I acquired a great fondness and admiration for the Georgian people. A small ethnic enclave, surrounded by far more powerful neighbours, their history is one of almost continuous wars against Assyria, Armenia, Persia, Byzantium, Tartars, Turks and Russians; yet in spite of countless invasions and occupations, they succeeded in preserving their national culture and traditions. In this respect they were not unlike the Hungarians, also a small ethnic minority, wedged in between Slavs and Germans and constantly menaced by them--a parallel that might partly explain my sudden affection for the Georgians. They are a stubborn but lovable people, with an innate genius for music, architecture, the gold- and silversmith's craft, and for standing up to phenomenal quantities of wine.

  The Georgians have never become reconciled to Russian rule (which dates from 1783), and have always maintained the silent hope that one day it would come to an end as the Armenian, Persian and Turkish occupations had come to an end. They were the only national minority in the Soviet Union which rose in open revolt after the consolidation of the Soviet regime. In none of the National Republics through which I travelled have I sensed such an intense and generalised anti-Russian feeling. If you asked anybody in a street or tramcar a question in Russian he would invariably answer in Georgian--though they all speak Russian, which is compulsory in the schools. After the 1924 insurrection, Stalin exclaimed that `all of Georgia must be ploughed under'. It was done, brutally and repeatedly--the last time during the 1935-38 Purge, when virtually the entire Party leadership of Georgia was exterminated.' There is little hope that the friends whom I made in the Georgian capital are still alive.

  A few days after my arrival in Tiflis I was asked to address a mass meeting held in the National Opera House in commemoration of some revolutionary event. The other four or five speakers spoke, of course, in Georgian, while I had no choice but to speak in Russian. My neighbour on the platform was an elderly Georgian poet, one of the Bolshevik Old Guard and a member of the Central Committee of the Party. Before my turn to speak came, I asked him half-jokingly in a whisper whether my addressing the meeting in Russian would make a bad impression. He whispered back with an amiable grimace: `Your Russian is so awful that they'll like it.' Addressed to a stranger, this was a politically risky remark, and typical of the devil-may-care atmosphere in Tiflis. As for my speech, the audience listened to it in polite boredom, until the last phrase. This--the obligatory slogan `Long live the World Revolution'--I pronounced in Georgian. I had learnt the words by heart so carefully that I still remember them: 'Gawmargios mossoplios revolutias!!!' The audience roared with delight.

  With that meeting my Party activities in Tiflis were concluded. To my lasting shame I did not visit a single factory in Georgia, and did not even study the Plan-fulfilment figures. A curious holiday spirit had come over me. After a couple of days at the Intourist Hotel I had moved to the house of a newly-acquired friend, the Minister of Education, Oragvilidze. He was an extremely well read, thoughtful and quiet young man in his early thirties, who shared a tiny house of three rooms with his mother--an old, big-boned, straight-backed Georgian peasant woman. She cooked, washed and cleaned the house for her son, a member of the,Government, and at night would sit and sip her wine with the two of us and other guests, matron and servant at the same time. Oragvilidze had studied in Berlin and Moscow, and was

  Europeanised in his habits and way of thinking; yet he had remained true to Asiatic tradition in one respect, by accepting his mother's menial services as a matter of course, and treating her with the courtesy and respect due to an old family retainer.

  When I had paid my first visit to this house, I had found to my utter astonishment German editions of Trotsky's My Life and of his History of the Russian Revolution openly displayed on the bookshelf, next to the works of Lenin and Stalin. I asked naively: `But can you permit yourself to do that?' Oragvilidze answered non-committally: `Censorship does not apply to members of the Central Committee.' It is true that this was Tiflis, and that the year was 1932, long before the murder of Kirov; nevertheless, it was an attitude that betrayed great daring and independence. I was impressed, and became very attached to my host. He was a stout, slow-moving young man, with the face and comportment of a somewhat shy undergraduate. His colleagues and friends--mostly members of the Government and of the top strata of the Party hierarchy--treated him with respect and affection. He usually left the talking to others, but was an attentive listener, and all his remarks went straight to the point. His thinking was entirely imbued with the Marxist method, but instead of the arid dialectics of the German C.P., he displayed the shrewd realism of Lenin. For all that he had an undergraduate's sense of humour with a native Georgian twist, and like all the men whom I met in Tiflis, he was a heavy and expert wine drinker.

  One evening he took me for dinner to a garden restaurant in the hilly outskirts of Tiflis. There were candles on the tables, a gypsy orchestra, and the sweet smell of dying autumn leaves in the air. I had not known that such places still existed in the Soviet Union. The dinner, with zakushka, shashlik, shushkebab, lulakebab, and the rest, was monumental. Halfway through it, we were joined by two of Oragvilidze's friends: the local head of the G.P.U., and the director of the National Picture Gallery, Professor Migrelidze. We talked Georgian art, the prospects of Hitler, the curriculum in bourgeois universities, and all the time the number of empty bottles on the table increased at a speed such as I had never seen before, not even at the famed Kneipe orgies of 'Unitas' in Vienna. By midnight I counted fourteen of them--and there were only the four of us. It is true that we kept on eating dish after greasy dish. The wine was the famous Kachetian--a light but full-bodied Beaujolais type of wine, which elsewhere one can only get in a doctored state, for it does not travel well. I had been unwise enough to boast about, the drinking prowess of my odd duelling fratnerity, and now I was challenged to live up to its reputation. Counting the fourteen bottles whilst sitting still reasonably up­right in the chair, I was silently congratulating myself, when to my horror I saw four bottles of white wine arriving, one for each of us. It was of the sweet Sauterne type, and I knew that drinking it would be disastrous; yet neither m
y Marxist nor my psychiatric training, nor the presence of the G.P.U. chief, nor the fact that I represented the `Proletarian Revolutionary Writers of Germany' could overcome my cowardly fear of being laughed at if I topped. We drank not only our bottle a head, but shared another two between the four of us. I was sick all night and the next day, but managed to hold out until we got home.

  The way we got home was memorable. The Professor and the G.P.U. chief had somehow vanished, and Oragvilidze and I walked with arms round each other's shoulder for mutual support. We swayed and lurched in semi­circles, in a manner that I had only seen before in cheap farces on the stage. Yet, though thick-tongued, we talked earnestly and coherently. We had little control over our bodies, but full control over our minds--a state of Dionysian bliss only known to wine drinkers with a solid stomach who abstain from hard liquor. It was a memorable evening, followed by a bad hhysical, but no moral, hangover.

  `What did your mother say,' I asked on the next day, `about the state we were in when we got home?' He shrugged: 'She knows that every man must get drunk now and then, or he is no man.' It was part of the Georgian philosophy of life. To be able to get occasionally drunk without a feeling of guilt has always seemed to me the state of innocence before the Fall.

  Of all this there is no mention in Red Days. I was afraid of compromising Oragvilidze. Today, unhappily, this fear is no longer justified. The chances that he may have survived the purges are practically nil. Even if by some miracle he had been spared, my stay with him, and the volumes of Trotsky on his bookshelf, are anyway on the G.P.U.'s record.'

  The chapter on Tiflis in Red Days thus became a piece of camouflage rather than an account of my experiences--a technique which I began to use more and more extensively. The chapter is called `Caucasian Mosaic' and insists entirely of the short biographical sketches of three local celebrities: Delavassera, Piroshmanoshvili, and Kamo. The first one was an adventurer of the picturesquely boring kind whose only claim to celebrity was his hobby of collecting foreign newspapers. He had assembled specimens in a hundred and four different languages, among them a copy of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of May 19, 1849, containing the text of the expulsion order, issued against the paper's editor-in-chief, and angrily annotated with pencilled exclamation marks by that editor, Karl Marx.

  The second local celebrity was a primitive painter, Niko Piroshmanoshili, Georgia's Le Douanier Rousseau. He was an illiterate and a kinto. The kintos in old Tiflis had been a guild of Villonesque vagabonds, costermongers, ballad-singers, thieves, cut-throats and pimps. According to Trotsky, the Georgian members of the Politbureau used to call Stalin among themselves contemptuously the kinto. Piroshmanoshvili was a permanently drunk member of the guild who passed his life in taverns, and painted signs for the tavern-keepers in exchange for food and drink. After his death, his paintings were collected from all over Georgia by Professor Migrelidze--our drinking companion on that memorable evening. They filled two rooms in the Tiflis National Museum--scenes from Georgian rustic life, peasants, ox-carts, village fairs, tavern brawls. All were painted on black cardboard or black canvas, with oil-paint of the illiterate artist's own making. They were very impressive indeed, in a style somewhere between Rousseau and Chagall. I bought several photographic reproductions which, to my great regret, I have since lost. I also had several of the kinto songs translated for me into the Russian by a collector of Georgian folklore. One is called: `Song of the Young Bride':

  My heart is of glass, fragile glass, fragile glass.

  Beware my beloved, beware, beware,

  For if it breaks-plim, plim­

  Not even the fire of love can weld it again.

  Others are satirical:

  I wanted to make my little son--into a vendor of fruit,

  To buy him a little donkey--and send him on the road.

  But the Devil was riding me--I sent him to school,

  And now he's in the Komsomol--the Devil take the fool;

  Plim-plim.

  The third biography was that of Simon Ivanovich Petrossian, alias Kamo, the famous Armenian terrorist, perpetrator of some of the most daring and successful bomb outrages of all times. He had been condemned to death four times in four different countries, and escaped on each occasion (the last time from a lunatic asylum after having simulated madness for eighteen months). He died, after the victorious Revolution which had no use for him, in a manner strangelv reminiscent of the death of T. E. Lawrence. While riding on a bicycle through one of the main streets of Tiflis, he was run over by a lorry and killed on the spot.

  Kamo-Petrossian had been an intimate friend of Stalin's before the Revolution. They were born in the same village, and it was Stalin, then nicknamed Koba, who gave his companion the nickname Kamo. Not only the history of Kamo, but all Tiflis is, of course, full of memories and stories associated with Stalin. Yet, on re-reading after twenty years the chapter on Tiflis in Red Days, I was surprised to find only one single tortuous reference to him, and even in this case I had managed to avoid mentioning him by name. It reads:

  The birth of Simon Ivanovich Petrossian, alias Kamo, took place in 1882 in the same village of Gori where the son of the cobbler Vissarion Dugashwili, who was later to be called `TheMan of Steel', had also been born into this world ...

  I had written Red Days in 1932, as a Communist living in Soviet Russia; and a description of Georgia by a Communist writer ought to be saturated with references to Stalin. Puzzled by this strange omission, I now re-read the entire book looking for references to the Father of the People, the Leader of the Blind, the Sun of the Revolution, etc., etc. In the 480 pages of the book I found nearly a hundred references to Lenin, and not a single mention of Stalin.

  Luckily, there was no index to the book, or I would have been lost. And yet this fantastic omission was entirely unconscious. I would never have dared to write a book with the deliberate intention of passing The Name in silence. Obviously, the political libido is also subject to inhibitions and repressions, which come from the same source as the dream of the slackening of the Alpinist's cord.

  VIII. Mount Ararat

  SOVIET Caucasia was at that time divided into three 'Trans-Caucasian Autonomous Socialist Soviet Rcpublics': Georgia, capital Tiflis; Armenia, capital Erivan; and Azerbaijan, capital Baku. Armenia was the second Republic that I visited.

  The distance between Tiflis and Erivan is approximately 240 miles, but the journey takes sixteen hours as the train has to climb over six thousand feet high to wind its way across the Little Caucasus. Only two trains of five or six coaches joined the two capital cities, one a day in each direction. My train was to leave at 9 p.m., but when I arrived at the appointed time at the station, I was told that it had got stuck somewhere in the mountains on the return journey from Erivan and would be several hours late.

  The waiting-room of the station in Tiflis had the same look as stations everywhere else in the Sovict Union--the look of a battlefield strewn with corpses. Resigned, I settled down amidst my baggage on the grimy stone floor, surrounded by bundles, baskets, and sleeping human shapes. Only one girl, in an embroidered Ukrainian blouse, was sitting up erect, watching my cumbersome, luggage-laden progress with a mocking smile. I chose my camping-place as near as I could get to her. She was a strapping girl with a typically Ukrainian, broad peasant face, her blonde hair tucked away under a coloured kerchief, with round arms made to pitch hay with effortless ease.

  We soon got talking. She talked readily about the sights of Tiflis and Kharkov--she had been born in a village a few miles from the Ukrainian capital--but her answers to questions regarding herself were rather laconic. She had been doing farm work in her village until the year before; then she had left to look for work as a domestic servant in Kharkov. Why had she left? She shrugged: `Oh, everybody left the village.' But why? She shrugged again: `Nichevo--we all just left.' She had worked for a while in Kharkov-­as a cleaning woman, and later as an unskilled hand in the tractor factory.

  Then she had managed to get on a t
rain to Dnieprostroy, and had worked for a year building the famous dam. I remarked how beautiful the dam was. She laughed out aloud: `Beautiful? A dam? It is all cement.'

  She obviously found me, with my foreign accent and outlandish dress, very stupid and funny. I asked her whether she was a member of the Party or the Komsomol. She laughed again: `Me? A Komsomolka? Do I look like one? No more than you!' The idea that a foreigner with, by Soviet standards, luxurious suitcases and clothes, should be a Communist was to her so obviously absurd that I left it at that. I had a bottle of wine and lots of food in my I uggage, and as there was no sign of the train, we spread out a newspaper on the floor and settled down to an enjoyable meal. I found out that she was going to Leninakhan, the second town in Armenia, because her sister's husband was working there as a mechanic; her sister had written to tell her that the food situation in Armenia was better than elsewhere, and that her husband would find her work. The wine and the food had made her more confiding, and when I asked her again why she and her people had abandoned their village, she said impatiently: `But don't you know about these things? I asked: `Because you had to join a kolkhos? She said, in a voice of boredom .1nd contempt: `Kolkhos! We were all dying. What do you foreigners know? I remembered the scene in the bazaar of Kharkov and did not press her further.