The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  Some time around midnight the train arrived, and the waiting-room became a battlefield. Two officers of the Station G.P.U., who had been advised of the presence of a`Comintern Delegate', came to rescue me and escort me to the sleeping car reserved for the privileged. They asked me with broad smiles whether I would like the girl (to whom they referred as `your comrade' also accommodated in the sleeper; the other berth in my compartment, they said, happened to be free. The girl blushed, but came along happily. It obviously never occurred to her to refuse the undreamt-of luxury of a sleeping car.

  That night on the train is agony to remember to this day. The girl took it for granted that she was expected to pay in the approved manner for the favour bestowed upon her. She was a peasant girl whose grandparents had probably been serfs; I was a member of the new privileged class which had replaced the feudal landlords. The only difference between then and now was that in Czarist days these privileges were exercised a little less crudely, or, at least, with a certain seigneurial style.

  She was pretty, tipsy, and desirable. Her surprise at the wonders of a

  sleeping compartment was pathetic and embarrassing. When I tried to explain that I had been merely acting in a`comradely' way and that she ought not to feel under an obligation, she obviously regarded me as an even greater fool than before. To end the absurd situation, I tried to overcome the inhibiting feeling of guilt, which by now had become physical, and made an even greater fool of myself. Such incidents are merely grotesque in retrospect, but very disturbing to a vain and complex-ridden young man. The girl's undisguised derision was an echo of the healthy proletarian's contempt for the bourgeois intellectual, under which I had suffered in my early Party days. At the same time my humiliation was also a symbolic punishment, the revenge of the starving peasants on the hated bureaucracy with which I had become identified. I thought that I had become impotent for life, and the dream of falling off the mountain assumed yet another sinister meaning.

  At the first light of dawn, we reached Leninakhan, and struggling with her bundles and without saying good-bye, the girl got out. I remembered her saying, earlier on, something like `you are, of course, accustomed to finer ladies'-and only now did it occur to me that, to complete the disaster, I had also hurt her feminine vanity. I watched through the window the white peak of Mount Ararat coming into sight, and for the first time realised how total and deadly my involvement with the Party had become if it could take control to this extent of the involuntary reactions of my nervous system.

  The first, unearthly sight of Mount Ararat in the rising daylight makes one understand why legend has chosen it as the site where the Ark came to rest. Owing to some optical delusion, the middle regions of the mountain up to some twelve thousand feet seemed non-existent--they had dissolved and become one with the misty sky; only the white peak, nearly twenty thousand feet high, was visible, suddenly emerging at the top of the window, hovering over the earth without support, like a space-rocket on its way to the moon. The people in Erivan told me that Ararat often appeared to them in this hallucinatory aspect. It seemed only too possible that it had hovered in the same aloof manner over the receding flood.

  Yet Ararat is not popular among Armenians. They call it a bad mountain, for a strangely ironic reason. Armenia is a dry land, poor in water, and Ararat contributes none of it. Its rival, Mount Alagoez, is a good mountain: it gives rise to the River Arax. Ararat is bad because its hygroscopic rock swallows all the water from heaven and does not yield a single drop to the thirsty valley. The water that it swallows often makes its belly rumble, and when that happens there is an earthquake. Earthquakes are frequent in Armenia, and they all are Ararat's fault.

  The mountain is not located on Soviet territory, but just across the frontier, in Turkey. From time to time some optimistic Americans equip an expedition to climb Ararat and look for the Ark. They usually find some weathered object which they identify as Noah's tiller or oar, and they usually get arrested as spies by the Turks if they have started out from Soviet territory, or by the Soviets if they have started from the other side. In the guest-book of the only hotel in Erivan I found traces of the last such expedition. It was called the 'Ararat Expedition of the Chicago Geographical Society' and consisted of a Mr. H. Wells, his wife and a photographer. The guest-book entry also showed a little elephant, drawn by Mr. Wells, and the prophecy that Erivan would soon become a new Mecca for tourists from all over the world. The Wellses must have been particularly efficient, for I was told that they found the Ark on the first day of their search, in the foothills on the Soviet side of the mountain; which was all the more lucky as they had no Turkish visas. I would have loved to go Ark-hunting myself, but in Communist circles this is strictly not done.

  The few days that I spent in Erivan lifted my flagging morale a little. Erivan was then a kind of Tel Aviv, where the survivors of another martyred nation gathered to construct a new home. They were full of hope, and as grateful to the Soviet regime which had provided them with an Autonomous Republic as the Jews had been to England in the days when Balfour promised them a National Home. The new capital looked like a huge building site. At the end of the first World War it had been a dirty Asiatic village, crammed with refugees who had escaped massacre by the Turks; by now it was well on its way to becoming a modem capital. `It is almost incredible how much has been achieved here within a few years with very modest means,' Fridtjoff Nansen, the High Commissioner for Refugees, had reported in 1926 to the League of Nations, and the evidence before our eyes confirmed what he had said.

  The massacre of two million Armenians in World War I was probably the greatest organised crime in history before the Nazis beat that record by killing six million Jews. Like most other people, I had vaguely heard about the `Armenian massacres', but not until I read, in Tiflis, the books by Nansen and Pastor Lepsius, did I realise the enormity of the facts. There was, for instance, the famous cable, addressed by the Turkish Minister of the luterior, Talaal, to the provincial governors on September 15, 1915:

  As already communicated to you, the Government by order of the Committee has decided to exterminate all Armenians on Turkish territory. Whoevever opposes this order cannot be regarded as loyal to the Government. However regrettable it may be to resort to the means of extermination, it is nevertheless necessary to put an end to their existence without regard for women, children or sick people, without listening to the voice of sentiment or conscience. Signed-TalaaLi (Quoted from Nansen, Betrogenes Volk, Eine Studienreise durch Georgien und Armenien all Oberkommissar des Vo(kerbuhdes, Brockhaus, 1928.)

  It sounded incredible, a pernicious propaganda fake, yet it was true. And this was merely the last chapter of a story which in cynicism and horror has few parallels, and in which each of the great European powers had played a shameful and treacherous part. Since I had become a Communist, I had so often heard and repeated the cliche about `the crimes of Imperialism' that it had gone stale on me. Now it again assumed a fresh and terrible meaning through the indictments of the Norwegian explorer and the German clergyman, neither of whom could be suspected of a Marxist bias.

  As I have said before, I have always suffered from an emotive condition that I have called `chronic indignation'. Since I was living in Russia where, according to my credo, the Revolution had abolished all injustice, I had found no legitimate cause to wax indignant. The iniquities of Soviet life had to be dialectically explained, and indignation in such cases was entirely illegitimate. This unconscious but constant effort to repress all angry reactions may explain why the story of the Armenian persecutions had such a sudden impact on me. It was so strong that echoes of it can be found in a novel written twenty years later (The Age of Longing), whose hero is a descendant of Armenian martyrs.

  I am dwelling at some length on this experience because it provides a sidelight on the Communist psyche. Communists are not as singleminded as outsiders believe. Their progress does not follow a straight, but a wavy line; they are exposcd to recurrent criscs comparable to th
e periods of temptation and doubt in the case of religious believers. I have said earlier on that the two poles of the Communist's faith are longing for Utopia and rejection of the existing social order. The first exerts a pull of attraction, the second a repellent push. In moments of disgust with Russia or the Party, when the fraudulent character of Utopia becomes temporarily evident, every Communist is tempted--in varying forms and dcgrees--to turn back. I know of one or more such crises in the life of nearly every comrade who has been near to me. And on every occasion it was some repellent aspect of capitalist society which put him back again on the road. I would probably have left the Communist Party after my return from Russia in 1933, had not Germany meanwhile gone Nazi. The show-trials of 1936-38 disgusted many European Communists, but the Fascist menace, smbolised by the Spanish Civil War, disgusted them even more. Just as, at the time of writing, the decay of French Parliamentary democracy and the imbecilities of the American visa departments provide a good deal of the repellent force which puts doubt-stricken Party members and fellow-travellers back on the road to Moscow.

  Thus my visit to Erivan staved off the first approaching crisis. I watched the great and hopeful effort that went into the reconstruction of the Armenian national home, and approved of it. I read the Czarist ambassador's classic advice to Abdul Hamid: 'Massacrer, Majeste, Massacrer,' and said to myself, `back to that past? Never.' Party jargon calls attacks of doubt `bellyaches'. In the ghastly documents of pre-1914 European diplomacy I had found the emetic for them. Of course, Stalin's regime was not perfect either. But it had to be understood as a transitory phenomenon, and Stalin's person was purely accidental. So accidental that I never even mentioned his name in my book.

  The more I saw of Erivan, the more it reminded me of Tel Aviv. The enthusiasm, the muddle, the errors and bad taste which accompanied the fever of construction were all touching and familiar reminders. Here, too, drab, cheap, ugly utilitarian buildings were superseding the charming, colourful and filthy Orient. Erivan, too, was an informal and chaotic pioneer-town, the unfinished streets, between half-finished buildings, a labyrinth of pipes and cables. There were as yet so few telephones that calls were made by asking the exchange for the name, and not the number, of the subscriber. Familiar, above all, was the Babel of languages, for a sizeable part of the population were refugees and immigrants from Turkey, Armenia, Europe and America. It often happened that, when I asked my way from a passer-by in halting Russian, the answer was given in fluent German or French. The town had a lively and well-informed intelligentsia whose political orientation, in contrast to Tiflis, was very friendly towards Russia and the Soviet regime.

  I returned to Tiflis greatly comforted. I could not foresee how shortlived the reprieve of the Armenians would be. The Great Purge swept through the nighbourhood of Ararat like a new Flood. Its destructions in Armenia were, perhaps, even worse than in the other minority republics, for the proximity of the Turkish and Persian frontiers made the whole border-district an unreliable and suspect area. As for the Armenians scattered over other parts of the Soviet Union, they were, as usual in the history of that unhappy nation, among the first to be singled out for special persecution. In Kharkov, for instance, there existed a small colony of about six hundred Armenians, most of them illiterate boot-blacks and cobblers. In the autumn of 1937 they were arrested and imprisoned to the last man.'

  IX. Nadeshda

  AFTER another few days in Tiflis I continued my journey to Baku, capital of Azerbaijan and centre of Russia's oil resources. As I still had an itinerary of several thousand miles through Soviet Central Asia before me, I only intended to stay a week. I stayed nearly three, partly because the town fascinated me (see the passages about Baku in The Age of Longing), and partly because I had fallen in love and became involved in a harrowing personal conflict.

  It again started on a train. This is not surprising, for the long train journeys in Russia are the social equivalent of transatlantic boat crossings, and for the foreigner one of the main opportunities for making acquaintances outside his official contacts.

  While the train was still standing at the station in Tiflis, there was one of the usual short-circuits, and the light went out in the sleeping car. I was sitting alone in the darkness of iuy compartment when a girl came in, followed by a tall officer of the Red Army. The officer had somehow got hold of a candle, and it was by its flickering light that I had my first startling glimpse of Nadeshda Smirnova. I saw a slim girl of about twenty-five, as tall as her escort, her slimness emphasised by a black tailored suit. She had soft brown hair which shimmered in the light of the candle, and a profile of classic, haughty purity. It was in profile that I saw her first, and I still think that it was the most beautiful that I have ever seen, with an almost abnormally tall, vaulted forehead and the chiselled lips of an adolescent Greek youth. Then she turned her head and I saw that hers was one of the faces which offer a disturbing contrast between profile and frontal view. Her profile had been forbidding in its beauty; en face, she looked charming, but different. Her very large dark eyes, with pupils dilated in the candlelight, gave the impression of faint shortsightedness, as if wanting her face to be brought closer to yours but being restrained in that impulse, and this gave the inhuman perfection of her features a touching, wistful quality. In profile, Nadeshda looked like an unapproachable great lady; en face, sometimes, like a very young girl. Her movements, too, were swift and impulsive; the whole slim apparition brought to mind the legendary ballerinas of the St. Petersburg Opera which I had never seen.

  It was an apparition that only lasted a few seconds. They had obviously entered the wrong compartment; the officer apologised in a soft, polite voice, and Nadeshda with a silent and charming bow of her head. Then they moved on to the next compartment. There was an air of graceful courtesy and breeding about both of them which made them appear completely out of place in this drab proleterian world. Soon the train departed and I went to sleep with in aching and guilty nostalgia for the world of the decaying bourgeoisie where women had Nadeshda's grace and poise, smelt of scent and spent hours in their bathtubs.

  Early in the morning I went out into the corridor for fresh air, and the first person I saw was Nadeshda. She was standing at the window facing her ompartment, which was next to mine, looking at the landscape.

  I planted myself at my own window, but felt so awestruck by her beauty that I could not find a word to say. The agonising timidity of my schooldays had returned, and I knew that if I were to speak to her it would sound false and gauche. I comforted myself in cowardly fashion with the existence of the tall Red Army officer as an excuse. We both stood there in silence for perhaaps five minutes, then Nadeshda went back to her compartment. Later on she was to ask me why I had looked so sullen and arrogant instead of talking to her, and when I told her that I had been too shy, she wouldn't believe me.

  I went to the dining-car for breakfast, and a minute later Nadeshda appeared at the door. The waiter directed her to the empty seat opposite mine, and she sat down, repeating the silent, charming little bow of the previous evening. After a moment of wild panic, I at last found a sufficiently original opening, by asking the apparition whether she was going to Baku. (Baku was the only place where the train was going.)

  `Yes,' said Nadeshda, and you too?' Thus started the saddest affair of my life, whose memory was to haunt me for years.

  I had fallen immediately and desperately in love with Nadeshda ' Smirnova. To watch her hands move, or her head bend over the tea-glass, filled me with boundless joy. I knew that I was in love, for the boldest of my desires was to be permitted to hold her hand in mine, short of dying for her on the spot. I was twenty-seven and had again fallen victim to the eternal romantic deviation.

  The dining-car was exceptionally well stocked. One could get black bread, cucumber, salted herrings, vodka, tea and red caviar. I ordered everything. In the Caucasus it is not unusual to start a day with a hearty zakushka of this kind, but as far as I was concerned it was the first time th
at I drank vodka at eight o'clock in the morning. Its effect was wonderful. I had learnt the classic way of drinking vodka in the Ukraine: you down a small tumblerfal of the pure, transparent, fiery liquid; (vodka or vodiclka are tender diminutives of vodn=water) ; then you hold a chunk of the black rye­bread to your face and inhale its potent, sour smell to clear your head; then you take a bite of the huge cucumber pickled in salt-water and dill. Nadeshda looked at first faintly shocked, then smiled, watching me with puzzled, amused eyes over her glass of tea. Then she suddenly tossed her hair back, pushed the insipid tea aside, and held out the empty tumbler, which the waiter had put next to her plate, across the table. I felt jubilant with delight; that gesture of her arm holding out the glass was like the signing of a covenant.

  We stayed in the dining-car until midday, talking and eating red caviar, but only drank one small bottle of vodka. I learnt the blissful news that the tall officer had remained in Tiflis--he was, she said, a casual friend who had only accompanied her to the train. I also learnt with some incredulity of Nadeshda Smirnova's occupation. She worked as a clerk on the Water Supply Board of the Baku Town Soviet, and was on her way back from her annual fortnightly leave, which she had spent in Kislavodsk, a Caucasian spa. She spoke fluent French with that melodious Russian drawl that has always seemed to me the only legitimate maltreatment of the French language. She also spoke a few words of German, and when she became animated, she recited passages from Pushkin and Mayakovsky. Her manner was one of restrained gayness, amused rather than amusing, but behind it I felt the impenetrable reserve of the jeune fille de bonne famille with a papa who is a staff officer of medium rank and who has just managed to offer his daughter an education at the Sacre Coeur. That, and the Water Board of the Baku Town Soviet just didn't make sense. I told her so. She opened her large eyes even wider, to indicate surprise. She had a way of doing that, without asking a question, and of bringing her shining eyes to within a few inches of one's own, which almost drove me out of my mind. I repeated that the Water Board just didn't seem to make sense. `Why?' she asked. `What else would you do in my place, skazitye pazalsta--tell me, please?' I told her truthfully that I had thought she was an actress at the Bolshoi Theatre or a prima ballerina, or at least the wife of a People's Commissar. She smiled and said with faint irony, but in a tone which closed the subject: `The Water Board assures one a quieter life.'