The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  My letters to Nadeshda Smirnova remained unanswered. Whether they arrived, I do not know. The G.P.U., like the gods, are capricious. I never heard from her again. Nor from Werner.

  During the Great Purge, all German Communists in Russia with a hand­ful of exceptions, were arrested, deported, or handed over to the Gestapo. During the war, the entire, native Volga-German Republic, and the German minorities in the Ukraine shared the same fate. The chances that Werner survived the Black Death of the Purge are small. If he did survive, then, as was in the case of Oragvihdze, what I have written here can do him no harm.

  Twenty years have passed, and the facts are in any case on record.

  As for Nadeshda, if she remained in Baku, she was lost. If she left in time she may have survived. Sometimes I make myself believe that this is the case, and I try to visualise her leading a normal life in Moscow or Leningrad. It does not work, because another image keeps intruding--the scene in the restaurant where she refused to lie even to the extent of a single smile for Werner, and where she had held her head so unnaturally high and still. She was one of those who, in the words of the Koran, carry their destinies fastened round their neck.

  I have mentioned before that having denounced Nadeshda, I never denounced anybody again, neither as a Communist nor later as an anti­Communist. What happened to me in Baku made me into a bad Communist, and a bad anti-Communist, and thereby a little more human. I had my first glimpse of the invisible writing. If I were a Catholic I would detect in my betrayal of Nadeshda the dialectics of Providence, and derive comfort trom it. But I am not.

  X. Storm Over Turkestan

  THE prevailing mood of my first fortnight in Turkestan was a sullen, brooding dejection in a sullen and dcjected part of the earth. The deserts of Turkestan and the deserts of Arabia were once the most explosive trouble-centres of this planet; their energies exhausted, they have both reverted to semi-barbarism and decay. The nomads from the Arabian desert were the scourge of the ancient Middle Eastern Empires whose last sally carried the banner of Islam to India and Spain; the desert of West Turkestan, between the Caspian Sea and the Parnir plateau, was the main area of high pressure that precipitated the great migrations.

  It is the part of our planet where the influence of cosmic changes on human destiny became manifest in the most palpable way. For the cause of the pressure which initiated the fateful moves of the people of Central and Western Asia was simply desiccation, and this process can be observed to this day. The Oxus and Taxartes, now called Amu Darya and Syr Darya, have drastically changed their courses in historical times, and the level of the Aral Sea is still falling with astonishing rapidity. Countries which were once rich and fertile, and have changed into deserts through desiccation and erosion, become imbued with a haunting sadness, and the same mood characterises the wandering nomads who people them. During three years of travel in Syria, Palestine and Iraq, I had become familiar with this atmosphere of decline and desolation, so that the deserts of Turkestan gave me a feeling of deja-vu. It accompanied me all through the endless, slow train journey through the Kara Kum, the Desert of Black Sands. I recognised the familiar landscape of barrenness and desolation, of hostile drifting sands sparsely dotted with black tents, tufts of mean thistles, and phlegmatic camels--the bulgy-eyed, melancholy maiden aunts of the animal kingdom. I also became conscious of being back in a Moslem country. The various tribes of Turkestan are certainly very different from the Arabs of the Middle East, but towards Europeans they seemed to share the same characteristic attitude, based on their common religion. Hidden under a jovial, or polite, or non-committal surface, one felt the surly fanaticism of Islamthat harsh faith, born in the desert, which has never been reformed and liberalised, which became petrified at the stage of development that Christianity had left behind in the days of the Inquisition.

  But the country was familiar to me for yet another curious reason. West Turkestan, between the Caspian and the Pamir, is also known as the `Turanian Basin', and is supposedly the place of origin of the Hungarian people. As a child I had learnt to regard the expression 'Turanian' as synonymous with 'Hungarian'; so in a sense I had come home.

  Echoes of this far-fetched relationship accompanied me all through Central Asia. Whenever I mentioned to any literate person that I was a Hungarian, the name of my illustrious compatriot, Armin Vambery, was flung at me with broad smiles. Vambery was the first European who, in 1863, penetrated into the forbidden Khanats of Khiva and Bokhara and into the city of Samarkand, by disguising himself as a Turkish Dervish and joining a band of pilgrims on their return journey from Mecca. His fantastic feats of endurance were made even more fantastic by the fact that he was congenitally lame and walked on two crutches. His Travels in Central Asia were classics of travel literature; as a schoolboy I had devoured them, together with the works of Sven Hedin. Now I found them everywhere in the libraries of Soviet Central Asia, and also found that his name was as well known and Popular in Bokhara as it had been in Budapest. Everybody told me that I was but the second Hungarian who had visited the cradle of his nation--and for all I know this may be true, for the Emirates of Central Asia remained forbidden countries to Europeans even after the Emirs became vassals of the Czar, and under Stalin they became forbidden countries again. Today they are more jealously guarded than ever, for this is the remote part of the Soviet Empire where the first Russian atomic bomb was exploded in September

  1949.

  Thus this inaccessible area seems to assume for a second time a curious significance for human destiny. The first time, the drying up of its rivers and lakes precipitated the great migration; this time, an explosion of a different type threatens another Asiatic invasion of the West. It is a region of the earth where short-circuits are frequent between Nature and History.

  Soviet Central Asia was divided at that time into three Autonomous Republics: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan. Among these Turkmenistan is the most desolate. Its borders are the Caspian in the West, Persia and Afghanistan in the South, the Amu Darya in the East and the Autonomous Kazakh Republic in the North. It is approximately the size of Germany, but its population in 1932 was less than a million. Its surface is almost entirely desert, only habitable on its fringes, where sparse water-courses make irrigation possible. The chief product of the irrigated areas is cotton.

  There are few towns. One cluster of oases lies in the North, round the mouth of the Amu Darya, where it flows into the Aral Sea. This is the former Khanat of Khiva, which in `932 was still something of a Shangri-la, inaccessible from the South except by camel-caravans. The remaining towns are strung in a single line along the Central Asiatic Railway which skirts the Kapet Dagh hills along the Persian frontier. In spite of their picturesque names, these towns--Kizyl Arvat, Bakharden, Geok Tepe, Ashkhabad, Merv --are not oriental in character but typical Russian garrison-towns. In fact, the main feature of the towns of Turkmenistan was that they were not inhabited by Turkomans but by Russians--government officials, railway workers, soldiers, merchants, artisans and colonials; the natives were left to their semi-nomadic existence. The change only started with the industrial revolution under the Five-Year Plan. The new factories drew native labour into the towns, and the creation of a`class-conscious native industrial proletariat' became a declared aim of Soviet policy in all national republics. Even so, in 1932 the Turkomans were still a minority in the towns of Turkmenistan, including Ashkhabad, the capital.

  The result was a complete absence of local colour and local architecture in these Czarist garrison-towns which cover like pockmarks the noble face of Asia. The Bolsheviks completed the process which Russian Imperialism had begun. The aim of Czarist colonisation had been to keep the natives in their state of semi-barbarism and iguorance--at the time of the Revolution there were less than one per cent. literates in Turkmenistan. The Communist regime took an apparently opposite line which in fact, however, completed the tragedy. The natives were drawn into the towns, educated, Russified and Stalinised by the pressure-coo
ker method. The children of the nomads were brought to school, processed, indoctrinated, and stripped of their national identity. All national tradition, folklore, arts and crafts, were eradicated by force and by propaganda. Everywhere in Asia primitive tribes and nations were transformed into a nondescript, colourless and amorphous mass of robots in the totalitarian State. With two exceptions--old Bokhara and Samarkand--I have almost no visual memory of the places I visited in Central Asia. In retrospect, Krasnovodsk, Ashkhabad, Merv, Tashkent, all dissolve in the same uniform dreariness of the Russian provincial small-town, except that they were even poorer and drearier. On the screen of memory they appear as vague grey blurs, as if their image had been absorbed by blotting paper.

  Up till now I had been travelling alone. In Ashkhabad I found unexpected and pleasant company for the remainder of my journeys in Central Asia.

  The capital of Turkmenistan had no hotel. The Station G.P.U. of Ashkhabad billeted me on the dom sovietov--the so-called Soviet House, which serves as a hostel for visiting officials. I was given a room which had an iron bed and no other furniture, and was rather like a prison cell. It smelt of the latrine across the corridor, which was blocked and permanently overflowing. I was, since Baku, in a state of acute depression. I lay down on the iron bed and felt forsaken by God in a godforsaken country. On the journey from the station to the hotel in the G.P.U. car I had seen all there was to be seen in the Turkmen capital, and it had been exactly like a suburb of Kharkhov. What on earth was I doing in Ashkhabad?

  As I lay on the sheetless bed, enveloped by gloom and stench, counting the familiar stains on the wall which crushed bed-bugs leave behind, I heard the sound of a gramophone in the next room. The record was cracked, and it played the then popular tear-jerker sung by Sophie Tucker, `My Yiddishe Momma'. It sounded eerie in the dom sovietov of Ashkhabad, and I got up to find out who my neighbour was. I knocked at his door and found a young American Negro squatting in front of a portable gramophone in a bare room similar to mine, and in a state of gloom similar to mine. He turned out to be the poet Langston Hughes, whose `Shoeshine Boy' I had read in Berlin and greatly admired. It was difficult not to say `Dr. Livingstone, I

  presume'.

  Hughes was then around thirty. He was slim, of medium height, and moved with the graceful ease of his race; but behind the warm smile of his dark eyes there was a grave dignity, and a polite reserve which communicated itself at once. He was very likeable and easy to get on with, but at the same time one felt an impenetrable, elusive remoteness which warded off any undue familiarity.

  He offered me some vodka and camel sausage (which, together with sweet Turkestan melon, was to replace in Asia my former staple diet of red

  caviar), and over these delicatessen he told me the tragi-comic story of how he had come to be stranded in Ashkhabad. He had arrived in the Soviet Union several months before, together with a troupe of some forty American Negro actors and singers. They had been invited by MESHRABPOM, the leading Soviet film trust, to make a film on the persecution of the Negroes. Hughes was to write the script. But by the time they arrived in Moscow political rapprochement had begun between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. which was eventually to lead to the official recognition of the Soviet regime by America in 1933. One of the American conditions for resuming normal diplomatic relations was that Russia should renounce its propaganda campaign among the American Negroes. Accordingly, MESHRABPOM over-night dropped the project of the film.

  For several weeks Hughes and the troupe were left to kick their heels in Moscow. Then the troupe was taken by Intourist on a pleasure-trip to the Crimea, and sent home with polite smiles and expressions of regret. As for Hughes, who, because of his great reputation in America, could not be got rid of in such a summary manner, they proposed that he should write a book comparing conditions in the cotton-growing regions of Central Asia with those on the plantations of the American South. Hughes at that time was deeply sympathetic towards the Soviet regime, but as far as I remember not a Party member. He was a poet with a purely humanitarian approach to politics--in fact, an innocent abroad. He had no clear idea of the connexion between the Russo-American negotiations and the dropping of his film, nor had I. We probably both dimly guessed what had happened, but, according to etiquette, did not talk about it.

  So, accepting the proposal, Langston Hughes had duly travelled down to Ashkhabad. Here he had run out of money. MESHRABPOM had advanced him a certain sum for the voyage and promised to wire the remainder. This, however, was a period when the Soviet Government pursued a policy of ruthless monetary deflation, in consequence of which all branches of admistration and production were desperately short of cash and for weeks on end unable to meet their commitments, including salaries and workers' wages. Stranded in Ashkhabad, Hughes had kept sending wires to MESHRABPOM which were never answered. For the last three weeks he had lived as a kind of pensionnaire of the Ashkhabad G.P.U. in the dom sovietov, getting what food was available in the G.P.U.'s canteen and co-operative stores on tick. He told me all this as a kind of shaggy-dog story--one of those funny things that inevitably happen in a country which has embarked on a great revolution. Later in the evening, more people arrived in Hughes's room, and I discovered that we were not the only intellectuals in Ashkhabad. First to arrive was a timid little mouse of a man with a wizened Tartar face, who hardly ever spoke but listened to everything that was said with an immutably admiring smile. He was Shaarieh Kikiloff, the President of the Turkoman Writers' Federation. What he wrote, neither Hughes nor I were ever able to find out, though we travelled together for about a fortnight. Nor did we ever discover whether he was married, where he lived and how he lived.

  Next came a large, hulking and vague youth who was to become our second travelling companion. He had a ship's anchor tattooed on his chest and a mobile nude on his biceps; he was a Ukrainian, and an ex-sailor of the Pacific Merchant Navy, called Kolya Shagurin. Kolya, too, was a writer, engaged in writing a pamphlet for the Ukrainian State Publishing Trust on the over-fulfilment of the Five Year Plan in Central Asia. We never saw him taking notes, or asking any pertinent questions on our journey; one day in Merv he picked up a native kotnsomolka who was said to write Uzbek songs, and vanished from our lives as abruptly and mysteriously as he had appeared.

  It became quite a party. Kolya sang Ukrainian songs and Hughes Negro spirituals. Later on three more guests drifted in. One was Mark May, a film director from the Baltic provinces, who had come with a travelling documentary unit to make a film about the construction of a sulphur factory in the heart of the Kara Kum desert, where rich mineral deposits had recently been discovered. He was an imperturbably matter-of-fact, impeccably dressed young man, who squatted on the floor of Hughes's room amidst this Asiatic crowd with the same efficient, self-confident, no-nonsense air which movie producers display in Hollywood, Ealing or Berhn-Spandau. Finally, there was a tall and pleasant Red Army officer of Udgurian nationality, by the name of Anvar Umorzakov. He was the colonel of a frontier unit in the Pamir Mountains, had been sent on a kommandirovka to Ashkhabad, and on the way had married a charming little Uzbeg girl, with dark plaits falling to her shoulders, who sat smiling next to her martial husband on the floor and never said a word during the whole evening. The next day I wrote down Colonel Uniorzakov's story. It is a typical sample of countless biographical sketches that I collected in Central Asia. I am quoting from the text in Red Days:

  Anvar Umorzakov was born in Kashgar, Chinese East Tccrkestan. One night in 1915, when he was seven, his family fled across the frontier into Russian Turkestan to escape imprisonment for failing to pay taxes after a bad harvest. They settled somewhere in the territory which is now the Tadzhik Autonomocas Soviet Republic, north of the Himalayas. After a while they became indebted to the local Bey and father Umorzakov had to sell his srnall farm. When the news of the Russian Revolution had percolated down to Central Asia, he joined a Red partisan band, and later the Red Arrny. In 1923 he and his wife were murdered by the Basmachi--the counte
r-revolutionary guerilla bands in Central Asia. Anvar, then fifteen, was made to watch while the Basmachi tied his father and mother to the bedpost and cut their heads off. The boy was allowed to escape, became a vagabond like millions of other waifs and strays, found work in the German travelling circus Yupatov first as a handyman, later as a trapeze artist, then joined the Komsomol, and finally the Red Army. At eighteen, he was sent to the University for Asian Minorities in Tashkent, and from here was commissioned as an officer in the Red Army. He had distinguished himself in fighting the Basmachi in the Alai region near the Chinese frontier, and at twenty-four had attained the rank of colonel

  I have no recollection of his features except that he was tall, friendly, restrained, with an open face and smile. He was typical of many young Red Army officers. They seemed to belong to a race different from the Party bureaucrats, and that distinction held good from Leningrad down to the Afghan frontier.

  Indignant at the treatment of Hughes, I sent, unknown to him, a long telegram to the Comintern, explaining his predicament and the repercussions to be expected in America if it were to leak out that its leading Negro poet had been lured under false pretences to Central Asia and simply forgotten there. It had an unexpected effect: Hughes's money arrived a few days later. The explanation is, I believe, that I was dealing with the German section of the Comintern, Hughes with the American; and that, according to the traditions of inter-departmental rivalry, the German section was probably delighted at this opportunity to annoy their American colleagues by reporting the matter straight to the Praesidium.