The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  In the meaiitune, Hughes, Kikiloff, Kolya and myself had become organised into an `International Proletarian Writers' Brigade;, and it was decided that we should continue our Journey into Uzbekistan together. I don't remember on whose initiative this was done, but it was not difficult to understand that the powers-that-be had become uneasy about us motley characters knocking around in Turkestan. It was also fairly obvious that Shaarieh Kikiloff, the silent, smiling, wizened Turkoman bard, was meant to act as our shepherd. At any rate, he was the only one who knew the native language, and we needed an interpreter. Hughes's Russian was even sketchier than mine; Kikiloff would translate from the Turkoinan into the Russian and I from Russian into English. In Merv, both Kolya and Kikiloff faded out of the picture, and the latter's place was taken by a Russian schoolmaster who had appeared somehow out of the blue. I have forgotten his name, which is not mentioned in Red Days, probably because both Hughes and I disliked him at first sight. He tried to boss us around as if we were a couple of school­boys, and as we could not get rid of him by polite hints, we at last told him to go to hell. But by that time we had arrived in Tashkent, our Asiatic terminal,

  Before leaving Ashkhabad with the `Writers' Brigade', I dutifully visited all its sights, which consisted of a silk factory, Mark May's mobile film studio, and the People's Court where a purge trial was being held.

  The silk factory in Ashkhabad is the oldest in Turkmenistan; it was founded in 1928. Before that, the word `factory' did not exist in the Turkoman vocabulary. It was the most picturesque factory that I had ever seen, except perhaps for the great pottery in Seville's Triana:

  In the little garden which serves as a factory yard, some twenty native factory girls are squatting on the ground, smoking over their bowls of khok-chai, the green Persian tea. They all still wear their colourful national costumes, complete with boerk. The boerks are tall cylindrical hat , wrapped in multi-coloured silks, and adorned with coins and amulets; each must weigh several pounds. They smoke black inahorkn, which looks like flaky pipe tobacco and is loosely filled into five-inch-long cornets rolled out of newspaper. Apart from the slow movements required to sip their khok-chai and lift the paper cornets to their lips, they are entirely immobile. The sky is blue, the sun stabs down in pitiless rays, a camel ambles past; little white mnhorka clouds float out of the immobile girls' nostrils. It looks as f they hadn't moved a limb For the last three hundred years. Then the factory whistle sounds, the girls carry the chai bowls unhurriedly to a corner, smooth their medals and amulets and, holding the smoking paper-cones between their teeth, vanish one by one through the concrete vault of the factory gate, tripping along like painted figures on a mediaeval clock­tower. The step across the factory gate takes them in one move from the seventeenth century straight into the twentieth.

  Thou and I, we shall die and never learn what news the first spaceship will bring home from another planet. We shall not learn what ideas, machines and courting habits the citizens of the future will employ. Our curiosity will never be assuaged. But look at these girls. The fetters which had tied them to mediaeval Islam have suddenly snapped; they rubbed their eyes, sat down in Wells' time machine, and alighted three centuries later. Their curiosity is satisfied. I envy them.

  Re-reading, after twenty years, passages like the above from Red Days, I am constantly amazed by their crude naivete. They express, however, what I believed at the time--or rather one set of beliefs to which I clung with desperate tenacity. I did not see, because I did not want to see, that for the tradition-bound people of Asia the enforced voyage in the time-machine amounted to their deportation into a disconsolate and incomprehensible world. I saw one half of the truth, indicated by dozens of stories like Anvar Umorzakov's--that a storm was brewing over Asia, and that the Revolution of 1917 had merely been the first blast. I did not see the barren desolation which the storm would leave in its wake everywhere, from China to Georgia. Nor that it would merely mean a change from partial enslavement by land­lords, tax-collectors and money-lenders, to total enslavement by the State, which is landlord, tax-collector and money-lender all in one.

  By a strange hazard I stumbled on the first great show trial in Central Asia--a foretaste of things to come.

  The only sizeable building in Ashkhabad was the City Soviet, the equivalent of a Town Hall. I had walked past it several times with Kikiloff and wanted to have a look inside, but the smiling little man had each time side-tracked me with a vague `They are very busy there' or `It is not a good time'. Puzzled by his manner, I at last insisted and simply walked into the building with the anxious Kikiloff in tow. Inside, there was a courtyard from which a staircase led to the offices; and opposite the gate there was a large door, with red draperies over it, leading into the City Hall. People were drifting in and out of that hall; it looked as if a meeting were in progress there. I walked in and sat down in the last row, Kikiloff unhappily huddled beside me.

  The hall was rectangular, with a raised platform which on other occasions served as a stage for the performances of the Turkoman National Theatre. On that platform now sat the People's Court, consisting of the judge who, Kikiloff said, was a workman from a cotton-mill, his two Assessors, the State Prosecutor, the Lawyer for the Defence, a translator and a stenographer. Facing them sat the audience on rows of chairs and benches. The first three rows were occupied by the defendants; there were twenty-nine of them. Behind them, in the otherwise empty fourth row, sat three militiamen with bayonets fixed on their rifles. Behind these the public: men, women, and a class of school-children between the age of ten and fifteen. Only about half of the seats for the public were occupied. One of the accused was testifying in a droning, monotonous voice. Everybody seemed half asleep-the Court, the accused and the audience: Turkomans in tall sheepskin hats, Uzbeks with coloured skull-caps, Russians in cloth-caps, women with tall boerks or coloured scarves on their heads. The accused was talking in Turkoinan; after each couple of sentences his statement was translated into Russian. We had come in near the beginning of his testimony. According to my notes, this is what he said:

  His name was Changildi. At the age of seven he had become an orphan, and was employed as a shepherd by the local Bey. One day he had stepped on a thistle, and his foot started festering and had to be amputated. Then he had sold milk, and later had become an opium-smuggler on the Persian frontier. Then he had been arrested, fined four hundred roubles, and put into prison.

  Then Citizen Attakurdov had got him out of prison and made him an official of the District Kholhoz Centre. (Attakurdov, as I gradually gathered, was the principal accused: he was the former Chairman of the Town Soviet and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Party). In 1931 Changildi was dismissed from the District Kholhoz Centre, but Attakurdov's brother-in-law got him a new job in the R.D.I. (Workers and Peasants Inspectorate'-a permanent control commission of the State adminis­tration.)

  As a member of the R.D.I., Changildi had dissolved a certain kolkhoz whose members had embezzled melons to the value of fifteen hundred roubles belonging to the State (in other words, they had eaten the melons instead of surrendering them). However, the members of Attakurdov's clan within the guilty kolkhoz got away without punishment because he, Changildi, felt himself indebted to Attakurdov. Moreover, after the kolkhoz had been dissolved, and individual property had been restored to its members, he, Changildi, had seen to it that the kulaks (rich peasants) got the best irrigated plots, whereas the bedniaks (poor peasants) only received dry plots. This also was done on Attakurdov's orders

  Gradually, through Changildi's testimony, and through the reports in the local newspaper during the following days, I got the hang of the affair. The trial had been on for several weeks. It was expected that it would last for another number of weeks. The City Hall was the only large public meeting place in Ashkhabad; whenever it was needed for a meeting or a theatre performance, the trial was adjourned. The twenty-nine defendants were accused of Sabotage and Counter-revolutionary Conspiracy.

&nbs
p; Attakurdov had been the leading personality in the young Turkmen Soviet Republic. He had been chairman of the Ashkhabad Soviet; his brother-in-law, Ovez Kouliev, chairman of the District R.D.I.; another of his in-laws had been editor of the official Party paper. They were now all in the dock. It looked as if Attakurdov and his clan had been running the Republic, and were responsible for all the troubles that had befallen it.

  Changildi's testimony provided a revealing glimpse into the nature of these troubles. An entire kolkhoz had been disbanded because of a hundred and fifty melons. Moreover, private property of the collectivised land had been restored to its former owners, against the policy and law of the Govern­ment. Neither the judge nor the Public Prosecutor had commented on this unheard-of event. When I asked Kikiloff about it, he shrugged and smiled: `There are difficulties'. But if such an event was possible, and accepted as a matter of course, the collectivisation-programme in Turkmenistan must be in a state of chaos. I did not draw these conclusions; but I vaguely guessed them. I did not doubt that Attakurdov and his people were bad, guilty men; but the eerie unreality pervading the courtroom made me at the same time feel that they were being used as scapegoats.

  There was another, more familiar aspect to it all. I knew, from my past sojourns in Syria and Palestine, how tenaciously the ancient clan-divisions survived in the politics of modern Moslem countries. In Palestine, for instance, Arab public life had been dominated by two powerful clans, the Husseinis and the Nashashibis. Before the Revolution, Turkmenistan had been an even more primitive country than Palestine, divided into tribes, and within the tribes into clans. Attakurdov and his numerous in-laws had evidently been running the country, as the Grand Mufti's clan had been running Palestine. Historically this was only natural, for in a country with less than one per cent. literates, educated people with administrative ability could only be found in the upper crust of the wealthier clans. On the other hand, for the socialist State it was a vital necessity to destroy the coherence of the traditional clan-structure in the backward areas. This was another implication of the trial with its constant emphasis on `in-laws' and `cousins' in the administration; it was intended to demonstrate that such relationship in itself was a counter-revolutionary tie.

  I stayed at the trial for several hours, but did not return the next day or after. It had been too depressing, and I was avoiding, by instinct, more depressing experiences. There had been a strange unreality about the proceedings. The defendants, for instance, were allowed to smoke in the courtroom. Everybody else, too, of course. Changildi, the one-legged former opium smuggler, had testified with a dead cigarette stump stuck in his dead, ashen face. The judge and his Assessors hardly seemed to listen. Now and then, when Changildi broke off, the Judge or the Prosecutor (both of whom were Russians) would prompt him, or ask him a question in an indifferent, remote murmur. Counsel for the Defence (one Counsel for the twenty-nine accused) never opened his mouth. He was the youngest person on the platform, a shy native youth, looking like a bewildered student at an examination who does not quite know what is expected of him next. There was no sign of any interest or tension in the room. The spectators seemed to doze, except when they shook Mahorka into a new paper-cone with slow, lazy movements. The school-children, who sat directly behind the bayonets of the guards, did not giggle, nor crane their necks. Several of them were asleep. There was an atmosphere of informality and amateurishness about the whole thing which made it quite impossible to believe that twenty-nine men, among them the leading figures of the Republic, were on trial for their lives.

  After Changildi's testimony there was a pause. The Judge and the Public Prosecutor exchanged a few casual, whispered words. Then they all sat for several minutes, and nothing happened at all. No word was spoken. Time seemed to have come to a standstill. Some of the defendants now and then shuffled their feet. Then the judge seemed to come regretfully back to life. He said something to one of the accused in the second row. The man got up obediently like a schoolboy, and said that Attakurdov had told him that the Russian people wanted to oppress the people of Turkmenistan. As he went on denouncing Attakurdov in a flat, impersonal voice, he seemed to vanish as an individual; all that remained of him was a limp puppet without a will of its own, manoeuvred by the arch-fiend, Attakurdov. The latter was apparently the Trotsky, or perhaps the Tito, of Turkmenistan.

  From my place all I could see of Attakurdov was an occasional view of the back of his head. It was a round head, with close-cropped dark hair, set on a powerful neck and powerful shoulders. The head never turned or moved.

  After some time a little man, who seemed to be something like an usher or clerk, came up to us in the last row and said something to Kikiloff. Kikiloff said to me smilingly that the Court was inviting me as a 'distinguished visitor' to sit on the platform. I had noticed him earlier whispering to the little man; then the latter had walked up the dais and had whispered to the Judge. So now we had to follow him to the platform. Two chairs were brought, and we had to sit down on them, on the edge of the platform, facing the audience.

  As a`foreign delegate' in Russia, I had been in the habit of sitting on platforms at all sorts of meetings and celebrations. But this time I felt a painful embarrassment. As we walked up to our two conspicuous chairs, the lodge seemed to take no notice of us, and neither the accused nor the audience gave any sign of curiosity. The judge was probably thinking that once this foreigner had managed to butt in, one might as well humour him with a place on the grandstand; and the others were probably thinking that we were Party officials somehow connected with the case.

  I could now see the accused. Attakurdov is described in my notes as having the `round, bloated, greyish-yellow face of a Turkish tax-collector'. I do not remember his features. I remember that he gave me one single glance of his flat eyes, penetratingly incurious like a dead man's, which made i ie avert mine.

  I also remember that he wore a high-necked, embroidered Russian shirt, because most of the other accused wore dirty, European shirts with the collars missing. They were a miserable lot--yellow-faced, unshaven, creased and crumpled, like vagabonds on police photogaphs. Yet these were the men who had, a short while ago, held the highest offices in the Party and State. And, unlike the faces on police photographs which stare with an angry or sullen or frightened look into the camera, the men sitting in front of the guards' bayonets all wore expressions of complete indifference and apathy. So did the spectators behind the guards. In fact, the expressions of the spectators were the same as those of the accused. I must have vaguely felt, even then, that they were all one--the defeated victims, the people down there before us; and that we who faced them from the raised platform were their con­querors and rulers. Not the representatives of the Workers' State and the People's Court; but simply the rulers. They did not hate us. They were too apathetic and resigned even for that. How much of this did I consciously understand at the time? I am unable to decide; but I do vividly remember feeling, while I sat exposed on that raised platform, that not the accused but I was being pilloried.

  The German Communist Party had a motto which used to appear every day on the top right corner of the official Party paper: 'Wo es Sta'rkere giht, immer auf der Seite der Schwaecheren'-`Where there is Power we are on the side of the Powerless'. On that platform I was obviously on the wrong side. It gave me the same guilty feeling that I had experienced towards the Ukrainian peasant girl in the sleeping-car to Erivan. And again, on a different level, towards Nadeshda. And again in my daily contacts with the common people who had no access to privileged co-operative stores, no priorities for food, housing, clothing and living. They were the powerless and I was on the side of the Power, and so it went on wherever I turned in Russia. A revolutionary can identify himself with Power, a rebel cannot; but I was a rebel, not a revolutionary.

  The trial of Attakurdov and accomplices was an exotic and amateurish forerunner of the great show-trials in Moscow. It was still on when I left Ashkhabad, and I never knew its outcome. Back in European Rus
sia I found that nobody had ever heard about it. It had only been reported in the local papers of Turkmenistan, and passed over in silence everywhere else. I had walked into it by pure chance. I wonder how many similar trials had been conducted in the same silence in various parts of the vast Soviet Empire, long before the Moscow purges revealed that weird, Kafka-esque pattern to the incredulous world.

  XI. To the Afghan Frontier

  FOR a week or ten days our `Writers' Brigade' explored the cotton plantations surrounding the oasis Merv.

  Merv occupies a strategic position at the point where the Murghab Itiver, which originates in the mountains of Afghanistan, loses itself in the sands of the Kara Kum. Before it is absorbed by the desert, the river divides into several branches, and each branch again into a number of capillaries: the artificial irrigation channels which make this oasis the central cotton growing region of Turkmenistan.

  At the same time, Merv controls the strategic approaches to Afghanistan and Persia from the North-East. It is one of the oldest towns in the world, mentioned in the Zend-Avesta and in the Hindu scriptures, and is regarded by Hindu and Arab tradition as the site of the Paradise and the cradle of mankind. It was also referred to variously as `the Town of Plenty' and `the Queen of the World'. But nothing of its past splendour remains, except crumbling ruins not worth the time to visit them--or so we were told, for the Brigade was never allowed to see Old Merv. When we alighted from our train one morning at four o'clock, we were taken to New Merv, which is another dreary Russian garrison town on the railway, at a few miles distance

  from the ancient city. Whenever I asked to see the old city, I was put off with

  smiles to the next day. It is unlikely that there were any secret military installations there. More probably, the District Party Committee, which only possessed one old Ford car, really thought that it was a waste of time and petrol to indulge in the bourgeois-romantic whim to look at ruins of the bygone past.