The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  Extracts from rny travel notebook:

  A huge, dry, dusty field, stretched to the dust-coloured horizon, covered with mean-looking shrubs. A line of women slowly advances on a broad front spread out across the field, their bodies in shapeless black garments, bent forward at ninety degrees so that their backs are parallel to the earth; from the distance they look like ravens on a stubblefield. They pick the white tufts from the knee-high shrubs with rapid automatic movements, with unseeing eyes, unerring fingers. In their wake, all the cotton has vanished from the shrubs into their bodices and aprons, and as the line approaches, their breasts and bellies swell into monstrous bulges. At the near side of the field they stop and empty the contents of these bulges onto heaps of white cotton. Amidst the heaps stands the foreman, an old, gaunt and gnarled Turkoman in a sheepskin cap, making marks in his tattered notebook with a stub of pencil. He is the only male in sight on the field, except for the Writers' Brigade. He is called Medshur Baba, and he is not a`foreman' but a `brigadier', and the thirty black-clad women are his `brigade'. Kolklhoz Aitakov, like all other kolkhozi from the Afghan frontier to the Arctic circle, is sub-divided into `brigades', which vie with each other in Socialist Competition to fulfil the Plan and win the battle on the Agricultural Front. The same military terminology is used on the Industrial Front and on the Cultural Front.

  The meeting between the Writers' Brigade and the Cotton Brigade was not a success. The women did not talk to us and did not glance at us--not even at Hughes, though he was certainly the first Negro they had seen, and a handsome one, too. The women of Turkestan have shed their black veils, but only physically. One feels that, when looked at by a stranger, they still feel naked without the veil that used to hide a woman's most intimate features: her eyes and lips. On the other hand, two of them plop out their breasts from under the black sackcloth without a trace of embarrassment and feed their infants in front of us. These infants they were carrying on their backs, in another fold of their garments. There were five or six of them carrying their babies in this fashion, on backs bent nearly horizontal to the ground, for seven hours a day. Moslem women are used to hard work, but not to regular, organised work. They are also used to carrying their babies on their backs, but not while on a back-breaking job in the fields. When the Cotton Brigade had emptied the contents of their bodices and aprons, and had gone on to the next strip, we tackled Medshur Baba on these subjects.

  Medshur Baba speaks no Russian, so Kikiloff had to translate. Medshur Baba is tall, morose and monosyllabic; Kikiloff short, wizened and all creased smiles. Of each word that Medshur Baba mumbled between two spittings of mahorka juice, Kikiloff made a well-rounded phrase. He explained the system. Kolkhoz Aitakov had around two hundred and fifty members, half of whom were women. The latter were divided into four brigades of thirty to forty, who were now engaged in harvesting the cotton. --And why no men? --Because the men were engaged on the more exacting work of digging irrigation canals. (Something in the manner of Kikiloff told us that he had doctored Medshur Baba's answer. Nowhere in Kolkhoz Aitakov did we see men digging at irrigation canals, though we asked to see them. But we saw plenty of men talking and smoking in the chai-khana--the tea house.) The kolkhoz has its Production Plan, and each brigade has its Production Plan. fhe brigade that we were watching had surpassed its Plan figures by sixty-five per cent., whereas the whole kolkhoz had only surpassed it by twenty-nine per cent. The earnings of the kolkhoz are distributed among its members according to the work done by each member. The work is measured by 'work-day units'. The work-days, however, are not measured in actual time. They are measured on a piece-rate scale. A work-day is the equivalent of chirty-two kilogrammes of harvested cotton. If a woman picks forty kilo-grammes of cotton then she is credited with one and a quarter work-days. One of the udarnitsas ('shock-brigader', forerunner of the 'Stakhanovite') was aleged to be able to pick sixty-five kilogrammes of cotton a day.--Which one was it?--Medshur Baba pointed vaguely at one of the black, doubled-up figures with an infant straddled on her back. --And why was she carrying the chld instead of leaving it in the nursery? --Medshur Baba shrugged. --Did kolkhoz Aitakov have no nursery? --It did have one. But it was too far from he field for nursing mothers. --Then why were nursing mothers not employed on work closer to it? --Medshur Baba shrugged. Kikiloff explained that it was important to fulfil the Plan and that the women were used to it, anyway.

  Midday break. We are all squatting on the edge of an irrigation canal which is now dry, sharing the women's midday meal. It consists of melons, soup and tea. The soup is being prepared in an iron pot over a fire of dry thistles and twigs. During the three or four days that we spent on the cotton plantations, all meals consisted of the same fare. We never had any solid food, not even bread, except on one occasion. This occasion was an official reception for the Writers' Brigade late one night, at which only the dignitaries of the District were present. We saw no sign that the workers of the kolkhoz ate anything but the liquid fare of melon, soup and tea.

  During the midday break, a pretty, adolescent native girl had joined the cotton pickers. She was carrying a book, and squatted down for a few minutes next to each woman in turn, whispering to her. Kikiloff explained that she was the teacher, and that she was going over their lessons in reading and writing with the women. In the evening, after work, they were too tired to learn.... They seemed even more tired now, and paid little attention to the little teacher, except for an occasional giggle and a covert glance at us. It was impossible to say whether the midday lesson was daily routine, or put on for our benefit. Kikiloff explained that before the Revolution there were only twenty-four women in the whole of Turkmenistan who could read or write. Somebody must have counted them. Now there are just over forty per cent. literates among the adults of both sexes. By 1934, according to Plan, illiteracy will be liquidated everywhere in Soviet Asia.

  (End of extract)

  In the early years of the Revolution, the Soviet Government had replaced the Arab and Persian scripts all over Soviet Central Asia by the Latin alphabet. But a few years after my visit, in 1934 or '35, the Latin was replaced by the Russian alphabet. By the middle 'thirties, the revolutionary policy of encouraging the development of national cultures had been replaced by the unitarian concept of `a single culture with a single common language'­-Russian. So the women in the cotton brigade of Kolkhoz Aitakov were supposed to learn first the Latin, and then the Cyrillic alphabet; and all that during a half-hour's midday break, in between feeding their babies and drinking their soup.

  Only one of them asked us, messengers from a distant world, a question. She was a youngish woman with an alert expression. Lowering her eyes, she asked Medshur Baba to ask us whether the country of America was ruled by Negroes.

  When the women returned to their work, the four of us, led by Medshur Baba, wandered off to the chai-khana for some more tea. We wandered for a mile or two along one dry irrigation canal and then another. Now and then we saw a black tent or a clay hut, planted somewhere among the cotton fields without apparent plan or reason. The Turkomans are a nomadic race, and tradition proved stronger than regulations. The entire life of the kolkhoz is planned, counterplanned, regimented and directed-in theory; but the members of the kolkhoz still build their kibitkas (tents) and mud houses wherever they fancy putting them. Aitakov is not a proper village; nomads hate crowding together. The kibitkas and clay huts are dispersed over an area of something like a square mile.

  The chai-khana was a kind of clay-cube bigger than the other clay-cubes. It consisted of a large room, whose only furniture was a rug on the stamped mud floor, and a smaller one which contained a table and several chairs. The smaller room served also as an office where most of the official business of the kolkhoz was transacted. On the rugs of the large room squatted several men, silent and motionless like Indian fakirs. They were drinking green khok-chai out of tiny cups. The atmosphere was so much like that of an opium den that I wondered whether it was not really an opium den. But I had lon
g ago given up the hope of getting to the bottom of any problem in Turkestan.

  In the smaller room, the one with a table and chairs, sat an Uzbek militiaman, a Russian agronomist and a third, nondescript person without definable occupation, such as can be found in any Levantine cafe or Asiatic chai-khana. They asked us for tobacco, and I tried to pump the militiaman, who spoke Russian, regarding the pre-revolutionary habits and folklore of Turkestan. I tried that more or less with every Turkoman, and never got anywhere. The answer to all questions starting with `How was this or that before the Revolution? was invariably a monosyllabic: `Bad, very bad'. One rarely got beyond that. An impenetrable wall seemed to stand between the present and the past--one of those walls of baked mud of which everything here was built. Beyond the wall lay the land of memories which were taboo. Sometimes that laconic `Bad, very bad' would be accompanied by a wistful, far­away smile--the smile of adults whom children ask naive questions about forbidden subjects. The land of memories had become transformed into a land of mysteries, where the Muezzins called from the minarets, and women's eyes flashed secretly behind black veils, and the smell of spices hung over the 'bazaars, and where there was sometimes hunger and sometimes a slaughtered sheep. It was a land where the sky was blue and the air full of colour, and where men argued and fought, and women gossiped and laughed--in the days before the great silence descended.

  `How were the women before the Revolution?' we asked the militiaman. 'Bad, very bad.' `How did a young man get himself a wife?? 'He could not because he had no money to buy her.' `So the poor all died out?? 'All the money and all the women belonged to the Beys. It was bad, very bad.'

  We sat in that chai-khana all afternoon. Something seemed to have gone wrong. Since we were going to stay in the village, the Ford of the District committee had gone back to Merv. Only gradually did it dawn on us that there was no village, or rather that the chai-khana was the village, and that we had arrived at our destination, so to speak. Kolya, the Ukrainian sailor-writer, had at the last minute decided to go back with the Ford, and we never saw him again. We were sorry to lose him for he had been a gay and resourceful companion with a gift for ferreting out food and lodgings in the middle of the desert. We needed that badly. On our arrival in Merv, the four of us had been billeted in one room containing two beds, one of which was already occupied. We had tossed for the other, and Kikiloff had got it. Perhaps Kolya had gone back to take possession of the bed. On the cotton-field he had tried to show off the tattooings on his arm to the women, but it had not been a success. Now that he had vanished, I wondered again why he had never taken notes or asked a question, and it occurred to me that I had never seen him use a pen or read a newspaper. I cannot swear to it, but I have a suspicion that one of the members of our Writers' Brigade was an illiterate.

  Darkness descended abruptly on the steppe, and we were still marooned in the chai-khana: Hughes, Kikiloff, myself and Medshur Baba, who seemed to have become permanently attached to us. Several hours earlier we had been told that our sleeping-quarters were being prepared, and that they would be ready presently. Then we had given up inquiring, and had sipped cup after cup of green tea which had a calming effect on our hunger. Since we had left Ashkhabad, the Brigade had been living on tea, melons, an occasional chunk of camel sausage, and lepioshkas--flat unleavened bread. We were also unable to get cigarettes, and had taken to smoking mahorka from paper-cones. As the melons gave all of us more or less chronic diarrhoea, we did not suffer too much from hunger. Yet the Brigade had been photographed in Ashkhabad, photographed in Merv, interviewed by the local Press and fcted everywhere it went. If, in spite of this, we were not better nourished, it was because we happened to be travelling through a country stricken by famine, without an efficient propaganda department to hide the truth from the visitors. Kikiloff knew about the famine; Hughes and I saw it every day more clearly, but did not talk about it.

  When it became completely dark, Kikiloff and Medshur Baba held a conference, and decided that it was time to go. It was a moonless, starry night, and suddenly very cold. Shivering, we stumbled through the darkness in single file, led by Medshur Baba, for perhaps a mile. The night is nowhere as immense as in the starlit steppe, and we no longer regretted our visit to Aitakov. At the junction of two canals, a very old man attached himself to us.

  He walked beside Kikiloff, who engaged him in conversation and later on, when we had arrived, translated the dialogue for Hughes and me:

  `How old are you, comrade uncle?'

  `Sixty, perhaps seventy, who knows?'

  `And still working??

  'I have worked all my life.'

  `Can you read and write, comrade uncle?'

  'Yok!' (No.)

  `Why don't you learn it?? 'I am too old.'

  `You should try, nevertheless.'

  What for? What I see I see, and what I know I know. I shall not be able to read my tombstone, anyway.'

  `Have you ever travelled on a train?'

  'Yok!'

  `But you have seen the train with your eyes??

  'Yes, in Merv. I have once been to Merv.'

  `But you have seen aeroplanes??

  'Yes, we saw them all the time. But I did not know that there were people sitting in them. They told me, but I would not believe it. Until my son wrote a letter and it said that he had flown in an aeroplane himself.'

  'Where did he fly, comrade uncle??

  'He works in Tashkent in the Cotton Trust. Then they sent him to Samarkand, and so he flew to Samarkand. By Allah, he flew to Samarkand.'

  Kikiloff was in an unusually mellow and unbuttoned mood. He was a native of the region of Merv, born somewhere around here, and for the first time since we had known him he struck a personal note in conversation. As we stumbled along through the darkness, he told us about the annual bloody feuds over water in the village where he had lived before the Revolution. The various strips of land were to be irrigated in an agreed order, but there was never enough water, and somebody always stole up at night to a sluice-gate to get more for his plot. In one of the brawls that grew out of such incidents Kikiloff's brother was killed--a neighbour bashed in his skull with a wooden plough.. That was perhaps the incident which had turned him into a revolutionary.

  Later on, commenting on what the old man had said about aeroplanes, Kikiloff told us another story. He had travelled among the Tadzhiks in the Pamirs--a people even more primitive than the Turkomans. One day a Red Army patrol on bicycles had arrived in a Tadzhik village. The villagers fled in panic. They had seen plenty of aeroplanes, but never a bicycle. They took aeroplanes for granted--why, they were just machines. But a human being riding on a thing which had only two wheels and no support--surely that must be a miracle worked by the Devil.

  Our billet, we found, was the communal day nursery. It was a large and fairly clean room, containing several rugs and no other furniture--except for the propaganda posters on the walls which preached hygiene and displayed enlargements of fearful infectious germs.

  Later in the night, there was a party attended by the natives of the district. Two bakhshi--bards--sang ballads, accompanying themselves on two-stringed taras. It was, as far as Hughes and I could make out, quarter-tone music of Chinese origin. It meant little to our Western ears, but much to our hosts, who listened avidly and gradually fell into a trance-like stupor. The room was filled with twenty or thirty men, squatting on the floor, and the air soon became unbreathable with mahorka smoke. The bards were a teacher and an official of the District Committee, and the ballads, Kikiloff explained, were about `heroism', about `tragic love', and again `heroism,.

  After each strophe the bakhshis threw their heads back and uttered a kind of guttural scream, which sounded to us like ee-ee-ee-ee ..., sustained for a whole minute or more, until the bards' eyes were bulging out and their faces began to get blue. These screams were apparently much appreciated, and the more so the longer they lasted; sometimes one of the listeners joined in with a high-pitched ee-ee of his own. No women we
re present except the doctor, a determined female comrade from European Russia, who soon vanished into the night without being bidden a single goodbye.

  The singing went on for several hours with nothing but tea to sustain us; yet there had been promising winks and whispered rumours about a sheep being slaughtered in our honour. Then, just after daybreak, unexpectedly and miraculously, the sheep arrived. It arrived in an enormous wooden bowl. The first rays of the rising sun glittered on the gravy. Globules of fat floated like water-lilies on the surface, and in between them were compact islands of meat. Next, a pile of steaming lepioshkns appeared, two for every man, and lastly a wooden spoon.

  The ritual of the feast was much the same as in Arab countries. The spoon, filled with gravy, made three times the round from mouth to mouth, under the ironic stare of the germs on the posters. Then the spoon was put aside, sleeves were turned up, and the great dunking of lepioshkas in the bowl took its ritual course. Finally came the turn of the meat, picked delicately, un­hurriedly, courteously, with outstretched fingers. Every man present would rather have died than betrayed haste or greed.

  When the sheep was finished there was more tea; and then the majority of the men wandered off into the warming daylight, whilst the remainder of us lay down where they happened to be sitting, and after a few contented belches rolled over into sleep.

  One day Kikiloff took Hughes and me to visit a school in Merv. Over the

  entrance-gate a streamer greeted us:

  'WELCOME OUR HEROIC PROLETARIAN REVOLUTIONARY WRITER COMRADES FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE'.

  We were first taken to the advanced class who were having a lesson in German. At a sign from the teacher, the class rose and chanted in a chorus: