The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  `But meanwhile, the Mullahs had not been idle. They had gathered together all the seminarists from the medresseh and incited the ignorant people against us. They ran through the streets shouting: "The Djadidi are depraved people who spit on the Koran and sleep with their mothers."

  `When we climbed into a droshky and rode past the crowd on our way to the Citadel, many cried: "Such noble men we shall not let go, for the Emir is going to slaughter them." We, however, said: "Be quiet, good friends, we shall come back with trumpets."

  `When we reached the Citadel, the Tubshi Bashi asked us what we wanted, and opened the gate. The courtyard was crowded with officers in full battle costume. This was unusual. It was a bad sign and we became frightened.

  `At once we were surrounded by soldiers and taken to the Kushbegi. The Kushbegi was sitting in a large room, and next to him the Kazi Kalan. As we entered the room, the Kazi Kalan shouted at us angrily:

  `"What have you done? What have you done?"

  `But we answered just as angrily:

  `"What have you done? What have you done?"

  `Outside the windows the mob screamed and yelled because the priests had incited them and they asked for our heads. Then a horde of Mullahs came running across the courtyard with wild shouts. The Kushbegi had us locked in a room nearby, and two sentries were guarding the door. We were hardly in that room when the Mullahs stormed into the big room where the Kushbegi was sitting; they bared their heads and shouted:

  `"The day of God has come, the tempter is amongst us, we shall defend Islam by the sword." And they asked the Kushbegi where we were hiding. I saw and heard it all through a crack in the door. The soldier who guarded the door whispered to me: "It looks bad for you, very bad, very bad."

  'Yussouf Zade lay down on the floor and stuffed his ears with his thumbs. Polat Khodjayev whispered to me: "Hadji, Hadji, tell us what's happening outside?" But I said: "It doesn't help now to stuff one's ears. When they come we shall shoot and kill ourselves with the last bullet." Meanwhile more and more people had gathered in the Kushbegi's room.

  `Then the guard who had spoken to me through the crack in the door, said to one of the Mullahs:

  `"We are guarding three great criminals in that room, three of the leaders." Thus the Mullahs found out where we were hidden, and they all ran to the door and roared:

  `"Deliver us those three. We shall eat their flesh and drink their blood."

  `And they fought with the guards who defended the door. And my two comrades were lying on the floor, and they cried: "Hadji, Hadji, we shall die by the knives of our enemies." For they had gone quite crazy with fear.

  `Then it became calm outside and I heard the Kushbegi say:

  "Be patient, please. The mighty Emir will presently give orders that the three be slaughtered on the Registan."

  `Finally, the door was opened and several high officers of the Emir's guard came into our room. They stared at us like mad wolves and asked each one of us:

  `Who art thou and what is thy name and what didst thou come for?"

  `"My name is Yussouf Zade, my father came from Ush, my mother from Ferganah. I am a Russian citizen."

  `The second said: "My name is Polat Khodjayev, my mother came from Ush, my father from Ferganah. I am a Russian citizen."

  `Then my turn came: "My name is Hadji Mir Baba Mukhsin Zade. I am a merchant in Kara-Kul furs, and a citizen of Bokhara."

  `Then they drew up a statement, and after a while the Kushbegi came in and said:

  `"The mighty Emir has just issued the order that Hadji Mir Baba be slaughtered on the Registan".'

  [Hadji Mir Baba never said `executed'; he always used the expression `slaughtered'. The most common form of execution in Bokhara was indeed to slaughter the delinquent like a chicken by pushing the knife sideways into his neck and cutting his throat by a horizontal twist.]

  `. ... My comrades cried: "Hadji, Hadji, why did you not say that you were a Russian citizen?" I, however, shouted: "Long live freedom!" Then they led me out.

  `In the courtyard a great crowd was assembled, and they shouted:

  `"This is Hadji Mir Baba, the enemy of religion, the author of bad books, let us kill him!" And all across the courtyard they hit and kicked me. And I spat out many of my teeth and much blood.

  `At the gate the guard took off my khalat and my clothes-they only left me my shirt. Now at that time it was the law in Bokhara that the executioner should tie your hands before he slaughtered you. Therefore, I searched with my eyes for a man with a cord in his hands, for that one would be the executioner. But I saw nobody with a cord.

  `Then I told myself: "Very well, there are a few more steps to the second gate and there they will surely tie your hands." But I got to the second gate and my hands were still free.

  `Then I told myself: "Very well, the man with the cord is certainly waiting on the Registan." They led me to the Registan and there was a great crowd, but there was no man with a cord. Instead, they brought a bucket filled with water in which several heavy sticks were soaking.

  `A great joy scorched my heart and I thought:

  `"Very well, very well, if it is only the sticks, you may perhaps survive them."

  `They lifted my shirt and twisted the ends of it round my neck and tied them in a knot. Two men were holding me by my feet and two by my hands. For at that time I was as tall and strong as a'camel. And two others each took a stick out of the bucket and began to beat me.

  `But I tensed the muscles of my back and held my breath before each stroke, for I had learnt that only in this way could you protect your spinal column from breaking. The strokes were like thunder, and I would have liked to shout because it helps if you shout down the pain, but because I had to watch my breathing I could only moan. I was just on the point of giving up by relaxing the muscles of my back because the strokes were breaking my will, when I saw one of the officers of the Emir who stood in front of the soldiers and winked at me with his eyes. And I recognised him as a member of our secret organisation. And when it was all over, and I collapsed, and the Mullahs came running to tear me to pieces, the soldiers of that officer lifted me up and carried me back into the citadel. They threw me into a room which was in darkness; I only noticed by the smell that there were many other prisoners in the room. But they were all common criminals, robbers and murderers, or people accused of such crimes.

  `As I lay in the darkness on the floor of that room and gradually resumed my normal way of breathing--for one ought not to do that suddenly--they all crowded round me and asked: "What have you done?" But I was afraid to tell them the truth for they were ignorant and fanatical people, so I answered: "Give me time to recover, then we shall talk." But they were too impatient to wait. And so I asked them:

  `"Have you heard that the mighty Emir has promised to set you all free?" [The manifesto of April 1917 had promised a general amnesty.]

  ` "Yes, yes," they cried.

  `"Well, you are ignorant people who cannot read, so the Emir has written his answer to you on my back. There will be no freedom, and you will all die in this prison."

  `When I had spoken these words, many began to weep and they told each other: "False is our Emir and false our religion."

  `And they said: "He has done this to save us. We know him, he is Hadji Mir Baba, a good man, a rich merchant. Not for his sake but for ours did he receive the sticks."

  `And they prepared green chai, and they said: "Djafur, give him of your medicine."

  `And one who was called Djafur the Smuggler, took from a tin-box a piece of opium as large as my little finger. I said "If I eat this piece I shall die of it." But they shouted: "No, no, go on, eat it."

  `When I had eaten it and had drunk some hot water, I was overcome by the sweetest feeling that I had ever known. I stretched out on the floor and fell asleep. Each man gave me a piece of his dirty clothes and covered me with it.

  `When I woke up it was as dark as when I had fallen asleep. Two men were massaging the palms of my hands and the soles o
f my feet to draw the blood away from my back. Then these men whom I had thought to be robbers each told his story in turn. They were very interesting stories and I shall now tell them to you. ...'

  It was at this point that Hadji Mir Baba's story branched out. Some of the prisoners' tales sounded indeed like something straight out of the Arabian Nights. I listened to them entranced, while we were both squatting face to face on the mat of my bare room under the light of one naked, fly-soiled electric bulb hanging from the ceiling. But as these memoirs deal with Red Days and not with Arabian Nights, I must call a halt, and bring Hadji Mir Baba's story summarily to its happy end. After several months in prison he was released as a result of representations from the Russian Provisional Government, spent some time in hospital, and then travelled to Moscow, where he arrived just in time for the October Revolution which brought the Bolsheviks into power. He joined the Party and visited Lenin in Petersburg. Admitted to Lenin's presence, Hadji Mir Baba bared his back and said: `This is my letter of recommendation.' He returned to Bokhara after the flight of the Emir in 1920, fought with the Red Army against the Basmachi, and was elected to the Central Committee. At the time of my visit to Bokhara he drew a Party pension and no longer exercised any political function-­allegedly because he was too old, though he was only in his sixties. Still, as a curator of the little museum he could spend his time browsing through the surviving documents from the archives of the Emirate. I don't know what has happened to Hadji Mir Baba since, and I prefer not to know.

  XIV. Instruments of Fate

  AFTER a few days in Tashkent, the colourless administrative capital of the Central Asiatic republics, and a week on a State Farm in Kasakhstan, my itinerary was completed, and I returned to Moscow. But the pull of my organisation, or my standing within it, was not sufficiently strong to procure me a room by myself where I could write my book; so I went back to Kharkov and the hospitable Weissbergs. I stayed for a fortnight with Alex and Eva, then managed to get a room in Kharkov's Intourist Hotel, where I spent the late winter and spring of I933, writing Red Days.

  In the meantime, Hitler was appointed Prime Minister, and a month later the Nazis staged their Saint Bartholomew's Night against our comrades in Germany. I learnt of that event one evening at the Weissbergs' flat--Alex has described the scene in his Conspiracy of Silence. We were playing a peaceful poker game for kopeks--Alex, myself, and Professor Shubnikov, head of the institute's laboratory for low-temperature research. Shubnikov was an endearing elderly Professor, very absent-minded and something of an eccentric. While one of us was dealing, he remarked dreamily, apropos of nothing:

  `. .. And so they have burnt down the Reichstag. I wonder now what they did that for??

  'What?' we shouted.

  `Don't you know? The Nazis have burnt down your Parliament--It was on the wireless.'

  Alex and I understood at once what this signified. During the first month of Hitler's premiership in a coalition government, the Nazis had still maintained the appearances of legality and democratic procedure. Now the moment had come for them to drop all pretence: the terror had started, and Germany had become a totalitarian state. It was a development that we had foreseen for a long time; but as always in such cases, the fulfilment of our own gloomy prophecies came as a shocking surprise. I don't remember what I did or said; Alex says in his book that I walked out of the room to pack my bag and go straight back to Berlin, and that he persuaded me to wait for more detailed news. Apparently I still believed that the Party would fight back on the famous barricades which had loomed so large in our orations and revolutionary songs. The news later on that evening destroyed what illusions we still had left. There were no barricades. The Party, which at the last elections had still polled five million votes, surrendered without fighting. Hitler's victory was complete and final.

  During that poker game, the pattern of my life had been changed without my being aware of it. I had ceased to be a traveller and had become a political refugee--which I would remain for the next thirteen years.

  It is a curious fact that the really important events which alter the whole course of one's destiny usually appear in an insidiously trivial guise. The first symptoms of cancer are much less dramatic than a bruised knee; every psychiatrist knows that the real conflicts of the patient are hidden behind those ideas and dreams which he dismisses as unimportant. If you keep a diary and re-read the entries of several years ago, you will always be surprised to find that the events that mattered most at the time are strangely under­emphasised and only mentioned casually. Real tragedy rarely makes good drama. The language of destiny is smooth and full of trivial understatements --like dear old Shubnikov's: `I wonder now what Hitler did that for?

  For a long time I was not conscious of having lost my privileged status as a leisurely traveller, and having become one of the grey horde of Europe's political exiles. It was a transformation under anacsthesia, so to speak. For the moment it made no apparent difference to my life; I continued to write Red Days, and my main worry was neither the future of Europe nor my own, but the problem how to go on working in an unheated room in the grim Ukrainian winter. For, as one of the minor disasters in that disastrous year of famine and general dislocation, the electricity supply of the Ukrainian capital had broken down--and the central heating in the Hotel Regina was operated by electric pumps. In the streets, the temperature often sank to fifty and sixty degrees below freezing point. When one tried to smoke in the open air the moisture froze in the cigarette which became hard as a stick and gave one the sensation of chewing nicotined ice-cream. Inside my room, the water was permanently frozen in the tap, and the tempetature rarely rose over freezing point. At first I tried to work in bed, but found this too uncomfortable; so I hammered away at.the typewriter, wearing mittens, and a kind of quilt­jacket padded with cotton-wool, called a vatinka.

  The electricity breakdown lasted all through the winter. The Ukrainian capital lived in a permanent blackout, paralysed by hunger, darkness and frost. The only public conveyances, the electric tramcars-dreadfully over­crowded even in normal times--now only ran during two hours a day, to get the workers to the factories and back. The people in the offices worked by the fight of paraffin lamps, or oil wicks when the paraffin ran out, huddled in their quilts, surrounded by little clouds of condensed breath, like saints in heaven. After eight o'clock in the evening the streets lay deserted like an arctic settlement in the polar night.

  One day the chambermaid in our privileged Intourist hotel fainted from hunger, and afterwards confessed that she had eaten nothing for three days because, as she had only just arrived from the country, the Co-operative had withheld her three-day ration of 1,8oo grammes (four pounds) of black bread. The bread ration was at the time 800 grammes per day for industrial workers, 600 grammes for other manual workers, 400 grammes for office employees (one pound=450 grammes); and bread, plus a few tea-leaves and an occasional cabbage or salted herring, was the only food to be had on the ration. In the country the people were dying of hunger; in the towns, they vegetated on the minimum survival level. Life seemed to have come to a standstill, the whole machinery on the verge of collapse.

  Today, the catastrophe of 1932-33 is more or less officially admitted by the Soviet Government, but at the time no allusion to the real condition of the country was permitted to appear in the Soviet Press. The Government was determined to keep the people in the dark regarding its own situation. This apparently impossible task could only be undertaken in a country where all information was centralised at the top of the pyramid, and all communications were a Government monopoly. The Soviet Press is, in fact, controlled to a degree which the Nazis were never able to achieve. Every town in the Union, Moscow included, has two morning papers: a Government organ and a Party organ. All Government papers throughout the country print every morning one uniform leader: the leader of the Moscow Isvestia, distributed to them by telegraph and radio. Similarly, all Party papers throughout the country appear with the Pravda editorial. All fore
ign news and home news are distributed by one single agency, TASS. Local events are covered entirely by official hand-outs. The effect of this total news-centralisation in a country with vast distances is that the people are kept in ignorance not only of foreign events, but also of everything outside the range of their immediate neighbourhood.

  Thus every morning I learned from my Kharkov paper about plan figures that had been reached and surpassed, about competitions between enthusiastic factory shock-brigades, about awards of the Red Banner, new giant factories in the Urals, and so on; the photographs were either of young people, always laughing and always carrying a banner in their hands, or of some picturesque elder in Usbekistan, always smiling and always occupied with learning the alphabet. Not one word about the local famine, the typhus epidemic, the dying out of entire villages; even the fact that there was no electricity in Kharkov was never mentioned in the Kharkov newspaper. It gave one a feeling of dreamlike unreality; the paper seemed to talk about some different country which had no point of contact with the daily life that we led. The same was true of the radio. The consequence of all this was that people in Moscow had no idea of what went on in Kharkov, and even less of what went on in Tashkent, or Archangel, or Vladivostok--twelve days' train journey away in a country where travelling accommodation was reserved for government officials; and these travellers were not of a talkative nature. The enormous land was covered by a blanket of silence, and nobody outside the small circle of initiates was in a position to form a comprehensive picture of the situation.

  In other words, news in Russia could only travel up and down the sides of the pyramid, along the lines converging in the top, but could not be exchanged horizontally, as it were. This twin policy of centralisation-plus­atomisation is a basic feature of the Soviet regime. To understand its full significance, one would have to imagine a world in which travelling is only possible by air, and only due North or due South. Thus to get from London to Paris, one would have to fly to the North Pole along the meridian of London, and then descend due South along the meridian of Paris. Precisely this was happening in the Soviet Union when, say, a metal works in Baku wanted to buy machine oil from a local refinery. The transaction could not be concluded locally; the request had to travel up to the Commissariat of Heavy Industries in Moscow, and then come down again. Similarly, a Ukrainian newspaper could not keep a local reporter in its local area. All news had to be reported to the top--to Pravda, Isvestia or TASS--and, in duly processed form, sent down again to the regional centre.