Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  At quitting time, we piled into a street car on our way to a boarding house, not far from the Capitol, where we all ate around trestle tables in a long bleak room. There was nothing in it but those tables, the folding chairs and a mantelpiece on which stood two small plaster busts. Across the flattened base of each was printed a name: Mozart.

  The food was prison fare; meat that was unidentifiable, and lapped in a greasy suspect stew. Potatoes were the filler. Dessert was nearly always the same—bread, the refuse from the last meal, glued into a pudding and concealed in a glutinous sauce that reminded me of masses of toad eggs in my boyhood (not far in the past—though one day made it seem like a decade). We were always ravenously hungry, and, while we sometimes grumbled at the food, we always wolfed it, washing out the more questionable tastes with unlimited coffee.

  By a selective seniority system, some of the men slept upstairs in the boarding house. Most of them, perhaps a hundred or more, drifted after supper to a barracks a few blocks away. There in a big hall, dingy and bare, and reeking of disinfectant, were a hundred or so beds, most of them double-deckers. Each man had his bed under which he kept his few belongings.

  I slumped down on my bed with my clothes on. My skinless hands were burning. A tall, lean, middle-aged man with an elusive face in which dissipation lurked, walked over to my bed. “Let me see your hands,” he said. He examined them as if he had been a doctor. “I’m an old soldier,” he said, “and I know what to do for these.”

  He rummaged among his things and brought up two bottles of iodine. “I am going to hold your wrist tight,” he said, “because when I pour this on your hand, it’s going to burn like hell, and you’re going to jump.” A crowd of men had slipped over and stood quietly watching.

  My doctor uncorked the first iodine bottle, and, like a doctor, he talked to distract me. “My name’s York,” he said, and unruffled by the listening gallery, added, “I had a good upbringing. You know what’s the matter with me? Women. Keep away from them.” (How often I was to hear that one.) While he talked, he emptied the whole bottle of iodine over the palm and fingers of my hand. I managed not to wince and even to smile. Then York grasped my other hand and emptied the other bottle over that.

  The men drifted away as quietly as they had drifted up. I knew that I had passed a test. In a short time, my hands healed with calluses that should have got me a job anywhere.

  XXIX

  Learning to do my different jobs kept me busy; the heavy physical work kept me exhausted. At first, in the evening, I would collapse on my bed at once and fall into a deep sleep. Gradually, I hardened. Then I began to look at the men around me.

  They were my first International. Practically every European nationality was represented. Yet they had no nationality, just as they had no homes. That was the difference between them and other men: they were the men who had no homes at all. They had reached that bleak barracks in the unheroic course of a workingman’s everlasting search for work which, as Tolstoy has noted, beggars the wanderings of Odysseus. The job was the nearest thing to home they felt. Few of them spoke English and I found that my scrappy knowledge of half a dozen languages was one way I could get to know them.

  I worked day after day beside a silent, sour, potato-faced Russian. One day I got tired of this mute companionship. I pointed to the rails and said: “Zheleznaya daroga” (railroad). The Russian froze, leaning on his pick, and repeated after me in a rapt voice, as if the words were a phrase of music: “Zheleznaya daroga.” Thereafter, when we got bored with the work and our silence, we would hold that kind of one-word conversation. He would point to something and I would give the Russian word for it, if I knew it. If I didn’t, he would tell me the word. We never progressed beyond that. But he seemed perfectly satisfied.

  There was a burly, surly Pole who ran the cement mixer near me on the job. In the barracks, he had the bed next to mine. Sometimes, as I fell asleep, I would hear him coughing his lungs out. Sometimes, his coughing woke me at night. After speaking to him once or twice and getting no response, I decided that he was ill-tempered, and gave it up. One day I asked somebody about him. I was told: “Paul’s got T.B. The cement dust is killing him.” So I took to greeting him again. Usually, he merely grunted and kept on shoveling cement and sand. One day I found him sitting on a pile of blocks beside the cement mixer. “How are you, Paul?” I asked. He looked up, not at me, but at the blistering blue Washington sky. “I die soon,” he said, “some day I die soon.”

  There was a Belgian, a Fleming, a wiry, sallow, hawk-faced young man, who sometimes spoke French to me. I think he doubted how much I understood, for one day he dove into his suitcase and brought up a copy of Madame Bovary. He opened it at random and said: “Translate.” I translated a page, haltingly. “If you can read Flaubert,” he said, “you can read anything.” Thereafter, he spent much time with me. Our conversations, on the sweating job or in the disinfected barracks, were persistently literary, though on a somewhat narrow range. For, outside of Madame Bovary, he seemed to have read nothing but the novels of Emile Zola, whose massive social tracts he admired tremendously and talked about continually. “E ‘ave written many books,” he said to me one day as if that were the first time we had touched the subject, “many books, beautiful books, and so filthy. But ’e ’ave written one book—listen, La Rêve—so piure that it can be read by the piurest virgin.” I have never read this immaculate book, but in his anonymous memory (for I cannot recollect his name), I hope to do so before I die.

  The Belgian said that he had been the boss of several gangs of native rubber gatherers in Malaya. He had fabulous stories of slave driving with whips, of monumental heat in which the workers sometimes dropped dead and were simply left to rot or be gnawed by beasts or insects. He was sincerely puzzled that I should find that a little horrible, for he was completely without pity or mercy, as if his reactions were on a different range from the human, more like a bird of prey’s.

  He brought the jungle creepily alive, with slow muddy rivers, a nocturnal pulsation of men, beasts and bugs and tales of king cobras stalking rubber gatherers in lonely huts. He insisted that men could make a fortune in a short time, gathering rubber (he had made a fortune himself, but lost it, according to the usual tale, on women). He begged me to go back to the East with him, and he began to teach me Flemish, for he planned that we should go to the Dutch East Indies. For a while I was strongly tempted, thinking that I heard my future coming up like thunder out of China cross the bay. But I did not like or trust him. I thought that he would not hesitate to kill me, and would scarcely know that he had done it, if I were in the way. And there was something about his yellowish complexion, his taut gestures and the way the pupil of his eye would contract to a fine point that made me guess at madness, drugs or less mentionable things. I gradually detached myself from him.

  My real cronies were the Latin Americans. They outnumbered any other language group on the job, and they all clumped together in one comer of the barracks. There was Manuel, who was close to being a friend. Manuel was a Venezuelan, short and doll-like, with a loose, ugly mouth topped by a black, hairline mustache, but with gentle and very intelligent eyes. He told me that in Venezuela, he had been studying for the law, but he had got a girl in trouble, and had left the country a skip ahead of her pursuing kinsmen. (I never quite believed this story.) But Manuel was an educated man, and, in my long talks with him, I became fluent in a kind of pidgin Spanish (for Manuel could not speak any English). We used to stroll, on Saturday nights, up Pennsylvania Avenue, among the monuments of government, and the honky-tonk shop windows full of workingmen’s clothes or trays of rhinestones, and the phrenologist’s chart of a human head that hung outside a doorway where gypsies beckoned us in to learn our fates.

  Washingtonians who glanced at the two young workingmen gesturing and jabbering in Spanish could scarcely have guessed what the discussion was about. It was usually about la Liga de Naciones—the League of Nations. Manuel was an impassioned admirer of Wood
row Wilson (and I was not). But from him I first sensed what Wilson had meant to the masses of Europe. Manuel also believed that the League of Nations was the hope of mankind while I thought that it was foredoomed to failure. We argued endlessly about it.

  Manuel was one of the casualties of the job. Sometimes, between three and four o’clock in the morning, when the street-car traffic was least, we would tear up the old rails and lay new ones. The work had to be done very quickly. Everybody was tired out with the previous day’s work and almost no sleep, and bad tempered and high strung, for the work was dangerous. In the speed-up, rails sometimes fell on men’s feet and crushed them. Manuel was anything but quick, even in the day time, and I often heard him bawled out for dawdling. On one of those frantic early morning jobs, he was working with a long-handled shovel. The handle was damp. Manuel was tired, slow and was being cursed at. He touched an exposed third rail with the shovel and the current flowed up the damp handle. They took him to the hospital. When he came out several days later, the skin below his eyes was drawn down exposing the dull and bloodshot eyeballs. He could barely walk and he seemed to have trouble thinking and speaking.

  At the very end, I lost track of Manuel. When the job was finally finished and we all burst out like boys when school’s over, I somehow missed him. Perhaps he went back to Venezuela, where life is less frantic, if not more tranquil, and there are fewer third rails.

  We had been separated for some time. For seniority at last entitled me to move to the boarding house. It was more comfortable, but the atmosphere was much more relaxed. The barracks had been rather ascetic. In the boarding house, there was a good deal of drinking, and I could not help but overhear, and hear about, things that cannot be mentioned. But nobody ever molested me.

  In time, my soft hands outlasted almost every man who had come down from Baltimore with me that first day. One by one, they tired of the heat, the work, the food, the boss—something—and drifted on their aimless way. I stuck to become a veteran.

  There was one job that every man dreaded. The two third rails hung, just below the surface of the street, in a shallow tunnel. It could not have been more than four feet deep. The concrete in the tunnel had to be chipped out by hand with a cold chisel. I saw men refuse to go into the shallow tunnel and work with the live rails just above them. One day the boss ordered me down. I went. I thought: “I wonder if I will be killed.” I had to lie prone on a heap of rubble. The third rails, with the full power of the Capital Transit System flowing through them, were about two inches above my sweat-soaked shoulders. In that cramping position, I had to break concrete. A sudden turn of my head, a slip of the hammer or chisel would have brought me in contact with the rail. It was an invaluable experience.

  After several days of it, my boss moved me out of the tunnel. He began moving me from one job to another until there was practically nothing that I had not done. I was there when the last rail was laid and the last concrete poured. I had saved every cent that I earned. I was lean, hard and browned dark by the sun.

  During the two or three months on that job, I had written weekly to my mother, long boy’s letters, telling her not to worry, that I was well, and describing the job and the men. I did not send her my address. I did not want to hear from home. And I had another reason. As I feared, my grandfather Chambers used the facilities of the Public Ledger to set the Washington police hunting for me. They did not find me.

  The day the job ended, I invested a good deal of my capital in a ticket to New Orleans on the Southern railroad (later I was to work at Time with the son of its president). That night, when I took the train, detectives were looking for me in the Union Station.

  XXX

  My first room in New Orleans was spacious, clean and airy. Even the inner doors were screened against mosquitoes. My second room was narrow and dark, with filthy unpapered walls. Between these two rooms lay two first-hand discoveries: 1) that the important day in a workingman’s life is never a work day, but the day when he finds himself without work; 2) what a crisis at the top of the economic system means to the man at the bottom. Unknown to me while I chipped concrete, the graph of the national economy had dipped sharply. The post-war slump had set in. For some time to come, there would be no more silk shirts with peppermint candy stripes. For many men there would be no more jobs. Of these men I was one. In addition, I found myself a Yankee stranger in a Southern city where most of the rough work was not done by white men. If I had been a wiser boy, I might have caught on in a few days and left the South. But I was not wise. I believed that if I just stuck it, something would turn up. I read the help-wanted ads in the Times Picayune and Item. I do not remember that there were very many of them, and whenever I applied for a job, I was waved along. My money was going fast. I saw that things would soon be desperate.

  My first step was to find myself a cheaper room. I drifted into the old French Quarter, past shops with tourist displays, their windows filled with trays of pralines and the works of Lafcadio Hearn and George Washington Cable (my mother was a great admirer of The Grandissimes and I had read Madame Delphine). The little houses of the old Quarter, with their long galleries and graceful grille-work charmed me as they charm almost everyone else. I had not known that it was possible for a city to be so beautiful. It seemed to me the perfect place to live.

  Walking up Bienville Street, I came to a high board fence, plastered with posters for a nearby burlesque house. In the fence was a board gate which was open. A brick path ran back two or three hundred feet, under a house, which it divided into two parts on the ground level. Beyond the house I could see into a sunlit court. Along one side of the brick wall, a tiny stream flowed. There must have been a sign that said: Room to rent. I went in. A disheveled, waspish, little woman, whom I shall call Mrs. Papyros, offered to show me the room. We climbed a circular staircase to the second floor. From the bridge that crossed the alley, we could look into the sunny courtyard behind. Then we went on to the long, iron-grilled gallery that ran across the front of the house. At the far end of the gallery, Mrs. Papyros flung open two full-length shutters and let the daylight into the dark room. It was foul. It was cheap. I rented it.

  As we reached the bridge over the alley, we heard a woman scream. In the courtyard, a dark man in a black and white checked suit was swinging a revolver. Another shorter, darker man was grappling with him, trying to hold the arm with the revolver straight up in the air. A slatternly young woman, with a cataract over one eye, was trying to force herself between the men. It was her screams we had heard. This was my first glimpse of One-Eyed Annie.

  The fight ended with the taller man sulkily pushing the revolver into a pocket of the checked jacket and stalking stiffly away. Then Annie tenderly took the hand of the victor, whom I shall call Ben Santi. By way of making me feel one of the family, as if I were the bringer of great good luck, Ben and Annie used sometimes to remind me, later on, that I had arrived on a momentous occasion—the day when Ben Santi took One-Eyed Annie away from the man with the revolver.

  XXXI

  My graduation suit, once more cleaned and neatly pressed, seemed a little bizarre for Bienville Street, and, besides, I needed money. Before I moved, I went to a second-hand clothing store and sold it. In exchange, I took the khaki trousers and jacket of an Army uniform. It was not a bad fit. The country was flooded with ex-servicemen back from World War I. Like me, many of them were looking for jobs dressed in just such uniforms as I wore.

  I put myself at once on a strict regimen. Every morning, I bought a loaf of bread of which I then ate half. In the evening, I ate the other half. That was all I ate. I was proud of my ability to keep to this diet of bread and water, and my will to withstand temptation and not eat the second half of the loaf for lunch.

  With my economic affairs in order, I continued my fruitless search for work. After a time, I reached that point that every workingman knows, when the hunt for a non-existent job is no longer worth the effort. There was a wharf at the foot of Canal Street, where I used
to sit and brood and stare at the green levees across the Mississippi, in Algiers. Once a banana boat unloaded there and I asked the white boss for a job. “Nigger work, boy,” he said sternly. I envied the Negroes who had the work to do.

  I tried to ship out. I was willing to ship to any port. But unless I was twenty-one, I had to have my parents’ consent, and I was obviously not twenty-one. I might have managed it, anyway, if I had had a union card (New Orleans was a union port), but I did not have a fee for one or union dues.

  One day I heard that a shipbuilding yard, on the Mississippi several miles below New Orleans, was hiring men. Ben Santi, his great friend, Jules Radon, and I got up before dawn and went down to see. By the time we got there, the lines of men looking for work were so long that we did not even bother to fall in. Since we did not have carfare back to town, we walked—through one of the most beautiful, sun-filled mornings I can remember, past little, whitewashed Negro houses, with banana palms whose big leaves just stirred in the heat, and hibiscus burning by the little fences.

  The proletariat that had befriended me in Baltimore, and that I had lived among and worked with in Washington, was not the proletariat that Marx and Lenin talk about. It was not the factory proletariat. It was the lowest level of the laboring class. The poor that were around me in Bienville Street were a lower layer still. They were what Marx had called the Lumpenproletariat—the slum proletariat, “that passively rotting mass.” But I had yet to learn of those distinctions, and to me these people too were simply the wretched of the earth. I observed them with interest and with pity. They taught me, once for all, what life swims in the dead deeps in which our society is moored, and which we try not to look into.