by Joseph Roth
They all lost their way. They lost their Russianness and their nobility. And because that was all they had ever been—Russian noblemen—they lost everything. They fell out of the bottom of their own tragedy. The great drama was left without heroes. History bitterly and implacably took its course. Our eyes grew tired of watching a misery they had revelled in. We stood before the last of them, the ones that couldn’t understand their own catastrophe, we knew more about them than they could tell us, and arm in arm with Time, at once cruel and sad, we left these lost souls behind.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 September 1926
29. The Border at Niegoreloye
The border at Niegoreloye is a large wood-panelled room we all have to pass through. Kindly porters have fetched our luggage off the train. The night is very dark, it’s cold, and it’s raining. That’s why the porters seemed so kindly. With their white aprons and their strong arms, they came to our aid, when we visitors encountered the frontier. An authorized official had taken my passport off me in the train, leaving me with no identity. So, myself and not myself, I crossed the frontier. I might have been mixed up with any other traveller. Later, though, it transpired that the Russian customs inspectors were incapable of any confusion. More intelligent than their colleagues in the service of other nations, they already knew the purpose of my visit.
We were expected. Warm yellow electric lights had been lit in the wood-panelled hall. At the desk where the chief inspector sat, there burned—like a friendly greeting from other times—a smiling oil-lamp. The clock on the wall showed the Eastern European time. The travellers, in their eagerness to get where they were going, promptly adjusted their watches. It wasn’t ten any more, it was eleven. Our train was leaving at midnight.
We were few, but our suitcases were many. Most of them belonged to a diplomat. According to international law, these remained untouched. As virginal as they had been when they left, they would also have to arrive. They contained so-called secrets of state. That didn’t mean that careful note couldn’t be made of each and every one of them. It took a long time. The most efficient inspectors had their hands full with the diplomat. And in the meantime, Eastern European time ticked on.
Outside, in the damp black night, the Russian train was being made ready. Russian locomotives don’t whistle, they howl like ship’s sirens, wide, cheerful and oceanic. Looking through the window and hearing the locomotive, you feel you are by the sea. The hall starts to feel cosy. Suitcases throw open their lids and spread out, as though they felt the heat. Wooden toys clamber out of the stout trunks of a merchant from Tehran, snakes and chickens and rocking horses. Little skipjacks rock from side to side on their lead-weighted bellies. Their bright ridiculous faces, garishly lit by the oil lamp, and darkened by the swift shadows of hands, come to life, change their expressions, laugh, grin and cry. The toys climb up on a set of kitchen scales, are weighed, tumble down onto the desk again, and wrap themselves in rustling crepe paper. The suitcase of a young, pretty and rather desperate woman yields lengths of coloured silk, pieces of a cut-up rainbow. There follows wool which breathes, expands, consciously inflates after so many days of an airless constricted existence. Slender grey shoes slip out of the newspaper designed to keep them hidden, page four of Le Matin. Gloves with ornamented cuffs climb out of a little coffin of cardboard. Underwear, handkerchiefs, evening gowns float up, all barely of a size to dress the hand of an inspector. All the playful accoutrements of a rich world, all the satiny, polished little riens lie there strange and trebly useless in this hard brown nocturnal hall, under the heavy oak beams, under the admonitory posters with jagged letters like sharpened hatchets, in the aroma of resin, leather and petrol. There are the trim and corpulent bottles of emerald green and amber yellow liquids, leather manicure sets open their wings like holy shrines, little ladies’ slippers sashay across the desk.
Never have I witnessed such a detailed inspection, not even in the years immediately after the War, in the golden age of inspectors. It seems this isn’t a border between one country and another, but one between one world and another. The proletarian customs inspector—the most expert in the world: how often he has had to conceal something himself and get away with it!—examines what are citizens of neutral and allied states, but people of an enemy class. They are traders and specialists, ambassadors of capital. They come to Russia, called by the state, but at war with the proletariat. The official knows that these merchants are here to sow order forms in the shops which will flower into wonderful, expensive, unaffordable wares. He checks first the faces and then the suitcases. He can tell the homecomers, despite their new Polish, Serbian or Persian passports.
Late at night, the travellers are still standing in the train corridor unable to get over the customs inspection. They tell each other everything, what they brought, what they paid, what they smuggled. Material there for long Russian winter evenings. Their grandchildren will have to listen to their stories.
The grandchildren will listen, and the strange, confusing aspect of our time will loom before them, time at its own frontiers, time with its perplexed children, with Red customs officials and White travellers, false Persians, Red Army types in long sand-coloured greatcoats, their hems brushing the ground, the damp night at Niegoreloye, the loud wheezing of heavily laden porters. No question, this frontier has a historic dimension. I feel it the moment the siren wails loud and hoarse, and we bob out into the dark, calm expanse ahead.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 September 1926
30. Down the Volga to Astrakhan
The Volga steamer that goes from Nizhny Novgorod to Astrakhan lies at anchor white and festive, like a Sunday. A man shakes a small, surprisingly noisy bell. The porters come running through the wooden departure hall, dressed only in track suit bottoms and a leather carrying strap. They look like so many wrestlers. Hundreds of them stand by the counter. It’s nine o’clock on a bright morning. A happy wind is blowing. It feels as if a circus has just put up its tents outside the town.
The Volga steamer bears the name of a famous hero of the Revolution and has four classes of passenger. In the first are the new citizens of Russia, the NEP-men on their way to holidays in the Caucasus and the Crimean peninsula. They eat in the dining room, in the scrawny shade of a palm tree, facing the portrait of the famous hero of the Revolution, which is nailed up over the door. The young daughters of the comrades play on the harsh piano. It sounds like metal spoons being struck on glasses of tea. Their fathers play cards and complain about the government. A few of their mothers manifest a predilection for orange scarves. The waiter is not class-conscious. He was already a waiter back in the days when the steamers were named for archdukes. A tip brings so much submissiveness into his face, you forget the Revolution.
Fourth class is in the belly of the ship. Those passengers lug heavy bundles, rickety baskets, musical instruments and agricultural equipment. All nations, those on the Volga and beyond, are represented among them: Chuvaish, Chuvans, gypsies, Jews, Germans, Poles, Russians, Kazakhs, Kirghiz. There are Catholics here, Russian Orthodox, Muslims, Tibetans, heathens, Protestants. Here are old people, fathers, mothers, girls, infants. Here are small-farm workers, poor artisans, wandering musicians, blind buccaneers, travelling merchants, half-grown shoe-shine boys, and homeless children, so-called bezprizorniy who live off wretchedness and fresh air. They all sleep in wooden drawers, two storeys one above the other. They eat pumpkins, hunt for lice in the children’s hair, still their infants, wash nappies, brew tea, and play the balalaika and the mouth organ.
By day this narrow space is shamefully noisy and unfit for occupation. At night, though, a kind of respect blows through it. That’s how holy poverty looks sleeping. All the faces have on them the real pathos of naïveté. All the faces look like open gates through which one can see into clear white souls. Confused hands try to chase away the painful lights like so many pesky flies. Men bury their faces in the hair of their wives, farmers hug their fla
ils, children their tawdry dolls. The lamps swing in time to the stamping engines. Red-cheeked girls smilingly show their white, strong teeth. A great peace is over the poor world, and man—asleep, anyway—suggests he is a thoroughly peace-loving creature.
But the separation on the Volga steamer is not the simple separation of rich and poor. Among the fourth-class passengers are rich farmers, among the first-class passengers are traders who aren’t invariably rich. The Russian farmer prefers fourth. It’s cheaper and that’s not all. A farmer feels more at home there. The Revolution may have freed him of deference towards the master, but not yet of respect for the object. The farmer cannot tuck into his pumpkin with gusto in a restaurant with a bad piano. For a few months, everyone travelled in all different classes. Then they went their own ways, almost willingly.
“You see,” an American said to me on the boat, “what has the Revolution achieved? The poor folks huddle in steerage, and the rich play cards on deck.”
“But that’s the only thing they can do without apprehension,” I replied. “The poorest shoe-shine boy in fourth class has the confidence he could come up and be among us if he wanted. The rich NEP-men are afraid of precisely that. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ are not symbolic any more on this steamer, they are purely technical. Maybe they’ll be symbolic again in the future.”
“You reckon?” said the American.
The sky over the Volga is close and flat and painted with unmoving clouds. On either side, beyond the banks, you can see every single tree, every soaring bird, every grazing animal for miles and miles. A wood here has the effect of an artificial formation. Everything tends to spread out and to scatter. Villages, towns and peoples are far apart. Farms, huts, tents of nomadic people stand there, surrounded by isolation. The many tribes do not mix. Even the person who has settled somewhere remains on the move all his life. This earth gives the feeling of freedom that we ordinarily only get from air and water. If birds could walk here, they wouldn’t bother flying. Man skims over the land as if it were sky, cheerful and aimless, a bird of the earth.
The river is like the land: wide, endlessly long (it is over fifteen hundred miles from Nizhny Novgorod to Astrakhan) and very slow. On its banks it takes a long time for the “Volga hills” to appear, little low cubes. Their bare rocky insides face the river. They are only there for the sake of variety, a playful caprice of God’s created them. Behind them the flat land goes on for ever, pushing the horizon further and further back into the steppe.
It sends its great breath out over the hills and the river. You can taste the bitterness of infinity on your tongue. In sight of great hills and shoreless seas you feel threatened and lost. Facing the great plains, man is lost but somehow comforted. He may be little more than a blade of grass, but he won’t go under: he is like a child waking up very early on a summer morning when everyone else is still asleep. You feel lost and at the same time privileged in the endless silence. When a fly buzzes, or a muffled pendulum gongs, it has the same effect of mingled sorrow and consolation as this endless plain.
We stop at villages built of wood and clay, roofed with straw and shingles. Sometimes the broad, motherly dome of a church sits in the middle of the huts, her children. Sometimes the church stands at the head of a long row of huts and has a thin, sharp, pointed tower like a four-sided French bayonet. It’s a church under arms, leading a wandering village.
Kazan, the Tartar capital, stands before us. Colourful noisy tents throng the shore. Open windows beckon like glass flags. We hear the drumming of its droshkies. We see the green and golden evening shimmer of its cupolas.
A road leads from the harbour to Kazan. The road is a stream, it rained yesterday. In the town quiet pools. Leftovers of plaster occasionally stick up into the air. The street signs and shop names are mud-spattered and illegible. Doubly illegible, because they are partly written in an old Turkic-Tartar script. The Tartars prefer to sit outside their shops and tell passers-by of their wares. They are canny traders, as is their reputation. They wear black brush chin beards. Since the Revolution, illiteracy has fallen by twenty-five per cent. Now many of them can read and write. The bookshops stock Tartar publications, the paper boys sell Tartar newspapers. Tartar officials sit behind post office counters. One official told me the Tartars were the bravest people there are. “But they’re mixed with Finns,” I countered maliciously. The official was offended. With the exception of pub landlords and traders, everyone is happy with the government. The Tartar farmers sided now with the Reds, now with the Whites. Often they didn’t understand what it was about. Today all the villages in Kazan province are politicized. Young people are members of various Komsomol organizations. As with most of the Muslim nationalities in Russia, religion is more a matter of habit than faith. The Revolution has disrupted a habit more than suppressed a need. The poor peasants here are happy as they are all over the Volga province. Having lost much, the rich farmers are as unhappy as they are everywhere else, as the Germans in Pokrovsk, or the farmers of Stalingrad and Saratov.
The Volga villages—with the exception of the German ones—supply the Party with its most enthusiastic young supporters. In the Volga districts, political enthusiasm comes more from the countryside than the urban proletariat. Many of the villages here were at a great remove from culture. The Chuvaish for instance are still secretly “heathen” today. They worship idols. For the naïve person grown up in a Volga village, communism is civilization. For the young Chuvaish the Red Army barracks in town is a palace, and the palace—into which he gains admission—is seven hundred heavens. Electricity, newspaper, wireless, book, ink, typewriter, cinema, theatre—all those things we find so wearisome, to the primitive person are refreshing and enlivening. All laid on by the Party. It not only put the masters in their places, it invented the telephone and the alphabet. It taught a man to be proud of his people, his smallness, even his poverty. Faced by the onrush of so many wonders, his instinctive peasant mistrust is vanquished. His critical sense is still a long way from being awakened. So he becomes a fanatic of this new faith. The “collectivist sense” that the peasant lacks he makes up for twice and threefold by simple ecstasy.
The towns on the Volga are the saddest I have ever seen. They remind me of the destroyed towns on the French front. The buildings burned in the Civil War; and then their ruins saw the White hunger galloping through the streets.
People died a hundred deaths, a thousand deaths. They ate cats, dogs, crows, rats and their own starving children. They bit themselves and drank the blood. They scratched the earth for fat earthworms and lumps of white chalk which looked to the eye like cheese. Two hours after they had eaten they died in torments. How could these towns even be alive still! How could people haggle and carry suitcases and sell apples and have children! Already a generation is growing up that does not know the Terror, already there are scaffoldings, with carpenters and masons busily building anew.
I am not surprised that these towns are only beautiful from a distance or from above; that in Samara a goat refused to let me enter my hotel; that a downpour drenched me in my room in Stalingrad; that the napkins are coloured packing paper. If only one could walk over the nice roofs instead of the bumpy cobbles.
In all of the Volga towns you come across the same things: the traders are unhappy, the workers are hopeful, but tired, the waiters respectful and unreliable, the porters humble, the shoeshine boys submissive. And everywhere young people are revolutionary—half the middle-class youth is enrolled in pioneer and Komsomol organizations.
People respond to the way I dress: if I put on a pair of top-boots and go without a tie, life suddenly becomes incredibly cheap. Fruit costs a few kopecks, a ride in a droshky half a rouble. I am taken for a foreign political refugee residing in Russia and they call me “comrade”. The waiters have proletarian consciousness and expect no tip, the shoeshine boys are happy with ten kopecks, the traders are happy with their lot, and in the post office the peasants ask me t
o address a letter for them, “with tidy writing”. But how expensive the world becomes when I put on a tie! I am addressed as “Grashdanin” (citizen) or sometimes, shyly, “Gospodin” (sir). The German beggars address me as “Herr Landsmann” (compatriot). The traders start to complain about the taxes. The conductor expects a rouble. The waiter in the dining car tells me he studied at trade school and is “a bit of an intellectual”. He proves it by charging me an extra twenty kopecks. An anti-Semite grumbles that the only people who did well out of the Revolution are the Jews. They were even allowed to live in Moscow now. He tells me he was an officer in the war, and had been taken prisoner in Magdeburg. A NEP-man threatens me: “Don’t think you’ll be able to see everything that goes on here.”
And it seems to me that I see just as much and just as little in Russia as I do anywhere else. I was never so generously, naturally invited by strangers as here. I am allowed to go into offices, law-courts, hospitals, schools, barracks, police stations, prisons, to police commanders and university professors. The middle classes are more loudly and forthrightly critical than is agreeable for a stranger. I can talk to Red Army privates and commanders in pubs about war, pacifism, literature and weaponry. In other countries this is more dangerous. The secret police are probably so discreet that I am not even aware of them.
The famous barge haulers on the Volga still go singing their famous song. In the Russian cabarets of the West, the “Burlaki” are portrayed with purple lighting and pizzicato violins. But the real Burlaki are sadder than their representatives can have any idea. Even though they are so burdened with traditional romance, their song slips deep and painfully into the hearer.
