by Joseph Roth
They may well be the strongest men alive. Every one of them can carry two hundred and forty kilogrammes on his back, snatch a hundred kilos off the ground, crush a nut between index and middle fingers, balance an oar on two fingers, eat three pumpkins in three-quarters of an hour. They look like bronze statues covered with human skin and given a carrying strap. They are relatively well paid, between four and six roubles. They are strong, healthy, they live on the river, free. But I have never seen them laugh. They have no capacity for joy. They drink. Alcohol does for these giants. Ever since freight has been carried on the Volga the strongest porters live here, and they all drink. Today more than 200 steamers and 1200 barges sail on the Volga, a total tonnage of almost 2 million. But the haulers still do the work of mechanical cranes just as they did two hundred years ago.
Their song doesn’t come from their throats, but from the unknown depths of their hearts where destiny and song are woven together. They sing like people sentenced to death. They sing like prisoners on the galleys. Never will a singer be free of his towing rope, or from alcohol. Work is a blessing! A man is a crane!
It’s rare to hear a whole song, only the odd verse, or a few bars. Music is a mechanical support, it works like a lever. There are songs you sing when you pull on a rope together, when you lift, when you unload, when you lower. The words are ancient and primitive. I have heard different words sung to the same tunes. Some of them are about a hard life, an easy death, a thousand pud, and girls and love. As soon as the load is lifted onto your back, the song is over. Then man is a crane.
I can’t go back to the glass piano and the card games. I leave the steamer. I am sitting on a tiny boat. Two burlaki beside me sleep gently on hawsers. In four or five days we will be in Astrakhan. The captain has sent his wife to bed. He is his own crew. Now he is preparing his shashlik. I expect it will be fatty and gristly, and I will have to share it with him.
Before I got off, the American drew a big arc with his index finger, pointing at the chalky, clayey soil and the sandy banks, and said:
“See all the raw materials lying here unused! What a beach this would be for invalids and people needing a rest! That sand! If only all this whole Volga were in some civilized part of the world!”
“If it was in some civilized part of the world, there would be factory chimneys, nippy motor boats, black cranes swinging back and forth, people would fall ill so that they could recover two miles away in the sand, and it wouldn’t be a desert. At a certain, hygienically determined distance from the cranes, there would be restaurants and cafés, with ozone terraces. Bands would play the song of the Volga, and there would be a dapper Volga Charleston, with words by Arthur Rebner and Fritz Grünbaum . . . ”
“Ah, Charleston,” cried my friend, and he cheered up.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 5 October 1926
31. The Wonders of Astrakhan
In Astrakhan people fish and deal in caviar. The smells of these activities are spread throughout the town. Whoever isn’t obliged to go to Astrakhan is advised to give it a miss. Whoever has come to Astrakhan will not stay there for very long. Among the specialities of this town are the famed Astrakhan furs: the lambskin hats, the silver-grey “Persian fur”. The furriers are kept busy. In summer and winter alike (winters are warm here too) Russians, Kalmucks and Kirghiz all wear fur.
I am told that before the Revolution rich people used to live in Astrakhan. I am shown their houses, though many were destroyed in the Civil War. From their ruins you can tell they were boastful and had no taste. Of all the qualities of a building, boastfulness survives longest, the least brick thumps itself on the chest. The builders have fled, they are living abroad. It stands to reason they will have dealt in caviar. But what possessed them to live here where (black, blue, white) caviar grows, and where the fishes stink so mercilessly?
In Astrakhan there is a little park with a pavilion in the middle and a rotunda in the corner. In the evening you pay a small fee and you go in the park and sniff the fish. It is dark, so you picture them dangling from the trees. There are cinema performances in the open air, and primitive cabaret likewise. The bands play cheerful tunes from old times. People drink beer and eat cheap pink langoustines. Not one hour passes in which one doesn’t pine for Baku. Unfortunately, the boat there goes only three times a week.
In order to lend plausibility to my dreams of the steamer, I go down to the harbour. No. 18 is the quay for the boat to Baku. The day after tomorrow.—My Lord, how remote is that! Kalmucks row, Kirghiz lead their camels on halters into town, caviar sellers shout in their offices, clueless peasants sleep out, two days and two nights, waiting for the boat, gypsies play cards. Because it is so evident that the steamship isn’t coming, the mood in the harbour is sadder than in town. To get a faint sense of departure I treat myself to a droshky ride. The seats are narrow and backless, perilous, no roof, and the horses are in white Ku Klux Klan robes against the dust—as if they were going to a three-day event. The cabbies speak hardly any Russian, and hate the cobbles. They go down sandy streets, seeing as the horse is dressed for it. The passenger, having got on in a dark suit, gets off in a silver one. If I had set off in a white one, it would be dove-grey now. To be dressed for Astrakhan means wearing long hooded dust coats, like the horses. In the dimly illuminated night you can see ghosts being driven around by ghostly horses.
And for all that, Astrakhan has a technical college, libraries, clubs and theatres. Ice cream under a swaying arc lamp, fruit and marzipan behind bridal gauze. I pray for an end to the dust plague. The next day God sent a cloudburst. The ceiling of my hotel room, pampered by so much dust, wind and drought, promptly fell to the floor with shock. I hadn’t asked for as much rain as all that. It thundered and lightened. The streets could not be made out. The droshkies groaned along, up to their axles in mud, the spokes dropped soft, grey, heavy clumps of it. The ghosts threw back their hoods and put up familiar human gear. Two couldn’t pass each other on the cobbled main street. One had to turn round and go back at least twenty feet to let the other pass. You triple-jumped to cross the street. I was lucky in that everything I needed was on one block: hotel, writing paper, post office, and café.
In those days in Astrakhan the most important institution was the café. It was run by a Polish family brought here from Cęstochowa by an implacable fate. I had to tell the women all about what they were wearing in Warsaw. I showed extensive knowledge of Polish politics. Doubts people in Astrakhan had about a war involving Poland, Russia and Germany I was able to allay at length. When I am in Astrakhan I am a witty conversationalist.
Without this café, I would have been unable to work, the most important means of production being coffee. There is no role for flies. And yet there they were, morning, noon and night. It is flies not fishes that make up ninety-eight per cent of the fauna of Astrakhan. They are perfectly useless, not a trading commodity, no one lives off them, they live off everyone. Thick black swarms of them sit on dishes, sugar, windows, china plates, leftovers, on bushes and trees, on dung heaps and excreta, and even on clean tablecloths where a human eye discerns nothing of nutritional value. A spilled drop of soup, long since absorbed into the cloth, these flies are capable of eating molecule by molecule, as though with a spoon. On the white tunics that most men here wear sit thousands of flies. Secure and contemplative, they don’t fly up when their host moves, they are capable of sitting for hours at a time on his shoulders. The flies of Astrakhan are nerveless, they have the tranquillity of great mammals, like cats, or their enemies from the insect world, the spiders . . . I am surprised and sad that these intelligent and humane creatures do not come to Astrakhan in numbers where they could be of great benefit to the human race. I have eight garden-spiders in my room, quiet, clever animals, friendly associates of my sleepless nights. By day they sleep in their apartments. At dusk they move into position—two, the most prominent and gifted, to the proximity of the light. Long and patiently they watch the cl
ueless flies, with their fine, hair-thin legs they clamber up ropes spun from nothing and spittle, carry out repairs and stay on the alert, surround their quarry on wide, wide detours, deftly make themselves fast to grains of sand on the wall, work hard and cleverly—but how poorly they are recompensed. A thousand flies buzz about my room, I wish I had twenty thousand poisonous spiders, a whole army of them! If I stay longer in Astrakhan, I would breed them and show them more attention than caviar.
But the people of Astrakhan are only interested in caviar. They are oblivious to the flies. They watch these murderous insects gnaw at their meat, their bread, their fruit, and they don’t raise a finger. Yes, the flies stroll about on their beards, their noses and foreheads, and the people talk and laugh. In the café, they have given up the fight against the flies, they don’t even bother to shut the glass vitrine, they let them gorge themselves on sugar and chocolate, they veritably spoil them. Fly-paper, invented by an American, the thing I most detest among all civilization’s blessings, strikes me as a work of noble idealism when I am in Astrakhan. But the whole of Astrakhan has not one scrap of that precious yellow stuff. I ask them in the café: “Why don’t you have any fly-paper?” They answer evasively and say: “Oh, if only you’d been in Astrakhan before the war, even a couple of months before!” The landlord says it, and the trader. They lend passive support to the reactionary flies. One day these little beasts will eat up the whole of Astrakhan, fishes and caviar and all.
I prefer the beggars to the flies of Astrakhan, more numerous here than anywhere else. They wander slowly through the streets, wailing or singing at the tops of their voices, crying their woes as though following their own corpse, pouring into every beer hall. I give them a kopeck—and on that kopeck they manage to live! Of all the wonders of Astrakhan they are really the most astonishing . . .
Frankfurter Zeitung, 12 October 1926
32. Saint Petroleum
There is an electric railway from Baku to Sabunchi, where vast quantities of petroleum are extracted. It wasn’t built till last year, and is still unfinished. (The trams in Baku are also the work of the Soviet government.) The people are proud of this railway. The Soviet government views it as a local, but highly effective propaganda success. It seems likely that earlier enterprises extracted petroleum more cheaply and used it more efficiently than the present nationalized enterprise. But it is also true that neither the Nobels nor the Rothschilds ever built a tramline for their workforce. All of them were made to cover great distances on foot, in dog-carts, or on primitive farm wagons. Now a spacious, hygienic, modern train leaves Baku every half hour. The Western European is not surprised to see it. But to a Soviet citizen, this railway is not only an acclaimed, long-missed conveyance; it is almost, it is in fact, a symbol. It is the only railway of its kind in the whole of Russia. What to us would be an unsurprising technical innovation in this corner of Eurasia carries political weight. The line preserves and encourages the optimism of the oil workers, many of whom earn comparatively high wages (up to three hundred roubles a month), who have an old revolutionary tradition, and are therefore predisposed to believe in the new state. So rails and carriages, bricks and cement, are capable of political and historical significance. The old entrepreneurs seem not to have considered this as a possibility.
Long before the train moves off the carriages are all full. It’s hot, and a slothful wind seems for once to have taken the place of the prevailing breeze. The sun pierces the windows and heats up walls, floor and ceiling. All the passengers are complaining about the heat—a welcome pretext for conversation. I see Turkish workers with the Red Flag, many of them with Party badges—beside them Turkish women, ritually covered features, an old sheikh for whom people move aside, maybe not reverently but with that degree of tolerance that is not yet a matter of course, and resembles politeness. An Armenian priest is reading a book, a holy book I had thought; but not at all, it is one of the many brochures produced from the new camp. A vendor comes by with Oriental sweets, halvah and baklava, sticky, sugar-powdered, sometimes garish and yet bland things, chewing gum you gulp down if you can get it clear of your teeth. The homeless children or bezprizorniy hunker down on the steps, wangle their way through the feet of the passengers, are picked up, thrown out, and creep miraculously back in through cracks and openings. There are a lot of proles and semi-proles—all drawn by petroleum—it looks menacing, but it’s harmless and hungry. Many people have stunningly beautiful eyes, shining and still haunted. I think of the heavy, tired blink of the Armenian, the veiled, tragic expression of Jewish [ . . . ] Turko-Tartars, the large moist pupils of the Muslim woman looking out between dense cloth wrappings like an animal between stout bars. The conductor begs to be let through. He wears a yellow tunic with tasteful badges, and looks like a British conductor in the colonies. This is a modern, technical Russia with American ambitions. Not a real Russia any more.
These towers suddenly popping up, black, dense, iron—these towers are no longer Russia. They are drilling towers, triumphs, symbols and revelations of the great power called petroleum; “nyeft” in Russian. The word expresses all the sweating fluidity of the substance. A historical sound and a historical sight. An atmosphere of capital, adventure, sensation and novelty. The greatest colonial power looks to these towers, and the greatest continental power holds on to them. This region alone produces at least half a million tonnes a day, the Caucasian earth is very liberal. Thousands of square miles are still unexplored and promising, volcanoes that issue fire signals every few months, betraying subterranean billions. (How barren and petty by comparison is the Galician soil of Drohobycz and Boryslav!) Give us money, money, money! chant the towers. We are ten thousand, twenty thousand—we want to be a hundred thousand, we want to be millions!
Outside Sabunchi’s little station is a blue-green lake, and beyond it a wild, shambolic, steep, treacherous, shitty, dusty path. It leads to the wells and into the town, up a small hill, with a church on its peak, lost, eccentric, puzzled, a feeble competitor to the towers, all alone among twenty thousand foes, cheek by jowl with the Soviet authorities. Left and right of the lake wait endless swarms of dusty droshkies. The coachmen stand upright like Roman charioteers, all of them shouting for custom. Around Sabunchi there are some quiet, distinguished dachas, or summerhouses. Sometimes—not often—a few passengers turn up to go out to the dachas. But there are a hundred times more “phaetons”. All the coachmen call out “Barin!” (Sir!) at once. Each one thinks twenty times a day the fare will choose him, and twenty times he is disappointed, and a thousand times he calls out. Here there are no probabilities, here a profession is a lottery. That’s what people are like: for the sake of tiny odds they will waste an entire day. Coachmen are gamblers.
The traders outside their sad Oriental booths shout themselves hoarse. Their quiet Oriental souls are agitated. Petroleum changes human nature. It ignites people even before it has left the ground. Here its aspect is more Asiatic than Russian. This is the gold-rush town from an American movie.
On the left is the market place. Extremely, preternaturally big green pumpkins litter the ground with their ovals and spheres. Fruits like a race of giants, the succulent diet of the people. Who eats so many pumpkins? More than twenty thousand workers live in Sabunchi; here are at least three times that number of pumpkins. These fruits of a lavish nature almost completely eclipse the grapes, the dates, the figs, the pears. There are a hundred stalls selling fruit, bread, meat, fat pigs, big, black-spotted, heavy, but nimble as dogs, pigs in a hurry: another whim of this southern nature. On the right, on the hilly ground are dwellings, sad, naked, reddish: they look flayed. The corridors are deep and black, the flats are open, the rooms give off a dull warmth, the dense aroma of a constricted life that is not unlike the smell of death. All round no horizon, only towers, towers, towers, black, cross-hatched, clustered together—as though they couldn’t stand unaided. They are so numerous and frail that they flicker and move. You turn away, oppresse
d by their grotesque numbers. When you turn back, it’s as though there were somehow more of them, they press and spawn and make more, they will eat up the big marketplace, the giant pumpkins, the mouldy, diseased houses.
The houses are temporary. The workers who live in them today will drift off to the settlements in a couple of years. For model working settlements are under construction in Azerbaijan. I go to look at one, not quite finished, already two-thirds inhabited. It’s called “Stenka Razin” after the Russian folk hero, the first farmer revolutionary who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, the lord of the Volga delta and the Caspian Sea, still revered today by the people with a tender affection that is far removed from hero-worship.
A deep gorge cuts through a mountain; people tell me it opens onto the sea. Stenka Razin dug it. Here he hid his stolen goods, from here he could run away. In the workers’ settlement there will be a monument to him, in the middle of a lawn: he never dreamed it would come to that. An alien doctrine adopted him after the fact. It would have struck him as odd. But it’s well-intentioned, and maybe he’d have come round to it. There is a playground for children, a club, a theatre, a cinema, a library. The buildings are ground level. Later they will grow up to be bungalows, because that’s the cheapest way. Moscow architects have devised more than a score of styles. Animatedness, difference, variety are the aim; no uniformity.
Only two years ago the earth was still bald, hostile, swampy, stiff. It breathed out death. The fact that it is now alive confirms the wonder-working force of socialism. How modest they are. In our capitalist Ruhrgebiet, which I visited in spring, they use the same means to turn the workers into little bourgeois. Here, they turn them into revolutionaries. Here as there: tin baths, electric sockets, space for a flowerpot, functional and practical furniture screwed to the floor, waxed boards you don’t have to scrub, a quiet gleam, a short sofa. How much that is already! And how little! The needs of the proletariat remain modest, whether he rules or is ruled. I think it’s to do with labour. There it’s coalmines, here the drilling towers. What a delight to man is a drill! How much more do you require of life if you spend eight hours, or six, or four, drilling for petroleum, for Saint Petroleum!?
