Orient Express

by John Dos Passos

  On the way up the hill we passed the Cheka. The pavements round it were brilliantly lit. There was barbed wire in the windows. Sentries walked back and forth. As we walked past, trying to close our nostrils to the jail smell, the idyll crashed about our ears.

  Up at the N.E.R. there was considerable excitement. One of the relievers was with difficulty being got into his cot. Others were talking about typhus and cholera. One man was walking round showing everyone a handful of heavy silver soupspoons—Five cents apiece in American money, what do you think of that?—Are you sure they’re not plated?—Genuine English sterling silver marked with the lion; can’t get anything better’n that—Because Major Vokes bought a necklace in Batum and it turned out to be paste.

  I lay curled up on my cot listening to all this from the next room; the uneasy smell of the summer night came in through the open window with a sliver of moonlight. The street outside was empty and dark, but frailly from far away came the sound of a concertina. The jiggly splintered tune of a concertina was limping its way through the black half desert stone city, slipping in at the windows of barracks, frightening the middleaged people who sat among the last of their Things trembling behind closed shutters, maddening the poor devils imprisoned in the basement of the Cheka, caught under the wheels of the juggernaut of revolution, as people are caught under the wheels in every movement forward or back of the steamroller of human action. The jail is the cornerstone of liberty, thought the E. A. as he fell asleep.

  V. ONE HUNDRED VIEWS OF ARARAT

  1. Tiflis

  The train was made up of one small passenger car jammed with soldiers and many boxcars. I sat on my bag on the station platform as it pulled in and stared ruefully at the grandiloquent order for a compartment in the sleeping-car they had given me at the office of the Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The usual ragged crowd that haunts all railway stations in the Caucasus was scuttling up and down, dragging bags and gunnysacks from one side to the other, a sweating threadbare medley of peasants and soldiers. The Sayyid (that means descendant of the Prophet or of Ali, son of Abu Talib) strode about and made a great speech in Persian and Turkish to everyone who would listen on the rights and appurtenances of a diplomatic passport. At last, after much prodding of a weary interpreter and seeing of dignitaries at desks, it was decided that the nearest equivalent to a sleeper would be the freightcar that carried the newspapers and that the instructive company of great bundles of the Isvestia and the Pravda would be even superior to a compartment and a berth, that was, if the Commissar in charge consented. More commissars at desks were interviewed. Of course the Commissar was only too delighted.… The car was opened and one Samsoun, an Armenian, was discovered therein, to whom the Sayyid addressed a fervent allocation in Turkish on the virtues of cleanliness and hygiene, with the result that water was brought and lysol splashed to the very roof and new copies of all of Moscow’s most famous newspapers spread on the floor for us to sit on. At that point the Sayyid drew his knife and began to massacre a watermelon, and Samsoun effendi, or more properly Tavarishch Samsoun began to make a lustful gurgling noise in his thoat and brazenly asked for cognac. We put him off with a promise of wine later and with a slice of melon. At that point the two grimy youths who were Samsoun’s underlings climbed aboard and the train, late only by some five hours, rumbled out of the station.

  A curious sort of existence people lead along the railroad tracks in the Caucasus and, I suppose, all over Russia; the dilapidated arteries of communication exercise an uneasy sort of attraction. In all the stations there are crowds and even at crossings that seem very far from any village, groups of men and women stand and watch the train go by. Perhaps they feel a vague ownership over the endless gleaming rails and the oilsmeared locomotives, feel that somehow by this means their hungry frustrate lives are linked to great happenings far away. Then so many people seem to live all their lives along the tracks. The soldiers of the Red Army are in many cases permanently quartered in passengercars and freightcars fitted up with bunks that fill up all the sidings joined in long trains with staffcars and clubcars and hospitalcars and with cars loaded with the black bread and salt herring that form the staple rations. Then there are the special armored trains that have been one of the features of each of the campaigns of the civil war. Furthermore, particularly near towns, there are hundreds of freightcars fitted up with windows and stovepipes, used as houses by all manner of families—refugees from Lord knows where, people who repair the railroad, minor officials, gypsies, vagabonds of all sorts. And as the train goes by all this population cranes from between sliding doors and from the little windows of cabooses and scrutinizes with mild insolence the soldiers and peasants and civil employees who sprawl on the roofs and dangle their legs from the open doors of jerkily moving boxcars.

  2. Karakliss

  Moonlight sifts through tall poplars by the railway track and mingles strangely on the floor of the boxcar with the glimmer of the candle in my corner. The Sayyid has contrived a sort of bed out of his suitcase and the provision box and is somewhat uneasily asleep. Probably he’s dreaming of Pan-Islam and driving off the attacks of hundreds of little British devils with cloven hoofs and pith helmets. At the other end of the car the Georgian and Samsoun and his myrmidons have made beds for themselves among the piles of newspapers. Outside, the station platform is deserted, drowned in moonlight. There is the sound of a stream. All along the picket fence are the shadows of people asleep. Along with the clean smell of the river and the mountains that rear spiny backs into the sheer moonlight behind the poplars, comes occasionally a miserable disheartening stench of cold sweat and rags and filthy undernourished bodies huddled somewhere in the sheds about the station.

  Ever since sunset we’ve been in Armenia, having crossed the neutral zone where the Georgians and Armenians burnt each other’s villages till the British stopped them, back in 1918. At the last Georgian stations before we started to climb this long valley up into the Little Caucasus everybody on the train invested largely in watermelons, which could be bought for a couple of thousand roubles apiece. Up here in the mountains and in the famine area, they sell for ten thousand or more.

  At about dusk we had great excitement. Shots were fired and whistles blown all down the train. Samsoun effendi drew an enormous revolver and began to whirl it about with great heroism, and sent off the smallest boy to find out what was the matter. First the news came that a woman had fallen off the top of a freightcar and been killed, but it eventually transpired that it was only a bag of flour that had fallen out of the American relief car. So the flour was picked up and everybody got back to his place, in the cars or on the roof or on the rods, and the train started wheezing its way up the grade again. Samsoun effendi was put in high spirits by the accident and started telling us of past deeds of valor, pointing the revolver absentmindedly at each person in turn as he did so. To get the revolver back into its holster the Sayyid and I had to crack a bottle of our best wine of Kakhetia. The effect was magical. The smallest youngster, a curious boy with a face as careworn as a monkey’s, began to sing songs of the Volga in an unexpectedly deep voice. The Georgian tightened his belt and slapped his thighs and began to dance, and a broad grin divided the rugged features, partly like those of a camel and partly like those of the Terrible Turk of the cartoons, of Samsoun effendi himself.

  3. Alexandropol

  Dusty soldiers and freightyards jammed with freightcars of which the paint has peeled under the hot sun. The little Armenian girl has picked up her basket and gone. She appeared somewhere in the night in tow of a white-whiskered station master. Caused quite a stir. The Sayyid sat up on his valise, and noticing that she had on her chin the mole so admired of Orientals, put on an air of the most splendid doggishness and cried out Quel théâtre! in a loud voice. Samsoun effendi lit a candle and started smoothing his hair, looking at himself with great satisfaction in a small pocket mirror the while. But the Armenian girl was quite unmoved by all these manifestations and went calmly to sleep wit
h her head on her basket.

  As it grew light we crossed the watershed of the Little Caucasus. On the north side the villages, scattered collections of square houses of volcanic stone, roofed with turf and often topped by tall hayricks, were intact, and wellfed peasants were already in the fields getting in the crops, but from the moment the train started winding down the southerly slope, everything was sheer desert. The last Turkish attack, in 1920, had wiped the country clean; not a house intact in the villages, no crops, even the station buildings systematically destroyed, and everything movable carted away. Ghengiz Khan and his Tatars couldn’t have laid waste more thoroughly. Alexandropol itself, though war-seedy to the last degree, had evidently been spared. It straggles among railway yards on a yellow scorched plain, where the wind blows the dust in swirling clouds from one side to the other; the most outstanding buildings are the great rows of grey barracks where orphans are housed by the Near East Relief. On the station platform the usual crowd, ragged peasants and soldiers, Russian and Armenian.

  Ararat, when I first saw it, was as faintly etched against a grey sky as is Fuji in some of Hokusai’s Hundred Views, a tall cone streaked white against pearly mist. The train was winding round a shoulder of the hills through reddish badlands that glistened in the flat spaces with alkali. Some time before the Georgian had pointed up over dry hills and said—Ani. Somewhere in the rocky wilderness to our left there had been the capital of the ancient kingdom of Armenia. I was as excited at the sight of Ararat as if I could see the Ark still balanced on the peak of it, and made an attempt to stir the Sayyid’s enthusiasm on the subject. But he refused to budge from where he was tending an elaborate engine of sticks and bits of twine that was intended to keep the tiny teapot from falling off our tinier alcohol lamp. When he did finally get to his feet, he looked at the mountain appraisingly for a long time, taking little sips from a tin cup of tea, and then shook his head and said:—Damavand is higher and more pointed—But the Ark and Noah and the elephant and the kangaroo and all the rest of the zoo didn’t land on Damavand!—They used to say that there were divs on Damavand, said the Sayyid, and considering the argument to have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, he squatted in his corner again and began brewing a new pot of tea.

  We were coming down from the hills into an irregular basinlike valley at the end of which the streaky white peak of Ararat soared on two great strongly-etched curves above the bluish mass of the mountain. In the foreground for a moment were the roofless stone walls of a village; from behind one of the huts drifted up a little woodsmoke from a campfire, but nowhere in the whole landscape of tortured hills and livid white alkali plains was anything alive to be seen. Then a squall that for a long time had been gathering up indigo fringes above the mountains to the west swept across and hid everything in oblique sheets of rain and hail.

  At a station on the plain we sent Samsoun effendi to get water for tea, and instead he brought back, to the Sayyid’s extraordinary delight, what the Sayyid always calls a Mademoiselle.

  We sat on the mysterious packing case and looked out over the plains at Ararat, that now, much nearer, stood erect and luminous above the dusk that was already seeping into the plain. We had given the Mademoiselle a cup of tea and some black bread and caviar from our provision box, and she seemed vaguely content and expansive, like a cat tickled about the ears. Evidently she had been taut on the defensive all the journey. She had come from Tiflis in a car full of soldiers. She had a pleasant Teutonic face, with rounded cheeks and steel-blue eyes, like Vermeer’s women, and was dressed with a faint reminiscence of style in a soiled white suit. She wore stockings, a distinction in these parts, and little rope sandals. She started to talk gradually, remembering her French with effort—Yes, I am going to Erivan. I work there as a stenographer in an office.… Of course a government office; there are no others. No, things aren’t so bad there. People are starving.… Certainly it’s worse than Tiflis, but, do you know? we are so used to it all now. We don’t notice those things any more. We have a nice house and roses in the garden and I have dogs.… I even take horseback rides. Still, it’s a miserable existence, and all because my father and mother took fright when the Germans were getting near to Riga. You see we are Esthonians, not Russians. We lived in Riga, and when it seemed as if the Germans would bombard the town we fled into Russia. Many other people fled, too. And then our troubles began—She laughed—What a time we live in!

  The train had stopped at a station. The plain was marshy now. In front of us, beyond a canebrake, was Ararat, at the base indigo, cut across by level streaks of mist, and on the summit bright rose. Behind it like a shadow was the smaller cone, all dark, of Little Ararat. Mosquitoes whined in swarms about our ears.

  —But as I was telling you, went on the mademoiselle,—oh, these mosquitoes! You can’t live a week in Erivan without coming down with malaria; really it’s a frightful place.… Everybody there is dying.… But anyway, although I was just a child then—you see I’m not awfully old now—I kept begging mother and father not to go. We had such a lovely big old house with linden trees round it and a garden full of overgrown shrubs where I used to play. You’ve never been in Riga? The Baltic is so beautiful in summer out among the islands.… My grandmother wouldn’t leave. I think she’s still alive, living in our old house. I’m going back there if I die in the attempt.… I have already applied for a passport, and I have seen the Esthonian consul in Tiflis.… That’s what I went up for. But it’s so difficult to get anything done here. They get so in the habit of prohibiting—She laughed again—Oh, they make me so angry. They just go about and if they find anybody wants to do anything, they cry: Stop it, stop it.

  The Sayyid in his corner was boiling a new pot of water for tea. A lurch of the train upset pot and lamp and everything, so I left the mysterious packing case to help reconstruct the scaffolding on which depended the frequency of our cups of tea. A moment later I saw that Samsoun effendi, who had been at his little pocket mirror again, had taken my place and was deep in conversation with the Mademoiselle. She looked at me over his shoulder and wrinkling up her nose like a rabbit’s, said: Il me fait la cour. Pensez!

  The Sayyid looked from one to the other and suddenly let out a stentorian: Quel théâtre! Then laughing he reached for the last watermelon, sliced it deftly with his penknife, and handed me half of it as a peace-offering.

  Through the little upper window of the boxcar I caught a last glimpse of Ararat for that day, as I sat on my suitcase with my teeth in the sweet dripping melon, three streaks of watermelon pink converging against a sky of solid indigo.

  4. Erivan

  Long straight grassgrown streets full of a sickly stench of dung and ditchwater. Half-naked children with the sagging cheeks and swollen bellies of starvation cower like hurt animals in doorways and recesses in the walls. Over grey walls here and there an appletree with fruit on it. Up above, the unflecked turquoise of the sky in which from every little eminence one can see the aloof white glitter of Ararat. They say, though I haven’t seen it, that a dead wagon goes round every day to pick up the people who die in the streets. People tell horrible stories of new graves plundered and bodies carved up for food in the villages. Yet on the Boulevard, the down-at-the-heels central square of the place, people stroll about looking moderately well fed and well dressed. There is plenty of fruit in the fruitshops, and meat and cheese and wretched gritty black bread in the bazaars. The Russians have started a cinema and an Armenian theater, that flaunts gaudy posters opposite the Orthodox church.

  It was there the Sayyid found a Persian who kept a shop. He was a Mussulman and told how the Armenians had massacred and driven out the majority of the Mohammedan inhabitants of Erivan. We bought a watermelon and ate it on the spot, while the Sayyid and the Persian chattered happily in turki. I heard the word Americai coupled with Ararat a couple of times, and asked the Sayyid what was being said—This man says that last year an American, an American journalist, went up to the top of Ararat and died there. He was
poisoned by an Armenian. This man was his servant.

  I was asking for details when several people came into the shop—He won’t talk now, said the Sayyid mysteriously. We never heard the rest of the story.

  Opposite the station a crumbling brown wall. In the shade of it lie men, children, a woman, bundles of rags that writhe feverishly. We ask someone what’s the matter with them—Nothing, they are dying. A boy almost naked, his filthy skin livid green, staggers out of the station, a bit of bread in his hand, and lurches dizzily towards the wall. There he sinks down, too weak to raise it to his mouth. An old man with a stick in his hand hobbles slowly towards the boy. He has blood-filled eyes that look out through an indescribable mat of hair and beard. He stands over the boy a minute and then, propping himself up with his stick, grabs the bread, and scuttles off round the corner of the station. The boy makes a curious whining noise, but lies back silently without moving, his head resting on a stone. Above the wall, against the violet sky of afternoon, Ararat stands up white and cool and smooth like the vision of another world.