Orient Express

by John Dos Passos

  On the road between Gareh Chaman and Tourkemanchai, where, by the way, was signed the first of Persia’s disastrous European treaties, we caught up with the caravan of some of the grandees of Tabriz on the pilgrimage to the tomb of the Imaum Riza at Meshed. Such a prancing of white horses and a shouting of donkey drivers and a bouncing of panniers full of brighteyed children and ladies invisible under their cheddars! A fine whitebearded mollah with the blue turban of a Sayyid, descendant of the prophet, led the way on a well-groomed grey horse of which the tail and mane had been dyed with saffron. Not only the living but the dead were enjoying the benefits of the pilgrimage; at the end of the caravan came a long train of mules with coffins strapped to them on their way to reburial on sacred soil.

  —If they worried as much about the living as they do about the dead, said the Sayyid, when we had got away from the dust and the shouting, Iran would be one of the finest countries in the world. If they would save the money they spend on pilgrimages and invest it in fabriks and railroads …

  —But why factories and railroads …?

  —Have you been in Germany?—Not for a long time?—Oh, but the commodité.… Everything is so convenient. Here things are done with such difficulty. Our peasants, if you knew how hard they worked, and nothing for it but to die of starvation when there is a famine in order that some grandee may make a fortune.…

  Conversation was interrupted by the phaeton sticking firmly in the mud in the bottom of a gulch. We had to clamber out and Maa’mat had to be waked up and made to push behind and the horses had to be lashed and shouted at until at last the phaeton bounced, careening perilously, out of the mud and came to rest halfway up the rocky hillside. The opportunity was pronounced an excellent one for the eating of a melon, a long yellow one, milky inside with a flavor like almonds. It threw the Sayyid into a haze of rosy reminiscence, and when we had got settled in our pumpkin coach again, he started talking slowly:

  —How well I remember when I first arrived in Leipsig from Constantinople.… Ah quelle commodité! It was so quiet at the hotel with thick carpets on the floors, and when you ordered anything, zut, it was brought! I dined there very well with wine, such good wine, and the waiter spoke French—I hadn’t learnt German then—and was very amiable. When I had finished he asked me if there was anything more I should like. And I spoke my thoughts aloud and said without knowing it, Yes a mademoiselle. The waiter smiled and said he’d see what he could do, and I thought he was joking and went up to bed. When I was half undressed, who should appear but the waiter saying that the mademoiselle was waiting for me downstairs. I said send her up, but the waiter said that wouldn’t do at all. And that is the whole difference between Oriental and European women. So I got dressed again and went down. I was so ignorant then of the ways of civilization; and the mademoiselle was very charming and took me to a cabaret where we drank champagne and there was music and she taught me many things.… Ah quelle commodité!

  4. The White Bedbugs of Mianej

  From Tourkemanchai on there was no appreciable road. The phaeton rattled over rocky hillsides, doubled itself up and leapt chasms like a flea, charged along the crests of ridges, dived into rocky defiles where at every instant we expected the whole contraption to do the trick of the one-horse shay. At a deserted caravanserai of the Shah Abbas sort, a roadguard, a most villainous-looking redheaded giant, met us and told us that last night a traveller had been sabred from the shoulder to the navel by robbers on that very spot. We gave him two krans and he went his way. The sun was hot like a lash in your face, we had eaten all our melons, and the water jar broke, and for all that day’s farsachs we saw no living thing. Quel théâtre! cried the Sayyid at every lurch.

  —Précautions. Toujours des précautions, was the burden of the Sayyid’s cry as he superintended the cleaning of the roof in the caravanserai outside the gates of Mianej, a town famous for its flies, its gnats, its mosquitoes and especially its white bedbugs which breed a private fever of their own which has made the town’s name renowned in the annals of medicine.

  That afternoon we fought the flies and drank tea and discussed politik to the effect that Persia’s policy should be to encourage European penetration from any countries that did not touch her borders, but to look with constant suspicion on her two great neighbors. That had been the reason for the pro-German tilt of the Democrats and Nationalists during the war—So far we have been saved by the fact that Britain and Russia can’t agree. For a moment they did agree in the early part of the war and we went under, trampled like the grass of a battlefield.… But now they don’t know us. They don’t know what we will do next, and we don’t tell our thoughts. Now is the moment to assure our independence. To do that we must have capital and foreign help, but not from our neighbors, from more disinterested countries.… But we must work slowly, cautiously, keeping our aims secret, toujours avec précautions, avec beaucoup de précautions.… As he spoke, the Sayyid wrinkled his face into an expression of almost superhuman cunning; then neatly catching a fly off his forehead, he said conclusively, Diplomatik!

  The night was the first of Moharram, the month of mourning for Hussein, the great martyr of the Shiah faith. The mosquitoes and sandflies were so thick it was impossible to sleep. The Sayyid was oppressed by the fear of a lurking bedbug and lay in a small disinfected patch on the floor, moaning from time to time Quel théâtre! in the most dismal fashion. I covered my head and face with a bandana and walked up and down a little balcony smoking and watching good old Orion climb slowly into the sky. From the town came a roll of drums and in constant breathless rhythm cries of Hussein, Hassan, Hussein, Hassan. In the intervals dogs barked deafeningly. The air from the courtyard had a sodden putrid smell, and I could hear the bells of our horses jingling as they fought off the mosquitoes and continually came the sound of men moving in unison and shouting with all the hard-muscled ferocity of Islam, Hussein, Hassan, Hussein, Hassan.

  5. The Humpless Camel of Djemalabad

  In the morning Khouflankou, a jolly broadbacked pass crossed by a paved road built, I suppose, by the indefatigable Shah Abbas. Clear thyme-scented air to blow away the miasmas of Mianej. But the Sayyid refused to be comforted. He assured me with tears in his eyes that he had been bitten and would probably fall sick and die. Et après tellement de précautions, he ended sadly, as we breasted the last upward curve. Neither the scenery nor a new stock of melons nor seedless white grapes of ambrosial fragrance would distract him. He had diagnosed himself as sick and it was due to his professional reputation to prove it, so sick he was; malaria, it turned out.

  Discussed matters of religion at lunch in a rather mournful tone under an appletree in the ruined village of Djemalabad while a very old camel mangy and humpless looked at us fixedly with a “They’ll come to a bad end” expression from the next field. The Sayyid said that all prophets had a little truth and that their followers should unite rather than squabble, since le Dieu was le Dieu by whatever name you called him. No, he was not a Baha’i, but he thought in many ways as the Baha’is thought, and they were good people, honest and tolerant and anxious for progress and education; he only wished there were more of them in Persia. But the poor people were very ignorant and fanatic and believed whatever the mollahs told them—Think, he said, suddenly sitting bolt upright,—I might have been a mollah instead of a doctor and a man of science.… My father was a mujtahid, a very holy man, and if the American missionaries had not talked to my father and induced him to send me abroad to study, I should certainly have worn a beard and a blue turban and became a mujtahid. Do you wonder I like the things of America?

  Then the Sayyid got to talking with a very ragged man who sat a little way off from us and ate our melonrinds. It turned out that his father had owned this field and many more, but that the Russians had come and the Turks had come and they had destroyed the crops and burnt the house and killed his father, and now he was a beggar. He told the story cheerfully as part of the divine order of things. Islam is truly self-surrender.
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  6. The Robin’s-egg Domes of Zendjan

  At Tarzikand the only place we could get to sleep was a contraption of planks perilously balanced over a cistern full of croaking frogs. The cistern was in a little walled garden of almondtrees. A terrific wind blew so that the coals would not stay in the samovar, and bits of the paper-thin bread at supper kept being carried away. As I lay on my back carefully balanced on the shaky planks the stars were like silver balls, Christmas-tree ornaments, hung on the swaying branches of the almondtrees.

  During these days the Sayyid was silent, took quinine and watched his temperature. We spent another night at Yekendje, a glen full of huge poplars that grew along the pebbly riverbed like those silvery trees in Piero della Francesca’s Baptism. There we took up our abode on the roof of the khan where was a little mud room into which retired the Sayyid and his malaria. We were waited on most charmingly there by a little boy named Kholam-Hussein who had run away from his home in Zendjan because, as he said, he did not like his father any more. When we asked him in the morning if there was anything we could do for him, he said that perhaps the Sayyid, who was a doctor, a hakim, could give him some medicine to make his complexion light, for he was very black.

  In Zendjan the Sayyid perked up under the influence of a very aromatic drink named bidmesh, that had an odor a little like orange blossoms and slipped down one’s gullet with a delicious drowsy smoothness. We made an attempt to dine in a restaurant in the bazaars but were told with brutal firmness Farangi nadjiss: A foreigner is unclean. The Sayyid could not even convince them that he himself was a good Mussulman and a descendant of the prophet, for he was wearing at the time a European felt hat. So we dined ignominiously at the inn and had a furious argument about industrialism. As we had walked through the bazaar, the Sayyid had made a great clamor about how hard the men who made copper kettles and the silversmiths worked and how much better it would be to have it all done by machinery. He seemed to have the idea, universal in these parts, that machinery worked itself. I tried to tell him that the life of an industrial worker in Europe and America was not all beer and skittles, and even wondered whether those people hammering away at their copper pots, miserably underpaid as they were, might not get more out of life than, say, the steelworker in Germany, for all his moving pictures and bierhalle with which to amuse himself. But he snowed me under with a long list of famines and extortions of grandees and mujtahids and governors—No, he said at last, we must have fabriks and railways. Then we shall be a great nation.

  The next morning we left the holy and dilapidated city of Zendjan. The sun glittered entrancingly on the dome of the mosque that was the color and shape of a robin’s egg. The nadjiss business came up once more that afternoon. We were drinking tea in a little roadhouse when a hadji with a huge crimson-dyed beard who was sitting in the corner smoking a thick-stemmed pipe saw fit to object to our presence. But the Sayyid was on his mettle. He shot out a verse of Saadi’s on the subject of courtesy to strangers, and without taking breath delivered himself of an enormous passage of the Koran from the chapter entitled The Cow. Then he stopped suddenly and challenged the hadji to go on from where he had left off. The hadji stuttered and stammered, but made no headway, and finally had to admit that the Sayyid was a good Mussulman and a learned man. He even handed him his pipe as a peace offering.

  From then on the Sayyid’s malaria was virtually cured. When we reached Kasvin he was chipper as a sparrow, and full of regretful reminiscences of the German mademoiselles—I shall marry a German, he said—I have a girl friend there who is a doctor, the daughter of a colonel. I think she will marry me when I am ready. I could not marry a Persian. They are very pretty but they are not developed. It would be like marrying an animal.… But all that will change; you will see!

  7. The Guest Room at Kasvin

  Kasvin was full of tall planetrees where perched enormous quantities of crows, that at dusk flapped cawing about the streets. We stayed with the Sayyid’s brother and were royally wined and dined, although it was Moharram, in which month the Persians don’t drink wine or allow any sort of amusement. There is something very pleasant about the simplicity with which middleclass Persians live. The rooms are often bare except for rugs and a few chairs and couches. There are no servants about; the sons of the house bring the pewter trays at meals and wait upon the guests. There are no beds or ornaments of any sort; at night and at siesta time mattresses and quilts are brought out of cupboards and unrolled. Everything seems to go on strangely quietly and without fuss. Out of the patterns of rugs and cups of tea and softvoiced subtle talk and the vaguely cloying taste of sweet drinks is woven an extraordinary harmony of indolence. In Persia—I suppose it’s the same throughout Islam—life gives me the impression of having no surge and torrent to it. It is like a dry watercourse that has once been a swelling river, but is reduced to a few quiet pools that deflect the blue and the clouds, that within their limits perhaps contain more intensity of wriggling intricate life than ever the river did, but that are troublingly discontinuous, intermittent.

  It seems to be the custom in Persia to turn in immediately after supper, and that night in Kasvin when I was left alone with my bedding in one of the upper rooms of the house, I was seized with an uncontrollable desire to walk about the streets. No use, for the house door was sure to be locked and I was afraid if I wandered out of my room I’d get into the women’s apartments. As a substitute I managed to crawl through my tiny window on to a little roof from which I could see the flat roofs and the inky-shadowed courtyards of the town stretching away in every direction under the moon. Opposite me was the fat dome and the stumpy tiled minaret of the Friday Mosque. On many of the roofs one could see figures in blankets rolled up asleep; occasionally there was some movement in a courtyard. I thought of a story of de Maupassant’s in which a girl stands up darkly naked in the moonlight on the flat roof of a house in Morocco. And for some reason a spasm of revolt against the romantic Morris Gest sort of Orient, and there’s tons of it even in the East, came over me to the point of climbing in through the window again and filling up pages of my notebook about it. Admitting the spectacle, the crimson beards and the saffron beards and the huge turbans and the high-domed hats of felt and the rugs and the gaudily caparisoned white horses and the beautiful gestures of old men and the shrouded ghosts of women and the camels with their long soft strides and the dim richness of the lofty vaulted storerooms in bazaars, was not all this dead routine, a half-forgotten rite learned ages ago? It is in the West that blood flows hot and that the world is disorderly, romantic, that fantastic unexpected things happen. Here everything has been tried, experienced, worn out. Wishing myself at Broadway and Forty-second Street I lay down on my soft mattress. As soon as I was quiet I heard a drumbeat in the distance and voices throaty, taut, ferocious, shouting in quick alternate rhythm Hassan, Hussein, Hassan Hussein, as if it had been yesterday that Hussein, the gentle grandson of the prophet, had died thirsty at Kerbela.

  In the morning before we left Kasvin the Sayyid performed an operation; then we jingled off in state, escorted by several officers of gendarmerie on their horses, leaving the victim bloody and groaning through his ether on a rickety table in the governor’s dispensary. We ate grapes as the phaeton dragged with impressive slowness through dusty roads and the Sayyid talked about the revolt of Asia. First, he said, it was the collapse of Russia in the war with Japan that made Asia wonder whether it had been eternally ordained in the books of fate that her people should be slaves of Europe. Then the Turkish Constitution and the Persian Constitution had shown that the shady and dilapidated groves of the Orient had not been entirely withered under the killing blast of energy out of the west. And during the war, while Europe was fighting, Asia was thinking. Things moved very slowly in Asia, so slowly Europeans did not notice and said they moved not at all, but the time would come when the exploiting powers would suddenly find they did not know the road they were walking on. That was how things moved in Asia—Look at me, said the Sayy
id shrilly,—when I was a small boy, I thought the Europeans a superior race, they seemed to have done so much five or six years ago; I thought the best thing that could happen to Persia was to be ruled by the British. But now.… I have seen all countries, I have heard all their propaganda, I have seen the money they gave in bribes, and their methods of fighting, all these highly civilized exalted races of Europe, and I know what I know. And what I know the muledrivers know, and the makers of clay pots and the men who rub you down in the baths and the farmers and the nomads. No, I will die gladly before my country is dominated by any European nation. And I am not the only one.

  —As for the British here in Persia.… yes, I know they are a great people. I spent three days in London once; it rained all the time, but I went about and saw the people, and I knew then that they were braves gens. But here it is not so, not towards us, and for that reason I shall fight against them, avec diplomatik, as long as I live. And among the Turks it is the same, and among the Arabs it is the same, and among the Afghans it is the same. First we liked the British because they were better than the Russians, but now there is no pressure from Russia, and the British have changed. And there is not so much resignation in Islam as there used to be. Europe is teaching us, giving us weapons.

  8. The Little People in Persia