A Russian Journal

by John Steinbeck

  They taught us a toast in Ukrainian which we like: “Let us drink to make people at home happy.” And they toasted again to peace, always to peace. Both of these men had been soldiers, and both of them had been wounded, and they drank to peace.

  Then Korneichuk, who had been to America once, said rather sadly that he had been to Hyde Park, and there he had seen pictures of Roosevelt and Churchill, of Roosevelt and De Gaulle, but there he had seen no picture of Roosevelt and Stalin. And he said they had been together, and they had worked together, and why in Hyde Park had they removed the photographs of them?

  The music grew faster and faster, and more and more people came to dance, and colored lights were thrown on the floor, and far below the river reflected the lights of the city.

  Two Russian soldiers danced a wild dance together, a dance of stamping boots and swinging hands, a dance of the war fronts. Their heads were shaven, and their boots were highly polished. They danced madly, and red and green and blue lights flashed over the dance floor.

  The orchestra played a wild Georgian melody, and from one of the tables a girl got up and danced all by herself. And she danced beautifully, and no one else was on the floor while she was dancing. Gradually a few people began clapping in rhythm to the music, and then more, until there was a soft beat of clapping hands to her dancing. And when the music stopped she went back to her table, and there was no applause. There had been no exhibitionism in it, she had simply wanted to dance.

  With the soft music, the lights, and the peaceful river below, our friends again began to speak of the war, as though it were a haunting thing they could never get very far from. They spoke of the dreadful cold, before Stalingrad, where they had lain in the snow and had not known how it would come out. They spoke of horrible things they could not forget. Of how a man had warmed his hands in the blood of a newly dead friend, so that he could pull the trigger of his gun.

  A poet came to our table, and he said, “I have a mother-in-law, and when the war came to Rostov she would not leave because she had an oriental rug that she treasured.” And he said, “We retreated, and we fought the whole war, and we came back to Rostov. I went to her place, and she was still there, and so was the oriental rug.”

  “You know,” he said, “when an army moves into a city there are many accidents, and many people are killed by mistake. And when I went to my mother-in-law’s, and she came to the door, the thought flashed through my mind, why shouldn’t she have an accident now? Why shouldn’t my gun go off by mistake?” And he finished, “It didn’t happen. And I have wondered why ever since.”

  Capa had set up his cameras on the roof of the little pavilion; he was photographing the dancers and he was happy. The orchestra played a sad song from one of Korneichuk’s plays. It is the song of the sailors of the Baltic. When they had to retreat, they sank their ships, and this is a song of sadness and a requiem to their sunken ships.

  CHAPTER 5

  IN THE MORNING WE looked up the date, and it was August 9. We had been just nine days in the Soviet Union. But so many had been our impressions and sights that it seemed like much more to us.

  Capa awakens in the morning slowly and delicately, as a butterfly comes out of its chrysalis. For an hour after he awakens, he sits in stunned and experimental silence, neither awake nor asleep. My problem was to keep him from taking a book or a newspaper into the bathroom, for then he would be there for at least an hour. I began to prepare three intellectual questions for him every morning, questions in sociology, in history, in philosophy, in biology, questions designed to shock his mind into awareness that the day was come.

  On the first day of my experiment I asked him the following questions: What Greek tragedian took part in the battle of Salamis? How many legs has an insect? And, finally, what was the name of the pope who sponsored and collected the Gregorian chants? Capa sprang from his bed with a look of pain on his face, sat staring at the window for a moment, and then rushed to the bathroom with a copy of a Russian newspaper which he could not read. And he was gone for an hour and a half.

  Every morning, for two or three weeks, I prepared the questions for him, and he never answered one of them, but he got to muttering to himself most of the day, and he complained bitterly that he could not sleep in anticipation of the questions in the morning. However, there was no evidence, except his word, that he could not sleep. He claimed that the horror created in his mind by my questions had set him back intellectually forty years, or, roughly, to minus ten years.

  Capa had stolen books in Moscow to bring along, three detective stories, the Notebooks of Maxim Gorki, Vanity Fair, and a report of the United States Department of Agriculture for 1927. All these books were returned to someone before we left Russia, but I am quite sure they were not returned to their owners.

  On this day, August 9, we went to the farm village called Shevchenko. We called it in the future Shevchenko I, since another farm village we subsequently visited was also called Shevchenko, named after a much beloved Ukrainian national poet.

  For a few miles our road was paved, and then we turned to the right and went along a dirt road, cut and torn to pieces. We went through pine forests and over a plain where vicious fighting had taken place. Everywhere there was evidence of it. The pine trees were ripped and ragged from machine-gun fire. There were trenches and machine-gun placements, and even the roads were cut and jagged by the tracks of tanks and pitted by shell fire. Here and there lay rusting bits of military equipment, burned-out tanks, and wrecked trucks. This country had been defended and lost, and the counterattack had fought slowly over every inch of territory.

  Shevchenko I has never been one of the best farms because its land is not of the first quality, but before the war it was a fairly prosperous village, a village of three hundred and sixty-two houses, in other words, of three hundred and sixty-two families. It was a going concern.

  After the Germans passed over it, there were eight houses left, and even those had the roofs burned off them. The people were scattered and many of them killed, and the men were in the forest, fighting as partisans, and God knows how the children took care of themselves.

  But after the war the people came back to their village. New houses were springing up, and since it was harvest time, the houses were built before and after work, and even at night, by the light of lanterns. Men and women worked together to build their little houses. The method was invariable: they built one room and they lived in it until they could build another room. Since it is very cold in the Ukraine in the winter, the houses are built like this: The walls are of squared logs, mortised at the corners. To these logs heavy laths are nailed, and then a thick plaster is applied inside and out to turn the cold away.

  There is a hall, which is a combination storeroom and entrance. From there one goes into the kitchen, a white plaster room, with a brick oven and hearth for the cooking. That fireplace and oven is raised about four feet above the floor, and in this the bread is baked, the flat brown cakes of Ukrainian bread, which are very good.

  Next to this is the communal room, with its dining table and its decorations on the wall. This is the parlor, and it has the paper flowers, the holy pictures, and the photographs of the dead. And on the walls are the decorations of the soldiers who have come from this family. The walls are white, and there are shutters on the windows to be closed against the winter cold.

  Opening off this room are one or two bedrooms, depending on the size of the family. And since these people lost everything, the bedding is whatever they can get now. Pieces of rug, and sheepskin, anything to keep them warm. The Ukrainians are a clean people, and their houses are immaculate.

  Part of our misinformation had been that on the collective farms the people lived in barracks. This was not true. Each family had its house and a garden and an orchard where there were flowers, and where there were large vegetable patches and beehives. And most of these gardens were about an acre in extent. Since the Germans had destroyed all the fruit trees, new trees were bei
ng planted, apple, and pear, and cherry.

  We went first to the new town council house, where we were greeted by the manager, who had lost an arm in the fighting, and his bookkeeper, who had just been demobilized from the Army and was still in his uniform, and three elderly men of the farm council. We told them that we knew how busy they were during the harvest, but that we wanted to see part of the harvest ourselves.

  They told us how it had been before, and how it was now. When the Germans came, this farm had had seven hundred horned cattle, and now there were only two hundred animals of all kinds. They had had two large gasoline engines, two trucks, three tractors, and two threshing machines. And now they had one small gasoline engine and one small threshing machine. They had no local tractor. In the plowing they drew one from the tractor station near by. They had had forty horses, and now they had four.

  The town had lost fifty men of fighting age and fifty others, of all ages, and there were great numbers of crippled and maimed. Some of the children were legless and some had lost eyes. But the town, which needed labor so dreadfully, tried to give every man work to do that he could do. All the cripples who could work at all were put to work, and it gave them a sense of importance and a place in the life of the farm, so that there were few neurotics among the hurt people.

  They were not sad people. They were full of laughter, and jokes, and songs.

  The farm raised some wheat, and some millet, and some corn. But it was a light, sandy land, and its main crops were cucumbers and potatoes, tomatoes and honey and sunflowers. A great deal of sunflower-seed oil is used.

  We went first to the fields where the women and the children were harvesting cucumbers. They were divided into battalions and were in competition with one another, each group trying to pick the most cucumbers. The lines of women were stretched across the field, laughing and singing and shouting at one another. They were dressed in long skirts and blouses and headcloths, and no one wore shoes, for shoes are still too precious to use in the fields. The children were dressed only in trousers, and their little bodies were turning brown under the summer sun. Along the edges of the field there were piles of picked cucumbers waiting for the trucks.

  A little boy named Grischa, who wore an ornamental hat made of marsh grass, ran up to his mother and cried with wonder, “But these Americans are people just like us!”

  Capa’s cameras caused a sensation. The women shouted at him, and then fixed their kerchiefs, and settled their blouses, the way women do all over the world before they are photographed.

  There was one woman, with an engaging face and a great laugh, whom Capa picked out for a portrait. She was the village wit. She said, “I am not only a great worker, I am twice widowed, and many men are afraid of me now.” And she shook a cucumber in the lens of Capa’s camera.

  And Capa said, “Perhaps you’d like to marry me now?”

  She rolled back her head and howled with laughter. “Now you, look!” she said. “If God had consulted the cucumber before he made man, there would be less unhappy women in the world.” The whole field roared with laughter at Capa.

  They were lively, friendly people, and they made us taste the cucumbers and the tomatoes for quality. The cucumber is a very important vegetable. It is salted, and the resulting pickles are used all winter. And green tomatoes are salted too, and these are the salads for the people when the cold and the snow come. These, together with cabbages and turnips, are the winter vegetables. And although the women laughed and talked, and called to us, they did not stop working, for this is a good harvest, seventy per cent better than last year, the first really good harvest since 1941, and they have great hopes from it.

  We moved on to a flowered meadow where there were hundreds of beehives, and a little tent where the beekeeper lived. The air was filled with the soft roar of bees working in the clover of the meadow. And the old bearded beekeeper came walking rapidly toward us, with nets to put over our faces. We put them on and shoved our hands in our pockets. The bees buzzed angrily about us.

  The old beekeeper opened his hives and showed us the honey. He had been a beekeeper for thirty years, he said, and he was very proud. For many years he had kept bees without knowing much about bees. But now he was reading and studying. And he had a great treasure, he had six new queens. He said they came from California. And I judged from his description that they were some California variant of the Italian black. He said he was very happy with his new bees. He said that they would be more frost resistant, and that they would work earlier and later in the season.

  Then he took us into his little tent and closed the flaps, and he cut great slices of the good black sour rye bread of the Ukraine, and put honey on it, and gave it to us to eat. The deep hum of the bees came from outside. And later he opened the hives again and brought out handfuls of bees without fear, as most beekeepers do. But he warned us not to uncover ourselves, for the bees do not like strangers.

  From there we went to a field where they were threshing wheat. The equipment was pitifully inadequate. There was an old one-cylinder gas engine running an ancient threshing machine, and their blower they turned by hand. And here again we noticed the shortage of men. There were so many more women than men, and of the men who were there so many were crippled. The engineer who operated the gas engine had all the fingers on one hand gone.

  Since the land was not very good, the yield in wheat was not high. The grain came pouring out of the threshing machine on to a large canvas. Children were stationed at the edge of the canvas so that any grains which happened to jump off and fall into the dirt could be put back, for every grain was precious. The clouds had been piling up all morning, and now a sprinkle of rain started. The people rushed up with cloths to cover the pile of wheat.

  An argument was going on among several of the men, and Poltarazki translated to us softly. It seemed that they were arguing as to who was to invite us to lunch. One man had the larger table, and the wife of another had baked that morning. One man claimed that his house was just finished, and it was new, and he should be the man to be the host. And so they agreed. But this man had very little to eat from. The rest should contribute glasses, and plates, and wooden spoons. And when it was decided that his house would be used, the women of his house hiked up their skirts and trotted for the village.

  Since we have come back from Russia, probably the remark we have heard most is “I guess they put on a show for you; I guess they really fixed it up for you. They didn’t show you the real thing.” The people in this village did put on a show for us. They put on the same kind of show a Kansas farmer would put on for a guest. They did the same thing that our people do, so that Europeans say “The Americans live on chicken.”

  They really put on a show for us. They came dirty from the fields, and they bathed and put on their best clothes, and the women got out from the trunks headcloths that were clean and fresh. They washed their feet and put on boots, and they put on freshly laundered skirts and blouses. Little girls collected flowers and arranged them in bottles and brought them into the clean parlor. And delegations of children from other houses came in with water glasses, and plates, and spoons. One woman brought a jar of her special pickles, and the vodka bottles from all over the village were contributed. And a man brought a bottle of Georgian champagne, saved for heaven knows what great occasion.

  In the kitchen the women put on a show too. The fire roared in the new white oven, and the flat cakes of good rye bread were baking, and the eggs were frying, and the borscht bubbling. Outside the rain poured down, so we didn’t feel bad, for we were not interfering with their work in harvest time, they couldn’t have been working with the grain anyway.

  In one corner of the parlor, which is the communal room, there was an icon, a Mary and Jesus, framed and gilded, under a canopy of hand-made lace. They must have buried these things when the Germans came, for the icon was old. There was an enlarged tinted photograph of the great-grandparents. This family had lost two sons in the Army, and their pictures w
ere on another wall, in their uniforms, looking very young, and very stern, and very countrified.

  A number of men came into the parlor, and they were neatly dressed, and cleaned, and washed, and they had shaved and they had on their boots. In the fields they didn’t wear boots.

  Little girls came running through the rain, carrying aprons full of small apples and little pears.

  The host was about fifty, with high cheekbones, and blond hair, and wide-set blue eyes. His face was weather-beaten. And he wore the tunic and broad leather belt of the partisan fighter. His face was drawn as though somewhere he had received a terrible wound.

  At last the meal was ready. Ukrainian borscht, which is a meal in itself, and hard fried eggs with bacon, fresh tomatoes and fresh cucumbers and sliced onions, and the hot flat cakes of sweet rye, and honey, and fruit, and sausages, were all put on the table at once. And then the host filled the glasses with pepper vodka, a vodka in which pepper grains have been soaked so that it has an aromatic taste. And then he called his wife and his two grown daughters-in-law, the widows of his dead sons, to the table. And he handed each of them a glass of vodka.

  The mother of the family made the first toast. She said, “May God bring you every good.” And we all drank to her. We ate hugely, and it was very good.

  Our host proposed a toast that we were beginning to know very well—the toast to peace among the peoples of the world. It is odd that there was rarely a little personal toast. The toasts were usually to larger things than individual futures. We proposed the health of the family and the prosperity of the farm. And a large man at the end of the table stood up and drank to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt.