A Russian Journal

by John Steinbeck

  There was obviously more prosperity in this village than in Shevchenko I. The icon was larger and it was covered with lace of pale blue to match the walls. This had not been a large family. There had been only one son, and his picture was very large on the parlor wall, a tinted photograph, and they only mentioned him once.

  The mother said, “Graduated in bio-chemistry in 1940, mobilized in 1941, killed in 1941.”

  Mamuchka’s face was very bleak when she said it, and it was the only time she mentioned him, and he was her only son.

  Near one wall was an old Singer sewing-machine, covered with a piece of cheesecloth, and against another wall, a narrow bed with a rug for blanket. In the center of the room stood a long table, with benches on either side. It was very hot in the house. The windows would not open. We decided that if we could, without seeming to be discourteous, we would sleep in the barn. For the nights were cool and delightful outside; inside the house we would smother.

  We went into the yard and washed ourselves, and then dinner was ready.

  Mamuchka is a very famous cook in the village, and a very good one. Her meals were unbelievable. Supper that night began with water glasses of vodka, with pickles and home-baked black bread, and Ukrainian shashlik which Mamuchka made very well. There was a great bowl of tomatoes, and onions and cucumbers; there were little fried cakes, full of sour cherries, on which honey was poured, a national dish and delicious. There was fresh milk, and tea, and then more vodka. We ate far too much. We ate the little cherry cakes and honey until our eyes popped.

  It was beginning to get dark, and we thought this was the last meal of the day.

  In the evening we walked down through the village to the club house. As we passed the pond a boat came across it, and there was music in the boat, a curious music. The instruments were a balalaika, a little drum with a small cymbal, and a concertina, and this was the dance music of the village. The players moved across the little lake in the boat and landed in front of the club house.

  It was quite a large building, the club. It had a small stage, and in front of the stage were tables with chess boards and checker boards, and then a dancing space, and then rows and rows of benches for spectators.

  There were very few people in the club when we went in, only a few chess players. We learned that the young people come back from the fields, and have their supper, and then rest for an hour, even sleep for an hour, before they come to the club.

  The stage was set up for a little play that night. There were big pots of flowers on a table, and two chairs, and, upstage, a large portrait of the President of the Ukrainian Republic. The little three-piece orchestra came in, and set up its instruments, and began to play. The young people drifted in, strong girls, their faces washed and shiny. Only a few young men came.

  The girls danced together. They wore bright print dresses, and head-cloths of colored silk and wool, and their feet were almost invariably bare. And they danced with fury. The music had a rapid beat, accentuated by drum and cymbal. The bare feet beat the floor. The boys stood around and watched.

  We asked a girl why she did not dance with the boys. She said, “They are good for marrying, but there are so few of them since the war that a girl only gets into trouble if she dances with them. Besides, they are very bashful.” And then she laughed and went back to her dancing.

  There were so few of them, young men of marriageable age. There were very young boys, but the men who should have been there dancing with the girls were dead.

  The energy of these girls was unbelievable. All day they had been working in the fields, since daylight in fact, and yet after one hour of sleep they were prepared to dance all night. The men at the chess tables played on, unmoved and unbothered by the noise that went on around them.

  Meanwhile the company which was to play was preparing the stage, and Capa was setting up his lights to photograph the play. It seemed to us that the girls were a little impatient when the music stopped. They did not want to stop dancing for the play.

  It was a little propaganda play, and it was naïve and charming. The story was as follows: There is a girl on a farm, but she is a lazy girl, and she does not want to work. She wants to go to a town, and paint her nails, and use lipstick, and be decadent and degraded. As the play opens, she is engaged in an argument with a good girl, a girl who is a brigade-leader, a girl who is honored for her great work in the fields. The girl who wants to paint her nails slouches around the stage and is obviously no good, whereas the other, the brigade-leader, stands very straight, with her hands at her sides, and declaims her lines. The third member of the cast is a heroic tractor-driver, and the interesting thing is that he really is a tractor-driver, and the play had been held up an hour and a half while he fixed the tractor he had been working with all day. The heroic tractor-driver had one dramatic trick, and only one—he delivered his lines pacing back and forth across the stage, smoking cigarettes.

  Now the tractor-driver is in love with the girl who wants to paint her nails. He is really in love with her, and he is in grave danger of losing his soul to her. In fact, as the play progresses, it is obvious that he is almost ready to throw up his job driving a tractor and helping the economy of the people, to move into a city and get an apartment and live softly with the nail-painting girl. But the brigade-leader, standing very straight, delivers a lecture to him.

  It does no good. He is obviously distraught, and he is very much in love with the slovenly, no-good girl. He does not know what to do. Shall he give up the girl he loves, or shall he follow her to town and become a bum?

  Now the decadent girl goes off stage, leaving the brigade-leader with the tractor-driver. And the brigade-leader, with feminine wile, tells the tractor-driver that this girl does not really love him. She only wants to marry him because he is such an eminent tractor-driver, and she would soon be sick of him. The tractor-driver does not believe this, and so the brigade-leader says with a flash of inspiration, “I have it. You pretend to make love to me, and when she sees us you will find how much she loves you.”

  This new idea is accepted. The nail-painter makes an entrance to find the tractor-driver holding the brigade-leader in his arms, and, lo and behold, not what you would expect happens, for the slovenly girl decides that she will become a worker in socialist economy. She will stay on the farm. She turns her fury on the brigade-leader. She says, “I will form my own brigade, not only you can be so eminent and decorated. I myself will become a brigade-leader and wear decorations.”

  This solves the tractor-driver’s problems both amorous and economic, and the play closes with everybody feeling pretty good about the whole thing.

  This is the story of the play, but this is not how it really came off. The tractor-driver had only made four or five paces across the stage, and the story had only opened, when Capa discharged his flash bulbs to take his first picture. This broke the play wide open. The nail-painting girl retired behind a bunch of ferns and didn’t come out for the rest of the scene. The tractor-driver forgot his lines. The brigade-leader stumbled and tried to pick up the play, and failed. The rest of the play was done like an echo. The actors repeated the lines given by the prompter, so that one had a double version. Every time they nearly got their lines again, Capa set off new flash bulbs and threw them.

  The audience was delighted. It applauded wildly every time the flash bulbs went off.

  The decadent girl’s light nature was indicated both with red nail polish and with strings of glass beads and shiny jewelry. The flash bulbs made her so nervous that she broke her beads and spilled them all over the stage. The play fell apart completely.

  We wouldn’t have known what it was about, except that the prompter, who was also a teacher, explained it to us later. And the curtain was finally drawn with tumultuous applause. We had the feeling that the audience preferred this version to any they had seen of this play. When it was over, they sang two Ukrainian songs.

  The girls wanted to dance. They were restless, and soon the orches
tra took up its position again and the whirling dances went on. They were only persuaded by the manager that they should go to bed. It was already a quarter of two, and they had to get up at five-thirty in the morning to work in the fields. But they were reluctant to leave, and they would have danced all night if they had been permitted to.

  By the time we had climbed the hill it was two-thirty, and we were ready to go to bed. But this was not Mamuchka’s plan. She must have started cooking the moment we left, after having finished what we thought was supper. The long table was laid, and the food was piled upon it. And at two-thirty in the morning we had the following meal: glasses of vodka, and pickles and cucumbers again, and fried fish which had been caught in the village pond, and little fried cakes and honey again, and a beautiful potato soup.

  We were dying of overeating and lack of sleep. The house was very hot, and the room uncomfortable. Also we had found out that the narrow bed Capa and I were supposed to occupy was Mamuchka’s bed, so we asked permission to sleep in the barn.

  They spread new hay for us and put a rug over it, and we lay down to sleep. We left the door open, and it was silently closed. Apparently the fear of night air is here, as it is in most of Europe. We waited a while before we got up and opened the door, but again it was closed very softly. They were not going to let us hurt ourselves by exposure to night air.

  The hay in the little barn was sweet. Rabbits in a cage against the wall rustled and nibbled in the dark. On the other side of the mud wall a few pigs grunted comfortably, and Lubka, the cow, stirred in her sleep.

  Lubka is the new cow, and not as well liked by Mamuchka as the old cow was. She says she doesn’t know why she sold her old cow. That was Katushka, an affectionate form of Katharina. She loved Katushka very much, and she does not know why she sold her. Lubka is a nice cow, but she hasn’t the personality, nor does she give quite as much milk as Katushka did. Every morning the village children come by to take the cows to pasture for the day, and Lubka goes out to join the herd, and there is Katushka in the herd. And every evening, when the cows come back, each one turning of its own accord into its own yard, Katushka tries to come into this yard, she still wants to come to her old home, and Mamuchka speaks to her for a little while, then drives her out of the yard.

  And she says, “I must have been crazy to sell Katushka. Of course, Lubka is a younger cow, and she will probably live longer, but she is not as nice a cow, she is not as generous a cow as Katharina was.”

  The night was so short as to be practically nonexistent. We closed our eyes, turned once, and it was gone. And there were people walking about in the yard beside the barn, the cows were being led out, the pigs were squealing and grumbling in anticipation of breakfast. I don’t know when Mamuchka slept. She could hardly have slept at all, for she had been up for hours cooking breakfast.

  Capa gave trouble about getting up. He didn’t want to do it. But he was finally lifted out of the hay. He sat on a log and stared into space for a long time.

  The breakfast must be set down in detail because there has never been anything like it in the world. First came a water glass of vodka, then, for each person, four fried eggs, two huge fried fish, and three glasses of milk; then a dish of pickles, and a glass of homemade cherry wine, and black bread and butter; and then a full cup of honey, and two more glasses of milk, and we finished with another glass of vodka. It sounds incredible that we ate all that for breakfast, but we did, and it was all good, but we felt heavy and a little sick afterward.

  We thought we were up early, but the village had been in the fields since the first dawn. We went to the fields where they were reaping the rye. The men with long scythes walking in a line, cutting a great swath. Behind them came the women who bound the grain into bundles with ropes of twisted straw, and after them the children who gleaned the grain, who picked up every straw and every head, so that none was wasted. They worked doggedly, for this is their busiest time. Capa moved about taking pictures, and they looked up and smiled and went back to work. There was no pause. This people worked this way for thousands of years, and then for a little while they were mechanized, and now they have had to go back to hand labor until they can build new machinery.

  We visited the mill where they grind the grain for their bread, and went to the office where the records of the farm are kept.

  On the edge of the village they were building a brickworks, for it is their idea to have every house of brick, and every roof of tile, for the fire hazard of the thatch has impressed them very deeply. They are glad that they have peat and clay to make the bricks on the grounds. And when their village is rebuilt, they said, they would sell bricks to the neighboring farms. The brickworks will be done before the winter, and when they cannot work on the land they will make bricks. Piles of peat are under roof now for burning.

  At noon we stopped in to see a family at lunch: mother, and father, and two children. They had a great bowl of vegetable and meat soup in the middle of the table, and each member of the family had a wooden spoon which he dipped into the central bowl. And they had a large bowl of sliced tomatoes, and a big flat loaf of bread, and a pitcher of milk. These people seemed to be eating very well, and we could tell what the process of good eating was by looking at the leather belts around the tunics of the men, for the lines of other years were on the belts, and now the belts were extended and the old lines were back two, three, and four inches, where the buckle had made its mark in the past.

  Mamuchka must have cleared away the breakfast dishes and started immediately to cook again. By four-thirty in the afternoon she had prepared a banquet. This was her little state dinner. She was very proud of her ability, and the village was very proud of her, which is probably one of the reasons she was our hostess. At this dinner the leaders of the village were her guests. There were present at the table the president of the farm, the agricultural expert, called agronome, and his wife, a pretty woman, who was the teacher and dramatic coach, the manager of the farm, the male schoolteacher, the father and mother of course, and us. And if we had thought the other meals were huge, this one outdid them all. There was a great carafe of vodka on the table, and we were very tired of vodka, and our stomachs were very weak. We began with black bread, pickles, tomatoes, and vodka, and then there was Ukrainian borscht with sour cream, and a huge stew of meat, cooked in some way so that the spices had gone into the potatoes themselves. And there were little cakes, and honey, and milk. When a plate became only half empty, Mamuchka filled it up again. She nearly fed us to death.

  Then the president of the farm made a little speech of welcome, and we made a little speech of thanks. And then they asked if we would mind answering a few questions, because we were the first Americans who had ever come to that farm, and they had a great curiosity about our country. They would like to know some things about it. We told them that America was a huge country, and we knew only a little of it, and possibly many of the questions we wouldn’t know the answers to, but we would try. Then the agricultural expert asked us about farming. What crops are grown, and where are they grown? And whether there are experiments with seeds, and do we have stations where experiments are carried on? And are there agricultural schools? He said that every collective farm in the Soviet Union has fields set aside for experiments with soils and seeds, and did we have things like that? And he asked whether the government helped farmers with money and with advice. This question had been asked before, and it was always a little surprising to them when we told of the work our government does with agriculture, not only our federal government, but our state governments. Then the farm manager asked how much land it took to support a family in America, and what its income was in relation to food, and medicine, and clothing; and what equipment there would be likely to be on an American farm, what machinery, and what stock. And he asked what care is being taken of our veterans.

  Then the schoolteacher asked us about our government. He wanted to know about the Supreme Court, and how the President is elected, and how the Co
ngress is elected. He asked whether the President has the power to lead the country into war, and what power has the State Department, and how close is the government to the people.

  We answered that we did not think the President has very great power, but he may have an oblique power, we didn’t know. And they wanted to know what kind of a man Truman is, and we didn’t know that. And our host spoke of Roosevelt. He said he was greatly loved by the people of Russia, and trusted, and he said that his death was like the death of a father.

  And he asked, “Did you know him? Did you ever meet him?”

  And I said, “Yes.”

  And he said, “Tell about it, how did he speak, and what was his manner? Could you tell some little stories about him that we can understand?”

  Then the agronome asked about atomic power, not as a bomb, but if anything constructive would be done with nuclear fission in America.

  And we said, “We don’t know. We think so. We think already many things are being done and many experiments are being made for the use of this power, and also for the use of by-products of fission for medical research. We know that this new thing could change the world if it were properly used, and also it could change the world if it were improperly used.”

  Then the people around the table spoke of the future of their farm. In a year or two it would be electrified and mechanized. They are very proud of this farm. Soon, they said, the new tractors would begin to come in, and before very long the people of the village would be well fed and well housed, and then the people would not have to work so dreadfully hard. “Come back in a year,” they said, “and see how we have progressed. We will be starting to build brick houses, and our club will be of brick, and our roofs will be of tile, and life will not be so hard.”

  Our driver had been sleeping almost solidly ever since we had arrived. He was a wonderful man with sleep. Now we awakened him, and he got his car running on about four cylinders out of eight.