A feeling of sadness came over us, for these were the offerings of the heads of governments, a copy of a medieval sword, a copy of an ancient shield, some parchment phrases, and many high-sounding sentiments, and when we were asked to write in the book we hadn’t anything to say. The book was full of words like “heroes of the world,” “defenders of civilization.” The writing and the presents were like the gigantic, muscular, ugly, and stupid statuary that is usually put up to celebrate a very simple thing. All we could think of were the iron faces of the open-hearth men in the tractor works, and the girls who came up from holes under the ground, fixing their hair, and of the little boy who every evening went to visit his father in the common grave. And these were not silly, allegorical figures. They were little people who had been attacked and who had defended themselves successfully.
The medieval sword and the golden shield were a little absurd in the poverty of their imagination. The world had pinned a fake medal on Stalingrad when what it needed was half a dozen bulldozers.
We went to visit the apartment houses, both rebuilt and new, for the workers in the factories of Stalingrad. We were interested in wages and rent and food.
The apartments are small and fairly comfortable. There is a kitchen, one or two bedrooms, and a living-room. Black workers, that is unskilled laborers, get five hundred roubles a month now. Semi-skilled workers one thousand roubles, and skilled workers two thousand roubles, a month. This does not mean anything except in terms of food and rent, and rent all over the Soviet Union, when you can get an apartment at all, is incredibly cheap. Rent in these apartments, with gas, light, and water included, is twenty roubles a month, two per cent of the monthly income of a skilled worker, and four per cent of a semi-skilled worker’s pay. Food in the ration shops is very cheap. For the common foods, bread and cabbages, meat and fish, which are the standard worker’s food, very little money is necessary. But luxuries, tinned foods, imported foods, are very expensive, and such things as chocolate are almost beyond the reach of anyone. But, again, there is the Russian hope that when there is more food the prices will come down. When there are more luxuries they will become available. For example, the new little Russian car, more or less on the model of the German Volkswagen, when it is in full production and can be distributed, will cost about ten thousand roubles. This price will be fixed, and the cars will be distributed as they are made. When you consider that at the present time a cow costs seven to nine thousand roubles, some idea of the comparable prices can be understood.
There were many German prisoners in Stalingrad, and, as at Kiev, the people did not look at them. They were still in German uniform, rather ragged now. Columns of them trudged through the streets, going to and from their work, usually guarded by one soldier.
We had wanted to go out with the fishermen who catch the big Volga sturgeon from which the caviar comes, but we had no time for that since they fish all night. But we did go to see them bring in the fish in the morning. They were gigantic. There were sturgeon of two varieties, one huge whiskery catfish-looking type, and another with a long shovel nose. There were no real giants that day. The largest one that had been brought in weighed only six hundred pounds. We were told that sometimes they run as high as twelve hundred pounds, and a great mass of caviar comes from them. The caviar is taken out and iced the moment the fish are caught. The fishing is done with very large nets of great strength. The moment the boats touch the shore, the iced caviar is rushed away and distributed by airplane to the large cities of the Soviet Union. Some of the fish are sold locally, but many are smoked and put away, and sold later, and they bring a very high price.
Capa was brooding again; he had wanted to take industrial pictures, and he had not been able to. He felt that not only was this trip a failure, but that everything was a failure, that he was a failure, that I was a failure. He brooded very deeply.
We were growing irritable. Chmarsky’s gremlin had been working so much overtime that he was nervous too, and we snapped at him a little, I am afraid. And so he gave us a curious lesson in Marxism, and it ended up in a schoolboy shouting argument. And Capa renamed him Chmarsky the Chmarxist, which did not bring out the best in Chmarsky. It was just that we were irritated at not being able to photograph the tractor factory. If we had been truthful with one another we would have arrived at that conclusion.
And here was the test of the association of Capa and me, for when we got angry we never got angry at each other, we joined forces and got angry at somebody else. During our whole trip we never had a serious argument, and I think this is probably some kind of a record. During our argument Chmarsky said that we were relativists, and we, not much knowing what relativists are, banded together and attacked him from the point of view of relativism fairly successfully. Not that we convinced him, but at least we held our own and were not convinced, and we shouted louder.
We were to leave for Moscow the next day, and Capa did not sleep that night. He brooded and worried about his failure to get the pictures he wanted. And all the good pictures he had got turned sour and foul. Capa was definitely not happy. And since neither of us could sleep very much, we wrote the synopses for two motion pictures.
The next morning we got into our Ford bus and went out to the airport very early. And the gremlin had been at work, for while our plane flew, a mistake had been made, and we had not been booked for it. But there was a later plane from Astrakhan, and we could go on it.
The plane from Astrakhan did not arrive. We drank tea, and ate big biscuits, and were miserable at the hot airport. At three o’clock word came that the plane would not arrive, or, if it did arrive, would not go on to Moscow, since it was too late to get there by daylight. We climbed into our bus to go back to Stalingrad.
We had gone about four miles when an automobile from the airport rushed up on us madly and headed us off. It seemed that the captain of the plane had changed his mind. He would start for Moscow that afternoon. We turned around and went back to the airport, and arrived just in time for a new decision. The captain had decided that the plane would not go. So we put our luggage back in our bus and took the horrible road to Stalingrad again. We were sore in very particular areas from the bouncing on the hard seats of our little bus.
At dinner we were mean to Chmarsky. We blew up, we told him unpleasant things, only part of which were true. We told him he should control his gremlin, that he was being pushed around by his gremlin. We criticized his attitude, and his suits, and his choice of neckties. We were bitterly cruel to him, and it was only because we were feeling miserable from having sat at the hot airport all day.
Mr. Chmarsky was upset. He had done his best, I am sure, but he had no way of defending himself against our raging fury, and also against the two of us, for we fought him as a team, and when one stopped talking, the other took it up. And after he had gone to bed, we felt very sorry about what we had done, because we knew why we had done it. We went to bed with the angelic intention of apologizing in the morning.
In the morning we started very early, for there were some pictures we wanted to take on the outskirts of Stalingrad, pictures of people building their new little houses of boards and plaster, and there were some new schools and kindergartens we wanted to see and photograph. We stopped at a tiny house that a bookkeeper in a factory was building. He was putting up the timbers himself, and he was mixing his own mud for plaster, and his two children played in the garden near him. He was very agreeable. He went on building his house while we photographed him. And then he went and got his scrapbook to show that he had not always been ragged, that he had once had an apartment in Stalingrad. And his scrapbook was like all the scrapbooks in the world. The photographs showed him as a baby, and as a young man, and there were pictures of him in his first uniform when he entered the Army, and pictures of him when he came back from the Army. There were pictures of his marriage, of his wife in a long white wedding gown. And then there were pictures of his vacations at the Black Sea, of himself and his wife swimming, a
nd of his children as they were growing. And there were picture postcards that had been sent to him. It was the whole history of his life, and all the good things that had happened to him. He had lost everything else in the war.
We asked, “How does it happen that you saved your scrapbook?”
He closed the cover, and his hand caressed this record of his whole life, and he said, “We took very good care of this. This is very precious.”
We got back in our bus and again took the road to the Stalingrad airport. We were beginning to know it very well. At the airport the passengers for Moscow had, beside their luggage, string bags in which there were two or three watermelons, for watermelons are hard to come by in Moscow, and there are plenty of very good ones in Stalingrad. We joined them and got a string bag, and each of us bought two watermelons to take with us to the boys at the Metropole Hotel.
The commandant of the airport was extremely apologetic about the mistake of yesterday. He wanted to make us very happy. He saw that we had tea, and he even told a little fib to make us feel happy. He said that we were going on a plane in which there were no other passengers and that it would soon be in from the Black Sea. It developed that when we attacked Chmarsky, Chmarsky had attacked him. Everybody’s temper was thin, and the air was full of injustice. But it was hot at the airport, and a hot dry wind laden with particles of dust blew over the steppe. That made people nervous, and so they were mean to each other, and we were just as mean as anyone else.
Our plane finally came in, and it was a bucket-seat plane. And instead of our being the only passengers, it was an overloaded plane. The passengers were mostly Georgians going up to Moscow for the celebration of the eight-hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding. They had laid their belongings down the center of the plane, and nearly every seat was taken. They had come prepared in the way of food. They had suitcases full of it.
When we got in, and the doors were shut, the plane became stifling, for, like most bucket-seat airplanes, there was no insulation, and the sun beating on the metal walls heated the inside. The smell was frightful, of people, of tired people. We sat in the metal bucket-seats, which looked like, and were not much more comfortable than cafeteria trays.
At last the plane took off, and as it did, a man sitting next to me opened his suitcase, cut off half a pound of raw bacon which was melting in the heat, and sat chewing it, the grease running down his chin. He was a nice man, with merry eyes, and he offered me a piece, but I didn’t feel like it at that moment.
The plane had been hot, but as soon as we made a little altitude the reverse was true. The beads of perspiration on the metal turned to ice and frost. We became freezing cold in the plane. We spent a miserable trip to Moscow, for we had nothing but light clothing, and the poor Georgians in the plane huddled together, for they were from the tropics, and this cold was something they were not used to.
Chmarsky bundled into his corner. We thought he was beginning to hate us, and that he wanted only one thing, to get us into Moscow and to get rid of us. We spent a bad four hours freezing before we landed in Moscow. And Chmarsky’s gremlin followed him to the end. The telegrams he had sent for a car to meet us had been misread and there was no car. It would be a matter of two hours’ waiting for a car to come for us. But a Greek showed up. In times of stress a Greek always shows up, anywhere in the world. This Greek could make an arrangement for a car, and he did, for a very high price, and we drove in to the Savoy Hotel.
We spoke of how the leaders of a communist or socialist regime must get very tired of the long-living quality of capitalism. Just when you have stamped it out in one place, it comes to life in another. It is like those sandworms which if cut in two go on living, each a separate individual. In Moscow the little clots and colonies of capitalism squirm to life everywhere: the black-market people, the chauffeurs who rent their employers’ cars, and the inevitable Greek who shows up with something to rent or sell. Wherever there is a Greek, there is going to be capitalism. Three hundred roubles it cost us to get into Moscow. Our Greek had a fine sense of how much the traffic could stand. I have no doubt that he made a quick estimate of our weariness, our irritation, and our finances, and he set an inexorable price of three hundred roubles, and we paid it.
We had a violent lust for cleanliness, for there had been no bathing in Stalingrad, except with a washcloth, and we yearned for the hot tub, the soak, the shampoo. The statue of Crazy Ella was an old friend to us, and we practically embraced the stuffed bear on the second floor. He didn’t look fierce at all to us any more. And our bathtub which rocked on three legs was the most beautiful and luxurious article we had ever seen. In our new-found passion for cleanliness we washed off two or three layers of skin, and Capa shampooed his hair over and over again. He has nice hair, very thick and very black, and because I was still feeling a little mean, when he came out after his third shampoo I remarked that it was rather sad that he was getting a little bald in back. He leaped in the air, and whirled on me, and denied it vehemently. And I took his finger, and placed it down among the hair next to the scalp, and he seemed to feel that there was a bald spot. It was a cruel thing to do, because I had put his finger in a place where he could not possibly see it in the mirror. He went about for a long time secretly feeling the back of his head with his finger. I only did it because I felt mean.
Later Sweet Joe came over and we had a light dinner, and hit the bed, and died. The air of Moscow was strong and cool and made for sleeping, and we didn’t get up for many hours.
Mail had come in at last; we had been in Russia only twenty-five days, and it seemed that we had been cut off for years. We read our letters avidly. And although we thought we had been away for so long, people at home who had written didn’t think we had been away a long time at all. It was a kind of a shock. We got our equipment together, and our dirty clothes off to be washed, and Capa put his films in order and sent them out to be developed.
He looked at the negatives that had been returned and began to complain bitterly. I might have known it. They were not right. Nothing was right. There was too much grain, this had been left in the developer too long, and this roll had been left in too little. He was furious. And because I had been cruel to him, I tried to reassure him that they were the most wonderful pictures in the world, but he only sneered at me. And because I had been cruel to him, I fixed all of his non-camera equipment: filled his lighter, sharpened his pencils, filled his fountain-pen.
Capa has one curious quality. He will buy a lighter, but as soon as it runs out of fluid he puts it aside and never uses it again. The same is true of fountain-pens. When they run out of ink, he never fills them. A pencil he will use until the point breaks, and then it too is laid aside, and he will buy another pencil, but he will never sharpen a pencil. I flinted and filled his lighters, sharpened all his pencils, filled his pen, and got him generally ready to face the world again.
Before we had gone to Russia, we had not known what kind of equipment would be available, so in France we had bought a wonderful pocketknife, a pocketknife that had a blade to take care of nearly all physical situations in the world, and some spiritual ones. It was equipped with blades that were scissors, with blades that were files, awls, saws, can-openers, beer-openers, corkscrews, tools for removing stones from a horse’s foot, a blade for eating and a blade for murder, a screw driver and a chisel. You could mend a watch with it, or repair the Panama Canal. It was the most wonderful pocketknife anyone has ever seen, and we had it nearly two months, and the only thing that we ever did with it was to cut sausage. But it must be admitted that the knife cut sausages very well.
We went to the Herald Tribune bureau and hungrily read the news reports and the cables for the last two weeks. We read the Embassy hand-outs, and the news reports from the British Information Service. We even read speeches. Capa sniffed through the rooms of the foreign correspondents in the Metropole Hotel and stole books right and left.
We even went to a cocktail party, given by the press divi
sion of the British Embassy, and to which an invitation had been only reluctantly issued to us. We conducted ourselves badly. We begged, and borrowed, and whined for cigarettes from everybody we knew, and made outrageous promises about the numbers of cartons we would send once we got home again. Each of us took three baths every day, and we used up all of our soap, and had to beg soap from the other correspondents.
A LEGITIMATE COMPLAINT
By Robert Capa
I AM NOT HAPPY at all. Ten years ago when I began to make my living by taking pictures of people being bombed by airplanes with little swastikas on them, I saw a few small planes with little red stars shooting down the swastika ones. This was in Madrid during the Civil War, and this made me very happy. I decided then that I wanted to go and see the place where the snub-nose planes and pilots came from. I wanted to visit and take pictures in the Soviet Union. I made my first application then. During these last ten years my Russian friends were often irritating and impossible, but when the shooting became serious they somehow ended up on the side where I was plugging, and I made a great many other applications. The applications were never answered.
Last spring the Russians succeeded in becoming spectacularly unpopular with my side, and considerable plugging was going on to make us shoot this time at each other. Flying saucers and atomic bombs are very unphotogenic, so I decided to make one more application, before it was too late. This time I found a certain support in a man of wide reputation, considerable thirst, and gentle understanding for the gay underdog. His name is John Steinbeck, and his preparations for our trip were very original. First he told the Russians that it was a great mistake to regard him as a pillar of the world proletariat, indeed he could rather be described as a representative of Western decadence, indeed as far west as the lowest dives in California. Also he committed himself to write only the truth, and when he was asked politely what truth was, he answered, “This I do not know.” After this promising beginning he jumped out of a window and broke his knee.
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