Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  She made a note of that: talk to him about the photographers.

  Russia

  Tom did not feel in the least licked.

  He had flown up the Caspian Sea from the Persian shore, where the port of Pahlavi was, the Shah’s family town. About that land mass from the Caucasus through the Tibetan Chinese backland to Siberia, he knew nothing. And that they were being flown by foreigners, in a plane not their own, over alien land, made them all uneasy. Perhaps it was designed to. The Russians have an Oriental talent for that kind of opening ploy. On Tom’s left rose the Caucasus. The Greeks had set some of their tragedies there, and Goethe, the Germans’ best one. To the right lay the tablelands of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic. Below them convoys steamed up the water, as they passed on to the Volga, past Stalingrad somewhere slightly to the left, and on to Kuibyshev.

  Now he sat on a bench above the Volga, in Kuibyshev, to think things over. Russia was too big and too diverse to deal with. What he needed was the fulcrum of a fact.

  It was agreeable to sit there, bundled up against the cold, and watch. Behind him was the Red Army rest-home in which he was billeted. It had previously belonged to a filthy bourgeois reactionary shipbuilder, long since liquidated, and was quite comfortable. The cold had not yet leeched the leaves from the deciduous trees. Along the river was a row of pines. Beyond the pines, lower down, the fields of wheat stretched towards Stalingrad. Among the pines stood unpainted dachas. A shepherd led a flock of sheep along the shore. Rumpy animals. To look at them, you would never have guessed that they had once been lambs. The air was still. Below, on the bank, a boat had finished unloading a cargo of birch logs. There isn’t anything in this world quite so naked as the freshly-axed end of a felled birch. A soldier walked behind the sheep, kicking pebbles into the river with his boot. He was very young. When he took off his hat he looked even younger. Tom could see the flash of the badge on the hat as he did so. The badge indicated that he belonged to the NKVD, the secret police. It seemed unlikely that he was idling down there by accident.

  Well, what was Russia anyway?

  Their culture they had taken over whole from New Rome, whose continuators they therefore were. The Dukes and Grand Dukes of Kiev, Nijny-Novgorod and Moscow, had been quite willing to become Byzantine. Another metamorphosis of ancient Rome, which was always pupating into curious and surprising new shapes. The country was still Byzantine in its love of intrigue, its bureaucratic heavy handedness, its suspicion, and its tenacity. North-west, beyond what was now the Kuibyshev reservoir, lay Kazan, where Ivan the Terrible had won an empire.

  But the nature of that empire had changed. At Kuibyshev, named after the inventor of the first five-year plan, as elsewhere, the country had liquidated almost its entire upper and professional classes. So what you were dealing with now were peasants and ex-serfs, educated, trained, but still peasants, stolid, suspicious, xenophobiac, and diligent. The Revolution may not have given them a new religion, but it had given them a new faith. The faith that they were better off. The belief that nothing was wrong. And yet something was missing, in almost every face. They had no private splendours: only public ones. That made life drab.

  Everything in the country seemed to have been done while the masters were away. The upper and professional classes were gone, but somehow you still expected to hear them ring the bell. They were all waiting for the sound of a bell, even though they were dead tired. It would take another two generations to produce new masters. There was something blind about it, blind, suspicious, and downright rude and somehow limited, like poor white trash in the Carolina hills, except that it had power, it had force, it was well organized and quite inexorable.

  What it did not have was lightness, spiritual grace, suppleness, ease, and all those little arts of the secure which alone make life worth while, those self-imposed restraints we call freedom, and which are not freedom when imposed by somebody else, those restraints which alone make freedom possible.

  Russia was not going to eat us or seduce us. Not, that is, unless we became sluggish and edible. Or was it that, actually, that we were so scared of?

  He got up and dusted off his knees, and catching his eye, the NKVD young man smiled uncertainly, but made no effort to come any closer. He looked a little sorry that he had doffed his hat. No doubt sometimes such actions were seen and misunderstood.

  Kuibyshev

  A film showing the defence of Moscow.

  It was a winter land. Outsiders forgot that. The ground froze. There was not enough sunlight for you ever to feel free and easy. There was a great deal of night.

  In the winter, when they were beating back the Germans from Moscow, they wore white uniforms, to blend with the snow, not quite so sumptuous as the white fur-lined sheep-herding coats affected by American officers about then in the Aleutians, but when they died, the blood was much the same colour, and the death was just as final.

  America, of course, will never be occupied. But when the bombs hit it, and there is a mass exodus down the roads, there will be fighting in the streets, and what will that be like?

  He did not think he wished to know.

  At the Opera

  He warmed to them, the way he did to everybody who wasn’t downright mean. But with his own people, at the embassy, there was, as usual, trouble.

  “Protocol, protocol,” they said, the way a wretched underpaid bank clerk who will never be anything but a bank clerk says, “We must protect the bank”. He wasn’t there to talk to diplomats, and he’d had quite enough vodka already. He was there to talk to anybody he could buttonhole on the streets. The staff, who didn’t care to buttonhole anybody, and liked diplomatic parties, at least the underlings did, because it meant more caviar than they ever saw at home, even in the movies, never forgave him. He did consent to attend one such function. It was boring. He stayed half an hour and then left.

  Then there was that regrettable incident at the Opera House.

  It was not exactly a top-notch performance. As usual, the Russians had too many people on the stage, so they looked more like demented Rockettes from the Radio City Music Hall than something Diagheleff would have been proud of, but the prima ballerina looked cold, her arms were too thin, and he decided to present her with some flowers.

  That wasn’t done, said an embassy aide, and besides, all the flower shops were closed at this hour, an out and out lie, since Kuibyshev didn’t have any.

  It just so happened this particular aide was pimply all the way through. Tom was annoyed. “They grow, you know,” he said. “They come on stems. All you have to do is snap the stem, and there, you’ve got a flower.”

  The aide was aware that some flowers grew. Flowers one gave to a ballerina, however, were of a more formal sort, and came in green tin vases. He looked shocked, left the box, but came back before the end of the performance with a wilted nosegay. It must be confessed it looked shabby. But then, its condition was not exactly the point.

  Tom clambered over the railing, tripped, righted himself, balancing the nosegay like an aerialist, and thumped down on the stage.

  There was a shocked silence. Several NKVD men moved forward nervously. A possible assassin? Some kind of outburst?

  No, only Tom. He presented his flowers. The ballerina took them, and gave him a funny, sidewise smile, almost as though she wanted to laugh, but didn’t quite dare. He smiled right back.

  It was almost an incident, said the embassy staff. You have no right to do such things. Always consult us first. If we had not saved the situation by explaining it was a strange American custom, there would have been a riot. That it was also a strange Swedish, Finnish, Italian, French, German, English, South American, Spanish, Portuguese, and for that matter, universal custom, did not seem to occur to them. That did not matter. It did not even matter that the ballerina had seem pleased. One must get permission first.

  Several of the minor aides never had any use for him after that. He did not know the rules. The country had been disgraced. They had been
such shabby flowers.

  On the other hand the ballerina was even shabbier, at least forty, obviously overworked, and hadn’t danced in Moscow for ten years. Perhaps she pressed one of them in a book. Who knows?

  Flowers are so few and far between. And once they are over, they are over. Except for the legend of the stone flower. In that they bloom again. It is a Russian legend, from past time.

  On the Volga

  There were other incidents. It is only natural. If you have a diplomatic staff, naturally you have incidents. That is what they are there for.

  He had insisted upon going over a collective farm. That was never done. The Russians pretended to give in, so he thought he had got his way. The staff was most amused at that. It was not a collective farm, but a State-run farm. He had been duped. A collective farm is a farm run by a group of farmers on government land. Whereas a State farm is a farm run by a group of farmers on different government land. Everybody knows that. Besides, it had been a mode State farm.

  So were the five farms at Rushville.

  Then there had been that business on the Volga, when he had almost wrecked the steamer, by taking the wheel for a while. That was not dignified. No Ambassador from the United States had ever taken the wheel of a Volga steamer. There was no precedent.

  For five minutes there he had felt like Tom Sawyer, blissfully gathered up into the endless dreams of Life Along the Mississippi, Samuel Clemens, leaning over to starboard to yell: “Mark Twain!” He wished he had a cigar to munch, or a captain’s cap to wear. Then the captain took back the wheel: dangerous shoals. It was what the captain had been waiting for. He had almost wrecked the steamer, had Tom, but he didn’t wreck it, nor would he have been allowed to do so. But the captain, who had two small sons at home and had once been a child himself, was heartily amused.

  Where do these whey-faced clerks spend their childhood anyhow? Or is it, like their adulthood, spent for them, as they seem to prefer?

  Rzhev

  Close to the front. To get there was a fourteen-hour trip by jeep, up and beyond the Leningrad highway out of Moscow. Fourteen hours in a jeep is too long.

  The Germans had really taken a beating at Rzhev. Nobody had cleared away the corpses yet, and in a trench Tom saw an unopened tin can, marked Luncheon Ham in English. Now on what global front had the Germans picked that up, and then not been able to eat it?

  His guide was Lieutenant-General Lelyushenko, a small man with bowed legs, a Cossack by birth. He looked healthy. The German prisoners didn’t. Some were forty. Some seventeen. All were a depressed lot. The fun of the war had gone out of it for them. So had all sense of the heroic. In the eighteenth century, before Bismarck caught them up into the national totentanz, and one princeling’s army had been the rough equivalent of another princeling’s opera company, no doubt this vanity for violence had been amusing enough. In the sixteenth century, when Landsknechte were shooting popguns over the shoulders of camp prostitutes and blowing their hat-feathers out of their eyes, it had probably been entrancing. But not now. This time they had done something inexcusable. Tacitus had always known they would. This time they had gone too far. And would do it again, when they were able, not that the Russians were exactly angels by comparison. Desperate men seldom are.

  Tom looked at the dead, twisted and frozen in the muddy snow. Yes, there would be dead. So many dead.

  In the Kremlin

  A visit with Stalin, one of two. The Kremlin was too big. One felt lost there. Through an open door could be glimpsed a ten-foot globe of the world. It brought back memories of Chaplin’s performance in The Great Dictator, a film discussed at the Un-American Activities hearings. It was quite true. The Great Globe Itself was an Un-American Activity. The sooner we got used to that the better. It whirls in space out there, totally unaware that we alone give it grace and dignity. That we alone are essential to its twirling.

  Stalin, rather unexpectedly, had a taste for pastel shirts in shades of pistachio and pale pink. His Georgian heritage, no doubt. Still, when you are in a position to strip the world naked, you do not have to be circumspect about what you wear.

  The American press claimed that Tom was rather taken in by Stalin. Perhaps. “A hard man, a cruel man, but an able man. He has few illusions,” said Tom.

  “Tom’s despatches are not worth reading,” said Roosevelt.

  And went to Yalta.

  “I grew up a Georgian peasant. I am unschooled in pretty talk. All I can say is I like you very much,” said Stalin, ushering Tom out of his office, on the whole, very prettily. Perhaps he did. But Tom was right. He was an able man with few illusions, and very little time. He said later he was very glad Tom held no elective office. Roosevelt was easier to deal with. For though Tom did still have a good many illusions, he also had a disconcerting habit of dropping them where he stood, like a wet bath towel.

  Moscow

  A meeting with the press, at which he suggested sending shostakovich to America, for propaganda purposes. He had just heard the 7th Symphony in Tchaikovsky Hall, and though it was a bit beyond him, he had found the first movement impressive. Shostakovich had once publicly announced that melody was bourgeois, but despite that, was himself a melodist. But then Russia is the only country left in the world in which the music our great-grandfathers enjoyed is still being written, and they had to justify that somehow. Tom was not astute at the arts. But Shostakovich must come.

  The journalists said no.

  “To suggest to us that we send a musician to the United States, which is also involved in this war and where human lives also hang in the balance, to persuade you with music of something that is plain as the nose on your face, is in a funny way insulting to us. Please don’t misunderstand us.”

  Tom didn’t think he did.

  At the Stormovic Factory

  It was an aeroplane, quite efficient, with wings of pressed plywood. By American standards, some of the factory operations were wasteful and slipshod, but you could not deny that the planes came out at the other end in a quite satisfactory manner.

  There were too many workers, chiefly because of a shortage of skilled hands, but every fourth or fifth place in the production line had a sign over it, to state that it belonged to a Stakhanovite worker, paid at a progressively increasing rate on a speed-up which worked like an accelerated Bedeaux system.

  It is not a name now often heard, that of Mr. Bedeaux, a man who made himself an international millionaire by the manipulation of his own invention, the erg unit. The erg unit was the minimal amount of time and space in which a muscular action could be performed in a constantly maintained series to maximum effect at minimal cost (or fuel). It was to protect ourselves against such systems that we had labour unions. But Mr. Bedeaux was a scientist, and we have no one to protect ourselves against scientists who, since their subject matter is not concerned with human emotion, or with particular instances of any kind, have no morals set to govern, as doctors have, their work.

  Mr. Bedeaux later shot himself in a Florida motel, after learning that he was about to be questioned as to the exact way in which he had managed to apply the erg unit in Fascist countries and with what profit to himself.

  The concentration camps and slave labour, both German and Russian, worked on the erg unit principle. When the human machine was used up, you threw it away. At least that is what happened to the millions of Russians the Germans shipped back home, and to goodness only knew how many the Russians put to work in Siberia. To combat the fuel cost overhead, a system of planned obsolescence was applied to the workers.

  Unions may sometimes go to extremes, but at least they don’t allow that sort of thing. If a statue is ever erected to Mr. Bedeaux, it will be interesting to know where.

  Kuibyshev

  There were spies everywhere. Even where they were not. Even in America, where it was thrilling to imagine them. That always happened in a war. In the war of 1812 a young man had been arrested as a spy because “he carried a long whip and wore an unusual number o
f buttons on his pantaloons”.

  Must we always come to resemble what we fear?

  Tom was glad to leave.

  Yakutsk

  It was supposed to be a stop-over, but the plane was weatherbound. Tom did not mind, but he was eager to get on to China.

  Yakutsk was twice the size of Alaska and six times the size of France, but the reception committee was small, and consisted chiefly of Muratov, who was President of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Yakutsk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. No Bourbon title could have been longer. It must take hours just for these people to introduce themselves to one another. Muratov said they could not possibly go on. He would be liquidated if he allowed that. It was a standard Russian word. It explained what had happened to everybody and everything. But it made for a moist-eyed world, and was about as cheerful to hear as somebody yelling firedamp up the seam.

  However, up there on the tundra, beyond the taiga, Muratov was having himself a fine time, and seemed in no danger of liquidation just yet. In the old days the place had been famous for syphilis, tuberculosis, and furs. Now it had pulp wood, gold, and essential minerals to play with as well; a capital of 50,000 souls, as Gogol would say; and an Opera House. They were to go to the Opera House that night.

  “When does the performance start?” asked Tom.

  “It starts when I get there,” said Muratov firmly. And so it did.

  After gold, furs were the most valuable export. Sables, fox, bear, Arctic hare, and white squirrels. If their skins were not to be ruined, said Muratov solemnly, white squirrels must be shot exactly through the eye.