Orient Express (4 page)

—This is extremely confidential, what I'm telling you now. This man we were talking about. His name begins with a Z.… You know the Vickers man.… You ask me some time about Vickers and the Ismid Roads. It seems that he's not a Jew at all but a Constantinople Greek. Everybody knew him around Pera, some little clothing business or other. Then one day he disappeared with the contents of a safe and turns up a couple of years later as a millionaire silk buyer in Lyon, and benefactor of the French Republic and all that sort of thing.

—No, this chap was a colonel on Wrangel's staff. They were starving and one day he found out that his wife and daughter had been … you know … for money and he shot 'em both dead and disappeared. Last night some charcoal burners found his body out in the hills.…

—Yessir I was the last white man outa Sebastopol … strange things you see in the Black Sea.… Agricultural machinery's my line. Last time I was out in Batum I seen upwards of six hundred women in swimmin' an' not one of 'em had a stitch on, in their birthday suits every one of 'em.

—Well, Major, how about another shakerful of Alexanders? They're mild and they hit the right spot.

—Kemal! He's finished.… Like hell he is. There's a lot of legendary stuff about him going round. How at Eski Chehir the Turkish army sank into the ground and came up behind the Greek lines. That's the kind of stuff that makes a hero in the east.

—They say that three divisions of Bolos are going in through Armenia and that he's promised 'em Constantinople in return for their help.

—Let 'em try and get it.

—They will get it some day.

—Nonsense the Greeks'll have it—The British—The French—The Bulgarians …—The League of Nations,—The Turks—I suggest it be made neutral and presented to Switzerland, that's the only solution.

Outside on the terrace Mr. Deinos and the two tall Greek ladies with Cupid's-bow mouths were eating pistachio nuts and drinking douzico in the amethyst twilight—Greece, continued Mr. Deinos, has always been the bulwark of civilization against the barbarians. Inspired by Marathon and Salamis and I hope by the help and sympathy of America, Greece is once more going to take up her historic mission.…

III. TREBIZOND

1.
Afternoon Nap

Between Ineboli and Samsoun. Lying on the empty boat-deck of the Italian steamer
Aventino,
a scrawny boat that used to be Austrian, empty this trip except for several hundred Russian soldiers crowded into the forward hold, prisoners being repatriated. I'm lying on my face; through my shirt the two o'clock sun claws my back already stinging from the burn of a day's swimming at Prinkipo. In the space between the deck and the lifeboat I can sleepily see a great expanse of waves grey and green like the breast of a pigeon, and beyond the khaki hills of Asia Minor rising in enormous folds up to bloated white clouds that float in slaty reaches of mist. The wind stirs my hair and whispers in my ears; under my face the deck trembles warmly to the throb of the engines. There's no past and no future, only the drowsy, inexplicable surge of moving towards the sunrise across the rolling world. There's no opium so sweet as the unguarded sunny sleep on the deck of a boat when it's after lunch in summer and you don't know when you are going to arrive nor what port you will land at, when you've forgotten east and west and your name and your address and how much money you have in your pocket.

And then awake again looking up into the shimmering blue sky, thinking of Constant' and the interallied police strutting about and the bedbugs at the Pera Palace and long lines of ragged people waiting for visas for their passports, and the blue eyes of Russians, blue as the sky in sagged tallow faces; Russians standing at every corner selling papers and kewpie dolls, cigarettes, sugar buns, postcards, paper flowers, jumping jacks and jewelry; and the long-nosed Armenians sitting on squares of matting in the courtyards of falling down palaces, and the Turks from Macedonia sitting quiet under trees round the mosques in Stamboul, and the Greek refugees and the Jewish refugees and the charred streets of burnt-out bazaars; and late one night the onelegged man sobbing into his knotted hands.

Groggy with sleep and sun I got to my feet. Gulls were circling about the ship. Here the air was clean of misery and refugees and armies and police and passport officers. The Russian soldiers in the bow of the boat looked very happy. It was like looking down into a pit full of bear cubs. In their cramped quarters they played and wrestled and rolled each other about, big clumsy towheaded men in dirty tunics belted tight at the waist. They throw each other down with great bearlike swats, pick each other up laughing as if nothing could hurt them, kiss and start sparring again. They are restless like children kept in after school.

In a corner a bunch of Tatars squat gravely by themselves, broadfaced men with black slits for eyes. They sit motionless looking over the bright plain of the sea; a few of them play cards or cut up their bread in strips to dry it in the sun.

The captain, a tall man with white Umberto Primo whiskers, has come up gravely beside me and looks down into the hold, making a clucking noise with his tongue—They smell bad, those Russians. They have no officers. What's the use of sending them back just to make more Bolsheviki? I Alleati son' pazzi … tutti. They're crazy, the Allies, all of them. Aren't there enough Bolsheviki?

2.
Angora

It was a surprise to find six Turkish army doctors in uniform sitting on the bench in the companionway. They certainly had been nowhere visible when we left Constantinople. They were worried about the Greek cruiser
Chilkis
that was sinking fishing boats and taking potshots at villages along the coast. They had the set faces of men with their backs to the wall. They treated me with jerky and very cold politeness.

—You Europeans are all hypocrites. When Turkish soldiers get out of hand and kill a few Armenians who are spies and traitors, you roll your eyes and cry massacre, but when the Greeks burn defenseless villages and murder poor fishermen it's making the world safe for democracy.

—I'm not a European, I'm an American.

—We believed your Meester Veelson.… All we want is to be left alone and reorganize our country in peace. If you believed in the rights of small nations why did you let the British set the Greeks on us? You think the Turk is an old man and sick, smoking a narghile. Perhaps we are old men and sick men, but originally we were nomads. We are sober and understand how to fight. If necessary we will become nomads again. If the Allies drive us out of Constantinople, very good. It is a city of misery and decay. We will make Angora our capital. We were not made to live in cities. Our life is in the fields and on the plains. If they drive us out of Angora we will go back to the great plains of central Asia, where we came from. Tell that to your high commissioners and your Meester Veelson. You have been to Stamboul. Did you see any Turks there? Only old people, beggars, Armenians and Jews, riffraff. The Turks are all in Angora with Mustapha Kemal.

—Are you going to Angora?

They nodded gravely—We are going to Angora.

3.
Inexplicable Staircases

We are at anchor in the bay in front of Trebizond. I wear out the upper deck walking up and down. The authorities won't let any one ashore, as the
Ckilkis
shelled the town this morning. There's a rumor that they are carrying out reprisals on the remaining Greeks and Armenians, so I wear out the upper deck and stare at the town till my eyes are ready to pop out of my head.

A pink and white town built on arches, terracing up among cypresses, domes and minarets and weather-gnawed towers against a mother-of-pearl sky piling up over the shoulder of a bulky escarped hill. Further along, dull vermilion cliffs zigzagged with inexplicable white staircases climbing up from the sea and stopping suddenly in the face of the cliff.

Black luggers are coming out over the grassgreen water to unload the cargo.

Trebizond, one of the capitals of my childhood geography, a place of swords and nightingales and a purple-born princess in a garden where the trees grew rubies and diamonds instead of flowers, a lonely never-to-be-rescued princess bright and cold and slender as an icicle, guarded by gold lions and automaton knights and a spray of molten lead and roar and smoke of Greek fire.

And what is happening in this Trebizond under the white mask of walls and domes? There's no smoke from any of the houses, no sound comes across the water. I walk up and down wearing out the upper deck wondering at the white staircases that zigzag up from the sea and stop suddenly in the face of the cliff.

At sunset we hove anchor and started nudging down the coast into the gloom eastward.

IV. RED CAUCASUS

1.
The Twilight of Things

Behind a cracked windowpane mended with tapes of paper, Things sit in forlorn conclave. In the center is the swagbellied shine of a big samovar, dented a little, the whistle on top askew, dust in the mouldings of the handles. Under it, scattered over a bit of mothchewed black velvet two silver Georgian sword-scabbards, some silver cups chased with a spinning sinewy pattern, a cracked carafe full of mould, some watches, two of them Swiss in tarnished huntingcases, one an Ingersoll, quite new, with an illuminated dial, several thick antique repeaters, a pair of Dresden candlesticks, some lace, a pile of cubes of cheap soap, spools of thread, packets of pins. Back in the shop a yellowfaced old man droops over a counter on which are a few bolts of printed calicos. Along the walls are an elaborate Turkish tabouret inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a mahogany dressing table without its mirror, and some iron washstands. The wrinkles have gathered into a deep cleft between the old man's brows; his eyes have the furtive snarl of a dog disturbed on a garbage pile. He looks out through narrowed pupils at the sunny littered street, where leanfaced men sit with their heads in their hands along the irregular curb, and an occasional drovshky goes by pulled by bony racks of horses, where soldiers loaf in doorways.

The old man is the last guardian of Things. Here possessions, portable objects, personal effects, Things, that have been the goal and prize of life, the great center of all effort, to be sweated for and striven for and cheated for by all generations, have somehow lost their import and crumbled away and been trampled underfoot. The people who limp hungrily along the rough-paved streets never look in the windows of the speculators' shops, never stop to look enviously at the objects that perhaps they once owned. They seem to have forgotten Things.

Only an occasional foreigner off a steamer in the harbor goes into the old man's shop, to haggle for this trinket or that, to buy jewels to resell in Europe, or in back rooms behind locked doors to paw over furs or rugs that can be smuggled out of the country only after endless chaffering and small bribery. The boat the night before we got to Batum was full of talk of this and that which might be picked up for nothing, pour un rien, per piccolo prezzo. People scrubbed up their wits, overhauled their ways and means, like fishermen their tackle the night before the opening of the trout season.

As one glances into the houses strolling through the tree-shaded streets of Batum one sees mostly high empty rooms, here and there a bed or a table, some cooking utensils, a scrap of mosquito-netting or a lace curtain across an open window. All the intricate paraphernalia, all the small shiny and fuzzy and tasseled objects that padded the walls of existence have melted away. Perhaps most of them went in the war under the grinding wheels of so many invading and occupying armies, the Russians, the Germans, the British, the Turks, the Georgian Social-Democrats and lastly the Red Army. After these years of constant snatching and pillage, of frequent terrified trundling of cherished objects into hiding-places, seems to have come apathy. People lie all day on the pebbly beach in front of the town, with their rags stripped off them, baking in the sun, now and then dipping into the long green swells that roll off the Black Sea, or sit chatting in groups under the palms of the curious higgledy-piggledy Elysium of the Boulevard along the waterfront. With half-starvation has come a quiet effortlessness probably sweeter than one might expect, something like the delicious sleep they say drugs men who are freezing to death.

And the poor remnants of what people persist in calling civilization lie huddled and tarnished and dusty in the windows of second-hand dealers, Things useful and useless, well made and clumsily made, and little by little they are wafted away west in return for dollars and lire and English pounds and Turkish pounds that lie in the hoards with which the dealers, the men with the eyes of dogs frightened on a garbage pile, await the second coming of their Lord.

2.
The Knight of the Pantherskin

There is a bright sliver of the moon in the sky. On the horizon of a sea sheening green and bright lilac like the breast of a pigeon a huge sun swells red to bursting. Palm-fronds and broad leaves of planes sway against a darkening zenith. In the space of dust outside of their barracks Georgian soldiers are gathered lazily into a circle. They wear ragged greyish uniforms, some with round fur caps, some with the pointed felt helmets of the Red Army. Many of them are barefoot. Blows off them a sweaty discouraged underfed smell. One man, seated, starts thumping with his palms a double shuffle on a small kettledrum held between his legs. The rest beat time by clapping until one man breaks out into a frail melody. He stops at the end of a couple of phrases, and a young fellow, blond, rather sprucely dressed with a clean white fur cap on the back of his head, starts dancing. The rest keep time with their hands and sing Tra-la-la, Tra-la-la to the tune in a crooning undertone. The dance is elegant, mincing, with turkeylike strut-tings and swift hunting gestures, something in it of the elaborate slightly farded romance of eastern chivalry. One can imagine silver swords and spangled wallets and gaudy silk belts with encrusted buckles. Perhaps it is a memory that makes the men's eyes gleam so as they beat time, a memory of fine horses and long inlaid guns and toasts drunk endlessly out of drinking horns, and of other more rousing songs sung in the mountains at night of the doughty doings of the Knight of the Pantherskin.