Orient Express (18 page)

XI. TABLE D'HOTE

1.   The wind blows up the tent like a balloon.

The tent plunges tugging at pegged ropes,

about to wrench loose and soar

above wormwood-carpeted canyons

and flinty sawtooth hills,

up into the driven night

and the howling clouds.

Tight

as a worm curls wickedly

round the stamen of a fuchsia,

a man curls his hands round a candle.

The flame totters in the wind,

flares to lick his hands,

to crimson the swaying walls.

The hands cast shadows on the crimson walls.

The candlelight shrinks and flaps wide.

The shadows are full of old tenters—

men curious as to the fashion of cities,

men eager to taste newtasting bread,

men wise to the north star and to the moon's phases,

to whom East and West

are cloaks pulled easily tight,

worn jaunty about the shoulders:

Herodotus, Thales, Democritus,

Heraclitus who watched rivers,

parian-browed tancheek travellers,

who sat late in wineshops to listen,

rose early to sniff the wind off harbors

and see the dawn kindle the desert places,

and went peering and tasting

through seas and wastes and cities,

held up to the level of their grey cool eyes

firm in untrembling fingers

the slippery souls of men and of gods.

The candle has guttered out in darkness and wind.

The tent holds firm against the buffeting wind,

pegged tight, weighted with stones.

My sleep is blown up with dreams

about to wrench loose and soar

above wormwood-carpeted canyons

and flinty sawtooth hills,

up into the driven night

and the howling clouds.

Perhaps when the light clangs

brass and scarlet cymbals in the east

with drone and jangle of great bells,

loping white across the flint-strewn hills,

will come the seeking tentless caravans

that Bilkis leads untired,

nodding in her robes

on a roaring dromedary.

2. Képis, two caps, a felt hat and a derby, headless on the rack; a muffler dangles, an umbrella. My hat among them. The doors swing.…

Table, two rows of green white jowls (
comme on s'ennuie
) munching razorscraped jaws face the catsup bottles, pickle-pots; collars constrict the veins on flabby necks; knives and forks tinkle with little zigzag acetylene glints (
dans ce sale pays
). Eyes in sideglances (
comme on s'ennuie
) purse minds in tight (
dans ce sale pays
) like clasps on the mouths of pocketbooks.

Baghdad: The Bazaars that Burned

My shoes creak as fed I make discreetly for the swinging door.

And yesterday

I rode a grey stallion

into the first olive garden

and day before yesterday

squatted in the full wind

I ate dates fried in ghee

at the right hand of Jassem er Rawwaf

in the red cave of firelight,

and watched Hassoon staunch the blood

from his cut foot in hot embers

and leaned my head back on the bale

of stringy yellow Persian tobacco

eyes gashed by the sharpscented smoke

legs pricked by the sharp desert flints,

and listened to Saleh

teach his frail thirsty song

of parched Hosein and Kerbela

to slenderwaisted Ali

whose walk when calling and calling

he led back to camp the fortytwo camels

was a procession of kings returning darkly

carved on a mountain

in triumph,

and wondered

watching the barbed flames of wormwood

why Nuwwaf rode off that day

on his great whitebearded dromedary

without eating bread

curlybearded Nuwwaf,

wind lover, cunning in the four directions,

who when he laughed brandished steel

out of kholblackened eyes.

Esch Scham

XII. HOMER OF THE TRANS-SIBERIAN

At the Paris exposition of 1900—but perhaps this is all a dream, perhaps I heard someone tell about it; no, it must have happened—somewhere between the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadero there was a long shed. In that shed was a brand-new train of the Trans-Siberian, engine, tender, baggage coach, sleeping-cars, restaurant-car. The shed was dark like a station. You walked up wooden steps into the huge dark varnished car. It was terrible. The train was going to start. As you followed the swish of dresses along the corridor the new smell gave you gooseflesh. The train smelled of fresh rubber, of just-bought toys, of something varnished and whirring and oily. The little beds were made up, there were mirrors, glittering washbasins, a bathtub. The engine whistled. No, don't be afraid; look out of the window. We were moving. No, outside a picture was moving, houses slipping by, bluish-greenish hills. The Urals. Somebody says names in my ear. Lake Baikal. Irkutsk. Siberia. Yangtse, Mongolia, pagodas, Pekin. Rivers twisting into the bluish-greenish hills and the close electric smell of something varnished and whirring and oily moving hugely, people in boats, junks, Yellow Sea, pagodas, Pekin.

And the elevator boy said the trains in the Metro never stopped; you jumped on and off while they were going, and they showed magic lantern slides and cinematograph pictures in the Grande Roue and at the top of the Eiffel Tower … but that must have been years later because I was afraid to go up.

I've often wondered about the others who had tickets taken for them on that immovable train of the Trans-Siberian in the first year of the century, whose childhood was full of
Twenty Thousand Leagues
and Jules Verne's
sportsmen
and
globetrottairs
(if only the ice holds on Lake Baikal) and Chinese Gordon stuttering his last words over the telegraph at Khartoum, and Carlotta come back mad from Mexico setting fire to a palace at Terveuren full of Congolese curiosities, fetishes of human hair, ithyphallic idols with shells for teeth and arms akimbo, specimens of crude rubber in jars; and those magnates in panama hats shunted slowly in private cars, reeking with mint and old Bourbon down new lines across the Rio Grande, shooting jackasses, prairie dogs and an occasional greaser from the rear platform, and the Twentieth Century and Harvey lunchrooms and Buffalo Bill and the Indians holding up the stage and ocean greyhounds racing to Bishop's Rock and pictures of the world's leading locomotives on cigarette cards. O Thos. Cook and Son, here's grist for your mill. Uniformed employees meet all the leading trains. Now that Peary and Amundsen have sealed the world at the top and the bottom and there's an American bar in Baghdad and the Grand Lama of Thibet listens in on Paul Whiteman ragging the Blue Danube and the caterpillar Citroëns chug up and down the dusty streets of Timbuctoo, there's no place for the Rover Boys but the Statler hotels and the Dollar Line (sleep every night in your own brass bed) round the world cruises.

That stationary Trans-Siberian where the panorama unrolled Asia every hour was the last vestige of the Homeric age of railroading. Now's the time for the hymns and the catalogues of the ships. The railsplitting and the hacking and hewing, the great odysseys are over. The legendary names that stirred our childhood with their shadow and rumble are only stations in small print on a timetable. And still.… Or is it just the myth humming in our drowsy backward-turned brains?

Does anything ever come of this constant dragging of a ruptured suitcase from dock to railway station and railway station to dock? All the sages say it's nonsense. In the countries of Islam they know you're mad.

In the countries of Islam they know you're mad, but they have a wistful respect for madness. Only today I was fed lunch, beef stewed in olives and sour oranges, couscous and cakes, seven glasses of tea and a pipe of kif, by the extremely ugly man with a cast in his eye and a face like a snapping turtle who hangs round the souks buying up fox skins, in the company of his friend the tailor, a merry and philosophic individual like a tailor in the
Arabian Nights,
all because I'd been to Baghdad, the burial place of our lord Sidi Abd el Kadr el Djilani (here you kiss your hand and murmur something about peace and God's blessing) and they feel that even a kaffir passing by the tomb may have brought away a faint whiff of the marabout's holiness. So a pilgrim has a certain importance in their eyes.

They may be right, but most likely this craze for transportation, steamboats, trains, motorbuses, mules, camels, is only a vicious and intricate form of kif, a bad habit contracted in infancy, fit only to delight a psychoanalyst cataloguing manias. Like all drugs, you have to constantly increase the dose. One soothing thought; while our bodies are tortured in what Blaise Cendrars calls the squirrelcage of the meridians, maybe our souls sit quiet in that immovable train, in the darkvarnished newsmelling Trans-Siberian watching the panorama of rivers and seas and mountains endlessly unroll.

Now's the time for the Homeric hymns of the railroads. Blaise Cendrars has written some of them already in salty French sonorous and direct as the rattle of the great express trains. Carl Sandburg has written one or two. I'm going to try to string along some inadequately translated fragments of
Prose du Transsiberien et de la Petite Jeanne de France.
It fits somehow in this hotel room with its varnished pine furniture and its blue slopjar and its faded dusteaten windowcurtains. Under the balcony are some trees I don't know the name of, the empty tracks of the narrow gauge, a road churned by motortrucks. It's raining. A toad is shrilling in the bushes. As the old earth-shaking engines are scrapped one by one, the mythmakers are at work. Eventually they will be all ranged like Homer's rambling gods in the rosy light of an orderly Olympus. Here's the hymn of the Trans-Siberian:

In those days I was still a youngster

Only sixteen and already I couldn't remember my childhood

I was sixteen thousand leagues away from my birthplace

I was in Moscow, in the city of a thousand and three belfries and seven railroadstations

And the seven railroadstations and the thousand and three belfries were not enough for me

For my youth was then so flaming and so mad

That my heart sometimes burned like the temple of Ephesus, and sometimes like the Red Square at Moscow

At sunset
.

And my eyes lit up the ancient ways
.

And I was already such a bad poet

That I never knew how to get to the last word
.

I spent my childhood in the hanging gardens of Babylon

Played hookey in railwaystations in front of the trains that were going to leave

Now, all the trains have had to speed to keep up with me

Bale-Timbuctoo

I've played the races too at Auteuil and Longchamp

Paris-New York

Now, I've made all the trains run the whole length of my life

Madrid-Stockholm

And I've lost all my bets

And there's only Patagonia, Patagonia left for my enormous gloom, Patagonia and a trip in the South Seas
.

I'm travelling

I've always been travelling

I'm travelling with little Jeanne of France

The train makes a perilous leap and lands on all its wheels

The train lands on its wheels

The train always lands on all its wheels
.

“Say Blaise are we very far from Montmartre?”

We are far, Jeanne, seven days on the rails

We are far from Montmartre, from the Butte that raised you, from the Sacred Heart you huddled against

Paris has vanished and its enormous flare in the sky

There's nothing left but continual cinders

Falling rain

Swelling clouds

And Siberia spinning

The rise of heavy banks of snow

The crazy sleighbells shivering like a last lust in the blue air

The train throbbing to the heart of lead horizons

And your giggling grief
…

“Say Blaise are we very far from Montmartre?”

The worries

Forget the worries

All the cracked stations katicornered to the right of way

The telegraph wires they hang by

The grimace of the poles that wave their arms and strangle them

The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion tortured by a sadic hand

In the rips in the sky insane locomotives

Take flight

In the gaps

Whirling wheels mouths voices

And the dogs of disaster howling at our heels
…