Orient Express (7 page)

3.
Alexandropol

Dusty soldiers and freightyards jammed with freightcars of which the paint has peeled under the hot sun. The little Armenian girl has picked up her basket and gone. She appeared somewhere in the night in tow of a white-whiskered station master. Caused quite a stir. The Sayyid sat up on his valise, and noticing that she had on her chin the mole so admired of Orientals, put on an air of the most splendid doggishness and cried out Quel théâtre! in a loud voice. Samsoun effendi lit a candle and started smoothing his hair, looking at himself with great satisfaction in a small pocket mirror the while. But the Armenian girl was quite unmoved by all these manifestations and went calmly to sleep with her head on her basket.

As it grew light we crossed the watershed of the Little Caucasus. On the north side the villages, scattered collections of square houses of volcanic stone, roofed with turf and often topped by tall hayricks, were intact, and wellfed peasants were already in the fields getting in the crops, but from the moment the train started winding down the southerly slope, everything was sheer desert. The last Turkish attack, in 1920, had wiped the country clean; not a house intact in the villages, no crops, even the station buildings systematically destroyed, and everything movable carted away. Ghengiz Khan and his Tatars couldn't have laid waste more thoroughly. Alexandropol itself, though war-seedy to the last degree, had evidently been spared. It straggles among railway yards on a yellow scorched plain, where the wind blows the dust in swirling clouds from one side to the other; the most outstanding buildings are the great rows of grey barracks where orphans are housed by the Near East Relief. On the station platform the usual crowd, ragged peasants and soldiers, Russian and Armenian.

Ararat, when I first saw it, was as faintly etched against a grey sky as is Fuji in some of Hokusai's Hundred Views, a tall cone streaked white against pearly mist. The train was winding round a shoulder of the hills through reddish badlands that glistened in the flat spaces with alkali. Some time before the Georgian had pointed up over dry hills and said—Ani. Somewhere in the rocky wilderness to our left there had been the capital of the ancient kingdom of Armenia. I was as excited at the sight of Ararat as if I could see the Ark still balanced on the peak of it, and made an attempt to stir the Sayyid's enthusiasm on the subject. But he refused to budge from where he was tending an elaborate engine of sticks and bits of twine that was intended to keep the tiny teapot from falling off our tinier alcohol lamp. When he did finally get to his feet, he looked at the mountain appraisingly for a long time, taking little sips from a tin cup of tea, and then shook his head and said:—Damavand is higher and more pointed—But the Ark and Noah and the elephant and the kangaroo and all the rest of the zoo didn't land on Damavand!—They used to say that there were divs on Damavand, said the Sayyid, and considering the argument to have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, he squatted in his corner again and began brewing a new pot of tea.

We were coming down from the hills into an irregular basinlike valley at the end of which the streaky white peak of Ararat soared on two great strongly-etched curves above the bluish mass of the mountain. In the foreground for a moment were the roofless stone walls of a village; from behind one of the huts drifted up a little woodsmoke from a campfire, but nowhere in the whole landscape of tortured hills and livid white alkali plains was anything alive to be seen. Then a squall that for a long time had been gathering up indigo fringes above the mountains to the west swept across and hid everything in oblique sheets of rain and hail.

At a station on the plain we sent Samsoun effendi to get water for tea, and instead he brought back, to the Sayyid's extraordinary delight, what the Sayyid always calls a Mademoiselle.

We sat on the mysterious packing case and looked out over the plains at Ararat, that now, much nearer, stood erect and luminous above the dusk that was already seeping into the plain. We had given the Mademoiselle a cup of tea and some black bread and caviar from our provision box, and she seemed vaguely content and expansive, like a cat tickled about the ears. Evidently she had been taut on the defensive all the journey. She had come from Tiflis in a car full of soldiers. She had a pleasant Teutonic face, with rounded cheeks and steel-blue eyes, like Vermeer's women, and was dressed with a faint reminiscence of style in a soiled white suit. She wore stockings, a distinction in these parts, and little rope sandals. She started to talk gradually, remembering her French with effort—Yes, I am going to Erivan. I work there as a stenographer in an office.… Of course a government office; there are no others. No, things aren't so bad there. People are starving.… Certainly it's worse than Tiflis, but, do you know? we are so used to it all now. We don't notice those things any more. We have a nice house and roses in the garden and I have dogs.… I even take horseback rides. Still, it's a miserable existence, and all because my father and mother took fright when the Germans were getting near to Riga. You see we are Esthonians, not Russians. We lived in Riga, and when it seemed as if the Germans would bombard the town we fled into Russia. Many other people fled, too. And then our troubles began—She laughed—What a time we live in!

The train had stopped at a station. The plain was marshy now. In front of us, beyond a canebrake, was Ararat, at the base indigo, cut across by level streaks of mist, and on the summit bright rose. Behind it like a shadow was the smaller cone, all dark, of Little Ararat. Mosquitoes whined in swarms about our ears.

—But as I was telling you, went on the mademoiselle,—oh, these mosquitoes! You can't live a week in Erivan without coming down with malaria; really it's a frightful place.… Everybody there is dying.… But anyway, although I was just a child then—you see I'm not awfully old now—I kept begging mother and father not to go. We had such a lovely big old house with linden trees round it and a garden full of overgrown shrubs where I used to play. You've never been in Riga? The Baltic is so beautiful in summer out among the islands.… My grandmother wouldn't leave. I think she's still alive, living in our old house. I'm going back there if I die in the attempt.… I have already applied for a passport, and I have seen the Esthonian consul in Tiflis.… That's what I went up for. But it's so difficult to get anything done here. They get so in the habit of prohibiting—She laughed again—Oh, they make me so angry. They just go about and if they find anybody wants to do anything, they cry: Stop it, stop it.

The Sayyid in his corner was boiling a new pot of water for tea. A lurch of the train upset pot and lamp and everything, so I left the mysterious packing case to help reconstruct the scaffolding on which depended the frequency of our cups of tea. A moment later I saw that Samsoun effendi, who had been at his little pocket mirror again, had taken my place and was deep in conversation with the Mademoiselle. She looked at me over his shoulder and wrinkling up her nose like a rabbit's, said: Il me fait la cour. Pensez!

The Sayyid looked from one to the other and suddenly let out a stentorian: Quel théâtre! Then laughing he reached for the last watermelon, sliced it deftly with his penknife, and handed me half of it as a peace-offering.

Through the little upper window of the boxcar I caught a last glimpse of Ararat for that day, as I sat on my suitcase with my teeth in the sweet dripping melon, three streaks of watermelon pink converging against a sky of solid indigo.

4.
Erivan

Long straight grassgrown streets full of a sickly stench of dung and ditchwater. Half-naked children with the sagging cheeks and swollen bellies of starvation cower like hurt animals in doorways and recesses in the walls. Over grey walls here and there an appletree with fruit on it. Up above, the unflecked turquoise of the sky in which from every little eminence one can see the aloof white glitter of Ararat. They say, though I haven't seen it, that a dead wagon goes round every day to pick up the people who die in the streets. People tell horrible stories of new graves plundered and bodies carved up for food in the villages. Yet on the Boulevard, the down-at-the-heels central square of the place, people stroll about looking moderately well fed and well dressed. There is plenty of fruit in the fruitshops, and meat and cheese and wretched gritty black bread in the bazaars. The Russians have started a cinema and an Armenian theater, that flaunts gaudy posters opposite the Orthodox church.

It was there the Sayyid found a Persian who kept a shop. He was a Mussulman and told how the Armenians had massacred and driven out the majority of the Mohammedan inhabitants of Erivan. We bought a watermelon and ate it on the spot, while the Sayyid and the Persian chattered happily in
turki.
I heard the word
Americai
coupled with Ararat a couple of times, and asked the Sayyid what was being said—This man says that last year an American, an American journalist, went up to the top of Ararat and died there. He was poisoned by an Armenian. This man was his servant.

I was asking for details when several people came into the shop—He won't talk now, said the Sayyid mysteriously. We never heard the rest of the story.

Opposite the station a crumbling brown wall. In the shade of it lie men, children, a woman, bundles of rags that writhe feverishly. We ask someone what's the matter with them—Nothing, they are dying. A boy almost naked, his filthy skin livid green, staggers out of the station, a bit of bread in his hand, and lurches dizzily towards the wall. There he sinks down, too weak to raise it to his mouth. An old man with a stick in his hand hobbles slowly towards the boy. He has blood-filled eyes that look out through an indescribable mat of hair and beard. He stands over the boy a minute and then, propping himself up with his stick, grabs the bread, and scuttles off round the corner of the station. The boy makes a curious whining noise, but lies back silently without moving, his head resting on a stone. Above the wall, against the violet sky of afternoon, Ararat stands up white and cool and smooth like the vision of another world.

5.
Bakh-nurasbin

We got out of Erivan last night on a private and specially cleaned boxcar, procured after long confabs with the station master and other officials and not a little crossing of palms. The Sayyid was superb, and used his Courrier Diplomatique style to great effect. When we were settled and waiting for the train to decide to leave, he gave me a great lecture on the theme of tell 'em nothing and treat 'em rough as a method of travel in Russia and the Orient generally. Promised to store up the pearls of his wisdom. Furthermore he attached to himself one of the men who swing lanterns, by name Ismail, a Muslim, who ran about fetching water and melons and even produced some rather withered cucumbers. We sent two boxes of sardines to the engineer and a package of tea to the conductor. Then, feeling our position on the train assured we closed our doors and opened our little square windows and got ready our usual meal of tea, cheese, bread and caviar, and after some hours' delay the train started.

This morning found us halted in a fertile but weedgrown valley between two ranges of bare pink hills. Behind us the two Ararats stood up tall in the gold shimmer of the dawn. Beside the track was a lean melonpatch that a skinny brown man in ragged Persian costume was trying desperately to protect from the inroads of the passengers on the train. We washed in an irrigation ditch and breakfasted hopefully, but it was noon and blisteringly hot before the train got under way. The Sayyid passed the time making great pan-Islamic speeches to little groups marshalled by the faithful Ismail, who collected round the door of the car and told of the atrocities of the Armenians and the sufferings of the Muslims. Meanwhile, out the other door I talked ragged French and raggeder English with an Armenian who told me the frightful things the Turks and Tatars had done. When the train eventually started it was only to run a couple of miles to this ruin of a town on the frontier of Armenia and Adjerbeidjan. And here we are, in an evil-smelling freightyard full of trains, beside a ruined station. As usual there is no house standing in the town. The Muslims say it was destroyed by the Armenians, and the Armenians that the Turks did the job. Every now and then Ismail comes to assure us that in two hours the train will start for Nakhtchevan and Djulfa, the frontier town of Persia that is our goal.

The Sayyid has gone to visit a woman who is sick in the next car. He comes back saying she has typhus, too far gone, nothing to do, will die in a couple of hours. We watch the other people in the car stealing away one by one. Then they bring her out and lay her on a little piece of red and yellow carpet beside the railroad track. She is a Russian. Her husband, a lean Mohammedan with a scraggly beard, sits beside her occasionally stroking her cheek with a furtive animal gesture. Her face is dead white, greenish, with a putrid contracted look about the mouth. She lies very still, her bare legs sticking awkwardly out from under a dress too short. Not even the red light of sunset gives any color to her skin. And the sun is sinking in crimson fury behind Ararat. From a triangular space between the slopes of the two mountains a great beam of yellow light shoots into the zenith. A man is standing beside the dying woman, awkwardly holding a glass of water in one hand. From the other end of the station comes the whining jig of a Georgian tune played on bagpipe and tomtom, to which soldiers are dancing. The woman's face seems to shrivel as you look at it. Behind Ararat a triangular patch of dazzle that rims with silver the inner edges of the two peaks is all that is left of the sun. On the wind comes a sour smell of filth and soldiers and garbage. The Sayyid, hunched dejectedly on the mysterious packing case in the middle of the boxcar, cries out feebly, shaking his head, Avec quelle difficulté.

Then without a word he gets up and closes the door on the side where the dead woman lies on the red and yellow mat beside the track.

Late that night, when I was wandering about in the moonlight with a glass of wine—the faithful Ismail had got us a bottle from the Lord knows where—trying to avoid the swarms of mosquitoes, I heard the Sayyid's voice raised in shrill discussion and often reiterated the phrase Courrier Diplomatique. Not being partial to discussions, I lengthened my walk up the track. When I returned everything was quiet. It appeared that certain people had tried to invade the sanctity of our private boxcar, but that in the middle of the discussion they had all been arrested for travelling without proper passes, which, according to the Sayyid, was an example of the direct action of Providence.