And while we were eating, the waiter came and said, "A lady would like to dance with either one of you gentlemen."
Chmarsky translated for us, and he did not look approvingly at the waiter. He said, "It is undoubtedly a public woman."
And we said, "But what's wrong with a public woman? Is she pretty?"
Chmarsky screwed up his face. He was the only one at the table who could see her. "No," he said, "she is very ugly."
We said, "We think she should be abolished. We think she is a social evil. We think that an ugly public woman is a threat to the whole structure of society, a threat to the home, and security, and mother love, and all things like that."
And Chmarsky nodded his head gloomily and agreed with us. It was practically the first time we had agreed on anything.
And we said, "If, on the other hand, she were pretty, there might be extenuating circumstances. There might be some social injustice involved. If she were pretty, we would advocate investigating her background, to find out what social difficulty has caused her to be a public woman, and to try, perhaps, to induce her to return to private enterprise."
Chmarsky began to regard us with a suspicious, inquisitive eye. He did not trust us very much.
Our backs were to the public woman, but eventually we stole a look, and he was right, she was not pretty, and we don't know whether they abolished her or not.
The summer nights were wonderful in Tiflis; the air soft, and light, and dry. Young men and girls walked aimlessly in the streets, enjoying themselves. And the costumes of the young men were rather nice: tunics, sometimes of heavy white silk, belted at the waist, and long narrow trousers, and soft black boots. They are a very handsome breed, the Georgian men.
From the high balconies of the old houses we could hear in the night soft singing of strange music, accompanied by a picked instrument that sounded like a mandolin, and occasionally a flute played in a dark street.
The people of Georgia seemed to us more relaxed than any we had seen so far, relaxed, and fierce, and full of joy. And perhaps this is why the Russians admire them so. Perhaps this is the way they would like to be.
There was a huge moon over the western mountains, and it made the city seem even more mysterious and old, and the great black castle on the ridge stood out in front of the moon. And if there are ghosts anyplace in the world, they must be here, and if there is a ghost of Queen Tamara, she must have been walking the ridge in the moonlight that night.
CHAPTER 8
THE TIFLIS WRITERS' UNION had asked us to come to a little reception. And it must be admitted that we were frightened, for these meetings have a habit of becoming extremely literary, and we are not very literary people. Besides, we knew by now that the Georgians take their literature very seriously: poetry and music are their great contributions to world culture, and their poetry is very ancient. Their poetry is not read by a few people; it is read by everyone. In their burial places on the hill we had seen that their poets were buried on an equal footing with their kings, and in many cases a poet has been remembered where a king has been forgotten. And one ancient poet, Rust'hveli, who wrote a long epic poem called The Knight in the Tiger Skin, is honored almost as a national hero in Georgia, and his verses are read and are memorized even by children, and his picture is everywhere.
We were afraid that the meeting of the writers might be a little rugged for us, but we went. About twenty men and three women received us. And we sat in chairs around a large room and regarded one another. There was a speech of welcome to us, and without transition our welcomer said, "And now Mr. So-and-so will read a short summary of Georgian literature."
A man on my right opened a sheaf of papers, and I could see that it was typewritten and single-spaced. He began to read, and I waited for the translation. A paragraph later I suddenly realized that he was reading in English. I became fascinated, because I could only understand about one word in ten. His pronunciation was so curious that although the words were English all right, they did not sound remotely like English when he said them. And he read twenty typewritten pages.
I got the manuscript later and read it, and it was a concise, compact history of literature in Georgia, from earliest times to the present.
Since most of the people in the room did not speak English at all, they sat and smiled benignly, for to them he was reading in perfect English. When he had finished, the man who had first spoken said, "Have you any questions now?"
And since I had understood very little of what had gone on, I had to admit that I had no questions.
It was quite hot in the room, and both Capa and I had developed a little trouble in the stomach, so that we were not comfortable.
Now a lady stood up, and she too had a sheaf of papers, and she said, "I will now read some translations into English of Georgian poetry."
Her English was good, but because I had a bad cramp in the stomach, I had to protest. I told her, which is true, that I much prefer to read poetry to myself, that I get more out of it that way, and I begged her to let me have the poetry to read when I was alone, so that I could appreciate it more. I think it hurt her feelings, but I hope not. It was true and I was miserable. She was a trifle curt. She said that this was the only copy in existence, that she did not dare let it out of her hands.
Again, as before, there came the questions about American writing. And, as usual, we felt terribly unprepared. If we had known we were going to be asked questions like this before we left America, we might have studied a little bit. We were asked about new writers emerging, and we mumbled a little about John Hersey, and John Home Burns, who wrote The Gallery, and Bill Mauldin, who draws like a novelist. We were dreadfully inadequate at this sort of thing, but the truth of the matter is we had not read very much of modern fiction lately. Then one of the men asked us what Georgians were well known in America. And the only ones we could remember, outside of the choreographer George Balanchine, were the three brothers who collectively had married many million dollars' worth of American women. The name Mdvani did not seem to bring out great enthusiasm among the present-day Georgian writers.
They are very stern and devoted, these Georgian writers, and it is very hard to tell them that although Stalin may say that the writer is the architect of the soul, in America the writer is not considered the architect of anything, and is only barely tolerated at all after he is dead and carefully put away for about twenty-five years.
In nothing is the difference between the Americans and the Soviets so marked as in the attitude, not only toward writers, but of writers toward their system. For in the Soviet Union the writer's job is to encourage, to celebrate, to explain, and in every way to carry forward the Soviet system. Whereas in America, and in England, a good writer is the watch-dog of society. His job is to satirize its silliness, to attack its injustices, to stigmatize its faults. And this is the reason that in America neither society nor government is very fond of writers. The two are completely opposite approaches toward literature. And it must be said that in the time of the great Russian writers, of Tolstoy, of Dostoevski, of Turgenev, of Chekhov, and of the early Gorki, the same was true of the Russians. And only time can tell whether the architect of the soul approach to writing can produce as great a literature as the watch-dog of society approach. So far, it must be admitted, the architect school has not produced a great piece of writing.