They all lost their way. They lost their Russianness and their nobility. And because that was all they had ever been — Russian noblemen — they lost everything. They fell out of the bottom of their own tragedy. The great drama was left without heroes. History bitterly and implacably took its course. Our eyes grew tired of watching a misery they had revelled in. We stood before the last of them, the ones that couldn’t understand their own catastrophe, we knew more about them than they could tell us, and arm in arm with Time, at once cruel and sad, we left these lost souls behind.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 September 1926
29. The Border at Niegoreloye
The border at Niegoreloye is a large wood-panelled room we all have to pass through. Kindly porters have fetched our luggage off the train. The night is very dark, it’s cold, and it’s raining. That’s why the porters seemed so kindly. With their white aprons and their strong arms, they came to our aid, when we visitors encountered the frontier. An authorized official had taken my passport off me in the train, leaving me with no identity. So, myself and not myself, I crossed the frontier. I might have been mixed up with any other traveller. Later, though, it transpired that the Russian customs inspectors were incapable of any confusion. More intelligent than their colleagues in the service of other nations, they already knew the purpose of my visit.
We were expected. Warm yellow electric lights had been lit in the wood-panelled hall. At the desk where the chief inspector sat, there burned — like a friendly greeting from other times — a smiling oil-lamp. The clock on the wall showed the Eastern European time. The travellers, in their eagerness to get where they were going, promptly adjusted their watches. It wasn’t ten any more, it was eleven. Our train was leaving at midnight.
We were few, but our suitcases were many. Most of them belonged to a diplomat. According to international law, these remained untouched. As virginal as they had been when they left, they would also have to arrive. They contained so-called secrets of state. That didn’t mean that careful note couldn’t be made of each and every one of them. It took a long time. The most efficient inspectors had their hands full with the diplomat. And in the meantime, Eastern European time ticked on.
Outside, in the damp black night, the Russian train was being made ready. Russian locomotives don’t whistle, they howl like ship’s sirens, wide, cheerful and oceanic. Looking through the window and hearing the locomotive, you feel you are by the sea. The hall starts to feel cosy. Suitcases throw open their lids and spread out, as though they felt the heat. Wooden toys clamber out of the stout trunks of a merchant from Tehran, snakes and chickens and rocking horses. Little skipjacks rock from side to side on their lead-weighted bellies. Their bright ridiculous faces, garishly lit by the oil lamp, and darkened by the swift shadows of hands, come to life, change their expressions, laugh, grin and cry. The toys climb up on a set of kitchen scales, are weighed, tumble down onto the desk again, and wrap themselves in rustling crepe paper. The suitcase of a young, pretty and rather desperate woman yields lengths of coloured silk, pieces of a cut-up rainbow. There follows wool which breathes, expands, consciously inflates after so many days of an airless constricted existence. Slender grey shoes slip out of the newspaper designed to keep them hidden, page four of Le Matin. Gloves with ornamented cuffs climb out of a little coffin of cardboard. Underwear, handkerchiefs, evening gowns float up, all barely of a size to dress the hand of an inspector. All the playful accoutrements of a rich world, all the satiny, polished little riens lie there strange and trebly useless in this hard brown nocturnal hall, under the heavy oak beams, under the admonitory posters with jagged letters like sharpened hatchets, in the aroma of resin, leather and petrol. There are the trim and corpulent bottles of emerald green and amber yellow liquids, leather manicure sets open their wings like holy shrines, little ladies’ slippers sashay across the desk.
Never have I witnessed such a detailed inspection, not even in the years immediately after the War, in the golden age of inspectors. It seems this isn’t a border between one country and another, but one between one world and another. The proletarian customs inspector — the most expert in the world: how often he has had to conceal something himself and get away with it! — examines what are citizens of neutral and allied states, but people of an enemy class. They are traders and specialists, ambassadors of capital. They come to Russia, called by the state, but at war with the proletariat. The official knows that these merchants are here to sow order forms in the shops which will flower into wonderful, expensive, unaffordable wares. He checks first the faces and then the suitcases. He can tell the homecomers, despite their new Polish, Serbian or Persian passports.
Late at night, the travellers are still standing in the train corridor unable to get over the customs inspection. They tell each other everything, what they brought, what they paid, what they smuggled. Material there for long Russian winter evenings. Their grandchildren will have to listen to their stories.
The grandchildren will listen, and the strange, confusing aspect of our time will loom before them, time at its own frontiers, time with its perplexed children, with Red customs officials and White travellers, false Persians, Red Army types in long sand-coloured greatcoats, their hems brushing the ground, the damp night at Niegoreloye, the loud wheezing of heavily laden porters. No question, this frontier has a historic dimension. I feel it the moment the siren wails loud and hoarse, and we bob out into the dark, calm expanse ahead.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 September 1926
30. Down the Volga to Astrakhan
The Volga steamer that goes from Nizhny Novgorod to Astrakhan lies at anchor white and festive, like a Sunday. A man shakes a small, surprisingly noisy bell. The porters come running through the wooden departure hall, dressed only in track suit bottoms and a leather carrying strap. They look like so many wrestlers. Hundreds of them stand by the counter. It’s nine o’clock on a bright morning. A happy wind is blowing. It feels as if a circus has just put up its tents outside the town.
The Volga steamer bears the name of a famous hero of the Revolution and has four classes of passenger. In the first are the new citizens of Russia, the NEP-men on their way to holidays in the Caucasus and the Crimean peninsula. They eat in the dining room, in the scrawny shade of a palm tree, facing the portrait of the famous hero of the Revolution, which is nailed up over the door. The young daughters of the comrades play on the harsh piano. It sounds like metal spoons being struck on glasses of tea. Their fathers play cards and complain about the government. A few of their mothers manifest a predilection for orange scarves. The waiter is not class-conscious. He was already a waiter back in the days when the steamers were named for archdukes. A tip brings so much submissiveness into his face, you forget the Revolution.
Fourth class is in the belly of the ship. Those passengers lug heavy bundles, rickety baskets, musical instruments and agricultural equipment. All nations, those on the Volga and beyond, are represented among them: Chuvaish, Chuvans, gypsies, Jews, Germans, Poles, Russians, Kazakhs, Kirghiz. There are Catholics here, Russian Orthodox, Muslims, Tibetans, heathens, Protestants. Here are old people, fathers, mothers, girls, infants. Here are small-farm workers, poor artisans, wandering musicians, blind buccaneers, travelling merchants, half-grown shoe-shine boys, and homeless children, so-called bezprizorniy who live off wretchedness and fresh air. They all sleep in wooden drawers, two storeys one above the other. They eat pumpkins, hunt for lice in the children’s hair, still their infants, wash nappies, brew tea, and play the balalaika and the mouth organ.