We could not answer their questions because we didn"t know enough, and because we are not in the confidence of our makers of foreign policy. We told them instead what was being asked in America: the questions about the domination of the Balkans by Communist parties; the questions about, and the denunciations of, the use of the veto by the Russians in the United Nations; the questions about the denunciation of America by the Russian press.
These things seemed to balance each other-they knew no more about their foreign policy than we knew about ours. There was no animosity in their questions, only wonder. Finally our host stood up, and he raised his gla.s.s, and he said, "Somewhere in all of this there must be an answer, and there must be an answer quickly. Let us drink to the hope that the answer may be found, for the world needs peace, needs peace very badly." And he pointed to the two who were struggling with the heavy beams to build a roof, and he said, "This winter those two will have a house for the first time since 1941. They must have peace, they want their house. They have three small children who have never had a house to live in. There cannot be in the world anyone so wicked as to want to put them back in holes under the ground. But that is where they have been living."
The host opened the champagne and poured a little of the precious fluid into each of our gla.s.ses. The table had become very quiet. We raised our gla.s.ses, and no one made a toast. We drank the champagne without speaking. After a while we thanked our hosts and drove away through the war-scarred country. And we wondered whether our host was right, whether there really were people in the world who wanted to destroy the new little houses again, and put the children in caves under the ground.
We slept long the next morning, and when we awakened we discussed the day on the farm, and Capa got his exposed films put away. We were invited to lunch at the house of Alexander Korneichuk and his wife, Wanda Wasilewska, a Polish poetess who is known in America. They live in a pleasant house with a large garden behind it. Luncheon was served on the porch, under a great vine that shaded it. Behind the porch was a square of flowers, roses and flowering trees, and behind that a very large vegetable garden.
Wanda Wasilewska had prepared the luncheon. It was delicious, and there was a great deal of it. There was a vegetable caviar made of eggplant, a fish from the Dnieper cooked in a tomato sauce, strange-tasting stuffed eggs, and with this an aged vodka, yellow and very fine. Then came strong, clear chicken soup, and little fried chickens, rather like our Southern-fried chicken, except that they were dipped in bread crumbs first. Then there was cake, and coffee, and liqueur, and last Korneichuk brought out Upmann cigars in aluminum cases.
It was a beautiful lunch. The sun was warm, and the garden was lovely. And as we sat with the cigars and liqueur, the talk turned to relations with the United States. Korneichuk had been part of a cultural delegation to the United States. On their arrival in New York he and his delegation had been fingerprinted and made to register as agents of a foreign power. The fingerprinting had outraged them, and so they had returned home without carrying out the visit. For, as Korneichuk said, "With us, fingerprinting is only for criminals. We did not fingerprint you. You have not been photographed or forced to register."
We tried to explain then that according to our rule the people of a communist or a socialist state are all employees of the government, and that all employees of foreign governments are required to register.
And he answered, "England has a socialist government, and you don"t make every Englishman register, nor do you fingerprint them."
Since both Korneichuk and Poltarazki had been soldiers, we asked them about the fighting which had gone on in the area. And Poltarazki told a story which is very hard to forget. He told of being with a Russian patrol which was sent to attack a German outpost. And he said that they had been so long getting there, and the snow had been so deep, and the cold so severe, that when they finally made their attack, their hands and their arms and their legs were stiff.
"We had nothing to fight with, except one thing," he said. "That was our teeth. I dreamed about that afterward. It was so horrible."
After luncheon we went to the river, and hired a little motor-boat, and cruised about under the cliff of Kiev and across to the flat sandy beach where hundreds of people were bathing and lying in the sun. Whole families in colored bathing suits were turning brown on the white sand. And there were many little sailboats on the river, tacking back and forth. There were excursion boats too, loaded with people.
We took off our clothes, and jumped over the side of the boat, and swam around in our shorts. The water was warm and pleasant. It was Sunday and very gay. In the gardens on the cliffs, and in the town, people swarmed. Music was playing in the orchestra sh.e.l.ls on top of the cliff. And many young couples walked arm in arm along the river.
In the evening we went back to the Riviera, the dancing place on the cliff, and we watched the night come down over the huge level Ukraine with the silver river twisting away.
There were many more dancers this evening because it was Sunday. And some of them danced almost professionally well. The orchestra played its usual gypsy, and Georgian, and Russian, and Jewish, and Ukrainian songs. In our honor they did a version of "In the Mood," which was a shattering affair. It was two-thirds over before we recognized it at all. But it was played with great vigor.
The open-air dancing platform was surrounded by a rich hedge of some flowering plant. And in a little cave in this hedge a small boy hid-a little beggar. He would creep out of his cave of flowers and come to the table and beg a little money to go to the movies.
The manager came over and said, "He is our steadiest customer, and he is very rich."
He drove the little boy away gently, but the moment the manager had moved away, he came back and got his money for the movies.
More and more people came to the club, and it was quite crowded. At about ten o"clock a fight started, a rushing, striking, running fight, among a number of young men. But it was not about a girl. It was about soccer, which is a very serious business for the Ukrainians. The men of Kiev feel as strongly about their soccer team as do the Brooklynites about their baseball. The fight raged over the platform for a moment, and then it settled down, and everyone went to a table and had a drink and settled the problem.
We walked back through the parkway. Hundreds of people were still sitting and listening to the music of the orchestras. Capa begged me not to ask him any questions in the morning.
There is an inst.i.tution here which would be good for us. In the hotels and restaurants, well displayed, there is a complaint book with a pencil on it, and you can write any complaint that you want against the service, or the management, or the arrangements, and you needn"t sign it. At intervals an inspector comes around to look over the restaurants, and all public services, and if there are enough complaints against any one man, or against the manager, or against the service, there is a reorganization. One complaint is not taken very seriously, but if the same complaint is repeated a number of times, it is.
And there is another book in the Soviet Union, which we were coming to view with a certain amount of terror. It is the impression book. Whether you have visited a factory, a museum, an art gallery, a bakery, or even a building project, there is invariably an impressions book in which you must set down what you think about what you have seen. And usually, by the time you come to the book, you don"t know what you have seen. It is a book obviously intended for compliments. The shock would be great if the remarks and the impressions were not complimentary. Impressions, with me at least, require a little time to cook up. They are not full grown immediately.
We had asked to go to another farm, one on richer land than the one we had seen, and one that had not been as badly destroyed by the Germans. And the next morning we started for it, in another direction from Kiev than the first farm we had visited. Our car was a pre-war Ziss. And as we had driven in it, it had grown progressively more decrepit. Its springs no longer sprang very much, its gears groaned and clattered, its rear end howled like a dying wolf.
We had become interested in the drivers we got. Being a chauffeur is not a servant"s job in the Soviet Union at all, but a well-paid and dignified position. The men are mechanics, and nearly all of them have been soldiers-either tank-drivers or pilots. Our driver in Kiev was a serious man who was nursing his dying automobile like a child. None of the new cars had come in from Moscow yet, and no one knew when they would arrive. Every piece of rolling stock had to be kept going long after it should have been sent to the junk heap.
As a car, our vehicle in Kiev didn"t amount to much, but as a water heater it was magnificent. We stopped every three miles and filled the radiator from ditches, from little streams, from water holes, and the car promptly turned it into steam. Our driver finally left his water bucket on the front b.u.mper, ready for use.
We went about twenty kilometers on a mildly paved road, and then turned left into gently rolling country. The road was no road at all, but a series of wheel tracks, and since it had rained, the trick was to find the wheel tracks least recently used. In the depressions between the rolls of land there were small ponds, with white herons and storks strolling around their edges. We nursed our boiling car between the ponds, and at each one stopped and let it steam a while, and filled it with fresh water.
Our driver said he had been a pilot during the war as well as a tank-driver. He had one very great gift, he could sleep at any time, and for any length of time. If we stopped the car for five minutes, he went to sleep, and immediately awakened when he was called, wide awake and ready to go. He could sleep for twelve hours and awaken the same way. I remembered the gunners in our bombers who had developed the same gift by sleeping on the way to their targets and on their way home.
We arrived at the farm and village about noon. And this farm was also named Shevchenko. We had to call it Shevchenko II. It was very different from the first farm we had seen, for the land was rich and versatile, and the town had not been destroyed. The Germans had been surrounded here. They had killed all the animals, but had not had time to destroy the village. This farm had raised a great many horses, and when the Germans were finally captured, all the horses and cows, chicken and geese and ducks, were dead. It is hard to imagine these Germans. Hard to imagine what went on in their heads, what their thinking process was, these sad, destructive, horrible children.
The manager of Shevchenko II had been a partisan fighter of note, and he still wore his brown tunic and belt. He was blue-eyed and had iron lines along his jaws.
This was a farm of over twelve hundred people, and a great many of its men were killed. The manager told us, "We can rebuild what houses we lost, and we can raise more animals, but we cannot get our men back, and we cannot give new arms and new legs to our maimed people."
We saw very few artificial limbs in the Soviet Union where so many are needed. Perhaps this industry has not been developed as yet, but it is surely one of the most necessary ones, for many thousands of people have lost arms and legs.
Shevchenko II is a thriving farm. The land is rich and rolling. The crops are wheat and rye and corn. There was a late freeze last spring, and part of the winter wheat was frozen. The people rushed to the earth and prepared it for corn, so that the land would not be lost for the year. And it is good corn land. The stalks stand eight or nine feet high, and the ears are big and full-bodied.
We went out to a threshing machine in the fields where the battalions of people were working with wheat. It was a very large farm, and all over in the distance we could see the people working with scythes, for there were only one small reaper and one small tractor on this farm. Most of the grain was being cut by hand and bound by hand. The people were working furiously. They laughed and talked, but they never paused in their work. And not only were they in compet.i.tion, but this has been their biggest year for a long time, and they wanted to get the grain in, for their prosperity depends entirely on this.
We went to see the granary where the produce is stored, the bins of sesame for oil, the rye and the wheat. The grain was being distributed: so much for the state, so much put aside for the new planting, and the rest distributed to the people of the community.
The village itself is laid out around the village pond, where people swim, wash their clothes, and water the horses. Little naked boys were riding horses into the pond and swimming them about to get them cleaned. The public buildings are grouped around the pond: the club, which has a small stage and a dancing s.p.a.ce and seats; the mill where the local grain is ground; and the office where accounts are kept and letters received. In this office there is a radio-receiver, with a loud-speaker on the roof. The loud-speakers in all the houses in the village are wired to this master set. This is an electrified village, it has lights and it has motors.
The houses of the people with their gardens and orchards climbed up over the small round hills. It was a very pretty little village. The houses were white with new plaster, and the gardens were green and rich, the tomatoes red on the vines, and the corn very high around the houses.
The house where we were to be guests was on the top of the rise, so that we could overlook the rolling country, the fields, and the orchards. It was a house like all the rest, like most of the Ukrainian farmhouses-an entranceway, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a parlor. It was newly plastered. Even the floors were clean new plastered. The house had a sweet smell of new clay.
Our host was a strong, smiling man of about fifty-five or sixty. His wife, Mamuchka, was just what her name implied. She was the hardest-working woman I have ever seen.
They welcomed us to the house and gave us the parlor for our own. The walls were plastered in pale blue, and on the table there were bottles covered with pink paper, in which were paper flowers of all colors.
There was obviously more prosperity in this village than in Shevchenko I. The icon was larger and it was covered with lace of pale blue to match the walls. This had not been a large family. There had been only one son, and his picture was very large on the parlor wall, a tinted photograph, and they only mentioned him once.
The mother said, "Graduated in bio-chemistry in 1940, mobilized in 1941, killed in 1941."
Mamuchka"s face was very bleak when she said it, and it was the only time she mentioned him, and he was her only son.
Near one wall was an old Singer sewing-machine, covered with a piece of cheesecloth, and against another wall, a narrow bed with a rug for blanket. In the center of the room stood a long table, with benches on either side. It was very hot in the house. The windows would not open. We decided that if we could, without seeming to be discourteous, we would sleep in the barn. For the nights were cool and delightful outside; inside the house we would smother.
We went into the yard and washed ourselves, and then dinner was ready.
Mamuchka is a very famous cook in the village, and a very good one. Her meals were unbelievable. Supper that night began with water gla.s.ses of vodka, with pickles and home-baked black bread, and Ukrainian shashlik which Mamuchka made very well. There was a great bowl of tomatoes, and onions and cuc.u.mbers; there were little fried cakes, full of sour cherries, on which honey was poured, a national dish and delicious. There was fresh milk, and tea, and then more vodka. We ate far too much. We ate the little cherry cakes and honey until our eyes popped.
It was beginning to get dark, and we thought this was the last meal of the day.
In the evening we walked down through the village to the club house. As we pa.s.sed the pond a boat came across it, and there was music in the boat, a curious music. The instruments were a balalaika, a little drum with a small cymbal, and a concertina, and this was the dance music of the village. The players moved across the little lake in the boat and landed in front of the club house.
It was quite a large building, the club. It had a small stage, and in front of the stage were tables with chess boards and checker boards, and then a dancing s.p.a.ce, and then rows and rows of benches for spectators.
There were very few people in the club when we went in, only a few chess players. We learned that the young people come back from the fields, and have their supper, and then rest for an hour, even sleep for an hour, before they come to the club.
The stage was set up for a little play that night. There were big pots of flowers on a table, and two chairs, and, upstage, a large portrait of the President of the Ukrainian Republic. The little three-piece orchestra came in, and set up its instruments, and began to play. The young people drifted in, strong girls, their faces washed and shiny. Only a few young men came.
The girls danced together. They wore bright print dresses, and head-cloths of colored silk and wool, and their feet were almost invariably bare. And they danced with fury. The music had a rapid beat, accentuated by drum and cymbal. The bare feet beat the floor. The boys stood around and watched.
We asked a girl why she did not dance with the boys. She said, "They are good for marrying, but there are so few of them since the war that a girl only gets into trouble if she dances with them. Besides, they are very bashful." And then she laughed and went back to her dancing.
There were so few of them, young men of marriageable age. There were very young boys, but the men who should have been there dancing with the girls were dead.
The energy of these girls was unbelievable. All day they had been working in the fields, since daylight in fact, and yet after one hour of sleep they were prepared to dance all night. The men at the chess tables played on, unmoved and unbothered by the noise that went on around them.
Meanwhile the company which was to play was preparing the stage, and Capa was setting up his lights to photograph the play. It seemed to us that the girls were a little impatient when the music stopped. They did not want to stop dancing for the play.
It was a little propaganda play, and it was naive and charming. The story was as follows: There is a girl on a farm, but she is a lazy girl, and she does not want to work. She wants to go to a town, and paint her nails, and use lipstick, and be decadent and degraded. As the play opens, she is engaged in an argument with a good girl, a girl who is a brigade-leader, a girl who is honored for her great work in the fields. The girl who wants to paint her nails slouches around the stage and is obviously no good, whereas the other, the brigade-leader, stands very straight, with her hands at her sides, and declaims her lines. The third member of the cast is a heroic tractor-driver, and the interesting thing is that he really is a tractor-driver, and the play had been held up an hour and a half while he fixed the tractor he had been working with all day. The heroic tractor-driver had one dramatic trick, and only one-he delivered his lines pacing back and forth across the stage, smoking cigarettes.
Now the tractor-driver is in love with the girl who wants to paint her nails. He is really in love with her, and he is in grave danger of losing his soul to her. In fact, as the play progresses, it is obvious that he is almost ready to throw up his job driving a tractor and helping the economy of the people, to move into a city and get an apartment and live softly with the nail-painting girl. But the brigade-leader, standing very straight, delivers a lecture to him.
It does no good. He is obviously distraught, and he is very much in love with the slovenly, no-good girl. He does not know what to do. Shall he give up the girl he loves, or shall he follow her to town and become a b.u.m?
Now the decadent girl goes off stage, leaving the brigade-leader with the tractor-driver. And the brigade-leader, with feminine wile, tells the tractor-driver that this girl does not really love him. She only wants to marry him because he is such an eminent tractor-driver, and she would soon be sick of him. The tractor-driver does not believe this, and so the brigade-leader says with a flash of inspiration, "I have it. You pretend to make love to me, and when she sees us you will find how much she loves you."
This new idea is accepted. The nail-painter makes an entrance to find the tractor-driver holding the brigade-leader in his arms, and, lo and behold, not what you would expect happens, for the slovenly girl decides that she will become a worker in socialist economy. She will stay on the farm. She turns her fury on the brigade-leader. She says, "I will form my own brigade, not only you can be so eminent and decorated. I myself will become a brigade-leader and wear decorations."
This solves the tractor-driver"s problems both amorous and economic, and the play closes with everybody feeling pretty good about the whole thing.
This is the story of the play, but this is not how it really came off. The tractor-driver had only made four or five paces across the stage, and the story had only opened, when Capa discharged his flash bulbs to take his first picture. This broke the play wide open. The nail-painting girl retired behind a bunch of ferns and didn"t come out for the rest of the scene. The tractor-driver forgot his lines. The brigade-leader stumbled and tried to pick up the play, and failed. The rest of the play was done like an echo. The actors repeated the lines given by the prompter, so that one had a double version. Every time they nearly got their lines again, Capa set off new flash bulbs and threw them.
The audience was delighted. It applauded wildly every time the flash bulbs went off.
The decadent girl"s light nature was indicated both with red nail polish and with strings of gla.s.s beads and shiny jewelry. The flash bulbs made her so nervous that she broke her beads and spilled them all over the stage. The play fell apart completely.
We wouldn"t have known what it was about, except that the prompter, who was also a teacher, explained it to us later. And the curtain was finally drawn with tumultuous applause. We had the feeling that the audience preferred this version to any they had seen of this play. When it was over, they sang two Ukrainian songs.
The girls wanted to dance. They were restless, and soon the orchestra took up its position again and the whirling dances went on. They were only persuaded by the manager that they should go to bed. It was already a quarter of two, and they had to get up at five-thirty in the morning to work in the fields. But they were reluctant to leave, and they would have danced all night if they had been permitted to.
By the time we had climbed the hill it was two-thirty, and we were ready to go to bed. But this was not Mamuchka"s plan. She must have started cooking the moment we left, after having finished what we thought was supper. The long table was laid, and the food was piled upon it. And at two-thirty in the morning we had the following meal: gla.s.ses of vodka, and pickles and cuc.u.mbers again, and fried fish which had been caught in the village pond, and little fried cakes and honey again, and a beautiful potato soup.
We were dying of overeating and lack of sleep. The house was very hot, and the room uncomfortable. Also we had found out that the narrow bed Capa and I were supposed to occupy was Mamuchka"s bed, so we asked permission to sleep in the barn.
They spread new hay for us and put a rug over it, and we lay down to sleep. We left the door open, and it was silently closed. Apparently the fear of night air is here, as it is in most of Europe. We waited a while before we got up and opened the door, but again it was closed very softly. They were not going to let us hurt ourselves by exposure to night air.
The hay in the little barn was sweet. Rabbits in a cage against the wall rustled and nibbled in the dark. On the other side of the mud wall a few pigs grunted comfortably, and Lubka, the cow, stirred in her sleep.
Lubka is the new cow, and not as well liked by Mamuchka as the old cow was. She says she doesn"t know why she sold her old cow. That was Katushka, an affectionate form of Katharina. She loved Katushka very much, and she does not know why she sold her. Lubka is a nice cow, but she hasn"t the personality, nor does she give quite as much milk as Katushka did. Every morning the village children come by to take the cows to pasture for the day, and Lubka goes out to join the herd, and there is Katushka in the herd. And every evening, when the cows come back, each one turning of its own accord into its own yard, Katushka tries to come into this yard, she still wants to come to her old home, and Mamuchka speaks to her for a little while, then drives her out of the yard.
And she says, "I must have been crazy to sell Katushka. Of course, Lubka is a younger cow, and she will probably live longer, but she is not as nice a cow, she is not as generous a cow as Katharina was."
The night was so short as to be practically nonexistent. We closed our eyes, turned once, and it was gone. And there were people walking about in the yard beside the barn, the cows were being led out, the pigs were squealing and grumbling in antic.i.p.ation of breakfast. I don"t know when Mamuchka slept. She could hardly have slept at all, for she had been up for hours cooking breakfast.
Capa gave trouble about getting up. He didn"t want to do it. But he was finally lifted out of the hay. He sat on a log and stared into s.p.a.ce for a long time.
The breakfast must be set down in detail because there has never been anything like it in the world. First came a water gla.s.s of vodka, then, for each person, four fried eggs, two huge fried fish, and three gla.s.ses of milk; then a dish of pickles, and a gla.s.s of homemade cherry wine, and black bread and b.u.t.ter; and then a full cup of honey, and two more gla.s.ses of milk, and we finished with another gla.s.s of vodka. It sounds incredible that we ate all that for breakfast, but we did, and it was all good, but we felt heavy and a little sick afterward.
We thought we were up early, but the village had been in the fields since the first dawn. We went to the fields where they were reaping the rye. The men with long scythes walking in a line, cutting a great swath. Behind them came the women who bound the grain into bundles with ropes of twisted straw, and after them the children who gleaned the grain, who picked up every straw and every head, so that none was wasted. They worked doggedly, for this is their busiest time. Capa moved about taking pictures, and they looked up and smiled and went back to work. There was no pause. This people worked this way for thousands of years, and then for a little while they were mechanized, and now they have had to go back to hand labor until they can build new machinery.
We visited the mill where they grind the grain for their bread, and went to the office where the records of the farm are kept.
On the edge of the village they were building a brickworks, for it is their idea to have every house of brick, and every roof of tile, for the fire hazard of the thatch has impressed them very deeply. They are glad that they have peat and clay to make the bricks on the grounds. And when their village is rebuilt, they said, they would sell bricks to the neighboring farms. The brickworks will be done before the winter, and when they cannot work on the land they will make bricks. Piles of peat are under roof now for burning.
At noon we stopped in to see a family at lunch: mother, and father, and two children. They had a great bowl of vegetable and meat soup in the middle of the table, and each member of the family had a wooden spoon which he dipped into the central bowl. And they had a large bowl of sliced tomatoes, and a big flat loaf of bread, and a pitcher of milk. These people seemed to be eating very well, and we could tell what the process of good eating was by looking at the leather belts around the tunics of the men, for the lines of other years were on the belts, and now the belts were extended and the old lines were back two, three, and four inches, where the buckle had made its mark in the past.
Mamuchka must have cleared away the breakfast dishes and started immediately to cook again. By four-thirty in the afternoon she had prepared a banquet. This was her little state dinner. She was very proud of her ability, and the village was very proud of her, which is probably one of the reasons she was our hostess. At this dinner the leaders of the village were her guests. There were present at the table the president of the farm, the agricultural expert, called agronome, and his wife, a pretty woman, who was the teacher and dramatic coach, the manager of the farm, the male schoolteacher, the father and mother of course, and us. And if we had thought the other meals were huge, this one outdid them all. There was a great carafe of vodka on the table, and we were very tired of vodka, and our stomachs were very weak. We began with black bread, pickles, tomatoes, and vodka, and then there was Ukrainian borscht with sour cream, and a huge stew of meat, cooked in some way so that the spices had gone into the potatoes themselves. And there were little cakes, and honey, and milk. When a plate became only half empty, Mamuchka filled it up again. She nearly fed us to death.
Then the president of the farm made a little speech of welcome, and we made a little speech of thanks. And then they asked if we would mind answering a few questions, because we were the first Americans who had ever come to that farm, and they had a great curiosity about our country. They would like to know some things about it. We told them that America was a huge country, and we knew only a little of it, and possibly many of the questions we wouldn"t know the answers to, but we would try. Then the agricultural expert asked us about farming. What crops are grown, and where are they grown? And whether there are experiments with seeds, and do we have stations where experiments are carried on? And are there agricultural schools? He said that every collective farm in the Soviet Union has fields set aside for experiments with soils and seeds, and did we have things like that? And he asked whether the government helped farmers with money and with advice. This question had been asked before, and it was always a little surprising to them when we told of the work our government does with agriculture, not only our federal government, but our state governments. Then the farm manager asked how much land it took to support a family in America, and what its income was in relation to food, and medicine, and clothing; and what equipment there would be likely to be on an American farm, what machinery, and what stock. And he asked what care is being taken of our veterans.
Then the schoolteacher asked us about our government. He wanted to know about the Supreme Court, and how the President is elected, and how the Congress is elected. He asked whether the President has the power to lead the country into war, and what power has the State Department, and how close is the government to the people.
We answered that we did not think the President has very great power, but he may have an oblique power, we didn"t know. And they wanted to know what kind of a man Truman is, and we didn"t know that. And our host spoke of Roosevelt. He said he was greatly loved by the people of Russia, and trusted, and he said that his death was like the death of a father.
And he asked, "Did you know him? Did you ever meet him?"
And I said, "Yes."
And he said, "Tell about it, how did he speak, and what was his manner? Could you tell some little stories about him that we can understand?"
Then the agronome asked about atomic power, not as a bomb, but if anything constructive would be done with nuclear fission in America.
And we said, "We don"t know. We think so. We think already many things are being done and many experiments are being made for the use of this power, and also for the use of by-products of fission for medical research. We know that this new thing could change the world if it were properly used, and also it could change the world if it were improperly used."
Then the people around the table spoke of the future of their farm. In a year or two it would be electrified and mechanized. They are very proud of this farm. Soon, they said, the new tractors would begin to come in, and before very long the people of the village would be well fed and well housed, and then the people would not have to work so dreadfully hard. "Come back in a year," they said, "and see how we have progressed. We will be starting to build brick houses, and our club will be of brick, and our roofs will be of tile, and life will not be so hard."
Our driver had been sleeping almost solidly ever since we had arrived. He was a wonderful man with sleep. Now we awakened him, and he got his car running on about four cylinders out of eight.
We said our good-bys. The manager of the farm and the agronome rode with us to the crossroads to see us off. The manager asked us to send some of the pictures we had taken of the farm, for they would like to put them up in the club, and this we will do.
On the way in to Kiev we went to sleep in the back of the car, from a combination of weariness and overeating. And we do not know how many times the driver stopped for water, or how many times his car broke down. We rolled out of the car and into bed in Kiev, and slept for about twelve hours.
The next morning we went to the river to see the barges bringing produce from the north and south for the markets at Kiev. There were barges of firewood, and little boats piled high with hay. Great loads of tomatoes, and cuc.u.mbers, and cabbages moved on the river and landed at the feet of the city. These were the products of the collective farms, brought in to be sold in the open market. We followed the produce up the cliff to the marketplace, where the sellers sat in long lines with their produce in front of them, old people and children, for the young people were working in the harvest fields.
From the market we went to a gigantic bakery, where the black bread is baked for the whole city. The manager put white coats on us before we could enter. Part of the bakery is in ruins and is being rebuilt and enlarged. The manager told us that while the city was under siege the bakery had continued to work, and even while bombs were falling on the buildings the ovens had turned out bread.
There were mountains of bread. It was a completely mechanized bakery, with mixers, kneaders, baking ovens all automatic. The great chains of black bread come through the oven and drop off and are piled on the carts to go out to the city.
The people were very proud of this bakery, and the manager asked us whether in America we had any such wonderful things. And here we found again something that we had found so often, that Russian people truly believe they invented these things. They love automatic machinery, and it is their dream to be completely mechanized in practically all their techniques. To them mechanization means ease and comfort, and plenty of food, and a general richness. They love machines as much as Americans do, and a new automobile will draw a crowd to stand around and gaze at it almost with reverence.
In the afternoon I was interviewed for a Ukrainian literary magazine. It was a very long and painful experience. The editor, a sharp-faced alert little man, asked questions that were two paragraphs long. They were translated, and by the time I understood the last part I had forgotten the first part. I answered them as well as I could. This would be translated to the editor, and then the whole thing written down. The questions were highly complicated and highly literary. And when I answered a question, I wasn"t at all sure that the translation was getting over. There were two problems. One was my complete difference of background from the interviewer, and the second was my English, probably quite colloquial, which did not register very clearly with the translator who had been trained in academic English. To make sure that I was not misquoted by accident, I asked to have the translation of the Russian back into English. I was right, the answers I was supposed to have given did not very closely approximate what I had said. This was not done on purpose; it was not even the difficulty of trying to communicate from one language to another. It was more than language. It was translation from one kind of thinking to another. They were very pleasant and honest people, but we just could not communicate closely. And this was my last interview; I never tried it again. And when in Moscow I was asked for an interview, I suggested that the questions be given to me in writing, that I be given a chance to think them over, to answer them in English, and to check on the translation. And since this was not done, I was not interviewed again.
Wherever we went, the questions asked us had a certain likeness, and we gradually discovered that the questions all grew from a single source. The intellectuals of the Ukraine based their questions, both political and literary, on articles they had read in Pravda. And after a while we began to antic.i.p.ate the questions before they were asked, for we knew the articles on which they were based almost by heart.
There was one literary question which came up on all occasions. We even knew when to expect it, for our questioner"s eyes sharpened, and he leaned forward in his chair and inspected us closely. We knew we were going to be asked how we liked Simonov"s play The Russian Question.
Simonov is probably the most popular writer in the Soviet Union at the present time. Recently he came to America for a while, and on his return to Russia he wrote this play. It is probably the most performed drama of the time. It opened simultaneously in over three hundred theaters in the Soviet Union. Mr. Simonov"s play is about American journalism, and it is necessary to set down a short synopsis of it. It is cast partly in New York, and partly in a place that resembles Long Island. In New York its set is approximately Bleeck"s restaurant, near the Herald Tribune building. And the play is roughly this: An American correspondent who, years before, had been to Russia and had written a favorable book about Russia, is employed by a newspaper tyc.o.o.n, a capitalist, a hard, crude, overpowering, overbearing newspaper baron, a man of no principles and no virtues. The tyc.o.o.n, for purposes of winning an election, wants to prove through his newspapers that the Russians are going to fight the Americans. He employs the correspondent to go to Russia, and to come back and report that the Russians want to go to war with America. The tyc.o.o.n offers him an immense amount of money, thirty thousand dollars to be exact, and complete security for the future if the correspondent will do this. Now this newspaperman, who is broke, wants to marry a certain girl and wants to have a little country place in Long Island. He undertakes the job. He goes to Russia, and he finds that the Russians do not want to go to war with the Americans. He comes back and secretly writes his book, and writes it exactly opposite from what the tyc.o.o.n wants.
Meanwhile, on his advance of money, he has bought the house on Long Island in the country, he has married the girl, and some little security is on the way. When his book is turned in, the tyc.o.o.n not only kills the book, but makes it impossible for the correspondent to publish it anyplace else. And such is the power of this newspaper baron that the correspondent cannot ever get a job again, and can"t have his book or his future writing published. He loses his house in the country; his wife, who has wanted security, leaves him. At this time his best friend, for a reason which is not dramatically exposed, is killed in an alt.i.tude flight in a defective airplane. Our correspondent is left broke and unhappy, but with the sense that he has told the truth, and that that is the best thing to do.