And for all that, Astrakhan has a technical college, libraries, clubs and theatres. Ice cream under a swaying arc lamp, fruit and marzipan behind bridal gauze. I pray for an end to the dust plague. The next day God sent a cloudburst. The ceiling of my hotel room, pampered by so much dust, wind and drought, promptly fell to the floor with shock. I hadn’t asked for as much rain as all that. It thundered and lightened. The streets could not be made out. The droshkies groaned along, up to their axles in mud, the spokes dropped soft, grey, heavy clumps of it. The ghosts threw back their hoods and put up familiar human gear. Two couldn’t pass each other on the cobbled main street. One had to turn round and go back at least twenty feet to let the other pass. You triple-jumped to cross the street. I was lucky in that everything I needed was on one block: hotel, writing paper, post office, and café.
In those days in Astrakhan the most important institution was the café. It was run by a Polish family brought here from Cęstochowa by an implacable fate. I had to tell the women all about what they were wearing in Warsaw. I showed extensive knowledge of Polish politics. Doubts people in Astrakhan had about a war involving Poland, Russia and Germany I was able to allay at length. When I am in Astrakhan I am a witty conversationalist.
Without this café, I would have been unable to work, the most important means of production being coffee. There is no role for flies. And yet there they were, morning, noon and night. It is flies not fishes that make up ninety-eight per cent of the fauna of Astrakhan. They are perfectly useless, not a trading commodity, no one lives off them, they live off everyone. Thick black swarms of them sit on dishes, sugar, windows, china plates, leftovers, on bushes and trees, on dung heaps and excreta, and even on clean tablecloths where a human eye discerns nothing of nutritional value. A spilled drop of soup, long since absorbed into the cloth, these flies are capable of eating molecule by molecule, as though with a spoon. On the white tunics that most men here wear sit thousands of flies. Secure and contemplative, they don’t fly up when their host moves, they are capable of sitting for hours at a time on his shoulders. The flies of Astrakhan are nerveless, they have the tranquillity of great mammals, like cats, or their enemies from the insect world, the spiders… I am surprised and sad that these intelligent and humane creatures do not come to Astrakhan in numbers where they could be of great benefit to the human race. I have eight garden-spiders in my room, quiet, clever animals, friendly associates of my sleepless nights. By day they sleep in their apartments. At dusk they move into position — two, the most prominent and gifted, to the proximity of the light. Long and patiently they watch the clueless flies, with their fine, hair-thin legs they clamber up ropes spun from nothing and spittle, carry out repairs and stay on the alert, surround their quarry on wide, wide detours, deftly make themselves fast to grains of sand on the wall, work hard and cleverly — but how poorly they are recompensed. A thousand flies buzz about my room, I wish I had twenty thousand poisonous spiders, a whole army of them! If I stay longer in Astrakhan, I would breed them and show them more attention than caviar.
But the people of Astrakhan are only interested in caviar. They are oblivious to the flies. They watch these murderous insects gnaw at their meat, their bread, their fruit, and they don’t raise a finger. Yes, the flies stroll about on their beards, their noses and foreheads, and the people talk and laugh. In the café, they have given up the fight against the flies, they don’t even bother to shut the glass vitrine, they let them gorge themselves on sugar and chocolate, they veritably spoil them. Fly-paper, invented by an American, the thing I most detest among all civilization’s blessings, strikes me as a work of noble idealism when I am in Astrakhan. But the whole of Astrakhan has not one scrap of that precious yellow stuff. I ask them in the café: “Why don’t you have any fly-paper?” They answer evasively and say: “Oh, if only you’d been in Astrakhan before the war, even a couple of months before!” The landlord says it, and the trader. They lend passive support to the reactionary flies. One day these little beasts will eat up the whole of Astrakhan, fishes and caviar and all.
I prefer the beggars to the flies of Astrakhan, more numerous here than anywhere else. They wander slowly through the streets, wailing or singing at the tops of their voices, crying their woes as though following their own corpse, pouring into every beer hall. I give them a kopeck — and on that kopeck they manage to live! Of all the wonders of Astrakhan they are really the most astonishing…
Frankfurter Zeitung, 12 October 1926
32. Saint Petroleum
There is an electric railway from Baku to Sabunchi, where vast quantities of petroleum are extracted. It wasn’t built till last year, and is still unfinished. (The trams in Baku are also the work of the Soviet government.) The people are proud of this railway. The Soviet government views it as a local, but highly effective propaganda success. It seems likely that earlier enterprises extracted petroleum more cheaply and used it more efficiently than the present nationalized enterprise. But it is also true that neither the Nobels nor the Rothschilds ever built a tramline for their workforce. All of them were made to cover great distances on foot, in dog-carts, or on primitive farm wagons. Now a spacious, hygienic, modern train leaves Baku every half hour. The Western European is not surprised to see it. But to a Soviet citizen, this railway is not only an acclaimed, long-missed conveyance; it is almost, it is in fact, a symbol. It is the only railway of its kind in the whole of Russia. What to us would be an unsurprising technical innovation in this corner of Eurasia carries political weight. The line preserves and encourages the optimism of the oil workers, many of whom earn comparatively high wages (up to three hundred roubles a month), who have an old revolutionary tradition, and are therefore predisposed to believe in the new state. So rails and carriages, bricks and cement, are capable of political and historical significance. The old entrepreneurs seem not to have considered this as a possibility.
Long before the train moves off the carriages are all full. It’s hot, and a slothful wind seems for once to have taken the place of the prevailing breeze. The sun pierces the windows and heats up walls, floor and ceiling. All the passengers are complaining about the heat — a welcome pretext for conversation. I see Turkish workers with the Red Flag, many of them with Party badges — beside them Turkish women, ritually covered features, an old sheikh for whom people move aside, maybe not reverently but with that degree of tolerance that is not yet a matter of course, and resembles politeness. An Armenian priest is reading a book, a holy book I had thought; but not at all, it is one of the many brochures produced from the new camp. A vendor comes by with Oriental sweets, halvah and baklava, sticky, sugar-powdered, sometimes garish and yet bland things, chewing gum you gulp down if you can get it clear of your teeth. The homeless children or bezprizorniy hunker down on the steps, wangle their way through the feet of the passengers, are picked up, thrown out, and creep miraculously back in through cracks and openings. There are a lot of proles and semi-proles — all drawn by petroleum — it looks menacing, but it’s harmless and hungry. Many people have stunningly beautiful eyes, shining and still haunted. I think of the heavy, tired blink of the Armenian, the veiled, tragic expression of Jewish […] Turko-Tartars, the large moist pupils of the Muslim woman looking out between dense cloth wrappings like an animal between stout bars. The conductor begs to be let through. He wears a yellow tunic with tasteful badges, and looks like a British conductor in the colonies. This is a modern, technical Russia with American ambitions. Not a real Russia any more.