Here, too, the innkeeper brings a live chicken that he offers us for dinner, and we nod again, indicating that chicken is fine. We learn later, incidentally, that the innkeeper was born of German parents here in Caucasia and that his mother tongue is German. He also speaks English. So here we don’t have to use signs.
An officer of the gendarmes turns up at the station. Scrutinizing us, he engages in a suspicious conversation with the innkeeper. The officer has two soldiers with him, to whom he talks now and then.
My deep anxiety returns, depriving me of my desire for chicken and food and everything; these gendarmes must have shown up at the request of the police officer in order to apprehend me here. What an obstinate, arrogant fool I was not to come to terms with that horrible person yesterday! Now it was too late. On the whole, one ought to come to terms with horrible people, make up with them instead of fighting them for the rest of one’s life.
As it was, I might have to spend the rest of my days in a Russian prison, be brought to St. Petersburg in chains, and get buried alive in the Peter and Paul Fortress. I would wear a hole in my stone table with my skinny elbow as I sat brooding, my head cupped in my hand, and I would cover the walls of my wretched cell with maxims that would later be studied and published as a book. I would be given every possible rehabilitation after my death, but what good did that do me now? I’ve never had a passion for the honor implied by the existence of large bronze statues of me in cities around Norway; on the contrary, every time I’ve thought about these posthumous statues, I’ve wished instead to have what they are worth right away—hand over the cash! But now the hour of fate had struck. What would happen to my scientific notes for the Geographical Society? Get destroyed, be burned by the executioner before my eyes in the stony backyard of the fortress. And soldiers would stand round about with fixed bayonets, and the sentence would be read and I would mount the fire and repeat until the end: And yet the earth is round! Then a herald blows his horn before the gate of the fortress and waves a flag and bursts in on a horse in a lather, crying, Mercy, in the name of the Emperor! And my sentence is commuted to incarceration for life. Then I ask for death—standing in the lames with an erect carriage beyond compare, I ask for death instead of life. But those inhuman executioners take me down despite my protest and lead me back to the stone table, which I’ve worn thin with my brooding….
While we are having lunch, the officer of gendarmes, using the innkeeper as interpreter, asks whether we saw an officer on our way.
I neglect answering and neglect chewing my chicken, all at once feeling completely full. So there was a connection between the gendarmes and the police officer.
The innkeeper repeated his question.
“Yes,” my traveling companion answered, “we did see an officer.”
“What was he like? Of medium height, rather stout, with a Jewish appearance, a Jew?” “Yes, precisely.”
The officer of gendarmes shows us a photograph of the man as he appeared on the train, in an officer’s uniform. “Was it him?” “Yes.”
The officer of gendarmes bows and leaves; he goes back to his two soldiers and speaks softly to them. Then he walks onto the veranda and looks up the road; he is obviously expecting the police officer any moment.
“You’re so pale,” my traveling companion says to me.
I get up from the table and go out on the veranda as well. But I didn’t descend the steps, to avoid being stopped by a thundering “Halt!” I sat down in my distress, breathing audibly.
On the veranda sits, besides the officer of gendarmes and myself, a young Englishman who plans to cross the mountains to Vladikavkaz. I begrudge him his indescribable calm. The young Brit is, like all traveling Brits, complacent, mute, indifferent to everybody; smoking his pipe, he smokes it empty, taps it out, fills it again and goes on smoking, his conceit meanwhile preventing him from even noticing the two of us who are also present. I laugh a little at him to vex him, but he pretends not to hear it. “Hm!” I say, but he doesn’t turn his head. However, having got a piece of dust in his eye, he takes out a pocket mirror and examines his eye while still smoking. I feel good about that piece of dust in his eye. True, the officer of gendarmes was my enemy and would soon apprehend me, but in what way was he personally to blame for it? It was the fault of the system. He was a cultured man who looked at me occasionally and seemed to deplore my fate. But there sat the Englishman looking down his nose at me.
Then we hear a carriage rolling on the sandy road; the officer of gendarmes jumps up and slips through the door, as if wanting to hide. The carriage comes to a halt in front of the veranda, and the police officer alights from it. He came, as he had predicted, one hour after us. He tipped his hat as usual as he passed me and remarked with a smile, “As usual, an hour behind you.”
He went into the dining room and ordered food.
So I’m reprieved until he has eaten, I think to myself, but then he’ll utter a word and point his finger, and the gendarmes will step up and seize me.
But the gendarmes were by this time gone; both the officer and the soldiers seemed blown away. Where were they? What a strange country Caucasia was! There I sat on the veranda and, though captive, was free to walk down those stairs if I wanted to. They gave me both time and opportunity to steal a march on justice, put a noose around my neck, and shorten my life. They felt so assured. But they shouldn’t feel assured about anything, but expect everything from me.
My traveling companion comes out and reports that apparently something is up: the officer of gendarmes and his two soldiers are standing in the corridor of the second floor, listening down the stairs and behaving suspiciously. “Perhaps they’re going to arrest someone,” I answer, half senseless.
The innkeeper is waiting on the chief of police with the greatest courtesy, addressing him as His Excellency; he must understand he’s dealing with an all-powerful man. His Excellency’s orders at the table are abrupt and authoritative, and when he has finished his dinner, he pays just as abruptly and authoritatively and joins us on the veranda.
He sits down beside the Englishman—who naturally doesn’t move one millimeter. He takes out a handkerchief with a coronet on it and wipes the dust off his face; afterward he takes out a cigar case with a coronet on it and lights a cigar. Then he sits there smoking in silence.
My traveling companion descends the steps and goes into the field to pick some flowers. The three of us are left sitting there.
Then I see the officer of gendarmes, with the soldiers in tow, walk stealthily down the stairs from the second floor. A mute cry comes from somewhere inside my chest, and I get up and remain standing. Now it would come! The innkeeper himself appears in the doorway of the dining room in order to watch. The officer of gendarmes steps out on the veranda and stops before the police officer. Did I see correctly? And did I hear correctly? He places his hand on his shoulder and arrests him. Arrests him. “You are my prisoner!” he said in French.
The police officer looks up at the gendarme with a momentary shudder. Then he flicks the ash off his cigar and replies, “What are you saying?”
“That you are my prisoner.”
“Why—? What do you want to—?”
A carriage that has been held in readiness rolls up, and the two soldiers grab the police officer under the arms and lead him onto the road; the officer of gendarmes follows them. I hear the Jew maintain that this will be a dangerous affair for the officer of gendarmes, he had papers and could establish his identity, just you wait! The four men take their seats in the carriage, the coachman cracks his whip, and the carriage rolls toward Tiflis.
There I was.
I turned here and there, looking about me for an explanation. The Englishman hadn’t bothered to look up; he was again using his pocket mirror to examine his eye. As soon as I recovered my power of speech, I asked the innkeeper what the whole thing was supposed to mean. Had an arrest just taken place?
The innkeeper nodded, unruffled.
“But God help you, man!” I say. “You nod as if the whole thing was nothing at all. Didn’t they just now arrest a living human being?”
“Surely. On a report from Pyatigorsk,” the innkeeper replied.
I couldn’t fathom this unheard-of action before our very eyes. “If something like that had happened to me, I would’ve sunk through the ground,” I said.
The innkeeper looked indifferent.
“You still don’t think that this was anything,” I then said. “How do you imagine I could’ve lived through something like that? And how do you imagine my traveling companion would’ve lived through it?”
“Yeah, sure. But it didn’t happen to you,” the innkeeper replied, giving up at once.
At this point the whole affair gave me a feeling of rapturous joy. Though the fever again raged inside me and my whole body trembled in a cold sweat, every single part of me was filled with joy.
When my traveling companion returned, she said, “You’ve got some color in your face again.”
“Yes,” I replied, “I’m fed up with moping around and thinking about that ox. The ox that we saw, remember, it had gotten the yoke between its horns and walked with a twisted neck. Now it feels comfortable.”
“It feels comfortable? How?”
“The officer just told me. The officer from the train, you know. He came just after we did; he also saw the ox.”
“Well?”
“He got the yoke straightened.”
“Thank God!” said my traveling companion.
I also felt content. I mentioned a couple of things I could eat now, and although I met with good advice to skip this or that and choose something else because of my fever, I persisted in my lunacy and ordered the dangerous things. For my appetite had become enormous.
In the same vein, I didn’t like the Englishman to be so taciturn and forlorn anymore, the more so as my traveling companion now went off, giving me a free hand. To make him sit up, I turned to him and said, “There is plague in Oporto. Do you know that?”
He stared at me.
I repeated that there was plague in Oporto, but he didn’t seem daunted and smoked away.
Then I fetched my issue of The New Press and said to the Englishman, “I’m just noting that, in the last report on market prices from Finland, chickens there cost one mark to one mark seventy-five penniä apiece.”
The little Brit persisted in his attempt to treat me as if I weren’t there; but he was too young, he couldn’t hold his own, and it was amusing to see him struggle with his unpracticed dignity.
“The chickens?” he asked. “In Finland? How?”
“You’ll cross the mountains,” I said, “and then you’ll go through Russia and finally get to Finland, from where you’ll go home to your happy and thoroughly charming people, the English. I wanted to prepare you for the prices in Finland, so you would know them when ordering food. Remember that the price quoted is apiece, not for a pair of chickens.”
“How much, did you say?” he asked.
“One mark to one mark seventy-five.”
“How much is that in English money?”
I knew roughly how much and was able to tell him.
“I’m not going to Finland,” he said.
It wasn’t possible to get him involved in a dispute.
Maybe I could catch his interest with something else, I thought, and began to read from the paper about “the rumors of war from Transvaal.” After reading the item aloud I translated it for him, torturing him with not knowing the simplest words in his language and asking his advice. In the end he was completely listless and answered yes to all my suggestions. Then he got up and ordered his telega to be driven up; I had worn him out. He tried to save the remnants of his British hauteur as he left: he again cut me dead. Then I said, “Have a pleasant journey! Remember to be courteous and greet people when you come and go. Those are the ways of the world.”
He turned scarlet, and in his confusion he touched his hat.
Then he drove off….
I once saw an Englishman in a Munich streetcar, an artist most likely, a painter; he was going to the Schack gallery. As we come down the street at great speed, a child, a little girl, is nearly run over; she falls, gets in between the horses and is trampled, hurt. But we manage to pull her out alive. Meanwhile the Brit is smoking his pipe. When it’s all over and the driver delays a moment before going on, the Brit looks at his watch in irritation. We cast a glance at him one and all, but we don’t mean a thing to him; in his priceless Englishman’s German he asks for his money back, he wants to get off. A child that has been run over doesn’t concern him. A passenger offers to reimburse him for his ticket. He casts an indifferent glance at the passenger; slowly and indifferently he withdraws his eyes, declining the offer. He’s not bothered by the indignation that is smoldering around him, and this staunchness would no doubt have won the applause of all his countrymen: that’s right, John, just stand pat! He remained on the streetcar until his destination. Then he got off.
Often, of course, it’s just as well and even preferable that not too many people crowd the scene of an accident. But everyone can stop smoking his pipe without special permission, everyone can raise his eyes, everyone perceive a light shock. Everyone. Without special permission.
If I were king of England, I would whisper a small piece of advice into the ears of my people. And my people would become the world’s most splendid people….
The carriage that drove past us yesterday is now overtaking us here. The Russian family eat, let the horses rest for only three quarters of an hour and prepare to be off again. Wanting to leave at the same time, Kornei, too, drives up with his carriage. There still remain three quarters of an hour of the four hours he had requested, but now Kornei can be less demanding, since he wants to take the opportunity to have company. He lines up behind the other carriage and waves to us. We let him wave. Then, starting to shout and scold, he even has the Russian come and speak with us in European tongues to get us going. But we are immovable. The Russian drives off.
Kornei remains behind, watching the carriage as it rolls away and ranting and roaring at us. We leave him to his ranting. There was a perverse streak in Kornei: if he hadn’t been granted those four hours, he would have taken them; now that he could have them he didn’t want them. But if he expected to be paid extra for not driving in the dust from the previous carriage, he fooled himself. He would not be paid anything extra. He had been troublesome all along.
•
Still, we don’t torment Kornei more than half an hour before getting into our carriage. Kornei is sullen and angry and drives hard, as if he wants to overtake the carriage and annoy us. And we let him drive. If we know Kornei, he’ll soon be bored with driving his horses too hard.
Riding across wide plains, we can see the road, long and yellow, running through the green landscape. After a while we come across corn. We are now at the altitude of Tiflis, approximately 450 meters above sea level, and from now on our road will be flat. It’s fertile here; corn, which according to an old adage must have one hundred days of warmth, ripens well here. The road is lined with Lombardy poplars, willows, and wild fruit trees; the hills are low. Ahead of us the mountains show blue far away, but they too seem low.
At a watering hole Kornei gets off, inspects each horse in turn and pours water on their heads. He has recovered his Molokan caution, since he understands that his forced driving won’t even bring a protest from us, and from now on he drives evenly as before. It’s none too early, the heat is terrible; we have to keep our hands under the mudguard, or the sun will burn through our gloves.
In the distance we see a castle with huge towers; in addition, we see meadows, fields, now and then a few trees, small Georgian houses of flint stone and clay, and plowing oxen.
A couple of times we meet carriages with canvas roofs, pulled by buffalo trudging ahead with sluggish steps. The carriages are occupied by sitting and lying people of a different type, Gypsies, reddish-brown migrating tramps. One carriage had ten people in it; a young girl, attractive and straight and with a red kerchief on her head, smiles at us, showing her white teeth.
We arrive at a huge ruined castle of stone and clay, a chaos of massive walls. The walls are cracked, but some of them may still rise to a height of about fifty meters; two of the many wings look as though they could collapse any moment. Possibly one of Queen Tamara’s many palaces round about Georgia and Caucasia. A short distance from this ruin we come upon two temple-like buildings surrounded by a great many human dwellings: they are a monastery and a church, both very much alike in their ancient and unfamiliar appearance but situated on opposite sides of the road. The many surrounding houses spoil the impression; some have two stories, and all are in the modern style, with casement windows and tile roofs, all boring, all stupid and shameless, hybrids.
We are approaching the large castle we saw in the distance. This is not a ruin, but a complex of wings, some round, others square, with a huge main part that is round and resembles the Castle of St. Angelo in Rome. The castle, which is inhabited, is well maintained; it’s the Arma Tsike Castle, the oldest seat of power in the country. We were told it is now used as a monastery, but I don’t know any particulars in that regard.
We are now passing a sawmill. It doesn’t run on steam or water, but on manpower. Standing two on each side of a huge saw, four men are cutting boards; they are bareheaded, clad in red flannel woolens from top to toe. Their appearance and their perpetual nodding, up and down, over the saw cause them to resemble figures cut out of wood and painted red.
Finally we reach the station Mtskheta.
Here Kornei tries for the last time to squeeze a small advantage out of us: he turns around on the box and suggests that we take the railroad from here to Tiflis. But then we would first have to get to the city and the railroad station, which is situated some distance away, then wait for a train, then struggle with our suitcases and other luggage in the heat, then incur an additional expense for tickets! I point Kornei’s nose straight ahead and utter the word that decides everything: Tiflis! And Kornei is sullen and angry and again drives faster.
We saw practically nothing of the town Mtskheta. Situated where the Aragvi joins the Kura River, it is one of the oldest places in Georgia and, before Tiflis, was the country’s capital. I’ve read that the city is poor and in ruins; its most important building is supposed to be a cathedral from the fourth century. Here the kings of Georgia are buried.
A short distance outside Mtskheta we again come up against a bar, where Kornei has to present the receipt for toll already paid. Up the hill, a train from Baku passes by; we count forty-six of the gray cylindrical petroleum cars in the train. We are picking up an awful smell of oil.
By now the telegraph poles have twelve wires. We are approaching Tiflis.
We follow the Kura River all the way. The Kura is majestic and beautiful. We are about to cross the railroad track, but a barrier is lowered due to an approaching train and we have to wait. The train comes, with forty-eight more oil cars, making a roar like a waterfall between the hills. Then the barrier goes up and we continue.
We can now see Tiflis far away, like a collection of dots, a world apart. Smog hovers above the city. So this is Tiflis, which so many Russian writers have written about and where so many things in the Russian novel have taken place. For a moment I feel like a youth, looking forward in wonder and hearing my heartbeat. I have the same sensation as the first time I was to hear Georg Brandes give a lecture. That was in an auditorium at the University of Copenhagen. We’d been standing on the street in the rain for ever so long, crowding one another before a closed door; then the door opened and we galloped up a flight of stairs, down a hallway and into an auditorium where I found a seat. Then we waited for a long time again, while the auditorium filled up amid a buzz and a roar of voices. Suddenly it’s still all around, deathly still, I could hear my heart throbbing. Then he mounted the rostrum…. Not that I wouldn’t have spoken far better myself! Of course I would.
Riding across a barren and infertile sandy plain, with thick, motionless dust hovering above the road, we meet the mail coach. The armed driver is playing a trill on his surna; I tip my hat, and the driver bows in answer while continuing to play as he passes us. We meet more and more oxen, donkeys and drivers, equipages, horsemen and loaded wagons. We also meet drunken men, a sight unseen during our whole trip through the mountains. We drive into the city. It’s already getting dark, and in the houses and on the streets, where crowds of people are milling about, the lights are turned on. Now and then a long-bearded Persian in a large turban strides along the street with imperturbable calm. He sticks to his course like a camel.
We settle with Kornei. After receiving his pay he asks for a tip. I have the interpreter reply that Kornei hasn’t deserved any tip. But when it is explained to him what his undeservingness consists of, he looks as though he has never in his life driven a more difficult princely couple. He doesn’t understand a thing. He gets a ruble for milk all the same. But Kornei Grigorevich isn’t satisfied with such a small tip, and he fusses and fumes so hard that he ends up being escorted out of the hotel.