Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy MacLean Read Free Book Online Page B

addition to my kitbag, I was now carrying a Tartar baby, whose mother had thrust it into my arms, and which seemed, at first sight, to be suffering from smallpox.
    Lenkoran, when we reached it, proved to be no more than a fishing village of white-washed houses clustering round a single unpaved street. Having inquired whether there was an inn, I was told that there was and that it was a two-storeyed building; on the strength of which description I had no difficulty in finding it. Here I succeeded inobtaining a room. On the wall over the bed, I noticed, a previous occupant had amused himself by squashing bed bugs in neat parallel rows, one above the other.
    My British passport, which I now displayed, caused considerable excitement and an admiring crowd collected to look at it, most of whom remained my fast friends for the rest of my stay. The information that I was a foreigner clearly conveyed very little to them, and, on ascertaining that I worked in the British Embassy in Moscow they inquired whether that was the same as the Moscow Soviet. I did not seek to enlighten them. In any case they showed no signs of the panic which seized the average inhabitant of Moscow when he found that he had inadvertently come into contact with a foreigner or worse still a foreign diplomat. Indeed for the next three days I spent the greater part of my time walking, talking, eating or playing cards with the local inhabitants or visitors from Baku who were occupying the other rooms in the hotel. Amongst them was a pretty, fair, Russian girl with a small baby, who told me that she was on sick leave from the collective farm where she worked. She was supposed to have gone to a rest home in the Crimea, but had been sent here by mistake. It was, she said, with a flutter of her long eyelashes, nice to meet someone cultured in such an uncultured place.
    The principal products of Lenkoran, as far as I could make out, were fish and tea. Apart from the high street where a flyblown and incongruous selection of over-priced Moscow-made goods were exhibited in the window of Aztorg (the Azerbaijan State Co-operative Store), the Westernizing tendency of the Russian colonists was not particularly evident and life centred round the seething Tartar bazaar, where individual enterprise still flourished and whither the peasants from the neighbouring villages ride to sell their wares to the highest bidder. Though the prices of Russian-made goods were exorbitant, local produce was cheap. Bread and dried fish, which form the staple diet of the Turko-Tartar peasant, were plentiful. Meat of sorts was also available at times for those who could afford it. Eggs, always a useful stand-by on such occasions, could, I was told, sometimes be had, but the supply had momentarily failed. There were no vegetables or fruitof any kind except garlic. On the other hand every kind of vodka was to be found, at a price, and weak tea with a judicious admixture of mud and dead flies.
    Agriculture in the Lenkoran district and in the rest of Azerbaijan had been almost entirely collectivized, though most of the peasants seemed to take advantage of the rule by which they are allowed to produce and sell on their own account a limited quantity of agricultural produce, while the inhabitants of some of the more remote villages apparently still managed to hold themselves completely aloof from the collective farms.
    At first sight the smiling faces of the Tartars and the comparative absence of the outward and visible emblems of the Soviet power gave the impression that this remote corner of the Soviet Union had perhaps not been entirely brought into line. But I was to change my mind before long. Lenkoran possessed no drainage system, or indeed any sanitary arrangements whatever. But it boasted, in addition to a Party Headquarters, a ‘School of Marxist-Leninist Propaganda’ housed in one of the only decent buildings in the town.
    Soon I was to have an even more striking proof of the long arm of the