Orient Express by John Dos Passos Read Free Book Online Page B

Kakhetia no. 66. Old Tiflis, dustcolored with an occasional patch of blue or white on a house, is loosely sprinkled in the funnel out of which the copper-wire river pours into the plain. Out of the defile rises a column of steam from the sulphur springs. Farther down, the enormous grey buildings of the Russian town straggle over the plain. From the valley bulge row after row of vast stratified hills, ochre and olivecolor, that get blue into the distance until they break into the tall range of the Caucasus barring the north. The huge continual streaming wind out of Asia, a wind so hard you can almost see it streaked like marble, a wind of unimaginable expanses, whines in the mouth of my glass and tears to tatters the insane jig that comes out of the mechanical piano behind me. I have to hold the bottle between my knees to keep it from blowing over.
    We used to dream of a wind out of Asia that would blow our cities clean of the Things that are our gods, the knick-knacks and the scraps of engraved paper and the vases and the curtain rods, the fussy junk possession of which divides poor man from rich man, the shoddy manufactured goods that are all our civilization prizes, that we wear our hands and brains out working for; so that from being an erect naked biped, man has become a sort of hermit crab that can’t live without a dense conglomerate shell of dinnercoats and limousines and percolators and cigarstore coupons and eggbeaters and sewing machines, so that the denser his shell, the feebler his self-sufficience, the more he is regarded a great man and a millionaire. That wind has blown Russia clean, so that the Things held divine a few years ago are mouldering rubbish in odd corners; thousands of lives have been given and taken (from where I sit I can make out the square buildings of the Cheka, crammed at this minute with poor devils caught in the cogs) a generation levelled like gravel under a steamroller to break the tyranny of Things, goods, necessities, industrial civilization. Just now it’s the lull after the fight. The gods and devils are taking their revenge on the victors with cholera and famine. Will the result be the same old piling up of miseries again, or a faith and a lot of words like Islam or Christianity, or will it be something impossible, new, unthought of, a life bare and vigorous without being savage, a life naked and godless where goods and institutions will be broken to fit men, instead of men being ground down fine and sifted in the service of Things?
    Harder, harder blows the wind out of Asia; it has upset the table, taken the chair out from under me. Bottle in one hand, glass in the other, I brace myself against the scaring wind.
    8. International
    The eastbound American had dinner of caviar and tomatoes and Grusinski shashlik and watermelon washed down with the noble wine of Kakhetia in the pleasant gone-to-seed Jardin des Petits Champs, where nobody thinks of cholera or typhus or the famine along the Volga. Afterwards strolling through unlit streets, you met no old people, only crowds of young men in tunics and dark canvas trousers, some of them barefoot, young girls in trim neatly cut white dresses without stockings or hats, strolling happily in threes and fours and groups, filling the broad empty asphalt streets.
    The night was warm and a dry wind drove the dust. The Grusinski garden, that used to be the Noblemen’s Club, was crowded with the new softly laughing youngsters. A band was playing Light Cavalry. A few colored electric bulbs hung among the waving trees. There was nothing particular to do. In spite of famine and cholera and typhus everybody seemed nonchalant and effortlessly gay. A certain amount of wine was being sold, illegally, I think, at a table in a corner, but nobody but the Americans seemed to have any roubles to buy it with. Gradually the crowd was trickling into a theater that had great signs in Russian and in Georgian over the door. The eastbound American found