Orient Express

Orient Express by John Dos Passos Page A

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Authors: John Dos Passos
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Sayyid (that means descendant of the Prophet or of Ali, son of Abu Talib) strode about and made a great speech in Persian and Turkish to everyone who would listen on the rights and appurtenances of a diplomatic passport. At last, after much prodding of a weary interpreter and seeing of dignitaries at desks, it was decided that the nearest equivalent to a sleeper would be the freightcar that carried the newspapers and that the instructive company of great bundles of the Isvestia and the Pravda would be even superior to a compartment and a berth, that was, if the Commissar in charge consented. More commissars at desks were interviewed. Of course the Commissar was only too delighted.… The car was opened and one Samsoun, an Armenian, was discovered therein, to whom the Sayyid addressed a fervent allocation in Turkish on the virtues of cleanliness and hygiene, with the result that water was brought and lysol splashed to the very roof and new copies of all of Moscow’s most famous newspapers spread on the floor for us to sit on. At that point the Sayyid drew his knife and began to massacre a watermelon, and Samsoun effendi, or more properly Tavarishch Samsoun began to make a lustful gurgling noise in his thoat and brazenly asked for cognac. We put him off with a promise of wine later and with a slice of melon. At that point the two grimy youths who were Samsoun’s underlings climbed aboard and the train, late only by some five hours, rumbled out of the station.
    A curious sort of existence people lead along the railroad tracks in the Caucasus and, I suppose, all over Russia; the dilapidated arteries of communication exercise an uneasy sort of attraction. In all the stations there are crowds and even at crossings that seem very far from any village, groups of men and women stand and watch the train go by. Perhaps they feel a vague ownership over the endless gleaming rails and the oilsmeared locomotives, feel that somehow by this means their hungry frustrate lives are linked to great happenings far away. Then so many people seem to live all their lives along the tracks. The soldiers of the Red Army are in many cases permanently quartered in passengercars and freightcars fitted up with bunks that fill up all the sidings joined in long trains with staffcars and clubcars and hospitalcars and with cars loaded with the black bread and salt herring that form the staple rations. Then there are the special armored trains that have been one of the features of each of the campaigns of the civil war. Furthermore, particularly near towns, there are hundreds of freightcars fitted up with windows and stovepipes, used as houses by all manner of families—refugees from Lord knows where, people who repair the railroad, minor officials, gypsies, vagabonds of all sorts. And as the train goes by all this population cranes from between sliding doors and from the little windows of cabooses and scrutinizes with mild insolence the soldiers and peasants and civil employees who sprawl on the roofs and dangle their legs from the open doors of jerkily moving boxcars.
    2. Karakliss
    Moonlight sifts through tall poplars by the railway track and mingles strangely on the floor of the boxcar with the glimmer of the candle in my corner. The Sayyid has contrived a sort of bed out of his suitcase and the provision box and is somewhat uneasily asleep. Probably he’s dreaming of Pan-Islam and driving off the attacks of hundreds of little British devils with cloven hoofs and pith helmets. At the other end of the car the Georgian and Samsoun and his myrmidons have made beds for themselves among the piles of newspapers. Outside, the station platform is deserted, drowned in moonlight. There is the sound of a stream. All along the picket fence are the shadows of people asleep. Along with the clean smell of the river and the mountains that rear spiny backs into the sheer moonlight behind the poplars, comes occasionally a miserable disheartening stench of

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