Trapped in 'Black Russia' Part 4

"I'm afraid I've brought you here on a very hot morning," said Mme.

C---- apologetically.

In spite of my curiosity I believe I felt a distaste of the detention camp on such a day. A crowd is always depressing, and doubly so in the heat. But we stopped at a door cut in a high board fence, and pa.s.sed by the sentinel into the enclosure where the Jews were penned in awaiting the next stage of their journey.

Hundreds of faces turned toward us; hundreds of eyes watched our approach. There were old men with long, white, patriarchal beards flowing over their dirty black gowns; there were younger men with peaked black caps and long black beards; and there were women who had pushed back their black shawls for air, and who held sore-eyed, whining babies listlessly on their knees. Bits of old cloth stretched over poles afforded shade to some. Others tried to get out of the burning sun by huddling against the walls of the tenements that enclosed the yard on three sides. The ground was baked hard as iron and rubbed smooth by the shuffle of numberless feet.

As we approached, the Jews rose and bowed low. Then they settled back into their former immobility. Some stared at us vacantly; others lowered their eyelids and rubbed their hands together softly, with a terrible subservience. If we brushed close to one, he cringed like a dog who fears a kick. Yellow, parchment-like faces, all with the high-bridged, curving noses, and the black, animal-like eyes. I was as definitely separated from them as though tangible iron bars were between us. We seemed to be looking at each other across a great gulf. "They are human beings," I said to myself. "I am one with them." But their isolation was complete. I could not even begin to conceive the persecution and suffering of ages that separated us. "All people are born free and equal," indeed! I turned away.

"This camp is run on communistic principles," Mme. C---- was explaining.

"The Jewish Ladies' Benevolent Society provides a certain amount of meat and vegetables and bread, which is cooked and served by the Jews themselves. Here is the kitchen." We spoke French among ourselves, which seemed to put us farther away from the dumb, watchful Jews behind us.

"If it wasn't for us, they would starve. The Government allows them eight kopecks a day. But who could live on that? Besides, most of the Jews here pay the eight kopecks to the overseer to avoid his displeasure. He makes a good revenue out of the blood money."

Two rooms in one of the houses had been converted into a kitchen. A dozen or so Jewish women were paring and cutting up potatoes and cabbages and meat into huge soup-boilers. They were stripped to their s.h.i.+rts, and their bodies were drenched with sweat. They curtsied to us and went on preparing dinner.

A blast of scorching heat puffed out from an open oven. Two women, with long wooden handles pulled out big round loaves of black bread and laid them on a shelf to cool.

The warm fragrance of cooking attracted some white-faced Jewish children. They edged into the kitchen and looked up at the food, their eyes impenetrable and glittering like mica. A woman cut up some bread and gave them each a piece, and they slunk outdoors again, sucking their bread.

"The food is scientifically proportioned to give the greatest possible nutriment," Mme. C---- said.

We went out. After the kitchen heat the air of the courtyard was cool.

"This is the laundry. A certain number of the Jews here wash and iron the others' clothes. They are kept as clean as possible."

The laundry was gray with steam. A dozen or so women were bending over wash tubs. Like the women in the kitchen, they were stripped to their s.h.i.+rts. The wet cloth stuck to their sweating bodies and outlined their ribs and the stretch of muscles as they scrubbed and wrung out the clothes. When the water became too black, some young boys threw it out of doors, and the women waited for the tubs to be filled again, their red parboiled hands resting on their hips, in the way of washerwomen the world over.

We crossed the mud before the wash-house, on planks, and went into a house across the courtyard.

"This is the tailoring establishment," Mme. C---- continued. "The tailors among them mend and cut over old clothes which we collect for them, so that every Jew may start on the next stage of his journey in perfectly clean and whole clothes. My husband and son complain that they will have to stay in bed, soon, I have taken so many of their suits of clothes.--And here are the shoemakers."

We looked into the adjoining room, where the cobblers sat cross-legged, sewing and patching and pegging shoes.

"It's very hard to find the leather. But it is so important. If you could see how they come here--their feet bleeding and swollen and their shoes in tatters. And many of them were rich bankers and professors in Galicia and Poland, used to their own automobiles like the rest of us. I think I would steal leather for them."

The workers were different from the waiting Jews in the courtyard.

Perhaps it was work that gave them importance in their own eyes, and took away that dreadful degrading subserviency--degrading to us as much as to themselves. The whirring noise of the sewing-machines, the click of shears, the bent backs of the workers, and the big capable hands, formed by the accustomed work! The trade of every man could have been known by his hands! My heart was warm toward them.

"It's splendid, I think," I said to Mme. C----.

As though she guessed my thoughts, she replied, "They are grateful for being allowed to work."

"For being allowed to work." Those words d.a.m.n much in the world. What hindrances we erect in the way of life!

And I looked out into the courtyard again, at the apathetic faces of the waiting Jews. Waiting for what? The white, dead faces, with the curved noses and hard, bright eyes, all turned toward us. Were they submissive or expectant, or simply hating us? They say the Galician Jews turn traitors and act as spies for the Austrians. But surely not these.

What could these broken creatures do? How near death they seemed!

The courtyard burned like a furnace. The shade was shrinking from moment to moment. The heat rose in blinding waves. I was sickened. The courtyard smelled of dirt and waste and sickness. It was unreal--the whole thing unreal: those working at usual, necessary tasks as well as those furtive, watchful ones in the burning sunlight. Death was in them all.

I went out into the courtyard, walking slowly in the scorching heat.

There was no shade or coolness anywhere. My attention was drawn to a pregnant woman who had evidently been sitting in a thin strip of shade by the fence; but now the sun was beating down on her bare head. She sat with her arms hanging along her sides, the palms of her hands turned upwards. A baby hardly a year old twisted fretfully on her lap, fumbling at her breast with a little red hand. But she looked steadily over the baby's round head, a curiously intent expression in her dark eyes, as though she were looking at something so far away that she must concentrate all herself on it so as not to lose it from view.

Near her a man leaned against the fence. He was red-headed, and his unkempt hair and ragged beard flamed in the sun. A rope tied round his waist kept up his loose trousers, and his s.h.i.+rt was open, disclosing a hairy chest. Where his skin showed, it was unexpectedly white. He kept plucking at his chest, smiling idiotically.

"Is he insane?" I asked Mme. C----.

"Yes. He's that woman's husband. He went out of his head on the road.

They say he was raging that his wife was obliged to walk in her condition. Well, he's happier than she is, now."

Under a canopy made from an old blue skirt lay a sick boy. His face was like a death-mask already, the yellow skin stretched tightly over the bones of his face, and his mouth unnaturally wide, with parched, swollen lips. From his hollow eye-sockets his eyes looked out unwinking, as though his lids had been cut off. He held himself halfway between a reclining and an upright position. No normal person could hold himself that way for long, but the sick boy kept himself motionless with maniacal strength. The flies hung over him like a cloud of black cinders. One of his friends attempted to keep them away with a leafy branch which he had found, Heaven knows where! I could see no other sign of green in the place. As we pa.s.sed, I noticed the branch sweep back and forth over the sick boy's face, touching the skin. And still the fixed stare continued, uninterrupted--that blind gaze straight out into emptiness.

At the farther end, an opening between two of the tenements led into a garden. This s.p.a.ce, too, was crowded with waiting Jews.

"But where do they sleep?" I asked. "Is there room for all those people in the houses?"

"No," Mme. C---- replied; "not when so many come through as came this last time. But fortunately, these summer nights are fine; earlier, we had much rain, and you can picture the suffering. Then there was no shelter for them at all. They were simply herded into a pen, and many died from the exposure. Now, however, we have made conditions better for them."

There was more reality here in the garden, where there was a suggestion of growing gra.s.s and a thin leaf shade. The Jews lay on the ground as though trying to get some coolness out of the earth. Up and down the paths walked several spectacled men, who were brought up to me and introduced as Professor So-and-So, and Doctor So-and-So. They were constantly trying to get in touch with friends in Kiev or Moscow or Petrograd, or colleagues in medicine or other sciences, or relatives who could help them. They worked through the society. By the payment of certain amounts they could bribe the overseers to let them stay on in the Kiev detention camp, or even have the liberty of the city. One man, a rich banker from Lvov, had been officially "sick" for several months, but as his money had almost given out he was in danger of being sent on to Tomsk in the near future. He lived in the hospital, where he had better quarters and food. These professors and doctors, men of wide learning and reputation, who are recognized as leaders in their professions, and are constructive, valuable forces in society, were herded together with the others, and will be allowed to disappear into Siberia, where their minds and bodies will be wasted, their possible future activity to count as nothing.

A man in a soiled white coat came up, looked us over with little blinking pig eyes, and addressed a few words to Mme. C---- in Polish.

"That is the overseer," Professor A---- said to me in English. "He takes every kopeck away from us. But he is no worse than the rest. All along the way it is the same thing. One is bled to death." He shrugged indifferently. "We most of us could have gathered together a little money. But what will you? It was all so sudden. We had no time. Here we are, _en tout cas_. And after all, in the end--"

I might have been talking with the professors on the campus of their own university. They exerted themselves to be attentive and entertaining, as though they were our hosts.

One doctor said to me in French, "I have seen your wonderful country. It is amazing. I would like to see it again. I have been asked to lecture.

Perhaps, after the war--"

He broke off abruptly. In a flash the end of his life came up to me.

His work and ambitions, and then the cleavage in his career; the sharp division in his life; the preparation of years, and then, instead of fulfillment, an exile to a country where life was a struggle for the bare necessities of the body--food and shelter. I looked at his hands--thin and white and nervous. What hideous, despairing moments he must know!

I asked him a question. His eyes blazed suddenly.

"Do not speak of these things! They are not to be spoken of, much less to _you_." He looked as though he hated me. "I beg your pardon, I am nervous. You must excuse me." He went away hurriedly.

"Poor chap!" Professor A---- said. "It is hard for us all in this heat.

And, yes, some of us have more imagination than others."

A man in uniform came into the garden. He walked to a tree in the center, and stood in the shade, a long sheet of paper in his hand. There was a stir among the Jews. Those lying down got up and approached him.

The women, with their children, dragged themselves nearer. Every one stopped talking. The apathy and indifference gave place to a strained attention. There was a kind of dreadful anxiety on every face--a tightening of the muscles round the eyes and mouths, as though the same horrible fear fixed the same mark there. I have never seen a crowd where personality was so stamped out by a single overmastering emotion. The gendarme began to read in a sing-song voice.

"What is he saying?" I whispered.

"The names of those who are to leave this afternoon," Mme. C---- replied.

The garden was absolutely still except for the monotonous voice and the breathing of the crowd. Oh, yes, and the flies. It was not that I forgot the flies, only their buzzing was the ceaseless accompaniment to everything that happened in the camp.

"How horrible this is!" Mme. C---- observed. "They all know it must come, but when it does, it is almost unbearable. It is truly a list of death. Many of them here cannot survive another stage of the journey in this heat. And yet they must be moved on to make place for those who are pressing on from behind. In this very crowd were five old men who were killed on the way here, by the soldiers, because they couldn't keep up with the procession. How could these civilians be expected to endure such hards.h.i.+ps? They are townspeople, most of them having lived indoors all their lives, like you or me."