The mother of the family made the first toast. She said, 'May God bring you every good.' And we all drank to her. We ate hugely, and it was very good.
Our host proposed a toast that we were beginning to know very well-the toast to peace among the peoples of the world. It is odd that there was rarely a little personal toast. The toasts were usually to larger things than individual futures. We proposed the health of the family and the prosperity of the farm. And a large man at the end of the table stood up and drank to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
We were beginning to understand the quality of Roosevelt's memory in the world, and the great sense of tragedy at his death. And I remembered a story that I had heard one time. Within a week of the death of Lincoln, the news of his death had penetrated even to the middle of Africa, sometimes on the drums, and sometimes carried by runners. The news traveled that a world tragedy had taken place. And it seems to us that it does not matter what the Roosevelt-haters think or say, it doesn't even matter, actually, what Roosevelt was in the flesh. What does matter is that his name is throughout the world a symbol of wisdom, and kindness, and understanding. In the minds of little people all over the world he has ceased to be a man and has become a principle. And those men who attack him now, and attack his memory, do not hurt his name at all, but simply define themselves as the mean, the greedy, the selfish, and the stupid. Roosevelt's name is far beyond the reach of small minds and dirty hands.
When the meal was over, there came the time we were beginning to expect. The time of questions. But this time it was more interesting to us, because they were the questions of farmers about farmers and about farms. Again it was clear to us that peoples have a curious composite idea of one another. The question 'How does a farmer live in America?' is impossible to answer. What kind of farm? And where? And it is difficult for our people to imagine Russia, with every possible climate from arctic to tropic, with many different races and languages.
These farmers did not even speak Russian, they spoke Ukrainian. 'How does a farmer live in America?' they asked. And we tried to explain that there are many different kinds of farms in America, as there are in Russia. There are little five-acre farms, with one mule to work them, and there are great co-operative farms that operate like the state farms of Russia, except that the state does not own them. There are farm communities rather like this village, where the social life is somewhat the same, except that the land is not owned communally. One hundred acres of good bottom land in America is worth a thousand acres of poor land. And this they understood very well, because they are farmers themselves. They had just never thought of America that way.
They wanted to hear about American farm machinery, for that is what they need the most. They asked about combines and seed drills, about cotton-pickers and fertilizer spreaders; about the development of new crops, of cold-resistant grains and rust-resistant wheat; about tractors and how much they cost. Could a man running a small farm afford to buy one?
The farmer at the end of the table told us with pride how the Soviet government lends money to farms, and lends money at very low interest to people who want to build houses on their farms. He told how farm information is available under the Soviet government.
We said that the same thing is true in America, and this they had never heard of. They had never heard of the farm loans or of the important work that is done by our Department of Agriculture. It was all news to them. As a matter of fact, they seemed to think that they had invented the system themselves.
Across the road a man and woman were working in the rain, raising the timbers for their roof-tree to the top of newly built walls. And on the road the children were driving the cows in from pasturage to the barns.
The women in their clean headcloths leaned through the kitchen door and listened to the conversation. And the conversation turned to foreign policies. The questions were sharp.
One farmer asked, 'What would the American government do if the Soviet government loaned money and military aid to Mexico, •with the avowed purpose of preventing the spread of democracy?'
And we thought for a while and we said, 'Well, we imagine we would declare war.'
And he said, 'But you have loaned money to Turkey, which is on our border, with the purpose of preventing the spread of our system. And we have not declared war.'
And our host said, 'It seems to us that the American people are democratic people. Can you explain to us why the American government has as its friends reactionary governments, the governments of Franco and Trujillo, the military dictatorship of Turkey, and the corrupt monarchy of Greece?'
We could not answer their questions because we didn't know enough, and because we are not in the confidence of our makers of foreign policy. We told them instead what was being asked in America: the questions about the domination of the Balkans by Communist parties; the questions about, and the denunciations of, the use of the veto by the Russians in the United Nations; the questions about the denunciation of America by the Russian press.
These things seemed to balance each other-they knew no more about their foreign policy than we knew about ours. There was no animosity in their questions, only wonder. Finally our host stood up, and he raised his glass, and he said, 'Somewhere in all of this there must be an answer, and there must be an answer quickly. Let us drink to the hope that the answer may be found, for the world needs peace, needs peace very badly.' And he pointed to the two who were struggling with the heavy beams to build a roof, and he said, 'This winter those two will have a house for the first time since 1941. They must have peace, they want their house. They have three small children who have never had a house to live in. There cannot be in the world anyone so wicked as to want to put them back in holes under the ground. But that is where they have been living.'
The host opened the champagne and poured a little of the precious fluid into each of our glasses. The table had become very quiet. We raised our glasses, and no one made a toast. We drank the champagne without speaking. After a while we thanked our hosts and drove away through the war-scarred country. And we wondered whether our host was right, whether there really were people in the world who wanted to destroy the new little houses again, and put the children in caves under the ground.
We slept long the next morning, and when we awakened we discussed the day on the farm, and Capa got his exposed films put away. We were invited to lunch at the house of Alexander Korneichuk and his wife, Wanda Wasilewska, a Polish poetess who is known in America. They live in a pleasant house with a large gar-den behind it. Luncheon was served on the porch, under a great vine that shaded it. Behind the porch was a square of flowers, roses and flowering trees, and behind that a very large vegetable garden.
Wanda Wasilewska had prepared the luncheon. It was delicious, and there was a great deal of it. There was a vegetable caviar made of eggplant, a fish from the Dnieper cooked in a tomato sauce, strange-tasting stuffed eggs, and with this an aged vodka, yellow and very fine. Then came strong, clear chicken soup, and little fried chickens, rather like our Southern-fried chicken, except that they w«re dipped in bread crumbs first. Then there was cake, and coffee, and liqueur, and last Korneichuk brought out Upmann cigars in aluminum cases.
It was a beautiful lunch. The sun was warm, and the garden was lovely. And as we sat with the cigars and liqueur, the talk turned to relations with the United States. Korneichuk had been part of a cultural delegation to the United States. On their arrival in New York he and his delegation had been fingerprinted and made to register as agents of a foreign power. The fingerprinting had outraged them, and so they had returned home without carrying out the visit. For, as Korneichuk said, 'With us, fingerprinting is only for criminals. We did not fingerprint you. You have not been photographed or forced to register.'
We tried to explain then that according to our rule the people of a communist or a socialist state are all employees of the government, and that all employees of foreign governments are required to register.
And he answered, 'England has a socialist government, and you don't make every Englishman register, nor do you fingerprint them.'
Since both Korneichuk and Poltarazki had been soldiers, we asked them about the fighting which had gone on in the area. And Poltarazki told a story which is very hard to forget. He told of being with a Russian patrol which was sent to attack a German outpost. And he said that they had been so long getting there, and the snow had been so deep, and the cold so severe, that when they finally made their attack, their hands and their arms and their legs were stiff.
'We had nothing to fight with, except one thing,' he said. 'That was our teeth. I dreamed about that afterward. It was so horrible.'
After luncheon we went to the river, and hired a little motor-boat, and cruised about under the cliff of Kiev and across to the flat sandy beach where hundreds of people were bathing and lying in the sun. Whole families in colored bathing suits were turning brown on the white sand. And there were many little sailboats on the river, tacking back and forth. There were excursion boats too, loaded with people.
We took off our clothes, and jumped over the side of the boat, and swam around in our shorts. The water was
