successfully.
The medieval sword and the golden shield were a little absurd in the poverty of their imagination. The world had pinned a fake medal on Stalingrad when what it needed, was half a dozen bulldozers.
We went to visit the apartment houses, both rebuilt and new, for the workers in the factories of Stalingrad. We were interested in wages and rent and food.
The apartments are small and fairly comfortable. There is a kitchen, one or two bedrooms, and a living-room. Black workers, that is unskilled laborers, get five hundred roubles a month now. Semi-skilled workers one thousand roubles, and skilled workers two thousand roubles, a month. This does not mean anything except in terms of food and rent, and rent all over the Soviet Union, when you can get an apartment at all, is incredibly cheap. Rent in these apartments, with gas, light, and water included, is twenty roubles a month, two per cent of the monthly income of a skilled worker, and four per cent of a semi-skilled worker's pay. Food in the ration shops is very cheap. For the common foods, bread and cabbages, meat and fish, which are the standard worker's food, very little money is necessary. But luxuries, tinned foods, imported foods, are very expensive, and such things as chocolate are almost beyond the reach of anyone. But, again, there is the Russian hope that when there is more food the prices will come down. When there are more luxuries they will become available. For example, the new little Russian car, more or less on the model of the German Volkswagen, when it is in full production and can be distributed, will cost about ten thousand roubles. This price will be fixed, and the cars will be distributed as they are made. When you consider that at the present time a cow costs seven to nine thousand roubles, some idea of the comparable prices can be understood.
There were many German prisoners in Stalingrad, and, as at Kiev, the people did not look at them. They were still in German uniform, rather ragged now. Columns of them trudged through the I streets, going to and from their work, usually guarded by one soldier.
We had wanted to go out with the fishermen who catch the big Volga sturgeon from which the caviar comes, but we had no time for that since they fish all night. But we did go to see them bring in the fish in the morning. They were gigantic. There were sturgeon of two varieties, one huge whiskery catfish-looking type, and another with a long shovel nose. There were no real giants that day. The largest one that had been brought in weighed only six hundred pounds. We were told that sometimes they run as high as twelve hundred pounds, and a great mass of caviar conies from them. The caviar is taken out and iced the moment the fish are caught. The fishing is done with very large nets of great strength. The moment the boats touch the shore, the iced caviar is rushed away and distributed by airplane to the large cities of the Soviet Union. Some of the fish are sold locally, but many are smoked and put away, and sold later, and they bring a very high price.
Capa was brooding again; he had wanted to take industrial pictures, and he had not been able to. He felt that not only was this trip a failure, but that everything was a failure, that he was a failure, that I was a failure. He brooded very deeply.
We were growing irritable. Chmarsky's gremlin had been working so much overtime that he was nervous too, and we snapped at him a little, I am afraid. And so he gave us a curious lesson in Marxism, and it ended up in a schoolboy shouting argument. And Capa renamed him Chmarsky the Chmarxist, which did not bring out the best in Chmarsky. It was just that we were irritated at not being able to photograph the tractor factory. If we had been truthful with one another we would have arrived at that conclusion.
And here was the test of the association of Capa and me, for when we got angry we never got angry at each other, we joined forces and got angry at somebody else. During our whole trip we never had a serious argument, and I think this is probably some kind of a record. During our argument Chmarsky said that we were relativists, and we, not much knowing what relativists are, banded together and attacked him from the point of view of relativism fairly successfully. Not that we convinced him, but at least we held our own and were not convinced, and we shouted louder.
We were to leave for Moscow the next day, and Capa did not sleep that night. He brooded and worried about his failure to get the pictures he wanted. And all the good pictures he had got turned sour and foul. Capa was definitely not happy. And since neither of us could sleep very much, we wrote the synopses for two motion pictures.
The next morning we got into our Ford bus and went out to the airport very early. And the gremlin had been at work, for while our plane flew, a mistake had been made, and we had not been booked for it. But there was a later plane from Astrakhan, and we could go on it.
The plane from Astrakhan did not arrive. We drank tea, and ate big biscuits, and were miserable at the hot airport. At three o'clock word came that the plane would not arrive, or, if it did arrive, would not go on to Moscow, since it was too late to get there by daylight. We climbed into our bus to go back to Stalingrad.
We had gone about four miles when an automobile from the airport rushed up on us madly and headed us off. It seemed that the captain of the plane had changed his mind. He would start for Moscow that afternoon. We turned around and went back to the airport, and arrived just in time for a new decision. The captain had decided that the plane would not go. So we put our luggage back in our bus and took the horrible road to Stalingrad again. We were sore in very particular areas from the bouncing on the hard seats of our little bus.
At dinner we were mean to Chmarsky. We blew up, we told him unpleasant things, only part of which were true. We told him he should control his gremlin, that he was being pushed around by his gremlin. We criticized his attitude, and his suits, and his choice of neckties. We were bitterly cruel to him, and it was only because we were feeling miserable from having sat at the hot airport all day.
Mr. Chmarsky was upset. He had done his best, I am sure, but he had no way of defending himself against our raging fury, and also against the two of us, for we fought him as a team, and when one stopped talking, the other took it up. And after he had gone to bed, we felt very sorry about what we had done, because we knew why we had done it. We went to bed with the angelic intention of apologizing in the morning.
In the morning we started very early, for there were some pictures we wanted to take on the outskirts of Stalingrad, pictures of people building their new little houses of boards and plaster, and there were some new schools and kindergartens we wanted to see and photograph. We stopped at a tiny house that a bookkeeper in a factory was building. He was putting up the timbers himself, and he was mixing his own mud for plaster, and his two children played in the garden near him. He was very agreeable. He went on building his house while we photographed him. And then he went and got his scrapbook to show that he had not always been ragged, that he had once had an apartment in Stalingrad. And his scrapbook was like all the scrapbooks in the world. The photographs showed him as a baby, and as a young man, and there were pictures of him in his first uniform when he entered the Army, and pictures of him when he came back from the Army. There were pictures of his marriage, of his wife in a long white wedding gown. And then there were pictures of his vacations at the Black Sea, of himself and his wife swimming, and of his children as they were growing. And there were picture postcards that had been sent to him. It was the whole history of his life, and all the good things that had happened to him. He had lost everything else in the war.
We asked, 'How does it happen that you saved your scrap-book?'
He closed the cover, and his hand caressed this record of his whole life, and he said, 'We took very good care of this. This is very precious.'
We got back in our bus and again took the road to the Stalingrad airport. We were beginning to know it very well. At the airport the passengers for Moscow had, beside their luggage, string bags in which there were two or three watermelons, for watermelons are hard to come by in Moscow, and there are plenty of very good ones in Stalingrad. We joined them and got a string bag, and each of us bought two watermelons to take with us to the boys at the Metropole Hotel.
The commandant of the airport was extremely apologetic about the mistake of yesterday. He wanted to make us very happy. He saw that we had tea, and he even told a little fib to make us feel happy. He said that we were going on a plane in which there were no other passengers and that it would soon be in from the Black Sea. It developed that when we attacked Chmarsky, Chmarsky had attacked him. Everybody's temper was thin, and the air was full of injustice. But it was hot at the airport, and a hot dry wind laden with particles of dust blew over the steppe. That made people nervous, and so they were mean to each other, and we were just as mean as anyone else.
Our plane finally came in, and it was a bucket-seat plane. And instead of our being the only passengers, it was an overloaded plane. The passengers were mostly Georgians going up to Moscow for the celebration of the eight- hundredth anniversary of the city's founding. They had laid their belongings down the center of the plane, and nearly
