PARTISAN REVIEW
aborigines were to the mind's eye as flat and transparent as figures
cut out of cellophane, and although we used their gadgets, applauded
their clowns, picked their roadside plums and apples, no real com–
munication, of the rich human sort so widespread in our own midst,
existed between us and them.
It
seemed at times that we ignored
them the wayan arrogant or very stupid invader ignores a formless
and faceless mass of natives; but occasionally, quite often in fact,
the spectral world through which we serenely paraded our sores and
our arts, would produce a kind of awful convulsion and show us
who was the discarnate captive and who the true lord. Our utter
physical dependence on this or that nation, which had coldly granted
us political refuge, became painfully evident when some trashy
"visa," some diabolical " identity card" had to be obtained or pro–
longed, for then an avid bureaucratic hell would attempt to close
upon the petitioner and he might wilt while his dossier waxed fatter
and fatter in the desks of rat-whiskered consuls and policemen.
Dokumenty,
it has been said, is a Russian's placenta. The League
of Nations equipped
emigres
who had lost their Russian citizenship
with a so-called "Nansen" passport, a very inferior document of a sick–
ly green hue. Its holder was little better than a criminal on parole and
had to go through most hideous ordeals every time he wished to travel
from one country to another, and the smaller the countries the worse
the fuss they made. Somewhere at the back of their glands, the au–
thorities secreted the notion that no matter how bad a state-say, So–
viet Russia-might be, any fugitive from it was intrinsically despicable
since he existed outside a national administration; and therefore he
was viewed with the preposterous disapproval with which certain
religious groups regard a child born out of wedlock. Not all of us
consented to be bastards and ghosts. Sweet are the recollections some
Russian
emigres
treasure of how they insulted or fooled high officials
at various ministries,
Prefectures
and
Polizeipraesidiums.
In Berlin and Paris, the two capitals of exile, Russians formed
compact colonies, with a coefficient of culture that greatly surpassed
the cultural mean of the necessarily more diluted foreign communities
among which they were placed. Within these colonies they kept to
themselves. I have in mind, of course, Russian intellectuals, mostly
belonging to democratic groups and not the flashier kind of person
who "was, you know, adviser to the Czar or something" that Amer-
