"And I thought I was going to die," he said. He related the story of his arrest by the O.G.P.U. because he had been denounced as a spy by the head of the Indian delegation in Moscow. He said the O.G.P.U. endeavored to get him to confess, but he had insisted that he was not a spy. He had had differences with the head of the Indian delegation and had thought of giving up revolutionary work and returning to student life. (His father had sent him to Europe to study.) He was kept in O.G.P.U. custody for months. Finally he was sent to some place up Archangel way, and from there he had escaped across the border into Finland. He had always been a thin enough fellow; now he looked like a mosquito. I told him I didn't think he had "escaped," as he thought, but that he had simply been allowed to escape. He asked me why, whether I had had any inside information. But I merely nodded my head and looked mysterious. Poor chap! He was so down in spirits, I didn't want to tell him that I thought the O.G.P.U. were convinced that he was not a spy, but merely a perfect specimen of a moron.
The next day, again on the Unter den Linden, I met Roy, the leader of the Indian delegation. Roy was editing a propaganda paper in Berlin, which was distributed in India. He invited me up to his office and asked me to contribute an article to his paper about Communism and the Negro. I consulted an English friend, a Communist sympathizer, and he advised me to keep away from the Indian movement because it was too "complicated." The advice was just the kind I was fishing for and I didn't write the article or see Roy again before I left Berlin.
It was interesting in Paris to mix in among the cosmopolitan expatriates. The milieu was sympathetic. It was broader than the radical milieu of Greenwich Village. The environment was novel and elastic. It was like taking a holiday after living in the atmosphere of the high pressure propaganda spirit of the new Russia. There in Paris, radicals, esthetes, painters and writers, pseudo-artists, bohemian tourists—all mixed tolerantly and congenially enough together.
Frankly to say, I never considered myself identical with the white expatriates. I was a kind of sympathetic fellow-traveler in the expatriate caravan. The majority of them were sympathetic toward me. But their problems were not exactly my problems. They were all-white with problems in white which were rather different from problems in black.
There were the expatriates who were lured to Europe because life was riper, culture mellower, and artistic things considered of higher worth than in America.
There were those who argued that a florescence of art and literature was impossible in America: the country was too new.
There were those who were in revolt against the puritan conscience and the denial of artistic freedom in America; the lack of public respect for creative art and artists.
There were those who were harassed by complicated problems of sex.
But when I got right down to a ruthless analysis of myself, to understand the urge that had sent me traveling abroad, I discovered that it was something very different from that which actuated the white expatriates.