Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

“Well, when is the boss going to order some regular goblets?”—which was more or less an attempt at humor on my part, since in Siberia at that time there was small chance of getting anything from anywhere.

“Pretty soon we’ll have glassware from Germany,” the waiter assured me proudly. Then with a click of his heels, he went back to the kitchen.

That was my second glimpse of the joker.

Across the street from the Dayooria was a much larger and more modern hotel, the Select. The lower windows on the street were all boarded up, for these had been the fronts of banks and shops when the Bolshevists cut loose on the town, and, in order to become free, found it necessary to smash the plate-glass, and loot—all of which was done to the (I was going to say King’s) proletariat’s taste.

But the interior of the Select had not suffered so complete a wrecking as the Dayooria. An American consul had once occupied a room at the Select, and through the kindness of the Cossack chief of staff, I was allowed to rent this room, with another for my interpreter. (The rent was raised each week, a mere detail even in Bolshevist Siberia.)

There was a shortage of electric globes in Chita. But the commandant managed so that I had globes for the three wires hanging from my ceiling, and a globe for the drop-light on my desk. In the halls of the hotel, as in my room, the globes hung from the ceilings on wires. One evening in a hall I observed a German war prisoner shorten the loop in one wire so that the globe fell as low as his shoulder. The next time he came through from the kitchen to the officers’ mess with a tray, he bumped the globe in such a manner that it crashed against the wall, and broke.

The same night I noticed that one of the lights in my room was not burning. I called the German prisoner who acted as janitor, and asked him to fix it. He brought a ladder, climbed up, unscrewed the globe, dropped it, and broke it. He said he felt rather bad about it, too. It was a blot on his efficiency.

The next night another globe gave no light. I investigated myself, by moving my bed and piling my two lockers on it. The globe burned all right when it was screwed into the socket. I unscrewed it until it again failed to burn, moved the bed and lockers back into place, and called the same German. He came with his ladder, examined the globe, told me it was burned out, and took it away.

When the third globe went dark, I found that it too, had been unscrewed enough to break the circuit. The German came, climbed his ladder, and with pliers, when he thought I was not looking, pried off the glass tip, rendering the globe useless. Then he told me the globe was no good. And—there were no more globes.

Now all I had left was the globe in the drop-light. Every morning I hid it, and thereby worried the German. There was evidence that he hunted for it when I was out of my room. Why were the janitor and the waiter destroying globes that were a necessity even to themselves? I clinched my suspicions by asking a former merchant of electrical supplies this question: “Where did you buy your electric globes and fixtures before the war?” Well, they came from Moscow—mostly made in Germany.