Wait till we get home, Ted and I told them.
We'll put the truth in America's magazines.
Police state. Prison. Human abattoir. Endless steppes of horror. Perversion of the mind. Destruction of the spirit. A factory of torture to keep the factories running. Hunger and helpless hatred. Dirt.
The old, old, old abomination in new clothes: tyranny.
We'll tell them.
It began, after that.
The GPU men everywhere we went—pretending they spoke no English and reddening when Ted and I blasphemed and insulted them in their hearing. The trip to the tea plantation in Batum—on a bus that deposited its other passengers and started up a series of hairpin turns—with a driver and Ted and myself on board. The slide—the driver jumping out. Ted and I jumped, too—but the bus didn't go over the cliff. It merely caught on the edge and hung there. (Was the driver chagrined because it failed to go over—or because we jumped also—or because he had steered so incompetently? How could you tell?)
Odessa.
The bartender offered us a bottle of Scotch—the first we'd seen in the long, grim way from Leningrad. We drank some and gave the rest away. And took the night train for Shepatovka, exulting in the thought that we would never see the UCCP again, come the morrow.