pera-bouffe_
There were no more pretty Tziganes, with disheveled hair and dirty,
bare breasts, to offer you baskets of roses and white lilies. There were
no Turks in red fezes squatting in the dust, hunting among their rags
for fleas, and there were no more slender peasants in tight white-wool
trousers and beautiful embroidered shirts. Everything, just by crossing
a river, had grown more serious and sober-colored and several sizes
larger. Pale-blue uniforms gave place to dingy olive-brown ones.

A porter took care of our luggage. He was exactly what I expected. He
wore a white smock with red and blue embroidery at the neck and wrists.
His reddish beard was long and Tolstoyan. We followed him into the big,
empty railway station, and there a soldier took away our passports and
we were left waiting in the _douane_, behind locked and guarded doors,
together with a crowd of bewildered Jews and Roumanians.

"It isn't much like the Roumanian frontier, is it?--where the
dreamy-eyed official vises your passport without looking at it--he's so
busy looking at you," Marie observed.

"No," I replied. "This is Russia. I am in Russia," kept going through
my head, and I felt like Alice in Wonderland, trying to adjust myself to
new perspectives.

"I hate getting back here," Marie went on. "It was too good to be in a
country, if only for a little while, where they took things easily. If
I'd stayed a little longer, I believe I could have laughed myself and
felt in a personal relationship toward life again."

That's what I was glad to get away from. You get too personal if you
stay in Roumania long. Roumania gets to mean Bucharest, and Bucharest
the universe. As I sat waiting in the _douane_, I felt like puffing out
and growing to make room for Russia inside me.

We waited hours.

"Can't you hurry our passports?" Marie asked an official. "We want to
leave on this train."

The official raised his shoulders helplessly.

"_Seichas_," he replied.

"What does that mean?"

"Presently--immediately--never," Marie replied in exasperation.

The train we were to have taken for Kiev left without us, on tracks
twice as wide as those of the Roumanian toy railroad. Only a courier
with a diplomatic pouch got on.

"It's like that here, always," Marie said. "No system, no economy of
time, or anything else." Suddenly she began to laugh. "Everything gets
on my nerves as soon as I get into Russia."

We left late in the afternoon. The air in o