Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  ‘But I didn’t know you were married,’ I said, foolishly.

  ‘I’m not – whatever made you think I was?’ he replied rapping my conventionality over the knuckles.

  ‘Kamran! Sergei! This is Charlotte Russe.’ It was one of the names by which he liked to call me, in reference to my Russophile inclinations, and also my infinite capacity for eating an English pudding of that name.

  The two young Slavs bowed ceremoniously, and fell into step beside us. They said nothing but, as we walked, we all eyed each other furtively. The Slavs had an advantage over me, for their eyes were set so sidelong that it was clearly easier for them to look out of the corners than for myself, with my round, doll-like Anglo-Saxon gaze.

  ‘Well, what shall we do?’ asked the Traveller, who had, of course, no intention of listening to any suggestions we might have made. ‘Shall we go and eat very rich cakes? (Something he knew I found irresistible.) Shall we make a state call on the Grand Duchess?’ He named a celebrated old Russian princess who lived in pinched state outside the city. ‘Or shall we run away? To Siberia of course,’ he added, catching my eye. ‘Though since you’ve become such a convent-miss, perhaps you’d expect to get married first? Then you could play stepmother to my sons . . . Mamasha!’ He laughed diabolically seeing my crimson face. ‘Yes, it’s quite an idea,’ he went on, ‘I always say every woman must be married at least three times. You’d better start off with me . . . You could do worse . . . Chort! I could do worse . . . Well, that’s settled then. Kamran! Sergei! What do you think of Charlotte Russe for your stepmother? She’ll spoil you abominably. Perhaps you can teach her to speak Russian. I’ve never succeeded. However, you can still count up to ten in Yakute, can’t you, pet?’ he asked anxiously, appearing delighted when I began the uncouth syllables, bir, iki, ous, tar, bar, ali, sekki . . .

  Thoroughly over-excited, I began to explain to my future stepsons that the Siberian tribe of Yakutes are said to be of Turanian stock, their language resembling Turkish. The two young men looked bewildered, more so, when to illustrate my point I began rattling off the similar Turkish numerals – bir, iki, utch, dort, besh, alti, yedi . . .

  ‘I love you, but that’s enough culture for today,’ said the Traveller. ‘Kamran, Sergei! Welcome your father’s fiancée!’ Fiancée! In a daze I saw the young men – my ready-made Russian family – bend over my hand – the hand of their future stepmother, I thought rapturously. It was the first time anyone had kissed my hand, although this bliss was shortlived.

  ‘What! Kissing a young unmarried woman’s hand! Don’t you know that’s not done?’ snapped their father. ‘I’m surprised at you. No tenue! And anyhow, all that hand-kissing is corrupt Petersburg rubbish. You should have dropped such salon stuff – it won’t fit tomorrow’s world. – And neither will you, Mamasha,’ he continued, enjoying my new name. ‘You never ought to be here, now. You ought to be in Russia – twenty years back. There’s been some accident in time . . .’ He suddenly looked pinched – old even. The long, bent back fingers began to snap: he stared, that curious, inward-turning stare which always meant he was remembering a vanished world, trying to summon its shadows round him once more.

  ‘Ah! que nos désirs sont sans remède.’ He sighed. ‘That’s Saint Theresa of Avila. Do they teach you that at your finishing school?’ The old mocking tone had returned and now we were bundling into a hired car, which was waiting for us on Mussolini’s splendid new highway.

  ‘I Promessi Sposi will sit in the back and hold hands,’ he said, cramming his sons in beside the chauffeur, a stout man who groaned dramatically as he manœuvred the hairpin bends of the Tuscan hills.

  ‘Now – about the wedding,’ the Traveller began, as, later, we sat eating gelati in the piazza. ‘I suppose you expect the whole traditional business – angelic choirs, the Metropolitan in person to pronounce the blessing, and those ridiculous golden crowns held over our heads? I knew you would.’ He seemed much amused by the whole idea. ‘You two can hold the crowns,’ he said to his sons, who remained as monosyllabic and deferential as ever. I noticed they were almost extravagantly respectful towards their father and, indeed, although they were what Nanny would have described as likely-looking lads (likely for what, she never explained) they immediately faded into insignificance beside the Traveller. Much as I rejoiced at the notion of acquiring a ready-made Russian family, I could not find them of interest, at that moment.

  To be married in a Russian church, with all the splendours of Byzantine symbolism, had long represented the sum-total of my romantic aspirations. There, the crowned bride and groom, become king and queen, too. The honeymoon, I thought with rapture, the real honeymoon this time, mystical consummation of my love for Russia, must be spent on the Trans-Siberian, locked in with love and caviare. At last! This time he could not refuse me. The fact that the Trans-Siberian, if it was still running at that moment, was unlikely to have been accessible to us did not occur to me. Politics were something to which I had never applied myself – or rather, had never felt applied to myself. Politics were newspaper headlines, and in any case no newspaper penetrated the convent. So far as I was concerned, the Trans-Siberian, like the Pumpkin Coach, would materialize magically for this magical occasion. Alas! there was a cloud on the glowing horizon, for I was offended by the Traveller’s mocking tone. Later, when Kamran and Sergei had been packed off to the cinema to see The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse I told him sulkily that he had spoiled everything, bringing up the subject – such a subject as our marriage – in front of other people. Particularly, in front of his sons – his sons by another woman.

  ‘Another woman? Other women, you mean.’ He laughed his rare thunderous laugh. ‘My poor Numskullina, can’t you see those two boys are of quite different stock? Sergei’s mother was a Georgian, from Tiflis. Kamran’s mother was half Turki – don’t go confusing Turki with Turkey, there’s a big difference – all Central Asia between them. Georgian women are great charmers, born to please – hot-tempered, as well as facile however. Nothing facile about Turki women. Kamran’s mother was a beauty too, but different – difficile . . . like her father. He was a Kirghiz chief – one of the Kara, or Black Kirghiz – they’re a swarthy lot. He was worth over a thousand tents. They reckon wealth by tents, you know. He was said to be descended from one of the Khans of the Little Horde – the Ktché Dj, which, by the way, is the largest, and one of his wives – my mother-in-law, I suppose you’d call her, politely – although as I said, I never married – was descended from Tamerlaine, I believe. Don’t ask me to explain Asiatic snobisme: and don’t go imagining they were all savages. A chieftain I knew used to pack Verlaine into his saddlebags when he went on the summer migrations. I found Kamran’s mother when I was looking for the Tombs of the Tartars beyond Semipalatinsk, which, for your edification, was once the Capital of the Province of the Seven Tents. Got that? I like travel as much as I like children. Plenty of both suits me. Don’t look so prim. And while I am on the subject, I’ve two more sons. My eldest was by a Manchu girl – he’s in Vladivostok, I believe. Haven’t seen either of them for years. The mother of Shamgon, the youngest, was from the Tien-Shan mountains (I usually find Asiatic women irresistible), but I’ve lost all trace of her, and the child too. Pity. He was such a funny little boy . . . I always have boys, so be prepared for sons.’

  Seeing my look, he added: ‘Perhaps you’d better go back to the finishing school after all. You’re not ready for the world. You ought to have been at Smolny.’ (This was the Institute for Noble Young Ladies at St. Petersburg: it had been founded by the Empress Elizabeth, and was housed in a former convent, the most sumptuously ornate building imaginable.)

  ‘They were much more worldly at Smolny . . . one of the pupils set her cap at the Tzar Alexander II. Katia Dolgorukaya. You know the story? She was finished all right – and so was he . . . And so are we all, one way or another . . .’ he added sombrely.

  We went to sit in a café on the Tornabuoni to await Kamran and Sergei, who present
ly joined us, demanding to be fed, and describing the tempests of emotion aroused in them by the love scenes between Rudolph Valentino and Alice Terry. It was getting late by convent standards, and soon I was obliged to leave this fascinating new-found Asiatic family life. The Traveller accompanied me to the convent gates, where our farewells were whispered in the shadow of the wall. Against the fast-fading lemon-coloured sky, the pointed leaves of the orange-trees were silhouetted sharp as cut-out black paper.

  ‘I hate to leave you here like this, Pussinka pet.’

  ‘Not as much as I hate to be left,’ I replied bitterly, crushing down a wild hope he might suggesting eloping there and then.

  ‘No, Greedy.’ He was reading my mind as usual. ‘We can’t be together as we want to be, for a while . . . But we’ll write – d’you know, I’ve always kept your first love-letter to me? Probably your first love letter. You wrote it when you were six. It said: Please come back I love you I love you yours sinserley. I’ve not kept anybody else’s letters, by the way. That ought to satisfy you . . . And – damn it all! I’ve proposed marriage to you! That’s more than I’ve ever done for any other woman. It will have to do, for now.’

  Over the wall, the chapel bell suddenly clanged, with rusty insistence. He kissed me violently and turned away, driving off without looking back.

  •

  After that, the Traveller disappeared for nearly a year and I heard no more of the radiant matrimonial prospects he had dangled before me: nor did I hear anything of Sergei and Kamran. A future stepmother who was still at school and appeared proud of counting up to ten in Yakute had no doubt intimidated them. I felt myself abandoned – marooned on an island of conventional living, and sulked accordingly. I admired the determined girl who had followed her love, Thomas à Becket, across Europe, on foot, without any means or language but her own, and at last ran him to earth in London, by the simple process of repeating his name to every person she encountered on her long march. Could I undertake such a search into the hinterland of Asia, repeating the Traveller’s name as I inched into those wildly desired horizons? But I knew I should be quickly lassooed by telephone and telegraph, frontier controls – the networks of civilization. In despair I dropped Dumas’ Siberia and applied myself to Russian history.

  When the Traveller told of treaties, ideologies, mystics or villains concerned with Russia, all sprang to life, alive, alive O! Which aspect of Russian history would find most favour in his eyes, I wondered, imagining how I would dazzle him with my learning. I had not yet realized that, in women, specialized knowledge is likely to chill rather than charm, and should always be cunningly concealed if the object is to please. Thus I weighed up Potemkin’s foreign policies against the Dekabrist rising or Russia’s annexation of the Central Asian Khanates. The last stand of the Tekké Turcomans was a serious rival to the eternal magnet pull of Siberia and the Dekabrists’ incarceration there. Desert or steppe?

  As I wavered, Bokhara’s mud-walled fastness rose before me, vibrating in heat and wickedness as the Traveller had told. I saw the Ark, the Emir’s fortress palace. Here, on a balcony hung with carpets and rainbow silks, I saw the Emir, a scowling, turbanned figure, pawn in the Central-Asian power game, for Bokhara lay on the Russian route to India and was only twenty-three years away from its annexation by Russia. Crescent, Cross, Hammer and Sickle. The age-old struggle for supremacy. All the colour and violence of Central Asia flamed round me in the cool dark library where I brooded. Many years later, I achieved these Turcoman territories, and stood before the Ark, entering its blunt-towered gates to hang over the prison pit, now displayed by Soviet custodians as an example of the combined abuses of both Emirate and Tzarist rule.

  But in the convent library, no crystal foretold my future travels for me, and I was still weighing up the respective merits of Central Asia or Siberia for my studies. Inevitably, Siberia won. With voluptuous abandon I floated away, out of the barred windows, across the trim box hedge of the garden, above the cyprus-speared hills of Fiesole, north, over the Apennines, northwards again, and backwards in time, till I reached the great grey blocks of granite surrounding the Senate Square in St. Petersburg, on that fateful December day in 1825, where the Dekabrists were making their stand – that heroic piece of clumsiness that led them to execution or a lifelong Siberian sentence.

  •

  The Dekabrist Revolt, ‘the Revolution that stood and waited’, took its name from the month in which this forlorn gesture was made. It was in the nature of an abortive stand for freedom, rather than a revolution. Its aim, among other reforms, was to obtain a Constitution – something Russia had never known. But the whole affair was conducted with such amateur folly that it was doomed from its inception. All was bravura and hurrahs; daggers were brandished but with no definite plan as to whom they should slay. Above all, there was too much talking. Those interminable nights of idealistic hyperbole beloved of the Slav politico-intelligentzia led nowhere, then, just as they led nowhere when I listened to them among the Russian exiles of Paris or London.

  The movement had begun among a young army élite, an aristocratic, cultivated milieu. The Guards officers had returned from the Napoleonic campaigns quite dizzied by the freedoms they had tasted abroad, in those heady days of triumph, occupying Paris in 1814, where they had frequented the intellectual salons as much as le beau monde, and been amazed, and awakened by the winds of liberty which blew through every strata of French thought and life. Now, all over Russia, secret societies on Masonic lines sprang up. Their aims were admirable. A Constitution, a more humane army administration, and the suppression of the twenty-five years’ military service then imposed, together with the freeing of the serfs and other liberal reforms were some of the things for which they stood, collectively. Individually, many among them set about liberating their own serfs, or organizing Agrarian reforms on their lands. The Union of the North, the Society of United Slavs, and the Southern Secret Society mustered an impressive aristocracy: the Princes Volkonsky, Troubetsky, Obolensky and Bariatinsky were all would-be reformers, stemming from the noblest stock. Great fortunes, limitless estates and privilege surrounded them, so that they were, potentially, wielders of decisive power.

  Nothing decisive was done, however, and the talkative visionaries continued to meet for the next five years – (the young Pushkin among them, though he was never deeply involved) planning more and more impractical means of overcoming the growing climate of reaction around them. When, in 1825, the Tzar Alexander I died without a direct heir, the succession was obscure, for his brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, living in Poland as Viceroy and married to a Polish woman, had, some time earlier and in secret, renounced his claim to the throne. It was not generally known that his younger brother, the Grand Duke Nicholas, was to succeed him. In this state of confusion, when the army was called to swear the oath of allegiance, it was not clear to whom it should be made, and some oaths were nullified by being made to Constantine.

  This was the moment chosen by the secret societies, to make their stand demanding a Constitution, before they would accept Nicholas as their Tzar. It seems a simple enough decision: yet fearful confusion and agitation prevailed.

  At last these idealists, so touching in their innocent beliefs, so exasperatingly ineffectual in their actions, decided to make their stand in St. Petersburg on the Senate Square, beneath Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great. It was December the fourteenth; the young Grand Duke Nicholas had taken the oath of succession and now, become Nicholas I, awaited his Court, his Ministers and his troops to take the oath of allegiance to him. This icy tyrant was to show, from the first, that ruthless force which now served him, but was to make him an abhorred symbol of oppression, in particular to the families of the Dekabrists, to whom he was never to show the slightest mercy.

  He believed in the Divine Right of Kings: he was, in his own eyes, God’s anointed, Autocrat of All the Russias. Rebellion was blasphemy. He ordered all available troops forward. Three thousand forlorn
rebels faced three thousand cavalry, nine thousand infantry and a thousand of the artillery. On each side of the vast square, they stood and waited. Their rebel ranks seemed pitifully insufficient for the great ideals they represented. They had no prepared plan of battle. It was all in their hearts.

  When the Chevalier Guards pranced out to take their places behind the Tzar, fourteen members of the various secret societies were among them. There was still time for them to support their rebel associates. But they too seemed frozen into immobility. The crowds, who also stood waiting, became impatient, and began taunting the Tzar’s troops, throwing stones and bricks: their sympathies were all with the rebels, to whom they now brought vodka as protection against the fearful cold. This had an unfortunate effect; some of the ranks falling drunk, their rifles clattering to the frozen ground. The short winter’s day was darkening as one of the more hot-headed rebel leaders, Kakhovsky, suddenly galvanized, fired his pistol at General Miloradovitch, Governor of St. Petersburg, who fell from his horse mortally wounded.

  The Tzar, his terrible pewter stare taking in the scene and noting each conspirator’s face for future persecutions, now ordered the artillery to open fire. But no one moved. The order was given again, but again the gun-crews hung back from firing on their fellow ranks. There was still time – a last, desperate chance – for the rebels to storm the guns trained on them. A civilian, Pushchin, urged action; yet, curiously none of the rebel officers seemed able to give the command. Again the Tzar ordered his troops to fire, and now, at last, rebels and civilians scattered or fell under a raking fire. Too late, a handful of insurgents attempted a last-ditch stand, meaning to retreat across the bridge, and storm the fortress of Peter and Paul, there to hold out against the rest of the army. But the Tzar ordered the guns up to the embankment, and shot them down as they raced across the ice-bound Neva. The ice was shattered by shot and shell, and gaping holes received many bodies which were seen no more till, with the spring thaw, they floated to the surface, ghastly reminders of this day. ‘The Revolution that stood and waited’ was over. The vengeance of Nicholas had not yet begun.