Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  This was some of the intricate background to that moment in Russian history which I now set out to study, being certain that one day, I should come to know the terrain of its Siberian sequel.

  •

  All that winter, the biting cold of Florence was warmed by the Traveller’s letters. He wrote to me often – guarded letters, but sometimes we now employed a peculiar code, or cypher, which he had once explained to me when describing the strange beliefs and habits of the Old Believers, snug in their forests beyond the Volga. In the seventeenth century this cypher had been used in diplomatic exchanges, but falling into disuse, had been adopted by the Old Believers for their secret correspondence between the monasteries and prelates, obstinately defending their Schismatic doctrines against the Patriarch Nikon’s reforms. Now, in a modified system we lisped our own secrets to each other in this juggled Russian alphabet.

  Although no one read my letters, the nuns not being empowered to do so, I think both the Traveller and I enjoyed this exercise in stealth. It heightened our agreeable sense of guilt, and besides, since we often recalled our expedition to Dijon in detail, we really did have something over which to be secretive. The tramontana might howl across the Apennines while I slept in an unheated, stone-walled, stone-flagged room in a bed inadequately warmed by a contraption of charcoal known locally, and bawdily, as ‘the priest in the bed’; yet I glowed, re-reading the Traveller’s cryptic letters, recalling another, warmer couch. Thus, although far apart, an illusion of closeness was preserved. I needed this solace, for my remaining months at the convent were stultifying. An occasional cinema, tea-parties among the English colony, long-distance flirtations with young officers at the Fortezza . . . these were not for me. I had tasted wine and now sipped water.

  Perhaps my restlessness was reflected in my moodiness, my lack of of interest for my studies, or anything around me. Perhaps the nuns complained to my mother and she drew her own conclusions. Even though she knew nothing of my true relationship to the Traveller she had always been aware of my infatuation. When the Sister, who supervised our out-going mail, reported I was writing to him three or four times a week, my mother wrote back to me, fond but firm. My studies were suffering. She feared he was becoming too disturbing an influence in my life . . . (Becoming? He had been that since I could first remember him, toasting bread and beef dripping by the nursery fire.) I wondered if my parents knew of the four Asiatic sons or had, somehow, learned of our project – the golden-crowned wedding. This, I sensed, would not be viewed with sympathy.

  Our Traveller is off on his travels again, said my mother’s letter, ‘and perhaps it would be better not to write for a while. He is planning a trip to Afghanistan, where there is Trouble’. During the Trouble, she suggested, he would have no time to write and I should be careful not to bother him with too many letters. Although we both knew how irresistible Trouble – especially if situated in Asia – always proved to the Traveller, I believed he would continue to write, and so he did. But I resented my mother’s attitude, feeling she had tried to come between myself and my Slavic destiny and I bore her a grudge for this, which lingered, hardening gradually from resentment to distrust. I also resented her referring to him as Our Traveller. He was mine, mine, entirely. I now became aware that no one was to be trusted wholly.

  •

  ‘It is frightfully hot here,’ wrote the Traveller, ‘but they know how to make good tea.’ The letter was headed, ‘September, southeast of Kabul.’ It went on:

  ‘Not much going on, so I have had time to look at the country: reminds me of the Caucasus. Rough-going for picnics. Wish you were here, Pussinka moiya. Your insatiable tourist appetites would at last be satisfied. There’s everything. Danger, beauty, innocence, corruption, small-pox, syphilis, stagnation . . . – my vocabulary is giving out – it’s Asia, all right. I can see you sitting sketching under a green umbrella, not noticing bursts of cross-fire from the hills. I suppose you’d tell the tribesmen not to be so silly, if they closed round you. Quite a good method, on the whole. I am writing from a tchai-hana, a sort of tea-house, with a little bridge across the stream; we sit on the bridge to drink our tea and watch the water flowing below.’

  ‘We? . . . My heart was pierced by a barb of jealousy. Who was with him in the tchai-hana? Another traveller? Some henna-fingered Persian houri? One of the legendary dancers of Shemakha?

  ‘Tell your mother that I have discovered a new way to cook rice,’ the letter went on. ‘It requires a copper cauldron at least 3 ft. across. Better try Harrods. By the way, prisoners are worse off here than they used to be in your adored Siberia. They stick them in iron cages, and leave them to perish, hanging from a rock. The last Prime Minister was swinging over a ravine for almost two weeks before he died. But they gave him a splendid funeral – full dress. I had to wear my tails. In this heat!’

  The letter then went on to ask for some laundry to be reclaimed and a number of books to be returned to the London Library – books that had, of course, been borrowed in someone else’s name. The atmosphere of the tchai-hana seemed to have induced total recall for everything except the golden-crowned ceremony round which all my thoughts were now centred.

  PART THREE

  THE BORROWED LIFE

  My love was much

  My life but an inhabitant of his

  Thomas Beddoes

  CHAPTER VII

  By summer the Traveller’s adventurous mood must have passed, for he had returned to London, where he soon conquered my mother’s resistance to a plan that I should join him, with his two sons, for a holiday in Corsica – ‘because it reminds me of the Caucasus. My mad Montenegrin aunt, the old Countess Eudoxia, will be there too,’ he wrote, ‘Just a family outing . . .’ Although my parents interpreted family outings in other terms than mad aunts from Montenegro and illegitimate sons (the Traveller had, it seemed, boldly proclaimed their bastard birth, no doubt aware of my family’s large views on such matters), it seemed that, for them, the educational benefits of foreign travel outweighed most other considerations and, since they were still in happy ignorance of our excursion to Dijon, where my education might be said to have been conducted along dangerously liberal lines, they agreed to this Corsican expedition. And so, once more it was written that I should hang on his words, lie in his arms, and fall even deeper under the Russian spell.

  Our journey was not without incident, for we had assembled early one morning at the Gare de Lyon under a torrid sun which shortened tempers dangerously. We were to take the rapide to Marseille; even so, we should not get there till nearly midnight. The Traveller laid no trust in the comforts of the wagon-lit or the dining-car. We would go by day, and we would picnic, he decreed. Mademoiselle Lavisse was escorting me to the train and, as we drew near the compartment, we heard him shouting angrily at the porters who were, he said, mishandling a large samovar he had brought along. Mademoiselle seemed rather disconcerted on finding that the Traveller was wearing dark blue silk pyjamas and grey suède gloves.

  ‘I always change into something of this sort for long journeys,’ he said, catching her embarrassed stare, and I wondered what he wore when crossing the Gobi desert.

  I was now introduced to the mad Montenegrin aunt. Her exuberant curves were moulded into a silk dress splashed with brilliant coloured flowers; a number of pearl necklaces were wound in a strangle-hold round her plump throat and, in spite of the heat, a rather shabby fur cape kept slipping off her shoulders and was clutched into place again. She appeared to be drenched in some particularly exotic scent for, at every movement, wafts of fragrance flowed about the compartment – something I found particularly delicious, remembering how my mother and most of her friends practised the utmost restraint, holding that anything more than the merest hint was a sign of vulgarity. I now perceived that, on many other counts, Aunt Eudoxia would not have met with their approval. She was boldly rouged, the colour painted high and wide, in the manner of a Largillière portrait, and her hair was that rich orange which derives from un
stinted applications of henna. It was bound round her head in tight plaits, forming a high tiara or kakoshnik which immediately proclaimed her Slav origins. Her eyebrows, carelessly slashed across her face, were an uncompromising black, like her small, almond-shaped eyes, set, like the Traveller’s, at an Asiatic slant. Yet with all the pearls and paint and overpowering perfume, there was nothing vulgar about her, and it was with an air at once majestic and agreeable that she greeted me.

  ‘So – I am seeing you at last. I have heard very much of you.’ I wondered what, exactly, she had heard . . . The hand she held out was beautifully shaped, small, white, cushioned, and heavily ringed; a pampered nineteenth century hand, recalling a portrait by Ingres.

  She smiled, gravely, thoughtfully, as if weighing me up, and then, having made up her mind about me, turned back to her preoccupations. An air of brooding melancholy settled round her and seemed oddly out of place since her sharp little nose turned up in the most cheerful fashion. She appeared to be a creature of contradiction, and I observed her with particular interest for she was the first member of the Traveller’s family I had encountered. Somehow, I did not regard his sons in the light of true family – of Russian roots and all that vibrant Muscovite past which I believed Aunt Eudoxia would be able to reveal. Sergei and Kamran were offshoots, adjuncts, echoes – but Aunt Eudoxia must inevitably have shared much of the Traveller’s early background.

  I sat contentedly, already preparing in my head a list of leading questions I would pose at suitable moments.

  Aunt Eudoxia was now focusing her attention on a complicated-looking object placed on the floor beside her. This, she explained, was a tchibouk, or Turkish water-pipe; its coiled tubing stemmed from a graceful ruby cut-glass jar which, since she was installed in a corner seat next to the corridor, caused anyone entering or leaving the compartment to trip over it, scattering the silver paraphernalia where the tobacco and charcoal were placed and jerking dangerously at the amber mouth piece attached to the tube through which the rose-water was already bubbling.

  ‘My tchibouk never leaves me – never,’ she said emphatically. ‘It is of such soothingness.’ But I was to discover that in the matter of trifles she was singularly agitated. The weather, the cards (she read them every day for guidance) or a lost hairpin appeared to be of more consequence than graver trials upon which she sometimes dwelled, her lost youth, her vanished wealth, or her murdered relatives. Like the Traveller, she seemed to find a certain pleasure in major disasters.

  There was no sign of either Kamran or Sergei, which I thought threatened a disastrous start to our journey.

  ‘If they miss the train I shall disinherit them – bastards though they are,’ said the Traveller angrily, at which a meek English couple who were trying to insinuate themselves into the middle seats looked startled and left the compartment.

  Just as the train was moving, the two young men flung themselves aboard. Their father’s face fell. He always enjoyed drama or suspense and had been hanging out of the window, beaming with anticipation, as the platform emptied and it seemed certain his sons had been left behind.

  They were leading an enormous woolly white dog, the largest, woolliest, and most curious animal I had ever seen.

  ‘Ah, so Hondi had to come too,’ said the Traveller indulgently. ‘But I won’t have him put with the luggage. You know how difficult it was to get him over.’

  ‘Hondi’, I learned, was an abbreviation of Hondof – ‘Hondof the Baskervilles’ as Sergei explained, adding that Sherlock Holmes was his favourite author. The creature was a Komondor, said the Traveller, the rarest breed of Mongol sheepdog, seldom seen outside Asia, although the Magyars brought some back with them to the Hungarian plains a thousand years ago, and Hondof had been born in the Puszta and brought to France last year.

  The Komondor’s matted white coat hung in long woolly stalactites, and his loving brown eyes shone out through a thick fringe.

  ‘That coat is what protects them against attack by wolves and the frightful cold,’ said the Traveller,’ and then it makes them acceptable to sheep – the ewes think it’s a sort of guardian angel.’

  He asked me for my comb and began to untangle some of the most clotted portions of Hondof’s coat.

  The Komondor whimpered neurotically and tried to climb on to my lap for protection.

  ‘He weighs eighty and three pounds,’ said Kamran fondly, eyeing the picnic basket. ‘Papasha, please, could he . . .?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ snapped the Traveller. ‘I did not know you were bringing him and I have nothing fit for him to eat. Chicken bones would be dangerous. Lobster is out of the question. Pâté would be constipating.’

  The Countess looked up from the pack of tarot cards she was now dealing and said she thought this might be most desirable on a long journey. But this question was shelved by the Contrôleur arriving to punch our tickets and working himself into one of those legendary Gallic uproars over the presence of a dog in the compartment. The animal had no ticket and, in any case, must travel in the luggage van, he said. A furious scene ensued.

  Although Russian invective is held to be of an unimaginable violence, I observed that in moments of fury the Traveller held to his opinion that the French language best expressed hatred. Sometimes, however, he had recourse to those homely English phrases he so much enjoyed acquiring. Now, after a tirade in his mother-tongue which left his family gasping, and which the Contrôleur, at last stung beyond officialdom, countered with the more homely Foûtez-moi la paix!, the Traveller capped it with ‘and the same to you with knobs on’. Although this phrase was no doubt incomprehensible to him the Contrôleur grew even more livid, lost all semblance of control, and striking an attitude worthy of Talma, hissed: ‘Mes compliments à Mademoiselle votre mère!’

  The Traveller had now worked up to a histrionic degree of rage, and, being almost asphyxiated by the fumes of garlic which the Contrôleur diffused about the compartment, threatened to open the outside door, and fling himself or the Contrôleur on to the line if a hair of the dog’s head was touched. A rush of air, soot, sparks and noise overwhelmed us. The Countess was clutching the tchibouk to her bosom, while the samovar overturned, hot water cascading over the plush seats. In spite of the silk pyjamas and the grey gloves, the Traveller contrived to appear an intimidating figure and, when Kamran and Sergei closed menacingly round, the official turned tail. The Traveller sat back, looking purged, while I righted the samovar. Hondof had taken advantage of the battle to apply himself seriously to the picnic hamper, his head and ears buried deep among the debris of a cold chicken. The Countess, I noticed, now had tears in her little eyes.

  ‘I saw it in the cards this morning,’ she moaned. ‘No good will come of this journey. We are under a dark star.’

  The guard had not given up so easily. He returned with a notebook, still glaring malevolently but calmer, being secure in his official rights. Ignoring Hondof, who growled half-heartedly, he now prepared to prosecute by taking down the Traveller’s name and address, both of which presented almost insuperable difficulties, for after the Russian patronymics came a long, and probably apocryphal address in Central America, full of Xochimilco-like words. This was the Traveller’s revenge. But the Contrôleur won the last round, for having announced that he would also prosecute for the use of insulting language, he went off, to return with some elaborately uniformed higher official of the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer, who bowed most civilly to all of us, and proceeded to lead Hondof away with an air of implacable authority amid shouts and threats which rose above the clatter of the train. The Traveller, who was now positively distorted with rage and frustration, yelled a last, and thoroughly Gallic insult on the lines of: ‘Va, rentre dans ta mère que je peux te refaire!’ while a number of passengers now stuck their heads out of their compartments and looked along the corridor with expressions of approval. A foreigner who possessed such a command of the French language was to be respected – doubly so, since he had come to blows with the officials,
something the uniform-respecting French admired wholeheartedly.

  ‘Scandalist! He was always a scandalist,’ the Countess was whispering with sibilant force, explaining that in Russia, in the old days, this term was generally used to describe those whose wild behaviour invited criticism and provided food for gossip of a censorious nature. ‘Some people made quite a hobby of it,’ she concluded.

  I always noticed that such uproars, while leaving those around the Traveller in a state of nervous prostration, had the most tonic effect upon him. He found them at once stimulating and relaxing. All passion spent, he now assumed an air of beatific calm, and was easily persuaded to recount other journeys – the sort I liked to hear about; of gliding down the Don to Astrakhan, legendary Tartar city – ‘Star of the Desert’; day after day, on a steam-boat filled with water melons and concertina-playing steerage passengers. Or another, by a branch-line of the Trans-Siberian, crossing the great golden sandy wastes of Asia, where only the eagles circled overhead, and the legends of Jenghis Khan still saturated the land. Or those journeys his grandmother’s generation had known, travelling by carriage, with style, in a dormeuse, four horses abreast, with two more added over the worst roads. Every comfort was included, every eventuality foreseen: backgammon boards and a small but choice library to while away the tedium; goose-feather cushions, bed-linen and ikons, to ameliorate wayside lodgings. The cook usually preceded the dormeuse in a tarantass, rattling his bones and the pots and pans and plate as he raced ahead to have dinner awaiting his master and mistress.

  The Traveller’s grandmother, who was as vain as she was fecund (she had fourteen children), was generally followed by another vehicle, carrying her hairdresser and the midwife. These precautionary measures had arisen after a journey when, attending a ball of the provincial nobility, she had been unable to have her hair dressed suitably by the local coiffeur and had been so chagrined that she had left the ball in the middle of a quadrille and, a quarter of an hour later, had given birth to her second son, the Traveller’s father, attended only by a panic-stricken femme-de-chambre.