Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  A character the Traveller had known by hearsay was the object of my especial envy: he always referred to her ceremoniously as La Voyageuse de la Volga. His father remembered her as a fabulously rich old widow, an eccentric, possessing vast estates in the region of Saratoff. She was convinced that her relatives planned to assassinate her, for a family feud had raged, even during her husband’s lifetime. After his death, she had abandoned her house and, for thirty years, spent her summers going up and down the Volga on one of the steamers which plied the lovely reaches between Saratoff and Astrakhan. Her winters were passed on the Saratoff-Moscow railway, shuttling backwards and forwards. She was revered by the personnel of both boat and train and, since she knew all the people of distinction living along both routes, she was treated like a Queen. Wherever she stopped en route her friends, expecting her arrival, would drive to the landing stage or the station where she held court. She never left her compartment, or the deck (for she took no chances of some particularly venomous relative coming too close) but, standing at the window or leaning over the rail, she held court, received le beau monde and their compliments, exchanged gossip, extended her hand to be kissed or made the sign of the Cross over them; but withdrawing before they began to bore her. She had arranged her cabin with her own comforts; a gold-plated samovar, her books, and embroidered bed hangings, while her compartment on the train was said to be plastered with ikons and made fragrant by pots of sweet-scented green plants at the windows. This has always seemed to me a perfect way of life; yet she was considered mad for adopting it.

  While the Countess puffed voluptuously at the tchibouk, her eyes half closed, an expression of exalted grief on her face, the rest of us worked steadily through what Hondof had left of the picnic, to the accompaniment of innumerable glasses of tea provided by the now restored samovar, which the Traveller managed skilfully.

  Apart from myself, no one seemed to have thought of bringing anything to read on the journey, but all of them eyed me with a certain envy when I opened The Mystery of Edwin Drood. However the Traveller soon settled matters by snatching the book out of my hands and slicing it into five sections which he now distributed among us, regardless of sequence. Thus, Sergei found himself with the last chapter, while a middle section fell to my lot, leaving equally incomprehensible chunks of text to be puzzled out by the others.

  ‘What’s the matter? Now you’ve all got something to read, haven’t you?’ demanded the Traveller, who appeared to feel he had acted with both ingenuity and impartiality, although I noticed he had kept the opening chapter for himself. For the rest of the journey one or other of the Traveller’s sons was ordered off to sit with Hondof in the luggage van, while all dietetic principles were cast to the winds and I was repeatedly sent the length of the train with delicacies for the dog rather than its human companion.

  As the last pale after-glow lit the vineyards before Marseille, we had come to the end of the pâté, the lobster and the strawberry tartlets and were falling back on the cucumber sandwiches.

  ‘Pastries and vegetables are no good for dogs,’ said the Traveller, ‘but all the same, go along and see if Hondof fancies something.’ There was no mention of the banished son.

  I was selected for this mission rather than whichever of his sons was with us, for, as he explained, only the English really knew and felt for dogs. I bumped and lurched down the length of the train, stepping over nuns’ cardboard suitcases and the kit bags of French sailors regaining their ships. The lights were pricking through the fast-gathering darkness when I reached the luggage van, where Kamran, the elder of the two sons, was sleeping on a mail sack, his dark head on the Komondor’s woolly flank. Both gobbled at the delicacies. While Hondof crashed a great hoof-like paw on to my lap, loving and pleading, the Traveller’s son eyed me with that same sly, sidelong glance as his father: and something of Hondof’s pleading, too.

  ‘So you and Papasha will to marry?’ he asked, and smiled, a diffident, almost surly grin, which lit his sallow face and revealed the strong, square, very square white teeth of some Asiatic races. Kamran, I perceived, had nothing of Europe about him, and I liked him the better for that.

  ‘Where you live?’ he continued, ‘I hope it being Paris, and I may come there also.’ He spoke English in a basic manner, but was far more at home in French, to which he usually reverted, as now.

  ‘I have never had a home,’ he went on. ‘I should like one . . . I should like to know my father better. I believe that you are more acquainted with him than either Sergei or myself.’ He sighed, and a forlorn look came over his flat-planed, youthful face. Suddenly I saw the Traveller as a young man, and I felt my heart turn in my side.

  ‘Will you bring Hondof too?’ I asked, to hide my confusion.

  ‘If Papasha permits it,’ he said, and again I noticed the almost slavish deference which both sons displayed towards the Traveller. To them, as to me, his word was law.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Corsica was quite unspoiled at that time. Like Russia, it had not yet become chic for tourists. There were few hotels, and fewer tourists. Boats put out from Nice twice a week, laden with food-stuffs and cattle. A little railway chugged through the cactus-studded hills at erratic intervals. There were some cars on the island, for the most part grotesque-looking taxis, perhaps retired there after their hour of glory on the Marne. The country, so precipitous and dramatic, was said to resemble the Caucasus by the handful of Russian émigrés who now found themselves at Bastia or Ile Rousse, which took its name from the red rock scarps, though I preferred to think of it as Ile Russe – a proper setting for our party. At Calvi, Prince Yussoupov and his wife, the Grand Duchess Irina, had an unpretentious little villa, round which clots of émigrés still discussed every detail of Rasputin’s murder. The Yussoupovs had got out of Russia leaving behind almost their entire fortune and possessions – an amalgam of fabulous jewels, estates and palaces which exceeded that of the Romanovs and all the rest of the nobles. Like most of their kind, they had not the slightest idea of the value of money. Although they had managed to take with them two Rembrandts, a stupendous black pearl and an amount of money which might be thought enough to provide a comfortable if not spectacular way of life, Russian improvidence took no count of economics: and then, the Yussoupovs were generous to a fault, being surrounded by a retinue of dependent friends and unnecessary servants, while supporting various relief organizations, which were run in a rather chaotic fashion. Presently their assets had melted away, a situation they accepted with a mixture of fatalism and childish amazement. A short distance from our hotel, there was a small bar run by a Tcherkess colonel – a dashing type, one of the survivors of the celebrated Dikiya Divizia – ‘The Wild Brigade’ which had resisted the Bolsheviki so furiously on the Caucasian and Crimean fronts. Corsican mountains, they all agreed, were scaled-down versions of the Caucasus.

  ‘Beshtau in miniature,’ said the Tcherkess colonel indicating a rugged peak rising above the forest, and swirled with heavy clouds.

  Every evening, in the stuffy little bar decorated with swords and daggers (Caucasian shashkas and kindjali, as I knew by my reading), I would listen to the talking and the singing that I loved. Sometimes a greenish-pale, silent man whose history no one knew, emerged from the corner where he usually sat over one small vodka throughout the long evening, and sang the old peasant songs of Russia. He would hurl them out on a note of such longing that it was as if he tried to reach across the Mediterranean, across France, north, far north, across the Hungarian puszta and the steppes which lay between him and some remote corner of his homeland, where the last echoes of his cry could sink to rest. A silence fell over the bar as each of the exiles returned in his heart, to his home.

  With the same sense of longing, I was peering through the darkness outside, to where the stars were scattered, projecting myself to an imagined landscape – the Caucasus. Away beyond that hill lies the aôul of Ghimri, I would tell myself . . . and Hadji Mourad and his Murids will gallop down from the mou
ntains by that very path, to ford the Terek – the River of Death (I had been reading Lermontov again), and the great Imam Shamyl will make a last stand on that rock, for it is Gounib, no less.

  The Montenegrin aunt never came to the bar: indeed, we seldom saw her. She spent her mornings on the hotel balcony, consulting the cards. Punctually at nine o’clock she would start laying them out for the day’s prognostications, rather as, today, people tune-in to the morning news. Her headline résumés were always gloomy. When the sudden gusts of wind peculiar to the island scattered the pack, she sent me to collect a bag of pebbles from the beach, to serve as paper-weights.

  ‘Try to find cornelian, or agate,’ she said – ‘they are always washed up after a storm.’

  When the Traveller pointed out that the season had been exceptionally fine, and we were obliged to return with ordinary grey pebbles, she was very much put out.

  ‘It is those Yussoupovs,’ she said. ‘As if they didn’t have enough precious stones already, without beach-combing . . . Why, in Moscow, I remember hearing that at the Coronation ball his mother wore a parure of rubies that were larger than strawberries . . . And yet they have to come here and grab all the cornelians.’

  At which the Traveller remarked that Tartars were extravagant by nature. And with that curious faculty he possessed for linking a remote past with present life, he told how Tamerlaine’s daughter-in-law was in the habit of throwing pearls to her goldfish, beating Cleopatra hands down, for she, after all, only squandered one pearl, on one man.

  •

  While Corsican beaches did not yield the treasures Aunt Eudoxia desired, the whole island seemed, I thought, to retain a certain hostility to visitors. It was alternately fiery in its heat and drought, its baked rock paths, lizard-infested, winding giddily upwards, or else a prey to sudden gale, with overcast skies, which brought hail whipping down from the mountains, turning a picnic into a trial by exposure.

  I ventured to ask the Traveller why he had selected Corsica for our holiday, if, although recalling the Caucasus, it was so often uncomfortably hot or cold; to which he replied:

  ‘Because I’m a spy, Miss. Well, that’s what people say, don’t they? You must have heard that often enough. It’s easy to carry on stealthy business here. Look how smuggling flourishes. A wild coast, remote villages and those dense thickets of the maquis for cover. Perfect terrain. Don’t you believe me?’

  And perhaps I did. It was all in keeping with his climate of mystery, and it made no difference to my feelings. I wondered if there was anything he could have done, or been, that would have destroyed my love. A bull-fighter, or big-game hunter, now . . . Could I have felt the same towards him? Fortunately this acid test was not applied and I loved on, without reserve.

  The Traveller hated Nature, which he always referred to in capitals. He also abhorred the British ritual of a daily walk, and only accompanied me under pressure.

  ‘All those British walks and washes – they are dangerous, habit-forming drugs,’ he would say, as I began to stir, after the siesta. The rituals of my childhood still held. A day without a walk was, somehow, not right, just as reading novels in the morning had seemed, to Nanny, too indulgent, even in our bookish household. Non-fiction – essays, biographies, travels, these could be read at any time; they had the sanction of study; but novels, however classic, were only for the afternoon – from tea-time onwards. Such Anglo-Saxon disciplines were alien to the Traveller, who often spent a whole morning monopolizing either the bathroom or lavatory, reading current fiction, impervious to the inconvenience this caused others. If a book particularly displeased him, he was apt to stuff it down the lavatory, as proof of his scorn. After which, there was inevitably trouble with the drains.

  ‘I am not surprised,’ he would say, when we remonstrated with him. ‘Such rubbish is enough to choke up any sewer.’

  •

  While Aunt Eudoxia brooded over the sinister implications of her Tarot cards, hanged men, swords and bleeding hearts turning up regularly, Kamran and Sergei spent their time with the Tcherkess colonel, practising revolver shooting and learning to mix the most imaginative cocktails at the bar,

  ‘As long as they don’t mix their own drinks,’ said their father coldly. He himself drank only vodka and kept me, very properly, to local red wines.

  The character of these two young men differed greatly. Sergei, the eldest, was active, sociable, and clearly with an eye on the main chance, inherited, said the Traveller, from his mother, the Georgian beauty.

  ‘All Georgians are opportunitists, supple and astute. That boy will use his looks and his charm, and always fall on his feet,’ said his father eying him approvingly, as Sergei set off for the beach, carrying the towels and sun umbrella of a trim-looking Frenchwoman who owned a villa near-by and sometimes danced with him at the bar, teaching him the tango, for which he showed great aptitude. I thought her the quintessence of chic, which indeed she was, with an extra, lacquered finish; but both Aunt Eudoxia and the Traveller agreed she lacked style.

  ‘I know her kind – dressed-up for lunch, undressed for tea,’ he said acidly, and the Countess, puffing at her tchibouk, shook her head in agreement. She had never lost that Balkanic, near-Eastern habit of shaking the head to signify Yes and nodding it to signify No; something which was to bewilder and amuse me all over again when, many years later, I lived in Bulgaria.

  The Frenchwoman’s yellow parasol could be seen bobbing along between the hedges of Barbary figs that led to the sea: as it turned a bend in the path I saw it waver, no doubt knocked sideways by the ardour of Sergei’s advances.

  Somehow, I could never associate him with his father. He bore a superficial resemblance, but there was something about him that was too assured, too pleasing, too regularly handsome, I thought. Except for his slanted dark eyes, there was not much of the Asiatic in his face. He could have passed for a Latin. Kamran was different – was his father’s double, was all Asia.

  ‘You spoil those boys – I always knew you would; but Kamran is your favourite, that’s plain to see. Don’t make Sergei jealous. Don’t make me jealous either. Don’t make me jealous of my own son!’ He laughed: ‘I don’t suppose you know the legend of Akbar’s favourite? She was buried alive, on his orders, because he saw her smile at his son.’ He paused dramatically for the impact of this warning to sink in, and then, resuming his usual tone, pronounced that Kamran would always be a problem. ‘He’s a drifter. There used to be a whole population of his kind in Russia, living from day to day, content with little or nothing. No curiosity, no desires. I don’t know where he gets it from. Not from me, anyhow. I don’t see any Turki or Kirghiz in him either. He’d never ride fifteen hours in the saddle hunting his food with a falcon. He’d be mooning around the yurt, like Oblomov in the parlour. I can’t imagine what he’ll do for a living here in Europe. I suppose he’ll just wait for life to pass.’

  ‘I think he’d like to come and live with us, in Paris,’ I said diffidently, for I did not want, once again, to be accused of favouritism. ‘Perhaps you could find something for him where he could use his languages? After all, he speaks five if you count Turki – and he could easily polish up his English. I’d help him. He ought to find something where he can travel about . . . Like you,’ I added, greatly daring, for having never discovered the exact nature of the Traveller’s comings and goings I was always wondering if, at last, the moment of revelation was at hand.

  The Traveller’s eyes slid sideways to consider the sprawling figure of his son, as immobile in the sunlight as in the chill squalls which broke over the island so often.

  ‘Look at him! He’ll never travel – he couldn’t even be a commercial traveller,’ said his father. ‘Travelling requires an energetic mind as well as an energetic body. Curiosity is a form of energy. He has none. He seems content just to exist – to be.’

  ‘Content to be rather than to have, d’you mean? I think that’s rather nice,’ I pronounced, and received a withering look.

  �
��You’d better not start thinking that way, Miss, or you’ll never get to Siberia,’ he snapped and returned to his attack on Kamran. ‘He’s been hanging round the veranda all the morning. Just the way the beggars used to hang round the church-doors in Moscow – great strong hulks as well as decrepit old creatures, the blind and the lame and the lazy – a pestilential lot. That’s where he belongs – unless it’s back in an aôul.’

  ‘I think you are being rather hard – after all, he’s not bothering anyone,’ I ventured. Something in Kamran’s forlorn air, his lonely figure touched me. And his stillness seemed, at times, positively desirable after the climate of drama in which I now simmered.

  ‘Hard? No. Just prophetic. He’ll rot his life away – you’ll see.’

  I looked again at the still figure on the steps below us. I had often remarked this particular quality of stillness among Russians. It has nothing to do with Oblomov’s inertia, however much the Traveller might cite him. Rilke, writing of Dostoievsky’s House of the Dead, found it an exaltation of Slav passivity.

  ‘There exists in the Slav soul,’ he wrote, ‘a degree of submission, even when harassed by the most urgent pressures, and the soul withdraws to the secret place it has created, a kind of further dimension of living, where absolute freedom is found, however painful outward circumstances may be.’

  It is perhaps this quality which has enabled them, as a race, to endure so stoically the many hardships imposed on them, over the centuries, by successive rulers.