Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  ‘. . .Lonely no More,’ sighed the Traveller, recalling the old Siberian song. He held out his arms and I rushed into them.

  •

  Although our golden-crowned wedding was imperceptibly assuming a remote and legendary quality, becoming a shared future as distant yet believable as that past in which we liked to dwell, we often spoke of it when alone together, and to my joyous surprise the Traveller announced he was plucking up courage to approach my parents on the subject.

  ‘Though I know what they’ll say.’ He stared gloomily out to sea, northwards, towards London, towards reality.

  ‘I expect they’ll say we must wait till I’m twenty-one.’

  ‘They’ll say a lot more than that.’

  •

  Kamran and Sergei continued to address me as Mamasha and seemed to have no doubt as to my place in their life; as their father’s future wife I was treated with a deference I found unexpected and pleasing, for it seemed to set the seal on my adult status – something which I still thought both improbable and desirable at that time. But Aunt Eudoxia, not unnaturally, saw the whole thing as a familiar joke.

  ‘Your father is not the marrying kind – you ought to know that by now,’ she said sharply, when Kamran sprang to my defence and said everything was settled and he was coming to live with us when we set up house in Paris.

  ‘The candles carried at the wedding ceremony must be kept to light the first night of the first-born,’ I told the Traveller, for I had been reading an anthology of Slav folklore, and was, moreover, now ensnared by a maternal urge, fancying I would enjoy a little Slav of my own.

  ‘Mumbo-jumbo,’ was the only reply I got from the Traveller but he did not seem displeased. All that day he had been morose, ‘thinking Russia’. Together he and Aunt Eudoxia had been recalling old times, telling of exotic characters they remembered from their Russian life: Tiflis, it seemed, had been peopled with the most furious and seductive types.

  ‘D’you remember how they used to dance?’

  Aunt Eudoxia sighed, recalling, no doubt, some romantic interlude.

  ‘The Dance of the Eagles . . .’ Now the Traveller was launched, describing to me the feudal Georgian Court dances, stately or fiery, a living tradition there.

  He possessed that curious magnetic power found in the street story-tellers of the East, crouched among their rags, holding a circle of listeners spellbound, becoming, by some sorcery of their own, each character in turn, conjuring, with a flick of a tattered sleeve, brigands, Caliphs or all the peris of Paradise. It did not matter that the Traveller was a man, in European clothes: with a turn of the shoulder, a movement of his hands – the supple hands of a magician – he could conjure up the gliding grace of the Lezghinka, evoking the Georgian noblewomen as they advanced or retreated, promising, denying, each step a stately ritual. Or, with another change of pace, or magic, crashing his foot down with that fury only Slavs and Spaniards know, he would summon up the dark fur-capped warriors of Elbruz leaping across steel in the dagger dance, or performing other strange, almost imperceptible steps, vibrations of passion.

  Many years later, in the shadow of Elbruz, I was to watch these same fiery dances, the Dance of the Eagles or of the Partisans, and knew that I was seeing them for the second time; for their reality was in no way sharper, more true, than his sorcery.

  Now Aunt Eudoxia was describing the manner in which the Georgian women seemed to float, gliding swan-like, infinitely remote, deified creatures of mystery.

  ‘Your mother caught me that way,’ remarked the Traveller, whacking Sergei hard over the head with a fly-swatter; but this seemed a gesture of affection rather than malice. ‘She was one of the youngest beauties at the ball,’ he continued. ‘They all wore white . . . trailing skirts, scarves, veils, shawls . . . that’s how women should be – like well-wrapped parcels – to be undone.’

  ‘And the men! O! those Georgian men!’ sighed Aunt Eudoxia, telling of the soft leather boots they wore, and how they rose sur les pointes like ballerinas. And then, how they seemed to stab the ground with violent steps, circling round the woman, stamping furiously – like – She came to a full stop, searching for words to describe this contredanse of desire.

  ‘Like rutting animals – after all, it was a pantomime of conquest,’ the Traveller reminded her. ‘But chevaleresque, too. Don’t forget that all the while, as they circled, the man’s tunic must not even brush the skirt of his partner. It was a tradition. She was his goddess, his Princesse Lointaine . . . But she wore a dagger, and knew how to use it, too. Those women knew about hating, as well as loving . . . D’you remember Anyia’s mother – the Princess who ran up all those debts in Tiflis?’

  Aunt Eudoxia nodded, and the Traveller went on to relate how the lady, who had been a famous beauty, had cornered the Tzar at a State ball and asked him to silence the Jewish money-lender who pressed her the hardest.

  ‘But my dear Princess, what can I do? – I can’t murder him,’ said the monarch.

  ‘And you call yourself a Tzar!’ she spat.

  No, she had not been sent to Siberia for such daring. But then she was a great beauty. Aunt Eudoxia sighed again, her plump painted face folding into lines of envy and resignation.

  ‘And it was the Caucasus,’ the Traveller reminded her. ‘Everything was more emphatic there. The Georgians were a fiery race, and the Russians always forgave them. I remember a story another old Princess used to tell. She was still a splendid ruin when I knew her. She wore the traditional velvet dress – the katiba, and the little flat cap, with two long curls each side of her face . . . But she still had a look about her . . . she was still very much a woman . . . Well, anyhow, I used to like visiting her. One afternoon we were sitting under the vines of her estates outside Tiflis: she used to have the samovar and her needlework brought out there on summer evenings, and once, she started talking about her marriage. Her husband had been an exceedingly jealous man, but she loved him.

  ‘ “I was only unfaithful to him once,” she told me, “and then only in my mind . . . though that’s the same thing, really . . . It was when I was very young. I caught sight of a tribesman from the mountains – one of those barbaric creatures that were still skirmishing with our troops. What a troublesome lot they were. They simply refused to be subdued! I saw this man riding through the woods. He had his bashlyk drawn over his head, so I only caught a glimpse of him, but he had the bluest eye you ever saw . . .”

  ‘ “Only one?”

  ‘ “I only saw the one, for his hood hid the other. But that was enough. He looked at me . . . a long look . . . and I was unfaithful to my husband – in my mind. I couldn’t forget that blue gaze. I was a silly girl. I told my husband about him. Blue eyes are rare among the tribes. My husband tracked him down easily enough. A week or so later he brought me his head. One eye had a dagger through it. The other was wide open, staring . . . staring at me!”

  ‘ “There’s your blue eye for you,” said my husband . . .’

  ‘So much for jealousy, Caucasian style,’ said Aunt Eudoxia, and breaking the spell she began to talk about unobtainable Russian delicacies – koumiss – and a special kind of jam made from black radishes ‘the kind Praskovia used to make.’

  ‘Yes, Proust was right,’ sighed the Traveller. ‘The only real Paradise is the one we have lost.’ The Traveller might sigh, but I, having not yet reached the watershed of time, still looked forward rather than back. At that time, I was entirely happy.

  •

  Below the terrace an enormous concourse of late-mating frogs croaked their bliss. The sun dipped below the mountain abruptly, and the valleys turned sharply violet. The Traveller was manœuvring to attract my attention behind the Countess’s back, He started pulling his ear, a signal, meaning: let’s get away together. In the wild Corsican countryside we had discovered mountain slopes covered with that dense and aromatic vegetation known as the macchia. It was sometimes shoulder high, and sheltered us even more completely than the bracken on the Clovelly
cliffs where once we had dallied innocently in the green shade of Gallantry Bower. But this macchia had a strange atmosphere of drama, something overpowering, like its perfume. It knew so many secrets: it had hidden bandits and lovers and fugitives. Violent crimes and joys and fears were woven into its twisted branches, communicating something of their fury to our bodies. Beneath the intertwining leaves the ground was dry and powdery, smelling of herbs and honey. The Traveller’s polished Chinese head lay beside mine, pillowed on tiny mauvish flowers.

  ‘No, I do not know their name, nor do I know if they grow in Siberia, if you thought of asking,’ he said in those smoky, wooing tones which could turn the most dispassionate sentence into a declaration of love.

  The first stars glimmered through the lattice of the macchia.

  ‘We must make a wish,’ I said, and began the old nursery doggerel –

  ‘Starlight, star bright, first star I’ve seen tonight

  Would we could, would that we might . . ..

  TRAVEL ON THE TRANS-SIBERIAN!’

  The Traveller leant over me, staring down with that expressionless mask from which the narrowed eyes told so much.

  ‘Pussinka! Stop thinking about Siberia. Kiss me –’ his voice was rough, like his hands. Then he laughed. ‘I tell you, I won’t have half Asia for a rival . . . or a railway train either! Still, if that’s what makes you feel more loving . . . Come closer – come and be loved in a Mongol yurt, like you were in Dijon . . . Doucinka moyia . . . this is our tent beside the Amur . . . Now kiss me properly . . .’

  Presently he resumed his teasing tone:

  ‘You’re such a romantic creature – I wonder, would you have followed me to Siberia in the classic manner, like Raskolnikov’s Sonia, and Albina Megouria and all the rest of them? Russian women . . . how strange, how sweet they are . . .’ He was thinking aloud now, staring his inward, Russian-turning stare. He held me in his arms but he no longer saw me . . . ‘The wives of the Dekabrists . . . what passion, what softness, what abnegation . . . so Russian.’ His voice sounded a curious, ardent note I had never heard before, as if he were in love with an abstraction – a Russian characteristic. This softness, or tenderness – I do not call it sentimentality – is the reverse side of the coin to brutality and often found in the Russian, but never, I think, alongside the methodical cruelty of the German, or Austrian, who is certainly sentimental. Over the years I have come to recognize it is an inherent Russian trait.

  ‘We were always told to give something to the prisoners we used to see being marched off,’ one Russian woman told me, recalling her childhood in Tobolsk. ‘Our nianya used to say “Give to the nestchalnie – the unhappy ones – give to the poor little prisoners,” she’d say with tears in her eyes as the criminals passed by. She’d find a kopek or two in her pocket, and we’d run after them, distributing our coppers, or the cakes and bublitchki we’d bought for ourselves. And they’d call down all the Saints of the Calendar to bless us.’

  Thus the nursery; and a like compassion was sometimes reflected in a harsher world. In 1905 the abhorred Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovitch, governor general of Moscow, was marked down by the terrorists, to be blown to pieces as he drove out from the Kremlin. The whole thing was timed to the second. But Kaliayev, the would-be assassin, clutching the bomb in readiness, was disarmed by the sight of two motherless children, the Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna and her brother, the Grand Duke Dimitri, sitting beside their uncle in the Imperial carriage. Such innocence! Kaliayev stayed his hand. But two days later the Grand Duke drove alone, and so, was blown to pieces after all.

  Such inconsistencies run like an undulating line through centuries of Russian life, and lie as a haze, obscuring the clear-cut horizons of history; simplicity beside cunning, cruelty and compassion; all are deep in the Russian character. This strata of cruelty which the Traveller attributed to the Tartar blood conflicts with the Slav bon enfant. Even when no Tartar strain is traced it must be remembered that the Khans ruled for centuries, dominating as much by craftiness as terror. At last the elliptical approach, so essentially Asiatic, so alien to the basically guileless Slav has become an integrated characteristic. In every field there are examples of this inconsistency.

  In the gathering darkness of the Corsican evening the Traveller was quoting Nekrassov, translating his beautiful verses on Russian women, evoking the sublime spirit of sacrificial love shown by the Princesses Wolkonskaya and Troubetskaya, Countess Mouravieva and the rest of those heroic wives who shared their husbands’ bitter years of Siberian exile.

  ‘There was a Frenchwoman too,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Ah. You know about her? Pauline Guèble.’ He seemed annoyed – ‘but her motives were not so pure. She had something to gain (she was French don’t forget). Just a little conturière, who became mistress of the Chevalier Garde Count Annenkov. She didn’t have so much to lose as the others, either – no roots, no traditions, titles or estates to abandon.’ (Her baby, whom she left and was never to see again, he ignored.) ‘She had never known the luxury and privilege to which the others had all been accustomed. Moreover, when she reached Siberia, Annenkov was obliged to marry her, so she became a Countess after all. No; she was quite a different case,’ he said, dismissing the Frenchwoman with a shrug; and for a moment I hated him for his cynicism, even for his national prejudice. He seldom passed up a chance to denigrate the French, and I wondered what event or person had brought about this profound hostility.

  Abruptly, he turned to me:

  ‘But you’re so nearly Russian, my darling, so sentimental and tétue, so sublimely silly, I do believe you would do what the Dekabristi wives did . . . Would you? But then –’ His mood was suddenly teasing – ‘But then, wouldn’t that be because you were really in love with the land rather than the man? I always said you were more in love with the train than me. O Pussinka! You’ll never love me in the way I love you . . . Never mind. Don’t start denials and explications! Never mind about the Irtysh and the Angara and all the rest of Siberia. To hell with Siberia. Let’s get on with the loving . . .’ As he leaned closer he blotted out the starlight and for a while even Siberia was forgotten.

  •

  Slithering down the rocky paths, brushing pine-needles and ants from our crumpled clothes, we could see, far below, light streaming from the hotel windows, lighthouse beams alerting us to the conventions, explications and obligations of everyday life; rocks, waiting for us to founder on them.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked, half-hoping we could turn back.

  ‘Yes. As I always tell you, emotions need feeding.’

  ‘But imagine, now, if we’d been on our train.’ I was harking back to my sigh-away, die-away dream, ‘Imagine, just us, shut in together, for a week, and all Siberia outside . . . and when we pulled up the blind we’d see that snowy emptiness rolling past, and the little villages hunched under the weight of the snow, day after day, night after night . . . We should be so cosy in our red velvet compartment . . . we shouldn’t have to walk down the mountain-side, or even go to the Hôtel de la Gare at the next stop. We’d light the lamp, with its green shade, and order caviare and champagne to be brought to us there.’

  ‘Yes, it’s an erotic image. By the way, I prefer tea with my caviare.’

  ‘Tea then; and then —’ I stopped. The image was overwhelming. The place and the loved one. ‘That would be Gallantry Bower,’ I finished lamely.

  We had reached the courtyard behind the hotel. The Run-Away Game was over. The Traveller drew me into the shadows of the outhouses.

  ‘Pussinka dousha, don’t you know yet, that Gallantry Bower is wherever we are together. Don’t always look for it the other side of the world, it’s here and now, whenever we kiss.’

  CHAPTER X

  And so it was, for the rest of that loving summer. When an unexpectedly early autumn lashed Corsica with its gales and rains, and snow powdered the mountains, the unheated, stone-walled hotel ran with rivulets of moisture where snails collected. ‘Now it’s r
eally like life in a Caucasian aôul – village to you,’ said the Traveller, relishing my discomfort. In this dank setting we shivered, munched hot chestnuts and at last decided to seek the remains of summer on the mainland, towards the Italian border.

  Aunt Eudoxia was becoming restive. She was urban by inclination and spoke of returning to Paris with longing, but Kamran and Sergei, their father’s double-shadow, seemed content to linger in the south.

  It was a rough crossing. At Marseilles we hired a car and made our way slowly along the banal stretches of coast studded with self-conscious playgrounds. Antibes, Cannes, Nice, Villefranche, Monte Carlo, all of them were made acceptable to me by their Russian associations; but in my heart I was not captivated, and wished, in secret that we could have been making for some more thrilling scene, the Albanian mountains, at least.

  Yet countless Russians had been drawn to the Riviera, finding it beautiful and romantic. Perhaps I could do the same. The lavish villas of the former Grand Dukes or their mistresses abounded round Cannes, set back from the vulgar gaze and deep in lush vegetation. Few if any of them had the swimming pool which today is as usual as a garage; but quite a number had small chapels in the medieval Russian style, onion domes and Orthodox crosses set down incongruously, beneath the palm trees. Ersatz as they were, they warmed my heart. At Nice, the Russian Orthodox Cathedral rose from behind the railway goods yard, an exuberant memorial to the frail young Tzarevitch who had wasted away in an Imperial villa on the same spot.

  On the Promenade des Anglais, Marie Baschkirtseff, as an enfant terrible of fourteen, corseted and draped in écru batiste, sat on the balcony of her mother’s villa, seething with passion for an English Duke who would shortly drive past, all unaware. ‘O God! give me the Duke of H.!’ she writes in her celebrated Journal. A great compatriot, with nobler aspirations, Alexander Herzen, also lived and suffered and is buried in Nice. His statue is to be seen in the cemetery, above the old town. At Monte Carlo, beside the Hôtel de Russie, one jeweller and pawnbroker’s establishment carried, until lately the sign ‘Lombard’ in big gilt Kyrillic lettering. The word Lombard was the Russian name for a pawnshop. No doubt the Principality decided it was as well to offer immediate, easily recognized aid to those despairing and impetuous Slavs who rushed ruined from the Casino prepared to leap from the suicides’ bridge.