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Journey Into the Mind's Eye

Page 29

by Lesley Blanch


  ‘How I am caring what they thinking?’ said Kamran, who now wildly suggested that I should try to free myself from my long-forgotten marriage. ‘And if we are marry together,’ he continued naïvely, shaking a wing of black hair from his eyes – ‘then they couldn’t say not one thing.’ But when I pointed out that this was unlikely, he scowled, calling them all the names with which the Russian language is so richly endowed.

  ‘So they say things then – the something sons of somethings. Bloodee Bloodees. You were always so loving of the Tartars – so O.K. I am learning incest was the religion of the Tartars. Marco Polo tells so.’

  I had lately persuaded Kamran to join a Franco-Russian library and to catch up on some of the reading his unsettled childhood had denied him; in general, he showed a preference for the Simenon books, or something like Nana, which of course he should have read at school. Now, as if quoting Scriptures to his own ends, he read from Marco Polo’s Travels triumphantly: the sonne marrieth sometimes all his father’s wives except his own mother.

  ‘See? I copy it out for you.’ Ingenuously, he proffered an envelope scrawled with his rather childish handwriting.

  ‘I see. All the same, I’m not free, and I wouldn’t dream of marrying you, if I was. It wouldn’t do.’ I heard generations of Anglo-Saxon convention sounding primly in my voice.

  Overweening conventions! They have us in a stranglehold from the cradle to the coffin. Sometimes a surge of violence liberates us for a while, for good or ill, but the voice of convention rather than conscience is ever with us. Even when, every twenty years or so, these conventions change or shift, their force does not abate and they din themselves in every ear. You must be respectable. You must not be. Either way, we are aware of their impositions.

  And so I did not make this improvident, imprudent marriage, and thus was spared much trouble and also, perhaps, missed much delight.

  CHAPTER XIX

  Years had passed and we were still together; together and apart, for although my visits to Paris were frequent, I could no more install myself there than Kamran could install himself in London. I earned my living in London, while Kamran was working, but scarcely earning, with a firm of French architects. Even the little hotel that had harboured our first transports was now beyond our means or, rather, beyond Kamran’s means, for he was adamant in refusing my proffered share. ‘What we eating and where we loving is business of me,’ he said, something of the Traveller’s arrogance sounding suddenly.

  What we ate, being mostly pommes frites, presented no problem, but where we loved was another matter. Kamran was sharing a room with two other struggling architects, who, he assured me, were prepared to go out whenever I visited him, a project I found disconcerting. I myself was in very low financial waters and had gone to stay with an English family out at Versailles. They had never known the Traveller and, I thought, could not criticize my affection for Kamran. But I had not reckoned with the strength of British principles. They might be living in France; they might have wine with their meals and breathe garlic fumes with the best of their neighbours; they might be aware that Kamran was my lover; and, as such, he might sometimes make the journey out to Versailles and dine en famille. But set a foot upstairs, in my room – certainly not. There could be none of what Mrs. Aphra Behn described as The midnight’s kind admittance. Nor was the weather conducive to evenings spent out of doors, in the park, so that it seemed our emotional life had come to a standstill. We would sit glaring at each other, estranged by this transplanted, but omnipotent British family life. Today, the bastions of such prudery have been stormed, and we should no doubt be encouraged to make free with the drawing-room sofa.

  ‘But why does he call you Mamasha?’ asked my hostess. Ah! Why . . .?

  ‘You must stop calling me Mamasha,’ I said, next time we met. ‘It’s not suitable – not now.’

  But Kamran brushed the suggestion aside.

  ‘You are Mamasha for me for evertime. Then, I am believing it is more exciting to be making the love with my father’s mistress . . . I am reading of François I and Diane de Poitiers . . . Also, as I say to you before, incest is Tartar religion. I am very much religious,’ he added, between embraces snatched in the shelter of a jasmine arbour, out of sight of the house. I remembered the Traveller’s postscript to his last letter: Be kind to Kamran . . . It was not hard to obey.

  •

  For a while, I tried to improve his English, but it made little progress. Generally we spoke a jargon of mixed French and English richly laced with Russian. Sometimes his misuse of English was particularly graphic. As we crouched under one raincoat, waiting for a summer storm to pass he hugged me close:

  ‘Thus is cuddleful, isn’t it – no?’

  ‘Cuddleful? What a ghastly word. Where on earth did you pick that up?’

  He smiled engagingly. ‘Once I had the happiness to love a blonde lady in Windsor Park. She was married with the professor from Eton school. She liked the cuddle.’

  I shuddered. ‘Papasha would have preferred you to have found a respectable French tart in Soho – a real pro.’ I spoke severely of the dangers of casual or amateur involvements.

  ‘Papasha always said English amateurs are more in gratefulness,’ replied Kamran with finality.

  •

  Kamran telephoned me at Versailles to say he had found a solution to one problem, at least.

  ‘Come to Paris tomorrow. We shall eating blinii to celebrate. I am finding good place for us. Not maison de passe . . . You will see!’

  Pride rang in his voice and, intrigued, I promised to join him.

  He was at the station to meet me, his dark slanted eyes smiling impudently over a large bunch of lilies of the valley, which he explained were not so much an offering of love as a symbol – a traditional offering of this day. ‘Is first day of May – you have forgotten? May-day in Moscow – the Red Flag? There will be big workers’ meetings, music, big talking, here too.’ And calling me Charlotte Russe, he suggested I should show my solidarity by joining them. Charlotte Russe . . . the old name, recalling the Traveller’s bantering tone.

  I plunged into my bouquet, side-stepping both memories and politics.

  The blinii were not particularly good, but neither was the restaurant – we knew it well and went there because Dadya, or ‘Uncle’ Plotnikov as the proprietor was called, kept prices low and portions large for his favoured clientèle.

  My bouquet was immediately seized and plunged into the water jug by a beaming Dadya Plotnikov. Perfume swam round us, enclosing us in a romantic aura, isolating us from the blasts of cooking emanating from the stove in the back room where, behind a bead curtain, Dadya Plotnikov’s brother could be seen doing the cooking in a singlet and battered cap.

  ‘You do not speak – what you thinking?’ asked Kamran, who could show himself jealous even of my thoughts.

  I did not tell him that his bouquet had reminded me of his father, and how, long ago in Corsica, he had carefully instructed his sons on the finesse of flower-giving – the kind of flowers suited to the winning of this woman, or another. For example, in le temps des lilacs, he said, it was more recherchè to give white lilac – only white – especially to married women, who particularly appreciated being treated in a bridal manner. Orchids, on the other hand, were for jeunes filles – they might be sufficiently naïve to think them deliciously evil – les fleurs du mal.

  Kamran and Sergei had listened to their father’s helpful suggestions with respect. The Traveller’s slit eyes had been intent, below frowning brows: he was wholly concentrated on the importance of his theme.

  ‘Believe me,’ he had finished – ‘it takes considerable sophistication to appreciate jonquils. If you are after a well-known actress or ballerina be sure to send some modest little bunch of country flowers – it’s worth taking a lot of trouble to get them – she’ll notice them at once, among all those sheaves of long-stemmed roses and gladioli – and then, also, she’ll think you think of her as younger, more innocent tha
n she is. It never fails.’

  When I taxed him on his revealing such a knowledge of flower names he merely said that a man should know how to order from the florist as well as from the wine-merchant.

  Suddenly I remembered how he had come to meet me at the Gare du Nord that faraway Easter, bringing bouquets for myself and Mademoiselle Lavisse.

  I stood again on the grimy platform, watching him come towards me through the crowds. ‘Pussinka Moyia – at last!’ he had said.

  O Aesop! there are fields of amaranth this side of the grave! There are voices of which the echo is never stilled!

  •

  ‘Now for surprise,’ said Kamran, ardent and urgent, pushing me out into the dazzling May sunshine. ‘It is very quickly near here – you will see – no one find us there – it is our Gallantry Bower!’

  I stopped in my tracks. ‘Gallantry Bower! What d’you mean? What do you know about Gallantry Bower?’ I shook off his encircling arm.

  Seeing my look, Kamran became defiant.

  ‘Is what you and Papasha call your hide love place in Corsica – yes?’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Silly Mamasha darling. How I not know? You always walk away so secret like criminal peoples so Sergei and I follow sometimes. How am I knowing about pretend-game, making the love in Mongolian yurt and on Trans-Siberian? But you are always so wanting the pretend Siberia I think you will like our Gallantry Bower, our pretend . . . A Kirghiz Kibitka, like my mother’s people, if you like it so. We go now.’

  The pride in his voice had given place to an aggressive note.

  Waves of fury engulfed me. I hit out at him with the bouquet. ‘You spied on us! Voyeur! Filthy voyeur! Your own father too! How dared you! I never want to see you again. Don’t explain. You’ve spoiled everything.’ I hit him once more, for good measure, and leaving him standing gaping in the sunshine, rushed blindly away, diving into the nether regions of a Métro which conveniently presented itself at the end of the street.

  Châtelet, République, Belleville, Porte des Lilas – the train was grinding its way under Paris towards some destination I did not know or want. Mairie des Lilas – the end of the line. With a sense of surprise I emerged into the same strong sunlight in which I had left Kamran standing bewildered, the lilies of the valley scattered at his feet. Somehow, I had expected the weather to change with my mood; it should have been grey, chill, for already I was overcome with a sense of desolation. I sat on the noisy terrace of a brasserie, waiting for the interminable café filtre to fill my cup and wishing passionately that it was a tchai-khana in Russian Turkestan – the kind the Traveller had so often described to me in his tales. But he had gone, and with him, his tales; and now Kamran was lost too. With a sense of abandonment that verged on panic I turned inward, into that other world of fantasy that always waited for me, that was only a sigh away.

  I scuffled in my bag and tugged out the chunky little red volume which alternated with Herzen’s Memoirs as my daily reading. My affection for Baedeker’s Russie 1895 (French Edition) which rivalled and often contradicted that other treasure, Murray’s Handbook of Russia for 1893, was mystifying to my French and Russian friends. They constantly reminded me that it was out of date. But then I, too, was out of date, keeping company with a ghost who had known Russia at that time. Apart from the fact that the Russia of which Baedeker writes is no more and that present-day guide books suggest enormous itineraries and cover distances which are only realizable by the use of jet planes and fast cars, there is another, striking difference.

  These earlier guide books are all obsessed by the same question – how to pass the time (when of course, the real problem is how to stop it passing so quickly, especially if one is in the faraway realms on which Baedeker and his kind dwell). But on that particular May-day of desolation at the Mairie des Lilas time undeniably seemed to drag. So, ordering another café filtre I opened my guide book and took flight to Russia, to St. Petersburg, 1895 . . .

  The magic never failed. Paris faded; the spire of the Admiralty gleamed before me, the old familiar smell of sun-flower seeds, wet leather and salted fish assailed me. I was home, safely home . . .

  Emploi du temps, says Baedeker, listing his suggestions – all of them, to me, mouth-watering prospects, but it is clear Baedeker doubts his reader’s abilities to pass the time in Russia without his aid. Murray goes further and devotes a long passage to eating, counselling and explaining the typical Russian cuisine for adventurous British stomachs. Is there, perhaps, a faint trace of cynicism to be detected? Of patronage, perhaps? In listing Botvinia merely as ‘a soup of a green colour,’ or describing Porosionok pod khrenum, cold boiled sucking pig with horse-radish, as ‘not a pretty dish but very eatable’, and dismissing various local cheeses warily, ‘should the digestion or habit require them’, we can also detect a dyspeptic note. Murray follows up this gastronomic section with one headed SANITARY PECULIARITIES, and I imagine the editors sitting back, a good day’s work done. That will keep the tourists busy! After the red pottage (or the green soup?), the exceeding bitter cry. Just let them try out those dishes. They have been warned, and then, if they feel poorly, we have listed reliable pharmacies and doctors too, say Murray’s editors complacently, going off for a mutton chop at their club.

  But Baedeker knows his French readers are not to be fobbed off with any suggestions about eating as an emploi du temps. They have been brought up in the noble traditions of the French cuisine and for them eating is not an emploi du temps; it is a whole way of life, a whole civilization. They are not to be distracted by picturesque plats. They must be given other suggestions for passing their time abroad. But so insistent are the editors on this emploi du temps, this pressing question of how to pass the hours, that I begin to envisage numberless tourists, all raging with boredom, all pacing up and down the confines of the variously graded hotels, throughout the world. In cities and remote provinces alike, the same ennui, the same gnawing preoccupation – how to pass the time? At the Hôtel de France, the Imperial, de la Poste, du Commerce, the Schweizerhof, the Victoria, or, for bold travellers in southern Russia, Cafés Tartares en face de la Gare. Malpropres. The emploi du temps here will probably be how to obtain insecticides but the preoccupation of the editors is always the same: how to pass the time. In Russia? They wouldn’t have to tell me.

  •

  Slowly, reluctantly, with a drug-addict’s sense of unreality, I returned to the present, to France, to the brasserie at the Mairie des Lilas. And as the French here and now sharpened round me, coming back into focus, I perceived that a petulant wind had sprung up round the terrace, slapping at the table cloths, flapping at the awnings, driving the garçon inside to comb his oily black locks into place again. Everything was bleak, lonely and sad. I knew that, however outraged I might be by Kamran’s clumsiness, I could not shut him out of my life for long. There was, I knew, no future for us – yet how much past!

  And so it was not long before we were together again, and Kamran conducted me with ceremony to his own version of Gallantry Bower.

  This was revealed as the back-room of a small furrier’s shop owned by a blue-chinned Armenian named Armin Nourbarian originally from Baku. He had been a wholesale furrier in Moscow and Kamran’s mother, of an extravagant nature, had often ordered furs from him, still craving the extravagant snow-leopard or black fox pelts prized by the Hordes from which she stemmed. Towards the end of the Revolution, as she was proceeding southwards, planning to board a boat at Odessa, she had encountered Monsieur Nourbarian speeding southwards with the same intent and fortified by a large consignment of fine furs. Kamran’s mother was not one to let such an occasion pass and had obtained at bargain rates the sort of fur wrap she believed would be suitable wear for the journey to Constantinople, the chill nights on board, the treacherous climate of the Bosphorus and its social distractions.

  As things turned out, the coat (Persian lamb, trimmed with ermine, and made up while waiting for a boat at Odessa), had been no use, for the d
eparture had been more tricky than anticipated. Crawling under some barbed wire behind the harbour, the coat had become inextricably hooked and, after desperate struggles, Kamran’s mother had been thankful to be cut free with a pair of nail scissors and to proceed without it.

  ‘Who cut her free? Papasha? Was she with Papasha?’ I pressed, believing I had stumbled on another piece of the jig-saw. But Kamran was vague on that essential point. He had run across Monsieur Nourbarian again by chance but the furrier appeared to cherish a warm regard for the son of his former client, ‘So elegant a lady, of such rich taste’. He was now happy to offer Kamran hospitality of the nature he sought.

  Southern climes had impressed their ardours on Monsieur Nourbarian. He found it the most natural thing in the world for Kamran and I to spend long afternoons in the back room. Here on a springy couch consisting of a heap of rather rank third-rate pelts, lamb and fox, we resumed our ghost-ridden romance while Monsieur Nourbarian, all understanding, would put up the shutters and hang a notice on the door saying CLOSED OWING TO SUDDEN DECEASE. This device came to be used so regularly that Monsieur Nourbarian appeared to be in a perpetual state of bereavement, and at last the sign lost all meaning for his few customers or those idle friends who were for ever dropping in.

  They would batter on the door, shouting jovially, ‘Hey! Armin Nikolaiovitch! here we are! Don’t keep us waiting! We know what you’re up to all right!’ And Monsieur Nourbarian, revelling in a borrowed aura of intrigue, would tip-toe down the colimaçon stairs from his room above, his collar and tie loosened suggestively, his sallow face oiled over with smiles, a finger on his lips, to admit his visitors, and with a comprehensive shrug indicate the romantic situation, which might be taken to involve either himself or some un-revealed Paolo and Francesca.

 

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