Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  Now I am in one of the many ill-equipped kitchens of the leased houses in which we lived. I am trying to ensure that eight people who will soon be arriving for dinner will be well fed. Katerina is at her most inept today, standing the white wine near the stove under the impression it should be chambré’d: on the other hand I have just rescued the Bordeaux from the refrigerator. Someone has sent me a bunch of lilac and, as I arrange it, my mind crosses continents and seas to a lilac thicket in Koursk . . . Koursk, where the celebrated Fair is held the tenth week after Easter, or so Murray’s Guide-book said in 1893 . . . Koursk, where my husband’s family once lived; but Romain can tell me nothing of it; his is not the backward glance. He finds no fascination in those accounts of provincial life by nineteenth-century Russian writers which are my passion and my drug. Now Katerina is trying to distract my attention from the butter which she has left in the westering sun, so that it is a rancid pool. She knows exactly how to proceed with this manœuvre.

  ‘When we travelled on the Trans-Siberian train,’ she says importantly, ‘I kept the milk in a bag, outside the window. When we needed some, we chipped off a piece . . . And where I taught school,’ she adds hurriedly, seeing my eye still fixed angrily on the butter-pool, ‘there was only one W.C. for the whole street. At night we used to go along to it wrapped in bear-skins. From our house it was quite a long walk.’

  Above the clatter of the saucepans I hear the rattle of chains as the convicts crawl across the prison yard . . . My steam-filled kitchen fades, dissolving into a snowy waste . . . Siberia! SIBERIA!

  Suddenly I am Albina Megouria, the Siberian heroine. I have followed my husband to some forgotten outpost, sharing his sentence. My two children die but I live on, for him, for the day when I can achieve his escape . . . I plan, I wait . . . I am crafty in my loving. I have perfected my plan and contrived to hide my husband in a crate which everyone believes to contain the children’s coffins. The long journey begins . . . day and night, over the boundless snowy tracks, a white world of silence and dread. Only one Cossack guard accompanies me, for a widow-woman with her children’s coffins is not much to bother about. We reach the frontier post too late to cross that night but, beyond, I see the glimmer of the little town where I shall be free . . . where my husband can rejoin me, where we can turn westward, towards a new life together . . . The Cossack climbs stiffly down from his horse; I offer him a drink at the traktir. As he crosses the yard, Bijou, my little dog, whom I have kept close to me all the way, slips the leash and bounds towards the crate. Frisking and yapping, Bijou proclaims to all the posting house that there is something of interest, something he knows well, inside the crate. The Cossack guard turns back from the door of the inn to see what all the noise is about . . .

  The door bell shatters this dramatic reverie . . . ‘My little God! The guests!’ says Katerina, crossing herself as she takes a look at the roast. Laboriously, I return from Siberia, from inhabiting the body of Albina Megouria and go to welcome my guests. Eight doushi – eight souls, says Katerina picturesquely: ten, with ourselves. With four courses and all those glasses, I calculate the washing up will go on far into the night. The hireling help will leave early and Katerina will give notice once again.

  The Traveller used to say we all made far too much fuss about washing up in London. Nomad Mongolians, he said, just licked their plates clean. I wonder how such a suggestion would be received by the company.

  •

  Perhaps one of the least considered aspects of diplomatic life – of life en poste in an Embassy – is the strain imposed on the digestion, until either ulcers prevail, a state proclaimed by the number of pillboxes placed beside the diner’s plate, or by a resistance, which once reached, might be described as a variation of Diplomatic Immunity. Invitations to an endless round of complicated meals are interspersed by a mosaic of cocktail parties, the whole structure assuming infinite intricacy and preserving a curiously early nineteenth century flavour, harking back to the days of Talleyrand and Metternich when diplomacy was indeed conducted across the dinner-tables of Europe, a sort of bickering family party where Africa, America, and much of Asia simply did not enter into anyone’s calculations. Congress waltzed in Vienna, and for a century afterwards inside information continued to be obtained via the key-hole, rather than some electronic device. But now that politicians – and even Heads of State – are jet-propelled backwards and forwards in time and space, making and unmaking treaties as soon as they land (after journeys from which doctors assure us, the human system needs thirty-six hours’ before returning to normal) there really seems nothing left for the professional diplomats to do – except eat. So back to the dinner-tables.

  Like the diplomatic menus (which seldom retain an interesting national flavour and follow the sole, chicken and profiterolle circuit), placement inclines to monotony. But this is due not so much to any lack of imagination or social daring as to the implacable rulings of protocol. One does not trifle with protocol. Thus, unless there was some new blood of a corresponding ranking, I would constantly find myself allotted the same dinner-partner, until, over a season, this began to assume almost matrimonial status. Having once found a topic of mutual interest such as I recall doing at one post with the Albanian Minister (our topic generally being Bashi-Bazouks), we were able to resume our conversation each evening at the point where we had left it the previous night. And were some passing visitor suddenly to replace the familiar figure at my side, it lent all the zest of bigamy to the evening.

  •

  Wherever we went, the snow-bound horizons of my inward-turning eye remained the preoccupation of my life. No place, no person changed this. Abroad or at home (and with our years of wandering the two became indistinguishable) I was for ever seeking my elective affinity, listening, below the overtones of daily life, for some ghostly Slavic cadence: the bells, sounding from Kitej, perhaps. Once, these overtones sounded loud and clear, becoming the tune to which I danced for two halcyon years. This was while Romain and I were en poste at the French Legation in Sofia.

  Bulgaria! The coloured wings of love and perhaps illusion, for they go together, are, for me, for ever spread round this country where I was so happy. Bulgaria was the archetypal Balkan country; itself, and yet more than half-way to Russia. The desired horizons came closer: here I found echoes, or rather, transpositions of the beloved.

  Beautiful, haunting, Bulgaria! I have never been back. I am told that the Black Sea coast we knew as a deserted paradise is now teeming with giant hotels. Do the summer visitors ever go inland, deep inland, to Tirnova, the old capital, to the Pachmakli and the heart of the country I knew so well, that cost me so dearly to leave, that I remember with love, with tears? I write of Bulgaria with such emotion because, although it was not part of my whole life, as Russia, it was part of my heart, and has remained so.

  •

  Wherever I went – in the New World, as in the old – East, West, New York, Mexico, I would catch myself still wondering if, one day, the Traveller would appear, djinn-like, as in my nursery. Magic of magics! Would I find him sitting opposite me in the Brooklyn subway? Or would he be the driver of some Tunisian fiacre, that I hailed at the Bab Souika? Would he be stooping to peer at me impudently, below the canopy, his sly slit eyes glinting with malicious amusement at the trick? Would I recognize him among the Indians of Guatemala, pacing with the stone-faced Quichés at some religious festival? Would his face be glimpsed there, wreathed in the eddies of copal-smoke from some Pagan altar? No: this was not his setting. Neither the High Sierras nor the Deep South, nor the pagodas of Bangkok or the deserts of Arabia were his: though I thought he could be in Asiatic, Moslem Russia, in Bokhara, or a village in the Pamirs, perhaps. And when I reached Samarkand and installed myself in some tchai-hana where, beneath gigantic plane trees, I drank bowls of green tea and watched the sun slanting low over the turquoise minarets, he seemed very close. I recalled how he would quote Gérard de Nerval’s Voyage en Orient, where the author deliberates, voluptuously, o
n where best to pass his declining years . . .

  Oui, soyons jeunes en Europe tant que nous le pouvons, mais allons vieillir en Orient, le pays des hommes dignes de ce nom, la terre des patriarches . . . The passage goes on to deplore the increasing equality of the sexes in the West so that, for men, it was already becoming a lost battle for supremacy. The Frenchman toyed with the idea of retreating to the East: ‘il faut que je m’unisse à quelque fille ingénue de ce sol sacré qui est notre première patrie à tous . . . ‘Life-giving’, ‘reviving’, ‘poetic’ . . . he waxes lyrical over the East but I fancy it was the fille ingénue of whom he was thinking: which was probably why the passage remained one of the Traveller’s favourite quotations.

  In my turn, as I came to travel more widely, I too fell under the spell of Islam. For me, the traditional ways of Moslem life, like its beliefs and traditions and trimmings, were all infinitely seductive, all beauty and harmony. From Turkey to the Sahara by way of the Middle East and Central Asia, the various Arab and Moslem civilizations held me in thrall. Gradually they merged into one fixed star, a glow to which I turned, and return, whenever I can. But Russia has remained the Pole-star by which I chart expeditions, both about the horizon of my mind or in the flesh: all else remain sorties from base.

  And, in spite of Gérard de Nerval, I still believed the Traveller had turned northwards; I thought he would be somewhere along the mysterious frontiers of Outer Mongolia and Siberia; and there I knew my longings would at last bring me.

  •

  Meanwhile, there was America: or rather, the Americas, for there were as many as All the Russias of my mind’s eye. In the United States, where we lived for several years, I found many Russians absorbed, in particular, into the mosaic of New York life. Gradually, the centre of émigré gravity had shifted west across the Atlantic. Writers, the world of ballet and musicians, were now centred there, as once in Paris. But it was another ambiance to that of the original exiles I had known. The succeeding generation, and those who had adapted successfully to the American pulse, whether a cross-section of the intelligentsia, professors, princes from St. Petersburg, musicians or Jewish furriers from the Pale – all had become competitive. Here, no one drifted; few Oblomovs survived in the New World any more than in the new Russia of the Soviet Union.

  The Russians of New York City were a less closely-knit colony than in Paris, having become more truly absorbed. The American melting pot is a powerful dip. There were, however, two groups which remained comparatively unaffected, putting their separate ideologies above personal advancements. On the East Side, the Soviet Delegation to the United Nations went about their work aloof; on the West Side, the offices of the Tolstoy Foundation cared for the old or needy and those of their compatriots who had fallen by the way.

  Since everything concerning Tolstoy has always seemed to me in the nature of a sacred revelation, my meetings with his daughter, the Countess Alexandra, were, to me, the confrontation with an oracle, and the modest little Japanese restaurant off Broadway where we met became a temple. Bowls of green tea and mysterious dishes of seaweed assumed mystical properties, as I listened to her memories of the gigantic figure who had dominated her life. This heroic woman was created in the same mould; burly, with her father’s bumpy potato features and the same small penetrating eyes that radiated goodness, understanding and intellect. In spite of a shapeless old overcoat and an equally battered fur cap stuck anyhow on her grey head, she had the same air of high breeding which struck everyone who met Tolstoy, the barin, the seigneur, disguised in peasant clothes.

  ‘So you know his daughter Alexandra?’ said a Soviet delegate to the United Nations, at a New York dinner-table; and he looked severe as he spoke of the Countess Alexandra’s ‘bigoted views’ and her work, heading the Tolstoy Foundation, for which he had no sympathy.

  ‘She is our enemy, you know,’ he added. And we both smiled. As if any child of Tolstoy’s could be regarded as an enemy of any Russian, anywhere.

  •

  The threads of Russian life that were interwoven in America sometimes glittered, and sometimes barely gleamed. Every encounter with Russians – even those of New York’s café society – held the promise of some peculiar significance. Similarly, I searched, and sometimes found, reflections, or cadences of my elective affinities in the most unlikely places such as Los Angeles, at ‘Hollywood and Vine’.

  Driving along Sunset Boulevard towards down-town Los Angeles – the wrong end of Sunset I was often reminded by those who had never been there – I discovered a forgotten quarter of modest little streets and gardens isolated by two great sweeping free-ways. Here a small Russian colony lived lives as by-passed as this section.

  The grocery store, the watch-mender and the laundry signs read – Popoff’s Great-Guy Groceries, Sosnovsky’s Snow-White Washings, and Shtochass Watch Repairs – this latter I particularly enjoyed for, literally, Shtochass in Jewish-Russian patois reads What o’clock. The snug little shacks and bungalows, each with their porch with its rocker and tea-table adorned by a large samovar, were gathered round a diminutive Russian village church with stumpy pillars framing the porch and a toy-like belfry, where one large, out-of-scale bell clanged assiduously. Giant sun-flowers rose above the low white palings and, for me, it was the Ukraine. On Sundays, after mass, the bearded, long-maned Pope and his flock gathered in a large white-washed room, a sort of parish hall. The samovars steamed valiantly, misting the glass over large portraits of the last Tzar and Pushkin. This was a Hollywood interior with figures, a little-known one, which I remember as fondly as all the turquoise swimming-pools, the flood-lit palms and extravagant households of Beverley Hills which I enjoyed so greatly during the four years my husband and I lived in Los Angeles. At that time I was writing The Sabres of Paradise, gnawing away at the dry bones of Arabic transcriptions or ferreting out some obscure detail of Russian-Caucasian warfare. Romain, having captured the Prix Goncourt with his Racines du Ciel, had just completed Lady L., and was plunging into La Promesse de L’Aube. It was a busy and productive time for both of us. Brews of tea succeeded each other and cups of black coffee and chocolate, Romain’s favourite stimuli at that time, were dispersed about, or upset, among cushions and piles of manuscripts balanced on sofas and chairs. Outside, the humming-birds darted and zoomed about the terrace, dive-bombing the flowering vines, and were watched longingly by our cats. Over all, recordings of Caucasian or Arabic music (to which I liked to write) sometimes floated out, surprising those who came to the Consulate-General on French affairs.

  One night, staying in a country house up the Hudson River, where so much of the landscape recalls the old estates and wide, still river-reaches of the Russian provinces, I tasted strangely exotic yet subtle food, unlike anything I had ever known. It was not, I thought, so much an unplaceable national cuisine as an evocation of a profound past, which stirred some atavistic memory I could not trace. Something with aubergine? With nutmeg, unnameable spices and cream . . . This was not the haute cuisine as we generally know it: it was immensely intricate and yet bold. I tried again to analyse it. Here was suavity and opulence too, without in any way being the cuisine of stuffed peacocks and pièces montées.

  ‘Ah! that is Vassili’s secret,’ said the Princess, my hostess. ‘He has been with us ever since he left Russia, during the Revolution. He was a kitchen-boy at the Winter Palace . . . He must have learned all sorts of curious dishes there.’ She added that he seldom admitted anyone to his kitchen, and preferred to work without assistance, jealously guarding his secrets.

  For this was the cuisine of Byzantium, no less.

  When, later, I was fortunate enough to be admitted to his confidence, and saw the old man among his pots and pans I knew that I was in fact, watching some of the last rituals of the Paleologi palaces. No doubt much of the Russian Imperial cuisine derived, like their Court ceremonial, from Byzantium, being originally transported to the Kremlin (along with the double-headed eagle and the first roses), by the Paleologi princess Zoë, becom
e Tzarina Sophia.

  Thus echoes of that Russia which was both my city and my solitude sounded for me even in New York of the nineteen-fifties.

  CHAPTER XXI

  The Traveller’s last letter had said: ‘Granting our wishes is one of Fate’s saddest jokes,’ and so it seemed, for only when my marriage broke up was I at last able to make the long-desired Siberian journey. Since I was no longer anchored to any person or any place, and the Siberian spell still held, I turned northward. Now, as if in a mood of conciliation, Fate made everything easy. All the difficulties which had impeded me for so long melted away; all that had been unrealizable was suddenly within reach.

  ‘You want to go by train?’ they asked me at the Intourist Travel Bureau in Paris, fearing the blasé western visitor would find the immense journey – the longest train journey in the world – tedious. ‘But from Moscow you can fly to Irkutsk in eight hours.’

  I know. I know: and the train takes five days and another three and a half on to Vladivostok. A whole week . . . a whole week on the Trans-Siberian train – on my train, our Gallantry Bower that should have been . . . No, I shall not find it tedious. ‘Païdium! Let’s go,’ I said, and they did not argue any more.

  •

  Over the years when I had planned and replanned this journey, I had seen myself making it exactly as the Traveller had done when he used to vanish from my nursery. For him, it had begun at Dover, and from Paris he had taken the North Express, via Berlin, and the Russian frontier at Wirballen, to St. Petersburg, from there reaching Moscow and the Trans-Siberian train. He never went direct to Moscow, by the Paris–Warsaw line. ‘No one goes direct to Moscow,’ he said scornfully, dismissing the Warsaw-Moscow route as the merchants’ way. The North Express linked Paris and St. Petersburg directly and was, he explained, considered the only way to travel to and from Western Europe. Besides – even people who didn’t live in St. Petersburg preferred to go through the capital, see their friends, the ballet, and hear what was going on . . .