Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  Transposing the scene now before me, I imagined such a dinner-table, with its imposing silver samovar steaming gently and, among the family ranks, my Traveller; a rumpled fidgety schoolboy, a smartly uniformed lieutenant, and finally, a blasé black-sheep, straining to be off, to join his mistress – myself – at some Gipsy cabaret.

  Coming back to earthy it seemed that the windows into which I now peered were so many stage settings where the players all wore the same costume and acted out an identical scene. At the table, now piled with books rather than dishes, a samovar still stood; a young couple were bent over their studies, for further qualifications and night-classes were something most citizens desired in the U.S.S.R. On a high mattressed bed, often curtained, in an alcove that did duty as bedroom, a child or baby slept. In another corner, the babushka-figure of tradition, head bound by a flowered handkerchief, a mother or grandmother, prepared supper on a small stove. In some rooms, the furniture, generally Beidermeyer in style, was arranged with more taste than others: usually there were pictures, snow-scapes, or prints of Red Armies on the march. Ornaments ranged from plaster busts of Beethoven or Lenin to models of aeroplanes; always there were flowers and books.

  In one such room I believed I would now find my friend the bookseller, unchanged, for such a witch could not have grown old or died. She was immortal, pickled in nicotine. But would she remember me – receive me, unannounced? Or would she, witch-like, know I was arriving? Would our meeting be wise – for her – for me? I decided to chance it.

  The house looked much like all the others but perhaps even more dilapidated. I tugged at a contraption of wire and string which jangled furiously. All Yakimankaya, I felt, must now be observing me covertly, while the forbidding grey-uniformed Guards stationed outside the French Embassy, on the main thoroughfare nearby, might abandon their posts to investigate my noisy, unorthodox conduct . . . Strangers do not make sudden, unaccompanied calls on citizens, a voice seemed to hiss in my ear, and a sense of guilt and apprehension now began to make itself felt. So much for the conditioning to which those who visit the Soviet Union are often exposed by others who disapprove – such persons being more often without the frontiers than within, I have observed.

  The door was opened by a young woman wearing boots and a pinafore and carrying a baby. She smiled and seemed in no way surprised, replying to my Russian in her English. ‘You have brought the books? No? Then you wish to speak with my grandmother? She is above in her work. Enter please.’

  I did so. The room was much like the others but knee-deep in newspapers and manuscripts in all languages, Greek, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic . . . Lying on the ledge of the stove in a state of stupefied bliss lay a cat – another, younger-looking Siberian grey. My old friend now appeared and greeted me without surprise. She seemed quite unchanged by the years: the same frowzy shawl and steel-rimmed spectacles, the same witch-like regard; but the wand had vanished, and her shoes were stoutly sewn.

  She accepted my visit, like my forthcoming journey and its object, as entirely natural.

  ‘I always thought you would come back here. Why didn’t you come to see me before? If you are still looking for him you’ve left it late. I’ve lost sight of him for a long while. Of course he returned here for good. Neither of us ever belonged anywhere else . . . All the rest was play-acting . . .’

  ‘You mean he really was —’ I stopped, and caught myself looking over my shoulder towards the door.

  She laughed sardonically. ‘Spying? Is that your idea? Then why don’t you say it? Are you afraid of the big black bogy Tcheka? If our police bother at all with a minnow like you, they’ll know by now that you are not worth troubling about – just toquée, love-sick . . . Besides, you know enough Russian not to be needing interpreters every inch of the way. What mischief could you get up to, anyhow? If only you tourists, especially the Americans, would realize that half the time what you all think of as surveillance is really quite benign – the means of organizing vast numbers of inarticulate foreigners who have come here just to follow the fashion – or to go back and say we live like savages. Snap-snap with those cameras, for ever trying to photograph the broken-down remains – never the new, and the fine – or else posing each other in front of our historic monuments . . . Grinning pygmies! We have to organize them somehow, or else they’d say we were lazy and inefficient and want their money back. Why, I’m told a lot of them can’t even find their way to the lavatory, let alone get themselves to a museum or know what they see when they get there. The Kremlin jewels and a bottle of vodka are all they recognize.’

  She spoke with a peculiar bitterness, but softened suddenly, to offer me plum-brandy, and I ventured to ask what had happened to Loris.

  ‘Oh! I managed to get him back here, at the end of the war. That was really far more of an undertaking than getting Boris out, during the Revolution . . . As a matter of fact it was one of the things that decided me to return.’ She paused, waiting for me to digest this statement, but as I said nothing, she continued: ‘You see, I couldn’t find another Siberian grey to mate him with in Paris, so that was that. He was over eighteen when he died. He’s buried under that lilac bush —’ She looked beyond the tight-shut steamed-up windows. ‘That’s his daughter, Doris,’ she added, indicating the soporific animal on the stove, ‘but it’s almost as difficult to find a mate for her in Moscow. She’s only had one litter of kittens. Times have been hard for man and beast here; there are not many animals about, as I dare say you’ve noticed. I’m lucky to have Doris.’ She patted the animal lovingly.

  When I recounted my difficulties in leaving for Siberia she looked thoughtful. ‘Siberia – yes, that might be troublesome . . . I suppose you still hope to find your old beau? “Journeys end in lovers meeting” . . . What incurable romantics you English are! A revolution would have changed that . . . Never mind: you must go – it’s part of the pattern. We all have one we must follow. I can’t help you much – but I could give you the name of a man in Irkutsk who might be able to tell you something. He’s Serbian – an old friend – he used to make the best explosives, but something went wrong.’

  ‘With the bombs?’

  ‘No – with him. He got religious mania or something – anyhow he stopped making them. They sent him away . . . Now he mends all the clocks at a factory or some such place outside Irkutsk. I believe he’s become quite esteemed there. I hear of him occasionally – ‘by slipper post’. That’s what it used to be called in the old days, when the ghetto Jews in their felt slippers had their own means of transmitting news they weren’t supposed to know . . . It wouldn’t be any good writing to him from here, but if you are going there you might manage to see him. Why not? You found me.’ She scrawled something on a piece of paper.

  ‘Here’s his address.’ She burst into a cackling laugh – a witch, up to her Abracadabras again.

  ‘So I’m playing Cupid at last! And by the way it might be wiser not to talk about this idea with other people. They might not show sympathy. When you get to Irkutsk, write to him – in English – he understands it well. Say you’ve seen me. Suggest a meeting place. Where? I don’t know – I’ve never been to Irkutsk. You’ll find a suitable place, I’m sure . . . You’ll have to show some initiative, you know.’

  She glared at me crushingly through the steel-rimmed spectacles. ‘Be sure to address the envelope in Russian though. You can do that? Good. And don’t post it from the hotel. Put it in a street letter-box yourself, after dark.’

  My sense of the dramatic and the romantic now being amply satisfied I took my leave, overwhelmed with gratitude.

  ‘Don’t thank me – I’ve learned something too – about personal relationships. I’ve always put politics first myself.’ But her remark did not ring entirely true, considering her devotion to the Siberian greys.

  •

  I was never to see her again. Next morning, when I returned to leave some of the soap, fountain pens and malted milk tablets I had been assured in the West would be so welcome in th
e Soviet Union, no one answered the bell. The house appeared deserted, the curtains drawn, as if to discourage callers. I left my goodies on the doorstep and hurried away through the quiet streets towards my sky-scraper hotel on the big new boulevard.

  •

  The Pekin Express is so named because its last lap is a diversion of the direct Moscow-Vladivostok route. Beyond Baïkal a line swerves south-east to run by Outer Mongolia, edging Manchuria to Harbin, and then plunges south to Mukden, where the Chinese Eastern Railway runs directly to Peking. The whole Far Eastern project had only become feasible after China ceded the Ussuri provinces to Russia by the Treaty of Peking in 1860 (the Treaty of Aigun had given them the Amur provinces in 1858). Then at last Russia awoke to the necessity of completing a line which stretched from coast to coast, spanning this colossal territory. But nothing was done about it for another thirty years. And even then, for some time, there was only a single track line.

  It was a fearful undertaking. The engineers were confronted not only by expanses of permanently frozen soil that had to be blasted, but by the frustrations consequent on employing Chinese coolie labour, where every coolie had to be taught even the most rudimentary use of technical equipment by means of interpreters who could not be obtained in sufficient quantities and hindered the work by graft and sedition. Moreover, construction was constantly threatened by attacks from the dreaded Red-beard bandits, the Hung-hutzes, as well as both Chinese army units and Boxer rebels, burning bridges and destroying completed sections of the line. When at last these dangers were overcome by large detachments of Russian troops being sent there to protect the railway, Asiatic cholera and bubonic plague spread along the line, ravaged the labour camps and threatened Harbin. After homeric efforts this completed Chinese Eastern section was lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 and only in 1916, after a series of further campaigns, frontier disputes and treaties involving China, Manchuria and the Japanese once more, did the Trans-Sib at last run throughout on Russian soil.

  But all across Siberia, until Baïkal, the Peking Express is identical with the Trans-Sib of my desire, so that I did not feel cheated. In all events, I planned to make the unbroken run as far as Irkutsk and, there, either to pick up the Vladivostok train of my original plan, or go about the Trans-Baïkal provinces which had been the heart of the Traveller’s Tales or, perhaps, to find the Serbian one-time high explosive expert and, through him, be led yet farther afield.

  The whole immensity of the Trans-Siberian route was made fitfully, in merging sections. The Western Siberian line links the Eastern, and that with the Trans-Baïkal, and its off-shoot, the circum-Baïkal loop beside the lake, or inland sea. There is the South Ural diversion, the Kuibyshev line, the northern route from Chita to Vladivostok by Khabarovsk, and the Turkestan-Siberian – or Turk-Sib, linking the Central Asian provinces, its line laid in blood during the Civil War.

  All these sections have taken half a century to compose, and are still, at certain seasons sometimes augmented by river transport, though the rivers run, for the most part, north and south, while most transport is needed east and west. All these complicated arteries of communication, stemming from the main Trans-Sib blood-stream, had been a matter of sharp temptation to me as I pored over Russian sectional maps and realized that, by doubling back on my tracks, side-stepping, hanging about wayside halts and relying on uncertain timetables – a prospect which did not intimidate me – it would have been possible to obtain a far more comprehensive Siberian journey than by remaining rooted in one train, moving inflexibly eastwards. But after all, it was the train I had wished above all to know, so I renounced all the rest.

  Though not without lingering regrets. Several longed-for cities had to be sacrificed. Two of these were of a particular, personal significance to me. Tiumen, east of the Urals, had been, I supposed, originally the headquarters of that Kalmuck Horde over which my Prince Serbedjan Tiumenev had ruled. Then, in the province of Tobolsk, near Semipalatinsk, ‘the Tartar Province of the Seven Tents’, the Traveller had wooed and won the Kirghiz beauty, Kamran’s mother; and Kamran had been born in Tobolsk. Putting aside such family interests, I referred to a tourist handbook. Province of Tobolsk: 439,859 square miles was not an enthralling opening. I possessed more lively snippets of general information.

  There were two towns in the city of Tobolsk. Nijni, the low, and Verkhné the high, with its historic buildings dominating the bluffs above the Irtysh. In this river Yermak the Cossack conqueror of Siberia was drowned, fatally weighed down by the splendid armour and Royal mantle Ivan the Terrible had bestowed as a mark of gratitude for the conquest. Here the Swedish prisoners taken at Poltava built ‘the Swedish Tower’, and went on to build churches and monasteries in eastern Siberia. Here the Stroganov family founded their fabled fortune trading glass beads for ermine pelts from the gullible locals. Here trading centres, where Bokharian and Chinese caravans converged, imparted a note of violent colour in the monochrome setting of snow and leaden skies which, for most of the year, surrounded Tobolsk, where, even in June, the temperature sometimes falls below zero.

  Here, until 1892, reposed the bronze bell of Uglitch, which had been exiled to Siberia by Boris Jodounov after being publicly flogged and its tongue removed for sounding the tocsin which roused the town’s insurgents. Tobolsk was one of the great forwarding centres for the convicts sentenced to Siberian exile. At Tobolsk many of the Dekabrists ended the tragedy of their lives, after surviving sentence in the mines of Chita far further east. Here is the Znamenski Monastery, oldest in all Siberia, where Kerensky had planned to banish the Emperor Nicholas II to a reasonable exile in 1917.

  Twenty versts to the south, I recalled the Traveller’s note-book told of strange ruins – the remains of Sibir, ancient capital of the Kingdom of those Siberian Tartars or Mongols, from whom the Traveller’s ancestors had sprung – in the saddle, armed with bow and arrow and lance, as I saw them: a marauding horde streaming across Asia to steal one’s heart away.

  But renouncing Tobolsk and other historic towns en route was the price I must pay to possess the Trans-Siberian journey in all its unbroken mileage; to savour, fully, the drama of the train that had thundered through my nursery so many nights, so long ago.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Tuesday’s train is fair of face I told myself, going down the platform to install myself in solitary state. The Traveller, I decided, was obliged to linger behind at the barrier to deal with the luggage; he would be joining me on the train, no doubt. But even before I reached my compartment a vague feeling of disappointment clouded my spirits. This train left Moscow in the afternoon, and a pale late autumn sunshine lit the platform so that there was none of the drama of a night-time departure. Nor did the crowds seem so archetypal. They were less urgent; their baggage was less bulky; some bedding and string bags were being hoisted through the windows, but there was not a samovar to be seen.

  Nor was there a guard in the likeness of a bear. A neat young woman in a beret and top boots replaced the shaggy figure I had found so sympathetic. As for the engine, the mighty monster was not at all the kind my mind’s eye had cherished all these years. Where was the funnel-shaped chimney stack typical of earlier Russian rolling-stock? In its place, I saw a stream-lined, blunt-nosed funnel-less diesel. Not a puff of smoke issued from its sleek bulk. It did not fulminate as its predecessors had done when I pined for them from behind the barrier.

  Now, with every verst we sped eastwards I would be obliged to overcome reality, and imagine the diesel engine replaced by one more traditional. It was with a sense of betrayal that I returned to my compartment, only to be confronted by yet another disillusion. Authority had proved implacable on the point of companionship. If I must wander about Siberia, then it would be better, from all points of view, not to make a lonely excursion.

  Olga Maximova was already installed; she smiled gravely and was, I saw, prepared to make the best of what she too considered an unfortunate situation. It was not her fault she was to be imposed o
n me and by her presence would certainly banish the Traveller’s shade; nor could I be blamed for approaching this journey in a spirit unlike that of other tourists. Ultimately, we overcame our sombre start, and I like to think she remembers me with the affection and esteem I reserve for her. But relations were strained until it became evident that neither of us were going to bother the other unduly. I was a self-reliant traveller, able to order my meals and enjoy some exchanges with fellow-passengers, and to spend timeless stretches either glued to the window or plunged into romantic reveries of the country as earlier travellers had known it. This was not the Siberia Olga Mazimova had counted on revealing to me; indeed, her knowledge of the past was as limited as my awareness of the present and we spent some time correcting each other’s inexactitudes or lapses.