Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  The Twist, I discovered, was of passionate interest to the young of Irkutsk, as well as those from Outer Mongolia. Since Western visitors were a rarity it was not long before I was approached to demonstrate the latest variations. Dialogue, in a curious mixture of tongues (I did not try out my three Mongolian phrases), was conducted with infinite civility.

  ‘Excuse please you one English Madam?’

  ‘English by birth, French by marriage,’ I reply, cashing in on both nations.

  ‘You reading Napoleon Bonaparte? You reading John Stuart Mill?’

  ‘Constantly.’

  ‘You do tweesting?’

  ‘Well, not constantly . . .’

  ‘You loving Siberia much?’

  ‘MUCH.’

  ‘You tell words of English tweest song on pick-up machine?’

  ‘I’ll try . . .’

  And hanging over a tape-recorder that had been left in Ulan Bator by an Amerikanski archaeologist, I did my best to distinguish words and phrases from a sound track that had collected all the dust of the several Gobis in its passage to Irkutsk.

  ‘It says Baby! Let’s twist! Baby! Let’s twist again!’ I announced, before it spun into a particularly gritty passage . . . Asiatic dust . . . the reddish dust of the Gobi, where no tree or flower lives, and only the many coloured stones, mauve and orange and gold, nourish the eye . . . On a spiral of desert dust, I was whirled far from the Twist-entranced Mongolians, faraway, eastwards, down the ages, to Karakorum, where Jenghis Khan ruled in terror and majesty. I heard the clash of cymbals and the wild strains that accompanied the Mongol armies on their march. The Traveller’s note-book told that, when they swept across the Danubian provinces, they brought with them musicians from Northern India, for the savage rhythms they played stimulated the troops to even more furious conquests, and such music was the origin of the Hungarian gipsy music we know, today. Around me was all the panoply of the Tartar camp. I saw the silken banners and horse-tailed standards and the white chargers tethered to gold or silver posts . . .

  Then slowly, I spun forward in time, to regain the hotel lounge with its leatherette club sofas and dark veneered walls. As they came into focus I saw that a coloured photograph of the Kremlin over the buffet hung slightly askew and the buffet was massed with festive beer bottles. I dislike beer at any time but now it seemed particularly out of place. All Mongols should be drinking their ‘insanity drops’, I thought; and for the Siberians there should be the ritual Siberian punch. I knew the recipe by heart.

  Three bottles of champagne, one bottle of vodka, half a bottle of brandy, four glasses of curaçao, sugar, sliced apple, grated nutmeg, the zest of a lemon: soda water if desired. Stir well and set alight.

  The flat, brick-brown Mongol faces and the pale Slav ones were smiling widely, even on beer. They wanted to know all about Pop music; it was not every day they encountered anyone likely to unravel such tape-recordings. But although I proved inadequate and the tape deplorable they were insatiable.

  ‘No more wording? Always Baby let’s Tweest?’

  ‘Well, farther on it says Let’s Twist again Baby . . .’ I began to feel cornered as they pressed round, all talking at once. Cruel in my desperation I told them the Twist was out – old-fashioned, already forgotten; that everything was Rock now, or the Madison, which had been the rage when last I was in San Francisco. It was a fatal move. They flung themselves on me.

  ‘ROK? MADISOUND? Please? Sing Madisound please! Dance Rok!’

  They were off again. And no doubt my rudimentary versions of both appeared as exotic a spectacle, to them, as the dislocated neck jerkings and fluted quarter-tones of the Tadjik Folk Opera appeared to me.

  The evening broke up late in an atmosphere of cordiality. In spite of her principles, it was clear that Olga Maximova had enjoyed it greatly. But later she confessed she had been obliged to revise her opinion of me. She had thought me more serious-minded.

  ‘On the train you spoke much of the Dekabristi. You read Herzen. I admired your culture. But in Irkutsk I see you are more interested in the Tweest.’

  ‘I’m much more interested in the Mongolians,’ I told her, and she seemed satisfied that I spoke the truth.

  •

  I thought it better to see something of the outlying country, as well as getting my bearings about the city, before I ventured to send my letter to the Serbian clock-mender. The Intourist Bureau had thoughtfully provided me with a map of the streets but it was not going to be easy to allay Olga Maximova’s lively curiosity as to my activities, however innocent they were in fact. As a sop, I allowed myself to be swept off on a round of uplifting visits to collective agricultural experiments, schools and hospitals and community centres, all of which, once faced, I found of absorbing interest. No one could be unmoved by achievements such as the new 660,000 kilowatt Power Station; nor remain indifferent to accounts of another, even mightier, in construction at Bratsk; a monster, to produce 4.5 million kilowatts – whatever that might mean. But it was in such mysterious terms I was learning of Siberia’s industrialization programme.

  Yet to me nature remained more impressive. Standing beside the primeval stretches of Baïkal, where the Angara flows from it, I thought of Thomas Beddoes’ lines:

  The loud rocky dashing

  Of waves, where Time into Eternity

  Falls over ruined worlds . . .

  I had hoped to avoid being confronted with the Angara Dam, for I dreaded to see progress imposed on the lovely landscape I knew so well from both the Traveller’s descriptions, and the romantic engravings that adorned my copy of Atkinson’s Travels. But when I saw this stupendous achievement I forgave Olga Maximova’s insistence. All the same, I mourned the disappearance of the age-old landmark, Shaman-Kamen – the Shaman’s Rock; now only one craggy tip remained above the encroaching waters. Soon that too will have vanished, and with it, the heart of Buriat legend, home of all Shamanist sorcery and sacrifice since the beginnings of this land.

  Baïkal – the Holy Sea of legend, ‘the inland sea’ is the world’s largest fresh-water lake and would take five hundred years to empty, said Olga Maximova, the voice of knowledge. Its depth, at present soundings, is 5,315 feet; its clarity such that, in fine weather, it resembles some Pacific lagoon, its limpid turquoise waters revealing objects 130 feet below.

  But in bad weather it lives up to its reputation for terror. Within a few moments, under lowering skies, it can produce giant waves eighteen feet high which dash over the darkened waters whipped by the dread Gara or mountain wind from the north. Hardly less furious is the Koultouk, or south-west wind, and the Bargouzine, which rages across the lake from east to west. Such are the storms and the waves which have inspired so many of the old Siberian songs.

  When furious Baïkal rages to the rocky shores –

  Even the beasts of the taïga dread its coming . . .

  Another, the song of the escaping convict, urges the Bargouzine to speed his raft across the lake to freedom. I had known them all from the nursery, and now, following the lake-side, heard them again.

  When covered by its six-month-long crust of ice, Baïkal is particularly treacherous. In spite of ice which attains a depth of six feet or more, it will suddenly crack asunder, without warning, leaving an icy canyon, perhaps fifteen miles long, and wide enough to swallow whole sledges, trading caravans and anything crossing the lake at that moment. Such were some of the facts and figures with which Olga Maximova primed me, adding that all the scientific data I could wish for was awaiting me at the Limnological Institute up the lake-side, at Listvyanko. But doubting my stamina for such exactitudes, I first made for the fishing villages, where sombre granite cliffs are fringed with pines and lonely little settlements of wooden dwellings are gathered in the shelter of narrow valleys running inland, to avoid the inclement open lakeside. Tradition was upheld by a few remaining small wooden churches, with green cupolas: progress, by bewilderingly-fitted meteorological stations checking the hour to hour vagaries of the weather.
It is from these regions that the Laïka dogs were chosen for the lonely Sputnik voyages they endured in the interests of science, those who survived becoming Dog Heroes of the Soviet Union. I encountered some of them, strong, shaggy creatures; golden eyed and loyal-looking; they were guarding the little stockaded gardens of their owners. It was clear they were not accustomed to casual pattings, but they looked well-fed. In the Traveller’s notes I remembered reading that, before the commercialization of caviare, the Buriat and Yakute fishermen set no value on it; they had not learned to salt and prepare it, and so threw it to the dogs.,

  We had walked a long way; the lake-side road stops at Listvyanka, where the ice-breaker ferry boats and hydrofoils put in for passengers or freight, plying across the lake to Trans-Baïkal territory. We were following a precipitous path winding round the crags and cliffs that continue northwards, volcanic in formation, with basalt and lava-like coarse granite to rejoice geologists. As the day became more overcast, and the path more precipitous, and we scrambled for a foothold, clutching at rocks and blasted pine boughs, I thought how much the Traveller (who always stressed his abhorrence of Nature as much as Walks) would have detested this outing. A piercing, chill rain spat down, and the choppy waters assumed a sullen greyness. However much I had longed to find him, or believed his shadow accompanied me, I knew it would not be on this sort of expedition.

  But I pressed on, longing for Seven-leagued boots, to stride me to Olkhon Isle, forty miles up the north shore. The straits that separate it from the mainland are known as the Little Baïkal and, to the Buriats, this was the most sacred part of the Holy Sea. Gigantic and curiously formed rocks tower above the water, pinnacles of 1,200 feet, rising before the few boats that venture near, for the island is honeycombed with caverns, arches and inlets where the waves surge and roar and form whirlpools. There is a tradition that Christ visited this part of Asia (perhaps there is a connection, here, with another Asiatic legend, that He passed through Afghanistan, after His supposed death on the Cross). The Buriats believe that He ascended one of the highest rocks on Olkhon and surveyed the great expanses of water and land. After blessing the mountains and woods, northwards, He turned south, and looking across the lake towards the Trans-Baïkal province of Daouria, said: ‘Beyond this lies nothing.’ Which, the natives believed, accounted for the sterility of the region. Deep inland, lies Chita and Nertchinsk, where prisoners serving their sentence in the mines no doubt concurred with the natives’ view.

  Eastwards from the lake lies Birobidjan, where there had been plans to found a new Israel. Here around 25,000 Jews were to pursue their own way of life far removed from even echoes of those persecutions and indignities they had once suffered in Russia, and with which they had become permanently associated. But nothing came of the scheme: the Jews showed a lack of interest – Olga Maximova could not say why. Today, all Jews have Soviet citizenship and a nationality, being Esthonian, Uzbeg, Ukrainian or other Jewry. The pogroms that were so terrible a part of Tzarist rule are no more: although I have heard that a certain prejudice is still remarked. The habit of centuries dies hard.

  •

  The weather had turned really disagreeable, and by common accord we turned back, towards the little inn at Listvyanka, where Olga Maximova promised the best omoul in all Siberia; and the best rastegai, added Russian, my driver, who had accompanied us on this expedition. I called him Russian because I could never remember his own name and, his wife being called Ludmilla, it seemed the simplest thing to do. This allusion to Pushkin’s poem Russian and Ludmilla, combined with humming an air from Glinka’s opera of the same name, delighted him, as well as earning his respect for my cultural depth. Russian, who, at eighteen was fighting at Stalingrad, was a third generation Siberian and knew many of the legends or old stories I had learned from the Traveller and which Olga Maximova, the young Moscovite, did not know: I was even able to steal a march on him by telling him how, long ago, the narta, or dog sledges had runners made from long strips of whale jaw-bone – a system peculiar to Siberia, and unknown in the Arctic. Later, American traders introduced metal runners, known as ‘iron bones’. Such exchanges of what my father would have called useless information were a great bond between us, and Russian displayed an especial patience when I used to stop the car every few miles, a habit which exasperated most drivers, to get out and look at some unscheduled aspect of his homeland; perhaps a little church where I hoped to find interesting ikons, or some particularly beautiful stretch of forest leading deep into the taïga.

  Majestic, and sombre, the giant Siberian conifers, which are at their darkest in summer, stretched ahead into realms of blackness. Tchern, a derivation of tchorné, black, is the local name for such forests. Here I fancied I might catch sight of bears, or lynx – or even the babyr of Irkutsk’s armorial bearings. ‘Only last week a huge bear came down into the centre of the town,’ Russian told me. ‘It went right up to the policeman on point duty and stood on its hind legs – that’s a very dangerous sign; that’s when they are going to attack But the policeman thought it had got out of a circus and was just doing its tricks, so he went on directing the traffic. It wasn’t till the bear ripped at him that he understood. He had to shoot it . . .’

  I saw there was, perhaps, a case in these parts of the world for arming the police.

  Stories about animals, forest laws, Shaman legends, village lore; these were my meeting ground with Russian, and like picnics and country expeditions, simple pleasures we could share. Once, while Olga Maximova waited discreetly in the car, we broke every law of forestry and, with the aid of a spanner, dug up a very small fir tree that I hoped to transplant to France as an evergreen keepsake.

  Brave little tree! It survived the long journey home, concealed in a sponge-bag, for the various frontier customs generally object to foreign plants. Repotted and cherished it lived for some years on my roof-top terrace in Paris, but although it remained green, and sprouted miniature cones, it did not thrive there. At last it was transplanted, all over again, to a Thames-side garden, where, among the roses and honeysuckle, it grows; slowly, but still, it grows, and is treasured. Each time I go to England, I see it, and remember the Siberian taïga of its origin.

  ‘Chudodie Baïkal! Miracle-working Baïkal! You must come back to Baïkal in June,’ said Russian, skipping statistics of the lake’s scientific potential which he knew bored me, to tell how, at that moment, briefly, the lake is covered with pink flowers, a kind of lily. This is known as the Blossoming of the Holy Sea. But its depths blossom strangely too: here among other extraordinary fauna are those emerald and violet-coloured shrimps I had coveted for my nursery aquarium; or those spherical fish which live at a depth of fifteen hundred feet, producing ready-made young rather than eggs (they eat their progeny in hard times) and burst or melt away if by accident they surface, encountering different pressures and daylight. This, and other seemingly wild statements of Russian’s were later confirmed and enlarged upon by the Director of the Limnological Institute, displaying his exhibits with true passion.

  Atkinson’s treasured book told of all this, and more besides. I was back, refuging in the school lavatory, avoiding compulsory hockey . . . CHAP. III HOW TO CROSS THE DESERTS OF ASIA I read, but of course, I knew it all by heart . . . Early in the morning I found the chieftain, Joul-bar, directing arrangements for our long ride . . . Twelve Kirghiz were to be my attendants . . . men on whom I could depend, who had a knowledge of the country . . . Yes, Atkinson had passed this way: he wrote intoxicatingly of the Eastern Siberian scene; of crossing the lake at the very point where I now found myself.

  Leaning over the ship’s rail, I thought of its ancestor, the first powerful steam ferry, which was ordered from Newcastle shipyards in 1898. It was constructed in sections and dispatched, in 7,200 separate packages, by rail to Krasnoyarsk. At that time the Trans-Siberian line ran no farther: from there the packages were carried on a sledge or soudna, a river barge, so that it is not surprising to learn that when the Russian engineers wait
ing at Baïkal (where there were no shipyards) began to assemble the various parts, some were missing. Far more surprising, the boat was nevertheless assembled and triumphantly launched the following year. During the Civil War it perished, being destroyed by the Czech forces allied to the White Armies. Russian told me that its stack can often be glimpsed, far below, becalmed there during the half-century of convulsive change that has ensued, on land. Such were the intriguing pieces of information that Russian fed me.

  In some telepathic manner we were always able to communicate. I followed the Russian he spoke more easily than that of more sophisticated citizens and, in return, he seemed to understand my efforts at conversational Russian, although these were often eked out by thumb-nail sketches, or primitive mime. He did not bother much with dates, ‘in time of grandfather’s father’ would indicate anything earlier than the immediate pre-Revolutionary era. I secretly enjoyed such an approach, for Olga Maximova’s professional exactitudes, though necessary, sometimes lacked the personal, or vivid narrative nature of Russian’s information. Russian was one of the many simple Russian people I encountered on my travels, whom I shall always recall with respect and affection.