Of all the lands he had known, his own, Russia, seemed to me the most fabulous. He was from Moscow, ‘a Muscovite’, he said, but later I was to learn he was of Tartar blood; and unmistakably, the Ta-tze or Mongol hordes had stamped their imprint on his strange countenance. The dark slit eyes, the pointed ears, the bald, Chinese-bald skull, the slight, yet cruel smile which sometimes passed across his usually impassive face – all these spoke of Asia, of the Golden Horde, and the limitless horizons of Central Asia, where he roamed, in spirit, and in fact.
Whenever he came to Europe, he would visit us, and then, reaching my nursery, sit beside the fire, his huge shadow spread-eagled – a double-headed Russian eagle to me – across the rosy wall-paper. Shrugging and gesticulating with odd, unexpected movements, his long, bent-back fingers cracking, the nail of one little finger sprouted to astonishing length, he would spin a marvellous web of countries, cities, people and things, conjuring for me a world of shimmering images. Fishing for serpents in the lakes of Central Asia. How pomegranates (which at that time I had never even seen) were said to contain one seed from Eden . . . The sort of food Mamai the Tartar ate sitting in his brocaded, fur-lined tent. The Trumpeter of Cracow, the private lives of reindeer, his grandmother’s house in the Ukraine, where the vast entrance-hall was paved like a chess board in squares of blue-john and jasper; how, when he was my age, he used to jump the various moves on it with two aged dwarfs, who had been part of the household of his grandmother’s mother, and had remained on, capering up and down stairs with messages, and preparing the special violet-scented cigarettes the old lady puffed incessantly.
Or he would tell of Tarbagan Bator, the Marmot hero of Mongol legend, one of my favourite characters, who, in the beginning of the world, shot down several of the twelve suns which then blazed on high. ‘The brave little marmot used a bow and arrow, and that is why, to this day,’ said the Traveller, ‘no Mongol will shoot at a marmot with such a weapon.’
‘So you see, since there are very few guns either, in Inner or Outer Mongolia, the marmots live happy lives there,’ he added reassuringly, seeing what was known in the family as my ‘Black Beauty Face’ threatening. This was always the prelude to an outburst of uncontrollable sobbing brought about by any mention of animal suffering, such as Anna Sewell’s story of that name, the poem entitled The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed or any other reminder of dumb distress.
Along with an amber chaplet which he fingered abstractedly, the Traveller always carried a squat little agate spoon. ‘For my caviare,’ he said, ‘– it tastes so much better from a spoon.’ He never met with this delicacy at our table, unless he brought it with him, which he sometimes did, appearing unexpectedly, with a lavish pound of the great, grey-grained Beluga kind.
‘Fish jam,’ cook called it, sniffing suspiciously. But I took to it from the first.
Sometimes he told me fairy stories – Russian legends, Ilya Mourametz the heroic, or Konyiok Gorbunok, the little hump-backed horse who brought his master such good fortune; or the magical cat, chained to a tree, who sang verses when he circled to the right, and told fairy tales when he went to the left . . . Best of all, he would tell of the great train that ran half across the world – the most luxurious and splendid train that ever was – the Trans-Siberian.
He held me enthralled then, and today, a life-time later, the spell still holds. He told me the train’s history, its beginnings (first mooted, it seemed, by an Englishman, a Mr. Dull by name); how a Tzar had said, ‘Let the Railway be built!’ And it was. He told me of its mileage, five thousand (to the Canadian-Pacific’s three thousand); of its splendours: brass bedsteads instead of bunks; libraries, hot baths, and grand pianos to while away the hours. (From Moscow to Irkutsk, barely a halfway point to Vladivostok, was nearly a week’s travelling.) Of its miseries; of prison wagons, iron barred trucks hitched on at some wayside halt where the shackled lines of wretched creatures could be heard clanking their chains, often five pounds of wooden logs added to the heavy irons – and singing their traditional exiles’ begging song, the Miloserdnaya, a sort of funeral chant of doom and despair.
‘How did they learn it?’ I asked. His face changed terribly. Another mask, of pure hatred, suddenly succeeded the habitual one of Asiatic impassivity.
‘Those who went on foot sometimes took over a year to reach Tiumen – not even half-way,’ he said, ‘two miles an hour – twenty miles a day was good going in chains . . . They had plenty of time to learn the begging song. And to learn how to suffer, and die,’ he added. He shrugged. ‘Life teaches.’ It was one of his favourite dictums. Then, wrenching himself from Siberia to London, he became suddenly autocratic. ‘More tea!’ he demanded, and I hurried to the tea-pot.
He always insisted on having his tea, Russian-style, in a glass. He liked a spoonful of cherry jam in the saucer, beside it. Sometimes he showed me how the peasants held a lump of sugar in their teeth, and sucked the tea through it, noisily, for sugar was a great luxury among them, and not to be dissolved prematurely. The Traveller always drank his own tea in a strange fashion. He never held the glass in his hand, but would leave it on the table, then bend his head down to it, rather like a camel drinking. And all the while his wicked-glinting little eyes would range round the room. If anything so narrow could be said to roll – they rolled ecstatically. He particularly savoured the China tea my mother obtained, and he strongly approved of her allowing it in the nursery. Even more, he admired her for giving me a beautiful old Worcester tea-cup for my own use.
‘When I was your age, I drank from Tamerlaine’s jade drinking-cup,’ he said, and I believed him.
How I loved him! How I loved his Traveller’s tales and the way he brought the Trans-Siberian railway thundering through the house. There was a chapel on the train, he said; a candle-lit ikon-filled chapel where the long-haired, long-bearded Orthodox priests (‘Popes we call them’) gathered the pious together before a gilded iconostas, praying and swaying as the great engine snaked across the steppes. Piety ran the length of the train. Piety and patriotism: love of a country. As the train rattled across the bridge over the Volga, every man stood up and doffed his cap to Mother Volga.
I knew it all by heart. Every Wednesday and Saturday, the Trans-Siberian train pulled out of Moscow and for seven days ate up the eastward miles to Irkutsk, and farther, into the heart of Siberia, through the Trans-Baïal provinces, edging the Mongol steppes and the yellow dust-clouds of the Gobi desert. There was a branch line to Outer Mongolia – another, along the Amur, to bandit-infested Manchuria, and at last, ten days later – Vladivostok, Russian outlet of life and death on the Sea of Japan. One extension of the line led to the Forbidden City.
‘The gates were scarlet lacquer, a hundred and fifty feet high, and stuck with the heads of malefactors,’ said the Traveller, spreading beef-dripping with a lavish hand.
•
For me, nothing was ever the same again. I had fallen in love with the Traveller’s travels. Gradually, I became possessed by love of a horizon and a train which would take me there; of a fabled engine and an imagined landscape, seen through a pair of narrowed eyes set slant-wise in a yellow Mongol face. These Asiatic wastes were to become, for me, the landscape of my heart, that secret landscape of longing which glides before our eyes between sleeping and waking; a region I could not fathom, but into which I was drawn, ever deeper, more voluptuously, till it became both a challenge and a retreat. It was another dimension where I could refuge from the rooms and streets about which I moved, docile but apart. From the first, the Traveller had understood my infatuation for Asia, and every time he came to see me, he brought some object which told of those horizons. A chunk of malachite, or a Kazakh fox-skin cap (which smelt rather rank) and once, a bunchuk, or standard, decorated with the dangling horse-tails of a Mongol chieftain. I was enraptured.
‘Nasty dangerous thing,’ said Nanny, holding it at arm’s length and depositing it in the umbrella-stand. ‘Why can’t he bring you dolls, dressed up in national costum
es? You could have quite a collection by now.’
But the Traveller knew better.
True, he had turned a deaf ear to my plea for a Samoyede dog, or at least, a pair of Pharaoh’s mice, the curious little creatures that swarm over Siberia, a kind of prairie-dog, which emerge from their burrows, to sit up on their haunches in attitudes of interest and amazement every time the great train rolls past. But by way of compensation he brought me the malachite, which I sank in my goldfish tank, and this now became, in my mind’s eye, a miniature Lake Baïal. The violet and emerald coloured shrimps which lurked in the lake’s depth were something I had also set my heart on acquiring although, in the matter of live-stock, the Traveller was not as accommodating as I could have wished. But I consoled myself by the thought that no other nursery of my acquaintance boasted the horsetail standard of a Mongol chieftain. Nor, I thought, did anyone else I knew put down a plateful of pudding for the Domovoi in the manner recommended by the Traveller.
The Domovoi, he explained, was a gnome-like creature of Russian legend, a self-appointed spirit of the house, inclined to be touchy, but gratified by such attentions. He was certainly somewhere about our house – knowing how much I loved Russia. It did not do to neglect the Domovoi, or bad luck would follow. Traditionally, food for the Domovoi should be placed beside the front door, but in our household this practice had to be abandoned when my father stumbled over a saucer of roast lamb, spinach and mashed potatoes (for I saw no reason to deny the Domovoi). After that my offerings had to be confined to the nursery threshold, where, for the most part, they were eaten by the cats.
Gradually, the Trans-Siberian journey became an obsession. But how to make it? At that time, my journeys were circumscribed: family holidays to Sussex downs or Cornish beaches (ginger-bread biscuits after an icy dip, sand-shoes drying on the window-sill, along with strips of sea-weed). But there were travel-books to comfort me, and whole worlds to be explored by turning the pages. The top shelf of my toy-cupboard turned bookcase now assumed a most business-like air, and was labelled SIBERIA, while I waited for donations. I had learned to read very young, so that by seven I was experimenting with any book I could lay hands on. When my father, who believed in children reading anything, at any age, cynically produced Dostoievsky’s House of the Dead my mother suggested Jules Verne’s Michel Strogoff would have been more suitable, to which my father replied that he had no doubt wading through Dostoievsky’s miseries would finish my Siberian craze for good. My mother contributed Xavier de Maistre’s La feune Sibérienne, in the hope it would improve my French, while Aunt Ethel produced Harry de Windt’s fearful accounts of a journey across Arctic Siberia, among the convict settlements and political prisoners. But still my enthusiasm grew.
I thought my Siberian collection looked particularly impressive, above a shelf full of the Bibliothèque Rose, the E. Nesbitt books and The Wind in the Willows, and I preened, becoming a topographical snob, a weakness which I have never wholly outgrown. Presently I acquired some odd volumes of Prishvin’s Russian Natural History. The Traveller, on learning of my budding library, sent me a sumptuously bound edition of Atkinson’s classic, Travels in the Regions of the Upper Amoor, with the most romantic early nineteenth century illustrations of perpendicular granite cliffs along the shores of Lake Baïal, of Tartar and Kirghiz horsemen, and the fluted roofs of Buddhist temples. Pour votre Bibliothèque Noire was inscribed on the fly-leaf, in his sprawling hand.
‘Siberia! I’ll give you Siberia – you with your chilblains,’ said my nurse, when I whined to go out in the brown-edged, slushy London snow. I was hardening myself, in preparation for journeys to Omsk and Tomsk (later I named two kittens after these towns) and the mysterious, icy-sounding places along the Trans-Siberian’s way. Verkhné-Udinsk, Chita and Chailor Gol were names round which the tempests of Asia howled. Nevertheless Nanny, who had now left us, showed an understanding of my peculiar passion, and next Christmas sent me a purple-bound volume (a come-by chance, off a barrow in the Portobello Road) entitled On Sledge and Horse-back to the Outcast Siberian Lepers by Kate Marsden – New York 1892.
‘Must have been off her rocker,’ said cook, when I read her the more dramatic passages. Moreover she was adamant in her refusal to make pelmeni, pieces of stuffed pasta, a celebrated Tartar dish, of which the Traveller had given me the recipe.
‘Staple Siberian diet,’ he said. ‘Filthy, but filling.’ He also added it was very hard to make.
‘Which is as maybe,’ said cook darkly, basting the roast in a crimson glow of professional complacency.
Nor was she any more co-operative when I dwelled on the habits of Jenghis Khan’s troops who were required to carry a sheep’s stomach full of desiccated dried meat, and another of powdered milk flour under their saddles, thus being ever at the ready to gallop off on some foray.
‘But it would only be like getting a haggis,’ I pleaded, when she refused to supply a sheep’s stomach. I had planned to attach it to my tricycle, and thus provided, pedal furiously off down the path to Asia.
•
On my seventh birthday there was a party. ‘Seven – a MAGIC number, the mystic number of all Asia,’ said the Traveller portentously. But the joy of cutting my cake was clouded by his telling me about the birthdays of his niece, Sofka Andreievna, in Tomsk. She had always been given the traditional Siberian birthday sturgeon: a six-foot-long giant fish, frozen stiff, garnished with ribbons. After the caviare had been ripped from its belly it was stuffed with special herbs, and cooked in a huge iron dish. ‘Big as a coffin,’ said the Traveller. And, suddenly, all the jam sandwiches and éclairs turned to dust. I craved a Siberian sturgeon.
Although a sturgeon was no more forthcoming than the sheep’s stomach, the Traveller always knew how to console and intrigue me. When, a week or two later, I came out in spots and measles was diagnosed he was all sympathy and imprudence, brushing aside any talk of contagion or quarantine.
‘I’ve had it and I don’t believe that rubbish about spreading germs, or I should have brought every kind of Asiatic plague into this nursery long ago,’ he said. All objections were useless – he installed himself beside my bed and launched into a flow of the most distracting stories, of how, when he was my age, and had measles too, he had been sent to a Bashkir camp in the Urals, to take the Koumiss, or fermented mare’s milk cure. ‘Pretend it’s Koumiss,’ he would say, when I turned away from a bowl of some despised Anglo-Saxon pap.
But my temperature was raised, rather than reduced, following his accounts of how, had I been stricken in Moscow, he would have gone to fetch the Miraculous Ikon of Iverskaiya no less. This most sacred of images was housed in the Iversky chapel beside the Red Square; Holy of Holies, the Ikon of the Mother of God was driven about the city in Her own carriage and four. Lackeys in livery, but hatless, even in a blizzard, as mark of reverence, conducted it to the bedside of the sick or dying, or to bless some family fête. (When demands were too numerous there was a stock reply: The blessed Mother of God is a trifle fatigued and cannot come today.)
‘Your spots would have disappeared as soon as they carried the blessed Mother of God upstairs,’ he said, crossing himself, ‘but as it is, you’ll just have to go on being spotted for a while . . . Though I shall bring you a little ikon all for yourself, tomorrow, so don’t be too sad, Spotichka,’ he said, embracing me, spots and all.
He had come into my life very early: indeed I can hardly recall a time when he did not dominate it, when I was not gripped by an infatuation for all things Russian. And then, as if to set the seal on my childish obsession, there had been that fatal encounter with the Grand Duke . . .
At the time of which I write, the beautiful Palladian building now known as Chiswick House (then Burlington House) was a luxury lunatic asylum for a small and particularly wealthy group of unfortunates. The place was run by a distinguished alienist, and the lunatics lived in considerable freedom and style. There were dinner parties in the lofty ornamented rooms and where once Georgiana, Duchess of Devo
nshire, had been adulated by Whig society, delicate dishes were served – but with wooden spoons. No cutlery was allowed, for some of the inmates were dangerous. Childlike, I took a keen interest in stories of these wretched beings. Nanny knew the lodge-keeper’s wife, and sometimes, as they chatted at the gate, I could watch one who spent his days constructing huge bird-like structures, flying machines, out of branches, twigs and lengths of sheeting. Aided by an apparently enthusiastic keeper he towed these structures along an open stretch of grass. ‘But they never fly – they never will!’ he said sadly, when once I strayed near, eluding Nanny’s vigilance.
On the day of my fatal encounter (I must have been about five at the time) I was bowling my hoop along the quiet road that ran beside the walls of Burlington House, when the gates swung open and from the ilex groves within, an elegant equipage emerged, drawn by a pair of bays.
(Horse-drawn carriages were, already, becoming something of an exotic legacy of the past – arresting spectacles.)
‘Careful now!’ called Nanny, as I went trotting on after my hoop. But at that moment, a gigantic ogre-like figure leapt down from the open carriage and dashed past us, swerving to avoid my hoop. Every detail of his appearance is graven on my memory. He wore a fawn overcoat, and a top hat, and a white flower in his button-hole. He had a dense black beard, and his general appearance was one of the utmost ferocity and fascination. The coachman had sprung down in pursuit, but already the keeper had caught up with the madman and they were locked in a desperate struggle. The madman’s black beard was flecked with foam and he roared terribly, unintelligible, like some great wild beast, before he was overcome and carried unconscious inside the gates. The top hat lay glistening in the dust near my hoop. I felt suddenly sick. A man came out of the gate-house and led the horses inside the grounds. They had been standing quietly throughout this alarming scene. As we passed him he smiled reassuringly and winked at Nanny. ‘It’s that Grand Duke again,’ he said, ‘I never saw such a one for giving trouble. Foreign, of course.’
Journey Into the Mind's Eye Page 2