Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  •

  Now the Traveller was more often in England. Yet his comings and goings were more mystifying than ever. No one knew from where he came and to where he went. In 1918 Revolution and counter-Revolution had flamed across Asia. The Romanov family met their end in a cellar in Ekaterinburg. Bandit warfare raged in Manchukuo; the tracks of the Turk-Sib railway were being dug with bayonets. Pale-eyed fanatic Baron von Ungern Sternberg was terrorizing Outer Mongolia and trying to raise his Corps of militant Buddhist monks. White officers and Red Commissars were hidden among the Mongol ranks. ‘He is certainly among them,’ said my father, when we had not seen the Traveller for some while. Had he returned there – on a longing, on an order? The Asiatic hinterland was his true setting, and away from it, he always seemed in exile.

  ‘I do believe you are more homesick than I,’ he had said in a rare admission of his exiled state. Can one be homesick for something one has never known? But then, had I never known it? Was it not once, my setting too?

  ‘I can see you there very clearly,’ he said. ‘And when you do get there, you’ll be home, I fancy.’

  ‘Don’t go putting ideas in her head.’ My mother’s voice sounded an unaccustomed note of sharpness. The Traveller and I were seated on the sofa, sharing a Russian picture-book together, and he was translating the titles under each picture. Perhaps it was the Tretiakov collection. Years later, in Moscow, I was to find there the originals of many of these pictures. Vereschtschagin’s Uzbek warriors gathered in Samarkand. The three giant Bogatyri, mythical horsemen, dominating the steppes. Portraits of Pushkin . . . I pored over them all.

  Sale of a young Serf translated the Traveller patiently. Tzarevitch Ivan on a Grey Wolf. Execution of the Streletzi . . . He turned the page and stopped, studying another picture attentively, going from it to my face and back again.

  ‘Look!’ he said triumphantly. ‘It’s you! You see. You do belong there!’

  I thought there was, perhaps, a flick of malice in the glance he shot my mother out of his sidelong eyes. ‘You’ll never have a better likeness.’ He spoke with finality.

  ‘You’re there for ever. Magic of magics! Now you have only to step into the picture-frame to be there whenever you wish. Chort! It’s better than the Run-Away Game.’

  ‘Please don’t teach her to swear in Russian,’ said my mother. Chort – the devil – was a mild enough expletive beside the rich resources of Russian swear-words he might have employed, and which, later, I sometimes heard in all their bawdy vigour. But oddly, the Traveller seldom exploded in Russian, employing the niceties of French more often. French, he would say, is the language of elegant spite – ‘of fury politely expressed – although that’s a contradiction in itself. Politeness has little to do with emotion: French is all right for hatred, though. When I hate, I find French phrases admirable – like poisoned darts. But it is not the language of love, whatever they may say – and how much they say about love! A national obsession! The tender passions . . . They don’t know the meaning of the phrase. The English now, have both passion and poetry . . . But when I love, I return to Russian. Russian is the loving tongue.’

  A silence fell over us all. The Traveller thinking of love; my mother too, no doubt. But I was, as usual, thinking Russia; straining to go on with this new variation of the Run-Away Game. Ostentatiously, I lifted the cumbersome picture-book from the table to my knee. The Traveller’s inward-turning stare shifted forward once more on the world around him, and the open page.

  It showed one of those early nineteenth century genre paintings at which the Russians excelled. I peered into the charming snowy scene. On the outskirts of a town, a fur-capped young man is dragging a little sledge loaded with household goods, baskets, pottery, and a brass samovar. His long caftan is bordered with fur, his top-boots crunch the snow. He gazes ardently at the girl beside him. Is he her lover or her husband, and are they setting up house, or is he a saucy merchant importuning her? She wears a voluminous cloak under which her hands seem to be holding a muff. Her smooth young face is turned towards him hesitatingly. It is an intriguing picture, full of that static, yet compelling quality peculiar to the best genre paintings, making them tableaux vivants in which we long to participate. I could see the girl’s likeness to myself.

  ‘But where are you?’ I asked, lonely in my new dimension.

  ‘Ah! Who knows? Perhaps we shall find ourselves together in another picture, racing out of the frame in one of those troïkas you love. “Gaïda troïka!” ’ he sang, his voice sharp as the cracking whip. “Gaïda troïka! Go on looking while I’m away,” he commanded, and vanished in a clap of thunder. Or rather, soon after disappeared on another recondite absence – a long one this time. We never discovered where he was when he was not among us, for he was an adept at side-stepping questions. The Arab saying, conceal thy tenets, thy treasure and thy travels might have been his. We had heard he was in some way connected with the export business; but exporting what? Slaves – biscuits – guns? And from where, to where? The combinations were limitless. My parents inclined to believe he was a secret agent. Particularly now that war was on us. Agent provocateur? Double agent? They breathed the sinister words unwillingly. For – against?

  We were never to know. They loved him in spite of themselves, accepting his comings and goings like the flight of some strange bird, a rather disturbing creature whose irruptions into their life brought drama, colour and confusion. I loved him unreservedly: for his strangeness and for the climate of danger that I sensed around him – as adventurer, and as the man of whom, even unconsciously, in my earliest childhood I had been desperately aware. So, loving him, I loved his background, everything that had surrounded and formed him, and I sought to penetrate that enigmatic and remote limbo-land of the Slav where, I felt, my roots had been planted in some unfathomable past. It seemed I had always known and loved him, and in his world I would at last come home.

  CHAPTER III

  The presents which I received from the Traveller in such erratic but gratifying quantities seemed, by comparison to the boxes of chocolates, work-baskets or suède covered prayer-books which most of my schoolfriends were receiving, to possess a quality of mystery worthy of his djinn-like personality.

  A string of enormous amber beads with a faded silken tassel proved to be a Moslem chaplet from the Holy City of Meshed. Richly embroidered Turcoman saddle-bags were, I thought, worthy to have been slung across the winged back of El Borak, Mahommed’s miraculous horse, and for a moment my loyalty to the Trans-Siberian wavered in favour of some Bactrian camel caravan, plodding across the Central Asian steppes, one of so many Moslem links in the Russian chain. Once, after we had heard nothing of the Traveller for a long while, a most romantic and grown-up gift arrived, and I took particular pleasure in producing this from my satchel in order to impress the fifth form, for it was a cigarette case, its dark steel and silver inlay work peculiar to the Caucasus. Besides the Traveller’s initials in gold, it bore a number of symbols and Russian regimental crests. No doubt it was, as I heard people say, a very odd present to give a schoolgirl.

  ‘Why not? By the time other people are giving her cigarette cases I may not be around to give her mine,’ he snapped. I have it still; and I have never defiled it with anything other than the Turkish or Balkan tobacco which it seems to demand. As for the Traveller, he broke all my preconceived notions of his epicurism, by preferring mahorka, a fearful rank stuff, the sweepings of third-rate Bessarabian tobacco generally found only among the soldiers or lower depth of moujik life. When I first remember him, he used to roll his own cigarettes from a tin of this mahorka, part of a large supply with which he always travelled. Later, when it seemed he could no longer come and go from Russia as he pleased, it was the loss of mahorka, he maintained, which irked him more than anything else he had left behind.

  Every Easter, I received the lovely painted eggs of Russian tradition; some were in papier mâché, elaborately decorated with the Imperial eagle or some regimental insignia; s
ome were gaily painted with peasant designs. When I was six he had sent a tiny one in dark blue enamel with a ribbon of pin’s-head diamonds around it, a lavish Fabergé toy.

  ‘Diamonds for a child! It doesn’t seem natural, does it?’ sniffed Nanny, putting it out of reach, until my mother appropriated it for her dressing-table, where it hung beside the looking glass, on a blue ribbon. One egg I particularly liked was in deep mauve blue-john, its bland surface veined in golden brown. This I was allowed to keep, placing it in a carved wooden sleigh, drawn by three prancing horses – another Russian acquisition. One red-letter day he gave me an ikon, and a lampada, or silver lamp, to hang before it.

  ‘Very decorative,’ he said, for he always shrugged off spiritual implications and often quoted an inscription over a Confucian temple, in the Master’s words:

  Listen! You must revere and oblige the Gods, for all the world as though they existed. But he was careful to see that I hung the ikon in the proper fashion – in the eastern corner of the room. Russian children, he told me, used to read by the little lampada long after they were supposed to be asleep. They were never afraid of the dark, for the ikon was always there, shining for them, keeping them company all night long, the long nights of a Russian winter . . . And now, I too had this sustaining image to shine down on me in London.

  The companionable aspects of the ikon were not, however, apparent to our window-cleaner, Mr. Bates, an old friend, to whom I proudly displayed my new treasure as he sat swaying giddily on the window-sill.

  ‘My word! them eyes follow you round. Fair gives you the creeps! Religious, is it? Looks ‘eathen to me. I wouldn’t ‘ave it in my room of a night, I can tell you.’

  •

  All night long the Trans-Siberian raced through the nursery; past the rocking-chair and through the rose-patterned walls it sped on its way, carrying me into the steppes, to Omsk, and Vera Andrievna’s birthday party, where the giant sturgeon adorned with ribbons dominated the feast . . . Wearing my white party dress, I was just taking my place at the table when a door banged somewhere downstairs, and I woke, hurtling back through space, to see the wavering red glow of the lampada swaying gently before my ikon . . . just as it had been doing in Vera Andrievna’s room . . . I turned over, and went back to Siberia, to blizzards and wolves, and a highly-coloured tale I had much enjoyed, lately, about a noble-hearted Siberian lad who rescues the beautiful but priggish daughter of an emigré French aristo turned dancing-master in Irkutsk. Alas! Feodor is but a serf, and Geneviève is a haughty patrician: between them the social gap looms as large as any fissure in the ice-floes over which Feodor leaps to snatch her from the arms of a polar bear. Although the niceties of social distinctions were something of which I was not then aware, I relished the story for its local colour, and thought Geneviève soppy, as she wept and swooned her way through the book. Didn’t she know how lucky she was to be on the Siberian ice-floes with a handsome serf and a polar bear?

  I lay in my warm London bed and wished ardently that her lot might be mine . . . Siberia! Russia! RUSSIA . . . the last thing I saw before I slept was a pin-point of light swaying before the shimmering silver casing of the ikon which the Traveller had brought back for me from Moscow.

  •

  Not all his presents were Russian or rare, like the ribbon knot, garnished with coloured stones and seed pearls, from which a miniature copy of the Koran dangled: this was a bouti, an ornament once favoured by the well-to-do Tartar ladies of Kazan, which I treasured accordingly. Packets would arrive from all over the world, particularly when we had heard nothing from him for some while: a blown-glass Christmas-tree cherubim from the Christkindlmarkt in Vienna, all gilded curls and fat pink cheeks ‘because it reminds me of you’. For my mother, an austerely beautiful bronze Buddha from Thibet. For myself post-cards, some not in the best of taste as my governess pointed out. (On one, a coloured reproduction of Fragonard’s La chemise enlevée, he had scrawled across the seductive pink rump, Miss you, Miss.) Curious papier-mâché animal masks from some Central American carnival, purple and white monkeys, or scarlet deer’s heads would arrive in battered hat-boxes still bearing the label of some celebrated Parisian milliner. A beautiful mother-of-pearl Victorian tea-caddy, containing six separate compartments, arrived on another birthday and is still in my possession, having survived the bombardment of London and all the successive déplacements of my life. Each compartment was filled with a different kind of tea – green tea, gun-powder, Lapsang, smoked on tarred nets, orange Pekoe and jasmine teas . . . A rather grubby Tarot card accompanied the box; across it he had scrawled another succinct message: It is as important to know about tea as about wine.

  The Traveller and I shared a craving for possessions – for things; though in his case, having so far as I knew no fixed home, his belongings were scattered all over the world. Some remained in packing-cases for years, in storage, others bulged his pockets, being transferred from one suit to the next, without explanation as to their particular significance to him, at that moment.

  In the course of conversation he was apt to say:

  ‘That reminds me – I’ve got something you’d love – a khalat from Bokhara . . . Nice for a dressing-gown. I must get it to you. Now where did I leave it?’ Or, ‘I bought you a painted Persian looking-glass when I was last in Kazvin . . .’ But why he was in Kazvin he did not say.

  He would remain abstracted, trying to place these objects, and then shrug off the matter. But months or years later they would turn up, the crimson and violet padded silk of the khalat crushed into a battered paper parcel bursting at the corners, and scattered with illegible customs markings, the cards, perhaps stuffed into a little tin tea-pot from Morocco.

  Thus my naturally acquisitive bent was fostered. From an early age I collected things – objects rather than objets d’art, and took them about with me, even on the shortest journeys. I have never understood the dictum ‘always travel light’. Like the Traveller, I have always travelled heavy. In the school-room, as the objects multiplied, my parents dwelled on the dangers of accumulating. And of course there were constant fretful references to dusting. But the Traveller understood my profound craving.

  ‘Things are loyal. They remain when people go,’ he said, investing things with a life, an entity of their own. This was something which I also felt to be true. From my childhood I was always conscious of this unity with what are described as inanimate objects. To me, the adjective has never applied. No brass-bound Arab coffer or sagging arm-chair but it cries aloud to me of its past.

  Marie Bashkirtsieff, so uncontrollably romantic, knew this sense of unity with things; writing of her childhood home in Tcherniakov she says:

  ‘One laughs at people who find memories, charm, in furniture and pictures, who say to them: Good morning, good-bye; who look on pieces of wood and stuff as friends, which by being useful to you and constantly seen . . . become part of your life . . .’

  Peering through the dusty windows of a junk shop or at the litter of a street market, I have always been aware of this unity with things. A sale-room, or a warehouse, is both a meeting place and a burial place. I feel a surge of recognition as my eye lights on some apparently unexceptional object, but it has spoken to me above the clamour of all the rest. Then, if I am able to acquire it, it comes home, finding its place in the hierarchy of my possessions, setting itself among other things which have come to me. Come back to me, perhaps. For who can say where, and in what other moment of time, things, as well as people, or the essence of an individual which we call the soul, was once known to us, or was part of ourselves, on our other passages through eternity?

  Thus, with what was perhaps an atavistic urge, I was, above all, set on acquiring anything Russian. I would long, with equal fervour, for a strange brass samovar of the type used in the encampments of the Eastern tribes, or for a kokoshnik-shaped tiara of gigantic emeralds, brutal in their splendour, with that unmistakably excessive effect so characteristic of Russian taste.

  •
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br />   It was 1920. The war was over and in those first post-war years the Traveller appeared among us again. Djinn-like as ever, he suddenly materialized, but brooked no questioning, even from my parents, who continued to speculate about him to each other. ‘When I am here, with you, you know all about me – why do you want to know all about me when I am elsewhere?’ he would say, turning our innocent curiosity into something sinister. And he would launch into tangled theories of time and place, and the non-existence of persons, or objects, except when in direct contact with other persons or objects. It was all very confusing, but his meaning was clear: don’t pry.

  There were, at this time, a number of bazaars for Russian Charities, to which I tried to lure him, but he remained aloof.

  ‘All those old Grand Duchesses selling off other people’s treasures in the name of charity!’ he said, rather unjustly, for many of the objects were their own possessions salvaged from the débâcle, and now gladly given. But he was not to be won.

  ‘Go, then. Go and find yourself a Palekh box . . . but I remember Fedoskino, the village where they painted them, and the hard bargaining that went on in the Stchoukin Dvor, the thieves’ market in Moscow. I’m not going to turn treasure-hunting into a benevolent or social occasion, not even for your blue eyes, Miss.’

  ‘But my eyes are green,’ I reminded him, laboriously literal. ‘Turquoise then,’ he replied, being in a poetic mood; he shuffled about in his pockets, producing an uncut stone, which, having held beside my eyes, he carefully re-pocketed, remarking it would be a reminder when he was far away.

  Later, I learned he had raised a storm among the Russian Relief Organizations by refusing to contribute anything whatever; worse still, on the mere mention of Lenin’s name, (anathema to the emigrés), he was in the habit of remarking: