Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  The fact that the Traveller had made no efforts to settle his sons in a more regular or remunerative way of life was something he refused to admit when Aunt Eudoxia boldly broached the subject.

  The boys had, she said, no background, no money, no chances, no country even. What was the good of suddenly irrupting into their lives, treating them to a series of rich meals, a holiday, as now, and then forgetting them entirely, or resenting it if they expected help or advice? ‘Why, you haven’t even bothered to get them proper papers,’ she added scornfully, and went on to disparage the Nansen passport which she herself had at last obtained. ‘It’s better than nothing, of course, and for me, it really doesn’t matter now – but they are only just beginning their lives – they are living in France where papers matter so much. You really might do better for them. You of all people,’ she added, alluding to the Traveller’s self-proclaimed ability to obtain generally unobtainable permits. The Traveller shrugged and opened his mouth to reply, but she cut in angrily, warming to her theme.

  They might just as well have been left behind in Russia, she continued, to become part of those packs of wolfish children who roamed, plundered, and lived lawlessly – the bezprizorni – without foyer – rootless, abandoned, children of the Revolution who defied all authority and were the terror of any person or community upon whom they descended.

  ‘At least among the bezprizorni they would have belonged.’ She glared at the Traveller and, then, following up her attack, continued, tank-like: ‘And what are you doing about the sort of women they pick up? I suppose they do?’

  The Traveller shrugged again. ‘What can I do? My dear Eudoxia, I haven’t got a household – there’s no Nianyia to arrange things any more.’

  At my inquiring look, he enlarged on this intriguing statement. ‘You see, in the old days everything of that sort was so well organized – none of your English hypocrisy and cold baths. And contrary to what you might imagine from reading rubbishy novelettes, our youngsters were not always toasting their mistresses in pink champagne. We started young, but not in the bordellos: it was all very natural. It was always the old family nianyias who arranged matters. I remember in our home, Nianyia watched over all of us boys: as soon as she thought it the right moment she’d go to my mother and say: “Barinya, we must think about getting a new house-maid. Master Dimitri’s sixteen . . . it’s time for him to find out for himself.” And Mama would choose some healthy peasant girl, and that was that.’

  ‘It was a delightful arrangement. The girls were always so proud to be chosen for the young master. They liked our uniform; we looked quite dashing – schoolboys or not. Everyone wore a uniform of some sort, then. At my Lycée ours was dark red, with silver braid . . . But I remember, it was only after we passed our final exams that the Mathematics Professor took us all to a brothel to celebrate. Things were really very well arranged then.’

  He looked across the terrace to where Kamran was now asleep under a narrow margin of shade provided by some cacti.

  ‘Lazy young fool. He can’t even arrange his siesta comfortably. Well, if he can’t look after himself that much, I certainly can’t be responsible for his papers, let alone his sex-life,’ said his father, shrugging Kamran out of his line of vision.

  •

  We had discovered an old piano in the hotel. It was curiously shaped, elongated and graceful and looked as if it might have served Chopin in Majorca. A family of mice had settled inside and were flourishing on the felt-covered hammers. They used to scuttle off at our approach, their tiny paws making a scampering glissando as they raced across the strings.

  In the hot Corsican noonday, we would take refuge in the empty, dim salon, and seated side by side, thump out the Polonaise from Eugène Onegin. The Traveller was unrestrainedly emotional over almost any music, and, as he picked out a haunting air – Alabiev’s Nightingale – tears glistened on the high yellow cheek bones, while he told me how that lyrical and soaring melody had sprung from a musician who had been exiled to Siberia for some minor offence. Next, he was trying to re-create the whole of Rimsky-Korsakoff’s opera Kitej. Humming, twiddling and banging, he scarcely did justice to the divinely lovely, melancholy music, but I was transported by his re-telling of the legend, sobbing with him, as he conjured the lost, loved city sunk below the lake in glassy calm.

  Fumbling for a handkerchief he shut the piano lid carefully to avoid jarring the mice who, we had discovered, removed themselves to the farthest end of the piano during our duets. We never found out if, or how, they left or regained their resonant dwelling, for the lid was seldom raised; we came to the conclusion they led stay-at-home lives.

  •

  The Traveller, who had known so many of the world’s capitals and their diversions, liked nothing better than small distractions – the local open-air cinema (seated on backless benches) or an outing to the Place – where we would dawdle over a coup de blanc and read the week-old newspapers pasted on the walls of the Mairie. Sometimes I would try to lure him to accompany me on my ritualistic walk.

  ‘We could go down to the jetty and see if the mail-boat has come in yet.’

  ‘Sly-boots – all you want is your walkies, like Hondi. And don’t try to exercise me. Let me tell you – if ever you’d walked across the Gobi desert, as I have done, you would have had enough of le footing to last you a life-time. That was one particularly good thing about both the Kirghiz and the Kalmucks, they never walked a step. They’d jump on their little horses to trot from one tent to another . . . never put a foot to the ground if they could help it . . . like Americans in their automobiles.’

  ‘Then let’s ride,’ I suggested.

  ‘On mules? I haven’t seen a decent mount since I left Russia,’ he grumbled, and was off, describing pure-bred Karabakhs, Orloff blacks, and the racing camels of Outer Mongolia. He sat down, firmly, under a eucalyptus tree in the hotel garden, knowing that by his tales he would distract me from my exercise.

  ‘You should have seen Ungern Sternberg’s white beast,’ he began. ‘A magnificent creature. Its bridle was decorated with two of the blackest sables you ever saw.’

  ‘Black sables?’ I was barely familiar with the brown pelts which, in the West, we associated with luxury.

  ‘Bargouzin sables – black as your hat,’ he replied colloquially. He was given to these excursions into the vernacular, and occasionally they proved too much for him. Having heard Nanny address me, in moments of softness, as ‘poor little mite’ he later rendered this as ‘poor little termite’, while chilblains, ever a subject of conversation in English nurseries (although apparently unknown in Russia, where it was frost-bite or nothing), he called chillyblains. For all his languages he could never learn to correct such lapses. Argue was pronounced arg.

  ‘Pussinka! Don’t arg!’ he would yell, nettled. ‘Your English pronunciation is without any rules. Besides, arg sounds much more definite,’ was his invariable defence.

  I recall a cloud falling over the luncheon table at home when he announced that he and my father were going to Richmond Park that afternoon.

  ‘And on the way home, I’m hoping to have some honourable virgins,’ he said genially. My mother stiffened slightly and left us before coffee, murmuring something about Harrods.

  What the sweet-toothed Traveller had in mind was an innocent plateful of little cakes, the famous Richmond Maids-of-Honour. When everything was explained, he kissed my mother’s hand in his own way, in the palm, rather than on the back of the hand.

  ‘You English women are angels,’ he said. ‘But do angels have appetites?’ At which she gave him a curious look, a look I had seen on her face several times, when he teased her, or spoiled me too lavishly.

  •

  On the terrace at Calvi, a chill wind began to rustle a puny clump of banana trees, a dry, scaly sound, as if this tropic vegetation resented being transplanted to so harsh a setting. But the sinking sun was still brilliant, slanting over the roof-tops. In the gathering shadows the Traveller was warming
me at the fires of his memory and imagination; telling of Siberian tigers, the largest, most ferocious of the species, that are still found in the reedy shores of Baïkal, their fur cream-coloured rather than tawny: telling of a breed of wild horse, native to Siberia, and named after Prjevalsky, the naturalist who first classified them: telling, too of the legendary huluk, a charger of preternatural strength: Jenghis Khan called his chargers his chosen marshals, worthy of leading his armies. The huluk is said by the Mongols to possess ribs which are formed in one single sheet of bone, like iron-clad plating; once this is hardened to maturity, the huluk can resist attack by wolves. Knowing this, wolves never attack a a grown huluk, going only for young ones; or so the Traveller said.

  Such were the curious pieces of information he enlarged upon: and sometimes, becoming more factual, he told of life among the Kirghiz, as they moved about the wastes with their flocks. This was something he knew well enough, since he had spent a whole summer’s migration in the upland pastures with them when courting Kamran’s mother. They lived much as their ancestors of the Hordes had done, he said. ‘Which did not stop your mother spending an alarming amount of money at the dress-makers and hairdressers, as soon as I took her back to St. Petersburg’, he continued, fixing Kamran with a baleful stare. Kamran moved off, with a hang-dog air, Hondof slinking sympathetically after him.

  Having disposed of Kamran his father settled himself comfortably and resumed his story-telling, his mind seeming to hover and dart dragon-fly-like, about so many different scenes and settings, telling of Kazan, where mighty Potemkin’s library, 80,000 volumes, had come to rest on the shelves of the city library. Of how the first roses were brought to Russia from Isfahan by way of Constantinople, being floated up the Don and the Volga in barges, destined for the Empress Sophia, the Paleologi Princess married to the Tzar Ivan III in 1472. Telling how good brandy smells of bugs – he emphasized the adjective. How Mongolian men’s prowess – as stallions – was celebrated in Eastern Siberia, but that they were as nothing beside the Chinese, who were the dread of all women captured by them, being insatiable, and constructed – here Aunt Eudoxia interrupted him, firmly changing the subject, being no doubt belatedly aware of her responsibilities as chaperone.

  Now the Traveller was recounting Asiatic plenty on other terms; of magnificence, and how the Baron von Ungern Sternberg knew that to be respected and obeyed he must be envied as well as feared and display a conqueror’s glory. Like terror, splendour has power throughout Asia.

  ‘Was he a friend of yours?’ I was longing to learn more about this legendary figure.

  ‘That monster? No, but I knew him well enough when his regiment was in St. Petersburg – he was in the Nerchinsk Cossacks. His family were Baltic barons. Baits’ – he spat out the word rather as some French hiss the word Belges! – a mortal insult. ‘As I was saying,’ he continued, ‘splendour is respected in Asia. There, furs and precious stones are coinage. In Siberia they are truly understood. Why, with all those mines of ours, my brother used to give the housemaids emeralds for Christmas. Jenghis Khan’s tent was made entirely of leopard skins,’ he went on, ‘leopard, lined with sable. The sort of furs most western women wear would not be used as bath-mats by Asiatics.’

  At which Aunt Eudoxia snorted:

  ‘Oh yes, we all know you used to pave the floors with sapphires and sweep them with sables in Siberia. All the same, it was a very provincial sort of life . . . So far from everything . . .’

  ‘And what about Montenegro?’ muttered Kamran, who having been born in Tobolsk (which made him, in my eyes, a Siberian), shared the general Russian view that Balkan countries were very small fry. The Traveller waved aside the matter as unworthy of further consideration. Towards his own family as to mine, he maintained an unmistakable air of arrogance – an overlord, relegating the rest of the world to their proper place – serfdom. He shared Dumas’ view that woman was merely la femelle de l’homme.

  Indeed, his whole conception of the relationship between man and woman retained something medieval. It was easy to imagine him living in the manner of the old Russian landowner, Kachkarov, barin, or absolute master of his domain. There, in 1820, he maintained, like so many of the neighbouring squires, a whole harem of comely serf-girls, twenty or more, whose lives and bodies were at the disposal of their master. They did not consider themselves ill-used. The girls, having passed by the master’s bed, were married off among the men servants, usually according to the whim of their master, who saw to it that they were well-dowered. Such Russian pashas lived in a curious mixture of indolence and energy, squalor and wealth. After a morning spent rigorously controlling the administration of his vast estates, Kachkarov would go hunting, and return to a dinner table set for thirty or more, for he had a large family and numberless guests. He himself ate with gargantuan appetite at a separate table, growling his criticisms of the sucking pig, stuffed carp, or other delicacies, while his serf choir sang traditional songs, or danced for him. After a game of whist, he would bid his meek wife and children good night and repair to his own quarters, one of the serf-girls having preceded him with a lighted candle, announcing, ‘The barin deigns to retire.’ At which the rest of his harem would follow, spreading their mattresses and quilts on the floor around his bed, for that was where he elected they should sleep. The chosen favourite for the night was expected to help the barin undress and then, drawing the curtains round the bed, tickle the soles of his feet (once a traditional method of wooing sleep among the Russians) until he snored. After which she must spend the night awake beside him, alert for his commands, to be cuffed, or caressed, to lull him with fairy tales, or just to keep the flies at bay.

  ‘Very proper,’ said the Traveller, smacking his lips as he recounted such goings-on, and fancying himself in the leading role.

  ‘I remember our feet were still being tickled with goose-feathers when I first married and went to Kazan,’ said the Countess dreamily, ‘it was delicious . . . You should try it, if you can’t sleep,’ she said turning her blank stare on me.

  ‘But who would tickle the soles of my feet?’ I asked, with visions of some outraged daily being asked to stay overtime.

  ‘Me, I would, Mamasha,’ said Kamran suddenly. He seldom spoke, so that I looked at him in surprise. He was sprawling on the ground, beside my chair, and looked sullen, as if the offer was wrung from him against his will. His hair needed cutting and fell over his face in a dark wing of plumage. He was a handsome creature.

  ‘Ridiculous! Mamasha sleeps like a log,’ said the Traveller. ‘A bastinado wouldn’t wake her.’ I thought his voice sounded unusually harsh. He led the way into the dining-room: the barin, deigning to eat.

  He had certain dictums about women, whom he saw at once sentimentally and cynically. Like Pushkin (who contradicted himself in his portrait of Tatiana), he held they should not have character: only passions, when young. When not young . . .? Then no doubt they ceased to exist as women, a point of view loosely described as Oriental, but which in fact is not so, for in the East older women continue to wield enormous power, both in the home and outside it; but always with discretion, behind that veil which progress now wishes them to discard.

  ‘Pretty women,’ pronounced the Traveller, ‘should always wear pink,’ and he would shrug disparagingly if I wore another colour, thus nullifying the implied compliment. Or, ‘all women should be able to play the piano – it suits them to play Schumann or Chopin; especially on summer evenings in the country . . . As long as they’re playing, their husbands know they’re not up to mischief . . . or watching them too closely.’

  He would smile sardonically, and then sigh and fall silent. I think he was recalling his childhood, his domineering father and his frivolous mother. Recalling her in the long white nights of Russia, seeing again their country house set on a hill above the river, seeing again the greenish dusk of the garden paths and the lamplight falling on the wide veranda; the smell of lilac and the sound of an accordion floating up from the village, overcomin
g the limpid notes of the piano, as his mother, so graceful in her pink chiffon tea-gown tackled a valse brillante, not very well perhaps, but well enough . . . Well enough for her little son to stop spinning his top and listen and her husband to light his cigar and smile, reassured, as he followed her maid upstairs: another barin, indulging himself.

  CHAPTER IX

  Although the Traveller had not brought anything to read on the train, he usually carried a few favourite books about with him, so that one or more could accompany him on even the shortest journeys. Or the longest evenings, he might have added, for he was ruthless when bored, making no attempt at civility, and would show his dissatisfaction with the assembled company by retreating to a corner, producing a book, and burying himself in it, to the chagrin of the hostess. Over the years, this ambulant library did not change; it represented, I supposed, his abiding favourites, to which he could return perpetually. Among them was Gogol’s Government Inspector, in a battered edition acquired during his schooldays. Sometimes, from a vertiginous hill-side above the port, where I had succeeded in dragging him for the ritual walk, he would read to me from whichever book happened to be in his pocket that day. If it was in Russian or German he went straight on, seldom stopping to translate.

  ‘You don’t follow? Too bad. Then listen to the language.’ And he would plunge into an exchange between Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky, laughing uproariously at Gogol’s sardonic scenes.

  Once, producing Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, he remained silent a long while, turning the pages, and pausing, to look down the rocky slopes to where, far below, pygmy figures darted about the Place du Marché and the carts began threading their way out of the town, towards the country. From a great distance I heard the noonday bells ringing, a gnat-like humming, and my built-in Anglo-Saxon sense of punctuality began to assert itself.

  ‘It must be after twelve. We shall be late for lunch unless we start down now.’