Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  ‘Listen!’ he said, and read me Aesop’s words to Rhodopé.

  ‘If, turning back I could overpass the vale of years and could stand on the mountain top and could look again far before me at the bright ascending morn we would enjoy the prospect together, and we would walk along the summit hand in hand O Rhodopé! and we would only sigh at last, when we found ourselves below with others.’

  He shut the book and took me in his arms.

  ‘Now you see, my Rhodopé, why the name fits you so well, quite apart from all that sugar-icing pink and whiteness of yours.’

  ‘Well, I shan’t call you Aesop, however appropriate – it’s a hairy Old Testament sort of name – not you at all, even if Aesop was twice Rhodopé’s age.’

  The conversation now took a yet more personal turn, and we missed lunch altogether.

  •

  Occasionally the Traveller was persuaded to go on an expedition – to cross the mountain passes, or to explore little towns like Cargese or Ajaccio, an overnight outing in a hysterically-behaved hired car.

  ‘You really love mileage – distance for distance sake,’ he would grumble as I watched the country unfold before us at each turn of the road.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ he continued. ‘Just going – moving into space satisfies you. Not for nothing were you born a Gemini. They’re always fidgeting. But with that passion in your blood, Corsica’s too small, like England – like Europe, indeed. You’ll soon fall off the edge. Only Asia will be limitless enough for you. I suppose, subconsciously, that’s why you crave Siberia.’

  •

  Some of the Traveller’s tales assumed, over the years, a legendary quality. Their telling and re-telling became a ritual, where each fresh embellishment was savoured, discarded, or integrated. But where truth ended and embellishment began was a delicate point.

  ‘I don’t remember that bit about the fugitive hiding in the Chinese quarter at Nijni-Novgorod – but do go on . . .’

  A sharp look. ‘That’s because I never told you that I was the man they were after . . . That was when I first shaved my head . . .’

  I liked to think that every treasured word, every fabled landscape was exact. However high-flying, given that faraway setting of white nights and limitless distances, I felt anything could be. However extravagant the episodes, I always preferred those of an allegedly auto-biographical nature, for they pierced, even fragmentarily, that screen which the Traveller had chosen to set up between himself and the rest of the world – myself included.

  Sometimes I would try to trap him into some further proofs of personal involvement, but he would parry, side-tracking me with a gaudy detail, or making one of his strategic withdrawals into a limbo-land of concentration, where he knew I could not follow, lurking behind that façade which tormented me with its mystery. Or he would toss me an autobiographical crumb which I would hoard, trying to fit it into the mosaic of circumstances I already possessed. Direct questions were not encouraged, often being met with silence rather than evasion. Nevertheless, he himself would interrogate ruthlessly, and when he fixed his victim with that unblinking stare he was always answered.

  It might be supposed that some of the Traveller’s friends, his aunt or his sons, whose respective mothers had, after all, shared some part of his life, could have told something more of that background lying behind the façade of baroque ornament he vouchsafed. I longed with a bourgeois craving for some sort of curriculum vitae. Birthplace, parentage, education, career, hobbies – clubs? At least some basic structure upon which to place the flourishes. Yet no one was able to tell me much more than I knew. It was not that they withheld anything, but rather that they were passive. Perhaps, being Russians, or Asiatics, and sharing fundamental characteristics of nomadism, roots were of no account. They took things for granted, including gaps in time, for, like animals, I noticed that a week, a month or a year was to them of no specific importance. They themselves existed. They had been, they were, and one day, they would be no more. Where, when, did not trouble them over-much.

  ‘When I was little . . . over there,’ Kamran would say, jerking his head towards Asia. But he did not recall his father being there too. He thought he remembered a big herd of horses . . . an encampment in the mountains . . . gun-fire . . . a falcon that had shared the saddle-bag in which he travelled to some city . . . strange songs he could still recall . . . Songs of the Ktché Dj, I thought longingly.

  ‘Sing some!’ I commanded, waiting for the reedy cadences of Asia. But while he was frowning in concentration, his father appeared suddenly, silently, almost stealthily, as was his habit, stepping cat-like, in his soft Torghut boots.

  He eyed us enigmatically. ‘Where the apple reddens never pry, lest we lose our Eden, Eve and I,’ he remarked, displaying, once again, his curious faculty for quoting appropriate lines in a number of languages.

  But I was not to be put off, Browning or no. When he was safely in the bath, I would sidle up to Aunt Eudoxia’s balcony, where she was ritualistically laying out the Tarot cards for the morning’s disasters. If a particularly sinister conjunction appeared, and her sense of drama was appeased, she was more inclined to be communicative. She was, it transpired, only a few years older than the Traveller, and perfectly sane. (So much for the appellation ‘Old, mad’), but her second husband, the Traveller’s uncle, had stemmed from one of the ancient Tartar families of Kazan. She told me she had seen her nephew-in-law for the first time in that city, when he was twenty, and on manœuvres with his regiment.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked breathlessly. Now, at last, some facts. But my question was not to be answered.

  ‘I don’t remember . . . he wore a shako . . . No, that was my first husband the Bulgarian – anyhow, it’s of no importance now,’ she said, shuffling the pack, poring intently over Justice, Misero, the Fool, and the Crumbling Castle.

  ‘I was only his aunt by marriage, after all,’ she continued. ‘He was moving about a lot just then, and seldom saw the rest of the family. His father was descended from one of the Hordes I believe, but his mother was from the Caucasus – a remarkably beautiful woman. So sad she had such an ugly-looking boy.’ (Ugly? was it conceivable that anyone found that darling Asiatic face ugly?)

  The Traveller seldom spoke of his father, but all these intriguing statements of Aunt Eudoxia’s were, I hoped, to be expanded at voluptuous length. ‘He left the army after some scandal: a duel’ – (a duel to the death, I wondered? . . .) ‘he always was impetuous, a real scandalist!’ continued Aunt Eudoxia, ‘I believe he went and joined a scientific expedition to the Gobi, and got himself involved with some Kirghiz tribe . . . Kamran’s mother was one of them – or was she a Bashkir? Something savage, I remember. Anyhow,’ she continued, dismissing the Hordes with the wave of a plump hand, ‘he spent years on and off in Siberia – crossed in love, his mother always said, though I never thought he cared that much about anyone. Siberia! and after the family had settled in that charming house in Moscow, too. But then he never did anything one expected.’

  It seemed there was a good-for-nothing elder brother who lived in Irkutsk – something to do with gold mines thereabouts, belonging to the family. Aunt Eudoxia couldn’t recall exactly where. ‘What difference does it make now? They must have been nationalized long ago, and he must have been killed.’

  Once when she was in Switzerland the Traveller had written asking her to engage a French-speaking governess for the wives of some Turcoman Khan whom he had encountered doing the cure at Vichy.

  ‘I remember he wrote that the Khan had seven hundred wives – not all with him, of course. I don’t know why, but it made an impression on me, at the time,’ she said. ‘I lost touch with him for years after that, and only ran across him again by chance, after we got out through Constantinople . . . He’d had a bad time, and was given up for dead, with cholera. The wounded were packed into cattle trucks – it was that, or leaving them behind at Batoum. They put the dying ones in last, so they could be thrown out as soon as they died,
without disturbing the others. One of his friends told me it hadn’t seemed worth transporting him, he was so obviously done for. But there you are – Destiny willed it otherwise. He didn’t die, though he was in a Turkish hospital for months. As soon as he was about again he got himself into heavy trouble over some business beyond Ezerum. Something to do with the turquoise mines, he said. But it was much too near the Russian frontier, to my way of thinking.’

  Her face clouded over. ‘I’ve never discovered what he was up to there . . . but then I’ve never understood – at times I begin to think –’ She checked herself abruptly, and I watched a brooding darkness settle on the carefully painted plump face.

  As the morning sun rounded the hill-top, its rays poured on to the balcony, gilding the Tarot cards, and turning the Countess’s painted cheeks to over-ripe plums. Sadness sat badly on such a countenance, for it was accustomed to more violent emotions – fury, gaiety, or anguish. Yet sorrow, a sort of passive melancholy, always possessed her when she consulted the cards concerning the Traveller. They told her nothing good, and she would call on Heaven to witness her despair.

  ‘Mother of God! I don’t like it. I often do the cards for him,’ she said. ‘He believes in them implicitly, as you know.’ (I didn’t.) ‘I think Ungern Sternberg’s fate influenced him.’ It seemed that this sinister and complex figure allowed himself to be guided by a Chinese necromancer, and that his campaigns in Outer Mongolia (against the Bolshevik army) and his own end had all been foretold him exactly.

  ‘Every hideous twist,’ continued Aunt Eudoxia, muttering of Japanese designs in Manchuria, of Allied treachery, Kolchak’s betrayal and ‘those moujiks’, as she always described the Red Army. What, if any, was the Traveller’s part in all this, she did not reveal. But anticipating some supreme moment of truth, I was making furious efforts to keep up with her, to memorize the names and implications.

  Her plump ringed hands swept the cards together as she talked, shuffling them and dealing afresh. I watched their symbolism unfold. The Hanging Man, the Wheel of Fortune, the Fool, and the Lovers. ‘There you are – you always turn up near him now,’ she said, tapping the designated card with a padded white finger. ‘But it’s dark . . . darkness, always darkness . . . No good will come of it. I’ve tried telling him, though of course he won’t listen to me. He enjoys drama. It’s become part of his life.’

  ‘Bojhe moyi! I don’t like it . . . Such darkness round him. I don’t like it at all. Although he’s only my nephew by marriage, I’m very much attached to him, even after that business about the box buried under the bath-house in Kazan. Oh, don’t you know about that? Well, remind me some other time . . . I must work out his cards now.’

  She gave me a beady look.

  ‘Don’t try to understand him. Men hate being understood. And he was always like that – always mysterious,’ she added. But I could have told her that. Once more the moment of revelation had eluded me.

  •

  Our Corsican evenings were often enlivened by the Tarot cards. When in the mood, the Countess told the fortune of anyone within sight – the other visitors, the chef, fetched in from the kitchen, or once again, our own family circle. She would hold forth on the cards’ mystic origin. They derived, she claimed, from Egyptian occultism, first brought from India by wandering Gipsies, who introduced them to Europe. Then the Traveller, who rarely accepted other people’s theories unchallenged, particularly those of women, would remind her the Gipsies were not known in Europe in any number before the fifteenth century, whereas the Tarot cards were in use as early as 1350. An uproar would ensue regularly, both of them behaving in a manner the English nannies of their Slavic childhood would not have tolerated for a moment. One particularly violent argument had arisen after Aunt Eudoxia had found an interesting old pack of Italian playing cards on a book-stall in Ajaccio, and had been laying them out before dinner in the manner of a mystical apéritif. She had, on this occasion, designated the Traveller as the Knave of Spades, when of course he saw himself as the King of Hearts.

  ‘Le Valet Moi? le Valet de Pique? You must be mad! Your own husband always said you were!’ Typhoons of ill-temper now rose round us till the Traveller, stamping his denials, kicked over the ever-present tchibouk. At which Aunt Eudoxia, livid beneath her rouge, for the thrust about her husband had pierced deep, flung the cards in his face and announced she was leaving in the morning.

  ‘And I shall take her with me,’ she hissed, stabbing in my direction. This threat was not to be taken lightly for, without her presence on the island, she knew my parents would not sanction my staying on.

  In reply, the Traveller seized the menu (the only one provided by the hotel) and tearing it to shreds, flung the particles after her, and hurled a tray of hors d’oeuvres variés to the ground. Aunt Eudoxia rushed to the reception desk, taking refuge behind the hall-porter and demanding the boat time-table. The knock-about nature of this scene was not apparent to Kamran or Sergei, who fled to the Tcherkess bar, while Hondof crouched shivering beneath the table.

  ‘Really! What a fuss about nothing! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!’ I heard my voice echoing generations of English nannies. Oddly it seemed to calm the furious Slavs for Aunt Eudoxia emerged from behind the reception desk and swept up to her room, making an exit worthy of Duse at her most tragic, while the Traveller sank into a basket-chair on the terrace, relaxed and purged, and wearing a seraphic smile. Suddenly, this sophisticated pair appeared to me as the over-excited, undisciplined children they must once have been. I saw them in a Moscow nursery, fighting over their toys, slavishly indulged by the old Russian nianya and sharply disciplined by their English nanny. ‘My little pigeons,’ sighs Matriona fondly, as the baby Traveller (at this age, his head is covered in dark curls) hits the pinafored Eudoxia over the nose with a piece of fire-wood lying beside the high white porcelain stove. Eudoxia yells, and takes a bite out of his neck (which emerges from a peasant-embroidered roubashka). The children have been fighting for possession of a carved wooden sleigh – it is the one which I now treasure – and soon, kicking and hitting, both are rolling on the floor, entangling themselves with the fringe of a crimson chenille tablecloth, so that Matriona’s sewing basket and a samovar (fortunately not lit) are brought down on top of them. At which Nanny Smithson (six years as under-nursemaid at Chatsworth and later head nurse in a Grand Ducal household) comes briskly into the room, a Mrs. Noah figure of starch and whalebone.

  ‘Goodness me! What’s all this about? What a to-do! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,’ she says, and with no more ado the struggling brats are separated, stuck into their high chairs and told not to be so silly.

  So now, in a Corsican hotel, the pattern was being repeated, the uproar quashed by my brisk nursery phrases. When, an hour or two later, harmony was restored, the Traveller and Aunt Eudoxia having apparently forgotten their differences in a common desire for dinner, it was found that dinner was off. The waiter, having spooned up the hors d’oeuvres variés from the floor, was now removing the cloths and salt cellars with an air of satisfaction, before vanishing.

  ‘Grandmama was right. It was the beginning of the end when the serfs were emancipated,’ sighed the Traveller, and the Countess agreed.

  •

  Kamran had disgraced himself, falling dead drunk across the tables at the Tcherkess bar where he had been fêting my eighteenth birthday in a traditional Russian manner. It was an old custom for an admirer to drink the lady’s health by downing the number of glasses of vodka which corresponded with the number of letters in her name Thus ‘Ann’ demanded only three glasses, but ‘Grushenka’, nine, and so on. The unfortunate Kamran had struggled gallantly through five of the six glasses my name required before succumbing. The Tcherkess colonel laughed uproariously for he had substituted extra large glasses for this celebration, which I thought most unfair, but Kamran had accepted the challenge and downed the first two at a gulp.

  It was a touching tribute, being so plainly designed to create
the Russian ambiance he knew I loved. I was entranced, but anxious. Such violence was nothing if not Russian. Sergei watched with a certain sulkiness; it would, he said, have been just the thing to gain the favours of Madame Pelletier – the Frenchwoman with whom he now spent most of his time.

  We had just succeeded in lugging Kamran back to the hotel when we encountered the Traveller, who was setting out to join us at the bar. For a Russian, he was always unsympathetic to hard drinking, but now he seemed unreasonably angry. I pleaded indulgence, but was met with a scowl.

  ‘It’s lucky for him you’re not called Elizaveta-Anastasia-Alexandra, like one of my mistresses when I was his age. I played the same fool’s game right to the end – twenty-seven glasses of vodka! The real stuff we used to have then, mind you, not the wish-wash you get here . . . But Kamran’s useless – he can’t even hold six glasses!’

  Seizing his unresisting son by the scruff of the neck he dragged him away. Kamran was not seen again that night, and when next day I went to his room to find out how he felt, the Traveller was impatient of my solicitude.

  ‘Let him alone. That will teach him.’

  ‘Teach him what?’

  ‘– Not to be so Russian. Now stop fussing over him, Miss.’

  •

  In Corsica we contrived to live becalmed: no letters and few newspapers reached us – nor was there, at that time, the intrusion of news-broadcasts. On the rare occasions when the Traveller came across newspapers he would dump them straight into the wastepaper basket.

  ‘As pointers to what we may expect from the future, I find them unnerving. I’d rather crystal-gaze, and see what I want to see . . . Or look back . . .’ His eyes narrowed to that stare which meant he was thinking Russia. This was my cue; soon we would be faraway together, safe in our own Slav limbo-land, playing the Run-Away Game, Magic of Magics . . .

  ‘Païdum! Let’s go!’ I pronounced the old formula.