Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  At one elegant hotel there was a very old wine-waiter, whose monkey-like features used to crease into a joyous, toothless grin whenever he saw the Traveller. It was difficult to believe that once he had been a Tzigane fiddler from Odessa, whose music had delighted some capricious Russian nobleman. He had been engaged to accompany the Prince on his travels. One fateful summer the Prince’s yacht had put into Monte Carlo harbour, where it had moored, lit from stem to stern each night, while the Prince gambled away his estates, his mistresses, his wife’s dowry, everything, except his Tzigane fiddler, though a number of his admirers offered a high price for him. When the last card had been played, and the last roulette wheel spun against him the Prince blew out his brains. The yacht was impounded and the crew repatriated. But the Tzigane fiddler stayed on at the hotel, going from table to table in the restaurant, his violin sobbing out its intimacies to enchanted or self-conscious diners. At last arthritis had put a stop to all that; but the old man remained to shuffle about with the wine-list. He was a favourite with successive maîtres d’hôtel, the Traveller explained; something about shady connections . . . Gipsy women were most efficient at procuring abortions. ‘Always handy to have people like that around in a big hotel,’ said the Traveller, patting the old man’s gnarled paw affectionately. They had, it seemed, known each other for many years.

  •

  The holiday was almost over, and summer done. Yet we lingered. I think all of us, in our different ways, sensed that never again should we have this moment of timeless well-being, becalmed between the past and the future. For the Traveller and myself this was an ideal state, as we drifted from a reality which seemed as unreal as that Russian limbo-land into which we sank with such nostalgic abandon. I have often thought, since, that Aunt Eudoxia must have been either a very unworldly woman or a very, very worldly one. Our preoccupation with each other appeared to have escaped her, although she was for ever urging Kamran and Sergei to go off and find their own amusements.

  ‘Boys of that age should be having affairs,’ she said firmly.

  ‘People of all ages,’ replied the Traveller with equal conviction.

  Sometimes the Traveller and I contrived to spend the day alone together, crossing into Italy for lunch at Ventimiglia or San Remo. It was only a day-excursion yet, to me, crossing the frontier seemed to invest it with the quality of a romantic evasion. The Traveller fostered this mood. At the Italian frontier, when sallow Romeo-like gendarmes requested our passports, he proffered his, a rather irregular-looking fold of paper which I had never been allowed to see, muttering, ‘and if they don’t like that one, I’ve others,’ a cloak-and-dagger remark I appreciated.

  Thus, in an atmosphere of high adventure and exploration, he, the blasé world traveller, and I, the apprentice, would climb the steep tunnelled streets of old San Remo searching for an ancient creature who remembered seeing Garibaldi or a place where they cooked seaweed patties . . . And the Traveller would give me advice by which I have profited, ever since.

  ‘Always explore a new town on an empty stomach,’ he would say. ‘It sharpens the vision.’ ‘Leave the main thoroughfare immediately.’ ‘Spend your time dawdling, or just sitting. Let the town come to you.’ ‘Forget monuments. Look at daily life first . . . it was this which made the men and events which the monuments commemorate.’

  San Remo’s Russian church, with its fish-scale, starred and coloured domes emerging from the surrounding palms, made the Traveller shudder, but to me it was all beauty, and I would drag him for a last lingering look, before we caught the train back to Menton.

  ‘Cheap and artificial,’ was his judgement. ‘Wait till you see Yaroslav, or the churches of Novgorod, or Sveti Ivan Voiina – St. Ivan the Warrior – near our old house in Moscow . . . Then you’ll see why all this sets my teeth on edge. C’est faux! Faux! like all that rich déraciné lot who made the Riviera their second home. Now they are émigrés in earnest. Serve them right. They used to snub Russia, never spoke Russian, spent as little time there as possible and cared nothing for its history, architecture and resources. For them, it was just a banking background – estates where their fortunes came from. Sickening lot, trading on their titles and their charm. And then, cashing-in on nice little soul-saving chapels, like this one, where they could corner their patron saints and buy forgiveness for gambling away their birthright.’

  •

  Along the cypress-bordered paths that wind through the old cemetery, high above the frontier bay of Garavan, the Traveller and I would clear away the brambles, bitter-smelling lentisque and rosemary which choked the tombs gathered round the little blue-domed, gold-starred Russian chapel where so many Russians are buried, so far from home. Here lies . . . Until the Day Breaks . . . I would spell out the Kyrillic inscriptions laboriously. At which the Traveller would become impatient:

  ‘Hurry up! Talk about the quick and the dead! Can’t you be quicker than that after all this time? If you want to be married in a Russian church you’ll have to get all the responses pat. In fact, you’ll have to be converted to Orthodoxy. I don’t believe you’ve made any progress since I first taught you our alphabet. You were seven. You had measles at the time, don’t you remember?’

  ‘Of course I do. Those soft L’s and hard L’s and signs at the end of a word, and your D being our G and our H your N, besides all those totally different letters. It was much easier learning to count in Yakute.’

  He pulled me close. ‘What a lot of odd things I’ve taught you.’ Now he was pushing me down across a stone slab, lichen-spotted and overgrown with feathery creepers. Above my head the gold-starred blue cupola shimmered in the heat haze.

  ‘You can’t! Not here!’ I was scandalized.

  ‘Why not? D’you find it uncomfortable or immoral – or both? I see I haven’t taught you to be free of all those idiotic conventions yet. You don’t suppose the dead care? Unless they envy us.’

  ‘But we might be seen . . .’

  ‘Up here, in the heat of the day? The French don’t sight-see or mourn at lunch time – they’ve other things to do. They’re all eating or rolling about on comfortable beds or sofas, behind closed shutters just now. They don’t care for le pique-nique – not this sort, anyhow.’

  When, later, we returned to the old town, we generally found Aunt Eudoxia installed in the depths of a café reading Tauchnitz editions of Robert Hitchen’s novels – ‘so good for my English’ – and puffing at her tchibouk (which she carried about with her in a kind of nose-bag made of Roumanian peasant embroidery), quite impervious to the gaping locals. Then the Traveller played chess with his sons, while I sipped apricot brandy. This was considered harmless, because of its excessive sweetness. Besides, Hondof liked it, licking his chops as his lolling pink tongue explored the glass which the Traveller snatched from me to indulge the dog.

  In those days the little restaurants and cafés centred round the more unfashionable Mediterranean ports were not yet given over to plastic and strip lighting – worse still, to photographic murals. They still had their own distinctive idiom of decoration; marble-topped tables, mirrors and frescoed walls in an Italianate idiom depicting some blue gulf ornamented with a toy-like yellow port, where red-capped Neapolitans crowded the jetty dancing the tarantella or playing the guitar, or congregated under vine-wreathed arbours – the whole mellowed to a sticky amber tone by the fumes of a thousand thousand tables d’hôte.

  Here, the diner could round off his meal by calling for a café cognac and the newspapers, which used to be presented furled on to cane batons, a practical arrangement, now obsolete, for today we are fed the news by loud-mouthed radio bulletins or flickering television screens.

  Sitting beside the Traveller in such cafés, the evening calm broken only by the rattle of dominoes and the Damier goblets or the hoarse voices of the habitués, playing belotte, I would trace the halcyon landscapes that adorned the walls. Charming scenes; but why were there never any restaurants with murals depicting the frozen north at its most picturesq
ue? Russian boîtes de nuit in Paris, said the Traveller, would disappoint me. They relied solely on the costumes of the waiters, embroidered roubashkas and the like. I recalled my one excursion into this world of nocturnal festivity. Certainly the setting for the Tziganes in Passy had been without any concessions to the picturesque. I longed to see the same innocent technique of wall-painting which flourished in the south applied to a Northern scene; golden domes sparkling through a snow-storm, princes winging along in troïkas, peasants and bears dancing a gopak.

  •

  ‘Too many Russians here – the wrong sort,’ said the Traveller, casting a jaundiced eye over the coquettishly pretty little bay where we had at last come to a standstill in an old fashioned hotel and were now lunching. By the wrong sort, he meant the kind which bored him, those who talked incessantly about returning to liberate Russia from the wicked Red clutches. Our polyglot party – of Russian, Montenegrin, Kirghiz, Georgian and English origins – aroused the liveliest curiosity among other visitors along the coast. The French, as usual displayed no curiosity; we were merely les étrangers. They shrugged us off; but we enjoyed listening to the speculations of others as to our racial origins and relationship. Sergei upset both the management of the hotel and a number of guests by telling some pressing Belgians that we were a circus troupe from the U.S.S.R. and kept our performing boa constrictors upstairs. ‘We do not bring them to the dining-room, but if you would like to see them . . .?’ The Belgians left that night, and there was a good deal of uneasiness among the rest of the visitors, who appeared to find both of Sergei’s statements equally alarming, so that the Manager coldly suggested we might prefer to move elsewhere. But the Traveller calmed him down and we stayed on.

  ‘Because it reminds me of the Krim,’ he said with finality, and Aunt Eudoxia agreed. ‘Although our Montenegrin coast below Cattaro was really lovelier, and far more wild, which seems to be what you like best,’ she said, turning an unsympathetic eye in my direction. She herself craved cities, chic night life, all the things our holiday did not provide. She had travelled little, beyond her own Balkanic and Russian perimeter and only once visited London, which had disappointed her, particularly the Crystal Palace – still a landmark of Southern London at that time – ‘but not a patch on the Winter Palace, one must admit,’ she said, turning to the Traveller for corroboration, and deaf to my explanations that the Crystal Palace housed dog-shows or agricultural exhibits, rather than Royalty. It was a Palace and, to her, a sub-standard one.

  ‘Thinking Krim,’ I would float off-shore in the turquoise shallows, then uncorrupted by those ‘attractions’ later to be imposed. No floats, snack-bars, or pédalos affronted the eye at that time; no roar of an outboard motor-boat towing shrieking water-skiers shattered the ear. I would look landward at the steep encircling hills silvered with olive groves (undefiled by blocks of cement and steel apartment houses), rising to the crags of the passes above the Italian frontier, where the smugglers did a brisk trade above, rather than under the noses of the gendarmerie. Little pink and yellow villas were dotted about the lower slopes, embedded in luscious foliage, feathery palms, plumbago, trumpet vines and the heavy-belled datura. The old town climbed the hill-side and was topped by the blue cupola of the tiny Russian chapel, its gold stars and crosses glinting through the dark spears of the Cyprus trees. The whole panorama had precisely that Southern felicity which enraptured Schredin, the nineteenth century Russian landscape painter, on his Mediterranean excursions; his paintings are romantic, meticulous, and quite unfashionable; but, fortunately, still prized in the U.S.S.R.

  Yet however charming this scene spread out before me, it was not, and could never be, the landscape of my heart’s desire. It was useless to count my blessings, to compare it favourably with the wind-swept beaches and bracing dips of my home land. Nor to reflect that in this halcyon bay I should be spared an encounter with those terrifying water-snakes, five or six feet in length, knotted together hideously, floating on the surface, sunning and hissing, as the Traveller had seen them along the shores of the Caspian. Black Sea or Caspian or even the hostile Sea of Aral, I thought, would have meant more to me than these pellucid waters. Yet here the sun was as strong, the water as blue – brighter, even, and the mountains and valleys almost identical with so much of the Crimea . . . His Krim! Would it ever be ours? Overcome with longing I would plunge my head underwater and then, with bursting lungs and choking emotion, surface, to tread water furiously, telling myself it is the Krim. It is! Magic of magics! I am there! But my magic was not strong enough to overcome the shrill badinage of French bathers kissing self-consciously as they swam past. And thinking how a few fur-capped Tartar fishermen chanting their minor melodies, and a mosque or two would have improved the day, I paddled ashore, as usual losing present sunlight for shadowy illusions.

  •

  The mistral had raged for a week, as if trying to drive us away. All night the waves surged against the rocks uneasily, and the October moon came and went behind scudding clouds. We were beginning to pack. Kamran and Sergei were as overcast as the skies. Hondof was to be left behind. Paris could not provide the sort of freedom he needed. A happy home had been found for him with an old Russian couple – he had been a general in the Caucasus, and she now served teas from their little cabin perched on the side of the steep track up to the Annonciade Monastery, set high in the hills behind Men ton. We knew Hondof would have loving care with them and all the hills and valleys to roam. Already, the General’s wife was setting aside the best of her home-made cakes for him rather than reserving them for the rare customers. Still, all of us dreaded the parting.

  Kamran was to continue his architectural studies at Grenoble, while Sergei was to rejoin his mother in Brussels. Both these programmes appeared repugnant to them. Even Aunt Eudoxia, who had fretted for city life, now complained she would have nothing to wear and must look for a job.

  ‘Or a husband?’ suggested the Traveller, at which she sighed tragically.

  ‘At my age? Don’t be ridiculous. Why, I remember in Montenegro a woman of thirty was of no more account.’

  The Traveller smiled slyly. ‘Let me remind you that it was Lenin who said the greatest crime for anyone was to be over fifty-five. Perhaps you’ll agree with him, for once?’

  Although the Traveller remained non-committal as ever over his own plans, my happiness was replaced by vague forebodings. Partings were in the air. Partings and renunciations. The Traveller had not told me, but he had at last concocted a letter to my parents breaking it to them that we contemplated marriage. Their reply came in the form of a telegram. I was to return immediately.

  ‘And not talk such nonsense – I can hear them saying it. I can’t bear it, after all this.’

  ‘Darling, you must, for a while. We jumped our fences. It wasn’t difficult to become your lover but it would be very difficult to become your husband, at present. Don’t you see, you’re under age. They can do what they choose about you till you’re twenty-one – you can’t dispute their authority. They can even send you back to the convent. They could probably send me to prison for what I’ve done. It’s wiser to wait a little while – just a few months more. Don’t forget, this is Europe – and you live in an Anglo-Saxon world. I can’t organize one of those steeple-chase abductions like the nomads of Central Asia, though no doubt that’s what you’d enjoy. No Miss, my darling. I shan’t change – I don’t think you will either. But they will, once they get used to the idea that you are grown up. You must give them time. You must give me time, too . . . there are other difficulties . . .’ His face was sombre, but he did not expand on the nature of his problems, which, I sensed, would take him away from me once again.

  ‘You’ll go away – you always do.’

  ‘Yes – but I’ll come back – I always do.’

  He tried to console me, talking Siberia, talking Russia, playing the old Run-Away Game.

  ‘Shall we take a boat down the Volga? Shall we go and dine in one of the little Armenian res
taurants overlooking the river, in Tiflis? I know! We’re at Alupkha, where the Worontzov palace hangs over the water; it’s very like this . . . the same cyprus trees, the same sound of the sea . . . Yes, Pussinka, I know the French Riviera is without interest to you – to me, too – but let’s pretend the Black Sea is out there (it can be terribly rough) and those lights bobbing about are the boats of Tartar fishermen. That’s better! Tomorrow we’ll go to one of their villages you always wanted to see. You remember,’ he coaxed, ‘the little bay where the Tartar beauties used to come down to bathe, wading in, wearing baggy pink trousers that ballooned up round them.’

  ‘– and their dozens of black plaits floated on the water like strands of seaweed,’ I finished.

  It was one of my favourite images, but I was not to be consoled.

  ‘Poor little Termite,’ said the Traveller, returning to nursery endearments, but kissing me passionately, in a sort of voluptuous counterpoint. Continuing our journey into the mind’s eye he promised me Bakhtchi-Serai.

  ‘The Khan’s Palace?’

  ‘If you like. Anywhere you like, tonight.’

  ‘Pushkin’s Fountain then –’

  ‘– The Fountain of Tears? Oh, Pussinka!’

  He kissed me reproachfully.

  The wind buffeted round, and the palms rattled against the shutters which banged fitfully. I went to close them, and felt a fine, driving rain on my hands. Suddenly it was the French Riviera again, shoddy and meaningless, as only it can be, when it no longer basks. I began to cry.

  ‘I hate this place. I hate the Côte d’Azur. I don’t care if it is like the Krim. I don’t want that, either. I only want us to be together in a snow-storm . . . together in our Trans-Siberian train.’