PART FOUR
BRIDGE OF CLAY
The Thames goes under London Bridge,
This year, like last
The present turns to past.
It’s day then night then day while I
Watch the Thames go by.
Lift your fingers and touch mine:
We make a bridge in air.
You and I stood here
This year, last year, and every day
Building a bridge of clay.
Building a bridge of silver and gold:
Love dissolves and is washed away.
Washed away like wood and clay.
London Bridge has fallen down
We thought we’d built in stone.
Silver and gold are stolen away;
London’s dark and daylight’s gone;
Our hands have fallen away.
With you and now without you I
Watch the years go by.
Laurence Lerner
CHAPTER XI
Next winter, I lost the Traveller, and so learned to look back, a practice which time perfects. No one knew what had become of my Asiatic love, neither his sons, nor Aunt Eudoxia, nor anyone who had known him, could give me news. He left me, as casually as ever, on one of those sudden departures which had become an accepted pattern. My parents had insisted there should be no further talk of marriage for at least a year. They had been less strict than I had anticipated, appearing to dismiss the question as some kind of childish make-believe: which perhaps it was, so that our project in no way disrupted their friendship with the Traveller; but then, of our expedition to Dijon they still remained in happy ignorance. My mother’s attitude towards me seemed to have changed subtly; it was difficult to define precisely. I sometimes caught her eyeing me speculatively, but she did not ask for my confidences. Perhaps she knew she would not have them. Ours was a singularly detached family. I knew little of my parents’ life, and nothing of their family background: they might almost have qualified for the state of born orphan-hood.
Lulled by this interim period, as I regarded it, I laid no particular stress on the Traveller’s comings and goings. ‘I’ll come back, I always do.’ He had said it so often that I came to believe it, as I believed in the rising and setting of the sun. Thus I do not recall the manner of our last farewell; for I did not, and perhaps he did not, recognize it as such. I had learned not to ask him where he was going – but I seem to remember asking if he would be gone long, to which he replied with the old convenient formula. ‘It’s all according . . .’ Perhaps, like Byron, he believed all good-byes should be sudden ones.
And so, stepping cat-like-soft down the street in his Torghut boots, his overcoat flung over his shoulders, he went out of our lives. To all of us, he remained a creature of mystery, remote and fabulous, like his Asiatic background.
•
On a shining morning in May, a week or so before my twenty-first birthday, a packet was left at our door. ‘For the young lady,’ said the bearer, leaving no name. I was out at the time and none of my questionings ever obtained any further details from Mrs. Cork, the char, who had opened the door.
‘Just one of them foreigners,’ was all I could elicit.
The packet, done up in scrubby brown paper, revealed further wrapping of printed pink calico. Inside was a small and very beautiful prayer-rug from Samarkand. It was folded round an eighteenth-century silver-cased ikon. I recognized it as the one which had been the ikon of the house in the Traveller’s Paris quarters. With these treasures was a shiny-covered black note-book, and a letter in the Traveller’s longed-for handwriting. It bore no date and no address, and was written in pencil on a page torn from the note-book.
‘I do not know if this will reach you in time for your twenty-first birthday – 21 – three times seven Magic of Magics!’ he wrote ‘or indeed if it will ever find you, Pussinka Moiya. What I send is to remind you of that Russia we shared. You will find other prayer rugs and ikons on your way. You love them and they will always come to you. I too love you, but I cannot come to you any more. Don’t ask me to explain. Now you will have to play our Run-Away Game alone. We shall never make that journey on the Trans-Siberian which was your favourite day-dream. To want anything so much is unwise – it gives fate a chance to hurt you – a chance fate seldom misses. The train, as I knew it, is gone. There are new landmarks and new passengers all along the route. Sverdlovsk, Magnitogorsk, Asbestos – all tell of wonderful achievements and human endeavours, but the Traveller’s Train you believed in is no more. The last time I made the journey in your way, the way you wanted it to be, was before you were born. Right up to the Revolution something of the legendary flavour remained. You believed in it – you had this idée fixe, and no doubt you were meant to make it then. But as I so often told you, there was an accident in time. The idea of my taking a child on such an expedition seemed too complicated. All that fuss about warm underwear, the right food and getting to bed early . . . After all, you were only about six or seven. But I was wrong. I should have hidden you in a valise and vanished! It is not the conventions which are too strong. It is we who are too weak. You knew best, my little Douraka. You should have made the journey then. It was the last moment to have tasted its full romantic flavour. And it might have led you where you meant to go. Subconsciously you must have felt that. The young have instincts which are far more sure than all our mature reasonings. Who knows what you were meant to find en route, or where it might have led us, later? Even at your age, it must have had some part to play in your life. Now it is too late. We have both missed sharing that particular moment of time and place.
Soon, no one will ever make the journey any more or even recall how it was. Aeroplanes will take its place and fly over the disused tracks. Even if the train still runs, its character will have changed. Its passengers and its landmarks will be entirely new. I made the Trans-Sib journey so many times, that it became part of my life. This note-book will speak especially to you. It contains some things that were to be part of a book I was always meaning to write. They were made at a time when each journey would have been, for you, a journey deeper into your heart’s desire. For us, together, our Gallantry Bower achieved.
Ah! que nos desirs sont sans remède . . . You always hated my quoting that. You never learned to accept fate. I don’t think you ever will. Perhaps it might be better if the journey remained as a journey into your mind’s eye. As someone or other said: granting our wish is one of Fate’s saddest jokes. I am sad not to have made the journey with you, moyia doushinka, ‘my Nursery Traveller but like our marriage, it was not written. Remember, Rhodopé ‘there are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices that are not soon mute, however tuneful. There is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.” That’s Landor. (But I quote from memory.) Now it is time for the Traveller and his Tales to go out of your life, and for you to begin your own journeys. The Turkish people say farewell beautifully. Guleyh, they say – Go with a smile.
There was a postscript:
‘Be kind to Kamran and Sergei if ever they come back into your life.’
The warm sunlight that fell across the page faded; suddenly everything had turned cold and grey.
‘No. No message – just the presents,’ I told my parents, trying to appear casual. I could not share my letter, and I could not bear them to speak of him or know how much I mourned him.
‘So we are no wiser,’ said my father.
I never told of the note-book, either. But in secret, I used to take it from its hiding-place under my hats in the Russian-disguised dolls’ house, to play the Run-Away Game, making over and over again, that magic journey into my heart’s desire – alone.
•
As time passed, and the certitude of my loneliness became apparent to me, I noticed that all which had seemed real in myself was lost, with him. With his disappearance, part of myself had vanished too. What was left did not belong
to the setting in which it remained. I had been formed in a mould of his creation, and all my longings and instincts were now fixed on some remote and seemingly unobtainable world – his – which I was determined to reach.
With a blank face concealing my anguish, I would listen to my parents speculating on his probable fate . . . They had obstinately refused to take our projected marriage seriously, and now seemed equally obtuse concerning my emotions. Killed – ‘somewhere over there . . .’ trapped, on some dangerous mission . . . Counter-espionage. Always, the whispered label: agent provocateur . . .? Somebody wildly suggested he could have been a tsaiking, or Taoist brother, at large in the world, and apparently of it, but in truth, only there to accomplish some special mission, and one who must ultimately return to his monastery.
I saw him in another guise, father of all bandits, grown more Asiatic-looking, a wisp of grizzled beard on his parchment chin, the narrow eyes still narrower against the biting winds of Asia, for of course he was there – no Europe, or even a European grave, could have held him, I knew. I saw him riding out on a shaggy little Mongolian horse, wrapped in a padded caftan, leading some unexplained foray – for – against? — he was always against authority, no matter what. Or was he simply becalmed in fatalism, following the pattern of his ancestry; waiting. . .? Waiting for life to pass? Yet his spirit seemed as ardent as ever, always beside me, luring me deeper into the horizons of my desire.
Somewhere there, he was; and I must find him. He would still be spinning his marvellous web, but telling, now, of a softer, western world which he had shared with me. I saw him, telling of a window on the river at Richmond, of walks in Kensington Gardens, and of firelight flickering on a nursery ceiling. Seen from Siberia these things would have assumed an inverted exoticism.
Just as once he used to tell me the names of the Hordes, the great Asiatic dynasties, the Djaghataídes or Timourides and their territories – nectar to my imagination – so now he might be holding a circle of Asiatics spellbound as he reeled off the names of London’s Underground stations – mighty-sounding names for vast, echoing subterranean ways where British hordes swept down and were carried far beneath the earth to emerge elsewhere: Hammersmith, Earls Court, or Potter’s Bar. No doubt even Metro-land sounded sonorous, from Siberia.
I imagined him there, somewhere near the Mongol frontiers, crouched in a Kirghiz yurt, pushing aside some yak-fat delicacy to tell of crumpet teas. Telling his niece, the now grown-up Sofka Andreievna (she who had aroused my envy by tales of her six-foot birthday sturgeon) of an English child’s midsummer birthday-party under the elm trees, tables piled with jam-puffs, brandy-snaps and a pink and white-icing birthday-cake.
‘Brandee snaps? Shto eta takoe?’ asks Sofka Andreievna languidly. She is sitting on a bundle, beside the grass-grown tracks of the Trans-Siberian railway. She has become a bundle, herself, for the child of Omsk has become a woman of thirty or more. She wears a sheepskin-lined overcoat buttoned awry, a handkerchief tied over her head, peasant-fashion, in the hopes it will conceal the fact she is not one; that she still has an arshins’ length of fine pearls sewn into her corset. She has a long pale face, and the same slit eyes as her uncle, but hers are a pale green. Together, uncle and niece stare out across emptiness for that faint smudge of smoke which will tell of the great train’s approach.
It no longer keeps any schedule. Would-be passengers camp beside the track, sleeping round their treasured samovar, patient in the hope of being able to climb aboard . . . one day . . . It goes so slowly, now, that this is easy; but it is always crowded to suffocation. Passengers even hang outside, clutching the door-handles, falling off, in winter, as their hands freeze. Their bodies lie there, frozen stiff as the huge birthday sturgeon, until spring suns come to thaw them, and rot them. People are sprouted all over the roof of the train and jammed in beside the engine-driver. Sometimes a band of nomad fighters gallop their little horses alongside the train in wonder, or in hatred, cutting down anyone they can reach, believing that all are enemies, all invaders of their territory, wicked Russian aristos or the latest Red oppressors.
‘Mark my words, those Bolshies have got him,’ said Nanny, who had long since retired to run a babies’ pension at Bognor, but still visited us, and took a keen interest in disaster.
‘Got him? Possibly. But in what sense?’ asked my father. Unlike Nanny he was aware of aspects of the Traveller’s nature and beliefs, which made it quite as probable that he was alive, somewhere in Central Asia, and working towards that millennium in which, oddly, his cynical soul believed. Or had his cynicism only been a camouflage – something which concealed his true self from that Europe in which, at heart, he remained an alien? So while all the Russias – and his Siberia, were re-forming, moving towards their destiny, I would ask myself where my own pygmy, all-absorbing pattern was to be played out?
•
While St. Theresa of Avila pronounced that our desires are without remedy, Balzac described desire as a memory that hopes. All my youth, I desired and was groping nostalgically for a land and a people very far from my London roots. It was as if I felt myself to be moving forward into the past, approaching my own moment in time, which was remote from the present.
To me, it has always seemed that each individual has such a moment. It is a fixed point in eternity, varying with each person, which they reach, sooner or later, in their trajectory through time. It is this moment which most perfectly expresses them, and to which essentially they belong, in which they live most fully. Both before and after, some awareness of this lies within them, so that in varying degrees of consciousness, they are seeking that moment in order to be fulfilled, or to find again in that fulfilment and setting, the persons who shared it with them.
•
Through the Traveller and his Tales I had glimpsed that moment which for me must be set in Russia, though in what conditions I cannot tell. Am I looking forward, or back? Perhaps it is yet to come, in some vast industrial centre of the Siberian steppes. Or it has already been – in the dark, low-ceilinged rooms of some medieval Moscow-merchant’s house where the women sat all day at their spinning and outside the tiny windows the ravens strutted in the snow. Equally, it could be compassed by some peasant izba, reeking of tallow candles and fish soup. A lifetime or a moment is all the same; a whole cycle lived richly, or thinly, or one day. Each can prove to have been the meaning of a life. We cannot know, from where we stand. But if we seek, and are aware we have missed the moment we seek, our own absolute moment in time, then we live out our lives unfulfilled. In the words of an eastern proverb: we die with our eyes open – we cannot rest; even in death we are still looking for it.
CHAPTER XII
A silence, absolute and tomb-like, had fallen round the Traveller’s name, I could not speak of him and, soon, no one spoke of him to me. His sons and Aunt Eudoxia, they too had vanished; the few letters I sent them were returned to sender, Reluctantly I began to come to terms with life around me, pursuing the outwardly conformist Anglo-Saxon pattern of my life. But beneath the façade of conventional interests I was groping eastward, flinging myself towards all things Russian. My youthful passion had crystallized into an adult obsession. I was entirely possessed by a shade and his setting and I sought, wherever I was and with whoever I might be, to recapture something of that particular climate I had known, beside the Traveller.
‘Every woman should marry three times’ had been one of his dictums, which he often impressed on me. ‘Marry first for love – get it out of your system – next for money – get that into your pocket and then, marry for pleasure, which has nothing whatever to do with love or money.’ At the time I thought this a puzzling statement, but in perspective, I see it contains much truth. An early marriage which I had recklessly contracted outside the charmed Slav circle was naturally doomed and soon perished unmourned. Henceforth, friends, lovers, all the emotional va-et-vient of my life remained centred round my national preoccupations.
But no one stood the test of comparis
on to the Traveller. Perhaps they might recall some of the same horizons, tell of some similar background even; speak with something of the same smoky tones, or possess the narrow, slanted eyes of the Tartar: but they came and went in my life leaving little or no mark. ‘Things remain when people go,’ the Traveller had said. Thus I set the scene scrupulously à la Russe, eating Russian food off the few pieces of Russian Empire porcelain I had collected. Beside me, on a charming old painted table representing the Kremlin at sunset, the little brass samovar the Traveller had given me on my fourteenth birthday hummed companionably, competing with recordings of exclusively Russian music.
Those few non-Russians who were admitted – admirers, perhaps, whose advances I favoured – were often severely tested by my versions of Russian cooking, pickled fish in sour cream, or rissoles, which I called bitky, and kasha, which to them was porridge. I recall one suitor who carelessly reached up from the sofa and lit his cigarette at the lamp which burned before the ikon. It was the Traveller’s Siberian ikon, now the Ikon of the House. Double sacrilege! He had defiled the Sacred Image and also the memory of the Traveller. He was thrown out, never to return. Others, more mindful of my mania, were nevertheless compelled to shout their endearments above recordings of Chastoushki – the shrill peasant songs of provincial Russia, which are delivered with a particularly piercing exuberance. Or they would be required to listen with bated breath to entire operas, Roussalka, A Life for the Tzar, Shostakovich’s latest symphony, or any other national manifestation which only too plainly distracted me from themselves.
The men about my house – for so I was arrogant enough to regard most of them, rather than as the men in my life – were generally Slavs – Russians: although Serbs were sometimes admitted. Poles were, somehow, a world apart – not my world – and I resented the influence some of this nation had exercised over the Marquis de Custine, tingeing those astute yet prejudiced views he records in his Voyage en Russie en 1839.
Journey Into the Mind's Eye Page 18