When at the end of the season the company vanished for the more refulgent ambiance of Monte Carlo a certain bleakness descended on my spirits. I was then living in Albany, working on a glossy magazine and encouraged by the management to pursue what they called ‘Gracious Living’ both in my work and train de vie. This state of ‘gracious living’ I preferred to label good-gracious living, and I always sought ways of escape. The Ballet, not yet having become entirely absorbed by the arch-exponents of such living, was one of my principal means. Alas! with its departure, I could no longer steal away from ‘gracious’ gatherings to find bliss among the steamer-trunks and squalors of the Bloomsbury lodgings. Love and entrechâts had to be replaced by more sober expressions of my Russophilia.
Happily these were not lacking. No distance across London in an overcrowded bus seemed too arduous after my day’s work if, at the end, I found a roomful of Russian intellectuals thrashing out some remote subject. As the bus ground its way north or south (for they were generally centred in these two unfashionable zones, in considerable discomfort, it must be said), my heart would lighten, for I knew that soon I should hear the sort of talk, on the sort of subjects I craved. Merejkovsky’s strange book on Gogol and the Devil; Belinski’s effect on his contemporaries; the poems of Anna Akhmatova; or those of Blok or Essenine – for in the matter of poetry, no political prejudice existed.
With every jerk of the bus I drew nearer to this elusive realm. We passed the bright-lit streets, the crowds surging up Shaftesbury Avenue, bent on their pleasure, the shop-windows full of black lace underwear and pornographic merchandise; and the strident glare of the theatres faded as we took a more sombre route through Seven Dials towards St. Pancras, Islington or Hoxton. This was the London immortalized by Cruikshank in his illustrations to Dickens or the Comic Almanack – a scene at once seedy and sinister. Now only an occasional greenish glow from an antiquated gas-bracket shone through a fan-light over a once elegant door, while lonely cats sidled round area railings. There were few people in the silent streets and crescents: it was London City’s urban suburbs, a submerged area, becalmed in the stillness which fell, each evening, as the workers left their offices and headed for the outer suburbs, and the green belt. Housing shortages had not yet predisposed the more eclectic Londoners to abandon ‘their’ London (which in the ‘thirties generally meant a mews flat in Mayfair, or S.W. 7), for some artfully restored Regency or very early Victorian house in the areas of which I write. No sugar-pink or lime-green doors or window-boxes broke the frowzy façades. Here many of the exiles had gone to earth, shuttling backwards and forwards to the British Museum Reading Room, where their sporadic work on translations or research kept them long hours, poring over the stacks, a stale bun stuffed among their notebooks to sustain them on the long walk home at twilight.
None of my Russian friends owned cars; some could not afford even a bus or underground ticket. They walked everywhere. Taxis simply did not come into their sphere of comprehension or else were regarded as Babylonian luxury, a point of view my own financial state led me to share. Taxis were to me something to be used with extreme caution – in a crisis or for a dressed-up outing, which these Islington evenings most certainly were not. But no doubt had I started on the downward path of taxi-addiction early, my reading would have suffered. So many hours were spent profitably, on long bus rides, plunged into pocket editions of the classics. The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, My Past, My Thoughts, six volumes, each conveniently scaled for carrying in the handbag, were my most regular accompaniment.
Wonderful, illuminating Herzen! Would I have loved and known him so well, except for the London transport system? Lurching and strap-hanging in the Underground’s rush hour he kept me company. I was beside him in his Moscow, listening to the old Princess’s tales or Belinski’s outbursts. I was in Nice when Ogaryov betrayed him. I was his confidante, sharing his lonely exile in Viatka . . . As the No 27 bus ground its way out to Richmond, it was always taking me to Cholmondeley House, where Herzen and his young son are passionately vowing themselves, at midnight, to the cause of Freedom. The heights of Hampstead become the Sparrow Hills, where, looking down on Moscow, the young Herzen is again invoking Freedom and vowing to avenge the Dekabrists. Herzen would have found many to help among the exiles I knew – exiled by that very Revolution he had desired so ardently, and for which his journal, The Bell, fought so vigorously.
Herzen has always seemed as real to me as any of my Russian friends and it would have been no surprise had I found him among those I visited so regularly, the bearded Titan dominating some basement flat, talking, talking, far into the night.
It was then, with a mounting sense of excitement such as I never knew on more elegant occasions, that I would at last reach some dilapidated doorstep and, peering down the area into the basement (the cheapest, and therefore the part generally occupied by the exiles), glimpse, through the carelessly drawn curtains, this pale agitated circle, all arguing vehemently, their gestures and voices in such robust contrast to their drawn faces. As I stood there on the threshold of bliss, snatches of their talk would resound up the damp-streaked stone steps, tantalizing snatches, so that the steps, the doorway and the whole dingy street seemed suddenly suffused with a golden blaze – the light of knowledge and desire.
In this forcing-house my appreciation of Russian literature and music bloomed with tropical exuberance, and presently I joined a Society for Cultural Relations between the U.S.S.R. and Britain, an organization which fostered lectures, art exhibitions and the exchange of films. It was, I believe, an earnest and innocent venture. In the matter of films, at that time, the cultural scales were heavily weighted on the Russian side; the players in The Childhood of Gorky, or Tcherkassov as Ivan the Terrible tipping them heavily against Anna Neagle as Nell Gwynn, or even Laurence Olivier as Nelson. But these latter performances were more generally appreciated, and my puny efforts to widen the pioneering work of the Academy Cinema programmes (then, except for the Film Society programmes and the Workers’ Film Society, London’s only means of seeing Russian films) were foredoomed. Letters I sent out urging my friends and acquaintances to join me in various excursions into the Slav cinema met with little or chilling response. Perhaps it had been a mistake to use the Cultural Society’s writing paper. The scarlet embossed hammer and sickle were generally mal vu.
Many years later (in the fifties), I found a left-over packet of this invidious writing paper among my affairs which had followed me out to America, where my husband and I were then en poste. I remember how much I enjoyed using it up, the heading struck through with an apparently careless stroke, when I had occasion to write to those few of my American acquaintances whom I knew to be admirers of the all-puissant Senator Joe McCarthy. But this was not in the best tradition of diplomacy, and the writing paper had to be consigned to the dustbin. I hope it caused no embarrassment to the dustman.
CHAPTER XVI
I had never altogether given up hope of finding the Traveller again, or at least coming on traces of him or his sons. Sergei might have gone to America, seeking the proverbial pot of gold, but not Kamran. And their father was of quite other clay. Since he had always seemed surrounded by mystery and drama, I believed him to be somewhere in Russia – in Siberia, or in the Mongolian wastes, and now unable to communicate or leave. How otherwise could he not have come back to me? (This theory I found far more acceptable than any possibility of rejection, something I could not even consider.)
So, since for the present further journeys to the U.S.S.R. were too expensive, too difficult to achieve, I learned to content myself with more conventional travels, the picture-postcard Europe that I did not want, that I was always comparing unfavourably with the Asia for which I lusted. And near at hand, there was Paris, where so many of my old Russian friends now lived and where I always hoped there would be, one day, someone who would throw some light on the Traveller’s disappearance. But they seemed unwilling to co-operate or to discuss him even, and I met with blank stares
or a non-committal shrug. Fearful of some revelation which, nevertheless, I sought, I never pressed them, but was for ever moving among them as it were on tip-toe, my ear to an invisible key-hole, eager for some passing allusion. But it was clear they avoided discussing him, with me as among themselves.
Where the apple reddens never pry, lest we lose our Eden, Eve and I.
Browning’s lines, spoken in the Traveller’s smoky voice, came back to me. Although my Eden was lost with him it was wiser to leave him unsought, where he had vanished, in that half-formed world of my desires. There sometimes we still seemed to meet, to steal away together, through a picture-frame or by means of a magic pass-word, into the boundless horizons of the Run-Away Game. Païdum! Païdum my love!
Gradually, the ranks of émigrés were thinning. Wrangel’s men had dispersed; the old were dying off, some went to end their days in the Russian colony of Ste, Geneviève des Bois and were seen no more about the city. Mosjoukine had died, after a painful decline; the arch-seductor was said at the end to be picking up a meal or a drink as a partner at thé dansants. In the Orthodox churches of Paris, the cathedral, like the little place of worship in the Rue de Crimée, the faces were changing, sharpening, for many of the younger generation had married among the French. The rich Slav blood was thinning. There were still a number of Russian taxi drivers, berets crammed low over their unmistakable flat Slav features which proclaimed their origin as clearly as their furry R’s. But Paris too was changing; was beginning to abandon itself to the post-Hemingway invasion, finding there was a lot to be said for the dollar.
Few Russian emigrés wished to hear anything I had to recount of the new Russia. They could not accept the fact that it existed – much less that it progressed: it seemed almost indelicate to insist, and was simpler to dwell, with them, entirely in the past.
At the end of a narrow sunless cul-de-sac, le Passage des Trois Sapins, was a small hotel of unimaginable squalor. Here old, brave, desolate Madame Sapojnikov had found refuge, wedging herself into a small room on the sixth floor, taking in dress-making, which she did very well and cheaply. She had run her own maison de couture in Moscow; but that was long ago. Now only her needle and thread and her skill, salvaged from the débâcle, attracted a few clients, impoverished fellow-exiles and some ruthless, bargain-hunting French, petits bourgeois who were prepared to suffer the six flights of greasy dark stairs where, on every landing, a noisome privy was in constant use by the shuffling, unbuttoned or peignoir’d inmates of the hotel.
I too accepted these disadvantages, attracted not only by Madame Sapojnikov’s skill and prices but also by the purely Dostoievskian atmosphere prevailing. It needed no stretch of imagination to believe oneself back in one of those quarters of St. Petersburg where Dostoievsky sets so many of his most wonderful scenes; streets in which I had wandered, imagining, re-peopling them, re-living each scene, when I had first visited Leningrad and sought out those desolate areas beyond the Haymarket where, in Dostoievsky’s time, the dramshops were crowded with moujiks and drabs, and barrel organs ground out their melancholy airs. Hurdy-gurdies still sounded in the 15 ème arrondissement, and I would listen, spell-bound.
‘Street music . . . I love it,’ said Raskolnikov, ‘particularly when they are singing to a street-organ on a cold dark grey winter’s evening, when all the passers-by have pale green sickly faces – when snow falls like sleet, down, straight down, no wind, and the lamps shine . . . You know?’
‘I don’t know. Excuse me,’ said the unsympathetic stranger to whom Raskolnikov spoke. But I knew, wandering along the Rue Frémicourt, catching snatches of some wry tune, longing for even the doleful St. Petersburg Dostoievsky immortalized, and which a hurdy gurdy now recalled. In the little hotel where Madame Sapojnikov lived I was immediately able to transport myself to the lodging house where the Marmeladov family played out their tragic and grotesque lives; as it were, to occupy a seat in the stalls.
A vinegary reek – cabbage soup – which perpetually simmered on a gas-ring balanced on the corner of Madame Sapojnikov’s marble-topped chest of drawers strengthened this illusion. Through the yellowing net curtains I could peer down into a well-like courtyard where shadowy figures came and went. Sonia, huddled in her thin shawl. Catherina Ivanovna coughing her lungs out, recalling past glories, instilling airs and graces in her bewildered children. Another figure – Dounia? or Sonia again? Though this one is pert, business-like, and scarcely seems likely to be going upstairs to read the Bible. A light floods out from her room on the fourth floor. A man has followed her there. It seems improbable that he will throw himself at her feet and ask pardon for either the sins of the world, or his own, for this is France. This time, the characters have stepped out of their frame. The spell is broken.
But look again! Here is Louzhin, crossing the courtyard, followed by coarse-grained Madame Lippevechzel the German lodging-house keeper and her lover, the Pole, running some crazy errand for Panna Marmeladov. That swaggering figure banging the glass door into the corridor must be Svidrigailov, making for another lodging-house. Perhaps the Hotel Adrianople, where the mice will crawl over his coverlet, rousing him from his erotic nightmares of sly little painted children in his bed. Across the well, through dimly lit windows, the farther side of the hotel always presented itself as some evil dolls’ house, where a number of puppet figures went through the motions of living out some sinister life. Although in fact, I never observed anything of singular interest, these figures lent themselves to my own form of dramatization, and the shadows of two men, engaged in lengthy conversation were at once transposed into the Baron and Kostylev, for sometimes this scene became Gorky’s Lower Depths.
One young man, wan and solitary, particularly intrigued me. He seldom stirred from a table covered with papers, upon which he occasionally scrawled something, and his attitude seemed one of despair. Raskolnikov himself, brooding over the murder. Any moment now, as I watched, he would get up, walk over to the cupboard, and furtively bring out the fatal purse. But Madame Sapojnikov knew all about him. Removing the pins from her mouth and puffing, for kneeling on the floor to measure hem lines taxed her failing strength, she said he was the physical culture instructor at a neighbouring Lycée, temporarily immobilized by a strained back, poor boy, and was working out a new system of callisthenics. He came from a happy family in Dieppe and was engaged to an heiress from Lille, she added. So I returned to my own fancies, my own Russian transpositions.
While the reek of cabbage soup impregnated my hair and clothing, I would stand patiently through the fittings, my eyes fixed on a postcard of the Imperial Family. Dog-eared and faded, it was pinned above the bed beside a bunch of battered paper roses and a ribboned Easter egg painted with the double-headed Russian eagle.
In the corner hung a small sticky-looking ikon which Madame Sapojnikov would not consider selling. It incorporated Holy Russia, Mother Russia, the shadow, the echo – all that was left to her now.
‘And if we make the sleeve raglan?’ she panted, reaching under the table for a tattered book of patterns. Raglan? My mind skipped across Europe, down the Danube, over the Dobrudja to Varna (not the Varna I was to know, far ahead, in 1946, under Red Army surveillance), but a muddy or dusty village where, in 1853, the British and French troops were embarking for Crimean battlefields. Had not Lord Raglan commanded the army during that dreadful, unnecessary war? Had not this kind old gentleman battled beside Florence Nightingale to better the lot of his men?
He was a veteran of Waterloo and still absently referred to the enemy as the French; something which piqued the French commanders Canrobert and Pelissier, who were by now fighting beside him.
‘Alors, la coupe raglan?’ persists Madame Sapojnikov, brandishing her cutting-out scissors, a tape-measure snaked across her heaving bulk. Raglan . . . the cut had indeed been named after the old leader; it all came back to me. He had lost an arm, when a young man serving as Wellington’s A.D.C. at Waterloo, and had devised this loose-sleeved garment to slip easily over th
e stump. When the surgeon had hacked off his arm he had borne it stoically, merely calling back an orderly who was removing it from the room, saying ‘Hey! bring that back! There’s a ring my wife gave me on one finger.’
Crimean commanders, many of whom had been in service under Wellington, were all larger than life. The monstrous Lord Cardigan, whiskered, corseted, and cruel, coolly returning to his yacht, after leading the charge of the Light Brigade, to enjoy a champagne supper. On the other side – I could not bring myself to think of the Russians as the enemy, there was Kornilov, defending Sebastopol, commanding his men to kill him with their bayonets if he should ever give the order to retreat; while Prince Mentschikov, commanding at the battle of Alma, had put up a grandstand with splendid optimism, misplaced, as it turned out, and invited a number of elegant ladies to follow the battle through pearl-handled opera-glasses.
From the overtones of Crimean Generals my mind moved to the extravagant beauties of Crimean shores, so little suited to battle. Halcyon shores, where the Khan’s Palace, the Fountain of Tears and all the marbles and palms of those princely villas the Traveller had known as a child were jumbled in my mind’s eye. I began to question Madame Sapojnikov about life in the Crimea. But she had never been there, ‘unless you count those terrible days and nights crowded on to the jetty at Yalta, waiting to be evacuated to Constantinople?’ She had seen the British warship, carrying the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna and her suite to safety in England. It had steamed past, quite slowly, inshore. The small black figure had stood alone on deck looking her last on the Russia that had been her country for so long. The people waiting on the quay, wept, knowing that she was weeping for them, as for her son and her grandchildren, prisoners; where, she did not know. Tears poured down Madame Sapojnikov’s face as she remembered the scene.
Journey Into the Mind's Eye Page 24