And then, there were the mysterious Tchouvass, a tribe inhabiting these regions, whose origin no one has rightly traced. They were said to be a mixture of Mongolian and Finnish stock, but referred to the Devil by his Arabic name of Shaïtan. The men wore peculiarly shaped high black felt caps, the women elaborate breast-plates, a kind of Amazonian armour of riveted coins; both men and women wore their hair in dishevelled snake-locks, and were known to worship idols. All my ethnographic blood was up – I would drift from Kazan to Astrakhan, following the sluggish yellow current, seeing these and other strange peoples and the territories Stenka Razin once commanded.
Unfortunately, this programme appeared highly suspect to the authorities and quite incomprehensible to those enthusiastic interpreters who were fitfully detailed to accompany me. Gradually, I was learning what an increasingly stern discipline of mind was required to pursue illusions such as those I cherished.
Vanished flavours are as hard to recapture, or to preserve, as illusions. ‘De se nourrir d’illusions . . .’ De Custine, thou shouldst be living at this hour! At Kazan, tugs raced up and down the great waterway, radios blaring from the deck head: no one wore emerald green taffeta cloaks, and where were the breast-plates of the Tchouvass?
But Astrakhan did not require so violent an effort of imagination. By its setting, its landscape alone, it retained a strongly Tartar flavour, and being remote in its sandy wastes, it was possible to visualize it as it had been when Hommaire de Hell, the French geologist, was exploring the surrounding deserts in the 1840’s. Over the whole place, an oily, fishy odour hung like a pall. It was disagreeable, but since it derived from the caviare one could eat there so cheaply, it was worth enduring.
In an old-fashioned shack-like restaurant, ‘Red Star and Flower of the Steppe’ (I fancy the Red had been added), sitting on a fretted wooden balcony above the river where the steamer docked and the melons were still stacked as the Traveller had described them, like green cannon-balls in an arsenal, I simmered in the heat of noon, eating great dollops of caviare from a painted wooden spoon and (remembering his agate one) knew it was the only way to savour this delicacy. Even two modest spoonfuls are worth half a dozen mouthfuls on toast. That particular day I was alone; alone with the Traveller’s shade, that is, for I was also left alone by the Intourist personnel and he always appeared when they disappeared. Had I won their confidence at last or did they guess that quantities of caviare would anchor me fast, and that I would feel no temptation to wander unwisely?
Far away I could see the herons along the sandy banks and overhead a solitary hawk circled and plummetted. There are many kinds of wildfowl hereabouts. The red-breasted goose, which breeds in northern Siberia, migrates south to the Caspian in winter, and in March the cranes fly northwards, from Central Africa. They cross Palestine and the Sea of Galilee, northwards again, to Russia, reaching Southern Central Asia first, as I have seen them, beside the storks, perched on their enormous, turban-like nests, topping the mosques of Bokhara. On, eastwards, to Astrakhan and farther north again, even to Siberia these aerial migrations continue. For the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed times and the turtle and the crane and the swallows observe the time of their coming . . .
There were other migrations in these regions. As the sun declined westward over the salt wastes where only the wild fowl now lived, I remembered ‘the Tiumene Prince’, a Kalmuck ruler of whom Hommaire de Hell writes in his accounts of his travels in Southern Russia, the same, I discovered, as that intriguing character whom the Traveller had described to me in Paris, who had raised his own regiment and fought beside the Russian army in the Napoleonic campaigns, pitching his tents, at last, along the Champs Elysées as once his ancestors had pitched their kibitkas across Asia. In the historic migration of the Kalmucks in 1771 (which inspired Samuel Coleridge), vast numbers of them had fled from the restraints which the Empress Catherine II imposed with increasing severity. The great migration headed north, making for the confines of China: but some fifteen thousand of the Horde had remained, betrayed by an unusually mild season when the Volga had not frozen over and they were unable to cross.
In 1814 it was the Noyon, or chief, of this particular Horde who had so much impressed Paris. Hommaire de Hell has described him in 1840, returned from the wars to live in state, in a pagoda-like château he had built on a sand-bank island up the Volga. Here he lorded it over the local society of Astrakhan, surrounded by a mixture of European luxury and barbaric opulence, slaves, dancing girls, grand pianos and bows and arrows; when he rode out, it was in a satin-lined landau, the work of French carriage-makers. The Prince was something of a magnifico, a Lorenzo di Medici figure: painter, philosopher and musician as well as a warrior. Scientific research interested him and he was particularly genial to the French geologist and his wife. The Prince was not cut off on his Volga island for steamers called regularly, depositing everyone of note who came through the region. Madame Hommaire de Hell describes the Kalmuck’s pagoda-palace as exquisite without, but, alas, rather too European within. (But then she was quite besotted on the east and never willingly ceded the smallest flick of local colour for comfort, an attitude with which I was in sympathy). Dinner, served on Sèvres porcelain, was a mixture of French and Russian cuisine – nothing Kalmuck – no yak-fat stirred into tea. Champagne flowed, as they toasted King Louis-Philippe and the Tzar Nicholas I. Next day, three hundred guests were convened and steamed up the river from Astrakhan to watch wrestling matches, contests of wild horse roping, and all the barbaric leapings and langorous pantomime of Asiatic dances. . .
For years I had longed to know more of this fabulous figure and, on one of my later visits to Moscow, in the archives of the Historical Museum, among souvenirs of the Napoleonic Camp-paigns, maps, prints, Bagration’s spy-glass, Kutuzov’s orders of battle and such, I came on a pastel sketch of three Asiatic figures whose cast of countenance and Caucasian tunics intrigued me. Tiumenev Princes, Serbedjan, Batyr and Tzeren by Hamplen, said the label, briefly. And here, unexpectedly, my chase had ended.
One, I knew, must be ‘the Tiumene Prince’ of Paris: but which one? Two were sketched wearing identical high fur-bordered caps and caftans; the third was seen in profile, the flattened Kalmuck features very marked. One figure was placed more in evidence, being seated, or rather crouched, in the Asiatic fashion, on a satin-covered bergère. He wore a medal of the Tzar Alexander I round his neck and beneath his long, snake-like locks, pearl-drop ear-rings dangled exotically. His expression was curiously remote, as if lost in some dream of distant horizons, which no doubt he was recalling during the ennui of the sittings. The third figure was as exotic, but less remote; and he seemed younger. Was he a son or a brother, I wondered? His dress was more strictly that of the Caucasian tcher-kesska (a costume adopted by most of the Asiatic volunteers in the Russian army), the chest barred with silver braid, on the lines of cartridge-cases, and he fingered a long dagger, the Caucasian kindjal. With his hair falling round him like sleek plumage and his wide-set slit eyes also gazing intently into some far distance, he seemed strangely familiar. But not so strange, for his eyes were the eyes of all Asia.
Suddenly I saw they were the eyes of both the Traveller and Kamran – my loved and lost Russian family – that looked through me and beyond, from this mysterious drawing.
Since in my imagination Tzeren Norbo became Kamran, and Sergei, who had faded from my mind, did very well as the figure in profile, I now identified Prince Serbedjan with the Traveller. There was so strong a look of both, in these Kalmuck warriors, that I plagued the Museum authorities until I obtained a photograph of the drawing, which, from that moment, assumed the value of a family portrait.
That the Traveller had Kalmuck blood I knew; Aunt Eudoxia had revealed that his father had descended from the Torghut Horde. This was enough to inflame my fancy. Could this, I wondered, be why the bells had always been rung, and the Metropolitan in person come to the Gates of Kiev, whenever the Traveller’s great-grandfather had arrived ther
e? (Although Kalmucks worshipped at Lamist-Buddhist shrines and were therefore unlikely to rate a ceremonial Orthodox welcome). The Traveller had never been forthcoming over his great-grandfather’s precise status, although he sometimes mentioned his more exotic forbears. But beyond sketching the migratory habits of the Hordes, he had not particularized.
Had anyone so colourful as this Tiumenev Prince been of his family, I thought he would have enlarged on him: but there were curious withdrawals in his nature and he would often withhold a seemingly straightforward piece of information, or suppress some link in a chain. As Aunt Eudoxia had said, he always enjoyed secrecy for its own sake.
PART SIX
THE BORROWED LOVE
Ici-bas, tous les lilas meurent
Tous les chants des oiseaux sont courts
Je rève aux fleurs qui demeurent toujours – toujours.
Ici-bas, tous les hommes pleurent
Leurs amitiés et leurs amours.
Je rève aux couples qui demeurent toujours – toujours.
Sully-Prudhomme
CHAPTER XVIII
Easter in Paris is one of the clichés of tourism. Organized insouciance, at so much per head, transforms the city into a huge tourist trap where the visitors court pneumonia in their determination to eat outside, under bleakly flapping awnings, to the fury of the waiters and the indifference of the chefs, who know this sort of custom is not worth bothering about. Paris is best in August, when the Parisians are for the most part away and those who remain seem to have called a truce to their usual activities of exploiting or intimidating the foreigners. But at Easter-time they are there in strength, closing in for the kill.
‘What does one do in Paris at Easter?’ I remember asking the Traveller, on my first rapturous visit.
‘Leave it, of course,’ he had snapped, but for reasons I never discovered, spent the following three weeks there showing me something of it.
Easter-time always renewed my hunger for him; those weeks had seemed to belong to us especially, as no other hours, past or to come, could ever do. So, in whatever country I chanced to find myself at Easter, I would search out the Russian church, going to the midnight service in a spirit compounded of self-dramatization, thanksgiving and mourning.
Never say with grief, he is no more
But rather say with thankfulness – he was.
These lovely lines, addressed, I think, to the memory of Pushkin – or were they by Pushkin himself? – were uppermost in my mind whenever I remembered the Traveller.
Fifteen or more years after I had first spent Easter in Paris beside him, found me there again. Once more I was going to the midnight service at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the Rue Daru. Russian friends had invited me to a party later but there would be no more Gipsies, I knew. The Gipsies were fading, fading fast. Those who remained had been absorbed into troupes which performed in expensive night-clubs catering to an international clientèle who listened carelessly, called for ‘Black Eyes’ and more champagne, and went on chattering. Nevertheless, the Russian exiles continued to make much of the occasion, one way or another, fasting or feasting. By now I had lived among them all enough to be aware that, for the Easter midnight mass and after, evening dress was considered proper. When the Traveller had initiated me into my first Russian Easter he had not followed custom to that extent, nor had he instructed me to wear anything particularly festive. At that moment I doubt if I had so much as a schoolgirl’s party-dress in my baggage: certainly Mademoiselle Lavisse would have been opposed to the idea of buying any finery for the occasion.
Now integrated into the exiles’ magic circle I held to their traditions with a convert’s zeal. Thus Madame Sapojnikov was concocting an elaborate toilette of blonde lace which, in the fashion of that moment, swept the ground, was very décolleté, and we both thought, particularly becoming.
During the fittings I was again indulging my passion for Madame Sapojnikov’s Russia – that vanished, chaotic, comic, dramatic, touching and generally ineffectual world that charmed me. She had once made the Trans-Siberian journey under particularly enthralling circumstances, and I was never tired of hearing her description.
It had all happened long ago – in her hey-day when, as one of the best established Moscow couturières she had received a splendid order to make, and deliver personally, twenty elaborate toilettes for the wife of a wealthy merchant in Harbin.
‘Twenty! It was such a chance! I knew it would lead to a lot more work . . . Besides, I liked the idea of starting a connexion with the Far East. I always wanted to travel.’ Madame Sapojnikov wheezed alarmingly nowadays. Life in Paris, after years on the sixth floor of the same dingy little hotel, was taking its toll. But as she pinned and snipped she gathered momentum, like the train she was recalling, for my delectation.
‘It seemed a whole way of life – we all got to know each other so well . . . At night we used to get up concerts or dances, even. There was plenty of room; why, the saloon car even had a grand piano. Oh yes! We knew how to enjoy ourselves, in those days.’
For the twentieth time I listened, entranced, to Madame Sapojnikov recounting how she had not trusted her precious dresses in the luggage van.
‘I reserved an extra compartment for them. I could afford that sort of thing then. Even so they piled up to the ceiling. Clothes took up so much room at that time. All my boxes were pale mauve – the tissue paper was lilac-coloured too. I had half a dozen great big hat-boxes with me as well. The sort of hats worn then needed enormous care . . . There was one, I remember, covered in bunches of sweet-peas with green tulle butterflies, so becoming . . . And the hat pins, I remember one pair of jewelled dragon-flies . . . But you don’t want to hear that again,’ she would say deprecatingly.
‘Oh, but I do – please go on. I love the part about the Japanese General. It’s so like Shanghai Express.’
Madame Sapojnikov looks mystified, for she does not go to the cinema and has never heard of Marlene Dietrich. But she embarks on the whole story once again.
Soon after the train had crossed the Urals the Japanese General had discovered she had all those lovely dresses in the second compartment and, being anxious to ingratiate himself with the blonde adventuress farther along the train, he had approached Madame Sapojnikov most civilly and made her an offer for some of the clothes. Of course, she refused, even though he had been very generous in his terms. When he saw Madame Sapojnikov was not to be persuaded he had bowed and smiled and bowed again, in a most pleasant manner, and backed away to his own compartment saying how much he regretted her decision. But while Madame Sapojnikov was in the restaurant car, having dinner – ‘ah! how delicious those dinners were, caviare and champagne every night; there was always some man to offer you caviare and champagne then – and the little tables looking so festive, lit with pink shaded lamps, and outside, the snow-covered forests rushing past . . .’ She falls silent, remembering her happy hey-day, and I do not like to intrude. But presently she takes up the tale . . . While she was in the restaurant car, the Japanese General had forced her compartment and slashed open the lilac dress-boxes with his sword, helping himself right and left.
‘Yellow rat!’ hisses Madame Sapojnikov, lunging with her scissors. No one had dared to stop him – one of the attendants had tried and had an ear sliced off for his trouble. He had rushed down the corridor screaming. He had nearly knocked down Madame Sapojnikov as she was returning from the dining car. When she saw the disorder in her compartment she fainted. All those lovely dresses in heaps on the floor! Hat-boxes ripped open, tissue-paper everywhere, and half the things missing! It was only some hours later when everything was put to rights and the General, who was now locked in with the adventuress, had promised the Controller (through the locked door), to settle the damage in the morning, that Madame Sapojnikov noticed the attendant’s sliced-off ear lying there on the floor!
Madame Sapojnikov gives a dramatic rendering of herself, discovering this grisly object. ‘I shrieked! The man next door rushed i
n and threw it out of the window. Of course he ought not to have done that, but I was too upset to stop him. When the poor attendant heard we had found his ear and thrown it away he was most upset. I remember he flung himself down on my bunk and sobbed. He had bought a bottle of vodka and meant to pickle the ear as a souvenir. So I got up a little subscription for him – even the General contributed – and we ended up drinking the vodka and singing . . . It became quite a gay party . . . Yes, life was like that, then.’ Madame Sapojnikov drags to her feet and pads across the room to remove the cabbage soup from the gas-ring, before it overboils and floods the chest-of-drawers.
Journey Into the Mind's Eye Page 27