Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  •

  Easter eve found me once again in the darkened Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevski. The atmosphere was claustrophobic. The crowds were wedged, immobile, unable to advance or retreat. There was none of that drifting, shifting concourse of the usual Orthodox service. Only those in the front rank were able to prostrate themselves in prayer or go from one miraculous ikon to another. The brooding silence of the Easter night vigil hung over all, so powerful that it seemed to reverberate in the shadowy dome, silence pressing on silence, stilling alike the muttering of the priests, invisible behind the iconostas, and the rustling of the congregation, as they passed lighted tapers across the church from hand to hand, shimmering garlands threading through the gloom. Incense drifted heavily, mingling and overcoming the wafts of expensive scents worn by the more affluent women – and men too, for a love of strong perfumes was an Oriental trait shared by Russian men. Incense and perfume; sacred and profane; on that night they were met in good measure.

  As the hour of Resurrection drew near the tension mounted: there was a quality of expectancy, of urgency about the vast throng; they seemed to simmer, standing there so rigidly. Behind the iconostas, remote from the world, the mystic rituals continued, glimpsed from time to time, when a bearded, black-robed figure came or went, the brief opening of the gilded doors revealing the dimly-lit inner sanctuary where more black-robed figures moved in their hieratical pattern, and a line of long-maned heads were bowed in prayer.

  Soon, very soon now, the clergy would emerge in all their panoply, to circle the building three times and then proclaim the Resurrection. But first, all was darkness, stillness. I felt myself sway with exhaustion. I had been standing several hours and, moreover, fasting. Most of my friends had observed the strict Lenten fast of Orthodoxy and I had joined them, though my denials were half-hearted beside their rigours, just as, beside their shining faith, mine was pinchbeck. Indeed, my presence in the cathedral that night, like all my other Easter attendances, was more in the nature of a remembrance service.

  The sense of expectancy was becoming suffocating. With only salted fish and kasha in my belly since morning my head began to spin and I sagged against the surrounding throng. I had become separated from my friends but I thought I saw Nadia’s auburn head beside a pillar, against which I longed to lean. With rising panic, I wondered what would happen were I to faint. But standing long hours in church was one of the things all Russians, even the most fragile or aged, were able to achieve. It would not do to falter.

  The candle I clutched was beginning to waver, spilling hot wax over my hands. Across the nimbus of light it cast the long dark faces of the ikons seemed to merge with the broad pale faces of the exiles, a shifting mirage of Byzantine and Slav; a mirage where my eyes still searched, almost automatically, for one long-sought face that once had been beside me there.

  Suddenly, with the impact of a blow, Byzantine and Slav and Tartar formed into one gigantic and blinding vision. In what seemed a clap of thunder and a blaze of light I saw that face before me. As I gazed, the vision dissolved, the light dimmed, and I saw the Traveller in the flesh, standing there, only a few yards away! His features were lit theatrically, as by footlights, from the glow of the candle he carried. The slit eyes were restless, ranging over the crowd, sliding towards me, and then, as if drawn by the violence of my desire, fastened on me. I saw him start in recognition. Forgetful of my whereabouts I tried to call his name but the words were strangled in my throat. I must have leaned forward towards him, for at that moment my candle set light to the lace Madame Sapojnikov had draped across my bosom so gracefully. There was a smell of singeing, but I continued to stand there transfixed, staring; as in a dream I felt someone snatch my candle, while someone else beat out the smouldering lace. There was a murmur of disapproval at the disturbance but only my immediate neighbours had been aware of the danger. Once this was averted they turned again towards the iconostas and were absorbed in their devotions.

  As if returning to consciousness after an anaesthetic, I seemed to circle outside myself, disembodied. At that moment I was aware of the Traveller forcing his way through the press towards where I, or my döppelganger body stood. With a sense of enormous effort, the bemused, the dispossessed I managed to return inside my waiting shell. I must be there to receive him. He was within an arm’s length of me now, his face still lit dramatically by the candle he carried. Now he had reached me. ‘Outside!’ he muttered, seizing my arm.

  Dragging me after him, he fought a way through the crowd, going against the surge of bodies pressing forward. There were angry exclamations, scowling faces and complaints as we struggled towards the door.

  At last, dishevelled and panting, we faced each other under the dim bluish light of the porch.

  I stared at him, uncomprehending. He seemed taller, younger . . . and where was the Chinese-bald skull? Hidden now beneath a close black cap of hair.

  ‘Mamasha! Don’t you know me? Oh Mamasha darling . . . darling . . .’ It was Kamran.

  How long we stood there I do not know, but almost at once, it seemed, the crowds began to pour out, making way for the procession. They swept us before them, stumbling down the steps into the forecourt. The bells clanged overhead among the stars. The crowds were crying out the joyous Easter salutation. ‘Christos Vosskress! He is Risen! Verily He is Risen!’ they cried, exchanging the triple Resurrection kiss. Below the sound of the bells I heard the Traveller’s voice once more: ‘The Resurrection kiss – you swore it me!’

  Kamran pinned me against the wall and, hunching his shoulders against the pressure of the crowd, continued to kiss me, greedily, angrily, as tears of love and disappointment streaked my face.

  •

  So began our strange relationship. Did I love him? Yes, for a past we had shared briefly, and for a certain reckless joy we now found together. But what I loved and sought in him were the echoes of his father. Did he love me? Yes, for the same shared memories, and for a sort of pride of conquest. His father, whom he had loved from afar and admired so unquestioningly, had loved me. So now, in possessing me, he came nearer to his father. Each of us were reaching for a ghost.

  His moody young face, which had grown so heartbreakingly like that of the Traveller, would darken as we kissed.

  ‘You always thinking of Papasha. Don’t lie – I am seeing!’ And furiously he would try to make me forget.

  Our friends were bent on separating us. Exasperated, we would take refuge in an obscure little hotel where, ostrich-like, we believed ourselves unobserved. Locked in our wildly-papered hide-out, we ignored the half-hearted attempts of a sullen femme de chambre to do the room. We would send down for relays of café complet, which was cheaper and more convenient than going out to meals; a shuttle-service of trays were alternately placed outside, or collected from, the threshold of our door by an even more sullen valet de chambre.

  The bilious gloom of a premature autumn in northern France was uninviting and the shutters remained permanently closed. A bead-fringed bed-side lamp was nourished by a current as fitful as the heating which regurgitated through the aluminium-painted radiator. A curtained alcove contained a large bath where the hot tap sometimes lost control so that a jet of scalding water would suddenly gush out noisily, jerking us from the langours by which we were possessed. On the rare occasions when we opened the shutters we could see, across the narrow street, a house with florid dix-huitième balconies inhabited by Adam Mickiewicz. A plaque commemorated his sojourn there.

  ADAM MICKIEWICZ – POÈTE POLONAIS. 1798–1855.

  ‘Pole!’ spat Kamran with the same scorn his father had shown towards that nation. But Kamran was speaking in echoes, becoming once again, his father’s shadow, and I would tax him with this.

  ‘You’ve got no reason to despise the Poles,’ I would say, annoyingly. ‘You aren’t even a full Russian yourself! Poles are quite as good as Kirghiz, Kalmucks or Bashkirs, I’m sure. Besides, Mickiewicz is different – and he was a friend of Pushkin’s.’ But Kamran d
id not want to be drawn into such discussions. It might have shown up his ignorance of anything concerning nineteenth-century Russia. This was a region where he could not follow me, where he knew I had been led by his father, a region in which I, an interloper, was more at home than he, the expatriate. Here the Traveller and I had enclosed ourselves, barricading ourselves against the present, against intruders, against himself, too. So now he sulked, too proud to show any interest. Presently one of us, exasperated, would pick a quarrel, the sort of violent quarrel which is in itself an act of love, and the fourth or fifth breakfast tray of the day would crash to the ground, dragging the slippery yellow eiderdown with it, brioche flakes and buttery knives adding to the disorder.

  Kamran had only the vaguest recollections of Russia; for him it was a blurred passage of time from which a few figures or incidents emerged briefly. Tobolsk, his birthplace? Nothing. Some long journey with dromedaries and horses and bright-coloured tents . . . A Kirghiz camp I suggested? Perhaps – he was not sure; he thought he had made a journey from some place a long way off, and that his mother had been waiting for him in a big town. She was pretty. Her eyebrows met across in one dark line, and she wore her hair in long black plaits – many of them; he used to play with them; each one had a gold coin attached. His father? He thought he had seen him for the first time much later, in Vienna. He recalled his fat Russian nianya, a summer of happiness running wild in the country, playing in a field where huge yellow sunflowers were tall as trees above him. Then a long indoor winter in a city where snow lay banked round the houses and he had been ill . . . A lot of people coming and going, trunks being packed, his nianya crying; then, no more Russia. Schooldays in Vienna, learning to speak German – later a Lycée in Paris and, in Rome, the death of his mother, whom it seemed, he did not mourn greatly. In France he had lived much among Russians, but already he was very far from his roots, and seemed indifferent when I showed him the portrait of the Tiumenev Princes, and Tzeren, his double. Russia remained deep in his blood; no Russian transplants wholly; they adapt, but a Slav core always remains untouched or, perhaps uncorrupted. Kamran knew nothing of Russia’s history, legends or literature, nor the tempo, or texture of its daily life – yet he felt himself an exile.

  But he was an exile without memories.

  Gradually, I perceived that Kamran craved such memories – that he envied that rich store of remembrance which sustained and linked the older exiles and which constituted a whole country he could not share with them. Gradually, he turned towards his unknown roots. From a ragbag jumble of hearsay and casual knowledge he would select something and question me. I think he felt easier admitting his ignorance to me than to his compatriots; and then, he knew that my own collection of rag-bag learning had been acquired from his father – that father who had always held him at arm’s length, for the Traveller had plainly not wished for the obligations of sustained family life.

  So Kamran would question me. ‘Who was Poltava?’ he would ask naïvely, and I would describe the battle. Or, ‘Have you read book called Dead Souls?’ ‘Were Strelzi good or bad?’ ‘What is story of Roussalka?’ ‘Did Papasha know Petrashevski people?’ ‘Tell about Ilya Mourametz.’ Now it was I who was the teller of tales, I who told of a thousand forgotten things belonging to his roots . . . of the curious street-names in old Moscow, the street of the Pug-Nosed, the street of the Louse-Eater . . . of churches which evoked Babayaga, and Moussourgorsky’s Great Gate of Kiev, St. Nicholas on Chickens’ Feet, or the church of the Nine Martyrs on the Cabbage Stalks, a name still redolent of the refuse-strewn alleys of old Moscow. It was I who evoked for him the medieval wooden city which retained something of a nomad Asiatic encampment about it, and where the kites still circled overhead. Before the eighteenth-century, houses were torn down or erected on a whim, thousands of carpenters being steadily at work to still that migratory itch which was so marked a characteristic of the Russians. It was I who told him of Stenka Razin, the brigand, seated in his ivory and silver chair high on the cliffs above the Volga, where he could lord it over the reaches he terrorized:

  ‘In the night, beyond the Volga

  The robber gangs flocked round their fires . . .’

  The quotation came from The Robbers, an unfinished poem by Pushkin, but Kamran knew nothing of Russian poetry, could not savour it through my Anglicized versions, and was too lazy to read it, for any length, in the original. Despairing, I would turn to legends or songs of the people: one, to me, conjured all the romantic wildness of the brigands’ boat.

  The crew were Cossacks and the sails were silk.

  At the helm, the Hetman with his gun,

  At the prow, the captain with his lance.

  On the deck, a tent of velvet

  Shelters caskets filled with gold.

  On them, stretched on silken carpets

  The Hetman’s doxy sleeps,

  A creature fresh as blood and milk,

  All beauty, all desire . . .

  But Kamran was not to be won and, having questioned the exact meaning of ‘doxy’ (‘I see, yes, so you are being my doxy – no?’) – he liked me to recount the mysteries of Russian history; of the belief that Alexander I had not died, but vanished, to become a monk. Princess Tarakanova’s fearful end intrigued him, for he had seen a picture of this young and beautiful pretender to the throne of Catherine II, trapped in her dungeon, surrounded by rats, as the waters of the Neva rose round her. Kamran was partial to strong meat; what he preferred in the history of the Strelzi was not the motives of their rising but the drama of their end, in particular, the manner in which the leaders were strung up outside the windows of the Novodievitchy Convent, where they hung, blackened and rigid, turning idly in the wind, all winter long, their frozen boots tapping against the windows where Peter the Great’s sister, Sophia, who had been inculpated in the plot, was immured for the rest of her life.

  Sometimes I would edge my stories eastwards, towards Siberia, telling of Jenghis Khan’s banners, over which, it was believed, no bird could fly; how the escaping convicts used to burn off their brand marks, enduring further agony for the chance of freedom. Or I would launch into a homily on the Trans-Siberian; telling how it had, from its inception, played a dominant role in Siberian life.

  ‘It’s not just that I want to make the longest train journey in the world,’ I would explain: ‘don’t you see – it’s the country’s life-line. It has known so much history. Well, it’s about the most romantic thing imaginable’; I would end, lamely, for it was clear my eloquence did not stir Kamran. But undaunted, or self-indulgent perhaps, I would return to my theme, telling how, by this life-line, a whole new population of settlers flowed eastward into the emptiness, each turn of the wheels bringing them closer, they believed, to their hopes of new life and prosperity. Westward, the riches of Siberia were exported along these same rails. The long, long passage knew births and deaths; wayside stations saw meetings and partings; anguish and even joy travelled on these trains, like dread, and the rattle of the convicts’ chains. During the Revolution terrible battles raged for possession of each section of the line. Roughly plated with iron sheeting, railway carriages became armoured cars. Within, supreme commanders planned their campaigns from these ambulant G.H.Q.s.

  Often, a briefly appointed leader would live out his whole command from one, never reaching the scene of battle, his route hampered by snow and blocked by mined tunnels. The carriages became Martial courts and execution cells too as they rolled across the country, slowing down or accelerating, attacked or attacking, carrying their secrets within their steel walls.

  In Siberia, battles were lost or won on trains rather than in the field, where diminishing numbers of soldiers sometimes waited forlornly for reinforcements that never came – that had perished, en route, when their train was dynamited; or as they deserted, one by one, dropping from the train as it headed for battle. Thousands of such deserters, growing more and more uncertain of what they were fighting for, made their getaway from the troop train
s and took to the taïga, on the run, as once the escaping convicts had done.

  But epic battles left Kamran unmoved. One of his favourite stories was that of the French prostitute from the Pont au Change who had found her way eastwards to become interpreter at the Mongol Court . . .

  Asia! Asiatic Russia. . .! Siberia! The old magic. ‘Don’t you ever want to go back?’ I would ask Kamran, hoping we might share something of the same romantic longing.

  ‘No, this is good,’ he would reply, content to spend the hours in love and idleness. ‘All the time you thinking about Siberia, Mamasha, he said, ‘you always wanting to love in the taïga I am loving to love. anywhere.’

  There was no answer to this. And so, engrossed for awhile in loving, ‘emparadised in one another’s arms’, I stifled my longings for the Siberian journey.

  But then, perhaps a love affair is a journey in itself – a journey into the heart of another. Sometimes a journey of no return.

  •

  Even in Paris, in Paris of the late ‘thirties our meetings were few and difficult. We had no money and far too many friends who disapproved and interfered. Some had known the Traveller; some had known my place in his life. Kamran was his son; then, he had no job, no future (unreliable, they implied, like his father). He did not even have a proper passport – his father had never bothered to attend to anything practical like that. Then, I was a married woman – at least I had been married, and the matter of my divorce had never been regulated. Where was my husband, anyhow? It was all very unsatisfactory. It would be a nice mess if this forgotten husband were suddenly to reappear and cite Kamran. Damages . . . Costs . . . They muttered and prophesied, witch-like, round the cauldron-samovar. There was a lot of gossip and our relationship was condemned as thoroughly unsuitable. Though what precisely this term implied was never classified. What has suitability to do with the emotions?