Stretched on the pelts and surrounded by dusty scraps of fur and paper patterns we watched, with some apprehension, the frowzy velvet curtains which divided our hide-out from the shop billowing with each fresh arrival. The atmosphere was not conducive to the softer passions and soon we were quarrelling once more. This was no substitute for Gallantry Bower, and we both knew it.
Sometimes, overcoming my opposition, Kamran would try out his own make-believe. Hauling the sheepskins over us like a stifling wigwam, he would say: ‘This is dog-sledge. We are crossing frozen river’ or ‘Now we are in Trans-Siberian train . . .’ But it was no good, for I knew, and he knew, he had never travelled on the legendary train and could tell me nothing about it that I did not already know. It held no significance for him – certainly none of those mystical attributes with which I had invested it; for him, it was only a way of pleasing me, part of a ritual that his father had liked to follow, and so he endeavoured to do likewise. Soon a shadow would fall between us and we were quarrelling again. But Kamran knew very well how to make up, and in his most wheedling manner he would say:
‘Mamasha darling, don’t you want that I love you in hut in taïga?’
How close the echoes: almost the same voice, almost the same question. The rank sheepskin gloom gave place to the scented green twilight of the maquis where one star shone overhead . . . a star that had not granted my wish. I knew now that I should never make the journey on the Trans-Siberian with the Traveller . . . Yet his whisper sounded down the years; Pussinka moiya, don’t you want to be loved in a Mongolian yurt?
I sat up and pushed the sheepskins away, demolishing Kamran’s hut in the taïga. But he pulled me down again, laughing, loving, teasing, beguiling.
‘No taïga? O.K. – anywhere you are saying, only not so cross-looking, Mamasha moyia.’
It was easier to lie there listening to the soft Slav syllables, catching sometimes the echoes of another, dearer voice.
•
As time passed, the strain of material conditions and frequent separations told on our relationship. Our quarrels were more frequent, our happiness more rare. I found myself resenting my lost journey to Siberia. I had given up the substance for the shadow; or perhaps one shadow had been sacrificed to another.
In my heart I believed Kamran could have told me something of his father’s fate or whereabouts. But he was vehement in his denials.
‘I am telling to you, he just vanish like that! For me, too. My mother is dead. I don’t know more to tell. He never coming to see her either. Always you were the lucky. How much I am thinking to find him too.’
But this I doubted. Kamran was a possessive lover. Even a ghost tormented him. He would not have been prepared to relinquish me, now; not even to the father of whom he had stood in such awe.
‘And Sergei?’ I would needle him, harping on the family. ‘I always had a weakness for Sergei . . . Perhaps Sergei will come back one of these days, looking for you – after all, you’re his half-brother.’
‘Come back – why he come back? To what person? We was different families. His mother Georgian. Mine Kirghiz. I think he went in South America to become gigolo.’
‘You’ve got it wrong. That’s where they came from.’
‘So – why speaking of Sergei now? Why thinking of him like he is in Siberia, with Papasha, perhaps, and you go there and find them. Me – I am not enough?’
He stormed at me, young, urgent and brutal in his desires, and indeed for a while Kamran was all.
But neither of us could long forget the link which had brought us together, and now, kept us together long after we should have parted.
I had become a double prisoner, of memory and the flesh: and when at last the means and the permits to make the ardently desired Trans-Siberian journey seemed likely to materialize, I backed out. Kamran could not go with me. He had no money, no permits, no regular passport. And I could not leave him. Kamran at his most seducing had wound himself round my heart, and so, enmeshed in loving, I let the journey go.
•
Kamran the Asiatic could be cruel. In his possessive moods he displayed a sure aim, as if, galloping across the Gobi on his shaggy Mongol pony, he had pierced my heart with a lance and gone on his way wearing the conqueror’s ruthless smile, showing those square white teeth that were so unmistakably Asiatic, so much part of his heritage. After one of our more stormy meetings, he struck:
‘How much strange,’ he said, his dark face carved into a mask of malice, ‘how you still thinking about Papasha, still loving him much, after many years . . . I think when you was together, he was still feeling very very in love with your mother.’
I was too much taken aback to feign awareness, indifference.
‘You not knowing? Is it possible? Why he was terrible in love with her, long long time ago . . . in Normandy or somewhere . . . Aunt Eudoxia tell me. So they never tell you? I am thinking when she marrying with someone else, and time going on, and he losing her, he begin to find some her in you . . . And then, you loving him so strong, and losing him, you finding something like him, in me . . . It is making the circle – so – isn’t it?’
I could not reply. I did not know what was Kamran’s malice or spiteful invention, and what was truth. I was never to know.
•
Gradually the gaps between my visits to Paris lengthened. There were distractions in London. Kamran was sinking back into his old habits of rootless apathy, reverting perhaps to his Kirghiz ancestry or grubbing along in the old student pattern of disorder and fecklessness. When I chided him he shrugged with fatalism.
‘How you expecting me to find fortune here? Where? Tell me! And for what I make fortune? For you, perhaps? For you to go and buy ticket for Siberia for finding Papasha? Yes?’ His voice was unusually bitter. Lately he had seemed too apathetic to care about anything – personal relationships, or even ghosts. I remembered the Traveller’s words – ‘emotions need feeding’. Kamran often went hungry.
But abruptly all was changed. With the offer of a job in Germany an unwonted energy transformed him.
‘In Germany? You can’t be thinking of accepting!’
‘Why not? It’s very important architects people. They are building much now. And they pay me good. No work, no fortune here. And you, Mamasha, you always saying you hate to be living in Paris.’
‘But Germany,’ I repeated, stunned. ‘Nazi Germany! I wouldn’t set foot in the loathsome place.’
‘I am not asking you to put your feet there,’ replied Kamran, working up to fury which was met by fury.
Soon after I returned to London, while Kamran left for Berlin. I was never to see him again; the war took care of that. Like his father, he vanished from my sight – yet he, too, remained in my heart – echo of an echo . . .
PART SEVEN
THE JOURNEY DONE
The whole seems to fall into shape
As if I saw alike my work and self
And all that I was born to be and do.
A twilight piece . . .
So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!
Robert Browning
CHAPTER XX
London in wartime: now the Run-Away Game was replaced by hide and seek with bombs. Shelters, sirens, gas-masks and black-outs – such was the texture of daily life. The war gathered momentum. London was full of Allied troops, strange uniforms and languages, each man making the most of his brief leaves, enthusiastically aided by Englishwomen, a number of whom had travelled little or not at all before the war and now discovered some of its joys without leaving home. Poles, Czechs, Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, Yugoslavs, the Americans, the Free French, all were among us . . . But no Russians. Once, once only, I sighted three dashing figures, some military delegation I supposed, in the familiar long grey overcoats, high boots and fur caps. They were striding up and down under the arcades of the Ritz as I was coming out. Through the revolving doors I saw them and, goggling, went round and round with the doors, rotating in a sort of treadmill of lo
nging, at each turn feasting my eyes on this hallucinatory vision. Alas! they were joined by a chunky-shaped civilian who shepherded them into a War Office car which shot away leaving me bereft.
•
Long ago, one of my Russian friends from the old days in Paris – was it Vassili, Mistislav, Nicolai, Boris, or Dimitri – had said ‘You must only marry Slavs. Only they will suit you. Make you happy? That’s another thing. No one but a Russian will provide you with the extravagant emotional climate you want. Only our sort of natures – people call them unstable, chaotic – but always vibrant, will satisfy you. A romantic English love would be too composed. Latins? Too facile. French? Too self-conscious about loving – too organized about living —’ Now the words came back to me, but were soon forgotten, for those were not marrying times, I thought.
But on a night made restless by incessant bombing, at a party for Free French airmen on leave in London, I observed one of them who seemed rather aloof from the rest. He was sitting in a corner, hunched over a bowl of salted almonds, which he was attacking with concentration. At that time salted almonds were an exotic rarity and I saw our hostess casting anguished glances in his direction. Something in his long dark brooding face seemed familiar, yet I could not place him, nor imagine where I had seen him before. Our party exploded into a night-club and still the singular stranger baffled me until, listening to his voice, his boot-deep tones, beneath the wail of the saxophones, I suddenly realized he was Russian. The sombre features were those of an ikon, the voice unmistakably that of a Slav. Free-French or no, this man was a Russian. Wearing the identical blue uniform of his copains he remained irrevocably Slav. I was not deceived. A year later we were married – in a Registry Office. Once again the golden crowns of the Orthodox Church had eluded me. But no passports, no Free French uniform or decorations could make my husband a Frenchman, any more than my newly-acquired nationality could make me a Frenchwoman. Changelings we both remained, and for a time well matched.
As a child of exile he had grown up in France, subjected to his mother’s passionate conviction that France was all. Over the years I watched him striving to absorb and be absorbed by a country which, psychologically, could never be truly his, while I strove to preserve in him the eternal Slav I craved.
He had been moulded by the will of his mother to become a Frenchman, and now he encountered my determination to retrace our steps Eastward into my own chimera and the profound roots of his nature.
•
As the years passed we settled and unsettled ourselves about the world, for my husband was now in the French Diplomatic Service, but I still gravitated towards everything and everybody Slav, and fostered the habits of domestic Russian living to which both of us were accustomed. Successive glasses of tea and salted cucumber punctuated the day, although our habit of sitting for a long moment in silence, on the threshold of our home, before leaving for a journey, a traditional Russian observance, was apt to make the drive to the airport or station a tense race against time. I still sometimes succumbed to the tyranny of the Domovoi and surreptitiously left provisions for him by the door, and when we had Slav-born servants this was always understood. There were other nationalities who came and went in our kitchen, but I do not recall them: they played no part in my life, as did the Slavs.
They come back to me as I write. Maddening, lovable, funny, and often pathetic creatures, making uproars and blinii with equal ease; imposing their family dramas, recounting singular episodes of their past, of long ago and far away, of the Ukraine, the Macedonian mountains or those Caucasian fastnesses which were so much part of my mind’s eye. Generally, it seemed, they had survived unimaginable trials, being harassed, if not regularly raped, by Cossacks,Turks, Bashi-Bazouks or Kurds.
Such sagas made all the difference to daily life; and there was, I believed, some current of understanding which flowed between myself and all the Slavs who worked for me. Perhaps it was because they never bored me, however much they tried my patience by their inefficiency. Sometimes I hit them, but this was accepted in the light of a colloquial gesture rather than an act of violence; I was, in fact, talking their language. They were not the kind of domestics, nor did they have the training customary to those obtained through Registry Offices.
However much in moments of social stress I believed I wished for those discreet, efficient figures which are the image of a good servant, I knew that I could not have endured their conventions any more than they would have tolerated my ways. Even if you come by this archaic breed, to keep them you must live in the traditional pattern which suits them. Our habit of writing half the night and requiring meals on trays at unpredictable hours in equally erratic settings, so that a roast might be enjoyed in the bedroom or a yoghourt and black coffee at the dining-room table, was something which the more bourgeois hirelings always found unacceptable.
‘You’ll never get good service if you don’t dress for dinner,’ a shrewd old lady once told me. ‘And by that I don’t mean dressing-up,’ she added, deploring my weakness for exotic costumes. But, in the matters of the exotical, I was out-done by the kitchen, where crude ikons were propped among the saucepans and the preparation of every dish was accompanied by incantations or imprecations of an ecclesiastical flavour, all the Saints of the Orthodox Calendar being summoned round the stove, with a smack of magic added. Sometimes these incantations were of a markedly poetic nature, beginning and ending ritualistically, as they had been handed down, generation by generation, the length and breadth of peasant Russia – ‘I, servant of God, Marfa Petrovna’ (or whoever voiced the spell) always prefaced each specific incantation, which was likely to bear on the rising of a soufflé or the expulsion of some insect plague. The ending was always the same. ‘I, servant of God, Marfa Petrovna, will bend myself like the young moon. May my words be strong, be powerful! Here be lock and key on my words. Amen! Amen!’
The last phrase was accompanied by the pantomime of turning a key in the lock. After which it seemed the matter swung between God and the Devil and nothing had been left to chance.
Such local colour was deepened by bunchy aprons, heads tied up in gaudy kerchiefs and feet as bare as they had been in the izbas of their origin. Sometimes, catching sight of them padding across the parquets, linoleums or moquettes of urban living, I saw instead the rich black earth of the endless steppes, and knew how idle it would be to imagine such feet could be crammed into shoes, any more than the big fist now proffering the kasha and mushrooms could ever be encased in gloves. But I welcomed the spectrum of local colour which the Slavs imposed and I was grateful for their special quality of warmth; it was the cosy glow of some traditional family nianya – the Russian family into which, by some mischance, I had not been born.
Marfa, Anna, Liouba, Natasha . . . the bright-coloured figures, toddling like Matriochka dolls, gather again as I write. Katyusha getting out of her own warm bed to bring me bortsch, when I had been writing far into the night. Liouba lingering to talk, taking a robust enjoyment in describing how the Cossacks had swept down on her village – how, searching for an escaped criminal in the name of the Tzar, they had ransacked the place and, of course, raped her elder sister, a cousin, and her mother. Liouba, flinging herself at the chest of drawers and hurling the contents to the ground as, with an imaginary sword, she turned over the dishevelled heaps of my stockings and underwear and pantomimed the repeated rapes with graphic gestures.
‘Barinya! they were devils! Terrible devils! Bad people! But so handsome! So strong! Such men!’
She melted at the memory and looking out of the window on the perspectives of civilization, spat angrily.
Masha, describing street-corner dentistry in the Tashkent of her childhood, where the Uzbegs hung their extracted teeth on the tombs of saints as votary offerings. Irina, explaining the intricacies of her Finnish-Tungus ancestry, while telephones shrilled unattended or I answered them absently, for with such counter-attractions at hand all else paled.
Raiina telling my favourite story o
f her Don Juan uncle and the Tzigane dancing bear which mauled his fiancée.
‘Ah! Gospodja! If you had seen my uncle Pencho when he heard the news! She was the Fiancée he didn’t want to marry, if you remember Gospodja?’
‘Perfectly. Do go on.’
‘Well, my mother sent me running off to tell Uncle. I found him at the inn, behind the Rose Mosque . . . I remember he gave me a whole leva – that was quite a lot of money then. We had a party that night. Everyone in our street came. The wedding was put off, of course. Tears of joy ran down Bai Pencho’s face. How happy we all were! Uncle danced till morning! Ratchinitzas! Horos! The Wedding Horo! All the dances you love, Gospodja.’
Twirling a kitchen cloth she performs a few ritualistic steps.
‘So what happened?’ I ask, forgetting to reprimand her for having short-changed me over the fuel bill.
But this is what Raiina has been counting on; now she can finish the story comfortably. She squats on her hunkers, smiling her broad, flat smile. ‘Well, they put the Tzigane in prison – because it was his bear, and he hadn’t watched what it was doing . . .’
‘And then?’
‘Then they put the bear in the Zoo. But he was so unhappy without the Tzigane he wouldn’t eat and lost his fur, so they decided to lock the Tzigane up with the bear, in the cage. The bear was happy. So was the Tzigane. He got regular meals, he didn’t have to work and he was out of doors. Tziganes can’t live indoors, you know. They kept each other warm at night too . . . Everybody used to go and see them and push food through the bars. Sometimes we took flowers for the Tzigane, because the bear smelt rather strong. We would have taken cigarettes but he wasn’t allowed to smoke. After all, he was in prison,’ she adds primly.
Once again I am spellbound, accepting every shortcoming.
•
Old Katerina exercised a particularly potent charm, for she had lived in Siberia, which of course compensated for almost every lapse. ‘Ah! Priroda! Krassivii priroda! Nature! Beautiful nature! What beauty in the Siberian country-side!’ the sly old thing would say, knowing I cared more to hear about the Siberian landscape than laundry problems. ‘Such air! Siberian air . . . it smells of mushrooms and apples . . . And at night – the moonlight over the snow. . .!’ she was off, waxing lyrical to distract me from her lapses.
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