Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  The North Express had a cachet all its own. Its character was entirely different to that of other celebrated trains, the Orient Express, or of course, the Trans-Siberian; it had neither the reputation for intrigue which coloured the former, nor that odd mixture of drama and monotony peculiar to the latter. It was regarded by its regular passengers as a kind of exclusive club on wheels, where the attendants, like faithful club servants, studied each passenger’s whims. ‘Everyone knew everyone else, the food and wines were excellent – yes, there was nothing like it anywhere else,’ he concluded, nostalgically. But I was never tempted away from the Trans-Siberian chimera, and now, eager to hasten this longed-for consummation, I cheated, flying from Paris to Moscow via Prague, thus sacrificing something of the gathering momentum the gigantic journey deserved, and which even the despised Moscow-merchants’ route would have provided.

  Not that the plane – a Russian jet – lacked atmosphere; drama, even. A victorious football team were returning home in triumph and, ignoring the customary injunctions about safety belts, which indeed no one had reminded us to fasten, immediately plunged into a recapitulation of the match, tackling exuberantly as we shot aloft. A massive carved side-board, baronial-Kremlin in style blocked one end of the plane and on it glasses of tea and a large samovar shifted uneasily, while a loud-speaker relayed folk-songs. Early descriptions of Russian trains (no doubt not including the North Express) always told of samovars and tea-tumblers rattling ceaselessly to the rhythm of the wheels, while passengers turned corridors and dining-cars upside down stamping wildly to the accompaniment of accordions and balalaikas. Russian jet travel, I perceived, maintained these characteristics.

  That night, in Prague, I crossed the statue-lined bridge to wander about the old town. The Street of the Necromancers (where, so long ago, the Traveller had assured me I would find spells to wing me to Siberia) was shuttered and deserted. The few shadowy figures that flitted, furtively I thought, from one ill-lit alley to the next, were each Cagliostro, the Golem, or Nostradamus casting those spells in which I had believed so ardently, as a child; and perhaps, still did. ‘Black Magic or White? You must believe in one or the other, or else this world is far too finite.’ The Traveller had said this as he lit a candle before some wonder-working ikon in the Rue Daru. Which magic, I wondered, was at last granting my wish; was now winging me towards Siberia? I willed my gratitude towards both shrines.

  •

  Next morning, flying over the rain-sodden plains of the Russian frontier zones I shut my eyes, the better to concentrate on the great train that awaited me in the Yaroslavsky Voxall – ‘the Siberian station’ where I used to stand yearning at the barrier. Soon, I too would be one of that purposeful throng surging on to the platform; soon I would be settling into my compartment – my world for a week. O fair-house of joy and bliss!

  The plane tilted steeply, and beyond the wide wing span I saw the silvery loops of a river, spinach green clumps of forest, straggling, toy-like villages, and here and there, the blue or gold onion-dome of a little lost church, a pin’s head, marking the map-like expanses. Russia once more.

  And Moscow again. My taxi sped away from the airport through fine but characterless avenues of new housing developments and, suddenly, the Kremlin rose before me in all its barbaric beauty. The spectacle never palled, always intoxicated anew. ‘Innumerable circumstances concur to give to Moscow an Asiatic air beyond any Town I ever saw,’ wrote Miss Wilmot, a century and a half ago, in a letter home, extolling ‘the glittering crescents beneath the Cross . . . Globes of Gold blazing among the Sunshine . . . Gaudy Belfries . . . stupendous Palaces guarded by roaring Monsters.’

  A fair description of the Kremlin, even now.

  •

  ‘In Russia, it is always the unexpected which prevails,’ wrote another, less enraptured visitor. And so I was to find it, on the threshold of my Siberian odyssey. The train was due to leave on a Friday night and I had arrived at the Yaroslavsky station in a mood of mystical fulfilment. All day I had told myself – still incredulous – Tonight I shall sleep on the Trans-Sib! It has come to pass at last! At the station, puffs of smoke were lit by livid greenish lights which bleached the faces of the crowds converging on those barriers that now, at last, admitted me. Children wailed, unwieldy bundles of bedding were dragged through the throng; passengers reeled under loads of provisions, bulky paper parcels and string bags full of gigantic watermelons (No longer any peasant qualms about St. John the Baptist’s severed head, I thought). Beside such baggage, my own, especially my dressing-case, looked startlingly streamlined, although, in Western Europe and the United States, a particularly luggage-conscious community, it struck me as shabby. Chekhov had known how to travel light. When setting out for Sakhalin, to study conditions on the dread penitentiary isle off the north eastern Siberian coast, he had departed with a sheepskin coat, a pair of top boots, and a knife – ‘to cut up sausages or kill tigers’, and, we suppose some, writing materials, for he set down his grim findings at some length.

  I was travelling soft, having stipulated a first-class compartment to myself. Seeing the third and fourth class carriages overflowing with humanity, I did not regret this indulgence, and shuddered remembering the Traveller’s descriptions of conditions he had seen, in his youth, in the fifth class wagons, which had no windows, and one of the diversions had been betting on which flea or bug would cross a given line first – the race lit by a ha’penny dip. On my first journeys about the U.S.S.R. I had often travelled hard, in the most hugger-mugger manner, finding it enthralling – and clean enough – although on occasions I had the impression that the Traveller’s shade did not share my enthusiasm, sometimes even abandoning me for the duration of a journey, and only reappearing, by his own djinn-like means, when our destination was reached.

  But this journey was different – was our journey, to be made in conditions he would have approved, in first-class luxury, alone (or together) or not at all. I had promised myself that, as soon as I had settled the baggage into my compartment, I would walk the length of the platform to where the monster engine stood, fuming to be off. I wanted to see and remember every aspect of the train which had so long possessed me and which now, at last, I was to possess.

  Every detail was to be studied lovingly: its carriage work, the look of the restaurant-car, the cook’s galley, the peculiarities of the wheels, the pistons and the engine, its typical funnel-shaped stack, its buffers, and the faces of its crew; all must be imprinted in my mind’s eye for ever. Like the place names of its route, running along its side – SVERDLOVSK – NOVOSIBIRSK – KRASNOYARSK – IRKUTSK – HARBIN – VLADIVOSTOK – everything was part of the magic. It was my bow of gold, my burning arrow of desire.

  At the door of wagon No 7 (‘Seven, the mystic number of all Asia,’ the Traveller’s voice reminded me.) a brown bear stood on its hind legs, a furled red flag tucked into its shaggy side. The guard, I supposed, finding it quite in keeping with my pumpkin coach. I placed my ticket in its outstretched paw, but alas! as it consulted the passenger list, it revealed a human face, and spoke, rather than growled. The full-length fur coat had misled me. It was to be the first of several deceptions.

  I was now conducted to my compartment along a crimson-carpeted corridor, all burnished brass and dark woodwork, where already a small wood-stove crackled, heating up water for the samovars, and little shaded lamps burned cosily beside banquettes being made up into beds. This was as the Traveller had described it, and I felt him pushing me forward towards our Gallantry Bower.

  Compartment A.14 said my ticket. ‘In here,’ said the porter, ripping open the door to reveal three ladies disposed about three of the four berths: two were already in various stages of déshabille. The porter asked forgiveness and edged my luggage in among them.

  ‘No! No! There must be some mistake,’ I said, my agitation mounting as several attendants now converged on the scene, countermanding my orders to move the baggage to the compartment reserved for me.

  �
�But no one wants a whole compartment to themselves – not all across Siberia,’ they said winningly. Speaking excellent French one of the ladies – the fully-dressed one – now introduced herself as my guide, to be attached to me throughout my journey.

  ‘Please call me Olga,’ she said. Fighting down my fury, I suppose I glowered, for the other two passengers appeared affronted.

  ‘These are Cultured Citizens,’ said Olga, making introductions in the silky manner of an accomplished hostess. I bowed. The ladies, already ensconced in the upper berths, smiled widely and bowed, spilling over the edge. But it made no difference. My whole plan lay in ruins. I had requested and, I thought, obtained a compartment to myself when, some weeks earlier, I had arranged the details of my journey in Paris. On arrival in Moscow I had understood all was in order, so that now I felt aggrieved.

  I might have realized that I would not contrive to go to Siberia unaccompanied. It seemed that even the wish to go there was still suspect, or at least worthy of observation. My guide appeared an agreeable girl, in fact I could have taken a liking to her under other circumstances, but when, much later, we be came friends, I learned that my favourable first impressions had not been reciprocated at the time. At that first meeting she had found me an extremely capricious, incomprehensible and indocile Capitalist figure. Moreover, she suffered from claustrophobia, and this interminable train journey represented, to her, unrelieved suffering. But she had her marching orders.

  Olga Maximova, accompany this visitor to Siberia.

  ‘You must find me another compartment at once,’ I said firmly. But there was, it seemed, no other available.

  Time was running short, I saw by the platform clock, and the brown bear began to show signs of agitation, looking anxiously from face to face as the arguments continued and I was being more firmly wedged into the compartment.

  ‘Then I shall not go. Please get my stuff out of here at once!’ I said, renouncing all Siberia with a wave of the hand; and I felt the Traveller’s shade nudge me approvingly. (He was always a scandalist, Aunt Eudoxia had said.) But how could we have kept our tryst in a four-berth compartment crammed with ladies in pyjamas and hair nets, stoking boiled sweets?

  Overcome with remorse at my seeming incivility, I now tried to draw the ladies into an all-embracing farewell smile.

  ‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t do for me to share with you – You see I have insomnia – I keep the light burning all night and play my radio-hot jazzki,’ I said wildly, hoping to soften my rejection. Although my Russian was as rudimentary as ever, the ladies followed my trend and responded warmly.

  One patted my hand: ‘I too cannot sleep,’ she said. ‘We shall play chess all night long, all the way to Vladivostok.’

  Clutching my dressing-case, I left the train.

  Olga Maximova followed me hurriedly and now expressed the liveliest concern. Renouncing the journey? It was unheard of! ‘But why do you not like to share a compartment? It is with ladies, after all.’

  I said I would prefer gentlemen, at which piece of levity she shrugged off the struggle, reminding me that there might be no more places available on any Trans-Siberian train for weeks to come, and certainly no compartment to myself. My visa would expire while I waited . . . And as for tonight – since I had quit my hotel room and Moscow was full to overflowing, where would I sleep tonight?

  ‘The lady might go on the Peking Express, the one that leaves on Tuesdays,’ said the brown bear, taking his snout out of his fur collar, his little eyes bright with good-will. Ignoring the furious glances of Olga Maximova, he went on to say there were often whole compartments empty on that train.

  ‘Only it goes on Tuesdays,’ he added in a melancholy tone.

  I pointed out that it was all the same to me, which day of the week I went to Siberia.

  ‘Ah well! if you are prepared to leave on a Tuesday . . .’ said Olga Maximova. Unexpectedly, she had now exchanged bureaucratic briskness for Chekhovian vagueness. But she promised to do her best for me. In her eyes, I think I had assumed a peculiar significance – that of some Capitalist cross which she must bear for the sake of her Communist faith. Besides, I was a visitor; and I have always found the Russian people most sweetly disposed towards the stranger in their midst.

  Contrary to her predictions, I passed a comfortable night back in the hotel. No one had yet registered the fact of my departure; I took my key, went upstairs, exchanging the customary badinage with the two dragon-figures who were always presiding over the lobby, and finding my room in the disorder in which I had left it, fell back into the crumpled sheets in a mood of mixed triumph and anti-climax. Once again, the Trans-Siberian train had eluded me, but I had not betrayed the Traveller’s tryst.

  •

  Although I was irked by this turn of events, I abandoned myself, with a certain sense of adventure, to the three extra days in Moscow. There is a secret pleasure attendant on missing a scheduled departure, for the unexpected hours suddenly at our disposal come as some bonus, uncharted hours, stolen from orderly living to be enjoyed with the sharpened sense of unreality. The heightened colours of this sudden vision make us aware of how much we take for granted, ordinarily. Now, while we should be many miles away, we return, like revenants, to familiar scenes; or to search out places and people which pressures of time denied us, earlier. Now, perhaps, we lie again in the lover’s arms after all the farewells had been said, living a whole romantic episode anew . . . meeting, loving, leaving, all over again.

  In my own case, there was now time to search out an old friend, one of the exiles I had first known in Paris, beside the Traveller, and who, I learned, had returned to the country of her birth. I believed she might have been able to tell me something of the Traveller’s whereabouts, but I had never succeeded in tracing her during my former visits to the U.S.S.R. It was only on the eve of my departure on this latest journey that some of her former friends, the old exiles of Paris, become a spectral band in their colony at Ste. Geneviève des Bois, furnished me with an address in Moscow from where she had written to them. A letter from Red Russia! This, in their eyes, constituted both a miracle and an affront, and they handed me her letter almost as if its touch could sear. It seemed she lived content; she did not vaunt a Utopia but she was home, working as a translator for she possessed many languages. That she was content, the spectral band found inadmissible; that she had gone home to die was, perhaps, understandable. ‘Mat Roussiya! Mother Russia,’ they sighed, and crossed themselves, looking towards the little pasteboard holy images that adorned their quarters.

  When I had first known her in Paris she kept a book shop specializing in Russian and Oriental material, where over the years I spent much time and money. In retrospect, I have small doubt she had other fish to fry in the murky little premises where the shelves were stacked three-deep in a wildly unclassified richness. She was generally to be found in an inner room even darker and more murky, piled with Oriental manuscripts, catalogues and tattered books, forgotten cups of tea and stale rolls mouldering among them.

  I often arrived to find her in earnest conversation with some unplaceable individual who would bow politely, and take himself off, forthwith.

  ‘He’s really the Khan of Avaria,’ she might say, making my mouth water at the perspectives such a title evoked. Or: ‘That man who brought in the bundle of books last time you were here, would have interested you. His father has a lot of papers concerning the Petrashevsky affair.’ But she never introduced them. A decrepit cat – a Siberian grey called Boris, which she had contrived to carry out of Russia with her in the exodus – occupied the only armchair, draped, like its owner, in a frowzy shawl. Over the years Boris had faded away, his memory perpetuated by a son, named Loris (after that Loris-Melikoff who had played a considerable part in the Constitutional reforms which were on the point of being realized when terrorists’ bombs shattered both the Tzar Alexander II, and his liberal dreams).

  Both cat and woman peered myopically through a haze of cigarette smoke w
hich hung over everything. Although my friend’s shoe-uppers gaped from the soles and the nails of her beautifully shaped hands were black-rimmed, she always puffed her cigarettes through a long gold and enamelled holder. This she waved over the jumbled stacks like some diviner’s wand, to produce treasures I had despaired of finding. Sometimes, when I took myself off for a more frivolous involvement, after long hours of concentrated grubbing, she would eye me critically as I prinked before the broken slice of looking glass hanging crooked beside last year’s calendar.

  ‘You should never arrange yourself for any man – they must know you as you are, clean or dirty, pretty or plain. All the rest is just posturing,’ she would say, stabbing the air with the cigarette-holder, so that it glittered, now become a witch’s wand and she the witch, binding me to the intellectual life and a shiny nose.

  •

  When I had returned to Moscow this time the preparations for my journey had been all-absorbing and, raring to go, I had forgotten about her; but now, with this unexpected time-bonus at my disposal, I decided the finger of fate was pointing to the address I had obtained in Ste. Geneviève des Bois.

  The old Yakimankaya quarter was familiar to me as being where the Traveller’s family had lived for a while. On earlier visits I had sometimes gone there, to wander about the quiet streets that sloped down from a brisk modern thoroughfare. These backwaters were lined with low houses shaded by trees, their little gardens heavy with lilac and sunflowers. As the daylight faded behind the lovely bell-tower of Sveti Ivan Voïna, St. Ivan the Warrior, and the lamps glowed from its porch, lighting the way for a straggle of the pious who still assembled there for vespers, I would peer in at the uncurtained windows of the shabby houses round about. They were still charming in their harmonious proportions, and I would wonder which had known the Traveller’s youth. Spying in, through pots of geranium and verbena, I would try to reconstruct a vanished way of life – not because I admired it particularly, but because it had been his. The rooms I saw were brightly lit, their graceful form unchanged beneath the darkened paintwork. Some still contained the traditional brass-bound white tiled porcelain stoves. Sometimes a pretty chandelier still hung from the ceiling, but it was unlit; beside it, a single bulb hung, starkly functional. Such a chandelier, I thought, must once have lit a family dinner-table – focus, or altar of family life round which the Central and Eastern Europeans always gathered, not only to eat, but to spend whole evenings, uncomfortably, in upright chairs, playing chess, drinking tea or sipping wine. It was a calm domestic pattern frequently broken by the fury of political arguments, which, unlike English family life, were allowed to penetrate the home.