Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  •

  All that night the train was racing through the nursery once more, speeding on its way past the rocking-chair, through the rosy-patterned walls, carrying me to Siberia . . . the blue pin-point light in the ceiling of our compartment had become the little winking ruby glow of the lampada hanging before my first ikon – the one which the window-cleaner had found so alarming, so long ago . . . The hunched up form on the other berth was no longer Olga Maximova but Nanny, and I was back in my own bed, imagining the Siberian journey. The bed was swayed with the loping rhythm of the train and I drew the covers over my head as I heard the wolves howl; with a shriek, the mighty engine gathered speed, putting distance between itself and the terrible pack that streamed after us . . . Now we were in a troïka . . . I threw out my sable muff, hoping the leader would fall on it and so lose speed; on and on through the darkness we raced eastward . . . Now the wolves were gaining on us. The Traveller was about to fire his last shot . . .

  A violent crash woke me. Where were the wolves? There was no forest, no nursery nor any ikon to be seen. One of the suitcases had fallen off the rack; Nanny had given place to Olga Maximova, who stirred uneasily, and slept again. Wolves or not, the train was now hurtling along, and the rest of the baggage shifted uneasily. The hiss of steam alternated with a regular high-pitched wail from the engine, as if pushed beyond its endurance. Gradually, these sounds wore themselves into a soothing cacophony to which, dozing, I fitted names – the magical Siberian place names that seemed always to have sounded in my inner ear . . . Omsk and Tomsk and Tsitsiha – Krasnoyarsk and Pokrova . . . The words rhymed with the train’s rhythm and lulled me to sleep again until, abruptly, we came to a standstill and the absolute stillness woke me as surely as a clap of thunder. Down the line I could hear the metallic tap, tap – tap, tap, tap, of a linesman testing the wheel caps, a reassuring sound, breaking through the tense silence of the steppes which pressed round us.

  On that other journey – the one I had made almost every night, and which started from the nursery – the Traveller and I always lifted a corner of the blind, to see the wicked, phosphorescent gleam of eyes – those wolves again – as the pack skulked on the edge of the forest . . . It had been a particularly delightful moment, snug in the train rather than a troïka, although that too had a thrilling charm all its own when racing for life across the snows . . . Tap tap . . . Tap, tap tap sounded the linesman’s hammer. It came nearer, was outside, and slowly receded, the length of the train. To its staccato beat I was fitting another song, one of the Mongol herdsmen, The Lord of the Arrows. The nomads of the Gobi desert used to sing it round their camp fires, the Traveller had told me as we lay together in the Corsican macchia. That macchia and the Outer Mongolian wastes that were drawing nearer now seemed to merge. ‘For I am the Lord of the Arrows said he . . ..’

  The Khan! The Khan! tapped the hammers.

  The son of the Khan!

  The daughter of the son of the Khan! they echoed.

  The veil of the daughter of the son of the Khan.

  The breeze from afar that lifted the veil of the daughter of the son of the Khan.

  The flowers that perfumed the breeze from afar that lifted the veil of the daughter of the son of the Khan.

  The Lord of the Arrows whose passion so perfumed the flowers that they scented the breeze that lifted the veil of the daughter of the son of the Khan.

  The marriage of she for whom the Lord of the Arrows perfumed the flowers that scented the breeze that lifted the veil of the daughter of the son of the Khan . . .

  •

  It was morning: we were snorting to a stop. We were at Tomsk.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Now the days and nights were merging, like the forests and steppes that slid past endlessly. ‘Monotony is the Divinity of Russia,’ wrote de Custine, and I wondered what he would have thought of Siberia. For long stretches there was no living thing, no sign of life in the unchanging emptiness.

  Like the desert, it might have been monotonous, had not this very nothingness stimulated the imagination to fill it with a mosaic of figures and events that had animated its vastness. Now I thought of the vanished note-book and its comments with an increasing sense of loss. Dostoievsky, I told myself, must have passed this way, freed from his years of Siberian sentence. Had the note-book told something of this? From the House of the Dead, I see him making southwards in a tarantass, cutting across this very stretch we now traverse, heading for Semipalatinsk where, basking in the torrid sun of a brief Central Asian summer, he will tame lizards with saucers of milk in company with the liberal-minded young Baron Wrangel, Administrator of the province, who admires his writing and offers him hospitality.

  Eastwards lies Kiakhta, once the great caravan centre on the Chinese border (that Kiakhta of the bright-coloured packets of tea I used to buy from the Russian Grocery shops in Paris). Here the merchants endowed their church with solid silver doors studded with diamonds, rubies and emeralds. And away, far away to the north west, beyond that ridge of firs, lie the black diamonds of Kuzbass, the coal basin – finest coal reserves of all the U.S.S.R. Between there and the Urals, raw materials are scattered as prodigally as the precious stones in the merchants’ silver door: black diamonds, coal; green diamonds, timber; white diamonds, the cotton fields; liquid diamonds gushing from oil wells – in particular, the rare ‘white oil’. Magnesium, gold, silver and natural gas all abound here, while at Mirny, centre of the diamond industry, the mines are said to exceed, in their concentration the output of any in South Africa.

  These were some of the rich harvests now yielded by Siberian earth; it was as if, so long neglected, a dumping ground for convicts, ‘cesspool of Russia in Europe’, or exploited for the benefit of the feudal few, the earth was responding lavishly to each fresh mark of confidence it received from a new régime; while seeing the great rivers harnessed to hydraulic plants and mighty barrages, one could almost fancy they now flowed with more force, surging towards their man-made goal more joyously. They had flowed furiously or listlessly, these great Siberian rivers, the Irtysh, the Lena, the Ob, the Angara (into which four hundred and fourteen tributaries flowed): but their character was wholly different to the rivers of central and southern Russia, the Dnieper, the Volga, the Don. Could Quiet Flows the Don have been written around a Siberian river? They too have their still reaches, but they are more primeval. On their way from the frozen north they have reflected so little of human life or habitation: they have carried timber rafts, and convict barges, their decks overloaded with iron cages holding the prisoners. Shamans or priestly sorcerers were said to dwell among the rocks but few villages were reflected there; few lovers have trysted by their banks in the pale sun of a northern midnight; few children have splashed in their shallows.

  When I aired this romantic view of the rivers’ character to Olga Maximova she listened sympathetically. Gradually her chill materialism was thawing and, sometimes, she now followed me some of the way into my mind’s eye.

  Even now, aboard the diesel-drawn Trans-Siberian, I still saw the country, like the rest of Russia, through a romantic, nineteenth-century filter which, of course, she could not be expected to share. My fellow-passengers had only to mention the existence of tigers in the Trans-Baïkal provinces, and my mind instantly presented a series of highly-coloured flash-backs, stemming from the illustrations to that old edition of Atkinson’s Travels in the Upper and Lower Amoor with which the Traveller had started off my nursery book-shelf; some particularly romantic ones depicted the tragic idyll of Aï-Khanum the beautiful, and Souk, a young chieftain of the Horde, the Kara, or Black Kirghiz (from which Kamran’s mother stemmed . . .). The restaurant car faded, the gravy-spotted table-cloth with its crumbs and ash trays and collection of shifting tinkling glasses, containing tea, vodka, Caucasian wines, and all the aftermath of our dinner disappeared, like the faces of my companions; the lonely wail of the engine slipped imperceptibly into a lower key, becoming the wind howling round a mountain pass . . . />
  The lovers are fleeing from the wrath of Aï-Khanum’s father, but their pursuers gain on them. Souk fights them off single-handed, (illustration of the slant-eyed Tartar brave flourishing a battle-axe as the enemy close in.) After overcoming every danger and hardship, the lovers reach the fertile lowlands at last and, locked in each other’s arms, believe their troubles are past. As the sun sinks, Souk goes hunting wild game for their bridal supper, while Aï-Khanum, a devout Moslem, rashly spreads her cloak in a clearing beside the lake and prostrates herself in prayer, praising Allah for his protection – at which instant she is seized and carried off by a ferocious tiger which has been prowling in the tall reeds near by (illustration of the meek beauty, with down-cast eyes, flowing locks, Turkish trousers and a pair of singularly Victorian-looking bootees. Behind, staring fixedly at the artist rather than his prey, the Siberian tiger skulks in the reeds). A fearful shriek pierces the dusk, but when Souk reaches the clearing there is only Aï-Khanum’s blood-stained cloak. Souk curses himself for having left his beloved to go looking for food. The tiger, disappearing into the marshes with his own supper, is never tracked down, nor are Aï-Khanum’s remains. Atkinson does not tell us what happened to Souk . . .

  ‘You are silent. Of what you thinking?’ inquired a taking young Red Army major, shattering my reverie.

  ‘Of different kinds of big-game hunting,’ I reply evasively, an answer which satisfies him as being thoroughly comprehensible.

  •

  Sometimes, our train followed a huge curve, sidling forward so that as I leaned out I could see the whole of its impressive length; and, when the sun shone, it cast a shadow, a long, shifting shadow, flickering over the pale grasses of the steppe. Sometimes, it was a shadow that was of particular moment to me, for when our diesel engine was replaced by the older, more traditional kind, I saw the silhouette of that high, funnel-stacked engine of tradition, the engine of my mind’s eye, racing ahead, eating up the miles, puffing smoke, wailing its lonely wolf-like howl, at once puissant and toy-like – the engine that had raced, each night, into my heart.

  As we rolled east, our rails ran parallel with a wavering track threading across the desolation. This was once part of the dreaded Imperial trakt, the Great Siberian Post Road, trudged by legions of convicts and persons of all degree. Here came pilgrims, ‘the God-praying ones’, hardened criminals, vagrants, politicos, and such as that noblewoman who had been found guilty of extracting the jewels from one of the Church’s most precious ikons. While appearing to kiss it with particular ardour she had, in fact, been engaged in biting out the best stones, and now, stumbling among this doomed band, expiated her cupidity in bitterness.

  Along this trakt came the composer Alabiev, for whom the song of the nightingale sounded above the clanking of chains; and sounded for me, once more, above the rattle of wheels, spinning me back through time to a shuttered salon in a Corsican hotel, where the Traveller and I are playing duets at an old-fashioned piano inhabited by mice . . .

  Along this way, more lately, came other minorities, uncooperative ethnic groups, or throw-outs from the Stalinist régime, heading towards those labour camps such as Solzhenitsyn described in terrible detail in his One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. But the old notebook had not spoken of labour camps; though they were, in a fashion, a repetitive pattern in Russian history. It seemed better not to question Olga Maximova about this recurring pattern and since, for my mind’s eye, the twentieth century Siberian scene remained out of focus, I returned to the earlier ages it saw so vividly. The Traveller had been too closely involved, perhaps, to evoke the contemporary Russian scene which was still barely forming when he vanished: perhaps what he knew of it made him as hungry as I for more remote and romantic visions. Perhaps not. In any case the notebook had concentrated on purely historic or personal perspectives; nothing political was apparent. Thus my own peep-show vision remained a period piece, and I preferred it that way.

  •

  Here comes a swaggering figure, all evil, with fur papakh set rakishly over his fleshy, sly face – the Ataman Semienov and his Manchurian bandit troops, a most unfortunate choice for the Allies to have sustained in the Siberian campaigns of 1918–20.

  Now we overtake a rambling line of children – spectral figures – the bezprezorni or homeless ones, refuse of the Revolution, hunting in packs, stealing and killing to survive, vicious, ruthless desperados of all ages, knowing no laws, yet forming their own fraternity, the elder children wonderfully protective towards the younger. Thousands of these bezprezorni roamed Russia, terrorizing as they went. Many who went southwards, towards the Crimea or the Ukraine, survived and were at last rounded up, to be successfully reclaimed by new systems of re-education; harsh ones, but not without idealism. Punishment, it was soon found, only hardened these desperate young creatures. Of the thousands who went north into Siberia, many did not survive the rigours of the climate. Those who did, grew up to be absorbed into the new land, participating in its struggles and reaping its rewards. Today, they rank among its most responsible citizens.

  Our train runs through a dense forest, and the road is lost to view. Daylight is blotted out, and for a while there is no sky to be seen above the branches of the towering fir trees. Abruptly, without any thinning of the trees, we emerge as from a tunnel. Once more the steppes stretch ahead to infinity and beyond; and, once more, the trakt keeps us company.

  Here, going against the east-flowing tide of humanity comes a solitary figure, that of a frail young girl, in a borrowed sheepskin pelisse, la jeune Sibérienne, whose case aroused great interest at the time and inspired Xavier de Maistre’s story, the same which my mother donated to my first Siberian bookshelf in the nursery.

  Now her solitary figure is replaced by a band of revellers, it seems, all wrapped in furs, roundabout figures, singing lustily. They are the six Kamchatka virgins that the Empress Elizabeth commanded to be brought to St. Petersburg, wishing to acquaint herself with her furthest peoples. The virgins set out on their immense journey in charge of an officer of the Imperial Guard, but some months later, on arrival at Irkutsk, barely half-way, all six were in a noticeably interesting condition. The officer in charge was, as may be imagined, severely censured by the Governor, and no doubt the Kamtchatka ex-virgins heard the sharp side of his tongue too. But there was nothing to be done about it; the caravan was obliged to put up at Irkutsk until all of them had been brought to bed safely. At last the journey was resumed, the ranks increased by six little additions. Alas! such was the force of habit, such was the vastness of the lands they traversed, that on arrival in St. Petersburg, they were all in the same condition again. History does not relate what the Empress said, nor what punishment she inflicted on this enterprising officer.

  Here, spattering the mud bridle-high, I see a sotnik of Cossacks at the gallop, escorting the britchka of Count Muraviev, Governor General of Eastern Siberia from 1847 to 1861. He sits muffled in his cloak, sunk in some dream of Imperialistic expansion, planning those long-sighted moves by which Russia will acquire from China the Far-Eastern territories through which my train will presently run.

  And along this same route I am now travelling – a way that has known adventurers, anarchists, explorers, patriots, mystics, the fine and the wicked, oppressors and oppressed – what may follow?

  So the endless horizons of time and space dissolved, one with another, and I sat in my corner seat watching the expanses of this haunted landscape, expanses where, it has been said, the only hills are those made by the exiles’ graves. Now they were thinly veiled by a fringe of birch trees, ‘the cold-place loving birch’, as it was described by William Browne, a seventeenth-century poet, in his Britannia’s Pastorals. The delicate striped saplings were shivering and swaying in a cold rain that whipped round them. I remembered the hideous purpose they had sometimes served in Siberia. Cattle thieves were shown no mercy; Siberian peasants would rope a horse-thief by his hands and feet to two birch saplings they had bent together – when released the
trees sprang back and the thief was torn apart between them.

  Once, as I gazed out across the nothingness that was the central steppe region, the bands of phantoms which I summoned gave place to a small procession of Soviet citizens wending their way towards a distant church, its cupolas lonely on the vast sky-line. This was a funeral procession, the traditional white coffin carried on a ramshackle telega, the mourners plodding after.

  In former days, the funeral rites prescribed for taking a coffin by rail were of such protracted ceremonial, with priests in their purple vestments, choristers, ikon bearers, candles and incense, that at last, only one coffin was permitted to each train, throughout its entire run. Otherwise, the rituals of Orthodoxy would have undermined those efforts which railroad companies were making with determination, but little success, to overcome the natural indifference to timetables displayed by the Russians as a race. Travellers of earlier days recount how the Trans-Siberian would dawdle so that passengers climbed down, picked flowers and regained their places without any rush. For some years, trains appeared to run when they would, or could. Hopeful travellers congregated at the wayside stations with their bedding and provisions, and settled down to wait unprotestingly.

  On one occasion, the presence of the living delayed a train’s run as much as that of any dead. There had been extraordinary scenes when the twenty-one-year-old Spiridonova, hailed by the terrorists as their heroine, was transported by the Trans-Siberian to serve a life sentence in a far Eastern Siberian prison.

  In 1906 she had succeeded in killing General Luzhenovsky, a monster of brutality and tyranny, whose crimes were widely known, but went unchecked by those in authority. ‘The assassin Spiridovna’ was condemned to death but, owing to the violence of public opinion in her favour, her sentence had to be commuted to life-imprisonment (as in the case of Vera Zassoulitch, another terrorist of tender years, who in 1878 fired on the chief of St. Petersburg’s police). Indignation swept Russia, and reached out even across its frontiers to Trafalgar Square, where a meeting of The Friends of Russian Freedom met on a Sunday in July 1907, with Cunningham Graham denouncing Russian (Tzarist) tyranny to enthusiastic crowds, among whom, it chanced, were my mother and the Traveller. Many years later he described to me the meeting and told me Spiridonova’s story. It seems that he and my mother had set out for a pleasant afternoon at the National Gallery among the Italian Primitives, but found themselves part of a mass protest meeting. The subject being of particular interest to the Traveller, they had stayed to the end.