Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  Feelings had run very high in Trafalgar Square, as well as in Moscow. There, outside the dread Butirky clearing-house prison, where the young girl was detained and tortured, crowds gathered below her cell window, demanding her release and chanting revolutionary songs. Although dispersed by Cossack nagaïkas, they returned again and again. As Spiridonova was put aboard the Trans-Siberian, she addressed the crowds that surged round acclaiming her. ‘Comrades, we shall meet again in a free Russia,’ were her parting words, as she was thrust into her barred compartment for the journey to her prison, beyond the sinister mines of Nertchinsk.

  But what should have been a prison journey became a triumphal progress. Mysteriously, at each stop, cheering crowds were assembled. News was brought that her Moscow prison persecutors, Avramov and Zhdanov, had met justice at the hands of the mob. At Omsk and Krasnoyarsk the frenzy mounted. The engine-driver was stoned, the Marseillaise was sung and red flags waved; the prisoner addressed the crowds from behind her bars as offerings rained through them, kopecks, five-rouble gold pieces, flowers and fruit. At each halt it seemed more likely she would be rescued and the guards were trebled. But they too, seemed infected by the extraordinary circumstances, and soon Spiridovna was holding receptions, regally, from the steps of her wagon. Yet she did not try to escape, nor did the feared rescue take place. An acceptance of suffering has always been a marked Russian characteristic. And then, perhaps, everyone realized that Siberia was prison enough. Where could she have gone – who could have hidden her, for long?

  At Kurgan scraps of paper were passed up – ‘Write something for us,’ yelled the crowd, hysterical in their admiration for the young heroine who had slain the dragon. All along the route she addressed them with noble words. By then the stops were getting longer and longer, the train’s schedule more and more wild, but, since the station-masters were one with the crowds, nothing was done. Now people ran beside the tracks shouting encouragement to her, or once again stoning the unfortunate engine-drivers. One hardy grey-beard, who had survived prison sentence in Siberia to settle on the land, raced beside the train for eight versts, lifting up his grandchildren, who proffered flowers.

  ‘Take them! Take them, little sister,’ he shouted, above the hullabaloo. ‘All their lives they will remember for whom they picked them.’

  And perhaps they did; perhaps they are still living somewhere in Siberia, still glowing from that brief encounter. One thing is certain. ‘The assassin Spiridovna’s’ journey was seldom if ever equalled on the Trans-Siberian; certainly not by the Tzarevitch Nicholas Alexandrovitch, returning westwards, after opening the line at Vladivostok some fifteen years earlier. Siberia reserved its really royal welcome for the revolutionary.

  •

  Once again it was the stillness which woke me – as insistent as the rhythm of running wheels. The train had stopped. Peering out I saw clouds racing across the moon’s face. So brilliant was its light that they scarcely dimmed this silvery northern midnight. It was my last night on the train, for I had finally decided to break my journey at Irkutsk. Too many places were being sacrificed for the image of the train’s fabled run and the shade of a lost companion who had not materialized but who still could – who might – somewhere. Perhaps he had been waiting for me in one of those towns along the route, which I had by-passed. Or, in Irkutsk, we should come face to face, quite simply, in the street, with no more ado. The place, and the loved one . . . but the time? I never thought of time where we were concerned. I was for ever in my twenties, as I had been when last we were together. He might have been twenty-five or more years my elder, but for me he remained without age, the unchanging Djinn of my nursery. I could not envisage him ‘tied up to the pier of old age’ in Turgeniev’s moving phrase. Pathos was not for him ‘;. . . For I am the Lord of the Arrows said he’.

  •

  When I announced to Olga Maximova that I had decided to quit the train at Irkutsk and see something of the city before proceeding to Verkné-Udinsk and beyond; in short, to break the run in its entirety, she received the news with enthusiasm and began listing a number of engineering achievements, educational ventures, geological institutes and kolkhoz in the vicinity, all of which were triumphs, to be seen to be believed. So she thought them, and so, no doubt, they were; yet I knew that many other magnets would be pulling at me, among them the Outer Mongolian border-land, perhaps to find there the Lamaserai where the Traveller had spent a year among the saffron-robed bonzes, nursing a broken heart. Was he withdrawn there, for ever, from life? There was a letter to post in Irkutsk, too; a letter I did not know how to write to a man I did not know, proposing a meeting at some place I had not yet seen; to question him about a long-lost love – though this project was now assuming an almost mythical aspect, like my old friend the witch at Yakimankaya. Had it not been for the address she had given me, lying snug in my wallet, I should have thought it all a dream.

  And then, I was side-tracked by the most beguiling accounts of a natural mud spa high on the northern shores of Baïkal which functioned, it seemed, as much for the wild animals of the vicinity as the few locals and fewer visitors. From time immemorial, seals, reindeer, foxes and bears, all the creatures of the taïga where it edges the arctic tundra, had come south to wallow trustingly in its curative mud. The presence of a handful of humans had not, until now, appeared to discourage them, I was told. Today, game laws are very strictly enforced in Siberia, and the inhabitants do not rush about slaughtering with the indiscriminate zeal of some other countries. The more I thought about this primitive spa, the more I had a fancy to go there and wallow beside some lolloping seal. Beside such attractions, what could the Monte Catinis, the Bad Gasteins and the other spas of Europe offer? Rheumatic complaints, said Olga Maximovitch, responded particularly to this mud cure. I had not imagined seals to suffer from rheumatism but then, Baïkal seals are a breed apart – of enormous size – and their presence in the lake has always baffled scientists, for Baïkal is an inland sea and no one has ever explained how the seals got there in the first place.

  Then, there was the magnet pull of Chita, eastward, beyond Verkhné-Udinsk, where the Dekabrist Princesses had at last been able to rejoin their convicted husbands and share their fate. There I would see for myself the miserable but now historic little street named for them, Damskaya Ulitza – the Ladies’ Street – where they lodged, these once-pampered young women, in a wretched izba too cramped for them even to stretch out full length on the floor, for there were no beds in the beginning. The Traveller had often recounted Princess Wolkonskaya’s reunion with her husband, a man she had not loved, but who represented every political idea she cherished. After the terrible journey she had undertaken and the hardships she had survived, when at last she entered the pestilential cell in which he rotted, she first knelt to kiss his fetters.

  The Dekabrist wives inspired some of Pushkin’s most beautiful verses, and were worthy of them. How, I asked myself, could I presume even to think of such women from the softness of my first-class compartment? How idle to imagine I could ever comprehend anything of Siberia and its dramas from such a cocoon.

  Prête-moi ton grand bruit, ta grande allure si douce

  O train de luxe!

  Tandis que derrière les portes laquées

  Dorment les millionaires.

  Even if there were no millionaires on this train, I was, figuratively, among them. Factually, I was journeying across Siberia, a journey few people of my acquaintance had made; actually, I was still playing the Run-Away Game – certainly not coming to know Siberia as once I had believed I would. I had confused the issue, glimpsing the country while brooding over the Traveller’s loss, comfortably, in my first-class compartment. But could I have done what the Dekabrists’ wives had done? Could I have crossed those terrible wastes, by slow and agonized stages, to join him – even to learn more of the country that had held my imagination for so long?

  The Traveller’s words came back to me: ‘You’re such a romantic creature, Pussinka! I wo
nder, would you have followed me to Siberia in the classic manner . . .? But then, wouldn’t that be because you were more in love with the land than the man . . .?’ Again I heard the mocking voice: ‘I believe you’re more in love with the train than me!’

  My spirit may have been willing, but O my flesh was weak! Only when one has seen the immensity of the Siberian steppes, or those implacable stretches of the taïga can one begin to measure the abnegation and courage of the dobrovolni – those who voluntarily followed the prisoners into exile here.

  Time and soft living had overtaken me and now, it seemed, I was in fact more in love with comfort than anything else, content merely to watch a new world through a window.

  Et vous, grandes glaces à travers lesquelles j’ai vu passer

  La Sibérie et les Monts du Samnion . . .

  Through a gap in the steamed-over windows of our compartment I could see the shadowy outline of trees surrounding the track. Taïga – primeval forests rising above, and interwoven with dense thickets, covering marshy land where the deeper earth remains perpetually frozen. The buffeting wind that soughed outside our windows and sent the clouds racing overhead could not stir the taïga. It was locked within itself, hostile, menacing. Here (until the advent of helicopters) no human being had ever penetrated profoundly, for it is estimated that the taïga covers over four thousand miles from east to west, and about one thousand five hundred from north to south. Hunters and fugitives and wild animals, too, always kept close to the few rivers that thread through the density. Even on the fringes where our train ran, a way had been forced with epic endeavour.

  •

  Olga was sleeping heavily, cocooned in blankets. I lowered the window cautiously and leaned out, breathing the icy resinous air, catching, I thought, some rustling or muttering where the taïga thickened. I remembered how my Russian friends used to tell of the mushroom-gathering expeditions of their childhood, in the great forests of Central Russia, and how the peasants believed that storms in the forest were battles of the Lyeshei or Wood Demons – Pan-like figures who lived in the deepest glades. Squirrels and mice, said the peasants, were their captives, and the yearly migrations of these little creatures were transactions of Lyeshei – gambling debts repaid in furry currency – two thousand or more mice wagered against a hundred squirrels. The Lyeshei were perilous to man; every peasant or hunter knew that. They lay in wait for wanderers in the forest, seeking to obtain their souls in exchange for granting a wish.

  And what if, at that very moment, the Lyeshei were gathering at the edge of the clearing, huge figures from a Vroubel painting, with wild, pale magnetic eyes, willing my soul away for a wish? It would have gone gladly, I thought, if they could have conjured the Traveller to my side on this, my last night on the Trans-Siberian.

  But as if to reassert its own, more positive powers, the train gave a sudden jerk, shook itself to life, and with a shriek, began speeding towards Irkutsk, leaving the Lyeshei and their spells far behind.

  CHAPTER XXV

  As we drew near to Irkutsk I lurched my way to the dining car for a farewell breakfast. The train would be going on by the Circum-Baïkal route and the usual nameless meal was being served for those to whom it was lunch, or supper time. I listened, for the last time, to the special sounds of my Trans-Siberian – a whistle, an infinitely lonely wail, and the rattle of tea-tumblers in their metal holders, shifting uneasily as they had done all the way across Siberia. Leaning from the window, straining for a first view of Irkutsk, I watched once more, the shadow of our train racing alongside and, seeing far ahead that our engine was the majestic high-stacked kind puffing smoke self-importantly, I rejoiced that it was this, rather than the soulless diesel that should bring me at last to Irkutsk.

  Leave-taking was an emotional moment; my ‘Fair house of Joy’ that had done its best not to disappoint! From the platform I reached up to pat its heaving flank – for so its metal sides now appeared to me. There were many farewells to be said. I had found friends the length of the train. ‘Come back! Come back!’ they cried, pressing sweets and flowers on me, as if I was leaving a house where I had been a welcome guest. The cooks leant out of their galley waving dishcloths with the majestic enticement of Queen Tamara from her Caucasian keep. Our car-attendant rehearsed me, once again, in the current Mongolian for good morning – I love you – thank you – useful phrases he had assured me, when teaching me, en route. The Vietnamese army, who were proceeding to the Chinese frontier and were now frisking about the platform performing their ritual gymnastics, stopped in mid-somersault to wish me well, as I wished them, going towards the cruel war that lay ahead.

  Olga Maximova, released at last from her claustrophobic torments, beamed as she shepherded me towards the station’s main building, a handsome structure adorned with formal parterres and busts of national heroes. While the good-byes were being said she had assumed the gratified yet deprecating air of a parent whose child has done well at the end of term celebrations.

  Driving to the hotel, along wide, tree-lined boulevards flanked by massive, rather over-ornate buildings redolent of taste at the turn of the century, interspersed by contemporary cement functionals, I remembered that Irkutsk used to be known as the Paris of Siberia. Beside the izbas and village settlements or wandering outskirts of industrial developments we had passed en route, it was infinitely urban; though the sky-scraper developments of other cities are discouraged here, on account of the severe earth-tremors which occur regularly, said Olga Maximova, apologetic that Nature had been so unaccommodating towards progress.

  For the limitless regions lying around and beyond, Irkutsk had always been a magnet, with something of splendour in its legend. The city’s arms were a curious animal, a babr, heraldic, yet seeming plausible, as if some creature likely to be encountered in the taïga. In the old prints or carvings its paws and ears were those of a wolf, while its tail was that of a fox. In its mouth, it held a sable. It was of Chinese origin, I was told.

  Second generation Siberians, settlers, or the children of reformed prisoners, those who survived sentence to strike it rich on the Lena gold fields, and merchants, grown fat on commerce, rarely made sorties to Moscow or St. Petersburg, though they traded with all the big cities within and without the Russian frontiers. For themselves, they preferred to import sumptuous trimmings to impose on their provincialism. Their newly built houses were resplendent with chandeliers, satin covered, gilded furniture, billiard tables and mechanical pianos. Luxuries such as kid gloves, French millinery and champagne, and engravings of Landseer’s paintings found their way here; but, while living it up, these native pioneers clung to earlier ways, and were sometimes said to ignore the comforts of their grandiose canopied beds, preferring to sleep on the floor, fully dressed and covered by their shoubas – probably sable-lined.

  Some of these Siberians developed a strong sense of civic pride, built churches and became patrons of the arts, endowing orphanages, theatres and an opera-house to which they cajoled the best artists. A flavour of gold-rush days persisted, however, and gambling saloons and their brassy girls abounded. Yet according to one visitor, around 1900, a positively frenzied ennui gripped its inhabitants. Even the hazards of lawless living did not dispel this. Some citizens were in the habit of firing off revolvers from their bedroom windows before turning-in, to remind possible marauders that they were armed. But perhaps it was also to shatter that nerve-wracking stillness that descended on the provincial capital where, through those interminable winters, the nothingness of taïga and steppe and tundra closed round.

  Looking about me, I thought the town remarkably thriving, lively and orderly, its streets controlled by buxom policewomen. Everywhere, I saw posters announcing performances of ballet and opera, specialized exhibitions or visiting orchestras. The Hot-Jazzki Boys from Tiflis were announced for the next night and I promised myself a rich mixture, with the Tadjik Folk Opera from Tashkent, for my first evening in Irkutsk. ‘Now welcome pleasure’ as the hedonistic Harriete Wilson used t
o say. I had already planned my menu for dinner: omoul, the ‘satin-fleshed’ fish from Baïkal which had rejoiced the Abbot of Krasny Yar in Melnikov-Pertcherski’s book on the Old Believers.

  ‘Omoul first – then Siberian apples, please – the transparent kind.’ I sat in the overheated, noisy restaurant fulfilling some of my dreams, and having looked up the Russian for transparent – prozratchini – expected to be served this local delicacy. ‘Apples or oranges?’ asked the waitress (oranges are confusingly called appelcinie). There were to be no nuances. The room was overpoweringly hot and noisy, crowded with a preponderance of reddish-brown faced diners – Mongolian medical students from the University, I learned, and others, in from Ulan Bator for a football match – Irkutsk v. Buriats United.

  The Mongol Hordes! But where were the saffron robes and Torghut boots described by earlier travellers, mine among them? I thought of the Hordes in that remote past when they conquered Moscow and held week-long feasts, Homeric junkets, their tables and benches being supported by the prostrate Muscovites, many of whom died under the weight of huge platters and hogsheads of liquor, as well as that of their sprawling conquerors. The Mongols round me in the dining-room looked a mild lot by comparison, though no doubt seen out of context – in a Western snack-bar, say – they might have appeared formidable. They were eating modest platters of pilmeni and discussing ‘futbol’, their usually impassive faces glowing with enthusiasm and bottled beer. The word ‘Shamanite’, spoken with fervour, recurred constantly, and I was surprised to find the youth of Outer Mongolia and Irkutsk too, were still invoking their primeval forms of worship. But Olga Maximova informed me otherwise. ‘Shamanite’ was the latest catch-word, a newly-coined adjective expressing anything fabulous, from a pass at ‘futbol’ to a record harvest. It derived, admittedly, from Shaman, those priestly witch-doctors whose magic had once been so powerful a force in these regions. But they were no more, she stated firmly.