Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  ‘Your friend often went to the Znamensky church,’ he continued. ‘You know it? Very beautiful . . . Always the same thing. He lighted three candles and watched them burn down. One time I asked him: are you praying? He answers No. Then why three candles, I say? For what are they? And he tells me: “For the man I was, and the man I am become, and for one person I love”.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then one day, he goes away and I never see him again.’

  ‘You mean he died?’

  ‘I don’t know. The war came then and a lot of people disappeared. He went to the German front as interpreter. I worked in an armament factory. I heard about him once, though . . . At the end of the war someone came here who told how he was taken prisoner by the Nazis and then escaped with Russian soldiers from an Austrian prison camp. They joined up with partisans in my country – in Serbia . . . Yugoslavia they call it nowadays.

  ‘He was badly wounded and getting not so young any more, so when the fighting is finished the partisans took him to Trieste and put him on a Russian hospital ship leaving for the Black Sea. All the way across Venezia Giulia province, he was saying he wants to stay in Trieste and go to the British Military Mission there. He said they would help him to get to England . . . Perhaps he was in delirium . . . he kept telling there was someone he must find in London. But he was very ill, so they put him on the boat going to Odessa. The man who told me all this was on the same boat. It was a beautiful one. Very luxurious it was, he said. It had been built for Roumanian pleasure cruises, those Roumanians think much about pleasure. We don’t. But some of the Russian boys took door-handles off the cabins for souvenirs. This man had one – he put it on the door of his izba. It looked nice. He kept it well polished, too . . .’

  Darkness had thickened round us and across the little square patches of light appeared from the half-buried houses set below street level. They glowed and winked like the eyes of crouching cats. Two old women shuffled past, mumbling together. They eyed us from the shawls that were wound round their heads. Near-by, an accordion sounded, accompanying one of the sad songs of Russian longing. The old Serbian began to speak again, and I held my breath, waiting for some ultimate revelation that would crown my journey.

  ‘That is all. All what I know for certain,’ he said apologetically. ‘I do not think you will find him. Why try? Perhaps he is dead. Perhaps not. He was badly wounded . . . and remember, that is twenty years past. He was not being young any more, last time we were together. Now he would be old, like me . . . Here we do not know much what is happening outside. Siberia is still many miles, many days away from everything. Yet now people are flying here in one day. You have been in an airplane? I have not . . . Once I was asked to make a special kind of bomb to explode in an airplane . . . But I told them no. I told it would be against my principles. The passengers take enough risks flying. It would not be fair. But I was not understood. That is why I am sent here to work on the kolkhoz clocks. But as I told you, I am happy.’

  A silence fell and then, as if to close the subject, he added: ‘I never hear anything more of your friend . . . but like you, I remember him.’

  A chill gust of wind stirred the trees and a few late leaves rattled to the ground at our feet. My companion turned up the collar of his sheepskin jacket.

  ‘You do not find it cold? Why you did not say we meet in the hotel? It is more gemütlich there.’

  A tinge of longing sounded in his voice and I realized that he would have enjoyed the club sofas and an Armenian brandy after a copious dinner in the overcrowded dining-room – the world, the flesh and the devil, beside kolkhoz living. How could I have been so inhospitable – so blind, too? I might have known that, if he was able to join me at all, this cloak and dagger rendezvous would not be necessary.

  ‘You mean we could have met there – at the hotel?’ I asked.

  ‘Why not?’

  It seemed an anti-climax to suggest returning there together now, but I made the gesture.

  ‘Thank you, but it is late. A friend will drive me back to the kolkhoz. I must not keep him waiting.’ (Or fail to report our conversation to the proper quarters, perhaps?)

  From the far side of the square two men were walking towards us; their footsteps sounded softly on the unpaved ground. They passed us slowly, and did not look in our direction, which was odd, for in Siberia everyone is of interest to everyone else – especially people speaking together in a foreign language. Their footsteps died away, and they vanished into the darkness. The Serbian explosives expert got to his feet stiffly.

  ‘Time I am going,’ he said, and took my hand, and smiled, and went away, melting, like them, into the darkness, leaving me alone.

  The Traveller had always been an elusive figure, and it was in keeping that he should remain so, recalled only by echoes, even in Siberia.

  Suddenly I wanted to leave. Chita, the reaches of the Selenga, like the Mongol frontiers faded . . . It was time to leave my sigh-away, die-away realm: time to go back from where I had come, westward, westward again, across Asia into the fret and fume of the European cities that are, au fond, my home. I recalled the words of Komensky the Quietist.

  Return! Return whence thou earnest, to the house of the heart, and then close the door behind thee.

  In the house of the heart there is room for all Siberia, all memories.

  •

  Olga Maximova was thoroughly put out when I told her I had decided to cut short my Siberian stay.

  ‘You want to leave – now? But your permit to stay in Vladivostok has just arrived. This is quite a rare privilege! Your accommodation has been reserved. I do not understand.’

  She spoke severely of capricious travellers and a change of plans. As it was equally unlikely she would understand a change of heart, I remained silent. Nor could I explain to Russian who had been planning further, mouth-watering local expeditions, and assumed an air of sad denial.

  On the morning of my departure he was waiting by the car with a basket, ‘for our taïga tree to travel in’ he explained, hovering anxiously as we packed it. Then he thrust a small parcel into my hand. It was a painted wooden spoon, one of the charming red and gold peasant spoons of tradition.

  ‘For goodbye from Siberia,’ he said. I have used the spoon ever since; it has taken its honoured place on my table beside the knife and fork of Shamyl the Avar, a treasure donated to me by the great Imam’s descendants.

  •

  On the way to the air-field I looked once again at that primeval landscape which had been for so long my heart’s desire. It was a desolate stretch of open country merging with the thinned-out edges of the taïga, marshy patches that would soon be frozen hard. The first snows had settled and lowering skies pressed round. A sleigh came racing towards us, flashing past in sprays of whiteness. Looking back, I saw it dashing northwards into the icy wastes. The little shaggy horses plunged forward bravely, and I could hear the jangle of bells. For a brief moment I had glimpsed the silhouette of two figures in the sleigh, a man and a child crouched down under their heavy furs. The man’s head, in a fox-skin cap, was bent over the child’s hood. They seemed to be talking intently, oblivious of the nothingness into which they sped. I wanted to ask Russian to turn the car and go after them . . . But then I saw their sleigh left no tracks across the snow; the Traveller and I were making another of our journeys into the mind’s eye.