As the train loped on its way towards Tomsk I thought of another, earlier Romanov, the Tzar Alexander I who had found doushevny mir, the peace of the soul, in Siberia: or so it is believed. The Tzar’s end is surrounded in mystery and the belief that he did not die in 1824 at Taganrog but reappeared, ten years later, at Tomsk, as the holy man or Staretz Feodor Kouzmitch is still firmly established in the countryside; and elsewhere too, for it is one of those enigmatic episodes which break through the rigidity of fact, and are so shot with colour and threaded with conclusive details that they become obsessive.
All that day I was recalling the strange story. Worthy and unworthy subjects alike obtain obsessive power by the mystery surrounding them. Was Naundorff the Dauphin? What really happened at Mayerling? Who was the Man in the Iron Mask? Was there a Monster of Glamis? What of Anastasia? In Moscow I encountered a distinguished historian who seemed astonished at my interest in her. ‘But why do you foreigners puzzle so much over Anastasia? If one of them escaped . .? It’s of no consequence to us now.’ His tone was authoritative, his lack of interest unfeigned, unlike so many of his fellow countrymen who showed a lively interest in anything concerning the Romanovs, the Yussoupov-Rasputin drama, and other episodes over which a veil has been drawn. Was Yussoupov still alive? Truly? Living in Paris? How? And was it true the last Tzar’s sister had gone to America. . .? These were the coulisses of history; in the U.S.S.R. it seemed the limelight fell on more immediate issues or those far further away in time.
•
Below the roar of party leaders, relayed on the loud-speakers, a persistent humming sounded. One late lingering mosquito was travelling with us, and zoomed round hungrily. I remembered how the Traveller had described the particular fury of Siberian mosquitoes. They had caused fearful malarial epidemics among the workers constructing the line. In summer, he said, one saw linesmen and working parties all wearing gloves and heavily veiled straw hats, like elegant Edwardian lady motorists.
We decided to move to the restaurant car while Mikhail, our attendant, dealt with the mosquito. He was partial to spraying all the compartments and corridors with particularly vigorous perfumes; but they had evidently not overcome our mosquito. Russians share the Asiatics love of scent, and manufacture many kinds. I asked Mikhail their names; some were flowery, Silver Lily, and Lilac; some were not, Red Moscow and Kremlin being, I thought, almost as oddly named as another, Pikovaya Dama – Queen of Spades – generally considered of ill-omen, as in Pushkin’s tale of that name. Mikhail let me sniff at his store of bottles, but Pikovaya Dama was not among them. It might have been just the thing to finish off our mosquito.
•
‘Do you know what Siberia produces in one hour?’ asked the engineer, beaming across the dining-table. Fortunately I was not expected to reply. ‘Six hundred tons of steel, 500 tons of laminated iron, 700 tons of mineral iron, 21,000 metres of cotton material, 6,000 cubic metres of wood, 15 million kilowatts of . . .’
His voice glowed with pride and Armenian brandy; I held out my glass for some more ‘insanity drops’, as the Buriat-Mongolians referred to alcohol. However impressive, I have always found statistics exhausting. But after another revivifying nip of ‘insanity drops’ I was able to marvel at descriptions of the new town of Akademgorodok – miracle concentration of scientists near the science-city of Novosibirsk; where Nuclear Physics, Cytology, Cybernetics, Solid State Physics and Geophysics are all household words. We were now joined by Olga who beamed, finding me at last responding to developments of which she was justly proud. Trotsky had called Siberia the accentuation of Russia’s backwardness – one railroad cutting across a wasteland. But now? Now it is surely the essence of Russian progress.
Akademgorodok was begun in 1957 and endowed as a privileged, first class community, in order to persuade a scientific intellectual élite to disperse from the overcrowded Russian cities and settle there, beyond the Urals. But there is no sense of exile. It lies in a beautiful countryside with skiing, hunting and swimming too, in the short but torrid Siberian summer. I was told that the opera-house is larger than Moscow’s Bolshoi (a city’s status, I noticed, is apt to be reckoned by the size of its opera-house), and all the best companies come there. There are cinemas, super-markets, amateur concert-groups and many clubs. The scientist society live in comfortable modern ‘kottedgi’ set among the birches. There is a special Wunderkind school for children from all the ethnic groups of the U.S.S.R. who show an outstanding scientific turn of mind, infant seismologists or mathematical prodigies from the Ukraine, junior physicists from Samarkand, and such.
I thought of another, earlier intellectual élite: the Dekabrists. They too had formed schools – the first in Siberia, when at last their prison sentence was commuted to Siberian exile. The brilliant tuition of these lost men was such that, when some of their pupils were later admitted to the universities of Moscow or St. Petersburg, they far surpassed the other students. Thus were they avenged, for from the young intellectuals they had formed came the seeds of a stronger, better organized spirit of revolt, which at last swept the way clear for the new Russia I now saw around me.
•
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.