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.
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 wonder, 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.