" which reminded me of a similar
situation in a Chekhov story.
What do you think has changed over the last sixty years
in the traveling style? You loved wagons-lits.
Oh, I did. In the early years of this century, a travel
agency on Nevski Avenue displayed a three-foot-long model of an
oak-brown international sleeping car. In delicate
verisimilitude it completely outranked the painted tin of my
clockwork trains. Unfortunately it was not for sale. One could
make out the blue upholstery inside, the embossed leather
lining of the compartment walls, their polished panels, inset
mirrors, tulip-shaped reading lamps, and other maddening
details. Spacious windows alternated with narrower ones, single
or geminate, and some of these were of frosted glass. In a few
of the compartments, the beds had been made.
The then great and glamorous Nord-Express (it was never
the same after World War I when its elegant brown became a
nouveau-riche blue), consisting solely of such international
cars and running but twice a week, connected St. Petersburg
with Paris. I would have said: directly with Paris, had
passengers not been obliged to change from one train to a
superficially similar one at the Russo-German frontier
(Verzhbolovo-Eydtkuhnen), where the ample and lazy Russian
sixty-and-a-half-inch gauge was replaced by the
fifty-six-and-a-half-inch standard of Europe, and coal
succeeded birch logs.
In the far end of my mind I can unravel, I think,
at least five such journeys to Paris, with the Riviera or
Biarritz as their ultimate destination. In 1909, the year I now
single out, our party consisted of eleven people and one
dachshund. Wearing gloves and a traveling cap, my father sat
reading a book in the compartment he shared with our tutor. My
brother and I were separated from them by a washroom. My mother
and her maid Natasha occupied a compartment adjacent to ours.
Next came my two small sisters, their English governess, Miss
Lavington (later governess of the Tsar's children), and a
Russian nurse. The odd one of our party, my father's valet,
Osip (whom, a decade later, the pedantic Bolsheviks were to
shoot, because he appropriated our bicycles instead of turning
them over to the nation), had a stranger for comp! anion
(Feraudi, a well-known French actor).
Gone the panache of steam, gone the thunder and blaze,
gone the romance of the railroad. The popular train rouge
is merely a souped-up tram. As to the European
sleeping-cars, they are drab and vulgar now. The "single" I
usually take is a stunted compartment with a corner table
concealing inadequate toilet facilities (not unlike those in
the farcical American "roomette," where to get at the necessary
utensil one has to rise and shoulder one's bed like Lazarus).
Still, for the person with a past, some faded charm remains
clinging to those international sleepers which take you
straight from Lausanne to Rome or from Sicily to the Piedmont.
True, the dining-car theme is muted; sandwiches and wine are
supplied by hawkers between stations; and your plastic
breakfast is prepared by ! an overworked, half-dressed
conductor in his grubby cubicle next to the car's malodorous W.
C.; yet my childhood moments of excitement and wonder are still
brought back by the mystery of sighing stops in the middle of
the night or by the first morning glimpse of rocks and sea.
What do you think of the super-planes?
I think their publicity department, when advertising the
spaciousness of the seat rows, should stop picturing impossible
children fidgeting between their imperturbed mother and a
gray-templed stranger trying to read. Otherwise, those great
machines are masterpieces of technology. I have never flown
across the Atlantic, but I have had delightful hops with
Swissair and Air France. They serve excellent liquor and the
view at low elevations is heartbreakingly lovely.
What do you think about luggage? Do you think it has
lost style, too?
I think good luggage is always handsome and there is a lot
of it around nowadays. Styles, of course, have changed. No
longer with us is the kind of elephantine wardrobe trunk, a
specimen of which appears in the visually pleasant but
otherwise absurd cinema version of Mann's mediocre, but anyway
plausible, Death in Venice. I still treasure an elegant,
elegantly scuffed piece of luggage once owned by my mother. Its
travels through space are finished, but it still hums gently
through time for I use it to keep old family letters and such
curious documents as my birth certificate. I am a couple of
years younger than this antique valise, fifty centimeters long
by thirty-six broad and sixteen high, technically a heavyish
necessaire de voyage of
pigskin, with "H. N." elaborately interwoven in thick silver
under a similar coronet, it had been bought in 1897 for my
mother's wedding trip to Florence. In 1917 it transported from
St. Petersburg to the Crimea and then to London a handful of
jewels. Around 1930, it lost to a pawnbroker its expensive
receptacles of crystal and silver leaving empty the cunningly
contrived leathern holders on the inside of the lid. But that
loss has been amply recouped during the thirty years it then
traveled with me-- from Prague to Paris, from St. Nazaire to
New York and through the mirrors of more than two hundred motel
rooms and rented!
houses, in forty-six states. The fact that of our Russian heritage the hardiest survivor proved to be a traveling bag is both logical and emblematic.
What is a "perfect trip" for you?
Any first walk in any new place-- especially a place where
no lepidopterist has been before me. There still exist
unexplored mountains in Europe and I still can walk twenty
kilometers a day. The ordinary stroller might feel on
sauntering out a twinge of pleasure (cloudless morning, village
still asleep, one side of the street already sunlit, should try
to buy English papers on my way back, here's the turn, I
believe, yes, footpath to Cataratta), but the cold of the metal
netstick in my right hand magnifies the pleasure to almost
intolerable bliss.
Last-modified: Sat, 25 Jul 1998 20:45:03 GMT