Byzantium Endures (29 page)

Because of the difficulties of travelling, I had been forced to leave Kiev on my birthday. Thus I celebrated it sitting on a wooden lavatory seat in a cold, slow train which jolted over every sleeper, eating a piece of inferior salami and half-frozen potato. Needless to say, I would not be the only Russian looking back on the winter of 1916 as something of a Golden Era!

Arriving at my lodgings I was greeted by a weeping landlady and two grinning daughters. They had made their conquests and were officially engaged to their beaux: the elder, Olga, to a corn-chandler called Pavloff, the younger, Vera, to a travelling salesman representing the Gritski Soft Drink and Mineral Water Company. Thus, within a year, they had given up dreams of Eugene Onyegin and had settled for a couple of wage-earners with a potential future. What both these husbands did after 1917 I do not know. Presumably, if he was good, one would remain a manager in the State Corn Division (with an appropriately ugly name like Statcorndiv) and continue to short-weight his customers whenever there was corn to sell (which would not be often). The other might represent the Statminsoftdrink Bureau in Leningrad and the Novgorod district, colouring all beverages red. Since he would not have to sell the stuff because it would be the only drink available he would enter the Statminsoftdrink Information Bureau where he would praise the virtues of Communist pop over the decadent Capitalist kind. He would have no real work, a better bread ration, and would risk being shot by the Cheka if the Party Line on soft drinks changed and he was discovered to have praised the virtues of cherryade over raspberryade when it should have been the other way round.

All this was in the future. We still had another year of freedom. A year in which food rationing became more and more stringent, in which the life of the capital began slowly to prefigure the life all would lead under the Reds. At least by paying a little more money from my allowance I was saved the sickly taste of horse-meat. Madame Zinovieff continued to serve the best she could and this was far better than most. She was helped, as so many others were helped, by Green and Grunman. They had once employed her husband. He had been killed on an errand for them in Denmark. My allowance was increased as inflation grew steadily worse. Dr Matzneff continued to give me extra tuition. With the Zinovieff girls working and spending their spare time with their fiancés, I had precious little company. Because of my studying, I had lost the self-confidence necessary to write to Marya Varvorovna, although she filled my fantasies. Her address was still safely kept, as was that of Sergei Andreyovitch. Sometimes, when my eyes grew tired from reading by the light of oil-lamps (both gas and electricity were often rationed and candles were quite hard to find) I would consider getting in touch with them, or even of asking Olga if she could introduce me to a nice girl. But I was too tired. If I stopped reading, I fell immediately asleep. I took the precaution of getting into bed as soon as I had had my supper, so that when I did go to sleep in the middle of a book, at least I did not wake up in the morning wearing my outdoor clothes.

The dreary winter of Petrograd was followed by a dreary spring in which there were further minor demonstrations, further scandal concerning Rasputin and the Court, further large gatherings of Cossacks and police in the streets. There were further visits of ‘brown-coats’ to our school, further news of defeats of our forces. I became incensed by the ludicrous public posturings of the so-called ‘Futurist artists’ who celebrated the Age of the Machine. They could not tell one end of a bicycle from another, and would have been horrified if they had had to spend half-an-hour at work in the grease, fumes and soot of an ordinary factory. The snow turned to dirty slush; the miserable buds poked cautiously forth, the tramlines were taken up from the Neva’s ice, the ‘white nights’ gave way to nights with a peculiar, greenish tinge to them, and the Prospects, so frequently in darkness due to power-cuts, were made scarcely more cheerful by pinch-faced girl thieves of ten years old or less selling withered bunches of violets for extortionate prices and, if no policemen were in hearing, offering their own dirty little private parts for a few kopeks more.

In my tired and somewhat depressed condition, I came to yearn for Odessa, for Katya or even Wanda (who had written once, claiming without proof that I was the father of her ‘lovely, healthy boy’), for the jolly company of Shura, who might now be unemployed because of what I had told our uncle. It is no wonder at all that the poets of Ukraine cease producing their light-hearted, happy, optimistic work the moment they arrive in the capital. Immediately, they begin telling gloomy tales of poverty and death and unjust fate in imitation of the neurotic Dostoieffski and his kind. I began to feel homesick for Kiev, but I was determined to return home with all the proper credentials. I would practise as a fully-qualified engineer with a good firm who would gradually learn my worth and give me a laboratory of my own. I thought of working for the State Aircraft Company, where I could easily have got a job at once, save that I did not possess the ‘official’ scraps of paper proving my abilities.

* * * *

Another Easter. Exchanges of eggs. ‘Christ is Risen!’ The sonorous chanting in the church, the procession, the prayers for our Tsar; for Russia in her struggle against Chaos and Barbarism. We were attacked from every side by Turk and Hun as we had been attacked for centuries. It seemed to me, as I kneeled to pray between the Zinovieff sisters, that the great area of green which was the Russian Empire, one-sixth of the entire globe, could be wiped out overnight, as that Carthaginian Empire had been destroyed. I rose to my feet wondering if it was my duty to join the army, to fight against our enemies, to ensure the future of the Slav people. The mood passed. I was still too young to be an ordinary soldier. This was one of my few experiences of hysterical patriotism. My understanding of the enduring Slav soul was to come many years later. In exile in England I was in a position to compare our virtues with the proud vices of the Anglo-Saxon, the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples. These peoples are materialists through and through, corrupting Science, imbuing it with an orthodoxy which allows no alternative interpretations.

Any idea I had of serving my country as cannon-fodder rather than as a cannon-maker disappeared when I returned to the Institute after Easter to find a third of the students vanished and three professors summarily dismissed. The Okhrana had visited the principal. They had had a list of ‘undesirables’ likely to damage the War Effort, who could be potential spies for the enemy. The outspoken Reds had all gone and for this, of course, I was grateful, but it was when I went into Dr Matzneff’s class I realised my own bad luck. Dr Matzneff had gone. In his place was his rival, the black-bearded, bulky, dark-uniformed Professor Merkuloff, who told me to take a seat at the back of the room and pay attention, for I would be receiving no favouritism from him. My ‘friend Matzneff’ was out of a job and lucky not to be in prison. I was shocked by the open aggression shown by Merkuloff. ‘You will have to study very hard if you want any sort of pass at the end of this year, Kryscheff,’ he added. He knew very well that I was the best student in the whole Institute, that I could discourse on virtually every subject taught there, and many more besides. But now I was faced with his blatant opposition to my advancement. Professor Merkuloff hated Dr Matzneff and hated anyone whom Dr Matzneff seemed to like.

Leaving school that evening, feeling utterly downcast, beginning to wonder if I had been foolish in all my ambitions, I considered going to see Dr Matzneff at his gloomy flat. I knew this would be stupid. The ‘brown-coats’ would be on the look-out for any student who seemed to be hob-nobbing with a suspected traitor. It would mean the end of my own schooling.

I returned to my lodgings where Madame Zinovieff handed me a letter. It had arrived, she said, shortly after I had left. The post, along with all other services, was in a state of partial breakdown due to the War.

The letter was from Dr Matzneff. He told me he had been dismissed because in his youth he had shown sympathies with the ideas of Bakunin and Kropotkin, the anarchist-intellectuals. His son, as I knew, was in exile in Switzerland, still a violent and outspoken Social Revolutionary. It was only by a miracle he had escaped imprisonment or exile to Siberia.

Dr Matzneff advised me not to contact him unless I was desperate. If I needed to borrow books I should try to borrow them through an intermediary. Then suspicion would not fall upon me. He knew I had no interest in politics. He would be with me in spirit. I should not be down-hearted. If I worked hard there was no reason I should not still be the star pupil at the Polytechnic, triumphing over all difficulties.

It was a touching and heartening letter. I determined to show Professor Merkuloff that Dr Matzneff’s ‘favouritism’ had been no more than recognition of outstanding talent. I would study all the harder, night and day if necessary, and win diplomas in every subject. I would cause them all to eat their words.

The days grew lighter. Fashionable people began to leave Petrograd not for the seaside, for the Crimea, as they had once done, but for their datchas in the country, closer to Moscow. I trained myself for the exams due at the end of the year. I would make it impossible for the authorities not to notice me. I began to ignore everything and everyone in pursuit of those studies. Of course, they became harder, the deeper into them I went. I had no great difficulty mastering the ordinary set problems, but I wanted to do better. I wanted to do so well they would have to promote me at least a year ahead, possibly grant me my diploma immediately. It would free me from Merkuloff. I would receive a higher standard of tuition from teachers who would not share his bias towards me.

I gave up fiction. I gave up my outings with the Zinovieffs. I gave up most of my sleep in order to study. I stopped thinking about Marya Varvorovna. I studied every textbook we had been set. I studied the advanced textbooks listed in the bibliographies. I began to understand whole areas of science, whole principles of engineering, as my mind made intellectual leap after intellectual leap. I had, of course, to resort again frequently to my cocaine, but this aided me in making unique connections. I began to see the very structure of the universe. Whenever I slept (which was infrequently) I saw every planet in the solar system circulating about the sun; I saw the other planetary systems, the galaxies. The whole universe was pictured to me. And the world of atoms was mirrored in the picture. Into this great conception I could fit an ontological understanding of the world encompassing the sum total of human knowledge: and more. These were the visions, I realised with excitement, which had led Leonardo and Galileo and Newton to their discoveries. I was party to the secrets of Genius. I knew I must not reveal too much at once to my teachers, particularly Merkuloff. He was an ordinary man with an ordinary mind. Others at the Institute had good minds, but even they would not recognise the value of my innovatory theories. I was party to the knowledge of the Gods: I could write it down, but I could not, at that time, communicate it to the world.

Madame Zinovieff began to worry about my ‘burning the candle at both ends’. She said I was looking pale, that my eyes were bloodshot, that I was not eating properly. I was a little impatient with her. This distressed her. I immediately apologised. I explained I was working hard on my examinations and a great deal depended on them. She was mollified. Olga and Vera no longer noticed me. They were in the process of making marriage plans with their chandler and their mineral-water salesman, preparing to settle into the life of good little
Hausfraus,
putting their childish romanticism behind them. Already their obsessions concerned the quality of winter coats and the price of furniture. I would scarcely have known them for the two girls I had met barely fifteen months before.

I walked to and from the tram-stop and felt like a giant striding between buildings barely reaching my knees. It was still very cold. The weather meant nothing to me. Before me I saw the stars and the lines of force combining to produce what we call ‘the universe’. The nature of matter itself was just within my grasp. At school I attended lectures but I already knew their substance. I listened with polite impatience to Professor Merkuloff. He was a fool. I ignored the remarks of my fellows. I returned home and I studied more and more. But my supply of cocaine had begun to shrink. I knew I would need more if I were to continue with my work, which was now filling a number of bulky notebooks. I was at the peak of my powers. I could not afford to lose time. I hunted for the scrap of paper on which Sergei Andreyovitch Tsipliakov had written the address of his friend, where he would be staying. I decided to take the last of the cocaine and return the snuff-box. It would be an ideal excuse. I could tell him the box had been opened and all his ‘medicine’ had been scattered. He would be grateful for the box, which looked valuable. I would find out where he bought his cocaine and I would buy some, too. I would spend the money on it which I would otherwise have spent on expensive imported fiction.

I took two trams to a street off the Nevski, near the Mikhailovski Gardens. I at last found the apartment building. It was not quite as grand as I had imagined, but far grander than anything I had visited before in St Petersburg. The porter stopped me from entering until I gave the name of Seryozha’s friend, Nicholai Feodorovitch Petroff. The porter made something of a grumble about the ‘succession of ruffians’ he had to deal with and told me where to go. It was across the courtyard, near the top of the building, occupying a whole floor. It was very quiet and felt extremely prosperous. I rang the bell of the apartment. The door was opened by a young girl wearing little more than a Japanese kimono. She had a vaguely oriental cast to her heavily made-up features and moved with peculiar gliding grace which was at once stiff and natural. Perhaps she was also a dancer. She said nothing after she had admitted me, but began to glide away towards the inner rooms. I took off my cap, closed the door and followed her. I found a large chamber furnished in the ‘Arts and Crafts’ style, a kind of Russian
art nouveau
then fashionable. The place was full of peacock feathers. I experienced a slight superstitious frisson. I had been taught it was unlucky to bring peacock plumes into a house. ‘Are you a friend of Kolya’s?’ the girl asked.