Byzantium Endures

SIX

THE UNIFORM I would wear to the Institute was not as magnificent as some: just a simple student uniform of dark-grey serge with silver buttons, a cap with the badge of the Polytechnic. There was much to be said for the practise. It would mean that my limited store of clothes would last much longer and it would not become evident that I was relatively poor. Most of the boys studying at the Institute were of limited means; The rich men’s sons studied at various Military Academies where science and engineering were taught, or at the Science Academy itself. Their uniforms were correspondingly more splendid, with gold embossed buttons and braid. Even so we had uniforms for summer and winter, greatcoats, regulation issue gloves, boots, caps and so on. All these were supplied on the day after my arrival by the specialist tailor to whom Messrs Green and Brunman sent me. Mr Parrot was again my escort on a dark snowy day to the backstreets of the Moskovskaya quarter where the tailor had his huge establishment.

The room in which I would board was in the house of a typical Russian lady of middle years. She was good-humoured, a little stupid, a voluble speaker on all topics of scandal, an ardent anti-radical (she did not even approve of the Tsar’s concessions to the formation of a democratic Duma and praised the recent curtailment of its powers): she could see no point whatsoever in the study of engineering. She hated the motor-car, the tram, the train, the telephone, and she was not altogether convinced that steam-boats were above suspicion. She thought, in common with many who lived close to the Neva, that their smoke injured the lungs, in spite of the fact that she only coughed during the winter, when it was impossible for the ships to sail. The nearby Finland Station, the steam-tram terminus, and various factories, also gave her cause for alarm. Within an hour or two of my arrival she had asked me what I was going to do about it. She was also able to blame me for the War. I had the impression that she would have objected to the wheel if it had just been invented and that she might also have had a great deal to say against the discovery of fire. For all this, she was a woman I grew to like immediately.

Her house was one of those featureless terraced Petersburg houses, set a little back from the street, with a narrow courtyard and all the rooms of regulation size. My room was on the third floor. It was much bigger than my room in Odessa. It was equipped with its own little stove and washing facilities, a large comfortable bed which could be set against the wall and disguised as a sofa during the day, a desk, a curtained-off ‘dressing’ alcove and so on. There was a lavatory one floor down. I shared the house with the lady, her two daughters, a maid and four other guests, all minor bureaucrats. We ate at a communal table downstairs. The food, I was to find, was heavy and indigestible by Ukrainian standards, but it was wholesome enough. The woman prided herself on providing good service to her customers. As the war went on and shortages became more evident we were given the choice of paying a little more in rent and her keeping up the standard of food, or paying the same rent but taking poorer food. Having experienced the horseflesh stews in the restaurants students used, I elected to eat whenever possible at Madame Zinovieff’s (she was no relation to the notorious Bolshevik).

Apart from the fact that she wore a wig and thick rouge to hide the scars of some disease, there was nothing very remarkable about the widow. Neither were her daughters anything out of the ordinary. Olga and Vera attended a nearby school and were interested in Russian literature, a subject which has never meant very much to me. They were full of romantic talk of Tolstoi, Dostoieffski, Bahshkatseva and various poets of whom Akhmatova (a woman) is the only one I recall. They read novel after novel, book of verse on book of verse, and they spoke of Lermontov’s and Pushkin’s characters as if they were real people. I found these girls often irritating and naive. They were also very plain. I was to learn later they thought me haughty and proud, like some character in a then popular novel, and they had been ‘a little in love’ with me. Russian girls are always a little in love with someone. But predominantly their abiding love is for themselves. I admit that when a Russian girl falls heavily, she falls all the way. This, however, is much rarer in real life than it is in fiction where passionate creatures are forever destroying themselves mentally and physically for the gratification of some inebriated cavalry officer or criminal-poet. I had never known a Russian girl to consider destroying herself, say, for a clerk in the Civil Service or a supervisor in an engineering works. One has to have no useful social function and preferably no money to win the hearts of such ladies. It is odd, therefore, that when they marry they tend to place much importance on the earning power of their dear one.

I was pleased when Olga elected the next morning, a Saturday, to show me something of the city. Thus far my impressions had been very vague. I had seen a few wide thoroughfares, a few alleys, the canals and quays, some municipal buildings, a girder bridge or two, some factory chimneys. I was more than pleased to take a tram with her over the Alexandrovski Bridge. There was no snow falling. The sky had cleared to a pale blue. This colour was reflected in the ice below.

Very shortly we were in what she called the better part of town, on the Nevski Prospect, Petersburg’s main thoroughfare. The traffic moved as rapidly as modern cars and was far more alarming. We descended at a tram-stop half-way up the Nevski. Olga, her hands in her muff, told me we should be crossing to look in the windows of a great shopping arcade opposite. Beneath the shadows of its columns were windows full of glittering goods. Something else attracted me, a mechanical toy being demonstrated, and so I set off across the Nevski and was almost knocked down by speeding troikas and motor-cars. There was a whistle from behind me but I could not stop. In a panic I moved through the traffic and jumped to the far kerb, panting. The glove of a ‘blue archangel’ (a Petersburg gendarme) fell upon my shoulder. A white truncheon tapped my arm. This huge bearded old man shook his head in admonition. ‘There are less public ways of committing suicide.’ Olga came up. She explained to him I had only just arrived in the city. He accepted her explanation. The gendarme continued on his way while I moved towards the arcade and stood beneath its canopy, looking at the displayed brass steam-locomotives. Olga shook her head and said I was lucky the archangel had been in a good mood.

The day was bright. The Nevski was emptier than I had expected. There was nothing but officers and ladies going past in carriages. And there were far more policemen than I had seen either in Kiev or Odessa. Olga showed me the main avenues and places of interest: the great Winter Palace of the Tsar, the Peter and Paul Fortress, St Isaac’s and all the other buildings still to be found in the guidebooks. However I was irritated by the scale of everything which made me feel even more insignificant. It was as if Peter had deliberately built his city for gods rather than men. We saw the famous shops of Fabergé and Gratchef, the Field of Mars, where ceremonials were held, the monuments and museums of the main Spasskaya district. Few of these interested me since I was more disposed towards the future than the past. Indeed, the city depressed me. Not because it was a collection of grandiose buildings surrounded by slums (most capitals are that) in which riches and poverty were contrasted to a degree which would be found crude in a novel by Zola, but because it was an artificial place, having no real function save to administer the rest of the country and to glorify its rulers. Like Washington, it was the product of naive, eighteenth-century minds, imitating the fashions then prevalent in France and England. Both cities were named after the ‘modern founders’ of their nations, but had no natural geographical ascendancy or place in the main lines of commerce (as New York or Moscow have). What marked them chiefly was the soullessness of everything save that of which they are rightly ashamed, their slums.

The scale of these public buildings is grandiose and cold, the product of unsophisticated architects employed to rival the glories of ancient Greece by building everything at twice its proper size. Simultaneously both cities have a poverty of detail: they are like sets for some fabulous Hollywood film; Washington with its cherry-blossoms, Petersburg with its lilacs. They are the embodiment of nouveau-riche bad taste, built at a time when their planners were all too conscious of the inferiority, the youth, the very barbarism of their nations. In Washington the inside of the Capitol is decorated with atrociously naive paintings by, I understand, an Italian immigrant. In Petersburg, similar naive painting, in the form of ikons and gold-leaf portraits of Romanoffs and their predecessors, was everywhere imposed upon the French-influenced palaces and cathedrals. It was all too big and the embellishments were all too bad. Both cities, moreover, had regulation designs for housing, much of it very elegant, yet those elegant houses had frequently become appalling tenements for the very poorest! No wonder that envy leads swiftly to crime and that the threat of revolution looms most menacing when it is closest to the seat of power. No wonder the rich build themselves sanctuaries, as Howard Hughes built himself a sanctuary high above the streets of Las Vegas. Someone once suggested that Las Vegas was not a sinister, cynical venture, erected to fleece the American public of its money, but the epitome of what an enriched Italian peasant would build to please his mother. Thus the nature of the popular entertainment, the forms of gambling, and the preponderance of pink and gilt one discovers everywhere, reflect the taste of some beaming mama, of some proud son of Sicily.

Naturally, St Petersburg’s gentlefolk did not display the rudeness of taste I associated with the city. Our Russian aristocrats were amongst the most cosmopolitan in the world, travelling regularly to Paris and Berlin, Switzerland and elsewhere. A good many of them were not originally of Slavic origin, but bore German, French, Scandinavian and even British names. Because of the Tsar’s strong feelings, one did not find Jews at Court, but there were Armenians, Poles, Georgians and many more nationalities, all with Russian titles. These people had been encouraged to become Russian citizens since the days of Peter the Great. It at once strengthened and weakened our Empire. Considerable profiteering went on. The great merchant families, the industrialists, even many of the aristocrats, continued making their fortunes by diverting war-materials to their own profit. They did not really believe that the Germans, Austro-Hungarians or perhaps even the Turks would take advantage of Russia. The war was a game, a chance to display their fine uniforms, to impress their womenfolk, to make histrionic self-sacrifice (if they were women) and to glorify the Slavic soul.

This, in the first few months, seemed the prevailing spirit in St Petersburg. As our armies showed themselves to be ill-equipped (partly because of profiteering, partly because of a lack of attention to detail typical of the romantic Russian) and were beaten in battle after battle, just as ten years earlier we had been beaten on the sea by the Japanese, morale went from the euphoric to the melancholic. Only the professional soldiers were left to try to save something of the ‘Russian steamroller’. They were too late.

When he went into exile to Germany after the Civil War, Krassnoff, Hetman of the Don Cossacks, pointed out in his books how decadence had already established itself through the capital, throughout Russia. As always, the smaller landlords suffered worst when the uprisings came. Those who created the situation had already fled. Only the poor, unwitting Tsar, his stupid, superstitious wife and their innocent children paid the full price of their folly. A stronger Tsar, as Krassnoff and other Whites explained, a more dignified Court, and there would have been no revolution at all. We should have gone on to greater glories and, with America, been the envy of the world. I say all this to give a general picture of St Petersburg at the time I arrived and to show that it was by no means only the Lenins and Trotskys who were complaining about the way the country was run. There was hardly anyone in the capital who did not think that something should be done. The Tsar was by no means the most popular ruler we had had. His foreign wife was carrying on a flirtation with a Siberian starets who was not even a proper priest (letters from her to him had been in circulation for three years) and she was a notorious drug-addict, unable to survive without morphine. Amongst the powerful families there was talk of abdication, of electing a stronger, more popular Tsar to ascend the throne which Nicholas, to be fair, had never wanted to occupy.

It should be said here that in those days cocaine-sniffing was a common habit in Russia, Vienna, Berlin and elsewhere. When the Bolsheviks took up the reins of power (like seizing the reins of a mad horse galloping towards a cliff) they used cocaine to a man and woman. There was no commissar without his supply. This is what gave the use a bad reputation. The whole of the high-ranking elite of the Third Reich, for instance, were familiar with the benefits of this distillation of the ordinary cocoa plant. Sometimes it seems to me that twentieth-century history is a history of its use and abuse. It supplied the energy which in turn fuelled the many upheavals (not all of them harmful) which have taken place in my lifetime. My use of cocaine was for a while abated, however, due to the routine I would follow for the next months. On the Monday I set off for my interview with my professor at the Polytechnic Institute. I travelled by steam-tram from the Wylie Clinic terminus.

My first ride on a steam-tram was an exhilarating experience. I went to the terminus early in the morning. The trams were like small single-carriage trains, running on rails and drawn by a boxlike locomotive (possibly a Henschel or an English ‘Green’). These locomotives can still be seen on narrow-gauge lines. In the summer some of the coaches would be open-sided, but in the winter they were enclosed. The locomotive itself had accommodation for about ten passengers. It was always these seats in winter which were the most coveted. There was no heating on the other coach. Needless to say my first trip to the Institute aboard the Number 2 tram was in the rear carriage, close to the door. In my new uniform and my greatcoat I was comparatively warm as we drove through the industrial suburbs. The misty streets were full of huddled figures on their way to factories like the famous Putilov Works. We passed into semi-rural country where bare trees and wooden fences seemed stuck at random into dirty snow and a smell of urine and oil predominated until one reached the middle-class suburbs and eventually, after about three-quarters of an hour, arrived at the Polytechnic buildings. These were unremarkable, institutional edifices and not in the least welcoming. Neither were the few students who watched my arrival. I asked the way to Doctor Matzneff’s office and was directed through various cold corridors, past many bleak, closed doors, until I found one bearing his name. I knocked. I was told to enter a bare, dark green room. I removed my cap, wondering if I should salute, for the professor wore a magnificent naval uniform. It was usual for retired military instructors to take positions in civil schools. Instead, I shook hands with him. He had a faded, sad-eyed look and was not the ogre I had expected. His hair was thin and grey; his moustache drooped and was snuff-stained. He remained standing near a small window which looked out across a courtyard. He could see above the green half-curtain on its brass rail, but I was too short to know what, if anything, he stared at.

‘You are Dimitri Mitrofanovitch Kryscheff?’

‘I am, your honour.’

‘You expect to study here, under me?’ He sounded deeply weary. For no good reason I felt sorry for him.

‘I hope so, your honour.’

‘You seem a polite young man.’

‘I wish to become a great engineer, your honour. I am delighted to have the opportunity ...’

He turned slowly, his sad eyes staring into mine. ‘You have a genuine wish to study here?’

‘It has been my ambition. All my life.’

Perhaps he was used to interviewing students who had failed to be accepted by better-class academies, who regarded the Polytechnic as a last resort. He grew a little more cheerful, though it was obvious he was not by nature a happy-go-lucky man.

‘Well, well.’ He sat down behind his desk. I remained standing, my cap in my hand. ‘That, at least, is a relief. I am probably as puzzled as you are, you know.’

‘Puzzled, your honour?’

‘You did not come here under conventional circumstances. You came on my recommendation. All being normal, you would not have a place here at all.’

‘I think I am qualified, your honour.’

‘That is commendable. And more than I hoped for. Do you wish me to examine you?’

‘I am ready, sir.’

He took a sheet of paper from his drawer. Reading from it he asked me straightforward questions on various scientific and engineering principles. I answered them easily. At the end of the session there was a faint smile on his face. ‘You are right, Kryscheff. You are perfectly well qualified for your place.’ I wondered why he was so surprised. He shrugged. ‘Since you’re here there’s a possibility you will benefit. But for what purpose?’

‘I wish to be a great engineer, sir. To bring Russia many inventions. To increase her fame and her prosperity.’

‘You are an idealist?’

‘I’m no radical, your honour.’

‘That, too, is a relief. My son ... Well, you were told, eh?’

‘No, your honour.’

‘Well, then, it’s confidential. Between your Mr Green and myself. My son was not as sensible. I was grateful to Mr Green for helping ... He has been very kind. I am glad to return the favour.’

‘Your son is in trouble, sir?’

‘He’s travelling abroad.’ Doctor Matzneff sighed. He rubbed at his moustache. ‘There are hot-heads at this Institute, Kryscheff. You would do well to avoid them.’

‘I shall, your honour.’

‘We all come under suspicion. Particularly with the War. It’s not as bad as nineteen-five or six, but it is still bad. People have been shot, Kryscheff.’

‘I know that, your honour.’

‘And exiled.’

‘I have an abhorrence, your honour, of politics. The only paper I read is Russkoye Slovo.’

A deeper sigh than the last. ‘Read it and believe it, Kryscheff. All you need otherwise are your textbooks, eh?’

‘My views exactly, your honour.’

We shook hands. He looked forward to seeing me in his class next day. I took the steam-tram back to my lodgings behind the Finland Station. I would discover from fellow students that Doctor Matzneff had been a radical in his youth. His son had followed in his footsteps. My uncle’s agents had probably bribed officials to commute a prison sentence to one of exile. That was how I came to have a special mentor at the Institute.

Uncle Semya and his associates were responsible for more philanthropic acts than many public charities. It is encouraging that not all ‘secret brotherhoods’ are revolutionaries, Freemasons or Zionists. In the spiritual teachings of Gurdjieff (himself an Armenian), Blavatski (a Russian) or even the Christian-Jew Steiner (an Austrian), we learn of groups sometimes called ‘the White Ones’: great, wise men and women party to the wisdom of the ages, who try to help mankind without ever interfering with the course of history. For a while I was a member of the Theosophists, then the Anthroposophists, and lastly a Gurdjieff group I briefly attended in London. Naturally, I cannot speak here of what I learned. It is against all their laws. I saw a man only recently who broke the Code of the Gurdjieffschini. He was mesmerised in a telephone box and has not woken up since (we shared a hospital ward for a few weeks when due to a typical administrative oversight I was thrown in with the senile patients). I will not go so far as to suggest that my Uncle Semya belonged to this ‘White Brotherhood’, but he formed part of a network of international businessmen I simply call ‘the men of good-will’. It was thanks to them, and they existed in all civilised countries, that I received my higher education. And if I received it under a false name, well, that is all part of the necessity for secrecy, I think.

I was already becoming used to being Kryscheff and so adaptable was I in those days that sometimes I all but forgot my original name. I was soon Dimka to Madame Zinovieff’s daughters, Olga and Vera, and even the good widow herself would use this term of affection. I did not mind it when we were alone, but found it embarrassing when the other guests were present. I tended to keep myself to myself both at home and at school. Marya Varvorovna’s address was still carefully preserved but I did not find time to see her. My regular trips on the tram were my only relaxation. On these I read fiction, usually H. G. Wells or Jack London in the cheap, red editions published by a London firm and sold in the English bookshop in Morskaya. They could sometimes be bought second-hand from street-stalls if one were lucky. A good deal of my money went on such luxuries, but they were well worth it.

Sometimes, too, I bought books in German and French. Many of the best engineering texts were in German and many of the best books on aviation were in French. And so my various languages improved imperceptibly, for I had no one on whom to try them out.

For my first year I led an impeccably dull and studious life. A major event would be an occasional visit to Nevski Prospect, still the longest and widest street I think I have ever seen, to look in the windows of the big stores, with their magnificent collections of goods. I would visit the covered bazaars which are such a feature of Russian life (they have started the idea in the Portobello Road now) where one great building houses dozens and dozens of small kiosks and stalls. Usually I accompanied the Zinovieffs to the shops: sometimes to the kino or the theatre; sometimes to a small café where we would have coffee or tea and cream-cakes à la Viennoise.

I had hardly needed any of my own store of cocaine, let alone what had been in the snuff-box (it was kept in ice on the window-sill to preserve its efficacy). My studies were comparatively easy. The oral examinations with Dr Matzneff had taken on the nature of friendly chats. Russian examinations are almost always oral, which is why we have such good memories for conversations and events. My professor had become increasingly well-disposed to me. He realised I was not only a serious student of science, but a clever one. I made very few friendships with other students. Most of them did not seem to like me much. I had once or twice been asked if I were of ‘foreign blood’. When I said I came from Ukraine, I was even asked if I were not a ‘half-Jew’. I became sensitive on the subject. Jews were only allowed beyond the Pale of Settlement by special permission. I had received no such permission because I needed none. I was a true Slav, through and through. This gave offence to the few Jewish students. Happily I escaped any major upsets because some of the other pupils sided with me and drove the Jews back into their little enclave.

My complexion was no darker than most. I was frequently compared by old ladies to the Tsarevitch himself, the poor little boy whom Rasputin claimed to have ‘cured’. It was not as if I had any Semitic characteristics, save my father’s mark, that stupid operation done ‘for the sake of health’. But the most damaging rumours spread magically. It is not always possible to stop them, however privately one lives. In Germany, I believe, the operation was already common and it became ‘quite the thing’ amongst ordinary people in England and Canada between the wars. Doctors recommended it. The same is true in America. But certainly not in Tsarist Russia! My dead father’s curse follows me still. It will follow me, I suppose, to the grave. I could wind up in the Jewish Cemetery in Golders Green. That would be an irony. The rabbis would spin if they knew a gentile lay next to them. My hope is that I will have the full Orthodox Service. I shall, as soon as possible, speak to the Archbishop of the Bayswater Orthodox Church which I attend whenever my health allows. It is so moving, the Russian service; all the white and gold, the incense, the people standing about the priest while he blesses them: then the icons are carried in procession. I celebrated the main holy days with the Zinovieffs in St Petersburg. This was almost the only time in my youth I was able to experience the wonderful feeling of acceptance and joy known to the true believer. It is a strange thing that the people which knows best how to worship God is today denied God in its own country!

My relationship with my fellow students left much to be desired but I had the comfort of the Zinovieffs, my regular letters from Esmé, and less frequently from my mother and Captain Brown; the close, enthusiastic interest shown in my progress by Dr Matzneff, who soon made me his favourite. Since it was not possible for me to afford the long journey back and forth to Kiev every holiday, I spent the vacations in Petersburg and Dr Matzneff would have me visit his own apartment which, although rather dark and empty, had the feel of a home that had once been happy and not unprosperous. Here were books on all the subjects I was studying: physics, applied mechanics, electrical and architectural engineering, draughtsmanship, mathematics and so on, and they were available for me to borrow, together with books on subjects not really related to my studies but which also interested me, such as ordinary architecture, geography and astronomy.

On only one occasion did Dr Matzneff ask me anything about my past. He supposed I had become Kryscheff because of my ‘background’. I said that it was true we had not been rich. My mother could not afford the fees of the recognised schools and colleges but my uncle was helping with my education.

‘And your uncle is associated with Mr Green.’

‘Mr Green is his agent in the capital. My uncle is in shipping.’

This seemed to enlighten Dr Matzneff. ‘Of course, you could not get the necessary travel permissions, so you used another person’s... ?’

I believed that my uncle, I said, had known Dimitri Kryscheff would not be using his place at the Polytechnic. Dr Matzneff held up a tactful hand and said I need tell him no more. This was just as well. I had little else I could tell him. Thereafter, my professor showed me even more attention and needless to say I came in for almost exactly the kind of cruelty and name-calling I had experienced a few years earlier as a pupil of Herr Lustgarten.

Consequently, I did not mix with the other students. I was in one way relieved, for too many of them entertained the most cynical and bloodthirsty radical ideas. The Okhrana, the political police, came to the Institute more than once. The ordinary ‘pharaohs’ (a disparaging slang term for the police) also kept a regular eye on the place. I did sometimes miss the camaraderie I had experienced in Odessa. St Petersburg, it seemed to me, was a place where healthy companionship could not be found. I had lost the will to visit Marya Varvorovna. All the boys of my own age at the fashionable military schools kept mistresses amongst the shop-girls and smalltime actresses who were only too glad to give themselves to a ‘gentleman’. Even the skating rinks and dance-halls were in the main private enclaves for those with money. St Petersburg sometimes seemed a series of castles behind whose walls privileged people engaged in every vice and pleasure. In the meantime, on the far island outskirts of the city, like some vast besieging army of the damned, the excluded, lay the camps of a more menacing enemy than any threatening from Prussia. The inner city contained the fortresses of light, of glass and diamonds and brilliant, beautiful people. The outer city, with its huge, bleak factories, its chimneys from which poured blood-red flames and sulphuric yellow smoke, with its filthy canals, with its sirens wailing like lost souls, held the fortresses of darkness. From them one day would issue the engulfing, defiling Mob. And who was to blame for this? It was the Duma. That ineffectual body aped the parliaments of the West but failed to find any roots in Russian soil or credibility in Russian hearts. The Duma was a sop to the revolutionists. It should never have been allowed to come into existence. It had no true power at any time, save the power of speech, which it abused daily. The Duma strangled Russia with words. It talked us into the War. It talked us into Defeat. It talked us into the Revolution. It talked itself into the Bolshevik prisons and eventually it talked itself in front of Bolshevik firing squads, which is what it had deserved all along. Russia never wanted democracy. She wanted strong leadership. Eventually, at the cost of everything she held sacred, she was to receive it again.

During the Easter vacation, when we attended Church to cry ‘Christ is Risen!’, and when we exchanged painted eggs, and ate fish and cranberries, I took time off from my studies to accompany the Zinovieff girls and their boy-friends to watch a military display on the Field of Mars. As we looked at the cavalry and the Guards and the streltsi and all the other traditional regiments parading and presenting arms, their banners and flags and pennants fluttering in the first warm winds of Spring, it was simply ridiculous to think any enemy could defeat us. The Tsar was not present at this particular display, but his portrait dominated the event and we all cheered it mightily and sang the National Anthem:

I had become rather lugubrious, I think, from reading too much. This event lifted my spirits and I became quite gay, agreeing to go with the Zinovieffs and their fiancés later that week to a performance of Tchekoff’s famous Three Sisters. What a mistake! I was never more bored in my life.

In spite of the War, the revolutionaries were out in force. Jews and Masons, saboteurs and wreckers, continued to incite the honest people to strike. Cossacks were from time to time forced to make a show of strength, though few people were hurt. Feeling against the Reds grew as the news from the Front became grimmer. More ‘brown-coats’ - political police - paid visits to the school. I was completely above suspicion. The fact that I was unpopular with the young radicals counted in my favour. Dr Matzneff, however, was frequently questioned. He would sometimes emerge from these sessions looking pale and extremely distracted.

There were more and more soldiers coming and going in the city: marching troops, military trains, artillery teams clattering through the streets, large guns being transported on wagons to and from the station. The papers at one time made a great deal of Kiev being threatened and swore that the Germans would ‘never take our Mother City!’ The War had almost ceased to be one in which various allies fought various other allies. It had taken on the nature of a Patriotic War, like the war against Napoleon. Increasingly the newspapers harked back to this. Since the Germans did not take Kiev, I did not worry very much and was in the main unmoved by the War news. Kiev could never come to harm and even if the Germans occupied it, my mother and Esmé would not suffer. There was a good deal said of rape, crucifixion and wholesale murder and looting by German troops, but I did not expect such things to happen in Kiev, even if they happened elsewhere. The Germans, I knew, were an orderly, scientific people. I was not completely undisturbed by the thought of our Mother City being entered by Teutons. But the original founders came from Northern Europe in the first place. Better Teutons than Turks or Tatars.

The Petersburg spring arrived. It was greeted by the entire population as if Jesus had created a miracle! It was true that the famous ‘crystal days’ of the winter were the only positive factor in favour of the months between October and April, but I, coming from the South, could hardly believe it when that pathetic Baltic spring filled the hearts of the citizens with so much joy. Wading through dirty slush in felt overshoes, having miniature green buds pointed out to me, being shown some already-wilting flower as proof that summer was on the way, watching a demonstration of Futurists, in orange top-hats and yellow frock-coats, marching along the centre of the Nevski holding placards announcing the death of art, the end of ’the greater illiteracy’ and so on, was one of the most disappointing times of my life. I had been led to expect a great deal more. For me, St Petersburg was at her most beautiful in the mist. Then all but the great buildings were obscured and the trees looked like petrified, many-tendrilled Martians forming a guard of honour for the few of us who chose to walk the boulevards and parks. The blocks of flats and offices, set back from the Prospects, became natural cliffs, orderly and quiet and completely devoid of life. This impression was best gained in the early mornings of spring. In the evening, the yellow gaslight and electricity (including the multi-coloured advertising signs) would make every building a cave in which denizens crowded around their fires and plotted forays into the world. In this most artificial of all cities, this forerunner of the great housing estates and high-rise pseudo-towns of the modern world, boredom seemed endemic. As the War went on, little theatres and cabaret bars proliferated and crime and vandalism, violent terrorism and morbid ‘modern’ art were at their peak. Police and soldiers appeared in even greater numbers but revolutionary literature poured from secret presses. The police and soldiers had become as corrupt as their masters, and were everywhere held at bay, by profiteer and Red alike, by the greased palm or the threat of death. Jewish agitators knew how to wheedle their way round their ‘comrades’ the soldiers; and Jewish speculators knew where to find the weaknesses in their ‘friends’ the police and politicians. The Russian people were being sold back into slavery by the very men employed to protect them.

For my part, of course, I knew very little of this at the time. I studied. Even through the Summer vacation I continued to study. It was a joy to learn from Dr Matzneff. He evidently got great pleasure from teaching me. He swore to me that he would make up for the injustices I had suffered. He appeared to focus all his idealism upon me. I believe he made enemies amongst the pupils and staff as a result. He encouraged me in every field of learning. He encouraged me to think for myself; to speculate. As the end of the year exams arrived, he told me I had no need to fear them, for I was bound to pass. And pass them I did (they were chiefly oral). I would leave the Institute with flying colours, Dr Matzneff told me. If I kept up my studies as well as I did, a diploma was assured. I would be a qualified engineer and ready to begin working for a firm.

As groups of students, we visited factories. These were in the nature of ’field trips’. We saw foundries, with their scarlet crucibles of steel, their rivers of liquid metal, their sweating, dark-skinned workers. We went to locomotive plants. We saw how weaving machines and printing presses were made. Only the armaments plants were restricted to us. We went to see motor-cars reassembled. Most of these trips were of little interest to me. I had learned far more with my Armenian boss two years before than I learned here. In Kiev I had been expected to do the work, not watch it from a distance while scowling men made comments about ‘gentlemen workers’. By the students of the military academies, who regarded themselves as the elite of St Petersburg’s youth, we were known simply as ‘blue meat’. We were not, in their eyes, gentlemen at all. We knew better than to clash with these cadets. Not only could they rally greater numbers, but they were better favoured by police and soldiers who would always take their part. Every one of the cadets was well-connected. They were often already Princes and Counts.

I returned to Kiev for the Christmas holiday and found Esmé older-seeming, while my mother had made a good recovery.

She was still something of an invalid and had continued to hire her interest in the laundry to a friend. Esmé now worked at the nearby grocery shop. She had hoped I would have stories to tell her of Petrograd as I had had stories of Odessa, but I had to admit I led a dull life, with my books, and that, with Dr Matzneff’s help, I was getting on well. She said she was pleased.

She had become very womanly. I asked her, as a joke, if she had a boyfriend as yet. She blushed, saying she was waiting for someone. I wished her good luck in her hunting.

The holiday was quickly over. I returned to Petrograd in a second-class carriage shared with one other student and several junior officers, all ex-cadets who had received their first commissions and were planning how to win the War. They were elated because we had recently made one or two victories in Poland. It seemed the German invader was on the run. The news from France was bad. Hundreds of thousands of people were being killed. It appeared to my fellow student (he was at University and rather superior about it) that the world would go on fighting forever until it was one vast battlefield and the world’s population was eventually dead in a trench of gas or shrapnel-wounds. I was not interested in defeatist talk and joined the junior officers in condemning him for his cynicism. He came quite close to being punched. For a little while I left the compartment and tried to get served in the restaurant, but the food was already exhausted. I had to go into the lavatory and eat the sausage and potatoes my mother had given me.

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.

‘I had hoped to see Sergei Andreyovitch Tsipliakov.’

It was then that she threw herself into one of the deep armchairs and let her kimono fall open. Her nipples were rouged. Her breasts were tiny. She had male genitals. It was a boy made-up as a girl. I became confused, then the cocaine helped me rally myself and I remained superficially unimpressed.

The creature drew his kimono about him. He said off-handedly, ‘I don’t think Seryozha and Kolya are on speaking terms. Are you a friend of Seryozha’s, then?’

‘We met on the train from Kiev.’

‘You’re not the little yid he tried to seduce?’

I smiled and shook my head. ‘That must have been on another trip. Is he staying here?’

‘He was. There was a row.’

‘He’s moved?’

‘Well, he isn’t here. What did you want him for?’

‘I have a snuff-box belonging to him.’

‘Any snuff in it?’

‘There was never any snuff in it.’

The youth gave a knowing sneer. Evidently this was a sophisticated ‘sniffer’. It was no part of my plan to aggravate a person who could help me find what, in all languages, cocaine users once called ‘snow’.

I said, ‘My name is Dimitri Mitrofanovitch Kryscheff.’

‘You’re from the South.’

I modified my accent to give it the sharp, Petersburg sound. ’May I have the honour of asking your name?’ I bowed with the sardonic courtesy one might extend to a lady of easy virtue. This pleased him. He stood up, making a gesture which could have been an attempt to curtsey. ‘Enchanté. You can call me Hippolyte.’

‘You are also connected with the ballet?’

‘Connected, yes.’ Hippolyte giggled. ‘A drink? We have everything. Champagne? Cognac? Absinthe?’ Absinthe had just been banned in France.

‘I’ll take absinthe.’ I had never had it and was determined to sample it before the apartment’s owner returned. He might be more restrained in his hospitality.

With another artificially sinuous flirt of the hips, Hippolyte moved to a large cabinet and poured me some absinthe. ‘Water? Sugar?’

‘As it comes.’

Hippolyte shrugged. He presented me with a long-stemmed narrow glass in which yellow liquid shone. I do not believe I let my pleasure show on my face as I sipped the bitter drink, but from that moment I had found a new vice. It is one which, sadly, became harder and harder to indulge. Hippolyte was free with the absinthe. He brought me the bottle. It was called ‘Terminus’. Modern readers will not remember the old advertisements which might only have appeared in good Russian shops. I never saw one, I think, in Paris. ‘Je bois à tes succès, ma chère,’ says the Harlequin to his fin-de-siècle ‘Mucha’ lady, ‘et à ceux de l’Absinthe Terminus la seule bienfaisante.’

I settled patiently to wait to see what would happen. The worst would be an angry host who would give me some idea of Seryozha’s whereabouts before he dismissed me. I could also go to the Little Theatre in the Fontanka where the Ballet Foline was performing some piece of nonsense by that Grand Deceiver, Stravinski. We were entering an age of brilliant conjurors posing as creators. They took the techniques of the travelling sideshow and transformed them into art. In time they allowed every ’sensitive’ young person to become an artist: all that was required was a gift for self-advertisement and the persuasive voice of a Jewish market-spieler.

Hippolyte inspected his kohl and rouge. The silver frame of the mirror was, like almost everything here, fashioned to resemble naked nymphs or satyrs.

The door opened and the master of the house entered. He was very tall. He wore a huge tawny wolfskin coat. I was immediately admiring and envious. One would not wish to give such a coat up, even at the height of summer.

The wolfskin was thrown off. ‘Kolya’ was dressed entirely in black, with black broad-brimmed hat, black shirt, black tie, black gloves, black boots and, of course, black trousers, waistcoat and frockcoat. His hair was pure white, either dyed or natural. His eyes had that reddish tinge associated with albinism, but I think overindulgence and a natural melancholy had created the effect. His skin was pale as the snowdrops in the hands of Nevski flower-girls. When he saw me he drew back a step in mock surprise. With his black, silver-headed cane in one long-fingered hand, he smiled with such compassionate irony that, were I a girl, I should at once have been his.

‘My dear!’ he said in French to Hippolyte. ‘But what is this little grey soldier doing in our house?’

‘He came for Seryozha,’ said Hippolyte in Russian. ‘His name’s Dimitri Alexeivitch something...’

‘I am known as Dimitri Mitrofanovitch Kryscheff.’ I bowed. ‘I called to return this to M. Tsipliakov.’ I held out the snuff-box.

With an elegant movement of his arm (I could see whom Hippolyte imitated), Kolya plucked the box from my palm. He snapped it open. ‘Empty!’

‘It is, your excellency.’

I had flattered and amused this magnifico.

‘You are a friend of Seryozha’s?’

‘An acquaintance. I have been meaning to return the box to him. But my studies interfered.’

‘And what are you studying? I see you are enjoying the absinthe. Sip it slowly and drain the glass, my dear. It is the last bottle.’ He spoke neutrally. There was no sidelong glance of disapproval at Hippolyte as I might have expected. I was in the presence of a real gentleman, a dandy of the old English sort, rather than a debauchee of our Russian kind. ‘Your French is good,’ he said. ‘Your accent is almost perfect.’

Hippolyte was scowling, evidently not following the conversation.

‘I have a talent for languages.’

‘And languages are what you study? Where? At the University?’

‘No, no, m’sieur. I study science. I have already produced a number of inventions and designs for new vehicles. Methods of bridging oceans. Well, all kinds of things ...’

‘But you are exactly the sort of fellow for me!’ Kolya seemed genuinely delighted. ‘I am obsessed with science. You read Laforgue?’

I had never heard of him.

‘An exquisite poet. The best of all of us. He died very young, you know. Of the usual sickness.’

‘Syphilis?’

He laughed. ‘Tuberculosis. My dear sir, I am ignorant. Will you give me lessons in the secrets of the internal combustion engine, the electrical landaulette, the composition of matter?’

‘I should be happy to ...’

‘You will become my tutor? Really? You will supply me with images?’

‘Images, m’sieu. I am not sure...’

‘The symbols of the twentieth century, my dear Dimitri Mitrofanovitch. It is in science we must find our poetry. And we must give our poetry to science.’ He spoke, I must admit, as if he had rehearsed this speech more than once. I was in the presence of a Futurist, but not one of the vulgar fellows I had seen demonstrating in the Nevski. There was something about ‘Kolya’ which impressed me in a way the Futurists and other modern confidence-tricksters had not. Kolya had magnetism. Kolya knew at least a little of the sciences. If he was rich - and he seemed to be - he might pay for private lessons. In turn these would pay for the cocaine he would be able to supply.

Hippolyte was glaring at me now. I think he suspected a rival for Kolya’s affections. This was ridiculous. I have occasionally been forced to indulge in certain minor affairs with members of my own sex. Who has not? I know this will not shock an English audience, for such things are the norm here. But my relationship with Kolya was to be one of the warmest friendship and regard. I had in fact found a patron!

‘Are you fond of Baudelaire, Dimitri Mitrofanovitch?’

‘The poet?’

‘The poet, indeed!’ Kolya strode to the window and drew back the shutters, letting in thin, Petersburg light. ‘Les tuyaux, les clochers ces mâts de la cite!’ He smiled. The celebration of urban life. The greatest poets were never Arcadians, your singers of shepherds and their lasses. The greatest poets of the world have always cried the virtues of the streets, the slums, the alleys and the buildings, the things created not by God but by their fellow men. To be a true poet is to sing of the city. To sing of the city is to be a true revolutionary!’

It seemed a safe enough way of being a revolutionary. I was not unduly alarmed, although I began to have doubts concerning Kolya as an employer. I was already associated in the minds of the police with one radical and here I was falling in. it seemed, with another. But I needed the cocaine if I were to continue with my work, to win my diploma, to begin my career, to give the world the benefits of my brain.

‘Villon, Baudelaire, Laforgue - even Pushkin, young Dimka. All celebrated the city. The innocent abroad in the gutters of the world, eh? It is our natural environment and it is natural for us to sing of it. Nature is the factory, the apartment building, the gas-holder, the locomotive. Are they not more beautiful than fields and flowers? More complex than cows and sheep? If Russia is to rise: If the Scythians are to display their glory to the world: then we must cease our celebration of the veins on the leaf of the beech; the wonder of the crushed poppy beneath the foot; the subtlety of sunsets over Lake Ladoga. We must describe the yellow fumes of the factories distorting the bloody rays of the sun: making human art of what we always believed was the work of the Gods alone.

‘Have you watched the sunsets over the docks. Dimka? Have you seen how red light is made more beautiful by the smoke and steam from the ships? How it illuminates the bricks of the buildings, the rusty sides of the ships, the wooden hulls, the sails? How it reflects from the oil lying on black water, producing a thousand images within one image? Have you noticed how a steam-locomotive brings roaring life to a dead landscape, as the great primeval beasts once brought it similar life? How golden sun streams through fine coal dust? Do not all these things excite you, make your blood pound, your heart beat with joy? You, a scientist, must understand what so many of my fellow poets do not! For all they rant of rods and engines, they have no true imagination and therefore cannot see that these things are not the objects of their satire, but the inspiration of their humanity!’

Whether it was the work I had been doing, or the effects of the cocaine, I was, I admit, inspired by Kolya’s words. He said in poetry all that I had been thinking. He inspired me to dreams of even greater intensity. I saw us, the Poet and the Scientist, changing the whole world. Those marching Futurists were only bragging journeymen. They had little in common with this wonderful individual.

‘I should like to read your poems,’ I said.

Kolya laughed. ‘You can’t read them. Sit down. Drink some more absinthe. I burned all my poems this winter. They were simply not up to standard. They were in imitation of Baudelaire and Laforgue. There was no point in adding second-rate verse to the mountain already immersing our city. I shall wait for the War to end, or for the Revolution to come, or for Armageddon or the Apocalypse. Then I shall write again.’

He seated himself upon a great divan in the centre of the room and reached for the bottle. ‘Would you have the last of the wine?’

‘If there is no more ...’ I put a hand over the top of my glass.

‘Enjoy it. Why shouldn’t you? If this war continues, if the Apocalypse really comes, then we’ll have no more absinthe anyway, merely the wormwood itself, if we are lucky.’ A black sleeve extended towards me, a black glove clutched the neck of the Terminus flask. Yellow liquid poured up to the rim of the slender goblet. ‘Drink it, my scientist friend. To the poetry you will inspire.’

‘And to the science you will inspire.’ I was fired by his mood. I drank.

Hippolyte vanished and, tut-tutting, emerged, it seemed only moments later, in a fairly ordinary, if somewhat dandified outfit, and said that he was ‘going down to the Tango’ to find some company. He was bored, he said. Kolya wished him an amiable farewell. Then, pausing by the door, Hippolyte said: ‘You’d better let me know when you want me home.’

‘Whenever you like, my dear!’ Kolya was casual. ‘Dimitri Mitrofanovitch and myself will be discussing matters of science.’

Hippolyte scowled, hesitated again, then left.

A moment passed. He was back. ‘I might go on somewhere,’ he said.

‘Just as you like, Hippolyte.’ Kolya turned questioningly to me. ‘Would you like to visit The Scarlet Tango? Or are you bored with such places?’

I suspected The Scarlet Tango would be like the bohemian cafés I had frequented in Odessa, where cocaine was always available. I must have seemed eager when I replied that I did not think I would be bored.

Kolya said to Hippolyte, ‘We’ll see you there in an hour or two.’

The door slammed. Kolya sighed. ‘Beauty is cheap in Peter, these days, Dimka. But it seems always to be accompanied by bad manners. It’s a pleasure to meet a scholar for a change.’

I was fascinated by this black-clad ghost, this Russian Hamlet. I had relaxed completely. Doubtless the absinthe made me reveal, almost at once, the nature of my quest.

‘You are a sniffer!’ He was amused. ‘Well, well, the good things of life are spreading amongst the people. The Revolution is with us, after all!’

‘I should point out,’ I said with some dignity, ‘that I am a rather unusual student at the Polytechnic, and an unpopular one. My experience of life has not been entirely of the schoolroom.’

He apologised with grave good manners. ‘And where were you, before the Polytechnic?’

‘In Kiev,’ I said, ‘where I flew my own machine.’

‘And so young? Where’s the aeroplane now?’

‘It was not an aeroplane as such. It was an entirely new design. It was reported in the papers.’

‘And you flew to Peter?’

I laughed, ‘I crashed. I still need time to perfect the design. But perfect it I shall.’

‘And after that? Where did you go?’

‘To Odessa for a while. I had already gained some practical engineering experience. In Odessa I developed a liking for cocaine and the pleasures of the flesh.’

I must have seemed a little naive to him, but he did not show it.

Since then, I told him, I had given up such vices and was concentrating on my studies. I mentioned my new problems. I was determined to succeed in spite of all. To this end I had begun to use a stimulant again. My work was proceeding well on all fronts. I had developed theories which would astonish any true scientist. I did not expect them to impress the staid and orthodox hacks currently teaching at the Institute. I had hoped to get more cocaine from Sergei Andreyovitch.

‘You are not a friend of Seryozha’s?’

‘An acquaintance, that is all.’

‘So your interest is in “la neige” rather than the place from which it falls?’ He smiled kindly.

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, it will be nothing to find you some. Particularly with the War on. God knows how they can supply all the warriors, poets and scientists with what they need to get them through this conflict and famine. You’re not interested in morphine?’

‘I’ve never indulged myself with the distillation of poppies. The world of dreams is not an escape for me. I intend to impose my dreams upon the world.’

He was pleased by this turn of phrase. He poured me the dregs of the absinthe. ‘I hope you will not disapprove of me if I say I have injected the occasional dose. When I have needed to retreat from society. The drugs can be complementary, you know.’

I did not fully realise then what I know today: cocaine is a stimulant, but morphine is a killer. I have never made use of depressants. It is not a very large step from the world of sleeping hallucinations to the cold world of Death; from Heaven on Earth, as it were, to the genuine article. The road away from Hell, as the Poles say, is the road that leads there.

I sipped the last of the absinthe. ‘I must point out that I do not use the drug for pleasure. I need it to keep my brain alive and my body working.’

‘Are you not afraid you’ll go mad with so much work?’

‘It is possible, but I have the necessary control.’

‘Inspiration and madness are very similar, I think.’ He crossed to the cabinet where he kept his drinks and opened a porcelain dish whose lid was in the shape of a white pierrot peering at a half-moon. ‘I have some here. I think it is good quality. These days one must be careful. So many customers. As a consequence, so many rogues who will dilute the crystals with anything which comes to hand. You must be careful. In Odessa, before the War, you would not have known such dangers, eh?’

‘There are a few crooks in Odessa,’ I joked.

‘So I have heard.’

He was bringing me alive again, as Shura had brought me alive. More. For Kolya was a sophisticated man of letters, a theatre-critic, a writer of essays in the thick journals, a man of taste, dignity and discrimination, who recognised intelligence and creativity. I was to discover that he saw himself more as a publicist of talent than as a talent in his own right. He was one of those great and necessary people who encourage others to aspire to do their best, whatever that best may be.

His whole name was Count Nicholai Feodorovitch Petroff and he was related to the famous Mikhishevski family, one of the chief aristocratic Petersburg clans, whose ancestral estates were in my native Ukraine. Nicholai Feodorovitch had visited rural Ukraine occasionally but had no experience of the cities or of that particular shore. He knew the Crimean coast well, however, it is even warmer. ‘We should go there,’ he said, ‘this summer. If the War ends.’ I enjoyed the fantasy. I asked if he had not stayed even briefly in Kiev or Odessa. He laughed, ‘I find them both attractive as ideas, Dimka, but that is all. The dark, romantic Jew has always intrigued me as a character, you know. I have every sympathy with Shylock. Haven’t you? Or even poor Fagin, who is the liveliest of Dickens’s characters? Or the noble Isaac in Ivanhoe?’

I was familiar with none of these English books then. Of course I had seen reference to them in my set of Pearson’s. The English were inclined to take a tolerant attitude to Jews. One of their most honoured writers, in those days, was Israel Zangwill, and they had, as we all know, a Jew as their Prime Minister. My friend continued in praise of the English poet Shelley, whose character Ahaseurus in Hellas inspired Kolya a great deal, he said, if only for the single speech he was fond of quoting:

Politeness made me refrain from telling Kolya what I thought of such high-sounding rubbish. The English have many virtues. They are excellent engineers and practical scientists. As story-tellers they give their novels good, strong, exciting plots. But as poets they have done more damage to the world than any others. The ideas of Byron and Shelley have probably caused more young men to lose their lives in hopeless, idiotic, romantic causes than the ideas of Karl Marx. Romanticism is the disease of the Modern Age. It is the direct result of increased leisure amongst a certain class. If one does not believe me, one has only to look around at the so-called hippies and ‘drop-outs’ who always complain of poverty yet find time to bargain with me for coats worth twice the price I am charging, and pay in the end with money donated to them by the State!

Perhaps, as some say, the world is no more decadent now than it always was. But what the so-called decadents of my days in St Petersburg had was a sense of style; of taste, of social position and, indeed, a good education.

Education, of course, can also confuse. Nicholai Feodorovitch was a great Slav, a true Slav, a believer in the Slavic Renaissance, but his love of romantic verse was also his blind-spot, for he was morbidly philosemitic, as so many of his heroes had been. Even as we left the apartment, on our way to The Scarlet Tango, he put an arm around my uniformed shoulder and quoted some nonsense from Byron about ‘tribes of the wandering foot and weary breast’. I owe the lines (for I would not otherwise remember them) to Miss Cornelius, who was educated at the Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, where only the very best pupils are accepted.

A sentimental streak of this sort is often the attribute of a dandy. It is as if they allow themselves one weakness. With some it is a liking for dogs or horses to whom they are inordinately kind. Nicholai Feodorovitch had a weakness for Jews: the very people who were at that moment scheming the destruction of him and all his caste. That was one of the ironic tragedies of life. I have noticed similar ironies wherever I have gone about the world. Even the Wandering Jew himself could not have witnessed as much as I have witnessed in my day.

The Scarlet Tango was not far from St Catherine’s Catholic Church. It was in a sidestreet mainly occupied by little jewellers and confectioners. It was part beer-hall, part bohemian café of the kind one used to find in Montmartre, full of dazzling mirrors and crystal lamps, crowded with circular tables and gilded metal chairs on which sat young men and women chiefly distinguished by their bright clothes, their pale faces and their intensely glittering eyes; make-up was in use with both sexes. Both sexes smoked cigarettes, often of European brands, in long holders. Upon a stage at one side, a negro four-piece orchestra played the latest syncopated jungle-tunes: the rag, the cake-walk, the coon-dance and the slow-drag. Was there a war in progress? Were there bread-shortages? Was light becoming as scarce a commodity as fresh meat or hope? H. G. Wells’s time-traveller visiting The Scarlet Tango might have believed that the world was at its happiest and most prosperous. Copies of outrageous revolutionary and artistic journals were being openly read: Truth, Freedom, New Worlds, Apolion and Cosmic Manifesto. The place had much of the atmosphere of Esau’s, though on a larger, grander and more elegant scale. Its atmosphere of friendliness, laughter and argument attracted me as I had been attracted before. There were famous names to be found here. Names associated with all that was called ‘the Russian explosion’ in the arts. It was an explosion as welcome to me as the bombs which fell on Notting Hill during the Second World War.

At the time, helped by Kolya’s absinthe and his enthusiasm for what he called Modern Experience, I developed at least an ability to parrot the names of their pantheon: Stanislavski, Diaghileff, Kandinski, Malevitch and Chagall, Blok, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Rabinovitch and others. Kolya, of course, could quote them all, could name pictures, even hum tunes if tunes they were. He had enjoyed the company of Sergei Andreyovitch largely because of the latter’s ability to interpret modern music. ‘But like most ballet-dancers he had only a limited imagination. You will find that a dancer has about six things he or she can do well: a good leap, perhaps, or a pas-de-deux or perhaps one of those writhing movements they favour so much. And they do them over and over again, in every ballet, whether “free” or choreographed with rigid discipline.’ I had to take his word for it. Ballet is another art which has never much attracted me. My experience of ballet-dancers has not been particularly happy. Their egos are such that they are quickly gratified with praise. Their talent becomes as stultified as their muscles if they do not exercise. There were a good many dancers to be found at The Scarlet Tango.

Later, we went on, full of absinthe, arm-in-arm, to another, less impressive place called The Wandering Dog, where Kolya had friends with whom he seemed more intimate and relaxed. My own recollections are vague. I had become almost incapably drunk. Doubtless I made a horrible fool of myself. I recall a small, not very pleasant young Jew lisping lines about Ossian and Scotland, moon and blood. Though in Russian, they might as well have been English, they were so derivative. A few lines remain with me, for they are the lines which always come out whenever I am inebriated (which is rarely, these days):

If ever I was going to develop a taste for modern poetry, I would have done so in Kolya’s company. Very late into the first night I found myself on the doorstep of my lodgings watching a carriage jogging off back towards the twinkle of the city while I fumbled for the bell. I was admitted by a desolate Madame Zinovieff who exclaimed about the state of my uniform and then, realising I was drunk, cried out that she had betrayed me and let me fall into bad company. I explained to her I had been dining with a famous Count and this, of course, mollified her a little. When I could not recall his name, she began to mutter and complain. She was not angry with me, but she had promised Mr Parrot I would come to no harm. She was responsible for my moral welfare. I assured her this was a unique occasion. I had had to accept the Count’s invitation. It would have been bad manners to have done otherwise.

She helped me to bed and out of my uniform. I fell asleep so heavily that if the next day had not been Sunday I should have missed school. I awoke with a hangover. A sense of depression was relieved when I discovered in one of the top pockets of my uniform jacket a screw of paper filled with two grams of the finest cocaine. A little of this snuffed into both nostrils and I was a new man. I was too late for breakfast, as a smiling, head-shaking Madame Zinovieff informed me, so I took one of my books on electrical engineering and enjoyed a glass or two of weak tea at a nearby café. I read the chapter on the Lundell Protected Ventilated Six-Pole Motor which even by that time was outmoded. The trouble with textbooks is that they tend to reflect what their writers learned twenty years before. This was for me, however, light reading compared to the abstractions I had been absorbing through most of the week. The chapter gave me some ideas for a development of the conventional hoisting-motors then coming into use on some battleships; this in turn led me to theorise about aeroplanes which could be launched from ships without needing a conventional runway. In that little café in Viborgskaya behind the Finland Station on a spring morning in 1916 I invented the modern aircraft carrier. It was nothing more than an exercise. When I had made my sketches and worked out all the mechanics involved, I crumpled up the paper and threw it away. Later I would return to the idea and make better plans, but it will give my readers some hint of how prolific I had become, how casually I had learned to treat advanced conceptions. I returned home for lunch and spent the afternoon studying the specifications of Waygood and Otis Electrical lifts with Rosenbusch Controllers, with a view to the building of an hydraulically operated deck which could be lowered when not in use and raised when the planes came in to land. I also developed a method of mooring airships at sea, also by means of electrical winches, so that the dirigibles could be towed until needed, then carry out bombing raids far beyond their expected range.

If I had taken my plans to the War Office or the Admiralty at that time, the whole course of the War would have changed. Russia would have emerged stronger and triumphant, a leader in modern military and engineering science, the greatest Power of her day. The British-converted tractors, the ‘tanks’, would have been as nothing compared to our airship-bombers and aircraft-carriers. I think I already guessed not only that the people who ran the ministries were corrupt or conservative, but that they were actively interested in making a separate peace with Germany. Had they been able, they would have capitulated eighteen months before the Bolsheviks gave away vast areas of our country. These were not recovered for years, in many cases not until after the Second World War when the old Russian boundaries were restored. In 1916 green and pink areas on the map represented the two largest empires the world has known. The Russians almost lost theirs through the agency of the Duma and the Jews. The British lost theirs through laziness, self-contempt and an exaggerated idea of the ability of savages to understand the principles of Christian decency. Two Empires have been destroyed forever. Only a few vestiges of their culture remain in corners of the world as yet uncorrupted by sentimental liberalism and a wish to placate at any cost the wily, unscrupulous Oriental.