Byzantium Endures (21 page)

This discussion was terminated by a terrible fit of coughing. My mother, her hair streaming about her white face just as if she were having one of her nightmares, flung herself half off the couch. Paroxysms of coughing threw her body this way and that. She gasped for something, holding herself steady on the floor with one hand, gesturing with the other.

‘Water?’ said Esmé.

‘Medicine?’ said Captain Brown.

I made to help her up. She shook in my arms. It was a peculiar, spasmodic shaking, as if at first she tensed herself, then released the muscles she had tensed. Her teeth began to chatter.

‘Should we send for a doctor?’ I asked.

‘It sounds callous,’ said Captain Brown, ‘but he will only charge money to tell us what we know. Your mother has become overexcited at the prospect of her only son being returned to her. She speaks of you all the time. She is proud of you, Maxim.’

‘Proud,’ gasped my mother. ‘Have some soup.’ I could tell that she felt both concern and pleasure.

‘You must sleep, Yelisaveta Filipovna,’ Esmé told her. She produced a bottle of chloroform, saying to me, ‘She has waited all night for you. You were expected sooner.’

‘The train,’ I told her. ‘The War.’

Noisily, almost greedily, my mother accepted the spoon. Soon she had fallen back on her pillows and was snoring. I looked miserably around the room. It now seemed impossibly small and cluttered. I saw my shelf. I had once enjoyed sleeping on my shelf. Now I longed for a bed, no matter how tiny. A bed with a white sheet on it and white pillows.

For almost a week I was to live in that apartment while my mother alternately coughed and snored, or occasionally broke into one of her old familiar nightmares. Esmé, at least, slept on the shelf, while I had her mattress in the other room. It was not quite so bad as I had expected. At least I had a degree of privacy, though the cooking utensils and food were kept near me. Water was fetched from a pump on the landing below, but we had a sink and drainage. We shared a lavatory with the drunken couple next door. The couple were only about twenty, but dedicated alcoholics. When the stricter drink laws came in, they continued to be as inebriated as ever. They were drinking all kinds of bad alcohol. Eventually both of them died a few months after I had gone to St Petersburg. At that time, however, they disturbed me every night.

I spent some of my first day taking a walk with Esmé. I retailed a censored version of my adventures. She was impressed. I elaborated some anecdotes: going aboard the English tramp, for instance, and encountering Greeks and laskars. In the main it was enough to tell her about all the wonders: the pleasure resorts of Fountain and Arcadia, the sideshows at the fair, more impressive than any we ever saw at the Contract Fair in Kiev, the myriad ships and races. She took my arm as we wandered through the muffled white streets into the grounds of St Kyril’s, where it was deserted save for an old snow-clearer, swathed in felt, who seemed to be there for our convenience alone. We stood looking down over the grey and yellow world and I spoke of the turquoise Odessa seas, the luminous days, the warm-hearted, quick-witted people. Esmé clutched my arm so tightly and listened so attentively that I began to suspect she had designs on me. But that was a terrible thought. Esmé was pure; above such desires. At least, she was unaware of any desires and her gestures were innocent. I pulled away from her. We continued to walk. Kiev seemed small and provincial compared with Odessa, for all that this was our major city. I missed the sea, the sense of the world beyond the water waiting to be visited. I told this to Esmé when she asked if I were glad to be home.

‘I want the opportunity for escape,’ I said. ‘My soul has the scent of foreign parts. I want to travel. I want to build machines in which we shall all be able to sail through the air. Remember when I flew, Esmé?’

‘I remember.’

‘We shall both fly. I shall go to Petersburg and get my diplomas. Then I shall possess the authority I need to convince the sceptics. Then I shall go to Kharkov and get finance. Then I shall build all kinds of flying machines: passenger liners, individual planes, everything. And gyro-carriages. And sailing-dirigibles which can land on water or fly, depending on the whim and needs of the pilot.’

‘You will be famous,’ she said. ‘Kiev will honour you. You will have your name in the newspapers every day, like Sikorski.’

Sikorski was in St Petersburg already. Having abandoned the ideas he had borrowed wholly from Leonardo da Vinci, he was no longer experimenting with helicopters. I had dropped a similar line of research as being impractical. Another idea, involving the use of a cyclist powering his own propeller, was taken up some fifty or sixty years later. Sikorski never replied to my letter offering him fifty per cent of the profits if he helped me develop the invention. His plans had become more grandiose. He was virtually the inventor of that terrible weapon, the bombing aeroplane. Too late, however, to give Russia the air-supremacy she needed. We could have transferred the theatre of operations into the upper atmosphere. We should no longer have had to depend on unreliable, untrained peasants whose empty heads were fitting repositories for Red propaganda. Stalin, ‘the Man of Steel’, has been blamed for a great deal. But Stalin, like Ivan the Terrible before him, realised the worth of encouraging Russians to rely on purely Russian brains and skill. Sikorski, in disgust, soon went to America to earn a fortune and an exaggerated reputation. Other Russians simply never got the credit they deserved. Stalin knew what Russian aeronautic expertise was worth. We needed someone of his ilk at the time of the First War. Then, ironically, we should not have found ourselves saddled with him later.

Of course, I said little of this to Esmé as we walked through the St Kyril gardens, in the last week of 1914. I had a certain gift for predicting the development of engineering ideas, but I was no Cagliostro!

During the week I was at home I was pleased to see my mother improving. Soon she was able to move about the flat. Uncle Semyon, it seemed, had granted her a pension. ‘He wants a gentleman in the family.’ My mother flourished his letter. ‘He will do anything to see you succeed.’

‘Will you give up the laundry?’ I asked. It was now a source of distress to me that my mother earned such an undignified living.

‘I am drawing a small rent on it,’ she said. ‘At present I am too ill to do much.’

‘You’ll make yourself worse by returning over-soon,’ Esmé agreed.

‘You should go to Odessa in the spring,’ I suggested. ‘It is wonderful there. The sunshine will make a new woman of you.’

This amused her. ‘You’re not happy with the old one?’

‘Not in her present condition. Stay at Uncle Semya’s.’

‘And be shot by Turks? This is the worst time to be visiting the seaside, Maxim.’ She was almost accusatory, as if I had suggested she put herself into danger. ‘We’ll wait, eh? Until after the War.’

‘It will be over by spring. See what a Russian winter will do to our enemies. We’ll thrive on it. They’ll die in millions in Galicia. The corn will be nourished on enemy blood.’

This raised a horrified ‘Oh, Maxim!’ from Esmé, a small groan from Mother and a chuckle from Captain Brown as he entered from the other room where he had been washing up. ‘You’ve become a Russian warrior, Maxim.’

‘We must all be warriors of some kind.’ I had read this in one of the newspapers. ‘Every Russian is a soldier, helping to bring Victory.’

‘Every Russian?’ Captain Brown winked at me. He had accepted my manhood whereas my mother still considered me the boy who had left Kiev in September. ‘What about Rasputin, eh? Do you think he’s doing his bit? If so, I’d like to help him.’

He was drunk. My mother exclaimed ‘Captain Brown!’ and suggested he go for a walk until he felt better. Esmé was blushing. I was surprised at the old Scot. Normally, drunk or sober, he was a gentleman. Perhaps his consumption of vodka had increased lately. With a murmur of apology he made a little bow to my mother and Esmé and left. He did not return for several hours. In the meantime I sat at the table and did my best, as I had done since my arrival home, to refresh myself on basic engineering principles. I had a place at the Polytechnic, but I would need to go through a preliminary oral examination when I arrived. I wanted to be sure of passing it. I continued to study at night while Esmé and Mother slept. My little store of cocaine got smaller, but my store of knowledge increased rapidly.

As I studied, ideas began to come back to me. These were projects I had set aside when I had left for Odessa. I developed a method of building underwater tunnels to link various parts of Petersburg divided by the canals and rivers; I toyed with the notion of bridging the Bering Straits to produce a direct land link between Russia and America; naturally new kinds of steel would be required and I considered different alloys. I was beginning, in short, to settle comfortably into my studious and creative mood again. Sometimes I would go for walks alone: to the gorge, now deep in snow, where Zoyea’s camp had been; to the Babi gorge, where I had flown. Once I visited the run-down house of Sarkis Mihailovitch Kouyoumdjian, only to discover he had given up his business. It was the matter of the bakery engine, apparently, which had made him decide to leave Kiev. Business had become harder to find, possibly because people were reverting to pre-industrial methods as the War progressed, and he had gone to Odessa not long after me. From there, I was informed, he had left for England. He had relatives, said an old female neighbour, in Manchester. I felt some remorse and asked her if she thought it was my fault. She shrugged. ‘He was afraid of the Turks. The moment they entered the picture he became nervous, you know. He saw a Moslem Khan on the throne of Kiev. So he went to the one country where he could be sure the Moslem presence would never be felt.’ (This is an irony. Manchester is now full of the Sons of Allah. They run local councils, lend money at inflated rates of interest, own most of the private housing.)

As my mother’s health improved she began to worry more about my impending trip. ‘Odessa was one thing,’ she said, ‘but Petersburg is another. In Odessa you had relatives. In Petersburg you’ll have no one.’

‘It’s not true, mother. Uncle Semya has given me the names of his agents. They are a respectable English firm. From Messrs Green and Grunman I’ll draw my allowance and I can go to them any time I am in difficulties.’

‘Petersburg is the centre of revolutionary schemes. Everybody knows that. Your father was never political until he went there. They started all the trouble. The arrests. The pogroms. It’s easy for them. They’re the sons and daughters of the rich. If they’re caught, they get exiled and have to go to live in Switzerland. But we get shot.’

‘I shan’t get shot, mother.’

‘You must promise to do nothing to put yourself under suspicion,’ Esmé begged me.

‘I’ve no time for Reds.’ I laughed at their fears. ‘Cadets or Social Revolutionaries or Anarchists. I hate them all.’ In those days the Social Revolutionaries, as opposed to Lenin’s Social Democrats, were regarded as by far the most fanatical radicals. Lenin, needless to say, hiding away in some luxury chalet, had never been heard of by anyone. It was only later, confident that his dirty work had been done for him, that he was paid to come back to Russia by the Germans and claim the Revolution as his own. People like that exist in all walks of life. They let the real workers exhaust themselves, then stroll in to take the credit.

I have had exactly that happen to me, with my inventions. Thomas Alva Edison’s reputation was based on the brainchildren of his assistants. Since this commonly happens in the scientific field, it is not surprising it should also happen in business and in politics. Many Germans have told me that Einstein stole all his ideas from his pupils. There is a young man in the pub who tells me he wrote all the Beatles songs and received not a penny in royalties. Even Sikorski’s much-vaunted helicopter experiments were preceded by the Cornu brothers’ successful French attempt of 1907: but you did not read much about them in the Kiev newspapers two years later. In the worlds of science and politics it is the man who has the most luck, seeks the most publicity, meets the right people, who gives his name to cities and to great companies. I am reconciled to obscurity, but at least these memoirs will set the record straight.

Obscurity seemed impossible to the boy who told Esmé of his plans for the future; of his visions of great, elegant skyscraper blocks rising above the ruins of the slums; towns with moving pavements and covered streets, with aerial transport, food dispensers, genetic selectors ensuring that all children were in perfect health. We were developing the technology. That was how we should use it.