Byzantium Endures (26 page)

‘Doctor Matzneff, sir.’

‘He was very obliging?’

‘He was, sir. His son left this afternoon.’

‘Straightened out, now. You’ll find Doctor Matzneff helpful to you, my boy.’ Mr Green beamed and patted my head. I wondered at these cryptic references. My uncle’s influence must be considerable. He had pulled strings in every department.

Rightfully I was up to gold-medal standard and had only been robbed of the medal by War and Herr Lustgarten’s departure. It was satisfying to know I had received my fair deserts. Uncle Semya was a great adjuster of rights. It was a relief that my professor would be favourably disposed to me. St Petersburg was no longer quite the threatening place it had seemed.

Mr Green gave me an envelope containing ten roubles. I would collect my allowance monthly. I should make careful use of it. The fares to the Polytechnic were about twenty kopeks a day, there and back. There might be opportunities to ‘make the allowance up to more’ in the future. I thanked him, put the money in my pocket next to Sergei Andreyovitch’s snuff box, and shook hands. Then I accompanied Mr Parrot, now clad in a maroon fur-trimmed greatcoat and top hat, to the ground floor. Here my bags were recovered and a cab called for us by the commissionaire. It was snowing. The hood of the cab was raised. It was already dark, but this part of the city was brilliantly lit. Once again I noticed that almost everyone in the street, civilian or military, wore some kind of uniform. We crossed a long bridge over the wide Great Neva, a forbidding stretch of ice. To my surprise I saw in the distance a tram apparently trundling over the surface of the river. Mr Parrot told me that it froze so hard it was possible to lay lines on the ice in the winter.

We entered an area much more crowded and familiar to me. I suppose it was poorer. Here were ordinary people, gas-lamps, open-fronted shops, crowded apartment buildings, stalls selling food, clothing, crockery, magazines, the smells of cooking, the sounds of street-musicians, children, quarrelling and laughter. There were flights of darkened steps, alleys, half-starved dogs. I was more nervous of the district than I might once have been: however, the street in which we found ourselves was fairly quiet and it was comforting to arrive at it. St Petersburg was not going to be an easy city, I thought, in which to find my feet. There were far wider gulfs between the classes. Even in Kiev, where there were many snobs, where poor people could find themselves driven from parks or certain streets, it had not been so bad. I was going to need all my confidence and might require the extra courage residing in my stolen snuff-box.

St Petersburg was to teach me much about the nature of wealth and poverty. Not only was it a city of extremes, it was a city of almost oriental decadence, of cruelty, of mindless authority. I was to realise why Tsar Nicholas was unpopular with so many middle-class people. The court was presided over by a crude, insane monk from Siberia who would come, just as in medieval times, to be murdered in cold blood by a group of aristocrats. They would poison him, shoot him and eventually push his body under the Neva’s ice to ensure he was dead. From Court to the meanest alley, the capital was rotten with superstition. Charm-sellers, occultists, mediums of every kind flourished. Their predictions filled columns in the most respectable newspapers. And all this in the twentieth century, when telephones and motor-cars and wireless sets and aeroplanes were in common use.

The ferocity of the Bolsheviks was the ferocity of a race of slaves. They had none of the instincts of civilised Europeans. They were savages into whose hands were placed terrible means of destruction and who were given the most sophisticated means of communication. Yet the Tsar himself and all his Court were probably scarcely more civilised or they would at least have had some intimation of their own fate. I blame the Tsar’s advisors, of course. Most of these were foreigners.

* * * *

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.