Byzantium Endures (28 page)

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:

God Save Our Tsar!

Rule for Our Glory!

And terrorise Our Enemies!

Orthodox Tsar!

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.