Byzantium Endures (30 page)

‘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.’