Byzantium Endures (33 page)

The captains and the kings depart!

Rome, he said, was being evacuated, for the Hun again threatened. ‘Byzantium! Byzantium!’ he sang, as he escorted me home in his carriage one late-August morning. ‘They are all fleeing East. Wait until the Tsar goes to Moscow, Dimka. Then you will know it is the end of us.’

‘The Tsar will never give up the capital.’

‘The Tsar scarcely occupies it now. How often have you seen the Royal Standard flying over the Winter Palace?’

‘Tsarskoe Selo is not too far from the centre,’ I reminded him.

‘There’s no proof he’s there. The rumours are that he, his family, Rasputin, are already packing their bags and plan to stay with the Kaiser. They’re related, after all.’

Our carriage stopped at an intersection as a marching column of cadets went past. The drums rolled, the trumpets blared, the fifes piped and the cadets moved as one creature. Kolya smiled sadly. He was as usual dressed all in black. The only white was the white of his hair beneath his hat. The paleness of his face was relieved by his slightly pinkish eyes. He put his chin upon his fist and shrugged. ‘Did you know I was once a cadet, Dimka?’

‘I suppose you must have been.’ It was natural for a member of the aristocracy to attend a military school.

‘I ran away. When I was fifteen. I ran away to Paris because I wished to meet poets. I met a good many charlatans and was seduced by a few of them, men and women. But I don’t think I met a single poet until I returned to Peter! Now all the Russian poets, all the artists, all the impresarios, are going to Paris! Is that an irony? Should we follow them, Dimka?’

‘The Germans will be beaten soon,’ I said. ‘The newspapers are confident. They haven’t been so confident for ages.’

‘A sure sign of impending defeat!’ He laughed.

‘Our allies won’t let it happen. England, France, Italy - even Japan - will come to help.’

‘They are no better off than we are. The Germans have all but taken Paris.’

‘Then we had better stay here,’ I said.

‘Until the War is over, at least. You should be reading only German science and philosophy and I should be studying Goethe. I shall go to - where? - Munich? Or study with the Moravian Brothers, as George Meredith did. There I shall become a proper, mystical German intellectual. In the new German Empire - the Holy Roman Empire - we shall become good Goths. We shall forget Paris. Paris and Petersburg alike will be provincial towns. Berlin will become the capital of the world. Art will flourish there, nurtured by our Russian genius, as it flourished in Berlin before the War. We will be like the Chinese, Dimka, and let ourselves be conquered, only to conquer secretly by means of our superior culture, our Slavic heritage. No longer shall we imitate the French and the English and the Italians. We shall become the architects of the new Empire. We shall present plans for a Kremlin in Berlin and our very energy and freshness will impress the German Caesar so that in time everything will take on a Russian tinge. Why should we worry about military victory when our greatest weapon lies in our Slavic genius! And you, Dimka, will show the world what Russian science can accomplish, because you are Russian at heart. As Russian as me!’

I presumed he was referring to my Ukrainian background. Sometimes he could make mysterious pronouncements which completely confused me. But I was never able to interrupt Count Nicholai Petroff in these soliloquies and rarely saw any point in trying. It was like listening to inspiring music. To interrupt him would have been like interrupting our Russian hymns, like shouting a contradiction in the Alexander Nevski Cathedral in the middle of a
Kyrie Eleison
or
Pomychlayu deny a Strachnya.
For all his absorption of foreign poets, his admiration of the foreign artists displayed by Shchukin and Morosoff, those two bizarre art-collecting figures, my friend was wholly Russian. He was the spirit of an incredible rediscovery of the Slavic soul which had begun in the nineteenth century. It would have continued well into the twentieth if it had not been aborted by little men with little Western ideas from Germany and America and England, carried by that carrier of all political diseases, the ubiquitous Jew. No wonder that the old Pale of Settlement was the most fought-over area of the Empire during the Civil War.

By September Kolya and I were possibly the closest we had ever been. I had returned to school to continue the impression of an attentive student. St Petersburg began to smell not of apathy any longer, but of fear. It was tangible, even as I travelled into the suburbs on the tram. Neighbour was beginning to distrust neighbour. Gangs of pinch-faced men in black coats and hats moved between factory and working-class suburb with a silence holding more menace than complaint. Madame Zinovieff became harsher in her criticism of me, of the girls and their fiancés, of the urban world in general. On my monthly visit to Mr Green I was warned to ‘tread carefully’ and advised to purchase a money-belt in which to keep my allowance. He said that Uncle Semya had written to him to ask him how my studies went. I said extremely well. I was bound to jump a year in my next class. Mr Green said I must soon use my gift for languages and my ‘knowledge of machinery’ to pay a visit abroad for Uncle Semya who was considering importing farm-machinery. I asked for more details. Mr Green would tell me nothing more, save that my education ‘would be put to some use at last’. Did Uncle Semya have a job waiting for me when I left the Polytechnic? I enjoyed the prospect of going abroad.

As if to counter the fear in the city, the military displays became grander. Golden banners, portraits of the Tsar, rattling drums, shrilling trumpets daily filled the city. The National Anthem was played on every possible occasion. It was at this time, to escape the empty display, that I took to wandering about the docks, a book under my arm, looking at the ships and gear which would begin to disappear as the Neva froze. I wondered where Uncle Semya was sending me. I watched the donkeys hauling fish from the little sailing boats. I admired the steam-launches with their short funnels and strange, busy motion. Beyond them the great ironclads and the few passenger ships of the Baltic Shipping Company lay at anchor, a picture of tranquillity, or stasis. Sometimes a wild, banshee wail would come from one or another of the ships. Occasionally it was possible to watch an old-fashioned brig or schooner in full sail, leaving perhaps for Finland or Norway, or even heading out towards England. I was sure that England would be my own destination. It was not more than two or three days away from here.

Surrounded by the bustle, the creak of the hauling gear, the putter of the engines, the shouts of the dockers, I found peace. The docks stretched for miles along the Neva. They were one of the few areas not radiating that peculiar atmosphere of terror found everywhere but in the bohemian cafés.

Yet even some of those girls, whose apartments I visited, no longer offered me quite the retreat and escape I had first found. They seemed neither so warm, so carefree nor so soft. The apartments themselves were as comfortable, cut off from the outside world; they still swam with the scent of Quelques Fleurs and were draped with Japanese silks and white towels. The girls broke the unspoken pact, and referred increasingly to their nervousness. Women are more sensitive to the
Zeitgeist.
They are the first to consider emigration during troubled times and they are nearly always right. They are the first to warn of treachery and cowardice in our ranks. They have this sensitivity, I believe, because they have more to lose than men. Sadly, I was too young to appreciate the feelings of these various Cassandras. I became, instead, impatient with them. I gave up sleeping with intellectuals and girls of good breeding. I sought the company of ordinary whores whose job was to mollify, to console, to keep the world at bay. I think quite a few of us dropped the beauties we had once courted and contented ourselves with brainless, good-natured creatures whose paint, dyes, cheap furs and cheaper satins became increasingly attractive as we grew tired of thinking. Thought meant considering the world and its war. The world was too full of fear to be any longer palatable. Because of this mood, I suspect, my second encounter with Mrs Cornelius did not develop into an amorous affair.

I had heard of the ‘magnificent English beauty’, a favourite of Lunarcharsky and Savinkoff and their radicals, but I had not associated her with the girl I had helped briefly in Odessa. The revolutionaries had their own haunts. It was those with literary or artistic pretensions who appeared infrequently at
The Harlequinade.

On 5 September 1916, I saw her again. She was the only female at a table where bespectacled, mad-eyed men in ill-fitting European jackets plotted the reorganisation of the poetry industry. She seemed more than a little drunk. She was dressed in a beautifully cut and simple blue gown. On her blonde hair was a small hat of a kind just becoming fashionable. It matched her dress. It had a cream ostrich feather following the line of her hair and neck, half-curling under her chin. She was drinking the Georgian champagne we were all by that time substituting for the real thing, but she gave every appearance of relishing it. In a holder blending the colours of her hat and her feather, she smoked a Turkish cigarette. Her skirts were lifted a little so that her sheer silk stockings were revealed above blue suede boots. She was the only woman in the café who gave any appearance of enjoying herself. All the others wore the painted smile of the harlot or the nervous grin of the intellectual. I was sure she would not recognise me as I raised a hand. She frowned, sat back, asked something of her fiercely-arguing companion (Lunarcharsky, I think: he had one of those goatee beards they all wore). He looked up, glanced in my direction, shook his head and returned to the fray. I lifted an eyebrow and smiled. She grinned, saluting me with a glass of champagne. I heard her familiar tones drifting through the general din:

‘Ere’s lookin’ at yer, Ivan!’

It was Mademoiselle Cornelius to be sure. I began to rise, to join her. She shook her head and pointed at an empty table. It was close to the stage where the negro violinist squeezed discords from his instrument which would have horrified the maker. She joined me there. She still smelled of roses. She put a friendly hand on my arm with none of the ambiguity I had come to expect from Russian women. ‘Yore ther lad from ‘Dessa, ain’t yer?’ She spoke in her usual English. I bowed and said that I was. She commented that it was ‘a turn up an’ no mistake’. It was an even smaller world than they said it was. She was doing nicely in Peter and had learned ‘Russki’ enough to get by. When she gave me an example, it was perhaps the worst example of grammar and the most romantic accent I had ever experienced. I could see why she had so many admirers. I asked her how she had come to the capital and what she was doing with Lunarcharsky. Did she not know they were all wanted by the police?

She said they were a more honest bunch of crooks than some she had met. She had a feeling that they ‘knew what was going on’. This was not true, she added disapprovingly, of the rest of the idiots in this bloody country. She had left Odessa with one of Dr Cornelius’s patients, an aristocratic liberal who had been holidaying there. When their affair ended she had fallen in with the radicals, whom she found amusing and, as she put it, ‘good sports’. She also had an eye, I believe, to the future, but her taste in men, together with her sense of humour, would often bewilder me. I am the first to admit, however, that I have never understood many jokes and that her taste was to serve both of us well in the years which followed.

She told me that I was looking ‘peaky’ and if there was anything I needed in the way of grub I should ask her. She had a few contacts. I said I was eating better than most. I was studying hard for my examinations. She wished me luck. She said that she regretted she had not stayed at school, but there had not been much point ‘in the Dale’. She referred, I learned, to Notting Dale, her birthplace. She had later moved to Whitechapel where she had ‘met a lot of Russians’. These Russians were actually Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms. When Mrs Cornelius suggested we go ‘somewhere quieter’ so that I could tell her how I was getting on, I was reluctant to accompany her. I had been picked up by too many women during that period. I had become sated and wary, even of her. A whore asked only which part of her anatomy would be required; whether one wished to stay the whole night for an extra rouble or two. Moreover, I was not always charged by the whores. For a few days I lived completely free at a whorehouse near one of the main canals. I could have stayed there longer if I had not needed to return to school.

I said I needed an early night. She laughed. ‘Don’t we all? I’ll see yer abart, Ivan.’ She patted my arm and got up to return to her party. I immediately regretted not taking her up on her offer. I do not believe, now, that it was sexual. She had wanted exactly what she had said she wanted, a quiet chat.

My friends congratulated me on my ‘conquest’ and one of the well-bred beauties leaned over and asked me loudly what ‘the English whore is like in bed’. Offended, I left
The Harlequinade’s Retreat.