Byzantium Endures (36 page)

I had some bad absinthe but a very satisfactory whore. With a new supply of cocaine in my velvet pocket, I returned to my lodgings, entering with the key Madame Zinovieff, after much persuasion, had given me. I found four letters of different dates waiting for me in the little black tin box, decorated with painted roses, which my landlady had hung on the wall for guests’ correspondence. I was replete and had not felt so physically well for days. In my room I tested my lamp to see if any oil remained. I decided to wait until morning to read the letters. I slept better than usual and I awakened early. I opened the letters, laid them before me on the quilt. The first two were from Esmé, the third was from my mother. The fourth, surprisingly, was from Uncle Semya. Esmé was at a hospital treating our wounded, as well as German prisoners on Darnitsa across the Dnieper from Kiev. She said they all seemed alike, pathetic and shocked. It was hard to feel the Germans were anything but wretched slaves, forced to fight by rapacious masters. Our own Russian soldiers, she said, were ‘splendidly courageous and always cheerful, true Russians through and through’. The letter from my mother said her health had improved. I was not to worry; she had a slight chill, but doubtless that was the winter. The river was frozen, she said. She hoped that food supplies were easier to obtain in Petrograd. Since Brusilov’s advances against the Germans she had expected improvements. I was to eat, she begged, anything I could. I was to eat ‘for her’. The letter from Uncle Semya was cryptic. Everyone in Odessa was fine. The War made things difficult but the ‘Rumanian decision’ (to change sides) had improved morale all round. There had been minor pogroms by private groups, but nothing like those of ten years before. Happily the wrath of the people was turned against anyone of German origin. It was surprising, he added with his characteristically dry humour, how many more Russians now occupied Odessa than before the War. Dr Cornelius had managed to leave the country. Things seemed to be improving, he said, but there must still be contingency plans. He might need me to journey abroad on his behalf. He would arrange all necessary papers. He knew he could call on me when the need arose.

I wrote back immediately. I owed everything to him. I was doing ‘brilliantly’ at school. When the time came for the end-of-term examinations I should impress everyone, as Pushkin was said to have impressed his teachers at the Tsarskoe Selo Lycee. He could expect an appropriate oil painting of me in due course! Naturally I was always at his disposal and would await news of the service I could perform. Mr Green had told me to expect something of the sort. I was looking forward to my first trip abroad. Could he, through Mr Green, let me have some hint of where I would go? In the meantime, I asked him to give my love to Aunt Genia, to Wanda, to Shura and my other friends and relatives in Odessa. I looked forward to seeing them all again. I asked him especially to apologise to Shura. I had become stupidly suspicious of him. This would show Shura, I hoped, that I was extending the hand of friendship.

I wrote a brief letter to Esmé. Things went very well in Petrograd. We made sacrifices with the rest of the country but very soon we should sweep the barbarian back to his lair for good. In the meantime she could help the prisoners by teaching them Russian. It might be the language they would be required to speak after the War! I wrote to my mother. I am ashamed to say I asked no specific questions about her chill. Instead I said I was glad she was ‘basically well’. I was sure she would soon be over her sniffles; besides she had a nurse about the place now. My mother, I should say here, was a woman of fundamentally excellent health. She complained of poor health, like so many of us, when she needed a little extra sympathy. I preferred to give her my love, respect and understanding. This was more dignified, I felt. She understood. She said that as an intellectual, I could not always display the ‘direct emotions’ of ordinary people. In this she showed her usual perspicacity.

If I were to travel abroad, I would have to study harder. I reduced my visits to the
Tango
and the
Reireat.
I stopped going to the theatre and the kino with Kolya. I cut down on my visits to the whores. Instead I went more frequently to the flat I called privately ‘the virgins’ nest’. Here I was allowed to read, to write, to remain night and day, if I wished, being fed with relatively wholesome food and with all the tea and coffee I could drink. Marya’s father had been a well-to-do beverage merchant originally situated in Yalta before moving to Moldavia. Lena’s father, she said with some disdain, was a ‘factory-owner’ in Minsk. My interest in Lena increased to the degree that I came close to proposing marriage to Marya. However, neither of these virgins was approached by me. Though they would often purr around me like cats wanting cream, I displayed very little amorous interest in them. I was keeping them for security and tranquillity. Their sexual favours could wait until I was ready for them. When I slept there, I slept on the couch. I rarely let them see either what I read or what I wrote. Not only did they humour me, they became confused if they should accidentally move a book or even glance at a page.

It was only bit by bit I began to realise they considered me a foolish young Bakunin, plotting the downfall of the Tsar (the event which they sometimes toasted in tea, in low voices), and in one sense I was delighted by their misconception. It gave me even less respect for them. I felt no guilt about making use of them. Knowing as much as I did I was able to drop the odd revolutionary’s name. This meant far more to them than it did to me. Here, some of those who had bored me so badly in the cafés were heroes to them. They were merely two typical middle-class Russian girls prepared like so many of them to throw away their careers, their freedom, perhaps their lives, for someone who was not only a worthless troublemaker but who coldly schemed their ruin. Better they should devote themselves to me, who had a genuine cause. The flat came to be full of
Iskras
and
Golos Trudas
and inflammatory pamphlets. They kept them about, I believe, to impress me. In the end I had to explain that it was bad to ‘call attention to certain facts’ and that it would be best if they kept their anarchist literature elsewhere. They were full of apologies. The ill-printed, ill-written manifestos and declarations soon disappeared.

My work continued. I visited Kolya, but more frequently at his home (where Hippolyte still resided) than at our old haunts. He was becoming distressed with the progress of the War. He claimed we were as good as done for. I think the Petrograd winter had brought an earlier than usual melancholy. He said the Tsar was doomed. Feeling against Rasputin was high. The Tsar’s running of the War (he had taken personal command of the army) was as inept as his running of the country. Many officers, including some of the ‘old guard’, felt Nicholas should be replaced. ‘The Revolution,’ Kolya said, ‘will not come from an uprising in the streets this time. It will come from within.’

I said that newspapers were full of our triumphs against Germans and Turks alike. Brusilov was a great hero. We should soon occupy ‘both capitals of the Roman Empire’. Brusilov was a new Kutuzov.

Kolya smiled at me. As usual he wore black. His face seemed paler than ever, his hair all but invisible against the white light from the window. ‘What we really need,’ he said, ‘is a new Napoleon. French or Russian. We have no generals of genius. They can’t understand the terms. They have no precedents and that, Dimka my dear friend, is what destroys them. They are so used to relying on precedent.’

‘You mean tradition?’

‘I mean precedent. Precedent is a simple-minded way of imposing apparent order on the world. Yet it robs whoever employs it of his need to reach a personal moral decision. A decision which suits the situation.’

‘You’ve been reading too much Kropotkin, Kolya.’

‘Even Kropotkin calls on “history” as a model. History will destroy every one of us, Dimka. Soon there will be no more history at all! Analysis, that might have saved us. The basis of all modern science, eh? Analysis, Dimka, not projections. You’re prone to project, as you know, when you get excited - ‘

‘What! I’m a pure scientist.’ I realised he was probably joking.

‘Marx, Kropotkin, Engels, Proudhon, Tolstoi - all use precedent and so they are completely unscientific. Kropotkin might be the most scientific. He has the proper training. But the radical young already treat him as some sort of Old Testament prophet, quoting his words rather than applying his methods. Is that all we are to have? Substitutes for past orthodoxies? Is the language of science to replace the language of religion and become a meaningless litany in support of authority?’

‘There are already such narrow-minded scientists,’ I agreed. ‘But there are others, as there will always be, who oppose them, who are constantly, as am I, generating new theories, new analyses.’

‘And they are accepted?’

‘Eventually. I’m staking my life on it.’

‘Eventually? When their words have been incorporated into the litany.’

‘Science is less subject to decadence. It thrives upon change. But is it a better world in which nothing is considered worthwhile if it’s more than a day or two old?’

‘It could not be more boring.’

But I was to live to see such a world during the days of the swinging sixties in Portobello Road, when the very ideas of Science became mere fads discussed for a few days in rubbishy papers and then dropped. At least in Russia people still respect the past. Science itself cannot cure the world’s ills. Did Aristotle manage to stop Alexander the Great laying waste to Persia? Did Voltaire restrain Catherine the Great’s reign of terror? I have done many positive things in my life, but many of my actions have been perverted or misused or at best misinterpreted. This was to be the complaint of another great Russian thinker. Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. He was a celebrity when I met him in Petrograd in the company of his ‘clan’. He was a life-long opponent of Bolshevism. He spent all his years, all his fortune, in an effort to stem the tide of ‘democracy’, ‘republicanism’ and ‘socialism’ sweeping across the world. He argued that Rasputin, for all his faults, gave better advice than many of the Tsar’s ministers. Rasputin at least understood there were higher worlds than the world which was then bent on destroying so much of value. I visited a house in Triotskaya Street, near the Nevski, one evening. Kolya wanted me to meet Gurdjieff’s most devoted follower, the journalist Ouspenski, who was at that time in the army. Gurdjieff, of course, was more concerned with the world of the soul than the world of material reality, but for a while, with a number of other intellectuals, I was impressed by him. Eventually I returned to the Orthodox Faith, which offers much the same as he offered and, if I may say so, asks a rather lower cash price. The price for a series of lectures from Gurdjieff, even then, was about a thousand roubles.

In the years between the wars Gurdjieff’s philosophy would attract many brilliant people who rightly saw it as a substitute for the current political creeds and fads. For a time a number of important politicians, too, were attracted to it. The world might have been a very different place today if Gurdjieff’s teachings had taken deeper root in the minds, say, of Hitler and Goering. Gurdjieff should have stayed on in Petrograd instead of returning to Tiflis in 1917. He might have changed the whole course of Russian history. He was a noble opponent of anarchism and socialism. He recognised them as a poor substitute for true mystical experience. Yet I saw him argue fluently with committed Bolsheviks and seem to be agreeing with them. But this was his way of turning their own logic against them to win them round.

In those months before the Tsar’s abdication, the streets became even worse. The broad pavements were dirtier and more depressing. Peter was a city of death and desolation. The war reports suggested tremendous advances until in early December, just before I was due to undergo my examinations, came the news of the taking of Bucharest. Rumania had capitulated. We had lost an ally overnight. Even more wounded filled the city. France and England were rumoured to be preparing to ally themselves with Germany against Russia. Even I, obsessed with my dissertation, could not ignore the fact that we were in great danger.

Then it came to me that all my examiners would be sharing this mood. In the course of speaking, I could tell them of certain personal inventions which might help win the War. I would not go into details which would frighten those poor, unimaginative souls. I would merely mention my ideas in passing. Psychologically, it would be a perfect moment to display my knowledge and ensure myself the highest marks.

It was not a plan conceived with cynicism (though, of course, I had the motive of wishing to startle both Professor Merkuloff, the rest of the academicians and the other students) but I knew it might stand me in good stead with my attempts to achieve a government appointment.

I tested some of my speeches out on the two girls. They were impressed, though most of what I said went well over their heads. I tested other ideas on Kolya who said that I was ‘brilliant’ and laughed with joy to hear me expound my scientific theories. I wrote letters home explaining I should soon be sending good news. I wrote to Uncle Semya. He would have a nephew of whom to be more than proud. To my landlady and her daughters I became, as they put it, ‘unbearable’ because my confidence was so great. I think they had preferred the shyer Dimitri Mitrofanovitch of his first year in St Petersburg. As the day of the main examinations came closer I grew more excited. The windows in the horse-tram were by now more than half-an-inch thick with frost on the inside. It was so cold that long icicles extended from the roof over my head, but I hardly noticed. I saw pictures of myself addressing the professors and examining board. I saw my fellow students listening with stunned wonderment or leaning forward with sudden, ecstatic understanding of what I was really saying.