The Vanishing Futurist (20 page)

My beloved Sophy, you’ve already learnt so many shocking and terrifying facts about your birth in these pages that perhaps the date of your birth will hardly matter to you; yet all these years, you know, I have held a little private celebration for you in mid-April, a private thanksgiving for my daughter accompanied by a plea for your forgiveness at having deceived you. All your life you have celebrated your birthday a month late, in mid-May; this began when we sailed out of Estonia. We could not risk his parents counting up the months and wondering how you could have been conceived when Pasha was still in the Crimea.

We came down the gangplank at Calais into a sea of waiting, anxious faces. I was carrying you, Pasha was heaving our suitcases; he was shaking with emotion. Where were they? And then – Liza. I saw her before she saw us, a tall, pale girl of sixteen, her expression reserved, chewing her lip – and suddenly she caught sight of her brother. She let out a piercing scream, and jumped in the air, blazing with joy. Beside her Dima began to wave and shout – ‘Over here! Over here!’ And pushing forward, Mr Kobelev, barely taller than his son, grey-haired, beaming and crinkling up his eyes which were already full of tears and his wife beside him . . . It was more than we could do to say anything at all; we embraced each other, round and round, and you smiled so sweetly at your grandparents, your aunt and uncle, and as your grandmother laid her cheek against your silken baby head, she let out a terrible sob, and said, ‘Sonya.’

We stayed with them in Paris for some weeks, until everything that could be said had been said; we told them everything, only keeping from them the truth about your father for your sake as well as for my own. The story of my ideals and my actions seemed too strange and confused for them to understand; maybe I couldn’t make sense of them to myself, either. It was a relief for me to edit out those months when I loved Nikita and when I would have done anything to make him love me.

 This set the pattern for Pasha’s and my life together. In every other detail than biological Pasha was your father, as you know; he was devoted to you. I never managed to have another child; and once I asked Pasha if he was sad not to have more children. ‘Why on earth would I be,’ he said, hugging you to him, ‘when I have my own angel?’

We set up home in London, it being easier for both of us to find work here, and after a couple of years your grandparents joined us. Mr Kobelev was taken on by the Ethnography department at London University and Mrs Kobelev, who had, through some extraordinary strength of character, cured herself during their exile, now set up a small dressmaking business in the East End. She employed several other Russian women and proved an effective businesswoman. Liza went to veterinary college – I was so proud of her – she was one of only five female students accepted in 1923; and although she married before she qualified, she has practised as a veterinary assistant to her husband for many years. Dima grew into one of those English schoolboys, mighty in their cricket whites, whose charm and good looks waft them through life on golden wings. He started up endless business ventures and different careers, none of which led to a great deal, but no matter – his friends always came to his rescue with a new proposal. He seemed more English than any of us, although of course his faint accent and his name bequeathed him the lifelong nickname ‘Cossack’.

My parents did their duty and came to pay their respects to their new son-in-law and their granddaughter, but they made no bones about their discomfort and returned to Truro as soon as they could. My mother’s remark when (in a weak moment) I asked her what she thought of Pasha – Paul since we arrived in England – passed into family lore.

‘Well,’ she said, giving it some consideration, ‘he’s a little too
interesting
for you, dear.’

And so he was. We spent a good life together, with you, and later your boys, our grandchildren; his work in publishing, mine in the library; our political lives – both lifelong Socialists. We were an ordinary family, bourgeois by the IRT’s reckoning, although over the years it seemed to me that the daily demands of being a parent and attempting to hold onto one’s principles were a far more effective and gruelling programme of transformation than we ever envisaged in the commune. We grew old; our lives were not marked by any exceptional achievements, if you discount the raising of one clever, serious daughter who from the age of five had a tendency to dismantle every machine she ever came across, who – despite her parents’ lack of scientific ability – became a mineralogist and studied for a PhD in rare earth metals, who brought up her two sons to dream of social justice.

Yet still I couldn’t shake off my fear. Mothers love daughters – but do daughters love mothers? My mother and I were never close. I have always dreaded the day, which seemed to me inevitable, when the world would somehow force the truth about your father upon you. I knew I didn’t deserve you. The longer I kept all this from you, the more convinced I was of it.

Since I began this account, without quite admitting it to myself, I have been reducing my rations. I have had this tendency throughout my life; the greater the store of tins under my stairs, the less I can bring myself to eat. I’ve never given this cycle much thought, but I notice now that the details which cause the nausea to rise in me are to do with shame. The endless self-deceptions that I’ve been acting and re-enacting all these years – it’s reminders of these that make me long for the acid rush in my throat, the clean, scoured emptiness afterwards.

At first the lies were such well-intentioned, small sprouts, necessary for the cause, but over the years they grew up into forests, blocking out the light. Since Paul died things have looked pretty dark.

And yet I write these words, in fact I’ve written the last chapter, in your sitting room, after I fell and injured myself in my kitchen. I lay there unconscious for some hours, apparently, before you found me and called an ambulance. For some reason, when I came round in hospital I did not wake up woozily but was alert the moment I opened my eyes. You were sitting by my bed and I watched your worried face for perhaps a full minute. Then you looked around and noticed that my eyes were open. I watched as your dear face lit up, tears in your eyes. ‘Mama . . .’

It struck me then that, at the very least, I owe you the respect not to pre-judge you. Otherwise how can history fail to repeat itself? Paul had been trying to convince me of this for years, but I suppose I needed to find my own way to the realisation. This account is, on a minuscule scale, my plan for a better future for us both. You still have to read these pages. I dread how they might hurt you. Yet I turn them over to you now in the certainty of your open heart and your powerful, generous imagination – the legacies of both your fathers – and in the hope, one day, of your understanding.

And so, at last, to the reappearance of the Vanishing Futurist.

With each year that passed, Nikita Slavkin became more celebrated. His scientific achievements were recognised in several ways: he was named a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ for his contributions to science in several areas including particle physics, and in the 1950s his pioneering experiments with iridium electroplating led to its use in the Soviet rocketry programme.

His fame, however, bore little relation to his work. In November 1919 Lenin sealed his status as a Soviet icon by mentioning him in his speech on the Second Anniversary of the Revolution as ‘Nikita Slavkin . . . known as the Vanishing Futurist . . . To labour unstintingly, to seek knowledge, and to give one’s life for science – this is a true Revolutionary hero,’ Lenin declared. The following year the first, short book appeared about Slavkin’s life. In Moscow in 1924 one of the floats in the May Day procession was dedicated to his memory, consisting of a large silver pod in which an unconscious Slavkin lay in a tangle of wires attached to outsize clocks and a huge dial marked ‘To Communism!’ When the arrow reached its Communist zenith, a bell rang and Slavkin leapt to his feet and performed a series of acrobatics. As the arrow ticked around to the beginning, he flopped back down again.

From 1928 and through the 1930s, the depiction of Slavkin moved away from a prone body to a more dynamic image. ‘Nikita Slavkin Breaking the Boundaries of Human Knowledge’ appeared in several further Soviet anniversaries. It showed Slavkin as a beefy fellow in white overalls slamming his fist through the outstretched page of a huge book. Soviet boys took this image to heart and came in their thousands to dressing-up days at school as little musclemen. I could imagine the scenes in the playground as they gave the boundaries of human knowledge what they deserved. ‘Take that! Hurr!’

Further books and a feature-length film (
The Vanishing Futurist
, 1952) came out, and several physics departments were named in his honour. A street and a monument were dedicated to him in Sverdlovsk (formerly Ekaterinburg), where he went to school, and a plaque was put up on the house on Gagarinsky Lane. Yet no one has ever managed to replicate his experiment with the Socialisation Capsule, and fifty years of advances in quantum physics cannot explain how his machine could have resulted in his disappearance.

During Khrushchev’s time in power, when so many injustices came to light, Pasha told me he wanted to try to discover the truth about Nikita’s – about your father’s – death. I was still reluctant; we argued over it, and Pasha didn’t bring the subject up again. When you first brought these boxes of papers down from the attic, however, I opened them to find an envelope with a Russian postmark that I’d never seen before. Inside it was a printed slip in Russian: ‘In response to your request.’ Pasha obviously wrote for information despite my resistance, and then left the results for me. He knew that when I looked through the IRT papers again – when I was ready to tell you this story – I would find it. It was a last act of love for you, Sophy, as well as for his friend.

The printed slip had a header, blurrily stamped in the pale green favoured by Soviet bureaucracy, which announced it originated in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR. Behind it was a photograph of some kind of form. My heart was racing horribly. Half of me wanted to put the envelope back in the box and pretend I had never seen it. It was hard to decipher; the photograph was not entirely clear, the Russian cursive script was typically fluid, one letter running on to the next with little attempt at legibility. Stamped in large red letters over the form were the words: ‘Restricted Information’.

Beneath them I read:

Earlier on in this account, I suggested that the real cause for astonishment did not lie in the failures of the IRT, but in the extent of our success. Some may wonder which success I am referring to. It is true that in material terms one would be hard pressed to point to any evidence of transformation. Our commune was split apart by jealousy and self-interest, while all around us Russia’s experiment with social justice became a vast agar plate for the cultivation of corruption and cynicism.

In the years since, an abyss has opened up between the left and the right, millions of lives have vanished into it, and the ideals behind our Revolution have been swamped by tragedy. As the 1960s recede and the cynical 1970s wear on, the demands of the market are the only signposts through the modern desert. On the right wing they dismiss social justice as facile and dangerous, while on the left, loyal Socialists – like myself for many years – believe they support the cause by closing their eyes to the reality of the Soviet Union, by blaming Stalin, or Lenin’s illness, or ‘errors’. Yet the truth is that in January 1919 Nikita Slavkin died of a bullet to the head in the filthy backyard of a lunatic asylum.

And yet . . . and yet . . . don’t give up. History may not advance in the swift straight lines that the early Soviet artists envisaged. But surely the cynics who claim it moves in circles are just as foolish. If it does seem to repeat itself, if we do seem to arrive back at the same place again and again – the outbreak of war, the counter-Revolution – we are still in a slightly better position each time. We have the experience of our previous passes.

As I see it, the IRT’s achievement was to embody, just for a fleeting moment, Slavkin’s greatest insight. His concept of Atomic Communism describes the fundamental nature of reality in our universe, in which with every conscious thought, every action, each individual influences the world around him or her. If we give up on this future, in this intricately connected world, we stand to lose everything. Yet even the most powerless and insignificant among us can trigger vast transfomations. A poor boy from Galilee imagined a society in which outcasts and prostitutes were the equals of kings, and set in motion a social revolution that is still playing out today. The Constructivists in the dark winters of War Communism envisaged the design of the modern world. Now a defenceless scientist and his wife, Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, are shaking the foundations of the Soviet Union with their simple demands for cooperation and freedom of thought.

‘Fortunately,’ as Andrei Sakharov has written, ‘the future is unpredictable and also – because of quantum effects – uncertain.’

Despite or, rather, because of the fact that the future is unknowable, each of us bears a responsibility towards it. If all that our imagination can summon up is some limp, apathetic, cynical vision of a world just like the one in which we now live, then frankly that’s all we deserve.

An image floats back to me: the first weeks of the IRT, and all of us are lying together on the lawn at Gagarinsky Lane, gazing at the first stars, and the smell of dry grass is in the air – the end of summer – and Nikita is speaking:

‘For better or worse, we are creating the future here, in our minds. Each time we allow ourselves to imagine a harmonious world, we bring it closer. Just share your thoughts with us . . . You know the answer, if only you can discover it within yourself. Inside your imagination lies the blueprint for the future. How, why, what you will into being – this is the choice that confronts you, and all of us.’