The Vanishing Futurist (3 page)

Dear, kind Mr Kobelev, with his conviction that Russia must not let down her Allies and that elections were all that the country needed, now seemed to be speaking from some fast-receding shore. I signed up for a course in political education; my little exercise book of notes on Proudhon and Engels and owning the means of production has, for some reason, survived, complete with doodles in the margin. Yet politics always remained opaque to me, however hard I tried.

Revolution, on the other hand – or at least the revolution that Slavkin envisaged – was clearly visible. It was the longed-for precipice just downhill of us.

On 3 March Mr Kobelev arrived back from his club out of breath, his face scarlet, his eyes full of tears, with the news that the Tsar had abdicated. We embraced each other, cried and rushed out onto the streets, swept up on the general tide of euphoria. It all happened more or less just as a revolution should, with dozens of symbolic moments – the burning of Tsarist regalia, huge demonstrations in the streets, exultant groups of citizens drinking the contents of a few looted stores.

Over the years I have often been asked about my memories of the February Days; in fact I gave a talk once on the subject to the Hackney Women’s Reading Group, one of a number of Socialist organisations I’ve belonged to. They were appreciative of my talk, which they preferred to the one I gave on the Great October Revolution, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. My view of Lenin’s Revolution was flawed, they told me, too personal, lacking a proper sense of the collective or the heroic. The inconvenient truth was, of course, that October had none of the ingredients of a people’s revolution – no processions, and no symbolic removal of the tyrant’s flag, because there was no tyrant by then. There was street fighting in Moscow, but, thank goodness, not too close to Gagarinsky Lane.

In late October, I remember, snow threatened but did not come; the air was oppressive and the sky low and bulging, until one longed for the flakes to start falling. The first we knew of any disturbance was gunfire in the afternoon. Mr Kobelev telephoned friends of his in the City Council and learnt a few details: the Bolsheviks had announced they must act to defend the Congress of Soviets, they had driven out the Provisional Government, it was a coup. We were not overly excited by this information, for there had been rumours of coups several times already that year. We could hear heavy fighting in other parts of the city, however, so we settled in at Gagarinsky Lane and played card games with the children to pass the time.

After five days it finally began to snow and the city fell quiet. Pasha and Nikita were keen to find out news and I volunteered to go with them; I think Mr Kobelev felt that my presence would act as a brake on their spirit of adventure. As far as I was concerned, after so long cooped up inside the house, I was ready for anything.

We turned towards the centre of town; Pasha and Nikita were deep in conversation, and did not include me. The snow was still falling, those large, soft flakes that give one the impression that gravity is not holding things down quite as reliably as it should. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the streets were almost empty. On Mokhovaya Street Pasha said, ‘What’s that?’ and we saw the body of a man in the road. From the way he was lying, awkwardly, his leg bent beneath him, it was clear from a distance of fifty yards that he was dead. Snow had already settled on his face and his clothes. The three of us passed him on the other side of the road. We did not say another word about it, but after a few moments I realised we were on Vozdvizhenka.

‘Perhaps—’ My voice came out in a croak; I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘Perhaps we might drop in to see Miss Clegg and the Beloborodovs?’

‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Pasha, with relief, and Slavkin, as if noticing that I was with them for the first time, turned to me, smiled and nodded. I felt an absurd, self-congratulatory flush.

Miss Clegg let us in herself. ‘I did tell you that your habit of taking walks around Moscow was unwise.’

We entered the Beloborodovs’ large, modern apartment, decorated in the art-nouveau style, and Miss Clegg brought us into the drawing room to join the family. Monsieur Beloborodov, who was talking with his brother-in-law Prince Svyatinsky in front of the fireplace, had made a large amount of money by investing in the railways and was destined for great things, according to Miss Clegg (as of course she would say). Madame was quite young, perhaps still in her twenties, although she adopted the gloriously condescending airs of a dowager.

‘Little Miss Freely,’ she drawled from her chair. ‘Do sit down with us. And of course this is Pasha – how is your father, my dear boy?’

We drank weak tea from little porcelain cups and spoke of this and that. The snow pattered against the window panes and the wind – or was it distant gunfire? – boomed in the chimney. Prince Svyatinsky, who was a collector of minerals, spoke of a rare specimen – jeremejevite – that he had found for sale in the market.

‘It was being sold by a peasant – goodness knows how he had laid his hands on it. My great-uncle would have given his eye teeth for such a specimen!’

Slavkin perked up. ‘I thought only a few examples were known?’

The Prince’s little black eyes fell on Slavkin. ‘Are you interested in minerals? You must let me show you my collection . . .’

They fell into conversation: Nikita, unwinding his limbs one by one from the gilt chair he had been torturing and beginning to gesture as he warmed up, and the little Prince, charming and portly, with the mannerisms of a grande dame. For all that he looked like an aristocrat in a Bolshevik cartoon, he was a serious scientist, and in later years would become a professor at the Sorbonne.

‘Is your friend at the University?’ murmured Madame Beloborodov.

‘Yes, he is studying Physics and Engineering, but he also attends lectures in the Geology faculty. He seems to know all the professors.’

‘Really? Prince Svyatinsky and his wife have had some bad luck. A fire in his house on Myasnitskaya, they think a sniper shot caused it. He and my sister are staying with us here.’

‘I am so sorry,’ I answered. ‘Can anything be saved?’

‘His collection, thank heavens, was unharmed. Now they plan to sell it’, she lowered her voice still further, as though uttering a rude word, ‘and leave for France.’

‘I see,’ I replied slowly, wondering why I was being favoured with this confidence. The subject of exile, never far from the thoughts of the Russian gentry in those days, was nonetheless considered in poor taste.

‘Perhaps,’ she breathed scarcely audibly to me, ‘your friend might have connections in the University who would be interested?’

I nodded. ‘Yes indeed.’

‘They cannot make an open approach, you understand. This needs to be handled with the utmost discretion.’

I reported this conversation on the way home.

‘Perhaps they hope to keep the sale a secret from the rest of the family,’ commented Pasha.

‘Poor Prince. That collection is his great joy.’

‘Excuse me,’ muttered Slavkin, beginning to walk faster, striding out like a racehorse. ‘I must talk to – I think I know who . . .’ He disappeared around the corner, still muttering to himself.

A few weeks later he and a student friend of Pasha’s, Fyodor, arrived at Gagarinsky Lane in a cart with a package wrapped in straw. It took both of them to lift it across the yard. When it was finally installed in his workshop, the packing came off to reveal a sizeable piece of some dark, silvery mineral.

‘I have arranged it all,’ said Slavkin, beaming. I’d never seen him so exhilarated. ‘The collection will go to the University. Would you be able to give us your help, Miss Gerty? Next week we must pack everything up. The Prince and Princess are delighted – they plan to leave for France a couple of days later. He gave me this as a thank-you.’

The times brought out unexpected qualities in all of us but even so I was impressed, as was Mr Kobelev, who embraced and congratulated him.

‘Well done, my boy – you must have managed the negotiations with great tact. Perhaps you will do the same for my collection one day?’

‘Yes, yes!’ Nikita, shiny with happiness, rushed off to see to his present, which was my first glimpse of the mineral iridium. He didn’t offer any more details, and I – always a little shy of him – did not enquire.

We spent several days packing and sorting the pieces at the Prince’s house. I was finishing up a last few tasks when the Prince came up to the gallery for the first time. He went straight to his study without greeting us, and Nikita – a little surprised, perhaps, but still beaming, excited by our work – immediately hurried over to speak to him. I could not see the Prince, who was concealed behind the door of his study, or hear their conversation, yet I read its course clearly in the lines of Nikita’s body. Before even a word was said, as soon as Nikita saw the Prince’s face, I could feel the enthusiasm flowing out of him. His shoulders drooped; I could sense, rather than see, his anxious frown. He plucked nervously at his sleeve, and shuffled from foot to foot, backing away from the fury directed at him. He shook his head.

Now the Prince raised his voice: ‘Robbery!’ he shouted. ‘They never had the slightest intention to pay!’

Nikita, cowering before him, still shook his head, ‘That wasn’t what we arranged . . . I had no idea . . .’

He flinched as though he had been hit. The study door slammed shut, and Nikita took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the Prince’s spittle off his face. He walked slowly back towards me.

‘He says – he says they’ve forced him to sign the collection over to the state. They told me they’d arrange the money side of things, and I believed them. I should have pressed them, but . . .’

‘You mean the University aren’t paying him at all?’

‘A pittance.’ Slavkin grimaced.

We set out through the darkening streets towards Gagarinsky Lane and he went over and over the episode. ‘What a fool I am, what a fool – I thought they would be honourable, I should have insisted on a contract . . .’

‘I suppose now the collection will be at the service of the people,’ I said at last, timidly.

He looked at me for a moment as if about to say something, then changed his mind. He stood up a little straighter. Then, quite unexpectedly, he took my arm and tucked it under his, his slow, sweet smile lighting up his face.

‘Gerty, I think you must be the most rational, sensible woman I know,’ he said.

We walked together through the icy streets and past the Central Post Office, pockmarked with bullet holes. His arm felt very warm against mine.

The Svyatinskys donated their collection to the Soviet State, against their will, and in return were permitted to leave for France. The Svyatinsky Theft, as the episode became known in émigré circles, was much cited as evidence not just of the Bolsheviks’ greed, but the
naivety
or, worse, the corruption of the Russian intelligentsia who did not go into exile. It gave Slavkin a certain notoriety abroad, but in Moscow, where ‘Revolutionary Justice’ was the slogan of the moment, it brought him the approval of the Bolshevik leadership and a position at the newly established Centre for Revolutionary Research, where he began his work on iridium alloys – the first step towards the Socialisation Capsule. It is a thought that I still find disturbing. Surely Slavkin’s future was already fixed in his genes, in his genius. Yet if I’d never suggested that visit to the Beloborodovs, might he have remained an anonymous scientist all his life?

‘Boots to beard, I’m a Muscovite – where else in the world will I live?’

Mr Kobelev refused to be concerned by the increasingly menacing tone against the middle classes in the winter of 1917. ‘There is much that is good about the new regime, even if I disagree with it in many ways; it’s my duty to stay.’

Russia withdrew from the war and despite the catastrophe of the German invasion across a vast area in the south and west of Russia, he was still optimistic that the various Socialist parties would solve their differences and a democratic system would develop with time. He summoned the servants and told them that they were free to leave his employ, if they wished, and one by one they melted away, all except the yardman Yasha, the cook Darya, and one of the maids, Shura. We unpicked the fur collars from the children’s coats and took care not to look or behave in a ‘bourgeois’ manner on the street. My English classes were in demand; I took private clients as well as continuing to work at the school on Tverskaya. The children’s schooling, as well as Pasha’s university degree, limped on through endless strikes and political meetings. Sonya visited us often, exhausted and sad. Her husband, Petya, had been left severely disabled by injuries incurred on the Austrian front, and poor Sonya struggled to care for him. In this way we lived more or less uninterrupted at Gagarinsky Lane until the following spring.

One May evening in 1918 I couldn’t sleep. I leaned out of the open window, gazing into the dark spring night. A car, its headlights extinguished, cruised quietly down Gagarinsky Lane. Underneath my window it stopped and several men jumped out. They ran up to the gate and banged loudly. This was not the first time that the house had been searched, but the other occasions had been in daylight, and we’d had some warning to hide incriminating possessions. I darted along to Mr Kobelev’s study. His gun, a Mauser, was lying quite openly on the sideboard. People were shot for less. I thrust it into my bodice, then ran to Mrs Kobelev’s room.

‘Wake up, Sofia Pavlovna, dear, the militia are here,’ I said, shaking her. ‘Give me your jewels, quickly.’

‘What? Oh . . .’ She sat up and fumbled in the chest of drawers by her bed, pulling out several velvet bags. I could hear voices in the hall downstairs shouting for Comrade Kobelev.

‘He’s at work,’ Pasha told them.

‘Look at all this stuff, it belongs to the people. Thieves!’

I peeped over the banisters. There were perhaps four or five of them, swaggering and nervous. One of them casually swept the large china letter-dish off the hall table. It chimed like a bell as it smashed.

‘Who are you?’ said Pasha. ‘Show me your identification.’

‘Comrade Kobelev, I’m the Deputy Head of the Smolensk District Soviet.’ A man pushed forward to talk to Pasha; I saw it was Prigorian, who had been the Kobelevs’ chauffeur until the car was requisitioned. He had always been the image of deference. Now he stood with his legs apart and rested his hand on the gun holster at his belt. ‘The people are concerned that your father has been carrying off the treasures he expropriated from the nation.’

‘You mean his collection?’ I was impressed by Pasha’s calm tones. ‘You know perfectly well, Prig, nothing has been carried off. My father has preserved large numbers of works of art for the Russian people.’