The Vanishing Futurist (4 page)

‘Search the house,’ Prig told the others without looking around.

They moved towards the stairs and I ran to my bedroom and shoved the jewels and gun under my mattress. My heart was thrashing about in my chest. Voices were raised, there was the crash of a table being overturned.

‘Open up or we’ll arrest you all,’ I could hear them saying outside Mrs Kobelev’s room.

I waited in my room.

‘Open up, open up at once!’ They thumped on my door.

‘Certainly not,’ I said in my most haughty tones. ‘I am a British citizen. You have no right to search my room.’ I opened the door a sliver and showed them my passport.

 In silence they examined it, one after the other. Prig was called.

‘It’s true, she’s an
Anglichanka
,’ he said, looking at me distastefully.

To my amazement, they moved on.

Half an hour later they were gone. When Mr Kobelev returned home, I went to see him in his study. For the first time since I had lived in the house, Mrs Kobelev was sitting with him. I gave them back their belongings.

‘Good Lord, Miss Gerty, how can we thank you?’ muttered Mr Kobelev.

‘No, no, don’t thank me – but, sir, is it safe for you all here in Moscow?’

‘I’ve always said the moral course is to remain—’ Kobelev began, then checked himself, looking at his wife. ‘I don’t know.’

Mrs Kobelev, very pale, but upright, suddenly spoke. ‘I think we should go south for the summer. Will you accompany us, Miss Gerty?’

‘No, Sofia Pavlovna, I must stay in Moscow,’ I told her gently. The Embassy had advised British citizens to remain in the capital in case of evacuation. ‘But perhaps you’d like me to protect the house, as far as possible?’

‘Oh Miss Gerty.’ Sofia Pavlovna turned away, unsteady on her feet. ‘What you do, of course, is your affair.’

I slept fitfully that night, and woke to hear someone crying. I went to check, but the children were quiet; in the early hours of the morning I heard it again. It was their mother.

We spent the next three days packing away Mr Kobelev’s ethnographic collection. We filled crates with straw for the peasant ceramics, then with the contents of the shelves in his study, fragments of embroidery and costumes wrapped in old cloths. All the woodcuts came down from the walls; all the Buryat weapons and animal skins. We labelled every box and Yasha nailed them shut. Then we hired a cart and transported them to the Alexander III Museum, which had agreed to store the collection. It took us four journeys, back and forth.

‘I always intended to donate it to the State when I died,’ Mr Kobelev remarked. ‘This way is better – sooner.’

Travel into German-held areas was not at all reliable, and although Mr Kobelev had procured tickets for them to Yalta, we had no real idea whether they would be allowed to cross into the Ukraine. Sonya’s husband Petya had returned to Petrograd; Sonya herself decided to accompany her parents south. Shura, the maid, would go with them to help with Dima and Liza. But the old ladies refused to move; Mr Kobelev was in despair.

‘We can’t leave you behind, my dears! Come with us, for our sake, if not for yours!’

‘No,’ said Anna Vladimirovna, definite as ever. ‘Much too hot! Not at all good for the health. Sonya, my girl, you will ruin your complexion.’

‘But my dears,’ said Sonya, kneeling beside her chair, ‘it might be dangerous for you here, and very hard – who will look after you?’

‘We’ll look after ourselves, won’t we, Mamzelle? We’ll manage very well.’

No argument would change their minds, and as I promised to care for them as best I could, Mr Kobelev finally agreed they should remain. In any case, as he admitted, it was quite possible that the journey itself would be just as dangerous for them. The trains were uncomfortable places these days, so it was said. Even more deadly than the borders and the militia were the typhus lice, hopping through the packed carriages. He insisted on leaving me the Mauser, which I took with some trepidation, having no idea how to load or fire it.

‘We’ll be back soon,’ said Mr Kobelev, his kind face creased by anxiety. ‘We’ll be back in the autumn. All of this will have blown over by then. A Government of National Emergency is what’s needed—’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ murmured Sofia Pavlovna, almost inaudibly. ‘It would be better if we forgot this life completely.’

It was another lilac-scented day in May when the old carriage was loaded up and a horse was hired to take them to the station. The children were dressed in their travelling clothes, heavy with the coins and jewellery that Sonya and I had sewn into the hems. They complained bitterly. ‘We can’t wear these clothes! We’re not puppets, you know!’

 The children’s excitement gave the last moments an unexpectedly cheerful tone.

‘I’ll sit next to Mama,’ Liza kept saying. ‘I’ll take care of Mama.’

 ‘Yes,’ said Dima casually, ‘that’s your job, and mine is to deal with any bandits we come across.’

We couldn’t help laughing at the bloodthirsty look on his face.

‘Where is Nikita?’ wondered Mr Kobelev. ‘Miss Gerty, you must embrace him for us. I am sorry not to say goodbye to him.’

‘Goodbye, Miss Gerty,’ said Pasha, doffing his cap and grinning at me. ‘Now I’ll never be able to convince you how much I love you!’

I laughed. ‘Pasha, you are ridiculous—’ I stopped; he had already turned away and was talking to Yasha, telling him to drive on.

‘Oh, do take care,’ I said after them. ‘Take great care . . .’

In the end the Kobelev family left the house on Gagarinsky Lane almost without noticing, talking and arguing among themselves.

I found the two old ladies standing forlornly in the hall and led them back to their room overlooking the courtyard.

‘We are all tired, I think,’ sighed Anna Vladimirovna, adding unexpectedly, ‘Perhaps you would sit with us for a cup of tea, Miss Freely?’

She was frightened, I saw, and no wonder. But I suddenly felt that if I sat down I would start crying and not know how to stop.

‘No, thank you. I must see to a few things, and then perhaps we will spend the evening together?’

Two heads nodded, eager to please.

‘We will have a little soup, a
soupchik
.’

They agreed again, more happily; there’s no Russian alive that is not soothed by a little
soupchik
.

I wandered into the study, now furnished with absences: squares of dust on the walls, pale patches on the parquet. With all the packing I had not slept more than five hours for the last couple of nights and everything had the dreary, gritty texture of sleeplessness. The empty shelves were scattered with dead woodlice. Prig’s people had smashed the pretty gilt sconces on each side of the fireplace, perhaps imagining them to be made of real gold.

Why was I here? There was a part of me that felt miserable for remaining. Should I have accompanied the Kobelevs? I loved them more than I did my own family, and yet I’d let them go alone, into danger.

Perhaps there was more of my father in me than I imagined. An image of him sprang to mind, red-cheeked and sandy-browed with great quivering lobsterish whisps, snapping at me, ‘Make up your mind, girl!’

Well, I had.

A cold draught suddenly hit the back of my knees. Slavkin was standing in the hall, gazing around him with a look of desolation.

‘Have they gone? Have I missed them?’

‘Yes, they left half an hour ago – they asked me to say goodbye to you for them; they were sad not to see you.’

‘I was at work.’ His chin trembled. ‘How bare it all looks . . .’

‘Mr Kobelev said he’d always planned to give it all to the people.’

‘It’s for the best. It was much too dangerous to keep the collection here.’ Slavkin’s voice betrayed him with an alarming squeak. He turned his back on me and clumped up to his room.

For several days, Slavkin and I barely saw each other. In the evenings I heard him stomping to and fro in his room; occasionally I fancied that he was listening to my movements, as I tended to the old ladies. The house felt strange, like a ship adrift on a silent sea, a huge empty ship with an echoing hold. The weather had suddenly turned cold and windy; in the evenings the chestnut branches flexed and slapped against the shutters like ropes. The rafters creaked and moaned and occasionally fell quiet; then I felt the presence of Slavkin most strongly. I didn’t seek him out; I was too shy of him. His brilliance rendered me absurdly prosaic and tongue-tied, blushing, a caricature of an English governess.

And yet sometimes, across the noisy evening gatherings, I had caught him looking at me as though we understood each other. We were outsiders in that house; we were not liberals, we didn’t understand doubters. We had little to lose.

 ‘What
can
he be doing all the time?’ wondered Anna Vladimirovna. In the empty house, even Slavkin’s ‘village voice’ was apparently better than nothing. ‘Doesn’t he want to come and sit with us? Can he be quite
well
?’

‘He’s probably busy with his contraptions, Anna Vladimirovna,’ said Mamzelle soothingly. ‘Scientists are not quite normal.’

I was working longer hours than ever at the English school on Tverskaya, lessons that were now paid mainly in kind – half a loaf of black bread and a smoked fish for the present continuous. One pupil, a Georgian, presented me with a bag of good black tea. Oh, the old ladies were happy.

 ‘
Vous êtes trop gentille
,’ said Mamzelle tearfully.

‘Take some, do, to that strange boy,’ said Anna Vladimirovna.

At my knock, Slavkin opened his door – even a little too quickly, as though he were waiting for me – and made me jump, and some of the precious tea was spilt. And then he hurried to relieve me of the tray, and I recoiled, trying to protect the cup, and there were apologies and counter-apologies, and I was blushing so hard, and my heart was racing, that I couldn’t help laughing, and he looked at me in embarrassment, drawing back.

I had never seen the inside of his room. The walls were covered in notes and equations, pieces of newspaper, scribbles and rather beautiful sketches. There was a series of X-rays that seemed to show a skeleton walking with a stick and sitting on a bench. Posters covered one wall. In one corner was a camera on a tripod, and in another, a heap of rubbish – quite literally, without any exaggeration, rubbish. Broken wooden crates, bits of old planking, dirty bottles, rags, stones . . .

‘Goodness,’ I said, ‘this is your work?’ I was conscious of a note of incredulity, and added, ’I know you are very busy, Nikita Gavrilovich, as always—’

‘I am.’

‘Perhaps one day you will explain it to me.’ I turned to leave, embarrassed.

‘Wait.’ He took a step towards me. ‘Why are you here? Why didn’t you go south?’

‘What do you mean?’ I stammered. ‘You know why. British citizens have been told to stay in Moscow—’

‘I don’t think you remained here just for reasons of safety,’ he said quietly.

I was speechless. At last I said, ‘I don’t know, I felt there’d be something for me to do here—’

‘For the Revolution?’

‘Well, yes . . . For the people, for my pupils, you know . . .’

He gazed at me, and I had an extraordinary sensation – as though it were the first time in my life that anyone had really looked at me.

‘You’re an unusual person,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

‘No, for some reason, I’m not. I feel . . . light. I feel that I’m changing, day by day.’ I laughed. ‘I know that must sound foolish.’

‘Miss Gerty,’ he said, ‘you could never do a foolish thing. It makes me happy to hear you. We are in the first stage, you know, and everything is rough and crude and even cruel, but we have a chance—’

‘A chance to reform society, you mean?’

‘Oh, not just society – ourselves! Transform our own souls, even our bodies – we can be different.’ He paused and then looked at me intently. ‘I’d like to—’ he said and immediately looked away, confused.

‘What?’

‘I’d like to visit you.’

I did not look away. Afterwards, thinking about it, I was amazed that I held his gaze so coolly, although my heart was rattling in my chest. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Please do. ’

My sitting-room floor in Hackney is littered with balls of paper. If this account is to be worthwhile at all, it seems to me, it must be as honest as I can manage. A dozen times I have found myself veering off into comfortable euphemism, torn out the page from my typewriter, and started afresh. The truth, my husband used to say, however shameful, however inconvenient, is the great healer. Isn’t that time? I’d ask. Yes, but the truth is the surgeon. It sets the bones. Otherwise time will heal them crooked . . . His voice so close, in my head. I rip out yet another spoiled page. How could he leave me to tell it on my own? Out of nowhere I begin to cry, noisily, into the silence.

After a while I quieten down. I wipe my face on my sleeve. I thread a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter and begin again. The truth is the surgeon.

Later that night, after I’d cooked for the old ladies and listened to yet more of Anna Vladmirovna’s endless supply of family stories, which could all really be boiled down to the simple maxim ‘breeding is what matters’, I lay in bed and listened to the wind – an unsettling tune with no comfort in it. Various conversations I’d had with Slavkin repeated and fragmented in my mind. ‘Revolution . . . once in a millennium . . . transform ourselves, reform ourselves, unform . . .’ Russian prefixes scuffled about drearily like the chestnut leaves on the window. I sat up in bed. There was someone at the door.

‘Who is it?’

Slavkin – a tall, awkward figure silhouetted in the doorway. ‘It’s me, comrade. You weren’t sleeping, were you?’ His voice gave way a little.

‘No.’

He approached my bed. I did not move; my mouth was dry. He crouched beside me, avoiding my eyes, and spoke in a ponderous monotone.

‘Comrade Freely, I have long thought you a very rational, intelligent woman. I have known your positive attitude to the Revolution and to women’s rights for some time, but when you told me your reasons for staying in Moscow, it struck me that you would see my situation clearly, without sentiment. I hope I deduced this correctly . . .’

He gulped audibly, and in the half-light I saw his Adam’s apple leaping up and down in his throat.

‘In order for me to work productively certain physical comforts are occasionally necessary. For some time now I have been wanting urgently to visit you with the proposal that we might . . . we might become intimate, so to speak. That in the light of the new world we are building, we might ourselves enjoy free, mutually satisfactory, er, beneficial . . .’

He hesitated.

For a moment my mind whirled. Then I noticed that he was trembling, the hand clutching his knees white-knuckled.

I reached across and touched him.

‘Oh, comrade—’

Suddenly we were together, and he was kissing my face, and pushing up my nightdress, and we were both shaking with urgency, and I was only astonished that I had never felt his hands on my waist before, or touching my breasts, and he was hurrying, hurrying, and pressed himself upon me, cried out, and a moment later fell still. I was aware of a wet patch on my thigh. The whole had taken perhaps five minutes.

My heart was galloping, I could not quite understand what we had done. After a while Nikita raised himself from me, stood up and straightened his clothes.

‘I greatly value and respect your honesty and your generosity,’ he said, serious as ever.

I sat up, flooded with shame. I covered myself with the sheet. ‘Oh . . . I see.’

He was avoiding my eyes again. ‘You will assist me on my great task, I hope, comrade. We will work together, shall we?’

‘Yes indeed,’ I answered.

‘Well, good night then. I’m tired,’ he said, retreating. ‘A peaceful night . . .’

Was that a ‘dear one’ that I heard at the end of his sentence? Perhaps it was. When he was gone I got out of bed, took off my nightdress and washed, staring at myself in the mirror. My shame evaporated and I was filled with joy. What had happened? It was very puzzling. I had only the vaguest knowledge of such matters, only my mother’s hissed and encoded warnings. For some reason, however, I was certain I would not fall pregnant or catch anything nasty. Shame? No, no, here in Soviet Russia there was no place for shame – here men and women were equal, we were honest with each other and we had no time for sentiment. And yet for some time he had been wanting urgently to visit me! I could hear my mother’s poisonous tones: ‘I’m afraid you’re not the type men like, dear.’ Every cell in my body rejoiced that night: she was wrong, wrong, wrong.

For several long days afterwards, I saw nothing of Slavkin. I began to dig the children’s vegetable plot in the courtyard, tripling its size, thinking of the winter ahead. In the afternoons I brought the old ladies outside and settled them in the shade of the lilac trees in the corner, where they watched and chatted.

‘I can’t think why we troubled to go all the way to Mikhailovka all those years,’ Anna Vladimirovna said. ‘Why, it’s just as pleasant here, without that terrible travelling!’

‘It was only an hour on the train,’ I reminded her.

‘No, no, much longer, and quite dreadful.’ In some way Anna Vladimirovna seemed invigorated by the strange new situation in the house, less tetchy, more energetic. ‘Where is the boy? Is he avoiding us?’

Oh dear God, did she somehow know how desperately I was asking the same question? My every nerve was alive to his presence in the house, and listening involuntarily to his movements in his bedroom, his arrivals and exits at strange hours, exacerbated my insomnia terribly.

As time passed it seemed to me that he had shown disrespect, if not for me then for the principle of self-transformation that he had spoken about so warmly. Taking my courage in both hands, I decided to approach him myself. In the new world men and women must be honest and direct with each other; it was no good hanging back like a blushing damsel.

I knocked on the door of his room that evening, my hands sweating uncomfortably.

‘Enter!’

‘Comrade Slavkin,’ I began, ‘I’m afraid I am disturbing you in the midst of important work, but it is essential that we discuss the matter of living space. We are here in possession of almost two hundred square metres of living space, enough by government standards to house at least another twenty-five people. Don’t you think we should report this anomaly?’

As honest as I intended to be, this was the subject that I lit upon in the awkwardness of the moment.

‘Oh, yes indeed, comrade,’ he said. ‘The fact is I have been thinking about exactly this problem . . .’

I could see, now, that he was blushing. Yes, blushing! A deep pink all down his neck and under his hair. He looked up at me almost beseechingly, like a boy gazing up at his teacher. A chill passed through me at that moment; if I had only heeded it, how much pain I would have saved myself. But I suppose it was already too late. I steadied myself, and spoke to him as gently as I could.

‘Please, you have no need to feel awkward with me.’

‘What? No, no—’ he stammered.

‘Really, it’s not necessary. We are adults, we are responsible for our own actions.’ I smiled, to show I meant it. ‘Now – start again. Tell me what you have been thinking.’

He gazed at me doubtfully for a moment. Then a smile began, and spread and spread. ‘Dear Miss Gerty, comrade, what a wonderful person you are! A true Revolutionary! I am convinced that if you will help me, we will succeed. Will you help me? Will you?’

He was almost on his knees before me, beaming, looking so young, and I couldn’t help laughing and agreeing. ‘Of course I’ll help you, Nikita, but with what?’