Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet Page 12

  Shura introduced me to girls. They kissed my cheek and said that I was ‘lovely’ and ‘a duck’, which was not quite the impression I had hoped to give them. I was learning the rich, elusive speech of the city, however, as I had learned other foreign languages, and was soon proficient in it. It was this ability, which I gradually lost as I grew older, which helped me in many of my future situations. Where language was concerned, I was a chameleon.

  Shura was very pleased with my progress. He took me up to the limans, those strange, dark, emerald-green shallows, full of mud and minerals. They are half-wild: the haunt of game-fowl and blind fish, where reeds wave and peculiar shadows move beneath the glinting, agitated surface. They are half-tamed where the large hotels and health-resorts crowd close together. Here I learned to run errands for rich women. There was a great deal of commission involved, for one was tipped by all parties involved in the transactions. At other times we would engage in business by the docks where there were always ships: steamers, sailing boats, schooners, loading and unloading. Cargoes of fish, fruit, wine, cloth or even coal were often sold directly they were landed. Traders were omnipresent and would pay for information of many kinds. Shura was well-known and I became almost as familiar to them by my slightly Frenchified nickname of ‘Max the Hetman’. Also my relationship with Shura guaranteed me a place in the bohemian inner circle. There was already a small legend which suggested I was ‘something hot in Kiev’. Soon it was possible for me to wander freely about the district without Shura to guide me and I made acquaintances of my own. I never went to the docks without him, however. That grey world of overhead railways, derricks and worn-out dray horses had a sense of danger to it. It was where most of the revolutionaries came from.

  In the meantime, of course, I tried to obey my mother’s wishes. I continued to study in the evenings (though they became shorter as my days grew longer) and to stay in the fresh air enough to show an improvement in my skin colour, so as to placate my aunt. Uncle Semya seemed to expect nothing of me save that I ‘learn a little of the world before going back to school’. I am grateful to his philosophy and experience which made me appreciate education all the more. But the wine and the euphoria could not sustain me indefinitely and sometimes I was forced to spend whole days in bed recovering from the excesses into which my enthusiasm led me. On one of these days a grinning Shura came to see me. ‘I heard you weren’t too well. I warned you about that rich Armenian wine, didn’t I?’ He picked up one of my journals. His lips moved as he tried to read the German words in the text. ‘What’s this?’ He pointed to a paragraph about Oddy’s work on chemical isotopes. It was the beginning of the end for practical science. Together with Bohr’s atomic theories, Oddy’s came to seem more like the mad abstractions of ‘modernist’ paintings, whose authors were part of the same mutual admiration society. I explained to Shura that it was probably nonsense. His reply was to laugh and say, ‘I see. You can’t understand it, eh?’

  ‘Well enough to see through it,’ I replied. ‘Why are you here?’

  Shura rubbed his nose. ‘I thought you might like to come out to Arcadia today. You need to get yourself a girl.’

  ‘I’ve no energy,’ I told him. ‘I can’t even think.’

  ‘You need a doctor.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  He was sympathetic. A little reluctantly, he drew something from his waistcoat pocket. Throwing his scarf back over his shoulder he opened a fold of newspaper and held it out towards me. ‘Don’t breathe too heavily, Max. You’ll blow a lot of money away.’

  I looked down at the small quantity of white powder which lay in the newspaper. It was like the stuff one took for dyspepsia or headaches. ‘What is it? For a hangover?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Shura went to my dressing table and put the fold of paper carefully down. Then he took a rouble note from his wallet and rolled it until it made a tight little tube. I was mystified, amused. ‘What on earth’s all this ritual?’

  He brought the packet back, with the rolled rouble. ‘Do you know how to take it?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You sniff it into your nose.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘It’s cocaine. You use it to pick you up. Everyone does.’

  ‘Like you get in hospital?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  In those days there was little association in the popular imagination with cocaine and addiction. It was not illegal to use it or to sell it, but it was expensive and therefore tended to be the prerogative of the wealthy. As I inexpertly drew the first crystals into my sinus I felt not that I was doing anything particularly wicked but that I was party to yet another luxury hitherto reserved for my betters. At first there was nothing but a little numbness in my nostrils and I was disappointed. I told Shura that either I was immune to the effects or that I needed more. He continued to leaf through my books. Slowly a feeling of ecstatic well-being filled me. Good cocaine does not merely give a sense of one’s whole body coming alive, there is at the same time an aesthetic delight, a love for the drug itself, a love for the world which can produce it, a love for oneself and for every other human being, a supreme confidence, an exquisite sensitivity, a profound understanding of the tensions and forces controlling society. An habitual cocaine-user (whether he injects or sniffs) should learn to distinguish the reality and the fantasy, to marshal the energies released by the drug, but at that time I was as much in its power as I had been in Shura’s. Of course, I felt utterly my own man. ‘It works very well,’ I said. ‘I feel a hundred times better.’

  ‘I knew you would. Coming to Arcadia?’

  I thought of the pretty girls I would see there, of the fine impression I would make. I thought of the foreigners I could meet and speak to, the inventions I could create, just lying on the sands. I dressed myself in Vanya’s best (along with one or two extra items which I had purchased for myself). ‘What’s the time?’

  Shura shook his head and laughed aloud. ‘Oh dear, Max, you’re certainly a joy to know. It’s about noon. We’ll have lunch at Esau’s first.’

  We never reached Arcadia. Instead we spent most of the afternoon in Esau’s and I talked of all the things I knew, in all the languages I could speak; of all the things I was going to do; and my most attentive audience was little Katya, a year or two younger than myself but already a well-liked whore, who led me, still in a daze of cocaine-dust, by her tiny warm hand, out of Esau’s and along an alley and up into a sunny attic room with a window looking towards the smoky heights of Moldovanka and Vorontzovka, inland towards the ancient steppe, and here she took away all my clothes and exposed my body and admired it and stroked it and removed her own little silks and cottons and lay upon her white bed and taught me the trembling joys of manhood so that to this day the pleasure of cocaine-taking and copulation are mingled together in my mind. I have been a regular user of the drug all my life and apart from some mild trouble with my sinuses I have suffered no ill-effects. While I frown upon reefer-smoking and opium-taking, because they dull the wits and the will to do, which is the supreme human quality, I know many great men who have made use of cocaine to help them in their work. Of course, it can be abused—Bolsheviks and pop-stars, for instance—but that is true of all the gifts we have on this Earth.

  After my experience with Katya I slept very deeply. Next morning I found that she was still there, still as tender as she had been, but anxious for me to leave because she stood to lose business. I asked when I could return. She said that I could come and see her the next day, when she had restored her routine. It might seem strange to my readers that I did not feel jealousy towards her customers. I never sought to analyse my feelings. My love for Katya, with her small, boyish body, her wealth of black hair, her humane and profoundly benign eyes, her delicate lips and fingers, was one of the purest loves I ever knew. Even when I saw her with her ‘friends’ I felt nothing but comradeship towards her. I do not think, in spite of what was to happen, that I managed to discover quite such a balanced
relationship again. My life with Mrs Cornelius was altogether more complex and her role towards me, in the early days at least, more maternal.

  My meeting with Mrs Cornelius came only a day or so after my first experience of sexual intercourse. My toothache had grown worse and Uncle Semya said I must have the best dental treatment. Again the dentist, Cornelius, was mentioned. Wanda must take me at once to Preobrazhenskaya (one of Odessa’s most fashionable streets) where the tooth would be pulled. My debauched life had left me pale, with bloodshot eyes. I think he believed my toothache to be worse than it was. He did not want the responsibility of telling my mother that I had, perhaps, poisoned my jaw.

  In a smart Steiger, the driver a stiff silhouette on the seat in front, Wanda and I drove through foggy, autumn streets. The wheels rolled over rustling leaves which had become gold as the sea-fog turned yellow. The Odessa fog muted all the colours of the season. It muffled the sounds of the ships in the harbour and the traffic in the main boulevards. We passed the cemetery, clad in a canary shroud. Shadowy ladies in their brown autumn coats and hats, and gentlemen also in darker colours, anticipated the approach of winter.

  By the time the cab turned into the long, straight avenue of Preobrazhenskaya I felt extremely lordly in my new three-piece suit, with white shirt, stiff collar and cravat, like a Count on his way to visit a Prince. My nervousness of the dentist had partly been offset by a soupçon of cocaine, taken just before we left, and partly by a sense of my own elegance. We disembarked outside an impressive building (it was in the district close to the Theatre and University) just as sunlight began to fall again upon the city. We entered a lobby and took a flight of stone, curving stairs up to a door which bore a brass plate announcing H. Cornelius, Dentist.

  We were expected, but there was another visitor in the well-appointed waiting-room. She seemed very much a lady of fashion, in her mutton-chop sleeves and her hat with fruit and flowers on it, with a little veil. She smelled of expensive perfume. She was, I now realise, only about Wanda’s age. But she had a romantic, foreign air to her.

  She had not, it seemed, been expected. The dentist’s receptionist was saying as much when we entered. I cannot reproduce the lady’s wonderful English so will leave that to someone else. She seemed very confident as she stood in the middle of the room, holding her salmon-pink sunshade in one hand, her matching reticule in the other. She was dressed almost entirely in pink with some white decorations and, of course, the various colours of her hat. She was a picture from one of my French or English magazines. The feathers swept round, like the train of a savage monarch, as she turned to look at us. She had blonde hair (not in those days very fashionable) and a pink and white face, with a little paint on it. She smiled down on us, although she was not particularly tall, and it might have been the Tsarina herself condescending to notice me. She was speaking English, as I say, and seemed a little put out by the stupidity of the receptionist who had addressed her in German and then in French.

  ‘I told yer. I’ve come ter see me cuz.’

  I recognised the English words, if not exactly the sense of what she said. ‘The lady is English,’ I informed the girl who, in apron and uniform, looked like a baffled sheepdog. I removed my hat. ‘Can I be of assistance, mademoiselle?’

  The English girl was delighted. She seemed to relax. ‘Could you inform this stupid cow,’ she said, ‘that I am ‘ere ter visit me Cousin Haitch—Mr Cornelius. It is Miss Honoria Cornelius, who he’ll doubtless remembah as the little girl ‘e used ter dandle on ‘is knee. I ‘ave been stranded in ongfortunate circs—circumstances—and need ter see ‘im in private.’

  ‘You have not come to receive his professional ministrations, my lady?’

  ‘Do what?’ I remember her saying. This puzzled me. She added: ‘Come again?’ I gathered she had not understood me. ‘You have nothing wrong with your teeth?’

  ‘Why the ‘ell should I? Everyone a bloody pearl and sound as a bell. ‘Ow old d’yer fink I am?’

  I spoke directly to the bobbing receptionist in slow, clear Russian. ‘This lady is related to his excellency, the dentist. Her name is Mademoiselle Cornelius. She is, I believe, his cousin.’

  The receptionist was relieved. She smiled and escorted the English lady into another, even more luxurious room. With a ‘Ta very much, Ivan,’ to me, Mrs Cornelius vanished. I was to learn from her much later that the dentist was not in fact a relation at all. She had come across his name in Baedeker’s at a nearby bookshop and had decided to visit him. She had been travelling with a Persian aristocrat, a well-known playboy of those years, when they had had a difference of opinion in their hotel (the Central). He had left on an early steamer, having paid the bill only up to that morning. She was unable to speak a word of Russian but even then she was making the best of things. She had been very grateful to me, it appeared, because she had almost been at the end of her tether. This was how she recognised me when we came to meet again. She had given up hope of finding an English-speaker anywhere in Odessa and I was ‘a godsend’, even if, in her words, I ‘talked like a bleedin’ book’.

  After she had gone, and Wanda and I were seated, the English lady’s perfume (crushed rose-petals) was all that remained of her. I was called into the surgery. Wanda still accompanied me. She was curious, I think, to see the inside of a dentist’s workshop. A handsome middle-aged man, murmuring in what I supposed to be Dutch, peered into my mouth, clucked his tongue, put a mask over my face and made his receptionist turn the tap on a nearby cylinder. A strange smell replaced the scent of roses. I was gassed. A peculiar humming began in my ears—zhe-boo, zhe-boo—and black and white circles became a moving spiral. I felt sick and dreamed of Zoyea and Wanda and little Esmé, the warm, comforting body of my Katya. All were dressed in the salmon-pink costume of the English girl who was cousin to Heinrich—or was it Hans?—or Hendrik?—Cornelius.

  I remember leaving with an emptier jaw and a fuller, throbbing head. When I asked what had happened to Mademoiselle Cornelius Wanda giggled. ‘Her cousin seemed only too pleased to be of assistance.’ I was reassured.

  With regular supplies of cocaine from Shura and from other sources, I was able to continue with my studies and with my new, adventurous life. I developed a firm, regular friendship with Katya. Eventually, I fell in love with her almost as deeply as I had with Zoyea. The holiday seemed to be without end. Uncle Semya had assured me that I was welcome to stay until my place at the Polytechnic was ‘firmly arranged’. There was no certainty when this would be. I was awake sometimes twenty hours in the twenty-four. Sometimes I did not go to bed at all. My letters to my mother were regular and optimistic. Nor was my whole life given over to adventure. Uncle Semya and I regularly visited the theatre and Opera (usually just the two of us). He proved an astonishingly tolerant host.

  Aunt Genia was inclined to fret over me, feeling that, quite rightly, I was overdoing things. But at dinner Uncle Semya would laugh and say: ‘Wild oats must be sown, Genia.’ This in spite of his standing in the community (high-ranking officials would often take dinner with us and on these occasions it was usual for Wanda and myself to eat in the kitchen with the cook).

  Of course life with the pleasure-loving bohemians of the Odessa taverns was not without its problems. There were fights—or threatened fights—almost every day. In the main I was able to escape trouble, either by assuming a friendly or neutral stance (something which became second nature to me) or by talking myself clear. But I was not always able to avoid the revolutionaries my mother had warned me against.

  In the main any political talk would send me away at once, unless it was the simple irreverences of Odessa small-talk, but when my engineering experience and scientific skills became known I was courted by more than one socialist. There was a particular scoundrel who might have given me trouble: a morose and introverted Georgian ‘on leave’, as he put it, from Siberia. He wanted me to make him some bombs for an attack he planned on the Odessa-Tiflis mail train. I trembled with terror at the very idea of
being overheard, let alone involved. If my mother had known, it would have killed her. But I could not merely walk away from him. This sinister bandit with the unlikely name of ‘So-So’ had a low, persuasive voice and smouldering eyes staring from a heavily unshaven and pockmarked face. These aspects alone were enough to make me address him with at least superficial politeness. I said I would look into the problem of producing the bombs. I planned to complain next time I saw him that it had been impossible to obtain the materials. I thought it wise to return to the tavern when I had promised, but to my huge relief he was not there. I never saw him again. Perhaps he was arrested. Perhaps he was shot by the police. It was even possible that, like the man who had double-crossed Misha the Jap over some morphine supplies, he wound up being fished from the Quarantine Harbour. There was only a certain, limited sort of honour amongst the thieves of Moldovanka. Anyone who broke his trust was submitted to sudden, swift justice of a kind which, if the Tsar’s police had been prepared to dispense it in a similar fashion, would have at once put paid to any revolution, Bolshevik or otherwise.