Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet Read online

  I was also astonished at the way in which porters, cabbies and others were treated. Sharp, commanding voices carried through the cold air and bags were loaded into carriages, horses were whipped into rapid trots (vehicles moved at an incredible pace in Petersburg, as if everyone were racing everyone else). Trams and motor-cars, even, seemed better-bred than any I had seen before. They hardly made a sound. And when I gave the address of Green and Grunman, my uncle’s agents, to the cab-driver, I had to speak to him two or three times before he heard me. Partly this was because of the vast fur cap he wore, with his scarlet coat-collar folded around it, partly it was my soft ‘Southern’ accent which was unfamiliar to him. The whip snapped, the horse picked up her feet, and off we went, trotting past tall buildings which seemed to contain nothing but bright electric light and no people at all.

  I was much impressed by the width of the streets, the classic beauty of the buildings. Our capital had been called the ‘Venice of the North’ because of the rivers and canals intersecting the streets, the palaces and public buildings, hotels and barracks laid out with precision to provide the effect of maximum grandeur. Odessa could not bear comparison in size or scope and seemed small, comfortable and welcomingly provincial to me. I regretted the trouble with Shura and wished I had elected to study in Odessa after all. I felt like a yokel. If St Petersburg had this effect on everyone (save, presumably, indigenous aristocrats) it was no wonder she had become a hot-bed of revolution. Such cities create more than envy, they create self-consciousness. And many who feel self-consciously inferior will resort to aggressive politics. There was something brooding and haughty, something distant about the city. The sky above was too wide. I could understand, at last, how the characteristic literature of Russia came to be written and why writers of light-hearted stories turned into melancholies as soon as they arrived at the centre of our cultural life.

  The cab came to a halt outside a tall, grey building. A haughty commissionaire stepped forward to take my bags and to help me to the ground. I paid the cabby what he asked and added a small tip. The commissionaire wore an elaborate blue-and-gold uniform. I was used to a preponderance of uniforms, for almost everyone had one in Russia, but I had never seen quite so many as in St Petersburg. I told him to look after my luggage and I took an electric elevator to the third floor of the building to where the firm of Green and Grunman had their offices.

  I knocked on a glass door. Behind it moved several shadows. There was a pause. One shadow loomed. The door was unlocked. A tall, white-haired man stood bending over me. He was one of the thinnest people I have ever seen. His hair fell over his face and almost reached his drooping white moustache which in turn touched his chin-beard (known in those days as a ‘Dutch’) which then appeared to blend naturally with his collar and shirt. He spoke good Russian in a whispering lisp I assumed to be some kind of English accent. He asked if he could help me.

  I told him my uncle’s name. I understood that I was expected. He seemed relieved and he ushered me in. He took me through two offices where girl typewriters and clerks were hard at work at small, wooden desks, and knocked upon a polished oak door. ‘Mr Green?’ he said.

  ‘Enter,’ said Mr Green in English.

  As we came in, Mr Green moved away from his bookcase towards his large desk. This was inset with panels of green leather. He lowered himself into a matching padded chair, opened his plump mouth and said: ‘Dobrii dehn’ (Good afternoon) to me in Russian. I replied ‘Zdravstvyiteh,’ or ‘How do you do.’ He raised dark brows to the lisping, white-haired gentleman and said, ‘Does the boy speak any English?’

  ‘I speak a little,’ I replied.

  Mr Green smiled and rubbed at his jowls. ‘Good. And French? German?’

  ‘Some of both.’

  ‘And Yiddish?’

  ‘Of course not!’ One might wish to learn Hebrew, but not that ugly patois combining the worst features of all tongues. Moreover, there was no need for it in Petersburg where Jews, in the main, were banned.

  He laughed. ‘Surely a smattering?’

  ‘A few words of course. How can one live in Kiev and not come to know them?’

  ‘And in Odessa.’ ‘And in Odessa.’

  ‘Excellent.’ He appeared amused and distracted at the same time. He picked up a grey folder. ‘And we’re giving you the name of Dimitri Mitrofanovitch Kryscheff. A good Russian name.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘Is he a real person?’

  ‘Aren’t you real?’ Mr Green’s eyes held a wary kindness; as if I were an attractive animal likely at any moment to bite him.

  ‘His place at the Polytechnic.

  . . ‘ ‘He gained it easily. With his gold medal.’

  ‘I hope you don’t think me over-inquisitive, sir. I wonder if you know a little more. After all, I’m supposed to be from Kherson where my father is a priest. I have never been to Kherson. I know very little about formal religion, my mother being a God-fearing woman but not a great church-goer.’

  ‘An Orthodox priest. That was a stroke of luck. You couldn’t get any more respectable, eh?’

  ‘I appreciate the respectability of it, sir. The mystery, however, is hard to fathom. Won’t I be asked questions?’

  ‘Of course not. Dimitri Mitrofanovitch was educated privately, at home, by his father. He was a sickly child. Just before he was due to take his place at the Polytechnic last term, he fell ill. Influenza. The unhappy lad was already tubercular, do you see? The priest was a relatively poor man and at his wits’ end. Your uncle’s friends in Kherson were approached for a loan to send the boy to Switzerland. They did better than that. They paid for the boy to go to Switzerland, to an excellent sanitarium where he may be cured. He will continue to study, of course. In Lucerne under your name. You come to St Petersburg under his. Everyone is catered for and everyone gets a good chance in life.’

  ‘It seems very complicated,’ I said. ‘And very expensive. After all, I don’t think I’m worth— ‘

  ‘You are worth it to your uncle, it seems. You’ll be of great help to him later. You can speak all these languages. You have a grasp of science. You are good-looking, charming, personable. You have a bearing about you. Why you could be the Tsarevitch himself!’

  I was pleased.

  ‘But healthier,’ added Mr Green, and spread his hands. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Where shall Dimitri Mitrofanovitch be living?’ I asked.

  ‘We had thought close to the Polytechnic. But that is such a long way from the centre and it would be useful if we could get in touch with you sometimes, or you with us. So we’ve found you lodgings not far from Nyustadskaya. It’s very handy for the steam-tram, for the Finland Station and so on. The tram will take you to the Polytechnic. What’s the address, Parrot?’

  ‘Eleven, Lomanskaya Prospect,’ said the white-haired Parrot. It sounded excellent.

  ‘We’ll take you there immediately, I think.’ I had a vision of the fat Mr Green and the thin Mr Parrot escorting me through the streets, each carrying one of my bags. But ‘we’ meant a member of the firm. ‘Will you see to it, Parrot?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And the term begins in four days?’ said I.

  ‘Four days. Make the most of ‘em.’ ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Mr Parrot will show you where the tram leaves and will give you details of which professor to see. I gather there’s some sort of oral entrance exam. A formality. We’ve spoken to the professor. There will be no difficulties. What’s his name, Parrot?’

  ‘Doctor Matzneff, sir.’

  ‘He was very obliging?’

  ‘He was, sir. His son left this afternoon.’

  ‘Straightened out, now. You’ll find Doctor Matzneff helpful to you, my boy.’ Mr Green beamed and patted my head. I wondered at these cryptic references. My uncle’s influence must be considerable. He had pulled strings in every department.

  Rightfully I was up to gold-medal standard and had only been robbed of the medal by War and Herr Lustgarten�
�s departure. It was satisfying to know I had received my fair deserts. Uncle Semya was a great adjuster of rights. It was a relief that my professor would be favourably disposed to me. St Petersburg was no longer quite the threatening place it had seemed.

  Mr Green gave me an envelope containing ten roubles. I would collect my allowance monthly. I should make careful use of it. The fares to the Polytechnic were about twenty kopeks a day, there and back. There might be opportunities to ‘make the allowance up to more’ in the future. I thanked him, put the money in my pocket next to Sergei Andreyovitch’s snuff box, and shook hands. When I accompanied Mr Parrot, now clad in a maroon fur-trimmed great-coat and top hat, to the ground floor. Here my bags were recovered and a cab called for us by the commissionaire. It was snowing. The hood of the cab was raised. It was already dark, but this part of the city was brilliantly lit. Once again I noticed that almost everyone in the street, civilian or military, wore some kind of uniform. We crossed a long bridge over the wide Great Neva, a forbidding stretch office. To my surprise I saw in the distance a train apparently trundling over the surface of the river. Mr Parrot told me that it froze so hard it was possible to lay lines on the ice in the winter.

  We entered an area much more crowded and familiar to me. I suppose it was poorer. Here were ordinary people, gas-lamps, open-fronted shops, crowded apartment buildings, stalls selling food, clothing, crockery, magazines, the smells of cooking, the sounds of street-musicians, children, quarrelling and laughter. There were flights of darkened steps, alleys, half-starved dogs. I was more nervous of the district than I might once have been: however, the street in which we found ourselves was fairly quiet and it was comforting to arrive at it. St Petersburg was not going to be an easy city, I thought, in which to find my feet. There were far wider gulfs between the classes. Even in Kiev, where there were many snobs, where poor people could find themselves driven from parks or certain streets, it had not been so bad. I was going to need all my confidence and might require the extra courage residing in my stolen snuffbox.

  St Petersburg was to teach me much about the nature of wealth and poverty. Not only was it a city of extremes, it was a city of almost oriental decadence, of cruelty, of mindless authority. I was to realise why Tsar Nicholas was unpopular with so many middle-class people. The court was presided over by a crude, insane monk from Siberia who would come, just as in medieval times, to be murdered in cold blood by a group of aristocrats. They would poison him, shoot him and eventually push his body under the Neva’s ice to ensure he was dead. From Court to the meanest alley, the capital was rotten with superstition. Charm-sellers, occultists, mediums of every kind flourished. Their predictions filled columns in the most respectable newspapers. And all this in the twentieth century, when telephones and motor-cars and wireless sets and aeroplanes were in common use.

  The ferocity of the Bolsheviks was the ferocity of a race of slaves. They had none of the instincts of civilised Europeans. They were savages into whose hands were placed terrible means of destruction and who were given the most sophisticated means of communication. Yet the Tsar himself and all his Court were probably scarcely more civilised or they would at least have had some intimation of their own fate. I blame the Tsar’s advisers, of course. Most of these were foreigners.

  SIX

  THE UNIFORM I would wear to the Institute was not as magnificent as some: just a simple student uniform of dark-grey serge with silver buttons, a cap with the badge of the Polytechnic. There was much to be said for the practise. It would mean that my limited store of clothes would last much longer and it would not become evident that I was relatively poor. Most of the boys studying at the Institute were of limited means. The rich men’s sons studied at various Military Academies where science and engineering were taught, or at the Science Academy itself. Their uniforms were correspondingly more splendid, with gold embossed buttons and braid. Even so we had uniforms for summer and winter, great-coats, regulation issue gloves, boots, caps and so on. All these were supplied on the day after my arrival by the specialist tailor to whom Messrs Green and Brunman sent me. Mr Parrot was again my escort on a dark snowy day to the backstreets of the Moskovskaya quarter where the tailor had his huge establishment.

  The room in which I would board was in the house of a typical Russian lady of middle years. She was good-humoured, a little stupid, a voluble speaker on all topics of scandal, an ardent anti-radical (she did not even approve of the Tsar’s concessions to the formation of a democratic Duma and praised the recent curtailment of its powers): she could see no point whatsoever in the study of engineering. She hated the motorcar, the tram, the train, the telephone, and she was not altogether convinced that steamboats were above suspicion. She thought, in common with many who lived close to the Neva, that their smoke injured the lungs, in spite of the fact that she only coughed during the winter, when it was impossible for the ships to sail. The nearby Finland Station, the steam-tram terminus, and various factories, also gave her cause for alarm. Within an hour or two of my arrival she had asked me what I was going to do about it. She was also able to blame me for the War. I had the impression that she would have objected to the wheel if it had just been invented and that she might also have had a great deal to say against the discovery of fire. For all this, she was a woman I grew to like immediately.

  Her house was one of those featureless terraced Petersburg houses, set a little back from the street, with a narrow courtyard and all the rooms of regulation size. My room was on the third floor. It was much bigger than my room in Odessa. It was equipped with its own little stove and washing facilities, a large comfortable bed which could be set against the wall and disguised as a sofa during the day, a desk, a curtained-off ‘dressing’ alcove and so on. There was a lavatory one floor down. I shared the house with the lady, her two daughters, a maid and four other guests, all minor bureaucrats. We ate at a communal table downstairs. The food, I was to find, was heavy and indigestible by Ukrainian standards, but it was wholesome enough. The woman prided herself on providing good service to her customers. As the War went on and shortages became more evident we were given the choice of paying a little more in rent and her keeping up the standard of food, or paying the same rent but taking poorer food. Having experienced the horseflesh stews in the restaurants students used, I elected to eat whenever possible at Madame Zinovieff’s (she was no relation to the notorious Bolshevik).

  Apart from the fact that she wore a wig and thick rouge to hide the scars of some disease, there was nothing very remarkable about the widow. Neither were her daughters anything out of the ordinary. Olga and Vera attended a nearby school and were interested in Russian literature, a subject which has never meant very much to me. They were full of romantic talk of Tolstoi, Dostoieffski, Bahshkatseva and various poets of whom Akhmatova (a woman) is the only one I recall. They read novel after novel, book of verse on book of verse, and they spoke of Lermontov’s and Pushkin’s characters as if they were real people. I found these girls often irritating and naïve. They were also very plain. I was to learn later they thought me haughty and proud, like some character in a then popular novel, and they had been ‘a little in love’ with me. Russian girls are always a little in love with someone. But predominantly their abiding love is for themselves. I admit that when a Russian girl falls heavily, she falls all the way. This, however, is much rarer in real life than it is in fiction where passionate creatures are forever destroying themselves mentally and physically for the gratification of some inebriated cavalry officer or criminal-poet. I had never known a Russian girl to consider destroying herself, say, for a clerk in the Civil Service or a supervisor in an engineering works. One has to have no useful social function and preferably no money to win the hearts of such ladies. It is odd, therefore, that when they marry they tend to place much importance on the earning power of their dear one.

  I was pleased when Olga elected the next morning, a Saturday, to show me something of the city. Thus far my impressions had been very vague. I had
seen a few wide thoroughfares, a few alleys, the canals and quays, some municipal buildings, a girder bridge or two, some factory chimneys. I was more than pleased to take a tram with her over the Alexandrovski Bridge. There was no snow falling. The sky had cleared to a pale blue. This colour was reflected in the ice below.

  Very shortly we were in what she called the better part of town, on the Nevski Prospect, Petersburg’s main thoroughfare. The traffic moved as rapidly as modern cars and was far more alarming. We descended at a tram-stop half-way up the Nevski. Olga, her hands in her muff, told me we should be crossing to look in the windows of a great shopping arcade opposite. Beneath the shadows of its columns were windows full of glittering goods. Something else attracted me, a mechanical toy being demonstrated, and so I set off across the Nevski and was almost knocked down by speeding troikas and motor-cars. There was a whistle from behind me but I could not stop. In a panic I moved through the traffic and jumped to the far kerb, panting. The glove of a ‘blue archangel’ (a Petersburg gendarme) fell upon my shoulder. A white truncheon tapped my arm. This huge bearded old man shook his head in admonition. ‘There are less public ways of committing suicide.’ Olga came up. She explained to him I had only just arrived in the city. He accepted her explanation. The gendarme continued on his way while I moved towards the arcade and stood beneath its canopy, looking at the displayed brass steam-locomotives. Olga shook her head and said I was lucky the archangel had been in a good mood.