Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet Page 6

  These city riffraff, many of whom were of foreign origin, were probably jealous of my ancient Cossack birthright. My atheist father with his ridiculous progressive ideas had not only succeeded in dragging my mother into impoverished, shameful widowhood, he had also taken personal liberties with my little body for, my mother explained, hygienic reasons. Thus I was of entirely Gentile blood but branded with the mark of the Jew. I did not know then how close, in later years, my father’s action would bring me to death. He might as well have tried to cut my throat at birth. It is not uncommon these days to have the operation, but in Ukraine in the 1900s it was as good as a conversion to Judaism. Jews profess to be mystified by Ukrainian resentments. There is little mystery. Jews, renting lands from absentee Polish landlords, drained our farmers and serfs in previous centuries. When the Cossacks drove back the Poles they also took revenge on their usurer-servants. And the Jews defended the Poles with muskets and swords. I make no excuses for cruel savagery. But the Jew is not quite the blameless fellow he these days makes himself out to be. If I were Jewish I would admit the causes of Ukrainian enmity. It might have a placatory effect. But the Jews are too proud for that.

  What a great deal my mother might have blamed my father for. And how little she did blame him. She spoke of him only with wistful respect (save in the matter of his atheism) and frequently told me to honour his name. This is something I was never able to do, even for her sake. As I have shown, he set me on the road of life with so many disadvantages I wonder that I am here today. All that I inherited was his mind, which has saved me more than once from death or torture; but my imagination and sensitivity could have come only from my mother, as she said. His rebellion against his great Cossack heritage, his Russian religion and culture, brought him fear and annihilation. To those he left it brought only sorrow. And what did his revolution achieve when it was successful? More death; more humiliation. As we used to say: ‘Better a Jew in Tsarist Minsk than a Gentile in Soviet Moscow.’ Is that progress?

  Possibly I inherited one other trait from my father: that same faith in the future which was in him a perversion of reality, a substitute for religion, was in me a belief in purely scientific progress. Verne and Wells, and also the many articles and stories in Pearson’s, were to fire me with a sense of wonder at the marvels of science and technology. Even before reading these authors I had determined to become an engineer. In this I was motivated by a noble love of the discipline itself. I did not corrupt it with mock humanitarian rationalisations, like some nervous monk of the Middle Ages excusing his interest in alchemy by saying it was ‘God’s work’. I maintained a loathing for all political pieties. I saw myself as one of those who would give a whole Slavic character to science and put it at the service of the Slavic soul. By introducing extraneous themes into their tales, Verne, the anarchist, and Wells, the socialist, did themselves and their readers great harm, warping their visions to fit completely unscientific themes, just as Rasputin warped religion to make it speak for every sexual perversion. We lived in an age when a pure heart and a truthful tongue were great liabilities. Even Jack London, who wrote so feelingly of nature and the nobility of the untamed North, came to betray his gift with tales of pessimism and polemics: because it was demanded of him that he did so, otherwise nobody would have taken him seriously. He would have lost prestige amongst those so-called liberals who have brought our world to its present sorry state. Everyone cares for the good opinion of his neighbours, but sometimes the price we pay for that opinion is far too high.

  Ironically, I was fired in my ambition to become an engineer before I was well-versed enough in English to read the stories in Pearson’s. Esmé and I had been walking somewhere in the centre of Kiev, perhaps in Kreshchatik itself, when we had come upon a large general store on the corner of a street near a theatre. I remember, too, one of those old kiosks with the domed roof copied from the French, and a public urinal, also on French lines. Most engineers I knew later had been infected by their first ride on a train, or their first contact with an automobile or a monoplane. With me it was the sight of a simple English bicycle. Typical of many Kievan stores of the time, the windows were not exactly used for display, but one could look through into the interior and see the bicycle on its special stand. Esmé had seemed to share my enthusiasm for the machine (though perhaps she had merely wished to please me). She had considered how we might buy it or how the owner of the store might be induced to give it to us for some great service we did him. It was a bright spring morning. The chestnut trees had their first buds. Behind us passed horse-cabs and handcarts, wagons and cars, to and fro on the wide, cobbled street. It was not merely a dawning year. It was a dawning era. The shop also sold gramophones, pianolas, mechanical organs, guitars and balalaikas, but the bicycle was the aristocrat of the place. A handsome black beast (a Raleigh ‘Royal Albert’ Gent’s Roadster, now long-since extinct), it was bright with red and gold transfers and polished steel accessories. It was completely beyond my pocket. It was more expensive, even, than the imported German and French bicycles available. I do not remember having any expectation that it might be mine. I did not even think of entering the shop to pretend to be a purchaser, to inspect or touch the machine, for I had no particular desire to ride one. Esmé had tried to get me to go and then had offered to go for me, but I had refused. I was not greatly impressed by the machine’s function so much as what it stood for. It represented all the great inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It stood for the airship and the aeroplane; the electric carriage, the steam-turbine, the motor-bus, the tram, the telephone, wireless radio-transmission; it was steel bridges and skyscrapers and mechanical harvesters. It was abstract mathematics become practicality. I studied its brakes, its chain, its spokes, its nuts and its tubular steel struts. I was impressed there and then by the divine simplicity of the mechanical system which, by producing pressure on the pedals turned the chain-wheel which then turned the back wheel, could, with the minimum of effort, help Man travel as fast and as far as any living beast. Beyond this conception—revelation if you like—I had no special interest. Certainly almost all the scientific inventions of those times had proved themselves of benefit to mankind, but for me their beauty rested in the simple fact of their existence. They functioned. They were solved problems. Krupp cannon and Nobel dynamite were to arouse in me the same aesthetic feelings as hydraulic dams or Mercedes ambulances. I was to be inspired by the machinery, not its social uses. Pistons and cylinders, circuits and gauges would satisfy me so long as they performed their appropriate task: driving a ship, taking an aeroplane aloft, sending a message. It would have seemed improper to me even then to indulge in metaphysical or sociological speculation as to their uses. When, later, the War came and we heard about the British tanks, you did not find me tut-tutting. I had anticipated them already. They had become a vision turned into the reality of plate steel, rubber and the internal combustion engine. I was similarly impressed by Sikorski bombers, Big Bertha and the great Zeppelins which attacked Paris and London, and I had already begun to formulate ideas of my own which, had I been born a year or two earlier, might have changed the course of the War, altering the whole development of world history. But I must try not to sound too grandiose. After all, I am a victim of history, not one of her conquerors, and to make it seem otherwise would be to show myself as a silly old man. I do not intend to confirm the view of those louts who already see me as no more than a ludicrous Russian ancient running a second-hand clothes shop in the Portobello Road.

  Well, it suits me to let people think what they like. They will be all the more astonished when they read this and see what I achieved. This is my private glee: to know how the peasants and loafers, the scum of three continents, see me, but to be aware of what I really am. There are a few who respect me and to these I tell my secrets. But I do not want fame now. And honour I shall have in plenty when I am dead. I have had enough of politicians to last several lifetimes. My heart could probably not stand any publicity I m
ight now achieve. Admittedly, a small pension, an OBE or perhaps a knighthood, would help me in my old age, since I am now entirely without regular companionship. Mrs Cornelius was the only one to offer me that. It was to be near her that I moved into this area. I could have gone to Earl’s Court. I could have had a job with the government. But I will not talk about Mrs Cornelius for the moment. It will be best to come to her when you know the kind of person who is writing about that remarkable personality who is justly famous, as are her talented children. Here I will say only one thing: she never betrayed me.

  I returned again and again to the shop with its solitary English bicycle, until inevitably it was sold. I saw it once, being ridden over the bridge near the Zoological Gardens, and that was that. But I did not care. The symbol remained. Many years later I read the whole of H.G. Wells’s Wheels of Chance, but was disappointed. It contained the seeds of his later literary decline. It was altogether too flippant and held none of the visionary wonderment I had found in The War of the Worlds, which I read in Pearson’s. His Sea Lady, also published in Pearson’s, was equally worthless. The desire to be fashionably amusing can infect the best of us. How is it that a writer can be so full of optimism and faith in one book and so foolish and cynical in another? My studies of Freud—who, as I was to discover, was a bad-tempered, misanthropic Viennese Jew willing to snub anyone he considered his social inferior—have yet to supply me with an answer to this mystery. Not that I have respect for the so-called psychologists, especially those of that same sordid Viennese school. You can take it from me that most of them were on the edge of absolute madness for the best part of their lives. At my single meeting with H.G. Wells I was able to ask why he had wasted so much time on his non-scientific novels and he answered that he had once thought he could ‘achieve the same sort of thing through comedy’. He baffled me by this. I must assume he was making fun of me or that he was drunk or experiencing, as so many artists do, a form of temporary dementia. It is just possible that he could have misheard me for though my English is excellent, as this narrative testifies, I had at first some difficulty in making myself properly understood. I learned colloquial English almost entirely from Mrs Cornelius. My attempts to apply it so as to put others at ease were not always successful. During my first year as a permanent English resident it was not unusual for me to be left in the basket quite innocently by my friend. I could actually communicate better (as I had done in the twenties) by using Pearson’s English, which was at least readily interpreted by all. My affectionate and admiring ‘How are you, you old bugger?’ to Mr (later Lord) Winston Churchill, at a function for celebrated Polish émigrés, was not as well-received as I had expected and I was never able to thank him, thereafter, for the hearty support he had given to the cause of Russia’s rightful rulers.

  I know today that the English share something with the Japanese, who do not like to hear their language spoken too well by foreigners. In Japan, I am told, people who speak perfect Japanese must often pretend to speak it badly in order to be accepted. In common with all Orientals, our Nipponese friends have an elaborate sense of protocol not easily communicated to foreigners. To a lesser extent this is true, in my experience, in all countries. I am by nature the most diplomatic of men, but it has sometimes been my fate to have my motives misinterpreted entirely because I have shown myself unsuitably fluent in a language.

  My sense of tact comes naturally to me. I have had it since I was a child. This virtue was encouraged by my mother in her permanent anxiety over the stigma attached to my father’s activities. More than once, when there was some kind of trouble in Kiev, she would be visited by the police. In the main these men were kindly, cheerful officers, merely doing their duty. Even when investigating some major crime, they did not have the pinch-faced fanaticism of Lenin’s ‘leather-coat’ Chekists. Indeed, they were true representatives of the Tsar; kindly, avuncular, a little distant in some ways. They believed that our young men were being led astray by romantic notions primarily of French, German and American origin. I recall hearing that when the Tsar met Kerenski, after the first Revolution, he remarked warmly that ‘He is a man who loves Russia, and I wish I could have known him earlier, for he could have been useful to me.’ Such generosity (more than I might have felt in the circumstances) was typical of the man and typical of the system which received criticism from so many different quarters. When it did take firm action it took it thoroughly and without malice. For every Cossack charge there were a thousand incidents preceding it. Young men of good family were rarely shot for misdemeanours but sent into exile, often to stay with relatives, until their hot blood cooled a little. Only the most persistent or vicious of working-class revolutionaries received long prison sentences or capital punishment. This my mother understood, as she understood that the police had their duty to do. When they called they were always cheerfully received and invited to eat a little cake and take tea from our samovar. I remember the bulky blue and gold great-coats steaming by the stove. My impression of these men was not at all frightening. I admired their splendid uniforms, their well-kept beards and moustaches. I remember delighting at least one set of these visitors when I informed them, without irony, that if I were not destined to become a great engineer I would wish to become a policeman or a soldier in the service of the Tsar.

  As it happened, both my desires were to be granted in a modified way in the future, though even here I was dogged by bad luck and misunderstanding. My mother was extremely proud of my attitude and she was complimented by the officers. One of them, who had presumably known him, remarked that I was considerably more sensible than my father. My mother had smiled, but I could easily tell she was off ended by their denigration of my father’s memory. She could accept no criticism of him, even when that criticism reflected well on herself and her only son. The policemen left in good spirits (I think they had had some vodka with their tea) and I remember how my mother drew a deep breath and looked at me oddly before telling me to resume my supper, which had been interrupted by the visit. She leaned against the shelf over the stove, where I normally slept in winter. She was gasping, almost as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown over her. Being the woman she was, she soon recovered, but she was inattentive for the rest of the evening. It emerged later that my father had not been the only Red in the family. Mother’s brother had been another. He had never, I gathered, been brought to justice. There was a rumour he was in Geneva. Mother received no letters from him.

  No paper or pamphlet even remotely radical was allowed in the house. The mildest nationalist periodicals were banned. She was so careful she would inspect the wrappings of meat or fish for seditious propaganda. She had been known to unravel a parcel in order to throwaway a sheet from The Thought of Kiev rather than take it home. She suffered dreadfully from her nerves and for this, too, I blame her husband.

  She had nightmares, the woman I must call Yelisaveta Filipovna (a name I have borrowed from one of the neighbours who showed kindness to us; but her real name she shared with a prominent princess). Frequently I was awakened in the middle of the night, hearing her mumbling feverishly on her couch. I would peer over the edge of my shelf and see her rise like a corpse at the Last Judgement. Then she would scream: a long, piteous sound. And she would sometimes cry out: ‘Forgive me!’ Then she would pray in her sleep, or wring her hands and weep silent tears, her unbound black hair standing around her pale head like a demon’s halo. I know that I should have shown more sympathy, but I was always terrified. It seemed she felt guilty (perhaps because she was not at her father’s bedside when he died), but whether that guilt had any real foundation I do not know. She would return to sleep often without realising what had happened, but sometimes I would wake her if she seemed in danger. In time I became used to these nightmares and, as I studied harder, could often sleep through them. An ability to sleep through the wildest disturbances has been both an advantage and a disadvantage to me. My mother’s nightmares came more frequently in the autumn and winter. It was beca
use of them that I ceased to invite Esmé to stay with us when her father was sometimes taken to the hospital; my mother refused to let me go to ‘the revolutionary’s house’, but Captain Brown would look after Esmé when he could. Captain Brown began to drink more frequently and it was occasionally my mother’s sad duty to ask him to leave our apartment because of his inebriation. He never, however, made any improper advances.

  Mother had further cause for concern from the Odessa branch of the family. Many of the more distant relatives were in trouble with the law over purely petty matters. This was the ‘black-sheep’ side. With the exception of my Great-Uncle Semyon, they were all cousins or second cousins of my mother’s. Sometimes they would come to Kiev and very rarely one of them would stay overnight at our flat, much to my mother’s dismay. We would always receive some luxury by way of payment for our hospitality: scented soap, or canned food of foreign origin, or a bottle of French wine. Mother would sell the stuff whenever possible, even give it away rather than keep it in the house. I think the young men from Odessa were smugglers. They were certainly well-to-do compared to their poor Kiev relatives. Uncle Semya was a successful shipping agent, far more respectable and wealthy than the shady ‘spivs’ who made such cynical use of their blood-ties, but he claimed to be unable to control them. It was to Uncle Semya that I think my mother chiefly appealed for help with Herr Lustgarten’s fees.