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 marshall 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.