All this was in the future. We still had another year of freedom. A year in which food rationing became more and more stringent, in which the life of the capital began slowly to prefigure the life all would lead under the Reds. At least by paying a little more money from my allowance I was saved the sickly taste of horse-meat. Madame Zinovieff continued to serve the best she could and this was far better than most. She was helped, as so many others were helped, by Green and Grunman. They had once employed her husband. He had been killed on an errand for them in Denmark. My allowance was increased as inflation grew steadily worse. Dr Matzneff continued to give me extra tuition. With the Zinovieff girls working and spending their spare time with their fiancés, I had precious little company. Because of my studying, I had lost the self-confidence necessary to write to Marya Varvorovna, although she filled my fantasies. Her address was still safely kept, as was that of Sergei Andreyovitch. Sometimes, when my eyes grew tired from reading by the light of oil-lamps (both gas and electricity were often rationed and candles were quite hard to find) I would consider getting in touch with them, or even of asking Olga if she could introduce me to a nice girl. But I was too tired. If I stopped reading, I fell immediately asleep. I took the precaution of getting into bed as soon as I had had my supper, so that when I did go to sleep in the middle of a book, at least I did not wake up in the morning wearing my outdoor clothes.
The dreary winter of Petrograd was followed by a dreary spring in which there were further minor demonstrations, further scandal concerning Rasputin and the Court, further large gatherings of Cossacks and police in the streets. There were further visits of ‘brown-coats’ to our school, further news of defeats of our forces. I became incensed by the ludicrous public posturings of the so-called ‘Futurist artists’ who celebrated the Age of the Machine. They could not tell one end of a bicycle from another, and would have been horrified if they had had to spend half-an-hour at work in the grease, fumes and soot of an ordinary factory. The snow turned to dirty slush; the miserable buds poked cautiously forth, the tramlines were taken up from the Neva’s ice, the ‘white nights’ gave way to nights with a peculiar, greenish tinge to them, and the Prospects, so frequently in darkness due to power-cuts, were made scarcely more cheerful by pinch-faced girl thieves of ten years old or less selling withered bunches of violets for extortionate prices and, if no policemen were in hearing, offering their own dirty little private parts for a few kopeks more.
In my tired and somewhat depressed condition, I came to yearn for Odessa, for Katya or even Wanda (who had written once, claiming without proof that I was the father of her ‘lovely, healthy boy’), for the jolly company of Shura, who might now be unemployed because of what I had told our uncle. It is no wonder at all that the poets of Ukraine cease producing their light-hearted, happy, optimistic work the moment they arrive in the capital. Immediately, they begin telling gloomy tales of poverty and death and unjust fate in imitation of the neurotic Dostoieffski and his kind. I began to feel homesick for Kiev, but I was determined to return home with all the proper credentials. I would practise as a fully-qualified engineer with a good firm who would gradually learn my worth and give me a laboratory of my own. I thought of working for the State Aircraft Company, where I could easily have got a job at once, save that I did not possess the ‘official’ scraps of paper proving my abilities.
Another Easter. Exchanges of eggs. ‘Christ is Risen!’ The sonorous chanting in the church, the procession, the prayers for our Tsar; for Russia in her struggle against Chaos and Barbarism. We were attacked from every side by Turk and Hun as we had been attacked for centuries. It seemed to me, as I kneeled to pray between the Zinovieff sisters, that the great area of green which was the Russian Empire, one-sixth of the entire globe, could be wiped out overnight, as that Carthaginian Empire had been destroyed. I rose to my feet wondering if it was my duty to join the army, to fight against our enemies, to ensure the future of the Slav people. The mood passed. I was still too young to be an ordinary soldier. This was one of my few experiences of hysterical patriotism. My understanding of the enduring Slav soul was to come many years later. In exile in England I was in a position to compare our virtues with the proud vices of the Anglo-Saxon, the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples. These peoples are materialists through and through, corrupting Science, imbuing it with an orthodoxy which allows no alternative interpretations.
Any idea I had of serving my country as cannon-fodder rather than as a cannon-maker disappeared when I returned to the Institute after Easter to find a third of the students vanished and three professors summarily dismissed. The Okhrana had visited the principal. They had had a list of ‘undesirables’ likely to damage the War Effort, who could be potential spies for the enemy. The outspoken Reds had all gone and for this, of course, I was grateful, but it was when I went into Dr Matzneff’s class I realised my own bad luck. Dr Matzneff had gone. In his place was his rival, the black-bearded, bulky, dark-uniformed Professor Merkuloff, who told me to take a seat at the back of the room and pay attention, for I would be receiving no favouritism from him. My ‘friend Matzneff’ was out of a job and lucky not to be in prison. I was shocked by the open aggression shown by Merkuloff. ‘You will have to study very hard if you want any sort of pass at the end of this year, Kryscheff,’ he added. He knew very well that I was the best student in the whole Institute, that I could discourse on virtually every subject taught there, and many more besides. But now I was faced with his blatant opposition to my advancement. Professor Merkuloff hated Dr Matzneff and hated anyone whom Dr Matzneff seemed to like.
Leaving school that evening, feeling utterly downcast, beginning to wonder if I had been foolish in all my ambitions, I considered going to see Dr Matzneff at his gloomy flat. I knew this would be stupid. The ‘brown-coats’ would be on the look-out for any student who seemed to be hob-nobbing with a suspected traitor. It would mean the end of my own schooling.
I returned to my lodgings where Madame Zinovieff handed me a letter. It had arrived, she said, shortly after I had left. The post, along with all other services, was in a state of partial breakdown due to the War.
The letter was from Dr Matzneff. He told me he had been dismissed because in his youth he had shown sympathies with the ideas of Bakunin and Kropotkin, the anarchist-intellectuals. His son, as I knew, was in exile in Switzerland, still a violent and outspoken Social Revolutionary. It was only by a miracle he had escaped imprisonment or exile to Siberia.
Dr Matzneff advised me not to contact him unless I was desperate. If I needed to borrow books I should try to borrow them through an intermediary. Then suspicion would not fall upon me. He knew I had no interest in politics. He would be with me in spirit. I should not be down-hearted. If I worked hard there was no reason I should not still be the star pupil at the Polytechnic, triumphing over all difficulties.