‘Ere’s lookin’ at yer, Ivan!’
It was Mademoiselle Cornelius to be sure. I began to rise, to join her. She shook her head and pointed at an empty table. It was close to the stage where the negro violinist squeezed discords from his instrument which would have horrified the maker. She joined me there. She still smelled of roses. She put a friendly hand on my arm with none of the ambiguity I had come to expect from Russian women. ‘Yore ther lad from ‘Dessa, ain’t yer?’ She spoke in her usual English. I bowed and said that I was. She commented that it was ‘a turn up an’ no mistake’. It was an even smaller world than they said it was. She was doing nicely in Peter and had learned ‘Russki’ enough to get by. When she gave me an example, it was perhaps the worst example of grammar and the most romantic accent I had ever experienced. I could see why she had so many admirers. I asked her how she had come to the capital and what she was doing with Lunarcharsky. Did she not know they were all wanted by the police?
She said they were a more honest bunch of crooks than some she had met. She had a feeling that they ‘knew what was going on’. This was not true, she added disapprovingly, of the rest of the idiots in this bloody country. She had left Odessa with one of Dr Cornelius’s patients, an aristocratic liberal who had been holidaying there. When their affair ended she had fallen in with the radicals, whom she found amusing and, as she put it, ‘good sports’. She also had an eye, I believe, to the future, but her taste in men, together with her sense of humour, would often bewilder me. I am the first to admit, however, that I have never understood many jokes and that her taste was to serve both of us well in the years which followed.
She told me that I was looking ‘peaky’ and if there was anything I needed in the way of grub I should ask her. She had a few contacts. I said I was eating better than most. I was studying hard for my examinations. She wished me luck. She said that she regretted she had not stayed at school, but there had not been much point ‘in the Dale’. She referred, I learned, to Notting Dale, her birthplace. She had later moved to Whitechapel where she had ‘met a lot of Russians’. These Russians were actually Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms. When Mrs Cornelius suggested we go ‘somewhere quieter’ so that I could tell her how I was getting on, I was reluctant to accompany her. I had been picked up by too many women during that period. I had become sated and wary, even of her. A whore asked only which part of her anatomy would be required; whether one wished to stay the whole night for an extra rouble or two. Moreover, I was not always charged by the whores. For a few days I lived completely free at a whorehouse near one of the main canals. I could have stayed there longer if I had not needed to return to school.
I said I needed an early night. She laughed. ‘Don’t we all? I’ll see yer abart, Ivan.’ She patted my arm and got up to return to her party. I immediately regretted not taking her up on her offer. I do not believe, now, that it was sexual. She had wanted exactly what she had said she wanted, a quiet chat.
My friends congratulated me on my ‘conquest’ and one of the well-bred beauties leaned over and asked me loudly what ‘the English whore is like in bed’. Offended, I left The Harlequinade’s Retreat.
The autumn term was remarkable only because we were allowed to wear hats, scarves and greatcoats in classes. There was no fuel allocation for heating the Polytechnic. The lectures were if anything duller than ever. As the world grew colder, life took on an entropic aspect. Social energy was running down. Within the first week of my return to the Institute the steam-trams were replaced by horse-trams. These were driven by haggard, pallid figures swathed in dark felt and serge from whose heads thin white fumes occasionally escaped. The men had been brought from retirement and were like the coachmen of the dead. Their horses, lean, sickly beasts, would eventually fill the stomachs, perhaps, of orphans - the first bezhprizhorni - who now swarmed about the railway stations and filled the parks. Displays of pomp and glory continued. We were advised to suffer all our discomforts because the War was almost won. More and more wounded men appeared on the streets. The theatres thrived, but many restaurants could not find enough food to make it worthwhile remaining open. Even Donan on the Moika Canal, that favourite of the jeunesse dorée and the Apollon group (who shared the building) had to close at lunch-time and became more of a bar than a restaurant. The sturgeon in mushroom sauce, the white partridges with klufka jam and bilberries, the other delicious Donan specialities, gave way to horse-meat in sauces which could not disguise the unpalatable odour of what Kolya called ‘long cow’. We would joke: recommending the ‘stuffed sparrow’ or the ‘Chat Meunier’, not quite realising what was to come. Together with the orphans and the wounded in the streets came a plague of rats. Newspapers reported the ‘scandal’ and suggested they originated from foreign ships, but the wild dogs and cats, released by owners no longer able to feed them, were unquestionably our own. In not much more than a year the same people who had let them go would be hunting them again for the pot. It would be like the days of the Paris Commune.
There was a steady decrease in our food supplies and an increase in illicit alcohol. Everyone lacked sleep. There was horrible tension in the air, a morbid sense of doom, longer bread-queues, longer rows of wounded waiting for transport or a hospital bed, larger crowds of beggars, hucksters and prostitutes on the quays and boulevards. So many aristocrats had left for Petrograd’s old rival, Moscow. Newspapers increasingly resorted to references to the Patriotic War against Napoleon as if preparing us for guerilla action with invaders on our own soil. Many people felt we were already defeated. The air of melancholia spread even to The Scarlet Tango. The negro band played ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ and ‘Nobody Knows The Trouble I See’, while thin young ladies with painted cheeks recounted gloomier jingles concerning death and the cooling of love.
I took to writing longer and more optimistic letters to my mother, to Esmé, to Captain Brown: life in the capital was full of good cheer; the Tsar and his family appeared in public every day; the Germans were bound to retreat soon; this winter would see the end of them. Because of difficulties with transport it was unlikely I would return at Christmas. They should not be surprised, though, if I did especially well at the Polytechnic. I wrote in cafés and restaurants. I wrote at school. I posted the letters sometimes twice a day. I was feeling homesick for the ordinary discomforts of Kiev. Petrograd’s filthy, uneven pavements, piles of refuse, menacing beggars, were all the worse for being unfamiliar. I received replies which were as optimistic. My mother said her health had improved. With God’s help and a mild winter she was looking forward to returning to the laundry. Esmé said she had applied to train as a nurse. She would soon leave the grocery. Captain Brown’s vaguely Anglified, sprawling letters, in which Russian characters took on the appearance of modified English ones, insisted that ‘Johnny Turk’ was on the run. He was only good at ‘defensive tactics’. ‘Fritz’ was useless without his officers and there were precious few of those left alive. British armour would soon shift the Hun from his ratholes. This would improve the morale of the ‘Frogs’, who had no real stomach for War, as they constantly demonstrated. He supplied maps in which military positions were described. He demonstrated how we would ‘smash through’ the German positions on a narrow front, with the Rumanians closing on them in a pincer movement. None of these battles ever came to be fought. Indeed the trench war was interminably boring. Larger numbers of men were killed and wounded. It seemed summer would never come again. Fimbulwinter and Ragnarok were actually with us.