A few days later, I received a note from Kolya. He was in town again and would like to meet for lunch. He suggested Laperousse at one o’clock. I left Esmé tucked up in our bed with some water and a note telling her where I would be. In my new suit I went to meet my friend. I will not say that I stepped lightly, however, for I was still nervous of meeting Brodmann on the street and, moreover, had no great desire to bump into Seryozha. It seemed my fortune might be about to turn - but everything could be destroyed if either of those individuals found out the truth.
Kolya was wearing black as usual. He stood up to greet me as I crossed the cool, comfortable upstairs room of the restaurant. His double-breasted jacket gave him the air of a well to do merchant banker and made him seem if anything paler. He apologised for not bringing his wife, ‘I thought it would be nice to chat alone.’
I was only too glad of the opportunity. There is a special love which exists between men, a love which the Greeks knew and described, which excludes women. It is noble and it is Spartan, far removed from those sordid meetings in the public lavatories and backstreet pubs of Hampstead Heath and Leicester Square. Kolya and I were almost part of the same being. I shall not deny I worshipped him. Equally, I am certain he loved me. We formed a unity. He was happy with his wife, he said. She was delightfully intelligent and very pretty, as I had doubtless noticed. Unfortunately, doting on him as she did, she wanted to pay for everything and this was not an ideal situation for a man who had always controlled his own fate. However, she had expressed serious interest in my Airship Company and, if she could convince her father and some of his friends to back it, Kolya wondered if he might be made Chairman. Would I object to this? Of course I welcomed the notion. ‘I can think of nothing better!’
In the gloom of a nearby hotel room we opened champagne to toast our coming together again. I could smell his body through his beautiful clothes. I had longed for him more than it was possible to admit, but till now my emotion had been suppressed. He said he, too, had missed me. There is nothing wrong. Christ says there is nothing wrong. It is spiritual, above all else. They accuse me of what their dirty minds invent. My life is my own. I am not their creature. How can these insinuating dwarfs understand my agony? They put a piece of metal in me. They move a magnet behind a card, trying to shift me in the direction they think I should go. But I resist them. I despise their pettiness, their unimaginative morality. It is not based on any true ethic at all. I am above those judges and magistrates. There was no purer love. No purer joy. I was helpless before it. Who could blame me? Their metal turns and twists in my womb, but I shall never conceive that demon-child, no matter what they say or do. Ich vil geyn mayn aveyres shiteln. Ich vil shiteln mayn zind in vasser. Ich vil gayn tashlikh makhen. What do they know with their accusations? Even more than his body, I loved his mind, giving myself up to both as I now give myself to God alone. I deny everything. I have done nothing wrong. I am my own master. My blood is pure. I did not let them make me a Mussulman. I was strong, accepting all blows. I did not challenge their lies, save through my actions. I kept silent and was true to myself. Let them believe what they want. They failed to keep me in their camps. They knew it was unjust. They called me vile names, hating me because they said I was perverted. But how could they know? The words were not there: they were dumb and I thrilled with the heat of my salvation. I conquered through the power of my brain, my God given gifts. Kolya knew what this meant. He never accused. He was Christ’s messenger; an angel. He was Mercury. He was silver intelligence, the essence of true Russian nobility, yet like me a victim. They took his power. We were beaten down like corn in the rain. But steppe-nourished corn is hardy; it grows back even before the ashes of the fires have dissipated. Kolya said the meeting was fated. We should both find ourselves again. The wings are beating; that white metal sings. All those cities have failed me, yet I cannot hate them.
Within a week the Company documents were being prepared. A dozen cultured faces with soft mouths and important eyes bent heads and dipped pens until I emerged christened, once more, as Professor Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, Chief Designer and a leading shareholder of the Transatlantic Aerial Navigation Company of Paris, Brussels and Lucerne: Chairman, Prince Nicholai Feodorovitch Petroff; President, M. Ferdinand de Grion. Anäis’s father had been immediately impressed by what I had shown him. France, he told me soberly, would benefit from the folly and the distress of the Bolshevik beast.
Esmé and I moved to wonderful rooms across from the Luxembourg Gardens. We had the clothes we desired and ate dinners in ancient halls, attending dances in tall civic buildings. My darling rose began at once to bloom. That doctor was a fool. She needed the very opposite of country air. Like me she was nourished by what the city offered. Deprived of it she began to fade. For her sake, however, I did not take her everywhere, but made sure she rested, or found some means of entertaining herself while I visited the clubs of France’s leading men of business. Sometimes I took my huge scrolls of linen paper to a little hotel in Neuilly where, undisturbed, Kolya and I discussed the details of our adventure. With a regular salary I was relieved of my previous anxieties, though Brodmann and Tsipliakov still occasionally haunted me. Now I had powerful friends they would be circumspect, those two, about bothering me. Esmé encouraged me to go out alone; she said she could see it did me good. She was content to remain in our apartment and read or sew. I could now purchase the best quality cocaine. Kolya had abstained from the drug, he said, since Petersburg, but was more than willing to resume an affair with what he called his ‘cold pure mistress of the Moon’. He admitted how bored he had been, how my company brought him back to himself. ‘Even before the ship is built, I can feel myself flying again!’ He was writing poetry, too, but, as he told me with a laugh, he still burned it almost before the ink was dry. ‘Poetry is too indiscreet, expressing inappropriate sentiments for a man of affairs.’ On land to the north of Paris owned by Anäis’s father a giant shed was going up. Mechanics and all necessary varieties of craftsmen were hired. And I became a celebrity.