The Vanishing Futurist Read online

  ‘Too much jam is bad for them,’ I told her in my broken Russian.

  ‘Ah, nothing can harm the innocent!’ came the airy reply, translated for me by Liza in a butter-wouldn’t-melt voice.

  They had had a succession of governesses, and neither their father nor anyone else would say no to them; they were universally pitied, by servants and family alike.

  ‘We’re poor, neglected children,’ Dima would say with a serene look.

  ‘Yes, tragic children,’ Liza chimed in. ‘Growing up without a mother’s love!’

  During my first week I devised a routine: lessons in the morning, a walk in the afternoon and an evening period for reading and learning poetry. The lessons passed off adequately, when I could persuade them to sit down and concentrate, but the real success was the afternoon walk, without which I suspect I would have soon gone the way of their previous governesses. My governess acquaintances at the Anglican church in Moscow, St Andrew’s, where I spent my Sundays, were disapproving of the idea.

  ‘I do not advise it, Miss Freely,’ Miss Clegg warned me. ‘Besides the dirt, it is quite dangerous, you know. The Russian people are an unpredictable lot. Take the children out for a drive, by all means, and a walk in the park, but on foot – no. You’re not in Truro now!’

  Dirty the streets often were, particularly in spring and autumn, but I had always loved walking, and saw no reason to stop in Moscow. Most Russian children, it seemed to me, were brought up in an absurdly cosseted atmosphere, ignorant of the world outside their immediate household. Talking to the servants was disapproved of, even in liberal households such as the Kobelevs’, and even when they had little playmates among the servants’ children, they were allowed to lord it over them in an unattractive way. As long as I was their teacher, I was determined that Liza and Dima would have a very different education.

  Their nurse, Nyanya, who was against any kind of change, was horrified. ‘Oh, she’s a cruel one,’ she wailed, ‘dragging the poor little crumbs out around the city! They’ll come home like stones, they will, it’s their poor kidneys that will suffer!’

  The children themselves rebutted her. ‘Oh Nyanya,’ they cried impatiently, ‘don’t fuss! It’s warm outside! We like going with Miss Gerty.’

  It had not always been so. On one early outing both of them lay down on the pavement. Telling them that English children of their age could walk several miles without complaint did not, unfortunately, rouse them to patriotic competition. Several peasants stopped and watched, full of outraged sympathy for the little children so mistreated by the foreign Miss. At last I turned to one of them, a fine figure of a man with dramatic moustaches and beard.

  ‘Please, carry them,’ I stammered.

  He berated me as he hoisted them up, one on each shoulder, and Liza translated his remarks with relish. ‘He’s saying you are vicious woman, and you have destroyed our dear little legs with too long walking.’

  ‘Tell him that your dear little legs still seem to work very well when you are playing on the slides.’

  ‘He says all foreigners are same – come to Russia to steal our national treasure.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’

  We continued on our walk, Liza and Dima waving triumphantly as though they were at the head of a victory procession, and attracting the delighted attention of a crowd of street urchins. When the peasant set them down at Smolensk market, they skipped a good half-mile home without noticing.

  Moscow is a city that insinuates itself cunningly into one’s affections. At first it fascinated and slightly repelled me, as some vast medieval fair might. I was still ignorant of politics, yet as a Chapel girl I couldn’t help but be shocked by the contrast between the golden domes and palaces and the crowds of beggars at their doors. The architecture, with its strange excrescences and decorations, struck me as a wild attempt at grandeur that understood nothing of the true properties of beauty. Yet slowly I came to know its little courtyards, its secret gardens and alleys, its cool green boulevards cast in relief against the bustle and noise. It was impossible not to be charmed by the wooden houses and the bandy streets, the little churches squeezed into every corner. There was a sort of unexpected joyfulness about it all, unlike any other city I have known.

  Liza and Dima and I explored together, discovering the river with its busy traffic, the markets – the birds on Trubnoi Square and the flowers on Tsvetnoi Boulevard – and the grand new mansions decorated in the latest styles. Our trips often included a visit to the grocer Eliseyev’s to gaze at the displays and drink a glass of flavoured mineral water, which I allowed Dima to order.

  ‘Which syrup do you prefer, sir?’ the tremendously solemn, white-coated assistant would ask, using the polite ‘Vy’.

  Dima would flush with pleasure. ‘Three lemon ones, please . . .’ And when the sparkling drink had gushed out of the silver siphon and the syrup was swirling in the glass, he might add, as one man to another, ‘I used to like the strawberry but I’ve grown out of it now.’

  The streets were always busy; hawkers stood on street corners selling knitted goods and garden produce, brushes and brooms, newspapers – there was an extraordinary array of different publications – hot pies, ice-creams, chestnuts. An increasing number of motor vehicles weaved noisily between the elegant carriages and the trams. In response to Dima’s urgent requests, we often passed by one or other of the grand hotels, the Metropol or the National, in the hope of glimpsing a chauffeur, in leather goggles and hat, in the act of cranking up his motor car, swiftly mounting his seat and roaring away, to the accompaniment of several deafening explosions.

  Dima was a straightforward little boy, happy as long as he was well exercised and well rested. Liza was more complicated, and I was glad of the opportunity, while walking, to encourage her to talk more openly. Her thoughts often shocked me.

  ‘I hate to eat,’ she told me one day. ‘I prefer to be hungry.’

  ‘But why, Liza?’

  ‘Look at my sister Sonya. She is fat, all she thinks about is clothes, and her marriage.’

  I couldn’t help agreeing that Sonya was not the most sympathetic of characters. She was making the arrangements for her marriage to Petya Ostroumov, the son of a prosperous manufacturer from St Petersburg, at the time. The plans seemed to result in tearful scenes with her father every other day, stamped feet, and the imploring figure of Mr Kobelev outside her bedroom door, begging her to be reasonable.

  ‘Well, I don’t like to hear such unkind remarks – but, Liza, you don’t have to be like your sister. You can study, and work, and you certainly don’t have to marry unless you want to. Your father has often said as much.’

  ‘What could I do?’

  ‘What would you like to do?’

  ‘I’d like . . . to look after animals.’

  ‘You could train to be a vet.’

  ‘A vet! Me!’ She was delighted by the idea, and still more so when, as a result of a conversation I had with her father, she was presented with a puppy. He was named Frank, and joined us on our walks as soon as he was old enough. Liza doted on him.

  The shadow of their mother’s illness fell over all her children, but Liza was the one, perhaps, who suffered most. She was four when her mother took to her room; no doubt it was hard to understand that her withdrawal was not deliberate. Dima had been too young to realise; he loved Nyanya with all his heart, and still occasionally fell asleep cushioned on her vast, wheezy bosom.

  *

  We were at the Kobelevs’ country estate, Mikhailovka, when the war began. I remember so vividly where we were sitting, looking down to the bend in the stream where the cattle were drinking. Mr Kobelev stepped out onto the veranda, rubbing his forehead.

  ‘Dears, it has happened. Russia has declared war on Germany.’

  The prospect of war had been hanging over us, and we felt a sort of ghastly relief when it was finally announced. I thought about but dismissed the idea of going home. I was enjoying myself, and like everyone I was convin
ced that it would be a short war. Only a handful of governesses in Moscow left at the outset, provoking Miss Clegg’s contempt. ‘We should support our Russian allies,’ she sniffed. Later, with the sinking of HMS Hampshire in 1916, travel to Britain was considered too dangerous and I became used to the idea of staying in Russia.

  The post arrived fairly regularly and I kept up with news about my brothers and my parents. James was training to be a doctor in Bristol, but Edmund had just left school. He joined up immediately. How could my parents have let him, that gentle, diffident boy? Or had they even encouraged him? He had been accepted to read Mathematics at Oxford; surely he could have been of more use in logistics, or munitions, or anywhere but on the front line, but it was quite possible that my mother wanted a soldier son to boast of . . . I lay awake many nights wondering whether I could have changed his mind if I had been at home.

  In the box I find the letter he wrote me from his barracks in Bodmin, scribbled in his unformed, boyish hand:

  Dear Gerty,

  I hope you are still enjoying yourself with the Rooskis! I have joined the Duke of Cornwall Light Infantry, there are about three hundred of us here, the most decent chaps you could imagine – Cornishmen all. This evening we had a sing-song, we almost lifted the roof off the old shack! So you needn’t worry about me – we’ll flatten the Hun at a hundred paces with a din like that . . .

  3

  In the second box of papers, inside my copy of Chernychevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, I find a half-written letter home to my parents, dated December 1914, and never sent. I suspect I abandoned it. Banal and schoolgirlish as it seems now, I knew it would have shocked my parents.

  Dear Pappa and Mamma,

  I am glad to report that my Russian has improved somewhat and I am now more able to take part in the Kobelevs’ evening gatherings, which are very convivial. I am given charge of the Samovar, quite a complicated matter, for the Russians are even more particular about their tea-drinking than the English!

  We scarcely ever number fewer than a dozen, and the conversation covers every subject imaginable. Pasha Kobelev is in his first year at Moscow University, and his student friends come to visit very frequently. One of them – Nikita Slavkin is his name – entertains us with all sorts of original suggestions – quite ‘avant-garde’! Last night he suggested that Russian children should be taught to walk on stilts, to overcome the huge distances in the countryside!!

  He believes, as we all do, that this war is quite unnecessary, a piece of Imperial conceit on a vast scale. I wish I could have convinced Edmund of this. I thought he was planning to study?

  *

  Nikita Slavkin sat a little apart from Pasha’s other friends, arms wrapped around his long, knobbly legs, pale and awkward. He had very short, almost colourless hair that revealed a bumpy scalp, and slightly protuberant pale-blue eyes. He ate a great deal of sandwiches, swallowing them whole, like a snake. When the conversation turned to women’s rights Pasha drew him in.

  ‘Nikita here has some ideas, don’t you, Nikita? He’s an inventor, he’s inventing all sorts of contraptions that will change women’s lives – and all our lives . . . Come over here, tell us.’

  Nikita stood – upright, he was absurdly tall and skinny – and blushed even under his hair. When he spoke, his voice was strangely deep and a little too loud; he looked embarassed by that too. ‘Just the outlines.’

  But Mr Kobelev was encouraging. ‘No, tell us. It sounds fascinating.’

  ‘Well, one of my inventions is a lightweight chastity belt, woven out of steel thread—’

  The room erupted into protest. Everyone was disgusted, either on liberal, conservative or squeamish grounds. Mr Kobelev’s aunt, Anna Vladimirovna, wanted him thrown out of the house. Pasha laughed so much he fell off the divan. Slavkin stood there, his large hands hanging by his sides, vulnerable. ‘Of course, I have not perfected the material yet . . .’

  A neighbour of the Kobelevs, Marina Getler, who was studying medicine, looked as though she might punch him. ‘Don’t you see, modern women need freedom,’ she hissed.

  His full, pale lips trembled a little. ‘I do see, yes,’ he muttered. ‘That’s my aim.’

  Slavkin had just moved into the small bedroom next to mine, which Mr Kobelev had offered him in exchange for a few hours’ work a week on his catalogue. At twenty-two, the same age as me, he was four years older than Pasha and seemed a decade wiser; I had the impression that he had been born with the grave air of a professor. A scholarship student from Siberia studying physics and engineering at Moscow University, he was already known to many of the artists and poets in the avant-garde for his inventions, which he claimed would ‘drive forward the steamer of Modernity’. The poet Mayakovsky dubbed him the ‘Futechnologist’. The new, non-objective art that fascinated all of us during those years was not simply a style to Slavkin, but the key to existence in the modern world. To his mind, its geometric shapes and grids, combined with the right technology, would not only define how society would look in the future; they would also shape the thoughts and emotions of its citizens.

  Long before the Revolution Slavkin was thinking how design could improve people’s lives. He invented steam-powered domestic appliances to ease the burdens of housework and laundry. He imagined multi-purpose objects for urban life – unbreakable rubber crockery sets that you could fold together and use as a pillow; a portable shower-bath; a telescopic hat with a telescopic feather that packed away as flat as a piece of paper; a kit for a ceramic stove made of 150 interlocking pieces; spectacles with different-coloured, slot-in lenses, depending on how you wished to see the world that day.

  He was not, at first, a popular addition to Gagarinsky Lane. Sonya made it clear that she found Slavkin uncouth, while Anna Vladimirovna claimed his ‘village voice’ gave her headaches. The servants were upset by the way he crammed his room with junk for his inventions and insisted on doing his own laundry, which dripped morosely over the nursery bath.

  The loyal Pasha, however, wouldn’t hear a word said against his friend. He teased Sonya and Anna Vladimirovna about their attitude, which he claimed was a medical condition, Snobosis. The two young men were inseparable, arriving at the dinner table in the middle of a conversation, too intent to notice what they were eating; sent on an errand, they would be found halfway up the stairs, hours later, still embroiled in the same debate. It was Pasha who gave Nikita the nickname Camel (legs and eyelashes, he explained), although he also described Nikita as a mythical creature – ‘half Moses and half the camel he rode on, with a heart made entirely of schenki pushistiye – little fluffy puppies’.

  *

  Those evenings, those three long pre-Revolutionary years with the Kobelevs seem almost as distant now, as mysterious and poignant as the jewel-rich illuminations in a Book of Hours – glimpses of a world so far removed from my present existence (the Formica tabletop on which I spread out the contents of my boxes from the attic, the two-bar electric fire at which I warm my old lady’s hands, my solitude) it seems quite incredible to me that I ever experienced it.

  As I read my letters I strain to catch again a whiff of the stuffy, overheated air of Mr Kobelev’s dark-green study, lit by the rosy glow of the large fringed brass lamps and the dark glitter of the wall sconces; his ethnographic collection spread over every surface: shamans’ drums, Chuvash jewellery, painted wooden figures, little bronze stags; the pale glimmer of the stove and the step at its base where Liza and Dima perched with the puppy Frank sprawled at their feet; and in the centre of the room, the great vessel of the high-backed red divan, crammed with shining, excitable faces, shouting each other down . . . Slavkin, still just an unknown student, showing us his new inventions, one after the other: the Electric Housemaid, the Automatic Carpet Beater, the flat-pack hats; billows of smoke hovering in the light, shrouding Mr Kobelev’s expression, and Mamzelle, the old governess, smiling timidly, on the edge of things; music cranked out of the gramophone, and me at the samovar – dark-haired, pale, wi
th serious grey eyes – still a little shy, frowning in concentration as I add the hot water . . . ‘No, no, too weak, girl!’ exclaims Anna Vladimirovna, poking me with her lorgnettes, and Mr Kobelev’s exasperated response, ‘My dear aunt, you’ll tan yourself like a saddle.’

  Those three years were my university. At home, for all my minor rebellions, I had never dreamt of challenging my parents’ articles of faith. Conversation consisted of a paternal monologue, broken occasionally by murmurs of agreement from the rest of the family. Any note of discord roused my father to spittle-laden fury. In Moscow I discovered a household where the most absurd and opposing views could be voiced, disagreed with, argued over or renounced without any tempers lost or touchy Chapel gods invoked.

  ‘Sing,’ Mr Kobelev liked to say. ‘Every bird has a song.’

  Pasha, who reminded me of my brothers, said, ‘Yes, Miss Gerty, I’m sure you have the voice of a nightingale.’

  ‘Do stop it, Pasha, or I will sing, and then you’ll regret it.’

  I listened, read and thought, and began to wonder in particular about the nasty old man by whom my parents set so much store, who trifled with his followers’ affections (poor Job, poor Abraham); who set up Adam and Eve to fail and then bequeathed the pain of childbirth on all women in memory of Eve’s misdemeanour; who allowed – no, planned – for his own son to be tortured.

  Meanwhile Liza and Dima grew up and flourished; I was proud of them. In the autumn of 1915 Liza, and a year later Dima, began to study at secondary school (in Russia called the Gymnasium). Travel to Britain was still out of the question, however, so I stayed on with the Kobelevs, as all their former employees appeared to do. I caught a tram each morning up the Boulevard Ring to a school on Tverskaya Street where I gave English lessons, and walked the children back from school in the afternoon.