The Vanishing Futurist

by Charlotte Hobson

  The post became erratic, and communication with my parents infrequent. What, after all, had I left behind in Britain? My brothers had moved away, and all that awaited me in Truro was my father, who seemed to dislike me, and my mother, who thought me unnatural. One sunny morning in 1916 I went to the hairdresser’s and asked her to cut off my dark plaits; I remember the sensation of release as they fell to the floor. I had grown a little plumper in Russia, a fact that Nyanya was always complimenting me on. ‘How pretty you are, Mees Gerty, now you’ve filled out!’ At home, my mother used to bewail, unanswerably, ‘What are we to do with you?’ In Moscow I felt I’d found a reply for her.

  Then in November 1916 I received a letter through the diplomatic bag. I have it here – a black-rimmed envelope addressed care of the Foreign Office, King Charles Street, London, in my father’s dark, decisive hand.

  ‘Dear Gertrude,’ wrote my father.

  It is with profound sadness that I write to tell you that your brother Edmund has been killed in action on the Somme, at Ancre, on the night of the 16th–17th October. His Commanding Officer tells me he fought bravely. Of course we expected nothing less. He is now at peace with the Lord. We will hold a prayer meeting at the Chapel in his memory and I will pray for you then. I trust that you are safe and well, it is only a pity you are so far from your family at a time when your mother needs you.

  Yr. affec. Father, S. M. Freely

  I suppose it was unfair of me to blame my parents for Edmund’s death. Even if they did encourage him to join up, they had done no more than millions of other families. And yet as I re-read that letter now I feel a rush of the rage I harboured against them for years. That nasty little dig: ‘It is only a pity . . .’ The sanctimonious: ‘I will pray for you then.’ Those phrases released me from my filial duty. I never wanted to see them again. I ripped up their unread letters. I hid in my room to cry, too angry to accept sympathy. I kept dreaming of my poor dear little Ed, my poor boy, how I’d abandoned him. Fighting sleep, I lay in bed making inventories of every detail about him: his babyish cheeks; how he blinked when he was excited, rapidly, trying to get the words out; his fine, clean, squarish hands with large pale moons on each nail; the way he ducked his head a little under too many direct questions – each day feeling him slipping away from me, solidifying into a few stock images.

  ‘All true Socialists take a defeatist position,’ said Pasha that winter – the first time I had heard the term. ‘This war was inevitable, a result of Empire. Colonial policies produce an excess of weapons, raw materials and manufactured produce, then they need a war to soak up the glut and keep the prices high. Under this system, war is not only simple – the underclass fights it for them – but essential.’

  I was speechless.

  He went on casually, ‘And the irony is, now it can only be good for the Revolutionary cause – the greater the war the better, because the result can only be chaos and the destabilisation of the regime. It’s bringing the Revolution closer every day.’

  ‘Pasha—’ I was so angry I shook all over. ‘I never thought I would hear you say such a disgraceful, cynical thing. If the Revolution depends on the death of innocent young men, it isn’t worth a jot.’

  ‘Oh Gerty, I’m sorry.’ He came towards me, but I rushed out of the room.

  It was Nikita Slavkin who set things right, knocking on my door late at night. ‘Miss Gerty, may I talk to you? I think you misunderstood.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Please, let me explain. We Socialists would abolish war entirely – we agree, the blood of a single human being is more valuable than any notions of patriotism.’ He sat down, not looking at me. ‘It’s primitive behaviour. My mother died just as stupidly, for no reason at all, of a minor infection after childbirth. My father would not take her to the hospital – he sat and prayed over her. If she had been treated she would still be alive . . .’

  He said gently, ‘At least let your brother’s death mean something. Revolution will redeem all these sacrifices.’

  Slavkin had grown in authority over the past couple of years; we often found ourselves turning to him for the final word. It struck me that his childhood in an Old Believer community, a type of strict Orthodox sect, had much in common with my own Chapel upbringing. We had both jettisoned a cruel, overweening god, yet against our will we were both left with a sense of loss – in my case intensely so after my brother’s death. We rejected the father, but we could not rid ourselves of the beauty of the son’s example, or a belief in the unity of all things. I loved hearing Nikita talk, not just for his encyclopaedic knowledge and flights of imagination, but for his almost mystical sense of the patterns of the universe.

  Among my papers is this copy in my own hand of an article by Slavkin that impressed me deeply:

  ‘Behold the Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,’ said John the Baptist, when he first saw Jesus Christ. For he understood that Jesus was to be a sacrificial lamb in the pagan sense: an innocent creature condemned to death. In medieval Christianity the sacrifice of the Lamb of God was explained as redeeming Man’s original sin. Yet in John’s time, for both Romans and Jews, a sacrifice was a form of sorcery – an offering to the gods, or God – an arbitrary blood-letting that was capable of altering the course of events. A sacrifice may bring about dramatic change; although, as the myths show time and again, it may not be the change we wished for.

  In modern times similar brutal sacrifices are still made, if less consciously: injustices occur that are so outrageous, so discordant, that the great kings and governments who carelessly order these vile acts are, to their astonishment and incomprehension, destroyed by them. The Pharisees sacrificed Jesus to shore up their earthly power, and this brutal and cynical act destroyed the Jewish people’s political status for thousands of years. In 1905, the Tsar ordered his Cossacks to carry out a massacre in front of the Winter Palace, and all of Russia rose up in protest.

  Poor Jesus, the man, understood that only by dying could he bring about a Revolution. ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ Alive, he was merely a Jewish prophet; dead, he was the agent of a change in human experience for centuries to come. In our unified world the smallest action can set off a reaction that reverberates throughout the galaxies. The bacterium kills the great Elephant, and after death the helpless Lamb rises up again as a mighty leader; the weakest becomes the most powerful; the peaceful one, who never retaliates, is the all-conquering King of many nations.

  We Socialists, who dream of a great reformation of the human spirit, we are also helpless against the powers of the world. Yet we feel the great swell of hearts behind us – millions all over the world – the weak who shall become all-conquering. We are willing to make any sacrifice for them. We shall be the microscopic action that sets off a vast reaction, that creates the future.

  Dear, kind Mr Kobelev, with his conviction that Russia must not let down her Allies and that elections were all that the country needed, now seemed to be speaking from some fast-receding shore. I signed up for a course in political education; my little exercise book of notes on Proudhon and Engels and owning the means of production has, for some reason, survived, complete with doodles in the margin. Yet politics always remained opaque to me, however hard I tried.

  Revolution, on the other hand – or at least the revolution that Slavkin envisaged – was clearly visible. It was the longed-for precipice just downhill of us.

  4

  On 3 March Mr Kobelev arrived back from his club out of breath, his face scarlet, his eyes full of tears, with the news that the Tsar had abdicated. We embraced each other, cried and rushed out onto the streets, swept up on the general tide of euphoria. It all happened more or less just as a revolution should, with dozens of symbolic moments – the burning of Tsarist regalia, huge demonstrations in the streets, exultant groups of citizens drinking the contents of a few looted stores.

  Over the years I h
ave often been asked about my memories of the February Days; in fact I gave a talk once on the subject to the Hackney Women’s Reading Group, one of a number of Socialist organisations I’ve belonged to. They were appreciative of my talk, which they preferred to the one I gave on the Great October Revolution, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. My view of Lenin’s Revolution was flawed, they told me, too personal, lacking a proper sense of the collective or the heroic. The inconvenient truth was, of course, that October had none of the ingredients of a people’s revolution – no processions, and no symbolic removal of the tyrant’s flag, because there was no tyrant by then. There was street fighting in Moscow, but, thank goodness, not too close to Gagarinsky Lane.

  In late October, I remember, snow threatened but did not come; the air was oppressive and the sky low and bulging, until one longed for the flakes to start falling. The first we knew of any disturbance was gunfire in the afternoon. Mr Kobelev telephoned friends of his in the City Council and learnt a few details: the Bolsheviks had announced they must act to defend the Congress of Soviets, they had driven out the Provisional Government, it was a coup. We were not overly excited by this information, for there had been rumours of coups several times already that year. We could hear heavy fighting in other parts of the city, however, so we settled in at Gagarinsky Lane and played card games with the children to pass the time.

  After five days it finally began to snow and the city fell quiet. Pasha and Nikita were keen to find out news and I volunteered to go with them; I think Mr Kobelev felt that my presence would act as a brake on their spirit of adventure. As far as I was concerned, after so long cooped up inside the house, I was ready for anything.

  We turned towards the centre of town; Pasha and Nikita were deep in conversation, and did not include me. The snow was still falling, those large, soft flakes that give one the impression that gravity is not holding things down quite as reliably as it should. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the streets were almost empty. On Mokhovaya Street Pasha said, ‘What’s that?’ and we saw the body of a man in the road. From the way he was lying, awkwardly, his leg bent beneath him, it was clear from a distance of fifty yards that he was dead. Snow had already settled on his face and his clothes. The three of us passed him on the other side of the road. We did not say another word about it, but after a few moments I realised we were on Vozdvizhenka.

  ‘Perhaps—’ My voice came out in a croak; I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘Perhaps we might drop in to see Miss Clegg and the Beloborodovs?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Pasha, with relief, and Slavkin, as if noticing that I was with them for the first time, turned to me, smiled and nodded. I felt an absurd, self-congratulatory flush.

  Miss Clegg let us in herself. ‘I did tell you that your habit of taking walks around Moscow was unwise.’

  We entered the Beloborodovs’ large, modern apartment, decorated in the art-nouveau style, and Miss Clegg brought us into the drawing room to join the family. Monsieur Beloborodov, who was talking with his brother-in-law Prince Svyatinsky in front of the fireplace, had made a large amount of money by investing in the railways and was destined for great things, according to Miss Clegg (as of course she would say). Madame was quite young, perhaps still in her twenties, although she adopted the gloriously condescending airs of a dowager.

  ‘Little Miss Freely,’ she drawled from her chair. ‘Do sit down with us. And of course this is Pasha – how is your father, my dear boy?’

  We drank weak tea from little porcelain cups and spoke of this and that. The snow pattered against the window panes and the wind – or was it distant gunfire? – boomed in the chimney. Prince Svyatinsky, who was a collector of minerals, spoke of a rare specimen – jeremejevite – that he had found for sale in the market.

  ‘It was being sold by a peasant – goodness knows how he had laid his hands on it. My great-uncle would have given his eye teeth for such a specimen!’

  Slavkin perked up. ‘I thought only a few examples were known?’

  The Prince’s little black eyes fell on Slavkin. ‘Are you interested in minerals? You must let me show you my collection . . .’

  They fell into conversation: Nikita, unwinding his limbs one by one from the gilt chair he had been torturing and beginning to gesture as he warmed up, and the little Prince, charming and portly, with the mannerisms of a grande dame. For all that he looked like an aristocrat in a Bolshevik cartoon, he was a serious scientist, and in later years would become a professor at the Sorbonne.

  ‘Is your friend at the University?’ murmured Madame Beloborodov.

  ‘Yes, he is studying Physics and Engineering, but he also attends lectures in the Geology faculty. He seems to know all the professors.’

  ‘Really? Prince Svyatinsky and his wife have had some bad luck. A fire in his house on Myasnitskaya, they think a sniper shot caused it. He and my sister are staying with us here.’

  ‘I am so sorry,’ I answered. ‘Can anything be saved?’

  ‘His collection, thank heavens, was unharmed. Now they plan to sell it’, she lowered her voice still further, as though uttering a rude word, ‘and leave for France.’

  ‘I see,’ I replied slowly, wondering why I was being favoured with this confidence. The subject of exile, never far from the thoughts of the Russian gentry in those days, was nonetheless considered in poor taste.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she breathed scarcely audibly to me, ‘your friend might have connections in the University who would be interested?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes indeed.’

  ‘They cannot make an open approach, you understand. This needs to be handled with the utmost discretion.’

  I reported this conversation on the way home.

  ‘Perhaps they hope to keep the sale a secret from the rest of the family,’ commented Pasha.

  ‘Poor Prince. That collection is his great joy.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ muttered Slavkin, beginning to walk faster, striding out like a racehorse. ‘I must talk to – I think I know who . . .’ He disappeared around the corner, still muttering to himself.

  A few weeks later he and a student friend of Pasha’s, Fyodor, arrived at Gagarinsky Lane in a cart with a package wrapped in straw. It took both of them to lift it across the yard. When it was finally installed in his workshop, the packing came off to reveal a sizeable piece of some dark, silvery mineral.

  ‘I have arranged it all,’ said Slavkin, beaming. I’d never seen him so exhilarated. ‘The collection will go to the University. Would you be able to give us your help, Miss Gerty? Next week we must pack everything up. The Prince and Princess are delighted – they plan to leave for France a couple of days later. He gave me this as a thank-you.’

  The times brought out unexpected qualities in all of us but even so I was impressed, as was Mr Kobelev, who embraced and congratulated him.

  ‘Well done, my boy – you must have managed the negotiations with great tact. Perhaps you will do the same for my collection one day?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ Nikita, shiny with happiness, rushed off to see to his present, which was my first glimpse of the mineral iridium. He didn’t offer any more details, and I – always a little shy of him – did not enquire.

  We spent several days packing and sorting the pieces at the Prince’s house. I was finishing up a last few tasks when the Prince came up to the gallery for the first time. He went straight to his study without greeting us, and Nikita – a little surprised, perhaps, but still beaming, excited by our work – immediately hurried over to speak to him. I could not see the Prince, who was concealed behind the door of his study, or hear their conversation, yet I read its course clearly in the lines of Nikita’s body. Before even a word was said, as soon as Nikita saw the Prince’s face, I could feel the enthusiasm flowing out of him. His shoulders drooped; I could sense, rather than see, his anxious frown. He plucked nervously at his sleeve, and shuffled from foot to foot, backing away from the fury directed at him. He shook his head.

>   Now the Prince raised his voice: ‘Robbery!’ he shouted. ‘They never had the slightest intention to pay!’

  Nikita, cowering before him, still shook his head, ‘That wasn’t what we arranged . . . I had no idea . . .’

  He flinched as though he had been hit. The study door slammed shut, and Nikita took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the Prince’s spittle off his face. He walked slowly back towards me.

  ‘He says – he says they’ve forced him to sign the collection over to the state. They told me they’d arrange the money side of things, and I believed them. I should have pressed them, but . . .’

  ‘You mean the University aren’t paying him at all?’

  ‘A pittance.’ Slavkin grimaced.

  We set out through the darkening streets towards Gagarinsky Lane and he went over and over the episode. ‘What a fool I am, what a fool – I thought they would be honourable, I should have insisted on a contract . . .’

  ‘I suppose now the collection will be at the service of the people,’ I said at last, timidly.

  He looked at me for a moment as if about to say something, then changed his mind. He stood up a little straighter. Then, quite unexpectedly, he took my arm and tucked it under his, his slow, sweet smile lighting up his face.

  ‘Gerty, I think you must be the most rational, sensible woman I know,’ he said.

  We walked together through the icy streets and past the Central Post Office, pockmarked with bullet holes. His arm felt very warm against mine.

  The Svyatinskys donated their collection to the Soviet State, against their will, and in return were permitted to leave for France. The Svyatinsky Theft, as the episode became known in émigré circles, was much cited as evidence not just of the Bolsheviks’ greed, but the naivety or, worse, the corruption of the Russian intelligentsia who did not go into exile. It gave Slavkin a certain notoriety abroad, but in Moscow, where ‘Revolutionary Justice’ was the slogan of the moment, it brought him the approval of the Bolshevik leadership and a position at the newly established Centre for Revolutionary Research, where he began his work on iridium alloys – the first step towards the Socialisation Capsule. It is a thought that I still find disturbing. Surely Slavkin’s future was already fixed in his genes, in his genius. Yet if I’d never suggested that visit to the Beloborodovs, might he have remained an anonymous scientist all his life?