The Vanishing Futurist

by Charlotte Hobson

  *

  ‘Boots to beard, I’m a Muscovite – where else in the world will I live?’

  Mr Kobelev refused to be concerned by the increasingly menacing tone against the middle classes in the winter of 1917. ‘There is much that is good about the new regime, even if I disagree with it in many ways; it’s my duty to stay.’

  Russia withdrew from the war and despite the catastrophe of the German invasion across a vast area in the south and west of Russia, he was still optimistic that the various Socialist parties would solve their differences and a democratic system would develop with time. He summoned the servants and told them that they were free to leave his employ, if they wished, and one by one they melted away, all except the yardman Yasha, the cook Darya, and one of the maids, Shura. We unpicked the fur collars from the children’s coats and took care not to look or behave in a ‘bourgeois’ manner on the street. My English classes were in demand; I took private clients as well as continuing to work at the school on Tverskaya. The children’s schooling, as well as Pasha’s university degree, limped on through endless strikes and political meetings. Sonya visited us often, exhausted and sad. Her husband, Petya, had been left severely disabled by injuries incurred on the Austrian front, and poor Sonya struggled to care for him. In this way we lived more or less uninterrupted at Gagarinsky Lane until the following spring.

  One May evening in 1918 I couldn’t sleep. I leaned out of the open window, gazing into the dark spring night. A car, its headlights extinguished, cruised quietly down Gagarinsky Lane. Underneath my window it stopped and several men jumped out. They ran up to the gate and banged loudly. This was not the first time that the house had been searched, but the other occasions had been in daylight, and we’d had some warning to hide incriminating possessions. I darted along to Mr Kobelev’s study. His gun, a Mauser, was lying quite openly on the sideboard. People were shot for less. I thrust it into my bodice, then ran to Mrs Kobelev’s room.

  ‘Wake up, Sofia Pavlovna, dear, the militia are here,’ I said, shaking her. ‘Give me your jewels, quickly.’

  ‘What? Oh . . .’ She sat up and fumbled in the chest of drawers by her bed, pulling out several velvet bags. I could hear voices in the hall downstairs shouting for Comrade Kobelev.

  ‘He’s at work,’ Pasha told them.

  ‘Look at all this stuff, it belongs to the people. Thieves!’

  I peeped over the banisters. There were perhaps four or five of them, swaggering and nervous. One of them casually swept the large china letter-dish off the hall table. It chimed like a bell as it smashed.

  ‘Who are you?’ said Pasha. ‘Show me your identification.’

  ‘Comrade Kobelev, I’m the Deputy Head of the Smolensk District Soviet.’ A man pushed forward to talk to Pasha; I saw it was Prigorian, who had been the Kobelevs’ chauffeur until the car was requisitioned. He had always been the image of deference. Now he stood with his legs apart and rested his hand on the gun holster at his belt. ‘The people are concerned that your father has been carrying off the treasures he expropriated from the nation.’

  ‘You mean his collection?’ I was impressed by Pasha’s calm tones. ‘You know perfectly well, Prig, nothing has been carried off. My father has preserved large numbers of works of art for the Russian people.’

  ‘Search the house,’ Prig told the others without looking around.

  They moved towards the stairs and I ran to my bedroom and shoved the jewels and gun under my mattress. My heart was thrashing about in my chest. Voices were raised, there was the crash of a table being overturned.

  ‘Open up or we’ll arrest you all,’ I could hear them saying outside Mrs Kobelev’s room.

  I waited in my room.

  ‘Open up, open up at once!’ They thumped on my door.

  ‘Certainly not,’ I said in my most haughty tones. ‘I am a British citizen. You have no right to search my room.’ I opened the door a sliver and showed them my passport.

  In silence they examined it, one after the other. Prig was called.

  ‘It’s true, she’s an Anglichanka,’ he said, looking at me distastefully.

  To my amazement, they moved on.

  Half an hour later they were gone. When Mr Kobelev returned home, I went to see him in his study. For the first time since I had lived in the house, Mrs Kobelev was sitting with him. I gave them back their belongings.

  ‘Good Lord, Miss Gerty, how can we thank you?’ muttered Mr Kobelev.

  ‘No, no, don’t thank me – but, sir, is it safe for you all here in Moscow?’

  ‘I’ve always said the moral course is to remain—’ Kobelev began, then checked himself, looking at his wife. ‘I don’t know.’

  Mrs Kobelev, very pale, but upright, suddenly spoke. ‘I think we should go south for the summer. Will you accompany us, Miss Gerty?’

  ‘No, Sofia Pavlovna, I must stay in Moscow,’ I told her gently. The Embassy had advised British citizens to remain in the capital in case of evacuation. ‘But perhaps you’d like me to protect the house, as far as possible?’

  ‘Oh Miss Gerty.’ Sofia Pavlovna turned away, unsteady on her feet. ‘What you do, of course, is your affair.’

  I slept fitfully that night, and woke to hear someone crying. I went to check, but the children were quiet; in the early hours of the morning I heard it again. It was their mother.

  We spent the next three days packing away Mr Kobelev’s ethnographic collection. We filled crates with straw for the peasant ceramics, then with the contents of the shelves in his study, fragments of embroidery and costumes wrapped in old cloths. All the woodcuts came down from the walls; all the Buryat weapons and animal skins. We labelled every box and Yasha nailed them shut. Then we hired a cart and transported them to the Alexander III Museum, which had agreed to store the collection. It took us four journeys, back and forth.

  ‘I always intended to donate it to the State when I died,’ Mr Kobelev remarked. ‘This way is better – sooner.’

  Travel into German-held areas was not at all reliable, and although Mr Kobelev had procured tickets for them to Yalta, we had no real idea whether they would be allowed to cross into the Ukraine. Sonya’s husband Petya had returned to Petrograd; Sonya herself decided to accompany her parents south. Shura, the maid, would go with them to help with Dima and Liza. But the old ladies refused to move; Mr Kobelev was in despair.

  ‘We can’t leave you behind, my dears! Come with us, for our sake, if not for yours!’

  ‘No,’ said Anna Vladimirovna, definite as ever. ‘Much too hot! Not at all good for the health. Sonya, my girl, you will ruin your complexion.’

  ‘But my dears,’ said Sonya, kneeling beside her chair, ‘it might be dangerous for you here, and very hard – who will look after you?’

  ‘We’ll look after ourselves, won’t we, Mamzelle? We’ll manage very well.’

  No argument would change their minds, and as I promised to care for them as best I could, Mr Kobelev finally agreed they should remain. In any case, as he admitted, it was quite possible that the journey itself would be just as dangerous for them. The trains were uncomfortable places these days, so it was said. Even more deadly than the borders and the militia were the typhus lice, hopping through the packed carriages. He insisted on leaving me the Mauser, which I took with some trepidation, having no idea how to load or fire it.

  ‘We’ll be back soon,’ said Mr Kobelev, his kind face creased by anxiety. ‘We’ll be back in the autumn. All of this will have blown over by then. A Government of National Emergency is what’s needed—’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ murmured Sofia Pavlovna, almost inaudibly. ‘It would be better if we forgot this life completely.’

  It was another lilac-scented day in May when the old carriage was loaded up and a horse was hired to take them to the station. The children were dressed in their travelling clothes, heavy with the coins and jewellery that Sonya and I had sewn into the hems. They complained bitterly. ‘We can’t wear these clothes! We’re not puppets, y
ou know!’

  The children’s excitement gave the last moments an unexpectedly cheerful tone.

  ‘I’ll sit next to Mama,’ Liza kept saying. ‘I’ll take care of Mama.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dima casually, ‘that’s your job, and mine is to deal with any bandits we come across.’

  We couldn’t help laughing at the bloodthirsty look on his face.

  ‘Where is Nikita?’ wondered Mr Kobelev. ‘Miss Gerty, you must embrace him for us. I am sorry not to say goodbye to him.’

  ‘Goodbye, Miss Gerty,’ said Pasha, doffing his cap and grinning at me. ‘Now I’ll never be able to convince you how much I love you!’

  I laughed. ‘Pasha, you are ridiculous—’ I stopped; he had already turned away and was talking to Yasha, telling him to drive on.

  ‘Oh, do take care,’ I said after them. ‘Take great care . . .’

  In the end the Kobelev family left the house on Gagarinsky Lane almost without noticing, talking and arguing among themselves.

  5

  I found the two old ladies standing forlornly in the hall and led them back to their room overlooking the courtyard.

  ‘We are all tired, I think,’ sighed Anna Vladimirovna, adding unexpectedly, ‘Perhaps you would sit with us for a cup of tea, Miss Freely?’

  She was frightened, I saw, and no wonder. But I suddenly felt that if I sat down I would start crying and not know how to stop.

  ‘No, thank you. I must see to a few things, and then perhaps we will spend the evening together?’

  Two heads nodded, eager to please.

  ‘We will have a little soup, a soupchik.’

  They agreed again, more happily; there’s no Russian alive that is not soothed by a little soupchik.

  I wandered into the study, now furnished with absences: squares of dust on the walls, pale patches on the parquet. With all the packing I had not slept more than five hours for the last couple of nights and everything had the dreary, gritty texture of sleeplessness. The empty shelves were scattered with dead woodlice. Prig’s people had smashed the pretty gilt sconces on each side of the fireplace, perhaps imagining them to be made of real gold.

  Why was I here? There was a part of me that felt miserable for remaining. Should I have accompanied the Kobelevs? I loved them more than I did my own family, and yet I’d let them go alone, into danger.

  Perhaps there was more of my father in me than I imagined. An image of him sprang to mind, red-cheeked and sandy-browed with great quivering lobsterish whisps, snapping at me, ‘Make up your mind, girl!’

  Well, I had.

  A cold draught suddenly hit the back of my knees. Slavkin was standing in the hall, gazing around him with a look of desolation.

  ‘Have they gone? Have I missed them?’

  ‘Yes, they left half an hour ago – they asked me to say goodbye to you for them; they were sad not to see you.’

  ‘I was at work.’ His chin trembled. ‘How bare it all looks . . .’

  ‘Mr Kobelev said he’d always planned to give it all to the people.’

  ‘It’s for the best. It was much too dangerous to keep the collection here.’ Slavkin’s voice betrayed him with an alarming squeak. He turned his back on me and clumped up to his room.

  For several days, Slavkin and I barely saw each other. In the evenings I heard him stomping to and fro in his room; occasionally I fancied that he was listening to my movements, as I tended to the old ladies. The house felt strange, like a ship adrift on a silent sea, a huge empty ship with an echoing hold. The weather had suddenly turned cold and windy; in the evenings the chestnut branches flexed and slapped against the shutters like ropes. The rafters creaked and moaned and occasionally fell quiet; then I felt the presence of Slavkin most strongly. I didn’t seek him out; I was too shy of him. His brilliance rendered me absurdly prosaic and tongue-tied, blushing, a caricature of an English governess.

  And yet sometimes, across the noisy evening gatherings, I had caught him looking at me as though we understood each other. We were outsiders in that house; we were not liberals, we didn’t understand doubters. We had little to lose.

  ‘What can he be doing all the time?’ wondered Anna Vladimirovna. In the empty house, even Slavkin’s ‘village voice’ was apparently better than nothing. ‘Doesn’t he want to come and sit with us? Can he be quite well?’

  ‘He’s probably busy with his contraptions, Anna Vladimirovna,’ said Mamzelle soothingly. ‘Scientists are not quite normal.’

  I was working longer hours than ever at the English school on Tverskaya, lessons that were now paid mainly in kind – half a loaf of black bread and a smoked fish for the present continuous. One pupil, a Georgian, presented me with a bag of good black tea. Oh, the old ladies were happy.

  ‘Vous êtes trop gentille,’ said Mamzelle tearfully.

  ‘Take some, do, to that strange boy,’ said Anna Vladimirovna.

  At my knock, Slavkin opened his door – even a little too quickly, as though he were waiting for me – and made me jump, and some of the precious tea was spilt. And then he hurried to relieve me of the tray, and I recoiled, trying to protect the cup, and there were apologies and counter-apologies, and I was blushing so hard, and my heart was racing, that I couldn’t help laughing, and he looked at me in embarrassment, drawing back.

  I had never seen the inside of his room. The walls were covered in notes and equations, pieces of newspaper, scribbles and rather beautiful sketches. There was a series of X-rays that seemed to show a skeleton walking with a stick and sitting on a bench. Posters covered one wall. In one corner was a camera on a tripod, and in another, a heap of rubbish – quite literally, without any exaggeration, rubbish. Broken wooden crates, bits of old planking, dirty bottles, rags, stones . . .

  ‘Goodness,’ I said, ‘this is your work?’ I was conscious of a note of incredulity, and added, ’I know you are very busy, Nikita Gavrilovich, as always—’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Perhaps one day you will explain it to me.’ I turned to leave, embarrassed.

  ‘Wait.’ He took a step towards me. ‘Why are you here? Why didn’t you go south?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I stammered. ‘You know why. British citizens have been told to stay in Moscow—’

  ‘I don’t think you remained here just for reasons of safety,’ he said quietly.

  I was speechless. At last I said, ‘I don’t know, I felt there’d be something for me to do here—’

  ‘For the Revolution?’

  ‘Well, yes . . . For the people, for my pupils, you know . . .’

  He gazed at me, and I had an extraordinary sensation – as though it were the first time in my life that anyone had really looked at me.

  ‘You’re an unusual person,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

  ‘No, for some reason, I’m not. I feel . . . light. I feel that I’m changing, day by day.’ I laughed. ‘I know that must sound foolish.’

  ‘Miss Gerty,’ he said, ‘you could never do a foolish thing. It makes me happy to hear you. We are in the first stage, you know, and everything is rough and crude and even cruel, but we have a chance—’

  ‘A chance to reform society, you mean?’

  ‘Oh, not just society – ourselves! Transform our own souls, even our bodies – we can be different.’ He paused and then looked at me intently. ‘I’d like to—’ he said and immediately looked away, confused.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d like to visit you.’

  I did not look away. Afterwards, thinking about it, I was amazed that I held his gaze so coolly, although my heart was rattling in my chest. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Please do. ’

  *

  My sitting-room floor in Hackney is littered with balls of paper. If this account is to be worthwhile at all, it seems to me, it must be as honest as I can manage. A dozen times I have found myself veering off into comfortable euphemism, torn out the page from my typewriter, and started afresh. The truth, my husband used to say, however s
hameful, however inconvenient, is the great healer. Isn’t that time? I’d ask. Yes, but the truth is the surgeon. It sets the bones. Otherwise time will heal them crooked . . . His voice so close, in my head. I rip out yet another spoiled page. How could he leave me to tell it on my own? Out of nowhere I begin to cry, noisily, into the silence.

  After a while I quieten down. I wipe my face on my sleeve. I thread a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter and begin again. The truth is the surgeon.

  *

  Later that night, after I’d cooked for the old ladies and listened to yet more of Anna Vladmirovna’s endless supply of family stories, which could all really be boiled down to the simple maxim ‘breeding is what matters’, I lay in bed and listened to the wind – an unsettling tune with no comfort in it. Various conversations I’d had with Slavkin repeated and fragmented in my mind. ‘Revolution . . . once in a millennium . . . transform ourselves, reform ourselves, unform . . .’ Russian prefixes scuffled about drearily like the chestnut leaves on the window. I sat up in bed. There was someone at the door.

  ‘Who is it?’

  Slavkin – a tall, awkward figure silhouetted in the doorway. ‘It’s me, comrade. You weren’t sleeping, were you?’ His voice gave way a little.

  ‘No.’

  He approached my bed. I did not move; my mouth was dry. He crouched beside me, avoiding my eyes, and spoke in a ponderous monotone.