The Vanishing Futurist

by Charlotte Hobson

  I was never going to be much use to the commune in terms of scientific or philosophical understanding, and no doubt I was such a dullard that people like Pasha would always use me for the butt of their jokes, but I did have a role – a useful one – and Nikita always showed how much he appreciated it.

  ‘Ah,’ he used to say when I appeared, ‘here’s Gerty, cheerful as always! English phlegm . . . that is what this commune needs.’

  8

  On Friday evenings, as long as we had enough fuel, the IRT bolstered its Revolutionary spirit by taking a communal steam bath. No other form of washing could ever be so good for morale. While it heated up, filling the air with the tang of woodsmoke, we ate outside on the terrace under a sky filled with violent, flaming cobs of cloud – caused, so people said, by the huge quantity of munitions dust and gas in the atmosphere. Then we made our way quietly across the yard; we’d voted for no talking in the banya.

  I slipped out of my clothes in the women’s section and entered, shutting the door quickly behind me. One by one we took our places and settled down. I breathed in the sweet, resiny steam and leaned back, feeling the painful tensions of the week begin to relax, the clamp of anxiety loosen. There was only the creak of wooden benches and the occasional sigh; and from the men’s side of the partition, the slap and shuffle of bare feet. Around me the women lolled, eyes closed, rosy and sweating, at ease. Dr Marina ladled water onto the stove. Thick, blinding steam billowed out into the room and then there was nothing, nothing at all, but the heat, and my breath in little gasps, and the prickle of sweat on my skin.

  The habit of modesty had been fiercely bred in me, and at first, I confess, I found the banya uncomfortable. It had seemed wrong – animal – to walk about naked, and I didn’t enjoy seeing these women reduced (as I saw it) to cows in a barn, with their undignified female shapes. Then Dr Marina noticed my awkwardness and forced me to look through her medical dictionary. ‘For goodness’ sake, Gerty, look at elephantiasis,’ she said. ‘No, wait! Look at psoriasis . . . Well, you feel squeamish about these poor sufferers, I quite understand. But why shy away from normal, healthy, strong bodies? That I can’t comprehend.’

  Dr Marina was not the subtlest of teachers, but in this case her incredulity made us both laugh. ‘I mean, look, this poor man with the strawberry nose – it’s drink that’s done that – you’d have to be a stone not to feel for him! But what could be wrong with your body, or mine for that matter?’

  So now if I felt shy, I took a deep breath and observed quite dispassionately how my mother’s remarks bobbed up in my mind, unsinkable:

  ‘Whatever shall we do about her nose?’

  ‘It’s a pity she didn’t inherit my chest . . .’

  ‘Oh dear, how she does overheat, it isn’t attractive!’

  And just: ‘Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear.’

  I observed how I constantly compared myself with the other women around me. Then I sliced those thoughts out, surgically, using Dr Marina’s words as the knife: ‘A normal, healthy body – a thing of beauty.’

  Not for the first time, I noticed the wave of pleasure it gave me to identify a splinter of the old me – of the old, pre-Revolutionary world – and to destroy it.

  For the last couple of weeks, however, there had been a new preoccupation to distract me during the steam bath. Since the IRT’s decision to collectivise our clothes, clean laundry was issued each Friday evening from the general store. We were meant not to sift through the clothes rail, but simply to take the outfit closest to us; but in practice the last members to be kitted out had an eccentric time of it that week.

  As I lay with my eyes closed, outwardly calm, I observed that my ears were straining to hear who had already left the banya, and that my muscles were actually tensed, ready to jump up and push in front of them, even though there was at least another half an hour of the steam bath left. The collectivisation of our clothes had clearly not yet succeeded in eliminating vanity from my soul. I did my best to be firm with myself, although I did notice (still without opening my eyes) that the others were cutting short their banya as well.

  After another fifteen minutes I went into the washroom, took a bucket of water and scrubbed myself, briskly but thoroughly, for ten. Only then did I approach the laundry dispensary in the changing room, taking note of the distinct quickening of my heart when I saw how few clothes were left on the rail. Almost all the other women had already taken their pick. Dr Marina was still dressing; she had the rather nice jacket I’d used a couple of weeks ago. I saw a cotton skirt – good; a shirt with no collar and a flannel waistcoat, rather large, but all right. But underwear . . . oh, underwear! I couldn’t help a lurch of disgust at the tattered, greyish bloomers that lay at the top of the underwear basket. But here, yes, another pair, really quite acceptable. I hesitated. It simply would not do, my conscience told me, to mind so much about bloomers. It was over just such matters as these that we had to be strict with ourselves in the Institute. Quailing a little, but determined, I took up the tattered pair, noticing that they had some truly repulsive yellowish marks.

  ‘Have you everything you need, comrade?’ Vera bustled over, her kind, plump face strained with anxiety over this important moment in the Laundry Commissar’s week. ‘Here, let me help you, Gerty – there’s some better ones here, wouldn’t you prefer—’

  ‘The most important thing, Verochka, is not to care.’

  ‘Oh, well, of course, but really I wouldn’t have thought it matters – look, there’s a nasty stain on those—’

  ‘Shall I sign here?’

  The delicious, unravelled feeling of the bath suddenly reasserted itself; I beamed at Vera as I interrupted her and, surprised, she smiled back. All this pettiness, these belittling preoccupations were falling away; the process of conquering the ego could only become more joyful. I dressed quickly and hurried to join the other members in the drawing room. It was time for our evening meeting.

  *

  In the early days of the IRT, many of our evenings were spent listening to and discussing each member’s piece on their Revolutionary Development. They were varied. Fyodor, smacking his rosy lips, gave us a curt few lines on his father’s incompetent management of their family estates and his own determination to learn a profession – engineering – and to devote his life to the technological advances that would make Communism possible. ‘The tasks of our commune’, he said, ‘are discipline and efficiency.’ They were his two favourite words. ‘We must mould men and women as punctual and regular as machines.’ If mild depression assailed us at these words, we tried not to let it show.

  Marina wrote about her life as a trainee doctor, Vera as a nurse and Volodya described the trenches; all of them, in their different ways, driven by a sense of the injustice of the autocracy.

  That evening after the steam bath, as we drank the hot water flavoured with a little grated carrot that we called tea and smoked our ‘goat’s leg’ cigarettes rolled out of newspaper, Sonya read us her account. We breathed the cool, scented air and listened to her little well-brought-up voice floating out of the darkness, describing the failure of her marriage. In 1915 she had married Petya, the son of a manufacturer of dandruff shampoo – we had all witnessed her tantrums over the guest list, the invitations, the wrong kind of quails’ eggs – only to wave him off to war just a few months later. In 1916 he was badly wounded and lost a leg to septicaemia. Throughout 1917, while he was ill, she devoted herself completely to him; I remember how impressed I was by this new side to her character. But as he recovered, all her attempts to be a good wife were met by increasing hostility on his part and frustration on hers. They had married young and in haste – Sonya, I suspect, had been longing to escape the shadow of her mother’s illness – and the foundations of their relationship had been shattered by war. What common ground was there to sustain them in this new situation? When he and his mother moved back to Petrograd, Sonya came back to Gagarinsky Lane, and soon afterwards left Moscow with the family for the south.
I thought the marriage would probably have foundered even without the injury, but of course that didn’t stop Sonya from feeling that she had failed him at his most vulnerable.

  ‘Ptichka,’ said Pasha gently, ‘Little bird, you know that it was his decision as much as yours, even though he didn’t admit it. He went back to Petrograd and he didn’t even ask you to come, did he?’

  Sonya’s voice caught. ‘Well, perhaps he just assumed I would. But he used to look at me with such hatred – he used to rail at me, abuse me, as if he blamed me.’ She cleared her throat. ‘And then, of course, I saw him again in Yalta . . . It was while my father still thought there might be a chance for them to leave immediately for Turkey, before he decided to rent the villa. I bumped into my mother-in-law who told me where she and Petya were staying; they fled Petrograd just about the same time we left Moscow. “Don’t imagine he’s longing to see you,” she said grimly – there was never a great deal of warmth between Evgenia Maksimovna and me.

  ‘He was in bed when I came, and made no attempt to sit up. It was only a couple of months since I’d last seen him but he seemed to have swelled up – I don’t know, perhaps it was some health problem – and his face was quite different, eyes and mouth tiny in big, pallid cheeks. I was shocked, and perhaps it showed on my face, because he was immediately angry, accused me of all sorts of vile behaviour—’ She hesitated, and laughed. ‘Well, it’s ridiculous, but he accused me of having an affair with you, Nikita. “That student, I’ve seen how he looks at you.” His mind was filled with every sort of warped nonsense. Then just as I was thinking I would have to leave, he burst into tears, and told me I was well out of it. “I couldn’t look after you now, could I? It’s better this way. You must live your life, and I’ll try to do something with mine, God knows what—” I cried too, and for a moment we sat together quietly, without speaking, and I thought we understood each other. And then he suddenly sat up and hissed into my ear, “The least you can do is get me some money! Ten thousand roubles – come on, I know you can lend it to me!” He pushed me away as hard as he could. Hating him, I went and sold some jewellery, and returned with a wallet. And then I made up my mind. I couldn’t go abroad with my parents. The only choice left to me, from the moment I left my husband, was to try to do something towards the Revolution.’

  Sonya stopped. She was blushing. ‘After that we returned, and you know it all from then on.’

  Anna Vladimirovna spoke into the pause that followed, ‘My dear,’ she drawled in her grandest voice, ‘it’s really not suitable to repeat all that in public. I tell you this in your parents’ absence.’

  ‘Oh, Aunt, but—’

  ‘Don’t interrupt. But I must say that boy was extremely badly brought up. You did the only thing you could, dear.’ She sank back in her chair, then suddenly added with a mad glint in her eye, ‘If I’d been there I would have horsewhipped him myself.’

  She laughed with all of us, still nodding fiercely. ‘I would have. Bring the whip! Swish, swish!’

  ‘You did well,’ Nikita said.

  Sonya looked up at him and I saw that she was crying. ‘No,’ she retorted. ‘I did not. That’s what I mean – now I must work hard and do well. All my life I’ve wasted time, squandered my privileges, but now—’

  ‘Now,’ murmured Nikita, ‘you have changed.’

  He was looking at her and I couldn’t help breaking in: ‘Well, yes,’ I blurted out. ‘Yes, but we’ve all changed, haven’t we?’

  Nikita turned toward me, frowning slightly, and I hurried on, ‘I mean, we’ve all changed, but obviously we’ve still got a long way to go, or I have, in any case . . .’

  He leant back in his chair. Even in the height of August he was still pale, and in the dark garden, in his white shirt, he looked almost ghostly. When he spoke we all fell quiet.

  ‘This week I suggest each of us devotes some thought to identifying what we have to do to become more measured, rounded characters. This will stand us in good stead in communal living. Each of you has thought hard about what made you a Revolutionary. Now you must try to identify the task that your story sets you. And how should each of us know what that is? Well, it’s quite simple. It is the thing that is hardest for you to do, the thing that terrifies you, that makes you feel least comfortable. Not something that is hard for your neighbour, which might be perfectly simple for you. But the one area that you think impossible for yourself.

  ‘Fyodor, for example – your task will be to exercise your imagination. You are a scientist, hard-working, logical, methodical – a list of your good qualities could go on for hours, we all agree. A free-flowing imagination, however, would probably not be on that list, don’t you think? This week I suggest you engage in some form of abstract self-expression – dance, art, music.

  ‘Marina, your task is to be spontaneous, irresponsible – to allow yourself to be silly.

  ‘Vera, yours is to identify what you really want – not just what others want of you.

  ‘Sonya? Yours is to forgive yourself. Set down your burden of guilt. You acted as best you could, in the circumstances. There are no Christ figures now to set ourselves up against and fail. You are flawed, as we all are, but you were honest, you showed courage. There’s an arrogance in guilt – it suggests you think you could, or should, be infallible. Let go of it.

  ‘And Gerty?’ He turned to where I was lurking in the corner, hoping to be forgotten, and I felt almost panicky at what he might say. He looked at me for a moment. ‘Yours is to believe that you are a full citizen of the world, as important as anyone else, as clever and as lovable. Be proud, be boastful this week, Gerty.’

  *

  A letter arrived from Mr Kobelev.

  ‘Dear children,’ Pasha read aloud,

  ‘I write to you like some Eastern potentate, sitting under the shade of a pomegranate tree. Liza and Dima are supposed to be doing their lessons at the table with me, although at this moment Liza is whistling to a lizard while Dima attempts to trap it under a box. They have a great desire to keep one as a pet, but so far the local lizard population, wily Tatars that they are, have had no difficulty evading them. Your mother is resting, but this morning she was gathering peaches in the garden. After a difficult first couple of weeks, her health is much improved by this move – we should have decamped years ago. We eat fruit from the trees, we sun ourselves, and apart from my sallies into Yalta to find out news, we see no one. In short, all is well with us. And how is it with you, my dearests? This letter is being carried to Moscow by an acquaintance of ours. Please telegraph c/o Yalta Central Poste Restante. I am afraid that your mother is worrying about you. My regards to Miss Gerty; tell her that her pupils are missing her.

  ‘With fondest love, your father A.A.K.’

  ‘You see?’ said Pasha to his sister. ‘You are feeling guilty for abandoning people, and all the time they are sunbathing and stuffing themselves with peaches and pomegranates.’

  ‘What wonderful news—’ I gulped down the lump in my throat. ‘You must have been so anxious about them.’

  Sonya laughed and unexpectedly hugged me. ‘Dear Gerty, I know how much you have been worrying about them yourself. My mother, gathering peaches! And the little ones are having a real Crimean summer.’

  I extracted myself a little awkwardly. We were picking raspberries together in the thicket at the back of the laundry house. Cool morning shadows lay across the yard and the birds were chattering and splashing in the water trough, but the sky was already its brazen, flat, August blue. As Pasha came out with the letter I had just been calculating that we might make two dozen pots of raspberry jam from this harvest, and another two dozen of blueberry, and later there would be blackberries, if only we could get hold of enough sugar – that would provide our vitamins for the winter.

  ‘We may not end up measured characters, but we’ll certainly be rounded, if you have anything to do with it,’ remarked Pasha. ‘I hope you’re feeling proud and boastful, Gerty.’

  I laughed. ‘Ye
s – proud, boastful and rounded, that’s how I’m feeling.’

  It was typical of Pasha to have noticed Slavkin’s words; I wondered if he had also noted their effect on me. Ever since that evening I had been feeling – what, exactly? Expectant, a little flustered, excited – I thought I knew what he wanted of me. I wondered when would be a good moment to approach him, whether I dared disturb him while he was working. Now, propelled by the good news from the Kobelevs, I decided to take the plunge.

  ‘My basket’s full. I think I’ll take these indoors and prepare everything for jam-making,’ I said casually. ‘Do you mind finishing off?’

  I left the raspberries on the kitchen table and slipped quietly across the yard to the stable where Nikita was working on the Propaganda Machine. Whatever the commune thought of privacy, that day I wanted some time alone with him. I leant against the wall and watched him as he concentrated. He performed a little dance around the PropMash; bending down, twisting, fixing, standing back, contemplating, diving in again to drive in another nail. He was grinning to himself, occasionally laughing under his breath, muttering. I found myself smiling too. My stomach was fluttering.

  It was not until he almost tripped over my feet that he noticed me.

  ‘Oh! Devils. What time is it? Is it dinner?’

  ‘No, no, I just wanted a talk with you, please, Nikita—’