The Vanishing Futurist

by Charlotte Hobson

  ‘Yes, I mean it!’ he rushed over to Nikita and shouted in his face. ‘Fuck you! How dare you sabotage my attempts at progress, you bastard? How dare you treat me with this disrespect when we have gone through with all your half-baked idiotic whimsical “experiments”, your narcotic counter-revolutionary fancies! You’ll suffer for this, you cretin, I’ll make sure you do!’

  A pause while we all stared aghast at Fyodor, scarlet in the face and shiny with sweat. ‘And fuck all of you too!’ he screamed, his voice breaking, as he stormed out of the room.

  The Red Guards upstairs broke into applause. Fyodor stamped downstairs and out of the front door, slamming it behind him.

  Sonya was the first to speak up. ‘I do understand what Fyodor means,’ she murmured.

  Nikita looked at her, and we all waited.

  ‘I should probably apologise to him then, should I?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, Nikita, well done,’ said Dr Marina bossily. ‘And by the way I think we can all agree that you’d be better off spending the time on the Capsule.’

  ‘Perhaps these evening meetings have run their course, just for the moment?’ I suggested. ‘Could we have a holiday, so to speak, until Pasha and Volodya return?’

  I immediately regretted having mentioned their names. Vera burst into tears and Sonya jumped up to comfort her.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Sonya rounded on me. ‘Gerty, you are as bad as Fyodor. There’s no need to say everything that pops into your head!’

  *

  As usual, Pelyagin had a few tasks to finish off when I arrived at his office. I sat down to wait for him and looked around. The room was warm and stuffy, and there was the usual faint smell of food from the canteen. His assistant was not there; I watched Pelyagin working methodically through his papers, scanning, signing, placing them on one pile or another. A delicious sensation of peace crept through me; I removed my coat and leant back in the chair, feeling the muscles in my back and legs relax, the tension in my forehead seep away. My eyes drifted shut . . .

  ‘My apologies, Comrade Freely.’ Pelyagin was standing over me and there was an expression on his face . . . I gazed at him, trying to read it. ‘I’ve kept you waiting,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I fetch some coffee from the canteen, and something to eat?’

  He left the room. Flustered, I struggled upright and tried to make myself tidy. I took the Illustrated London News out of my bag and bent over it as he entered, carrying a cup and a bag of rusks.

  ‘Goodness, coffee!’ I exclaimed. ‘I haven’t tasted it for months.’

  ‘They call this coffee. I think it is made out of wood chippings.’

  We both laughed, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of a younger Pelyagin, a boy with a loose, aimless grin.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said diffidently, sitting opposite me. ‘I couldn’t help with the housing compression. It is not my department, you know. I talked to my colleagues but they were not sympathetic. Are you managing to continue your communal work?’

  ‘Oh, yes, we are managing – although things are not easy at the moment, we have some personality clashes – it is inevitable, it may even be a necessary part of the evolution of the commune.’ Suddenly my loneliness came out in a wail. ‘But it is hard . . .’

  ‘I’m . . . I’m sure you will persevere.’

  I leant forward and put my hand on his arm.

  ‘I really am so grateful to you for doing what you could.’

  He almost snatched his arm away. ‘We must start work.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Please, read this passage for me.’ As he stumbled his way through an article on recent innovations in the Manchester textile industry, I drank the rest of my coffee and tried to calm down. I was becoming morbidly sensitive. It was poor nutrition and lack of sunshine, no doubt.

  *

  Summons to Nikolai Gavrilovich Slavkin to a Labour Tribunal at the Centre for Revolutionary Research, 29 November 1918.

  . . . Comrade Slavkin takes as his starting point obscure and esoteric theories of ‘quantisation’ and develops these theories erratically and with little evidence of either mathematical or empirical backing for his work. We cannot allow the limited resources of the Centre to be wasted.

  The tribunal will take place on 12 January 1918.

  I don’t think Nikita ever apologised to Fyodor. While I was with Pelyagin – a strange little stage-lit excerpt from winter – this summons to justify his working methods arrived from the workers of the Centre.

  According to Sonya, he fell into a panic on reading these words. ‘He was shaking and gasping for breath,’ she told me. ‘You know that funny little twitch he sometimes has? I think it’s from the narcotic, he’s been taking it quite often. He wouldn’t listen to anything I said – he didn’t seem to be able to hear me. He ran out into the night and the only thing I could do was to go after him. He ran all the way to Bryansk station and I thought I’d lost him among the crowds. Then I found him just standing at the bottom of the main steps – in everyone’s way – he didn’t recognise me, Gerty. I stood with him and we were being pushed here and there by the crowds, but he wouldn’t move a step, it was as though he was made of stone. At last a station guard shouted at him and dragged him out of the way, and that seemed to wake him up. He looked around as if he didn’t know where he was and then he saw me, and I could see him wondering who I was, and then it dawned on him and he smiled . . .’ She smiled too, at the memory.

  ‘Romance, for Revolutionaries, is as horrid a perversion as anything the French Marquis dreamt of.’ I said it aloud, without quite meaning to; Sonya frowned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, something Nikita once told me . . . I thought he meant it.’

  Sonya stood up, turned away, her voice cold. ‘Don’t you need to get on with your chores? Fyodor will reduce your rations if you’re not careful. I can manage him perfectly well . . .’

  I glanced over to the mattress in the corner of his workshop. Nikita was sleeping now; I had arrived back to find Sonya struggling with him in the hall. He was refusing to go upstairs, shouting that he must work, that he didn’t have any time to lose, and so on. He agreed to lie down only when we made up a bed next to his workbench.

  In the centre of the workshop, on stands, were two long metal pods the shape of canoes, lined with cotton wadding. On the outside they were encrusted with electrical circuits and batteries made out of the iron bars Volodya had successfully purloined from the railway station, copper wire from Marina’s hospital, vinegar I had bartered for at the market.

  ‘Why is he building two Capsules?’ I asked.

  ‘He wants me to test it with him. Just in case, you know . . .’

  I swivelled towards her. ‘In case of what?’

  ‘I’d better not say – it’s just a remote possibility . . .’ But there was something about her smile, half suppressed, that filled me with miserable rage. I was shaking as I left. Anna Vladimirovna was calling me, but I stood for a while in the hall until I had gained control of myself. Then I heard Vera’s voice calling too.

  ‘Gerty! Please, Gerty, we need you! It’s Mamzelle . . .’

  *

  Mademoiselle Bourget looked as if she were sleeping. Her small, wrinkled face was pale and calm, her eyebrows very slightly raised. My first thought was how very thin she had become. The bones in her skull were clearly visible through her wisps of grey hair. Her jawline was horribly sharp. That morning she had complained of the cold and when I set off to see Pelyagin I had wrapped her in my blankets as well as her own. In her faint voice she had thanked me.

  ‘Fille sage, c’est-ce que tu es . . . très sage . . .’

  Now it seemed that those were her last words. No one recalled her having said anything while I was out. She had always been shy; like the gentle little creature she was, she had left us at the quietest moment in the day, when all of us were out at work and even her old companion was taking a nap.

  ‘I woke up and tried to speak to her, and she didn’t
answer!’ Anna Vladimirovna kept repeating. ‘It’s most distressing! She’s always been with me, ever since I came to live in this house!’

  I persuaded the old lady to sit outside in the hall while Vera and I laid Mamzelle out. She was so light that we were able to lift her easily. There were no flowers, but we lit what candles we had and arranged them around her. When the others returned we sat quietly with her. There seemed little to say about her. I realised that I knew nothing about her childhood or her family; I’d never heard her mention anything about her life before she came to the Kobelevs. A lonely, unassuming soul, a governess through and through. I began to cry and suddenly I was sobbing noisily and burying my face in my apron. Yet even those tears, I reflected bitterly, were not for Mamzelle.

  14

  By December we had developed the habit of going straight to bed, fully dressed, the moment we arrived home – that way we preserved any heat we might have managed to create by walking. All of us were malnourished. Sonya had twice fainted in the street. I had been feeling dizzy and nauseous for some weeks; occasionally I had no desire even for our meagre rations. Now, of course, I’m an old lady and I need very little food. But I still feel the urge, now and again, to control hunger by embracing it; the strange pleasure of not eating.

  The Centre had relieved Slavkin of his post due to his nervous collapse and articles began to appear in the papers accusing him of various Bolshevik taboos – ‘spiritual tendencies’, ‘self-indulgent bourgeois experimentation’.

  ‘This is to be expected,’ Nikita said shortly. ‘They don’t understand particle physics. Before a great advance in science you will always find nay-sayers.’ The Socialisation Capsules, he thought, would soon be ready for trials.

  Instead of our evening meetings we chatted and read aloud – poetry, usually. Novels we avoided not for any political reason but for their unbearably detailed descriptions of meals. Blok’s poem The Twelve, which had come out earlier that year, was strangely cheering, despite its subject matter – a prostitute murdered by an ex-lover. Its rollicking pace was as catchy as a marching song, and its slogans and red flag, starving dog, fear and hope felt entirely familiar to us. The last lines, in which one glimpses the shadowy figure leading the twelve Red Guards, always made the hairs on my neck stand on end:

  So they march with sovereign tread . . .

  Behind them limps the hungry dog,

  and wrapped in wild snow at their head

  carrying a blood-red flag –

  soft-footed where the blizzard swirls,

  invulnerable where bullets cross –

  crowned with a crown of snowflake pearls,

  a flowery diadem of frost,

  ahead of them goes Jesus Christ.

  ‘I feel it, don’t you?’ said Nikita slowly, from the dark corner where he lay, ‘the scouring out of the old. Almost everything will go, almost all of us, we will be hollow shells, baked clean and white, to receive the future. It is happening already – time itself is speeding up to allow for the transformation. Look at the children – a child of five is already an adult these days. Look at us – decades have passed in the last year.’

  We glanced around at each other’s pallid, wasted faces, at our old, tired bodies.

  ‘Don’t be afraid. This is all as it should be. This reality must cease to exist in order for the other to be imaginable.’

  We shall all die here, like this, lying around this stove, I thought to myself, and nausea rose up inside me again.

  A knock at the door, and all of us froze for a long minute. A visit so late meant danger. Since the end of August the only vehicles in the streets at night time were the Cheka’s Black Marias; sitting in the dark we had watched them in Starokonyushenny Street and on the Arbat, swinging their headlights into the courtyards, car doors banging, torchlight, shouting, making their way through the buildings, weeping voices, hurried steps down the stairs, slam, slam, engine gunning, and a black pool of silence behind them.

  Door on the chain, Fyodor opened it cautiously. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘I’ve come from Mikhailovka,’ muttered a small, dark figure. ‘It’s Golubukhin.’

  ‘Golubukhin!’ Sonya struggled upright. ‘Good heavens! Come in . . .’

  As she hurried him towards the stove, I recognised the head coachman from Mikhailovka, stooped, with a grimy, lined face and half-frozen fingers wrapped in rags. Formerly he had had a certain swagger – in charge of the busy stables and a renowned trainer of horses and dogs, a rogue who could be found in a drunken stupor at every horse market in the region.

  ‘How are things at Mikhailovka? Look, we’ve some warm water, have a little tea – sit down and warm yourself.’

  ‘Here . . .’ With a sigh he swung the heavy bag off his back. ‘It’s only a little, all that we could spare this winter.’ He untied the sack and to our amazement we saw that it was three-quarters full of millet.

  ‘My dear,’ said Sonya softly. ‘You brought that all the way from Mikhailovka?’

  He bowed slightly. ‘Glad to do my bit, your honour,’ he muttered.

  He had put his life at risk several times over by this act. Carrying goods without the right documents on the train; crossing Moscow after the curfew; let alone removing a whole sack of corn from his village during a winter like this one – any of these could have earned him a bullet in the head.

  ‘Well, you see, your brother comes to Mikhailovka,’ Golubukhin began. He sat and accepted a cup of our brackish tea. ‘He and Yakov’s boy arrive in the night, oh, must have been four weeks ago – before All Souls’, about the day of Our Lady in October – waking up half the village with their shouting and joking around, they haven’t changed. So by the next morning the local Soviet hears that a former landlord is in the village and they’re planning to come up and get him, and of course my wife’s sister, you remember her, miss? Paulina, her name is, that helped in the nursery—’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course . . .’

  ‘Her man Alyosha Gumiltsev is a commissar now, Paulina goes in mortal fear of him, but anyway she ran up to us and told us, she was always fond of all of you, and so I went over to Yakov’s to tell the boys to make themselves scarce. But I was too late, see, and I was just passing the church when Commissars Debryakov and Gumiltsev come riding in (they took Star and Rowan for their own use, miss, you remember them? Beautiful beasts they were, it breaks my heart to see them now) and another Bolshevik with them, and so I stood back in the porch and I saw them dragging the boys out and taking them off. Paulina tried to find out what had become of them and it seems Gumiltsev said they were mixed up in some kind of counter-revolution.’ He hesitated, glancing at the slack faces around him. ‘Well—’ He cleared his throat. ‘Your family were good to me, your excellencies, I had nothing to complain of from your father and mother, so I thought I’d better come and let you know. It’s not easy to travel these days as you know, took me several weeks to get away, but they can just throw you in prison and forget about you, this lot . . .’

  Sonya was trembling. ‘Bozhe moi. How do we find them?’

  Nikita went over to her and placed his hands on her shoulders. ‘This will be a simple matter,’ he said slowly, looking her in the eye. ‘Tomorrow morning we go to Lunacharsky, and tell him that a worker in his own department and his colleague have been mistakenly placed under arrest. We’ll get them out all right.’

  ‘But . . . counter-revolution!’ she blurted out, starting to cry.

  I said nothing, but lay in bed fuming at her. Really, didn’t she understand anything? These confusions were unfortunate, but there was no need to panic. Sonya was physically weak, and, I thought to myself, mentally unreliable as well. After some time I got up and went out into the dark hall, hoping some air would clear my head.

  A rustle from the corner . . . I jumped aside.

  ‘Vera, what are you doing there?’

  She was slumped on the floor, hugging her knees. When she looked up I saw her face was red and swollen with tears. Of
course . . . in all the drama I had not thought of Vera.

  ‘Oh Vera, don’t cry,’ I murmured, placing my hand awkwardly on her back. ‘We’ll get Volodya back—’

  ‘But I haven’t even told him.’

  ‘What?’

  Her face crumpled and she wailed, ‘Don’t you see, I’m having his baby . . .’

  Suddenly I could see, quite clearly – the greasy plumpness of her face, her breathless, saggy bosoms. ‘What have you done?’ I heard my voice as though it were someone else’s. ‘You deceived us, didn’t you? You carried on with your . . . your entanglement. Oh Vera, how could you?’

  *

  That night in the dark dormitory, lit only by a smoky flicker from our stove, we listened as Golubukhin told us in his hoarse voice about affairs in Mikhailovka since the October Revolution. The last time I visited was in August 1917, with the little children and the usual entourage of staff. In my mind Mikhailovka was still white-columned, still standing in a haze of sunshine and green shade, the buzz of bluebottles and frogs croaking in the evening light.

  ‘It was summer, a warm night with a big moon,’ Golubukhin began diffidently. ‘Word had been going round and there was a fair old crowd, led by the boys back from the Army, but they came from all over – everyone felt they had to join in, you see. Frielen, the steward, saw them coming and tried to run away with his family but he left it too late, they caught him and began to beat him, he screamed like a girl. He’d squeezed them for twenty years, after all. Anyway he wasn’t too hot but his wife got him and the children away, he’s in Moscow now, I hear. And then they carted out the furniture and passed it around, and the pictures and objects and that, “loot the looters”, you know – some people have got all sorts in their huts now, carpets and china, but most of it was broken straight away – the pictures got a boot through them and the furniture was smashed up. They were drunk of course – the first place they went was the cellar – and crazy too. They were prancing around dressed up in the fine clothes, and shooting out the fireplaces and the windows. And then we smelt smoke and someone shouted ‘Krasny Petukh!’ – the red cockerel, you know, fire – and I and my boys ran to let the horses out – I wasn’t leaving them to be burnt. Most of them got rounded up later and sent off to the front. I told you already about Star and Rowan and, miss, your mare was grabbed by that fat old Pryanishnikov and he’s beaten her half to death already. I tell you, it breaks my heart to think of the animals. But the fire fairly ripped through the house, I’ve never seen anything like it, the flames must have been fifty arshin high . . .’ There was a ghost of a smile in his voice. ‘We were drunk on it all for three days, like a wedding.’