Slavkin shook his head. ‘I’ll be gone before you return.’
‘Gone? Where to?’ My voice emerged squeakily, like a little girl.
He did glance at me then – he caught my eye for a moment, and afterwards it always seemed to me that there was pity in that look. ‘Tonight I must begin the experiment,’ he said.
Pasha shook him by the shoulders, ‘For God’s sake, can’t you see how ill Sonya is? What the hell are you talking about, you bastard? Why now? Where’s the timetable?’
‘I’ll stay with you,’ I tried to say to him. ‘I must talk to you—’
‘No!’ Slavkin blurted, shrinking away from me with a look of horror, and Pasha took me by the hand and led me away from him. I was crying as we went out to the cart, stumbling over the snowdrifts. As we left the yard I turned and saw him for the last time.
He started towards us, raising his hand and mouthing something, I didn’t catch what; then he changed his mind and stopped, hand still raised, a shadow against the snow as we rounded the corner.
17
In the early hours of the morning, I left the others gathered around Sonya’s hospital bed and set out across the dark city to Gagarinsky Lane. It was as though I were making my way through some long-abandoned ruin. The wind had dropped; it was long past curfew, the streets were deserted and thick with new snow. The bluish, luminous snowlight was my only guide. I stumbled into hidden craters in the road and heaps of rubble, terrified I would fall and hurt the baby.
The icicles strung along roofs and balconies were too menacing to use the pavements, so I kept to the middle of the road. I had never seen such icicles as that year, huge, tubular specimens like baroque organ-pipes now that no one had the job of knocking them down. Some grew to several metres, sharpened each freezing night. Stories circulated of people injured and killed by their sudden descent. As a Communist, the thought flashed through my mind, I do my best to be rational, to make sense of the world in scientific terms. Yet one person walks down the street safely, while the next is felled by an icicle: what sense can one make of that?
God forgive me, I was not planning to give Nikita the news about Sonya’s health straight away. I pushed aside the image in my mind of her thin hands plucking at the blanket as I rehearsed my first remarks: ‘Nikita – now we are alone, I have something to tell you, something that concerns us both . . .’
*
As I approached the house on Gagarinsky Lane my anxiety increased. The windows were unlit.
‘Nikita, are you here?’
The door of his workshop stood ajar. In the dim light it was hard to make sense of what I saw – smashed and broken equipment, a lamp leaning drunkenly. The Socialisation Capsules were gone. Their stands lay overturned in the centre of the room.
A quavering voice in the hall: ‘Gospodi pomilui – Lord have mercy—’
‘Anna Vladimirovna.’ I hurried to her. ‘You’re so cold, come and sit down.’
‘It’s all too unpleasant.’ In the study she sat and glared at me, trembling.
‘What is?’ I sank to my knees before her and took a deep breath. ‘What happened?’
‘I was looking for you, where have you been? I was frozen, I wanted that boy to light the stove, so I looked into his room. I just peeped in, I didn’t mean any harm by it, but he caught sight of me and started shouting to leave him alone – he raised his voice to me! So I left, I fell in the hall and bruised myself—’ She sniffed, furiously. ‘I dragged myself in here and hid, and he carried on shouting. I thought he was coming to murder me! And then I heard him start up his engine, and he left . . .’
‘Oh dear.’ I tucked a blanket around her; my hands were shaking. ‘Bednyashka, poor dear, I’m sorry. We’ll try to get warm now. I’ll put the kettle on, we’ll drink tea. How did you know that Slavkin had left?’
‘It all went quiet and when I came out to see, he’d gone.’
‘What did the engine sound like?’
‘Bozhe moi, it just sounded normal, noisy – then it faded into the distance.’ She paused for a moment and added peevishly, ‘I’ve never liked him, such an odd boy. It wasn’t very kind of you to leave me with him . . .’
I stood up. ‘Let me make the tea now.’
As I stepped out into the yard to fetch water, I gazed up at the dark sky, spread dustily with stars from one horizon to the other, galaxy upon galaxy – universe upon universe. For one cloudless, happy night, I knew exactly where Nikita had gone.
*
Then the fog rolled in, a swirl of conflicting accounts that continued for decades. Pravda ran an article on the 23rd:
The inventor, Nikita Gavrilovich Slavkin, was reported missing last night from the commune that he founded, known as the Institute of Revolutionary Transformation. Fellow members of the Institute have not seen him for several days and attest that the inventions he was working on are missing from his workshop. The probability is that he, like many of the Avant-Garde, has left for the capitalist West. Slavkin has already been reprimanded for the fanciful turn that his researches have been taking; there is a distinctly pessimistic element to his theories. It would be typical of this strain of false Communism that Slavkin should abandon his duties to the Soviet motherland and leave for some dusty, nostalgia-soaked café in Berlin or Paris. We expect to hear reports soon of his posturing for the benefit of the French and German bourgeoisie.
Sonya, I am glad to say, never read this piece of official venom. Towards the end she seemed to think Nikita was with her. She fell into a coma on the 22nd, and died on 24 January in the isolation ward of the Golitsyn Hospital. So quickly – that was how typhus took you. She was buried the same day in the temporary cemetery near the hospital; Pasha hoped that once the Civil War was over, he’d be able to transfer her remains to Mikhailovka, where his grandparents and great-grandparents were buried. The whole commune was at her funeral, apart from Nikita. Vera and Volodya had heard the news from Marina, and had tracked Fyodor down at work. The day was bitterly cold and windy, we had to haggle for a coffin with a vile fellow outside the hospital, and I couldn’t believe the girl that I had known and lived with for almost six years was being laid in the ground. I didn’t feel like crying. I was in a breathless panic at the thought that her smile was gone, her vain little way of pouting out her lips, her breathy laughter when Pasha teased her, the look of adoration she used to turn on Nikita that enraged me – all gone. Her poor, weak pleading right at the end.
Poor Pasha was distraught. ‘She should have gone abroad with Mama and Papa. I persuaded her to come back.’
All I could say to comfort him was that it was her choice. ‘We shouldn’t deny her that.’ She was brave, I thought. She was more honest with herself than any of us.
Afterwards we all went back to Gagarinsky Lane, where Volodya produced a copy of Pravda. We read the piece once, twice, three times.
‘So has he? Has Slavkin gone abroad?’ said Volodya at last.
‘No—’ Both Pasha and I answered together; then he bit his lip and looked away.
‘No,’ I repeated. ‘He would never have left us like that, without telling us.’
‘Surely he wouldn’t have left Sonya in hospital,’ murmured Marina.
There was a silence in the room.
‘Apparently there’s some sort of grant they are handing out to academics in Czechoslovakia,’ said Fyodor. ‘Quite a few Russians are receiving it. Perhaps he’s gone to save the work – we know how close he felt he was.’
‘Why would he not have told us?’
‘Perhaps he couldn’t bear to,’ said Vera softly. ‘He had to save himself, and his inventions—’
‘Where did he go after the lecture?’ Pasha asked Fyodor. ‘Do you know where your colleagues took him?’
‘No. They congratulated him, said how impressed they were, which I must say surprised me because I thought his talk very confused, didn’t you? But they apparently approved of it, and they said that they wanted him to work for them. And Nikita got more
and more excited, you know how he did, gabbling away, and they suggested they go to the Polytechnic café to discuss it further. I left them to it.’
‘They were Russian, were they?’
‘Yes, Russian, normal people – kulturniye, cultured.’ This was always Fedya’s highest praise.
‘They could have planned his journey this week,’ put in Vera.
‘They’d be hard pushed to organise it in one week,’ I objected. ‘It takes people a month at least to get a passport, let alone a visa.’
‘He could have been thinking about it for a while.’ Volodya’s voice was hard. ‘After all, didn’t he tell you? He said he wouldn’t be here when you got back.’
‘But he didn’t mean a journey abroad, a train journey,’ I whispered.
‘What did he mean then?’ Fyodor, matter of fact.
‘He meant . . . I thought he meant . . . Pasha, you knew more about it than me. He said something like this might happen, didn’t he?’
‘You mean his idea that his Capsule might transport people into another dimension? I didn’t know how seriously he meant that. It was a theoretical possibility, but . . . I said, “Nikita, are you telling me you’ve invented a Time Machine?” He loved that, he couldn’t stop laughing about it. “That’s very well said,” he kept repeating. “A Time Machine.” He came back to the idea a couple of times. “Of course my Time Machine is an improvement on most, because it uses so little fuel, and it’s so simple to make the return journey – one merely needs to set the Capsule back to the original frequencies.” “Yes, H. G. Wells would be jealous,” I told him, and we laughed together . . . He was in high spirits those days before the lecture, wasn’t he? I was just pleased to see him so cheerful.’
‘Sonya believed it,’ I said slowly. ‘That’s why he built two Capsules, so that they could go together. But what I don’t understand, in that case, is why would he go without her?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ snapped Volodya, getting up. ‘You people will believe anything! What, you think his machine whisked him away to a better place? With Father Christmas and the Snow Maiden? Leaving behind his girlfriend dying in hospital and, so I hear, a baby on the way. Congratulations, Miss Gerty,’ he added spitefully. ‘How does it feel to be in Vera’s shoes? Except you’re not, are you – the father seems to have run away. The sooner you realise that the only thought that man ever had was for himself, the better.’
*
I gathered up the courage to go and see Pelyagin the following day. Surely, I kept thinking, if Nikita had simply been arrested, we would have been informed by now – his name would have appeared in the papers. But my last conversation with Pelyagin was all I could think of. Had Slavkin’s disappearance anything to do with my tirade? I was not sleeping. Adrenalin fizzed and popped horribly in my veins. It was all I could do not to blurt out my fears twenty times a day. But I kept them to myself.
‘Comrade, I’m afraid . . .’ Rosa Gershtein half rose from her desk at the sight of me as if to bar my path, but Pelyagin had already looked up.
‘Comrade Pelyagin,’ I called past her. ‘Please, may I come in?’
He looked a little annoyed. ‘Comrade, I thought we understood each other. I don’t need any more lessons, thank you. I hope you received my gift?’
‘Yes, of course, I quite understand. Your English has already made such progress I don’t believe I had a great deal more to teach you!’ My laugh came out as a hideous, artificial sort of trill.
He considered me, and turned back to his papers. I flushed deep red. What I had said and done the last time we met was obviously as distasteful for him to recall as it was for me, and he wanted nothing more to do with me. But still I had to know – what exactly had he understood by it?
‘I’ve come on another matter, comrade. You have perhaps heard that since we last spoke, our friend Nikita Slavkin has gone missing. We’ve heard no word from him now for over a week.’
‘I really don’t have time,’ he said, not looking up.
‘Please—’ As a gift I had brought him a copy of Dickens’s Dombey and Son; this I now thrust towards him clumsily. ‘I beg you. You helped us before, and we were so grateful. I came here to try to thank you in person then, but was sent away.’ I sat in front of his desk and looked him straight in the eye. ‘I know you quite well from our lessons, comrade. You are an honest person, a man of integrity. Last time we met I was not myself, and you kindly offered me comfort. Now, I beg you, tell me – have the Cheka had any dealings with Slavkin? The things I said – you didn’t misinterpret them, did you, for I never meant . . .’
‘Goodness me, that’s enough!’ broke in Pelyagin, jumping up and walking over to the window. ‘What’s all this about? What makes you think I’d have the least interest in what you say about Slavkin? You must have realised that his type doesn’t appeal to me, these weird avant-garde sorts with all sorts of wild ideas—’ There was a pause, and he spoke simply. ‘Comrade Freely, I hope I would always try to assist you in any way that I could. But in this case, I’m sorry to say, I can’t help. As it happens, for your sake I have made my own enquiries. If I had discovered anything I would have come to you myself. But I heard nothing.’
‘So the Cheka . . .’
‘He’s not being held by the Cheka, that I can assure you.’
I leaned forward, wanting to shake his hand; I was so grateful for this effort on his part. ‘Oh, thank you!’
He gaped at me then with a new expression, something close to revulsion. I stepped back. ‘Forgive me.’
‘That’s all I have to tell you on the matter.’ Pelyagin sat back down at his desk. ‘Goodbye.’
As I hurried home, full of relief and hope, a glimpse of myself in a shop window stopped me in my tracks. The wind blew my wrapper against my body and I suddenly realised the cause of Pelaygin’s repelled look. My pregnancy was clearly visible. My poor little one, what a reaction to provoke.
*
In February the frost dipped down to minus 27 and then kept falling, into the thirties. The house on Gagarinsky Lane, which had been crumbling long before the Revolution, now began to crack up in earnest. In the early part of the winter we burnt the beams and doors from the stables. Now we moved on to the panelling, the shutters and even the floorboards in some rooms. Chunks of plaster fell from the walls, revealing the brickwork underneath.
After Sonya’s death Marina moved into accommodation for doctors near Chistiye Prudi. She was distraught, blamed herself for insisting on taking Sonya to hospital. Anna Vladimirovna also moved out to live with Vera and Volodya; she had developed a fear of the Kobelevs’ house, her home for so many years, ever since the night Slavkin disappeared. ‘I can’t be expected to live here now that strange one has ruined it – now he’s driven everyone away.’
Only Pasha and I were left of the members of the IRT. When Nikita returned, I wanted to be there to meet him.
My pregnancy began to slow me down. I was out of breath after the slightest exertion; I was worn out, and yet could not sleep for more than a few hours at a time. Just recently I had felt my baby move inside me for the first time – usually such a cause for joy for prospective mothers. Instead I was terrified. I willed away the time with work, a medical translation job that Marina had found for me.
The hope I’d felt on leaving Pelyagin’s office had not entirely faded. The longer we didn’t hear from Slavkin, the more certain I was that he hadn’t gone abroad. We had made enquiries of everyone we knew, but there was no breath of a rumour that he was in Europe. Anna Vladimirovna still insisted that he and his machine had left together – ‘Just like that! The engine started up, and . . . poof!’ Pasha and I moved into Slavkin’s workshop, giving up the other rooms in the house to new inhabitants. I insisted on keeping the stands for the Capsules exactly where they had been, not moving them by so much as an inch.
Then a colleague of Pasha’s, on the condition of strict secrecy, showed him a confidential publication by the Department of Mobilisation
of Sciences, a division of Narkompros, dated 18 February 1919, that listed current research by Soviet scientists in government facilities. Among the list, the following phrase appeared: ‘N. G. Slavkin, study into Transformational Science’. In the column that listed the research faculty, there was only a line of stars. What could this mean? Could it simply be a typing error – some tired secretary copying out last year’s list without checking? In which case, surely his area of study would have been ‘Possible Applications of Iridium Alloys’? And what of the line of stars?
Everyone had heard rumours of secret State-run institutions where Soviet scientists were creating astonishing new technologies. This was the first sign either of us had come across that they might exist. Pasha and I went immediately to Lunacharsky. He had been supportive of Slavkin’s research, even if he had dismissed the Propaganda Machine. Waiting outside his office, I felt almost faint, suddenly, with relief. Surely at last we were to hear the truth.
‘Come in, come in!’ Lunacharsky stood to greet us, shook both our hands warmly. He read the list slowly. ‘I rather think you need not worry,’ he said at last.
‘Not worry? Why’s that? Is he working in a government laboratory?’
He said nothing, simply looking at us both kindly. ‘I am not at liberty to tell you,’ he murmured at last. ‘We are at war; certain freedoms are not available to us as they would be during peacetime. Can you, foot soldiers, simply accept what I, your commanding officer, tell you? Slavkin is putting his talents to work for the future of our country. That is all you can know.’
Darkness had fallen by the time we emerged onto Ostozhenka Street. By the door we gathered up two or three sharp stones and set off towards home. If the dogs got too close we threw them, not very accurately, but as hard as we could. On one occasion there was a sharp crack and an anguished yelping retreat. Hurrying, breathless, keeping to the shadows, I found myself grinning like a madwoman in the dark.
The Vanishing Futurist Page 18