The Vanishing Futurist

by Charlotte Hobson

  ‘I will accompany you as far as you wish me to, of course. Then I suppose I’ll continue my work at Narkompros.’

  I stared at him. ‘But you’ve impersonated a Cheka official – you’re in danger too.’

  ‘I doubt Sister Serafima would identify me.’

  His expression was stony, a look that I would not have recognised on him a couple of years ago. Weakly, I changed the subject.

  ‘How will we get tickets to Petrograd? People wait for weeks to get them . . .’

  ‘Volodya might be able to help us. But we shouldn’t spend a minute more than we need at Gagarinsky Lane. I’m willing to bet Pelyagin’s men will have been round to tell the neighbours to report our return.’

  We waited in the woods for the next train, a goods vehicle that we managed to scramble aboard. We sat on the running plate until it arrived just outside Paveletsky station in Moscow at six in the evening. I was very cold, very tired and my belly seemed to be growing heavier and more uncomfortable each moment. Until then I had given little thought to the birth, but now it suddenly filled my mind. I had little more than a month left. I wanted to beg Pasha to promise he would stay with me at least until the baby was born, but he looked so grim I didn’t have the courage to raise the subject.

  ‘Perhaps we can rest somewhere?’

  ‘If you want.’ Outside the station we found an old woman with a little card saying simply ‘Bed’. She took us to her room, in the basement of an old apartment building, and showed us the bed she meant – her own. We lay down and covered ourselves with our coats and she sat on a chair, keeping a close eye on us. At some point I woke in the night and found her trying to undo my shoelaces. I pushed her away but she clung on for a while, glaring at me reproachfully. Finally she let go and sat back down again.

  During the hours of night Slavkin’s hands, with their long, pallid, Orthodox fingers, appeared in my dream. His gentle manner with the old ladies, his smile. ‘Guardian angels’, he remarked once to me, ‘are a scientific fact.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘Yes, a fact! They are the electric current that guides us, unknowing, through our lives . . . towards one decision, away from another. On what do we base our decisions? Most of them spring from an instinctive response, very few are based on logic. And yet we make good decisions much of the time. Like animals, we have a natural instinct for the electromagnetic currents of the Universe.’

  We left before dawn and walked up to Gagarinsky Lane to collect our passports and a few belongings. I shoved the surviving IRT papers into a couple of boxes and, in return for the last of our food supplies, the metalworker’s wife agreed to deliver them to the British Embassy. Volodya, miraculously, managed to obtain tickets for us that evening, to travel under false papers as a Communist Party member and his wife, going to take up a post in Petrograd. Once in Petrograd, we took turns all day to queue for tickets to Narva. The train left the following morning on a twenty-four-hour journey, much of which was spent stopping, starting and crawling into sidings for hours at a time. Around midnight, our compartment fell silent and I finally plucked up the courage to speak to Pasha.

  I put my lips up against his ear and whispered as quietly as I could.

  ‘I wanted to ask . . . I mean, I don’t want to press you . . . but I wondered if you would mind very much if I asked you to marry me?’

  A pause.

  ‘I didn’t know whether I should ask you, what with the – the matter of the baby, and of course marriage itself is utterly bourgeois, against both our principles. I quite understand if you refuse . . .’

  He still said nothing but I could feel him pulling away from me.

  ‘No, I’ve started this all wrong. Wait, please, it’s nothing to do with Revolutionary principles. You’re right, of course I loved Nikita – we both love Nikita, we will never stop loving him. But I made a mistake. I misunderstood what love felt like, do you see? For whatever reason – I don’t know why – I thought of love as something difficult, something I should suffer for.’ I swallowed hard, floundering. ‘I – I didn’t realise I loved you, because it was just so easy, and warm, and good . . .’

  He tried to speak, but I was determined not to be interrupted. ‘The fact is, now I know that I love you, I have to say so. I can’t let you disappear, and I’m terrified that when we get to the border they might not let you through, or they might take me off somewhere separate, or . . . or who knows what they might do to you, don’t you understand?’ I was gabbling by this time and my voice was rising. Suddenly I felt his finger on my lips.

  ‘Sh. No – no.’

  ‘No?’ My voice rose to a squeak.

  ‘No, I don’t mind marrying you, my darling love. You absolute idiot. And also no, I don’t care about the matter of the baby, and it’s not against my principles. And no, I am not going to disappear. I didn’t think you wanted me to come with you . . .’

  ‘Oh . . . Good.’

  We started laughing weakly in the dark, and trying to stifle our laughter, which had the result of mild hysteria.

  ‘Oh, shut your gobs!’ snapped the market trader squashed beside us. ‘You’re shaking the bed up like a bloody blancmange!’

  That didn’t help. It was some moments before I could compose myself. Then Pasha whispered in my ear, ‘Let’s do it now, then, shall we?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get married.’

  ‘Oh! How?’

  ‘We each say our vows to the other. I, Pavel Aleksandrovich Kobelev, take you, Getrude Freely—’

  ‘Gertrude Adelaide.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know. How delightful. Gertrude Adelaide Freely, as my beloved wife. I vow to love you, care for you, kiss you, and always tell you the truth, till death us do part.’

  ‘And not to disappear.’

  ‘And not to disappear. Now you.’

  ‘I, Gertrude Adelaide Freely, take you, Pavel Aleksandrovich Kobelev, as my beloved husband. I vow to love you, care for you, and always be truthful, till death us do part.’

  ‘And to kiss me. You can start that now.’

  We kissed, in the darkness, all the way to the border.

  Finally we were told to disembark. At the checkpoint they kept us waiting for hours, searching through the mound of luggage that our fellow travellers were carrying. My stomach began to ache so painfully that I was convinced that labour had begun. I begged them to let me get to the hospital in Reval. The young customs officer looked alarmed, and went to consult his superior.

  ‘Go on,’ snapped the senior officer, jerking his head. ‘Get out of here. We’re not a crèche!’

  Holding hands, Pasha and I walked across the bridge over the muddy, turgid Narva river and into Estonia.

  *

  We were married for the second time in Reval (or Tallinn, as it had just been renamed). The city was battered by civil war itself, but to us it seemed the epitome of peace. Its shops were magically stuffed with goods, and in the streets people strolled about and appeared not to be thinking about food at all. With our last funds we bought ourselves clothes and visited the barber. I remember the delicious luxury of lying back in the barber’s chair, only the snippety-snip of the scissors breaking the silence, the previous months falling away from me as each long curl landed on the floor. We bathed ourselves carefully in the digs we had taken near the station and dressed in our new clothes, like children going to First Communion. Outside the Guild Hall we bought a bunch of snowdrops from an old woman. Half an hour later, we emerged with a marriage certificate.

  The Kobelevs had friends, perhaps even distant cousins, the Rauds, who had an estate south of Tallinn. I hadn’t met them, but before the war they had been frequent visitors in Moscow and Pasha had visited their estate as a child. We sent a telegram on our arrival, and the next we knew, several days after our wedding, was Mark Raud himself arriving at our door in a pony-trap, embracing us both, and insisting we eat the picnic he had brought with him from the estate. A big,
stern figure, he stood over us, hushing us while we ate.

  ‘Now get in the trap,’ he ordered, ‘and you can tell me the news of the family while we travel. I want to get you back to Jarvekula straight away. I am sorry to say such a thing, but you look terrible, my children. Never mind, thank God the war is over in Estonia, at least. You will have your baby here, my dear.’

  The year was just tipping over into spring; every day the ground dried out a little more and the buds swelled. The Rauds, kind, generous people that they were, housed us for almost six months. Like all women waiting for their first baby to be born, I could not quite believe that an entirely new person was about to arrive in the world. I was scared – not so much that our living conditions might have affected her (I could sense how healthy she was inside me), nor of the birth itself, but of the great burden of sorrow that she would immediately have to shoulder. Yet when, in the middle of April, she emerged – you emerged – tiny and hairy-eared as a little wood sprite, with large, serene, dark eyes, I saw that my fears were quite irrelevant. We called you Sophia – for Sonya, and also for the calm wisdom that you seemed to exude. You immediately knew what to do, eating, sleeping and looking about you with lovely solemnity. I was tired, of course, in the first months, but now my little Sophy was here, the terrible events of the past year seemed somehow to make more sense.

  In September we packed up and sailed for Paris, after exacting a promise from the Rauds that they would visit us soon. You were by then a solid baby with creases on your wrists and a throaty little laugh and Pasha had, at last, tracked down his parents. We had heard nothing from them more recently than November 1918, when they had left Russia for Marseilles. As a last resort, Pasha wrote to put an advertisement in the Figaro. A week later, to our amazement, a boy came up the track to Jarvekula with not one but three telegrams in his hand, all from Mr Kobelev. The first: ‘Dearest children we are in Paris stop your mother Liza Dima all well stop send news.’ The second: ‘Dears come immediately I will wire funds Bank of Estonia.’ The third, simply: ‘All to meet boat Calais.’

  Before we left, we decided to tell Pasha’s father about Sonya by telegram. We felt it was better that he break the news to the others gently, before we arrived. There was a part of me that dreaded seeing them; again and again I saw poor Sonya lying on the divan in the study, glassy-eyed, while I tried to feed her broth.

  The thought also struck me now, as it had signally failed to do when Pasha and I were signing our marriage certificate at the Guild Hall, that the Kobelevs might be less than pleased at their new daughter-in-law and their not-quite-granddaughter. Pasha and I agreed on an official line: we had had a Communist wedding in Russia, but having lost our papers in our hurried exit from Russia we’d decided to formalise our situation in Tallinn. It went without saying that you were his daughter.

  My beloved Sophy, you’ve already learnt so many shocking and terrifying facts about your birth in these pages that perhaps the date of your birth will hardly matter to you; yet all these years, you know, I have held a little private celebration for you in mid-April, a private thanksgiving for my daughter accompanied by a plea for your forgiveness at having deceived you. All your life you have celebrated your birthday a month late, in mid-May; this began when we sailed out of Estonia. We could not risk his parents counting up the months and wondering how you could have been conceived when Pasha was still in the Crimea.

  We came down the gangplank at Calais into a sea of waiting, anxious faces. I was carrying you, Pasha was heaving our suitcases; he was shaking with emotion. Where were they? And then – Liza. I saw her before she saw us, a tall, pale girl of sixteen, her expression reserved, chewing her lip – and suddenly she caught sight of her brother. She let out a piercing scream, and jumped in the air, blazing with joy. Beside her Dima began to wave and shout – ‘Over here! Over here!’ And pushing forward, Mr Kobelev, barely taller than his son, grey-haired, beaming and crinkling up his eyes which were already full of tears and his wife beside him . . . It was more than we could do to say anything at all; we embraced each other, round and round, and you smiled so sweetly at your grandparents, your aunt and uncle, and as your grandmother laid her cheek against your silken baby head, she let out a terrible sob, and said, ‘Sonya.’

  We stayed with them in Paris for some weeks, until everything that could be said had been said; we told them everything, only keeping from them the truth about your father for your sake as well as for my own. The story of my ideals and my actions seemed too strange and confused for them to understand; maybe I couldn’t make sense of them to myself, either. It was a relief for me to edit out those months when I loved Nikita and when I would have done anything to make him love me.

  This set the pattern for Pasha’s and my life together. In every other detail than biological Pasha was your father, as you know; he was devoted to you. I never managed to have another child; and once I asked Pasha if he was sad not to have more children. ‘Why on earth would I be,’ he said, hugging you to him, ‘when I have my own angel?’

  We set up home in London, it being easier for both of us to find work here, and after a couple of years your grandparents joined us. Mr Kobelev was taken on by the Ethnography department at London University and Mrs Kobelev, who had, through some extraordinary strength of character, cured herself during their exile, now set up a small dressmaking business in the East End. She employed several other Russian women and proved an effective businesswoman. Liza went to veterinary college – I was so proud of her – she was one of only five female students accepted in 1923; and although she married before she qualified, she has practised as a veterinary assistant to her husband for many years. Dima grew into one of those English schoolboys, mighty in their cricket whites, whose charm and good looks waft them through life on golden wings. He started up endless business ventures and different careers, none of which led to a great deal, but no matter – his friends always came to his rescue with a new proposal. He seemed more English than any of us, although of course his faint accent and his name bequeathed him the lifelong nickname ‘Cossack’.

  My parents did their duty and came to pay their respects to their new son-in-law and their granddaughter, but they made no bones about their discomfort and returned to Truro as soon as they could. My mother’s remark when (in a weak moment) I asked her what she thought of Pasha – Paul since we arrived in England – passed into family lore.

  ‘Well,’ she said, giving it some consideration, ‘he’s a little too interesting for you, dear.’

  And so he was. We spent a good life together, with you, and later your boys, our grandchildren; his work in publishing, mine in the library; our political lives – both lifelong Socialists. We were an ordinary family, bourgeois by the IRT’s reckoning, although over the years it seemed to me that the daily demands of being a parent and attempting to hold onto one’s principles were a far more effective and gruelling programme of transformation than we ever envisaged in the commune. We grew old; our lives were not marked by any exceptional achievements, if you discount the raising of one clever, serious daughter who from the age of five had a tendency to dismantle every machine she ever came across, who – despite her parents’ lack of scientific ability – became a mineralogist and studied for a PhD in rare earth metals, who brought up her two sons to dream of social justice.

  *

  Yet still I couldn’t shake off my fear. Mothers love daughters – but do daughters love mothers? My mother and I were never close. I have always dreaded the day, which seemed to me inevitable, when the world would somehow force the truth about your father upon you. I knew I didn’t deserve you. The longer I kept all this from you, the more convinced I was of it.

  Since I began this account, without quite admitting it to myself, I have been reducing my rations. I have had this tendency throughout my life; the greater the store of tins under my stairs, the less I can bring myself to eat. I’ve never given this cycle much thought, but I notice now that the details which cause the nausea to ri
se in me are to do with shame. The endless self-deceptions that I’ve been acting and re-enacting all these years – it’s reminders of these that make me long for the acid rush in my throat, the clean, scoured emptiness afterwards.

  At first the lies were such well-intentioned, small sprouts, necessary for the cause, but over the years they grew up into forests, blocking out the light. Since Paul died things have looked pretty dark.

  And yet I write these words, in fact I’ve written the last chapter, in your sitting room, after I fell and injured myself in my kitchen. I lay there unconscious for some hours, apparently, before you found me and called an ambulance. For some reason, when I came round in hospital I did not wake up woozily but was alert the moment I opened my eyes. You were sitting by my bed and I watched your worried face for perhaps a full minute. Then you looked around and noticed that my eyes were open. I watched as your dear face lit up, tears in your eyes. ‘Mama . . .’

  It struck me then that, at the very least, I owe you the respect not to pre-judge you. Otherwise how can history fail to repeat itself? Paul had been trying to convince me of this for years, but I suppose I needed to find my own way to the realisation. This account is, on a minuscule scale, my plan for a better future for us both. You still have to read these pages. I dread how they might hurt you. Yet I turn them over to you now in the certainty of your open heart and your powerful, generous imagination – the legacies of both your fathers – and in the hope, one day, of your understanding.

  22

  And so, at last, to the reappearance of the Vanishing Futurist.

  With each year that passed, Nikita Slavkin became more celebrated. His scientific achievements were recognised in several ways: he was named a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ for his contributions to science in several areas including particle physics, and in the 1950s his pioneering experiments with iridium electroplating led to its use in the Soviet rocketry programme.