Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

  As a boy I was generally more interested in doing than seeing. I am by reputation an intellectual, but my chief instincts are those of a man of action. I owe my scholarship almost entirely to my mother. She insisted on my receiving an education far better than most of the other children in the neighbourhood. Fortunately she had a number of friends who, I suppose, were chiefly would-be candidates for her hand (she was a beautiful and vivacious woman) and they were helpful with advice about the best schools and what special subjects I should pursue. Our apartment was never without at least one visitor. Often there were many more, and they were by no means all Russians. In particular there was Captain Brown, the Scottish engineer, a gentleman living in reduced circumstances. He had a room off the same staircase as ours. He was rumoured to be a deserter from the Indian army. Certainly he knew a great deal about the North-West Frontier, Afghanistan and also the Caucasus, where he had spent several years (giving credence to the notion that he might be a deserter). I hardly heard him repeat a single story, he had so many: about Kazakhs, Turkmen, Tajiks and Kirghiz brigands, about Kabul and Samarkand, or the problems of building railways in Georgia. He was a small, dark man, always genial yet giving off a sense of restrained aggression, though he was very gentle with my mother in that careful, masculine, delicate way of someone almost afraid of their own strength. He not only taught me my first English words but he gave me the set of Pearson’s Magazine which was to supply so much of the reading of my boyhood and youth, make a crucial impression on my imagination and, subsequently, my ambition. I liked him the best, I think, because my mother found him such good company. She went with him to the opera and to the theatre far more often than she went with other admirers.

  Kurenvskaya was one of the most cosmopolitan suburbs. My mother was popular with her customers, who were chiefly unmarried men or the servants of well-to-do people. Some of them, doubtless from boredom or loneliness, would prolong their visits to the laundry. A few old regulars would be invited into her private office, a tiny room off the main floor of the laundry, where she would offer a glass of tea or perhaps some seedcake. Captain Brown could sometimes be found there but more frequently the chief visitors were minor officials, including Gleb Alfredovitch Korylenko. Tall, thin, lugubrious, with the appearance of a dissolute stork, he was the local postman. Previously he had been a sailor with our Black Sea Fleet until invalided home after the disaster at the hands of the wily Japanese in 1904. Gleb Alfredovitch was full of gossip and my mother and her little circle of women friends were willing listeners, though I suspect the postman and a few others were favoured chiefly because they could be of use in my education. Sometimes I would be allowed to listen while Korylenko retailed his stories of well-to-do locals. I would sit in a corner with a piece of cake in one hand, a glass of tea in the other, learning of worlds almost as romantic as those described by Captain Brown. I have a recollection of the smell of tea, of lemon, of cake, and the heavy mixture of soap and lye, starch and dye, the hot dampness of the steam which covered everything, so that newspapers and magazines were always curling and chairs and table-cloths and rugs were always just a little moist to the touch.

  The postman would occasionally come to the flat, along with one or two women and perhaps Captain Brown. They would bring a bottle of vodka and discuss the gossip from Moscow and St Petersburg and any scandal (with appropriate expressions of piety) concerning Rasputin and the Tsarina. Rasputin was well-known in his day—a wandering monk with a mesmeric personality and an adroit way of palming drugs into drinks, who wheedled himself into St Petersburg society where he led a life of total debauchery, seducing even the youngest of the Tsar’s little daughters. After a glass or two of vodka Korylenko was inclined to begin a tirade against the Court for its degeneracy. He believed that stronger men were needed to control the women, that Tsar Nicholas was too lenient. But my mother would hush him up. She would not accept any hint of political talk. She became highly nervous, for obvious reasons, at such references. Probably that was why I have always hated the tension engendered by political argument, which is always pointless. I have never judged anyone by the way he votes, so long as he does not try to get me to agree with him. And only a fool, of course, will vote himself into the slavery of socialism. In my life I have met all sorts of people. Their political beliefs rarely had much to do with their actions.

  During this period, I knew the company of adults far more than the friendship of children. I always had a certain amount of trouble in relating to other children. I suppose that once the adult world had been opened up for me the world of children seemed dull. I was not much liked, either, because I was party to grown-up intercourse and must have seemed precocious to envious would-be comrades.

  There was one little girl who admired me. Esmé was the daughter of a neighbour, a gentleman who had once, I suspect, been amongst Mother’s suitors. Mother was convinced that he was an anarchist living under an assumed name because he had escaped from Siberia. She had therefore discouraged him. There was no evidence, but my mother had learned to be more than cautious. No one could blame her for this. The name the gentleman gave was Loukianoff. He had been in the cavalry (he had a horseman’s way of walking) and lived, apparently, on a pension. Korylenko told us that Loukianoff’s wife had deserted him in Odessa for an English sea-captain, leaving their daughter when she was less than a year old. Loukianoff went out rarely. The most we usually saw of him was his washing, brought to the laundry by Esmé. I was flattered by Esmé’s admiration. Our friendship was frowned upon by my mother who saw an agent provocateur in a horse with a red ribbon in its tail. Esmé was a beautiful blonde-haired little creature, always dressed very neatly, who acted as her father’s housekeeper and shared, therefore, something of my own adult ways. We must have been a comical sight, two eight-year-olds discussing the cares of the world as I sometimes escorted her home from the laundry.

  I enjoyed Esmé’s company as an equal but felt nothing romantic towards her. My own heart was the sole property of a dark-eyed girl who hawked second-hand tin toys from a tray on a corner near the tram-stop. Sometimes she carried a cage in which sat a trained canary which would peck at letters and symbols in order to tell a person’s fortune. She was a genuine gypsy, I heard, from a camp in one of the gorges. I dared to go close to the camp on an overcast autumn afternoon. It was not what I had expected. There were no carved and painted caravans, just a collection of shanties and carts, of fires which sent dark smoke to the upper air. It was not the Heaven I had imagined. It was more a scene of Hell. To some extent this vision cooled my ardour and I no longer planned immediately to marry my sweetheart according to the customs of her own people (with the King of the Gypsies, of course, presiding) but I bought as many toys from her tray as I could afford, always got an excellent fortune told by her canary, and discovered that her name was Zoyea. She had red lips and curly black hair and a manner about her, even then, which was totally entrancing. I think her parents had been Rumanians. She had none of the passive femininity of my friend Esmé. She was neither modest nor quietly spoken. She used a patois similar to the rolling Southern Ukrainian dialect, full of words I could not understand and in which ‘a’s and ‘o’s were all mixed up. She carried herself with the swagger of a boy. Yet I believed she thought me attractive. Perhaps it was those eyes, which seemed to look with sexual calculation upon every living creature. My mother found her even more alarming an acquaintance than Esmé and, when I suggested inviting Zoyea home for tea, had one of her most elaborate attacks of hysteria. Thereafter, Esmé was never quite the persona non grata of former times.

  One day Zoyea was absent from her usual corner and I went to the shanty town to look for her. The camp had gone. All that remained was the sort of rubble gypsies leave the world over. I learned from a passer-by that the authorities had closed them down and moved them on. The tinkers had set out along the Fastov road, he thought, perhaps heading for the coast or the Crimea. He was pleased to see them go. He had lost more than one chicken since they
had put up their ramshackle village. I felt I had lost much more than a cheap supply of German toys.

  Hope took me to Bessarabskaya, as if I would find her amongst the organ-grinders, beggars and sellers of exotic pets, the noise and the colour of the market. I half-expected to see their carts, bearing their clay ovens and drainpipe samovar chimneys intact. There were several toy-sellers with their trays. They were all old men with long beards and insincere grins. There were tinkers, too, offering to mend pots and shoes, but my gypsy had left before the first snows and was on her way to the sun. I bought myself a twist of balabhuka, the famous Kiev confection, as consolation, and went home. I think that I was to see Zoyea again.

  During the following spring and summer Esmé and I would go for walks together in the nearby Kirillov woods. I remember most strongly the ravines and the smell of the massed lilacs in the summer rain as we sheltered at the top of a gorge looking down on another gypsy camp. It continued to rain. Gypsy fires sent orange flame and black smoke into the semi-darkness. We became wet enough to gain courage to ask for shelter. I led Esmé down the slippery slopes, getting nearer and nearer to a colourful rabble of wretches who at first ignored us and then greeted us with greedy caution, asking if we wished to buy a toy or a lucky charm. As these grimy bargains were displayed to us on grimier hands we dumbly shook our heads and, as the rain stopped, stumbled back up to the top of the ravine. We returned the next morning, still fascinated by our discovery, until Esmé became obsessed with the idea of our abduction and fled, leaving me once again to deal with the offerings, their sly grins and their soft voices. This particular band was moved on by the police a few days later and I believe it was my mother’s complaint which was the chief cause of this official action. I was forbidden ever to visit such a camp again.

  A little after this incident, both Esmé and I were enrolled in an excellent local school run by a dedicated German couple called Lustgarten. The fact that we were enrolled at the same time was, I learned from my disapproving mother, merely an unfortunate coincidence. I understood that a relative was helping pay for my studies, but I was never sure who this relative might be. Perhaps it was my Uncle Semyon—Semya, as we called him.

  He was strict and very generous with his malacca, but our lantern-jawed, grey-eyed Herr Lustgarten was an enthusiastic teacher. His greatest joy came from finding pupils in whom burned a genuine relish for knowledge. A very tall man with loose limbs, he wore a formal frockcoat and high collar. His black boots were always polished to mirrors. I see him now, his arms and legs flowing like scarves in a wind, his stick waving over his head, as he demonstrated some point in algebra. I was the kind of pupil he liked best. It became evident that I had a natural capacity for languages and mathematics. I gained a working knowledge of German and French, a little Czech, which the Lustgartens spoke excellently, having spent several years in Prague, and I already had Polish from Mother. English came chiefly from Captain Brown (who continued to encourage me in all my studies). Like so many others I had only a few words of Ukrainian. My first language was Russian. The mania for nationalism had not yet taken hold of Ukraine. Someone remarked to me not long ago that, deprived of their pogroms by the Reds, Ukrainians had turned to nationalism as a poor substitute. Well, I am no Jew-lover, but I am no nationalist, either. Herr Lustgarten, in common with many Germans of his generation, was somewhat philosemitic. My mother would have been horrified if she had heard his discourses on the Russian character. I recall a favourite topic almost word for word: ‘The Russian people,’ he would say, ‘are like the Americans. They have no sense of ethics, only of piety. Their Church, supported by the bureaucracy and the military, supplies them with a formula for living. It is why they look to novelists for ethical models; why such importance and respect is attached to the novelist. Why young men and women ape characters in Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky. These novelists are not merely writers of fiction, they are teachers, ascetics taking the place, for instance, of the Moravian Brothers in Germany and Bohemia, of Luther or John Wesley, of the Quakers. By and large Russians are a people without a moral creed, lest it be the simplest one of all: To serve God and the Tsar.’

  I have remembered Herr Lustgarten’s words because in some respects they were prophetic. The Russian people are again beginning to realise, I gather, the menace of the Zionist-Masonic conspiracy. I hear that the military is issuing instruction pamphlets warning soldiers of the dangers of international Zionism. As for the Yellow Peril, most Slavs are already only too well aware of that particular threat. The great creed Professor Lustgarten could never understand was the creed of Pan-Slavism, which flourished in Ukraine, heartland and birthplace of the greatest Slav state in the world. Potentially, it is the core of a single Slav state embracing Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, even parts of Greece. It could form a bastion of its own intense brand of Western culture against the decadence represented by America or the barbarism represented by the new Tatar Empire under Mao. The hair-splitting obsessions of Germanic theology are not for us. We are concerned with our destiny. Ukrainian nationalism is at odds with Pan-Slavism. That is why I was never a nationalist. I was born into the Russian Empire and it is my greatest wish to die there, too, though I fear it will be a little longer before the Russian people return wholeheartedly to their ancient heritage.

  Herr Lustgarten’s historical views did not always accord with my own but I found myself responding excellently to his tuition. He was delighted, and gave me extra lessons in the evenings. He assured me that if I pursued my studies diligently I would be sure of academic honours. My mother was ecstatic and it was satisfying to me that I was able to repay her for the sacrifices she had made. I had, she said, my father’s intellect, but I possessed her sense of values. I determined not to waste my brain as my father had wasted his. Mother accepted sewing work to pay for the extra courses and from the age of eleven (the year Stolypin was assassinated in Kiev) I received Mathematics and Science from Herr Lustgarten and Languages and Literature from Frau Lustgarten. This wonderful lady, as quiet and impassive and short and fat as her husband was volatile and lean, introduced me to the books which were to leave such a deep impression on me. Grimmelshausen, Dickens, Goethe, Hugo and Verne were all firm favourites by the time I was thirteen. I would also read the Pearson’s volumes which Captain Brown had given me. There were twenty-eight in all. I wish I owned them still. They would cost a fortune to buy, even if they existed. These were lost, with so much else, during the Civil War following Lenin’s usurping power. They had identical bindings of gold, blue and dark green on buff. I think I read every word in them at least twice. Here were the tales of H.G. Wells, Cutcliffe Hyne and Max Pemberton, Guy Boothby, Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Rafael Sabatini and Robert Barr are other names you rarely hear these days. Films, radio and television have completely destroyed literacy. The socialists have achieved their end: everyone is reduced to the level of the mouzhik. In my day we strove to improve ourselves. Today the common aim, even amongst the so-called educated classes, is to appear as stupid and as illiterate as possible.

  By 1913, then, my waking life consisted almost entirely of work and reading. I saw Esmé only on the way to school (girls were segregated from boys) and we rarely spoke of anything but our education. Her father was very ill and she abandoned lessons increasingly to look after him. She was an angel. Save for my lasting friendship with her, I was essentially a solitary child and had few acquaintances. This and my penchant for scholarship earned me the jealousy of most other boys and I suffered the most horrible insults, usually without demur. I had a friend for a little while. His name was Yuri and he was about my own age, though much poorer than us. He used to come and sit by our stove while I studied in the evenings. I would help him with his lessons. My mother was delighted that I had a new playmate. But then a few ornaments were missing and only Yuri could have taken them. Next day I taxed him with the theft. He was frank in admitting it. I asked him why he had stolen from us, who had shown him kindness, and recei
ved the most shocking reply.

  ‘Because you are Jews,’ he said. ‘Jews are fair game. Everyone says so.’ Sickened by this slur, I complained to Herr Lustgarten who seemed unsympathetic in a way I still cannot quite define. ‘I am the son of a Cossack,’ I told him and his wife. ‘Come home with me and I’ll prove it to you.’

  Herr Lustgarten brought Yuri home in order, he said, to make the thief return personally the things he had stolen. They were not all there, but what had been recovered was put back into my mother’s hands. Under the threat of Herr Lustgarten’s cane Yuri apologised, although it was evident that he felt victimised. I took down the hand-coloured photograph of my father in his shapka, his Cossack uniform. Proof, if ever it was needed, of his blood. I showed it to Yuri. His reply brought my mother to tears:

  ‘It’s just a picture. Everyone knows you’re a Jew’s bastard. What does a picture prove?’

  I attacked him, wrenching my schoolmaster’s cane from his thin hand and bringing it down over Yuri’s head. I have never experienced such fury. And this time, again unexpectedly, Herr Lustgarten was on my side. Yuri made threats involving the Black Hundreds (patriots who sought to control the insidious spread of Jewish power) and became contrite when Herr Lustgarten said he would dismiss him from the school and tell his parents the reason. That was the end of my friendship. Yuri later drew a band of fellow-spirits about him—not all, by any means, from the poorest class and began to make a misery of my life. This gang would pursue me home from school. It would offer me a ‘fair fight’ and, when I refused, chase behind me screaming names like Little Rabbi and Jerusalem Colonel—epithets which, in Kiev at that time, were not merely obnoxious slander; they could be, under specific conditions, the next thing to a death sentence. Accusations like that, though, were fairly common in my childhood, and often carried no weight at all. No more, say, than calling a mean man a Jew, even if it is obvious he has no semitic blood. Nonetheless, it was these insults more than the others—’Teacher’s pet’, ‘Toady’, ‘Sneak’, or even ‘Blockhead’—which would make me lose my temper and become involved in stupid stone-throwing bouts and fist-fights.