Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

  Esmé was allowed to visit me and it was to her that I described my plans for a modified ‘bird-man’ machine. Speaking to her of those who remained sceptical of my achievement, I mentioned the soldiers’ claim that I had merely tumbled down the gorge. She was indignant. ‘Of course you flew. Of course you did. You flew for miles and miles. All over Kiev!’ This was an exaggeration, naturally, from loyalty, but Esmé was well known for speaking the truth and was called ‘the little saint’ in our neighbourhood, for the way she looked after her father.

  When Esmé was not there (as all too often she could not be) I contented myself with reading in various languages and drawing up improved plans for my ‘flying infantry’. I wrote letters to our War Office, describing my success, but received no reply. It is quite possible that some jealous bureaucrat, perhaps Sikorski himself, made sure they never reached the proper hands. I also designed a wrist-teleprinter and worked out a means of bridging the Sea of Azov between Berdiansk and Yenikale, using semi-buoyant pontoons. These were just two of many designs which I was to lose during the Civil War, but they were far ahead of their time. I deeply regret not patenting any of my inventions. I was too trusting. The ‘word of mouth’ and ‘shake of hands’ which was good enough for honest people in my boyhood was merely, by the time I reached maturity, the mark of a thorough scoundrel. Had I been less gullible, I would be a millionaire by now. I would have been a millionaire, in fact, many times over, if only on the strength of my Ultra-Violet Light Projector.

  Also while in hospital I evolved my lifeplan, after the German fashion. I drew up a chart of the next few years, with all my various goals carefully listed. There was my education, my government work, my employment of agents to seek out Zoyea for me, the house I intended to buy for my mother where she could be looked after by Esmé and Captain Brown, whom I would employ at good wages. There was no reason to consider this plan unrealistic at the time.

  Revolutionists and fanatics again conspired to thwart my destiny, however, when, in August 1914, I was healed enough to consider taking the entrance exams at the Technical School. This time an assassination at Sarajevo—’the shot which rang round the world’—led to monstrous Armageddon, the First Great War, and my mother told me the disappointing news that Herr and Frau Lustgarten, those gentle scholars, had fled the country, apparently for Bohemia, fearing an expression of the anti-German feeling already experienced by a number of people with German-sounding names with shops in Kiev’s suburbs. So, between the Armenians and the Germans, I was suddenly without tutor or employer!

  It was left to my relatives to rescue me. Some of those to whom my mother had written had, by autumn, responded, including my paternal grandparents, whom I never knew, and Uncle Semya. Certainly there was now talk of my going to be educated in St Petersburg (this delighted me, for the best technical schools were there), but first Uncle Semya wanted me to go on holiday, to visit him in Odessa, all expenses paid. He never really explained why he wished to see me. I assumed he wanted to look over his ‘investment’. My mother found Uncle Semya’s interest in me rather suspicious. She did not care for him much. It seems to me now that he had come to pin most of his hopes on me, having failed to have sons who cared a jot for education. None of my cousins was particularly literate. I think this was a disappointment to him. He need not have worried. They were prepared for Russia’s future. Two of them at least became powerful Commissars during the terrible famines of the twenties and thirties. The Bolsheviks considered brute strength, cunning and blind obedience far more valuable than learning. It did not greatly matter to me why Uncle Semya agreed with my mother, as he agreed on no other subject, in the matter of my improvement. That he was prepared to give me both an education and a holiday was enough. The next few months looked exciting indeed. If I had already astounded Kiev, how might I astound the lazy natives of our Southern and most cosmopolitan metropolis, or the world-weary citizens of the capital itself?

  During the three weeks before I left, my mother was in tears. She packed and re-packed my few clothes. She made me swear not to fall in with radicals. Not to imitate flashy Odessa ways or speech. She made me promise to have nothing to do with ‘those crooks of Moldovanka’ (readers of the commissar-journalist Babel will know what I mean). She wept as she reminded me of her husband’s guessed-at fate. She wept as she reminded me to change my underwear. She was the most wonderful, caring mother a boy could wish for. I regret, now, that I did not humour her as much as I should have done. My patched-up skull was full of dreams about my future exploits. The night before I was to leave Kiev, Esmé came to our door with a St Christopher medal which her father had brought back from some foreign land. This she hung, with all proper gravity, around my neck. Then she hugged me. She kissed my cheeks. And she wept. When she had gone, my mother inspected the medal, suspicious that it might be associated in some way with sedition. It was only with reluctance, and some weeping, that she returned it to my neck. I found the medal extremely reassuring and wore it for a long time afterwards, to remind me that I had at least one loyal friend in Esmé.

  Soon after Esmé had gone, my cousin Alexander arrived. He was called by himself and everyone else ‘Shura’. He was a weasel-faced and cocky youth with the cropped hair and red-and-white chequered neck-scarf fashionable amongst his kind at the time. He left his small bag with us, refused my mother’s offer of food, condescendingly took half-a-glass of tea from our old samovar, and went into the city to accomplish some piece of slouching business. He returned with a tin of chocolate and something in a sack which he put immediately into his luggage, to my mother’s great anxiety. He had had more than a little vodka (few paid attention to our prohibition laws) and stood at the stove rubbing his hands together and winking at me.

  My poor mother came close to fainting and hurried him into our other room where he was to sleep. He did not go to sleep at once. In the darkness, where I lay on my shelf for the last time, I heard him singing some mysteriously lewd song in his soft, trilling Odessa accent, while my mother sniffled complicated counterpoint on her couch. I have every sympathy with her: Shura was not the most reassuring of escorts for a son who was to leave the city for the first time alone.

  She accompanied us to the station. Even by September 1914 the trainservices had begun to be disrupted (though there were extra trains to important places like Odessa) and tickets were becoming hard to acquire. Nonetheless Shura spirited us through all the formalities, through all the early-morning crowds of uniformed police and soldiers and sailors—a sea of multi-coloured cloth and gold braid—through the sweetmeat sellers, the drinks-vendors, the sellers of charts and lurid magazines or newspapers. How Russia was full of men, women and children with trays around their necks in those days. In his knowledge of the station, its peculiar customs and denizens, Shura was at least able to comfort my mother. ‘I suppose if you must go into the world, it is better to go with a worldly guide,’ she said, when he had vanished for a moment to engage some pinch-faced maiden in furious conversation before returning with a swagger and a handful of long-stemmed cigarettes, one of which he offered to me. I refused, of course. My mother told Shura of the dangers of smoking and warned him how upset his Uncle Semya would be if he learned that the ‘little scholar’ had been corrupted. Shura took all this with a kind of pitying tolerance for both of us and then announced that the train was in and that we should board it.

  My mother came with us. She followed us along the gangway of our coach, distracting me from my admiration of its wonders: its galley, its stove. This was one of the finest expresses of the South Western Railway. She was a real beauty of a locomotive (probably a 4-6-4, though I cannot now recall the exact type) whose livery of dark green, gold and cream was matched in all the coaches. It was a very long train, comprised entirely of first- and second-class carriages. There was no third-class accommodation on this Kiev-Odessa Express, which could normally do the journey in under fourteen hours. Even the steam from the loco seemed whiter and cleaner and more impressive than t
he steam from other trains. In some of the further platforms I saw troop-transports with heavy artillery on flat-cars and these, together with the large number of armed servicemen in the station itself, were a clear reminder that we were a nation at war. Once again I felt the old urge to don a uniform. I remarked to Shura that he must be looking forward to the moment when he was called to the service of his country. His only response was to puff on his papyrussa cigarette and offer me another of his winks. My mother burst into tears at the thought of my joining the army and she was comforted by the easy-going Shura in that same spirit of tolerant contempt. Through some trick he found us both places in a compartment and let me bid farewell to my mother while he kept the seats for us.

  The collar of my new coat was damp with her tears before the guard told her kindly that she must leave. Shura shouted that she should fear nothing, that if the driver lost his way Shura would be able to put him on the right track. This raised a laugh from the other occupants of the carriage and drew a last snuffle or two from my mother, who kissed me and went to stand on the platform, dabbing at her eyes and producing, every so often, a kind of agitated grin. I took my seat. Shura and I stood out from most of the other passengers in that we were younger and did not wear uniform. Most of the people in our carriage were soldiers, sailors and nurses, all of whom were smiling at us with that peculiar complacency those who wear uniform often reserve for those who do not.

  This was to be the first long train journey I recall with proper clarity (there are hazy impressions of our journey from Tsaritsyn to Kiev). It was to span the whole day, from eight-thirty in the morning until late into the night, but I should have been glad if it had gone on forever. The train was taking me to a new world of romance comprised partly of Hope’s Ruritania, partly of Pushkin’s poetry, and of Green’s book The Cap of Invisibility, with its tales of exotic ports and flawless sapphire seas. I was prepared to sit in my place the whole way, but Shura had me up almost as soon as the train left the station, and my mother’s limp and glistening handkerchief, behind. He wanted to show me the first-class carriages. So we made a tour of the train, playing the innocent whenever an official asked us what we were about, telling him that we had lost our carriage.

  I was astonished at the luxury of the first-class, at the deep-green plush, the polished brass and oak. Shura told me that he had travelled first-class more than once, but I did not believe him. He knew, he said, how to act like a gentleman: ‘It will be my job some day.’

  I could not imagine what business he planned for himself. What could elevate him permanently to this world of plush and glitter? I did not, however, disapprove of his ambition. Those wonderful carriages looked like the abode of angels and smelled like a well-groomed beast. And the people who inhabited them were demigods. I loved them. I longed to share their life, to be accepted by them.

  I was to retain my enjoyment of luxurious travel no matter how frequently I came to experience it. It raised me from the deepest gloom to the highest imaginable sense of well-being. Some years would pass before I was to familiarise myself thoroughly with that most delicious form of transport. It has now all but disappeared from the world. Today it is replaced by the utilitarianism of plastic and nylon; the bleak, characterless, ‘efficient’ State-operated railways and airlines. And not only the trains have steamed their way into oblivion. The great ships, the monarchs of the Cunard and P&O Lines, have gone completely. What do we have instead? Car ferries. No wonder all the transport-systems are losing money. What human being really wishes to travel in something resembling a less-than-clean hospital ward? As one who has used every form of modern transport, from the great prewar liners to the sadly missed and much-maligned Zeppelin passenger ships, I can honestly say that democratisation has worked entirely against everyone’s interest, including the public’s. Save for a few pathetic cruise vessels, there is nothing left of the flying boats and luxury steamers which so frequently confirmed the maxim that to travel was better than to arrive.

  When I speak nostalgically in the pub about the C-class Imperial Airways planes, I am laughed at openly. Those ignorant polyhybrids occupying their featureless housing estates resent anyone who remembers days when ‘civilisation’ was something more than a word for labour-exchanges and municipal art galleries. Romance has vanished from their lives. They could not recognise it now if they were handed it on a plate (as they are handed everything else). They mock the past. They ape only its most tawdry and ‘glamorous’ aspects. For them Sensation has become everything. They cultivate cynicism as their mothers and fathers cultivated ‘sophistication’. They are quite as ludicrous as those shop-girls and sad clerks who filled the dance-halls of the twenties and thirties and were despised by genuine high society. They share another thing: they have no respect for their elders. They have no imagination. Yet they flock to see films like Murder on the Orient Express. Do they believe that the likes of them would have been allowed to set even a grubby boot on the footplate of such trains? In my day ‘skinheads’ and ‘teddy boys’ knew their place. In the gutter! They have the transport they deserve: hidden in the lower depths, noisy and dirty and claustrophobic, fit only for H.G. Wells’s bestial Morlocks.

  If I did not exactly feel like an Eloi by the time we returned to our seats I certainly felt like a prince. The sense of comfort and security was everywhere in the train. And it was obvious that many of our fellow-passengers shared this mood. Every place in the compartment was, of course, taken. There were uniformed people filling the corridors. It was almost impossible to see past them to the mellow wheatlands of the Ukrainian steppe, now churned with chaff and scattered with sheaves and haystacks, for the harvest had been gathered. The sky had that wonderful pale-gold and silver-blue quality which comes at about nine o’clock in the morning, promising a warm autumn day. The two Catholic nursing nuns, one in her twenties and the other apparently not yet reached maturity, asked if the window could be opened and we all agreed that it would be good to have some fresh air. I offered to open it for them, but failed to understand the sash-cord method. To my great embarrassment Shura had to help me. The wind blew the smell of the countryside, sweet and rich, into my face, and my spirits rose again. As well as the nuns, who had the window seats, we shared space with two youngish naval lieutenants; a Cossack captain in grey shapka and kaftan, with bullet pouches and a wide belt, into which was stuck a dagger and from which hung a typical Cossack sword; a gentleman in a dark homburg hat and coat, with an astrakhan collar; and a Greek priest who spoke little Russian but who smiled at us a great deal, as if in blessing. The Cossack captain sat next to Shura and more or less opposite me. He had a clean-shaven jaw but a huge, curling grey moustache with waxed ends. He sat with his sabre between his knees, his back stiff and unsupported by the seat behind him, as if he rode an invisible horse. He had that manner Cossacks often have, of his horse never being very far away, and I imagined (though in all likelihood I was wrong) that a box at the end of the train bore a chestnut stallion.

  Having asked for the window to be opened, the nuns faced one another apparently in telepathic communication. They spoke not a word for the whole journey, making it embarrassing when we needed to approach the window to buy something from a platform vendor if the train stopped at a station. These vendors lacked the smoothness of the Kiev hawkers, but they were just as noisy. Bare-footed peasant women offered us cakes or fresh milk, and their grandfathers brought up samovars on trolleys and described in husky bellows the refreshing properties of their tea. Children were there in plenty, rarely selling anything, merely begging us for a few kopeks. The nuns would sit with their feet just above the floor of the train, their skirts arranged to cover their toes, while we did everything in our power to avoid contact with them (all, that is, save Shura). It was Shura, half in the carriage after some panting expedition along the platform, who found his hand placed firmly in one’s lap and apologised. Later, in the corridor, he murmured some crude speculation when they did not appear to be listening, wondering at their ?
??impossible capacity’. I scarcely understood him, but the naval officers, who had overheard, enjoyed the joke. I blushed. The Greek priest laughed uncomprehendingly along with the sailors, while the man in the astrakhan collar grumbled into his copy of Neeva— The Cornfield—magazine.

  Shura got into conversation with the Cossack, who seemed to like him. The captain said he was a supply-officer going to Odessa to arrange for certain provisions and equipment for his unit. He could not, of course, tell us anything more. He was amused when I mentioned that my father had also been a Cossack. Shura laughed, too, telling me to be quiet. Claims of that sort, he said with a look at the captain, could get me into trouble. The navy men were all the way from Moscow, where they had been on leave, and were full of tales about the delights of Russia’s second great city. These delights were hinted at with looks and whispers to Shura. He was only a little older than me but seemed far more worldly, understanding the full meaning of the innuendoes, made obscure so as not to shock the nuns who, Shura swore, were nonetheless listening avidly.

  The good-natured Cossack was soon offering vodka which was accepted by the priest, refused by the gentleman in the hat, ignored by the nuns. He pushed his woolly shapka on the back of his grey head and unbuttoned his kaftan to reveal a shirt embroidered in black and red. He had blue breeches and soft leather boots and seemed at once more free and more of a soldier than any others on the train. At our request he showed us his long sabre, his shorter dagger and his pistol, but allowed us to handle none of them. Of the sabre he said ‘it must never be drawn, save to be blooded’, though he displayed an inch or two so that we could see the engraving (in Georgian by the look of it) on the hilt. ‘These blades,’ he said, ‘are so sharp that a moth settling on them would find itself cut in half before it realised anything had happened. It would only find out when it tried to fly away again!’