Читаем Byzantium Endures полностью

I wrote a brief letter to Esmé. Things went very well in Petrograd. We made sacrifices with the rest of the country but very soon we should sweep the barbarian back to his lair for good. In the meantime she could help the prisoners by teaching them Russian. It might be the language they would be required to speak after the War! I wrote to my mother. I am ashamed to say I asked no specific questions about her chill. Instead I said I was glad she was ‘basically well’. I was sure she would soon be over her sniffles; besides she had a nurse about the place now. My mother, I should say here, was a woman of fundamentally excellent health. She complained of poor health, like so many of us, when she needed a little extra sympathy. I preferred to give her my love, respect and understanding. This was more dignified, I felt. She understood. She said that as an intellectual, I could not always display the ‘direct emotions’ of ordinary people. In this she showed her usual perspicacity.

If I were to travel abroad, I would have to study harder. I reduced my visits to the Tango and the Reireat. I stopped going to the theatre and the kino with Kolya. I cut down on my visits to the whores. Instead I went more frequently to the flat I called privately ‘the virgins’ nest’. Here I was allowed to read, to write, to remain night and day, if I wished, being fed with relatively wholesome food and with all the tea and coffee I could drink. Marya’s father had been a well-to-do beverage merchant originally situated in Yalta before moving to Moldavia. Lena’s father, she said with some disdain, was a ‘factory-owner’ in Minsk. My interest in Lena increased to the degree that I came close to proposing marriage to Marya. However, neither of these virgins was approached by me. Though they would often purr around me like cats wanting cream, I displayed very little amorous interest in them. I was keeping them for security and tranquillity. Their sexual favours could wait until I was ready for them. When I slept there, I slept on the couch. I rarely let them see either what I read or what I wrote. Not only did they humour me, they became confused if they should accidentally move a book or even glance at a page.

It was only bit by bit I began to realise they considered me a foolish young Bakunin, plotting the downfall of the Tsar (the event which they sometimes toasted in tea, in low voices), and in one sense I was delighted by their misconception. It gave me even less respect for them. I felt no guilt about making use of them. Knowing as much as I did I was able to drop the odd revolutionary’s name. This meant far more to them than it did to me. Here, some of those who had bored me so badly in the cafés were heroes to them. They were merely two typical middle-class Russian girls prepared like so many of them to throw away their careers, their freedom, perhaps their lives, for someone who was not only a worthless troublemaker but who coldly schemed their ruin. Better they should devote themselves to me, who had a genuine cause. The flat came to be full of Iskras and Golos Trudas and inflammatory pamphlets. They kept them about, I believe, to impress me. In the end I had to explain that it was bad to ‘call attention to certain facts’ and that it would be best if they kept their anarchist literature elsewhere. They were full of apologies. The ill-printed, ill-written manifestos and declarations soon disappeared.

My work continued. I visited Kolya, but more frequently at his home (where Hippolyte still resided) than at our old haunts. He was becoming distressed with the progress of the War. He claimed we were as good as done for. I think the Petrograd winter had brought an earlier than usual melancholy. He said the Tsar was doomed. Feeling against Rasputin was high. The Tsar’s running of the War (he had taken personal command of the army) was as inept as his running of the country. Many officers, including some of the ‘old guard’, felt Nicholas should be replaced. ‘The Revolution,’ Kolya said, ‘will not come from an uprising in the streets this time. It will come from within.’

I said that newspapers were full of our triumphs against Germans and Turks alike. Brusilov was a great hero. We should soon occupy ‘both capitals of the Roman Empire’. Brusilov was a new Kutuzov.

Kolya smiled at me. As usual he wore black. His face seemed paler than ever, his hair all but invisible against the white light from the window. ‘What we really need,’ he said, ‘is a new Napoleon. French or Russian. We have no generals of genius. They can’t understand the terms. They have no precedents and that, Dimka my dear friend, is what destroys them. They are so used to relying on precedent.’

‘You mean tradition?’

‘I mean precedent. Precedent is a simple-minded way of imposing apparent order on the world. Yet it robs whoever employs it of his need to reach a personal moral decision. A decision which suits the situation.’