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‘Until the War is over, at least. You should be reading only German science and philosophy and I should be studying Goethe. I shall go to - where? - Munich? Or study with the Moravian Brothers, as George Meredith did. There I shall become a proper, mystical German intellectual. In the new German Empire - the Holy Roman Empire - we shall become good Goths. We shall forget Paris. Paris and Petersburg alike will be provincial towns. Berlin will become the capital of the world. Art will flourish there, nurtured by our Russian genius, as it flourished in Berlin before the War. We will be like the Chinese, Dimka, and let ourselves be conquered, only to conquer secretly by means of our superior culture, our Slavic heritage. No longer shall we imitate the French and the English and the Italians. We shall become the architects of the new Empire. We shall present plans for a Kremlin in Berlin and our very energy and freshness will impress the German Caesar so that in time everything will take on a Russian tinge. Why should we worry about military victory when our greatest weapon lies in our Slavic genius! And you, Dimka, will show the world what Russian science can accomplish, because you are Russian at heart. As Russian as me!’

I presumed he was referring to my Ukrainian background. Sometimes he could make mysterious pronouncements which completely confused me. But I was never able to interrupt Count Nicholai Petroff in these soliloquies and rarely saw any point in trying. It was like listening to inspiring music. To interrupt him would have been like interrupting our Russian hymns, like shouting a contradiction in the Alexander Nevski Cathedral in the middle of a Kyrie Eleison or Pomychlayu deny a Strachnya. For all his absorption of foreign poets, his admiration of the foreign artists displayed by Shchukin and Morosoff, those two bizarre art-collecting figures, my friend was wholly Russian. He was the spirit of an incredible rediscovery of the Slavic soul which had begun in the nineteenth century. It would have continued well into the twentieth if it had not been aborted by little men with little Western ideas from Germany and America and England, carried by that carrier of all political diseases, the ubiquitous Jew. No wonder that the old Pale of Settlement was the most fought-over area of the Empire during the Civil War.

By September Kolya and I were possibly the closest we had ever been. I had returned to school to continue the impression of an attentive student. St Petersburg began to smell not of apathy any longer, but of fear. It was tangible, even as I travelled into the suburbs on the tram. Neighbour was beginning to distrust neighbour. Gangs of pinch-faced men in black coats and hats moved between factory and working-class suburb with a silence holding more menace than complaint. Madame Zinovieff became harsher in her criticism of me, of the girls and their fiancés, of the urban world in general. On my monthly visit to Mr Green I was warned to ‘tread carefully’ and advised to purchase a money-belt in which to keep my allowance. He said that Uncle Semya had written to him to ask him how my studies went. I said extremely well. I was bound to jump a year in my next class. Mr Green said I must soon use my gift for languages and my ‘knowledge of machinery’ to pay a visit abroad for Uncle Semya who was considering importing farm-machinery. I asked for more details. Mr Green would tell me nothing more, save that my education ‘would be put to some use at last’. Did Uncle Semya have a job waiting for me when I left the Polytechnic? I enjoyed the prospect of going abroad.

As if to counter the fear in the city, the military displays became grander. Golden banners, portraits of the Tsar, rattling drums, shrilling trumpets daily filled the city. The National Anthem was played on every possible occasion. It was at this time, to escape the empty display, that I took to wandering about the docks, a book under my arm, looking at the ships and gear which would begin to disappear as the Neva froze. I wondered where Uncle Semya was sending me. I watched the donkeys hauling fish from the little sailing boats. I admired the steam-launches with their short funnels and strange, busy motion. Beyond them the great ironclads and the few passenger ships of the Baltic Shipping Company lay at anchor, a picture of tranquillity, or stasis. Sometimes a wild, banshee wail would come from one or another of the ships. Occasionally it was possible to watch an old-fashioned brig or schooner in full sail, leaving perhaps for Finland or Norway, or even heading out towards England. I was sure that England would be my own destination. It was not more than two or three days away from here.