Byzantium Endures (13 page)

I understood how Shura’s connections with the bohemians and their connections with the underworld could prove useful for a businessman wishing to keep his finger on the pulse of the city. My admiration increased for Uncle Semya’s good-hearted pragmatism. Rather than force Shura to take a regular job in the office, he paid my cousin to be his contact with the people he obviously could not deal with personally. People who would not trust him even if he did approach them. I asked Shura how he had first found Esau’s. He said that it was instinctive; he had grown up in the area. He had had to earn his own living for years. His mother, like mine, was a widow. When he was ten, she had run off to Warsaw with a farm-implement salesman. She must have felt, as he put it, that he was old enough to live on his own. I commiserated, but he laughed and patted my arm. ‘Don’t fret for me, little Max. She was my only dependant. When she went, I became a rich man.’

I said nothing about Uncle Semya. It was obvious that our uncle had taken pity on Shura as he had taken pity on me. He made the most of Shura’s talents as he planned for me to make the most of mine.

As we went by the parks and lawns, the trees and fretwork datchas of Fountain, we smelled the last of the acacias. Unspoiled beaches, cliffs yellow with broom, like scrambled egg; the white gothic mansions of industrialists; the more modest houses of people who had retired to Odessa for their health. There were famous artists living there, too, said Shura.

In the square Shura left me outside Uncle Semya’s. He was anxious to keep his appointment. It was about five. I had time to wash and change into my more familiar clothes, speak a few words to Wanda and ask when we were to eat. She said about six. I could go downstairs to the parlour, if I wished, to see Aunt Genia. The window was no longer quite the lure it had been that morning so I decided to do as Wanda suggested.

I knocked on the door of the parlour. Aunt Genia’s pleasant warble bade me enter. The room was full of light from the street. In it were books and magazines and newspapers of all descriptions. There were potted plants and photographs and deep chairs. A mirror, into which were stuck dozens of postcards, mostly from Vanya, hung over a modern art nouveau what-not. There were pictures on the walls, mostly romantic scenes of the provincial Ukraine. Aunt Genia put down her book. She invited me to sit in one of the comfortable chairs opposite her (there was no stove in the room, but there were radiators near the window and the far wall) and tell her how I had liked Odessa. I told her, of course, all I could, leaving out some of the parts which I thought might alarm her. I told her about the tram-ride to Fountain and she agreed that it was a very beautiful district, that she might like to retire there herself one day ‘if God spared her’. The district had originally possessed a spring which supplied the whole of Odessa with water. Nowadays half the houses were unoccupied during the winter. Since she was a girl they had come more and more to be used for holidays. There were, she said, too many restaurants and pleasure-gardens. Had I seen Arcadia? I said that I had. That, she said, was the worst. A gong sounded. She rose with a sigh. ‘Dinner.’ There were also, she said, too many children at Fountain in the summer and not enough in the winter, while the limans on the other side of town had nothing but old people trying to prolong their lives by a few miserable months. ‘Women of that sort seek immortality,’ she said, ‘in baths of mud or the arms of monks. There’s not much to choose between them.’ I wondered if this was another reference to Rasputin. Odessans, for all that they lived close to many representatives of the Tsar, had extraordinarily loose tongues.

Uncle Semya had also changed for dinner. He now wore a dark suit and his hands were free of ink. Wanda served the three of us and then sat down to join in. Uncle Semya spoke of ’consignments’ and ‘bills of lading’ for a while as he enjoyed the delicious cold yushka of the sort we used to call ‘country-style’. During the pickled herring, which Wanda went to fetch, he complained about ‘Moscow crooks’ who had bargained him out of most of his profit on some barrels of olives. By the time we had reached the main course, which was boiled beef in horse-radish with potatoes in butter, he had mellowed enough to generalise about the progress of the War. I was unable to concentrate on my great-uncle’s soliloquy because I was overwhelmed by the food. Course followed course. I thought I had eaten my fill of the soup. Then I had found room for the herring. Now I was having to force my way through the beef. It was the first time in my life I had been embarrassed by too much food. And this, it appeared, from the way Uncle Semya was treating it, was an ordinary meal.

‘You’re tired,’ I heard Aunt Genia say to me. ‘You’ve no appetite. Over-excited, eh, Maxim?’

I nodded. I could not at that moment speak. I felt if I opened my mouth a potato would pop out again.

The worst happened. Uncle Semya stopped speaking of the military skill of the Germans, the superiority of their equipment over ours, and noticed me: ‘What have you been up to, today?’

I grunted. Uncle Semya smiled quietly, ‘I hope Shura isn’t leading you into bad habits. I warned him you had been respectably raised, that you have been a recluse in Kiev. He didn’t take you to that casino ... ?’

I shook my head, anxious that Shura should not be blamed simply because I was too afraid to speak.

‘Or that house. What’s her name?’

‘We went to the harbour,’ I said. ‘And Fountain.’

‘Oh.’ Uncle Semya seemed almost disappointed. ‘So you saw the sea?’

‘Mm.’ Still the potato did not come out. ‘First time.’

‘It’s easy to get used to. And yet, living on the edge of the ocean as we do, it keeps our brains sharp. Not just the invigorating air, of course, but the sense of the world. Keeps perspective. Makes you aware, moreover, that you’re only too vulnerable. To the elements, let alone your fellow man.’ He enjoyed this. ‘We are prone to forget that we are mortal, we city-dwellers. But the sea reminds us. To the sea we came and to the sea, at length, we shall return.’ A fruit compote was put in front of him. ‘Mother to us all.’

This was my first encounter with my uncle’s mild pantheism. At that time I thought he was expressing some sort of evolutionary theory.

After the meal Uncle Semya went into his study and I sat with Aunt Genia and Wanda, reading a scientific article in
Zanye (Knowledge),
which because of its radical associations had never been allowed in our home. There were several copies here. All had articles I would normally have found inspiring, but I was still too full of my impressions of the day. I would read a paragraph or two then discover I was thinking about warm bodies and laughing mouths, of bawdy songs and comforting companionship. That sense of belonging to something at last was what chiefly obsessed me. Odessa was Life and I had been accepted by it so easily.

Perhaps I should feel bitterness towards Shura now, but I cannot. I believe that all he did was to introduce me to a world he dearly loved and knew I would love. I did love it, for those few months. I regret its ending. I did not value generosity then. Shura introduced me to Odessa in all her last, glorious, decadent days, before war, famine, revolution, the triumph of bourgeois virtues, came to turn her into just another port-city, built for traffic, with the people swept into grey concrete heaps on either side of ’motorways’, ‘fly-overs’ and ‘bypasses’. He introduced me to decadence and I saw it only as life and beauty and friendship. The hot sun of Odessa had ripened this fruit. Now, perhaps, it was rotting in the final summer of the old world.

Aunt Genia looked up from her novel. I seemed pale. I must take care of myself, for my mother’s sake. I must get brown in the sunshine of Arcadia while it lasted, not go with Shura to all his ‘dark holes of conspiring youth’.

I agreed that I was tired, but I could not think of sleep. My mind was analysing so much. ‘You will sleep,’ she said, ‘I’ll play you some music.’ She went to a large cabinet gramophone that was either German or English (it had the little dog on its metal label) and asked me if I had any preferences in music. I said that I had not. She had a good selection of the solid black discs with colourful labels we used to get in those days. She played me some operatic arias by Caruso (it was the first time I had heard Puccini or Verdi), some Mozart, two or three popular songs by a favourite singer of the day (I think it was Izya Kxemer) and a recent tango which, perhaps because the instrument wound down a little at the end, had a peculiar, significant quality which haunted me as I went up to bed and haunts me now, as I write. I fell almost immediately into a deep sleep.

* * * *

FOUR

IN THE DAYS WHICH followed, Shura was to introduce me to scores of new delights and against these I had absolutely no protection. My mother had warned me about revolutionists but not about the real attractions and dangers of Odessa: the gay, sardonic company of those slangy bohemians who did not give a damn for Karl Marx or the Tsar, who believed that their city was the world and that nowhere else on Earth was so beautiful. They were in many ways right. Very quickly I began to assume the tastes and manners of my friends. Odessans were regarded by the rest of Russia much as Californians are regarded by New Yorkers. The bright clothes we wore were natural to us, natural to the rosy light which made the city glow, and only appeared vulgar when removed from their locale. Even casual thievery in Odessa was not looked upon very seriously. It was almost as if property in that city were already communal, save that it was up to a person to hang on to as much of it as he could but not be resentful if he were outwitted and parted from it. Of course, not everyone shared this spirit. Such people were usually officials or immigrants of some sort, anyway: like the pompous burghers in their seaside cottages, or the holiday-makers who came to swim and lie in the sun. The women wished to flirt with sailors and our Odessa boys.

Odessa boys had dark eyes and white teeth and brilliant scarves. They wore painted ties, displayed a great deal of cuff with elaborate cuff-links, sported stick-pins and monstrous rings and cocky hats and chocolate-coloured spats; their waistcoats were of yellow mohair or Chinese brocade. Odessa girls wore feathered hats and dark, Ukrainian shawls, crisp, white blouses and light, swinging skirts. They patrolled the promenades in little, giggling gangs during the day and occupied the gardens, lit with strings of tiny electric bulbs, in the evenings. Then the huge Odessa moon would make the sea look like mercury, as volatile and indescribable as the Odessan character, while accordions or orchestras would play the tunes of the moment, as well as the latest songs from France, America, even England and Germany. Through the crowds would stroll soldiers and sailors, arm in arm with their lady-friends; gigolos on the look-out for the wives or widows of self-satisfied merchants; merchants on the look-out for girls; pick-pockets, confidence-tricksters, photographers, hurdy-gurdy men and postcard-sellers. Here, too, were families of Hasid Jews, conspicuous in their dark clothes, shawls, pe’os and other paraphernalia, who were an embarrassment to all, bourgeois Jew and Gentile alike. Yet they were tolerated, these fanatics, as they would not be tolerated elsewhere, in spite of the fact that members of the Black Hundreds, who had begun the pogroms ten years before, almost entirely comprised Odessa’s city council.

Shura introduced me to girls. They kissed my cheek and said that I was ‘lovely’ and ‘a duck’, which was not quite the impression I had hoped to give them. I was learning the rich, elusive speech of the city, however, as I had learned other foreign languages, and was soon proficient in it. It was this ability, which I gradually lost as I grew older, which helped me in many of my future situations. Where language was concerned, I was a chameleon.

Shura was very pleased with my progress. He took me up to the limans, those strange, dark, emerald-green shallows, full of mud and minerals. They are half-wild: the haunt of game-fowl and blind fish, where reeds wave and peculiar shadows move beneath the glinting, agitated surface. They are half-tamed where the large hotels and health-resorts crowd close together. Here I learned to run errands for rich women. There was a great deal of commission involved, for one was tipped by all parties involved in the transactions. At other times we would engage in business by the docks where there were always ships: steamers, sailing boats, schooners, loading and unloading. Cargoes of fish, fruit, wine, cloth or even coal were often sold directly they were landed. Traders were omnipresent and would pay for information of many kinds. Shura was well-known and I became almost as familiar to them by my slightly Frenchified nickname of ’Max the Hetman’. Also my relationship with Shura guaranteed me a place in the bohemian inner circle. There was already a small legend which suggested I was ‘something hot in Kiev’. Soon it was possible for me to wander freely about the district without Shura to guide me and I made acquaintances of my own. I never went to the docks without him, however. That grey world of overhead railways, derricks and worn-out dray horses had a sense of danger to it. It was where most of the revolutionaries came from.