Byzantium Endures (5 page)

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 frock-coat 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 received 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 school-master’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.

These city riff-raff, many of whom were of foreign origin, were probably jealous of my ancient Cossack birthright. My atheist father with his ridiculous progressive ideas had not only succeeded in dragging my mother into impoverished, shameful widowhood, he had also taken personal liberties with my little body for, my mother explained, hygienic reasons. Thus I was of entirely Gentile blood but branded with the mark of the Jew. I did not know then how close, in later years, my father’s action would bring me to death. He might as well have tried to cut my throat at birth. It is not uncommon these days to have the operation, but in Ukraine in the 1900s it was as good as a conversion to Judaism. Jews profess to be mystified by Ukrainian resentments. There is little mystery. Jews, renting lands from absentee Polish landlords, drained our farmers and serfs in previous centuries. When the Cossacks drove back the Poles they also took revenge on their usurer-servants. And the Jews defended the Poles with muskets and swords. I make no excuses for cruel savagery. But the Jew is not quite the blameless fellow he these days makes himself out to be. If I were Jewish I would admit the causes of Ukrainian enmity. It might have a placatory effect. But the Jews are too proud for that.

What a great deal my mother might have blamed my father for. And how little she did blame him. She spoke of him only with wistful respect (save in the matter of his atheism) and frequently told me to honour his name. This is something I was never able to do, even for her sake. As I have shown, he set me on the road of life with so many disadvantages I wonder that I am here today. All that I inherited was his mind, which has saved me more than once from death or torture; but my imagination and sensitivity could have come only from my mother, as she said. His rebellion against his great Cossack heritage, his Russian religion and culture, brought him fear and annihilation. To those he left it brought only sorrow. And what did his revolution achieve when it was successful? More death; more humiliation. As we used to say: ‘Better a Jew in Tsarist Minsk than a Gentile in Soviet Moscow.’ Is that progress?

Possibly I inherited one other trait from my father: that same faith in the future which was in him a perversion of reality, a substitute for religion, was in me a belief in purely scientific progress. Verne and Wells, and also the many articles and stories in
Pearson’s
, were to fire me with a sense of wonder at the marvels of science and technology. Even before reading these authors I had determined to become an engineer. In this I was motivated by a noble love of the discipline itself. I did not corrupt it with mock-humanitarian rationalisations, like some nervous monk of the Middle Ages excusing his interest in alchemy by saying it was ‘God’s work’. I maintained a loathing for all political pieties. I saw myself as one of those who would give a whole Slavic character to science and put it at the service of the Slavic soul. By introducing extraneous themes into their tales, Verne, the anarchist, and Wells, the socialist, did themselves and their readers great harm, warping their visions to fit completely unscientific themes, just as Rasputin warped religion to make it speak for every sexual perversion. We lived in an age when a pure heart and a truthful tongue were great liabilities. Even Jack London, who wrote so feelingly of nature and the nobility of the untamed North, came to betray his gift with tales of pessimism and polemics: because it was demanded of him that he did so, otherwise nobody would have taken him seriously. He would have lost prestige amongst those so-called liberals who have brought our world to its present sorry state. Everyone cares for the good opinion of his neighbours, but sometimes the price we pay for that opinion is far too high.