Byzantium Endures (9 page)

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 pre-war 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 poly-hybrids 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!’

I was considerably impressed. I said that my father must have had a similar sword. He asked me jovially to which
sech
my father had belonged. I said the Zaporizhskaya. He asked me how old my father was. I said I did not know. He asked me if I was sure Father had not been an
inogorodi.
I did not understand him. This was a Cossack word, he explained, for Great Russians living amongst them. The word meant, more or less, outsider. I assured him that my father had never been an outsider. He had served with a Cossack regiment in St Petersburg. He asked which one. I told him that I did not know. Again he laughed, evidently pleased that anyone should claim Cossack blood, even if they did not, as he believed, possess it.

I became agitated and insisted that I told the truth. I recall Shura saying flatly: ‘His dad’s dead, see.’ At which the Cossack softened and patted me on the knee, holding his scabbarded sabre out towards me and smiling. ‘Don’t worry, little one. I believe you. We’ll soon be riding side by side, you and me. Killing Jews and Germans willy-nilly, eh?’ The naval officers (and the echoing priest) joined in his laughter, as did my cousin, and I felt a happy warmth. The train journey remains in my mind as one of the most comradely times of my life. The Cossack’s name was Captain Bikadorov.

Shura asked the naval officers how they thought the War was going. What was the atmosphere in Moscow? They said everyone was confident, from the Tsar downwards. Our allies were predicting that ‘the Russian steamroller will crush the Germans in weeks.’ Tannenberg had been an untypical set back due to our over-confidence. We had learned our lesson over Japan and were now the strongest we had ever been. We would play the game of war more cautiously but more effectually. ‘Particularly,’ one of them pointed out, ‘now that Japan is our ally!’ This created further trumpetings from the gentleman in the homburg.

‘And the Turks?’ I said. ‘When shall they be beaten and the Tsar attend mass in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople?’

‘Just let them start something now and they’re as good as finished,’ said Captain Bikadorov. ‘Though there isn’t a better enemy than your Turk.’ It would be good to free ‘Tsargrad’ (Constantinople) but it was the French he was unsure about. They had gone soft, since Napoleon. They had already been beaten over and over again by the Germans. Moreover he was not sure that the English were reliable allies ‘since they’re almost Germans themselves.’ But the French were the real weak link. The naval officers agreed that in their experience of the French they had met in Odessa ‘the frog-eater is as effete as he is grandiose.’ It was impossible, the older one added, for a Frenchman to think of himself as mortal. The moment the conception impinged (usually when the real fighting started) he became outraged. ‘They are not cowards. They are merely possessed of a divine pomposity!’

The gentleman behind
Neeva
rose, bowed to the naval officer, and said that he was a native of Odessa and that he had the honour of bearing a French name. His grandfather had been French. He sat down again, raised his
Neeva,
then, as if upon reflection, lowered it to add: ‘Napoleon was defeated not by our soldiers, my friends, but by our snow. And for our snow we have only God to thank.’

‘And I say thank God for our soldiers as well,’ said Shura.

At this second mention of the divinity the Greek priest clapped his hands together while the nuns turned their heads with one accord towards the windows.

Asking the nuns to speak up if they objected to his smoking, Captain Bikadorov took out a large pipe and began to fill it, while Shura, encouraged by his example, offered some of his papyrussa round the carriage. The naval lieutenants accepted, the old gentleman of French origin refused with a snort (but drew out a cigar as soon as everyone else was smoking) and soon the carriage was full of tobacco fumes. Happily the window was open, which meant that neither the nuns nor myself were greatly inconvenienced. Now I associate the smell with the pleasantness of the occasion. So euphoric did I feel that, later, after we had enjoyed a shared picnic in which all but the nuns and the old gentleman joined, I took my first puff at Shura’s cigarette. I regretted the sausage, bread, pieces of crumbed veal and chicken and even the tea we had bought at the station. My discomfort was mingled with a rather pleasant, dizzy sensation. I disembarked at the next station. I think it was Kazatin, a very pleasant place with willow trees and carved gables and pillars. I took another cigarette at Shura’s insistence. Always get back on the horse as soon as you’ve fallen off, he said. Under his charming influence (and he had a very persuasive manner) I began to experience, for the first time in my life, a sense of the joys of sin. We rushed back, with everyone else, as the train began to move. We flung ourselves past the knees of the nuns. Reseated, Shura offered me a sip of Bikadorov’s vodka. I winked and accepted.