Byzantium Endures

ONE

I AM A CHILD of my century and as old as the century. I was born in 1900, on I January, in South Russia: the ancient true Russia from which the whole of our great Slavic culture sprang. Of course it is no longer called Russia, just as the calendar itself has been altered to comply with Anglo-Saxon notions. By modern reckoning I was therefore born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on 14 January. We live in a world where many kinds of regression dignify themselves with the mantle of progress.

I am not, as is frequently suggested by the illiterates amongst whom I am forced to live, Jewish. The great Cossack hawk’s beak is frequently mistaken in the West for the carrion bill of the vulture.

I am not a fool. I know my own Slavic blood. It roars in my veins; it pounds as the elemental rivers of my fatherland pound, forever longing to be reconciled with our holy and mysterious soil. My blood belongs to Russia as much as the Don, the Volga, and the Dnieper belong. My blood still hears the call of our vast, timeless steppe under whose solitudinous skies aristocrat and peasant, merchant and worker, were dwarfed and understood how little material prosperity mattered; that they were united by God and were part of His inevitable pattern. Alien Western ideas came to threaten this understanding. It was in the factory towns, where chimneys crowded to shut out our incomparable Russian light, where people were denied the shelter and confirmation of God’s wide roof, God’s cool and merciful eye, where the synagogues sprouted, that Russians began to elevate themselves and challenge God’s will, as even the Tsar would not dare; as even Rasputin, playing Baptist to Lenin’s Antichrist and spreading rot from within, would not dare. Influenced by Jewish socialists in Kharkov, Nikolaieff, Odessa and Kiev, these stokers and these riveters first denied the Lord Himself. Then they denied their blood. And then they denied their souls: their Russian souls. And if I cannot deny my soul after fifty years of exile, how then can I be Jewish? Some Peter? Some Judas? I think not.

Admittedly, I was not always religious. I have come to the Greek Orthodox religion relatively late and perhaps that is why I value it so, as those persecuted millions in the so-called Soviet Union value it, worshipping with a fervour unknown anywhere else in the Christian world. I have suffered racial insinuations all my life and for these I blame my father who deserted his faith as casually as he deserted his family. Since I was a child in Tsaritsyn I have known this suffering and it became worse when my mother (by then probably a widow) moved us back to Kiev after the pogrom. My mother was Polish, but from a family long settled in Ukraine. She told me that my father had been a descendant of the Zaporizhian Cossacks who had for centuries defended the Slavic people against the Orient and who had resisted foreign imperialism from the West. My father had picked up radical ideas first as a clerk in Kharkov, later during his military service. When he left the army he remained in St Petersburg for two years before getting into trouble with the authorities and being deported to Tsaritsyn. Many of these names are probably unfamiliar to the modern reader. St Petersburg was renamed into Russian Pyotr-grad (Petrograd) in 1916, when we wanted no echoes of Germany in our capital. Now it is called Leningrad. Doubtless they intend to change it with every fresh political fad. Tsaritsyn became Stalin-grad and then Volgo-grad as the past was revised for the umpteenth time, and the inevitable future and the impermanent present re-proclaimed in fresher slogans, sufficient to make schizophrenics of the sanest citizens. Tsaritsyn is probably called something else by now. Nobody knows: least of all those émigré Ukrainian nationalists whom I sometimes speak to after Church services. They have become as ignorant as everyone else living here. It is hard for me to find equals. I am a well-educated man who received Higher Education in St Petersburg. Yet what good is education in this country, unless you are part of the Old Boy Network, or a homosexual in the Central Office of Information or the BBC, or Princess Margaret’s lover, like so many self-styled intellectuals who come over here and betray themselves for the peasants which, in reality, they probably are? It is incredible how easily these Czechs, Poles, Bulgarians and Yugoslavs manage to pass themselves off as academics and artists. I see their names all the time: on books in the library, in the title-credits of sex-films. I would not lower myself. And as for the girls, they are all whores who have found richer prey in the West. I see two of them almost every day when I buy my bread in the Lithuanian’s shop. They flaunt their long blonde hair, their wide, painted mouths, their flashy clothes: their skins are thick with make-up and they stink of perfume. They are always gabbling away in Czech. They come into my premises for fur capes and silk petticoats and I refuse to serve them. They laugh at me. ‘The old Jew thinks we’re Russians,’ they say. Ah, if they were. Good Russians would have a discount. The girls speak Russian, of course, but they are obviously Czechs. Believe me, I know I bring these suspicions on myself, because I cannot give anyone, not even the British authorities, my real name. My father changed his name a dozen times during his revolutionary days. For different reasons, I also had to take other names. I still have relatives in Russia and it would not be fair to them to use their title since we had very strong aristocratic connections on both sides of the family. We all know what the Bolsheviks think of aristocrats.

They are of a type, you see, these girls. Ruined by Communism well before they come to the West. Without morals. It is a joke the Czechs tell: the Communists abolished prostitution by making every woman a whore. I remember girls just like them, from good families, speaking French. Fifty years ago they were crawling across the boards of the abandoned Fisch château near Alexandria while shells whistled everywhere in the dark and half the city was in flames. They were filthy and naked, luxuriating in the expensive furs Hrihorieff’s bandits had given them. Some were not more than fourteen or fifteen years old. Their little breasts hanging down, their brazen mouths open to receive us, they were utterly corrupted and it was obvious that they were relishing it. I felt nauseated and fled the scene, risking my life, and I still feel sick when I remember it. But are the girls to blame? Then, no. Today, in the free world, I say ‘Yes, they are.’ For here they have a choice. And they represent Slavic womanhood, for so long pure, feminine, maternal. But this is what happens when religion is denied.

My mother, although of Polish extraction, was attracted more to the Greek than the Roman in her religious preferences, though I never knew her to attend formal services. She observed all the Orthodox holidays. I do not remember ikons (though she doubtless possessed them). She always had a picture of my father (in his uniform) in an alcove, with candles burning. It was here that my mother prayed. She never criticised my father, but she was anxious to remind me of how he had gone astray. He had denied God. An atheist, he had been involved in the uprisings of 1905. During this period he had almost certainly been killed, though the circumstances were never entirely clear. My mother herself would become vague when the subject was raised. My own memory is a confused one. I recall a sense of terror, of hiding, I think, under some stairs. On the other hand the equation itself was clear enough: God had withdrawn his grace and his protection from my father as a direct punishment. Aside from the fact that my father had been an officer in a Cossack regiment and had thrown away his career, that his family had been well-to-do but had disowned him, I knew very little about him. Out of tact, our relatives never mentioned him. Only Uncle Semyon in Odessa ever made any reference to him and that was always to curse him as ‘A fool, but a fool with a brain. The worst kind.’ At any rate I have no memories of him, for he was rarely at home, even in the Tsaritsyn days, and my memories of Tsaritsyn itself are confined to a few narrow, dusty, nondescript alleys, for we moved in 1907 to Kiev again, where my mother had a sister. Here they both worked as seamstresses. This was a terrible descent for a woman like my mother, who possessed a refined sensibility, spoke several languages, and was conversant in all forms of literature and learning. Later she became the manageress of a steam-laundry and after her sister re-married we moved into the two-room flat near Mother’s job. This was in a part of town with many old trees, little copses, parks and some fields even, very close to the Babi ravine (the ‘Old Woman’ ravine) which, with its grass, rocks and stream, became my main playground.

Here I would defend Kipling’s Khyber Pass and, as Karl May’s ‘Old Shatterhand’, explore the Rocky Mountains. I would fight the Battle of Borodino. I would defend Byzantium against the Turks. On rarer occasions I would go to the Dnieper’s beaches and be Huckleberry Finn, Ahab, Captain Nemo. Even then Kiev had its share of revolutionary troubles. The agitation came mainly from the workers in the industrial suburbs beyond the Botanical Gardens: blocks of flats as featureless and smoky as any you can find today. The authorities had had to clamp down quite heavily, but all I knew of this was when my mother kept me inside or stopped me going to school. On the whole, however, I experienced little of the unpleasant side of life in Kiev. It was a wonderful city in which to grow up. Near us was a road which ran through the gorges. This area was known as the Switzerland of Kiev. Thus I had the best of both worlds - country and city - though we were not rich. Kiev, and the Ukraine in general, inspired art and intellectual activity of every kind. Half Russia’s greatest writers produced their best work there. All Russia’s best engineers came from there. Even the Jews excelled themselves. But they, of course, were never content.

Built on hills above the river; full of cathedrals and monasteries with glittering onion-domes, green copper, gold and lapis lazuli; full of great public buildings in the soft yellow brick for which Kiev was famous; of carved wooden houses, crowded street markets, statues, monuments, the large stores and theatres of the Kreshchatik, our main street, the University and various institutes, the Botanical Gardens, the Zoo, modern tramways; its squares crammed with electric signs, advertisement hoardings, kiosks, theatre advertisements; its thoroughfares crowded with motor-vehicles and horse-drawn carriages, carts, omnibuses; with trees, parks and green places everywhere, with the great commercial river full of steamers, yachts, barges and rafts (she was founded by the Scandinavian Rus to protect their most important trade-route), Kiev was no provincial city, but the capital of ancient Russia, and well aware of the fact. Once, centuries before, she had been a walled garrison city of grim stone and unpainted wood: ‘Mother City of all the Russias. The Rome of Russia.’ And the infidel had come and the infidel had been forced back, or converted, or accommodated, perhaps temporarily, and Kiev and what she protected had always survived. Now she was Yellow Kiev, warm and hospitable to all. In the summer sunlight it would seem she was made entirely of gold, for her brick glowed while her mosaics and posters, flowers and trees shone like jewels. In the winter, she was a white fairy-tale. In the spring the groaning and cracking of the Dnieper’s ice could be heard throughout the city. In the autumn Kiev’s mellow light and fading leaves blended so that she was a thousand shades of warm brown. By the early twentieth century she had reached the height of her beauty. Now, thanks to the Bolsheviks, she has become a lustreless shell, just another beehive with a few nondescript concrete monuments to pacify tourists. The Germans were blamed for destroying Kiev, but it is well-known that the Chekists blew most of it up in their 1941 retreat. Even the existing statues are copies. Kiev had a history older than most European cities: from her came the culture which civilised the Slavs. From her came our greatest epics. Who has not, for instance, marvelled at the film version of Ilya Mouremetz and the Heroes of Kiev, defenders of Christendom against the Tatar Horde, Bogatyr and the Beast? Ironically, what the Tatar failed to accomplish, the armies of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis succeeded in doing with relentless and unimaginative thoroughness.

We were poor, but there was wealth and beauty all around us. Our suburb, the Kurenvskaya, was rather run-down, though picturesquely countrified, with many wooden buildings and little gardens among the newer apartment houses (which were built around courtyards after the French model). If I wished I could walk down to the main city, or I could take the Number Ten tram past St Kyril’s church to Podol and, if I failed to be seduced by the sights and smells of the Jewish Quarter, could walk up St Andrew’s Hill to that great church, all blue-and-white mosaic on the outside and rich gold on the inside, to stare at the distant Dnieper, at Trukhanov Island where the yacht club was. On a misty autumn evening I would enjoy walking along the wide Kreshchatik boulevard, with its chestnut trees and bright shops and restaurants. But Kreshchatik was best at Christmas, when the lamps were lit and the snow was piled against walls and gutters to make magical pathways from door to door. I remember the smell of pine and ice, of pastries and coffee and that special smell, rather like newly-cut wood with a hint of fresh paint, of Christmas toys. Cabs and troikas rolled through the golden darkness; the breath of horses was whiter than the snow itself; warm, rattling trams radiated orange electric light. It is a ghost in my mind. It no longer exists. The Bolsheviks blew it to pieces as they retreated from the Nazis who, only a few months earlier, had helped them loot Poland.

As a boy I was generally more interested in doing than seeing. I am by reputation an intellectual, but my chief instincts are those of a man of action. I owe my scholarship almost entirely to my mother. She insisted on my receiving an education far better than most of the other children in the neighbourhood. Fortunately she had a number of friends who, I suppose, were chiefly would-be candidates for her hand (she was a beautiful and vivacious woman) and they were helpful with advice about the best schools and what special subjects I should pursue. Our apartment was never without at least one visitor. Often there were many more, and they were by no means all Russians. In particular there was Captain Brown, the Scottish engineer, a gentleman living in reduced circumstances. He had a room off the same staircase as ours. He was rumoured to be a deserter from the Indian army. Certainly he knew a great deal about the North-West Frontier, Afghanistan and also the Caucasus, where he had spent several years (giving credence to the notion that he might be a deserter). I hardly heard him repeat a single story, he had so many: about Kazakhs, Turkmen, Tajiks and Kirghiz brigands, about Kabul and Samarkand, or the problems of building railways in Georgia. He was a small, dark man, always genial yet giving off a sense of restrained aggression, though he was very gentle with my mother in that careful, masculine, delicate way of someone almost afraid of their own strength. He not only taught me my first English words but he gave me the set of Pearson’s Magazine which was to supply so much of the reading of my boyhood and youth, make a crucial impression on my imagination and, subsequently, my ambition. I liked him the best, I think, because my mother found him such good company. She went with him to the opera and to the theatre far more often than she went with other admirers.

Kurenvskaya was one of the most cosmopolitan suburbs. My mother was popular with her customers, who were chiefly unmarried men or the servants of well-to-do people. Some of them, doubtless from boredom or loneliness, would prolong their visits to the laundry. A few old regulars would be invited into her private office, a tiny room off the main floor of the laundry, where she would offer a glass of tea or perhaps some seed-cake. Captain Brown could sometimes be found there but more frequently the chief visitors were minor officials, including Gleb Alfredovitch Korylenko. Tall, thin, lugubrious, with the appearance of a dissolute stork, he was the local postman. Previously he had been a sailor with our Black Sea Fleet until invalided home after the disaster at the hands of the wily Japanese in 1904. Gleb Alfredovitch was full of gossip and my mother and her little circle of women friends were willing listeners, though I suspect the postman and a few others were favoured chiefly because they could be of use in my education. Sometimes I would be allowed to listen while Korylenko retailed his stories of well-to-do locals. I would sit in a corner with a piece of cake in one hand, a glass of tea in the other, learning of worlds almost as romantic as those described by Captain Brown. I have a recollection of the smell of tea, of lemon, of cake, and the heavy mixture of soap and lye, starch and dye, the hot dampness of the steam which covered everything, so that newspapers and magazines were always curling and chairs and tablecloths and rugs were always just a little moist to the touch.

The postman would occasionally come to the flat, along with one or two women and perhaps Captain Brown. They would bring a bottle of vodka and discuss the gossip from Moscow and St Petersburg and any scandal (with appropriate expressions of piety) concerning Rasputin and the Tsarina. Rasputin was well-known in his day - a wandering monk with a mEsméric personality and an adroit way of palming drugs into drinks, who wheedled himself into St Petersburg society where he led a life of total debauchery, seducing even the youngest of the Tsar’s little daughters. After a glass or two of vodka Korylenko was inclined to begin a tirade against the Court for its degeneracy. He believed that stronger men were needed to control the women, that Tsar Nicholas was too lenient. But my mother would hush him up. She would not accept any hint of political talk. She became highly nervous, for obvious reasons, at such references. Probably that was why I have always hated the tension engendered by political argument, which is always pointless. I have never judged anyone by the way he votes, so long as he does not try to get me to agree with him. And only a fool, of course, will vote himself into the slavery of socialism. In my life I have met all sorts of people. Their political beliefs rarely had much to do with their actions.

During this period, I knew the company of adults far more than the friendship of children. I always had a certain amount of trouble in relating to other children. I suppose that once the adult world had been opened up for me the world of children seemed dull. I was not much liked, either, because I was party to grown-up intercourse and must have seemed precocious to envious would-be comrades.

There was one little girl who admired me. Esmé was the daughter of a neighbour, a gentleman who had once, I suspect, been amongst Mother’s suitors. Mother was convinced that he was an anarchist living under an assumed name because he had escaped from Siberia. She had therefore discouraged him. There was no evidence, but my mother had learned to be more than cautious. No one could blame her for this. The name the gentleman gave was Loukianoff. He had been in the cavalry (he had a horseman’s way of walking) and lived, apparently, on a pension. Korylenko told us that Loukianoff’s wife had deserted him in Odessa for an English sea-captain, leaving their daughter when she was less than a year old. Loukianoff went out rarely. The most we usually saw of him was his washing, brought to the laundry by Esmé. I was flattered by Esmé’s admiration. Our friendship was frowned upon by my mother who saw an agent provocateur in a horse with a red ribbon in its tail. Esmé was a beautiful blonde-haired little creature, always dressed very neatly, who acted as her father’s housekeeper and shared, therefore, something of my own adult ways. We must have been a comical sight, two eight-year-olds discussing the cares of the world as I sometimes escorted her home from the laundry.

I enjoyed Esmé’s company as an equal but felt nothing romantic towards her. My own heart was the sole property of a dark-eyed girl who hawked second-hand tin toys from a tray on a corner near the tram-stop. Sometimes she carried a cage in which sat a trained canary which would peck at letters and symbols in order to tell a person’s fortune. She was a genuine gypsy, I heard, from a camp in one of the gorges. I dared to go close to the camp on an overcast autumn afternoon. It was not what I had expected. There were no carved and painted caravans, just a collection of shanties and carts, of fires which sent dark smoke to the upper air. It was not the Heaven I had imagined. It was more a scene of Hell. To some extent this vision cooled my ardour and I no longer planned immediately to marry my sweetheart according to the customs of her own people (with the King of the Gypsies, of course, presiding) but I bought as many toys from her tray as I could afford, always got an excellent fortune told by her canary, and discovered that her name was Zoyea. She had red lips and curly black hair and a manner about her, even then, which was totally entrancing. I think her parents had been Rumanians. She had none of the passive femininity of my friend Esmé. She was neither modest nor quietly spoken. She used a patois similar to the rolling Southern Ukrainian dialect, full of words I could not understand and in which ‘a’s and ‘o’s were all mixed up. She carried herself with the swagger of a boy. Yet I believed she thought me attractive. Perhaps it was those eyes, which seemed to look with sexual calculation upon every living creature. My mother found her even more alarming an acquaintance than Esmé and, when I suggested inviting Zoyea home for tea, had one of her most elaborate attacks of hysteria. Thereafter, Esmé was never quite the persona non grata of former times.

One day Zoyea was absent from her usual corner and I went to the shanty town to look for her. The camp had gone. All that remained was the sort of rubble gypsies leave the world over. I learned from a passer-by that the authorities had closed them down and moved them on. The tinkers had set out along the Fastov road, he thought, perhaps heading for the coast or the Crimea. He was pleased to see them go. He had lost more than one chicken since they had put up their ramshackle village. I felt I had lost much more than a cheap supply of German toys.

Hope took me to Bessarabskaya, as if I would find her amongst the organ-grinders, beggars and sellers of exotic pets, the noise and the colour of the market. I half-expected to see their carts, bearing their clay ovens and drainpipe samovar chimneys intact. There were several toy-sellers with their trays. They were all old men with long beards and insincere grins. There were tinkers, too, offering to mend pots and shoes, but my gypsy had left before the first snows and was on her way to the sun. I bought myself a twist of balabhuka, the famous Kiev confection, as consolation, and went home. I think that I was to see Zoyea again.

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.

Ironically, I was fired in my ambition to become an engineer before I was well-versed enough in English to read the stories in Pearson’s. Esmé and I had been walking somewhere in the centre of Kiev, perhaps in Kreshchatik itself, when we had come upon a large general store on the corner of a street near a theatre. I remember, too, one of those old kiosks with the domed roof copied from the French, and a public urinal, also on French lines. Most engineers I knew later had been infected by their first ride on a train, or their first contact with an automobile or a monoplane. With me it was the sight of a simple English bicycle. Typical of many Kievan stores of the time, the windows were not exactly used for display, but one could look through into the interior and see the bicycle on its special stand. Esmé had seemed to share my enthusiasm for the machine (though perhaps she had merely wished to please me). She had considered how we might buy it or how the owner of the store might be induced to give it to us for some great service we did him. It was a bright spring morning. The chestnut trees had their first buds. Behind us passed horse-cabs and hand-carts, waggons and cars, to and fro on the wide, cobbled street. It was not merely a dawning year. It was a dawning era. The shop also sold gramophones, pianolas, mechanical organs, guitars and balalaikas, but the bicycle was the aristocrat of the place. A handsome black beast (a Raleigh ‘Royal Albert’ Gent’s Roadster, now long-since extinct), it was bright with red and gold transfers and polished steel accessories. It was completely beyond my pocket. It was more expensive, even, than the imported German and French bicycles available. I do not remember having any expectation that it might be mine. I did not even think of entering the shop to pretend to be a purchaser, to inspect or touch the machine, for I had no particular desire to ride one. Esmé had tried to get me to go and then had offered to go for me, but I had refused. I was not greatly impressed by the machine’s function so much as what it stood for. It represented all the great inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It stood for the airship and the aeroplane; the electric carriage, the steam-turbine, the motor-bus, the tram, the telephone, wireless radio-transmission; it was steel bridges and skyscrapers and mechanical harvesters. It was abstract mathematics become practicality. I studied its brakes, its chain, its spokes, its nuts and its tubular steel struts. I was impressed there and then by the divine simplicity of the mechanical system which, by producing pressure on the pedals turned the chain-wheel which then turned the back wheel, could, with the minimum of effort, help Man travel as fast and as far as any living beast. Beyond this conception - revelation if you like - I had no special interest. Certainly almost all the scientific inventions of those times had proved themselves of benefit to mankind, but for me their beauty rested in the simple fact of their existence. They functioned. They were solved problems. Krupp cannon and Nobel dynamite were to arouse in me the same aesthetic feelings as hydraulic dams or Mercedes ambulances. I was to be inspired by the machinery, not its social uses. Pistons and cylinders, circuits and gauges would satisfy me so long as they performed their appropriate task: driving a ship, taking an aeroplane aloft, sending a message. It would have seemed improper to me even then to indulge in metaphysical or sociological speculation as to their uses. When, later, the War came and we heard about the British tanks, you did not find me tut-tutting. I had anticipated them already. They had become a vision turned into the reality of plate steel, rubber and the internal combustion engine. I was similarly impressed by Sikorski bombers, Big Bertha and the great Zeppelins which attacked Paris and London, and I had already begun to formulate ideas of my own which, had I been born a year or two earlier, might have changed the course of the War, altering the whole development of world history. But I must try not to sound too grandiose. After all, I am a victim of history, not one of her conquerors, and to make it seem otherwise would be to show myself as a silly old man. I do not intend to confirm the view of those louts who already see me as no more than a ludicrous Russian ancient running a second-hand clothes shop in the Portobello Road.

Well, it suits me to let people think what they like. They will be all the more astonished when they read this and see what I achieved. This is my private glee: to know how the peasants and loafers, the scum of three continents, see me, but to be aware of what I really am. There are a few who respect me and to these I tell my secrets. But I do not want fame now. And honour I shall have in plenty when I am dead. I have had enough of politicians to last several lifetimes. My heart could probably not stand any publicity I might now achieve. Admittedly, a small pension, an OBE or perhaps a knighthood, would help me in my old age, since I am now entirely without regular companionship. Mrs Cornelius was the only one to offer me that. It was to be near her that I moved into this area. I could have gone to Earl’s Court. I could have had a job with the government. But I will not talk about Mrs Cornelius for the moment. It will be best to come to her when you know the kind of person who is writing about that remarkable personality who is justly famous, as are her talented children. Here I will say only one thing: she never betrayed me.

I returned again and again to the shop with its solitary English bicycle, until inevitably it was sold. I saw it once, being ridden over the bridge near the Zoological Gardens, and that was that. But I did not care. The symbol remained. Many years later I read the whole of H.G. Wells’s Wheels of Chance, but was disappointed. It contained the seeds of his later literary decline. It was altogether too flippant and held none of the visionary wonderment I had found in The War of the Worlds, which I read in Pearson’s. His Sea Lady, also published in Pearson’s, was equally worthless. The desire to be fashionably amusing can infect the best of us. How is it that a writer can be so full of optimism and faith in one book and so foolish and cynical in another? My studies of Freud - who, as I was to discover, was a bad-tempered, misanthropic Viennese Jew willing to snub anyone he considered his social inferior - have yet to supply me with an answer to this mystery. Not that I have respect for the so-called psychologists, especially those of that same sordid Viennese school. You can take it from me that most of them were on the edge of absolute madness for the best part of their lives. At my single meeting with H. G. Wells I was able to ask why he had wasted so much time on his non-scientific novels and he answered that he had once thought he could ‘achieve the same sort of thing through comedy’. He baffled me by this. I must assume he was making fun of me or that he was drunk or experiencing, as so many artists do, a form of temporary dementia. It is just possible that he could have misheard me for though my English is excellent, as this narrative testifies, I had at first some difficulty in making myself properly understood. I learned colloquial English almost entirely from Mrs Cornelius. My attempts to apply it so as to put others at ease were not always successful. During my first year as a permanent English resident it was not unusual for me to be left in the basket quite innocently by my friend. I could actually communicate better (as I had done in the twenties) by using Pearson’s English, which was at least readily interpreted by all. My affectionate and admiring ‘How are you, you old bugger?’ to Mr (later Lord) Winston Churchill, at a function for celebrated Polish émigrés, was not as well-received as I had expected and I was never able to thank him, thereafter, for the hearty support he had given to the cause of Russia’s rightful rulers.

I know today that the English share something with the Japanese, who do not like to hear their language spoken too well by foreigners. In Japan, I am told, people who speak perfect Japanese must often pretend to speak it badly in order to be accepted. In common with all Orientals, our Nipponese friends have an elaborate sense of protocol not easily communicated to foreigners. To a lesser extent this is true, in my experience, in all countries. I am by nature the most diplomatic of men, but it has sometimes been my fate to have my motives misinterpreted entirely because I have shown myself unsuitably fluent in a language.

My sense of tact comes naturally to me. I have had it since I was a child. This virtue was encouraged by my mother in her permanent anxiety over the stigma attached to my father’s activities. More than once, when there was some kind of trouble in Kiev, she would be visited by the police. In the main these men were kindly, cheerful officers, merely doing their duty. Even when investigating some major crime, they did not have the pinch-faced fanaticism of Lenin’s ‘leather-coat’ Chekists. Indeed, they were true representatives of the Tsar; kindly, avuncular, a little distant in some ways. They believed that our young men were being led astray by romantic notions primarily of French, German and American origin. I recall hearing that when the Tsar met Kerenski, after the first Revolution, he remarked warmly that ‘He is a man who loves Russia, and I wish I could have known him earlier, for he could have been useful to me.’ Such generosity (more than I might have felt in the circumstances) was typical of the man and typical of the system which received criticism from so many different quarters. When it did take firm action it took it thoroughly and without malice. For every Cossack charge there were a thousand incidents preceding it. Young men of good family were rarely shot for misdemeanours but sent into exile, often to stay with relatives, until their hot blood cooled a little. Only the most persistent or vicious of working-class revolutionaries received long prison sentences or capital punishment. This my mother understood, as she understood that the police had their duty to do. When they called they were always cheerfully received and invited to eat a little cake and take tea from our samovar. I remember the bulky blue and gold greatcoats steaming by the stove. My impression of these men was not at all frightening. I admired their splendid uniforms, their well-kept beards and moustaches. I remember delighting at least one set of these visitors when I informed them, without irony, that if I were not destined to become a great engineer I would wish to become a policeman or a soldier in the service of the Tsar.

As it happened, both my desires were to be granted in a modified way in the future, though even here I was dogged by bad luck and misunderstanding. My mother was extremely proud of my attitude and she was complimented by the officers. One of them, who had presumably known him, remarked that I was considerably more sensible than my father. My mother had smiled, but I could easily tell she was offended by their denigration of my father’s memory. She could accept no criticism of him, even when that criticism reflected well on herself and her only son. The policemen left in good spirits (I think they had had some vodka with their tea) and I remember how my mother drew a deep breath and looked at me oddly before telling me to resume my supper, which had been interrupted by the visit. She leaned against the shelf over the stove, where I normally slept in winter. She was gasping, almost as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown over her. Being the woman she was, she soon recovered, but she was inattentive for the rest of the evening. It emerged later that my father had not been the only Red in the family. Mother’s brother had been another. He had never, I gathered, been brought to justice. There was a rumour he was in Geneva. Mother received no letters from him.

No paper or pamphlet even remotely radical was allowed in the house. The mildest nationalist periodicals were banned. She was so careful she would inspect the wrappings of meat or fish for seditious propaganda. She had been known to unravel a parcel in order to throw away a sheet from The Thought of Kiev rather than take it home. She suffered dreadfully from her nerves and for this, too, I blame her husband.

She had nightmares, the woman I must call Yelisaveta Filipovna (a name I have borrowed from one of the neighbours who showed kindness to us; but her real name she shared with a prominent princess). Frequently I was awakened in the middle of the night, hearing her mumbling feverishly on her couch. I would peer over the edge of my shelf and see her rise like a corpse at the Last Judgement. Then she would scream: a long, piteous sound. And she would sometimes cry out: ‘Forgive me!’ Then she would pray in her sleep, or wring her hands and weep silent tears, her unbound black hair standing around her pale head like a demon’s halo. I know that I should have shown more sympathy, but I was always terrified. It seemed she felt guilty (perhaps because she was not at her father’s bedside when he died), but whether that guilt had any real foundation I do not know. She would return to sleep often without realising what had happened, but sometimes I would wake her if she seemed in danger. In time I became used to these nightmares and, as I studied harder, could often sleep through them. An ability to sleep through the wildest disturbances has been both an advantage and a disadvantage to me. My mother’s nightmares came more frequently in the autumn and winter. It was because of them that I ceased to invite Esmé to stay with us when her father was sometimes taken to the hospital; my mother refused to let me go to ‘the revolutionary’s house’, but Captain Brown would look after Esmé when he could. Captain Brown began to drink more frequently and it was occasionally my mother’s sad duty to ask him to leave our apartment because of his inebriation. He never, however, made any improper advances.

Mother had further cause for concern from the Odessa branch of the family. Many of the more distant relatives were in trouble with the law over purely petty matters. This was the ‘black-sheep’ side. With the exception of my Great-Uncle Semyon, they were all cousins or second cousins of my mother’s. Sometimes they would come to Kiev and very rarely one of them would stay overnight at our flat, much to my mother’s dismay. We would always receive some luxury by way of payment for our hospitality: scented soap, or canned food of foreign origin, or a bottle of French wine. Mother would sell the stuff whenever possible, even give it away rather than keep it in the house. I think the young men from Odessa were smugglers. They were certainly well-to-do compared to their poor Kiev relatives. Uncle Semya was a successful shipping agent, far more respectable and wealthy than the shady ‘spivs’ who made such cynical use of their blood-ties, but he claimed to be unable to control them. It was to Uncle Semya that I think my mother chiefly appealed for help with Herr Lustgarten’s fees.

As well as studying literature, languages and mathematics, I learned geography and basic scientific principles. A true scientific education was beyond the kindly German’s range. I read a good deal and was particularly impressed by an American book, obtained from one of my Odessa cousins, describing current methods of building flying machines. Those were the days when one could not only learn to fly without need of special instructors or licences, but one began by constructing one’s own aircraft. The book was full of carefully made line-drawings, complete with hand-lettered captions which would be mysterious to anyone not au fait with the modern flying machine: Optimum Angle of Incidence - Centre of Gravity - Centre of Drift - Wash-in to Offset Propellor Torque - and so on. That book was also a victim of Revolution and Civil War. From it I could have built an entire aeroplane (with the exception of the engine), from frame to the treatment of the canvas.

By the time I was thirteen-and-a-half Herr Lustgarten was beginning, he said, to despair of teaching me more. I suppose I had exhausted his learning. In the years just prior to the Great War the Kiev Technical Institute (where logically I should go to continue my studies) was a hotbed of radicalism. My mother was reluctant to send me there, in spite of my assurances that I wished only to learn. I could never have been infected by the nihilistic emotionalism of those young men who, rather than gain knowledge of the world, would change it to make it accept their ignorance. The institute’s ‘quota system’ was too liberal. There was also the question of identity papers. My dead father’s hand continued to hamper my career. I believed the application-board to be fair-minded, but Mother thought I should be prepared for certain specialised oral entrance examinations before contemplating application. This decision was reached after her final conversation with Herr Lustgarten, when possibly he warned her that the board would find me ‘too clever by half’. It is certainly no advantage to have more than an average share of brains in this world. To temporise, it was at last agreed I should ‘cram’ in the evenings, with the special object of preparing for entrance to the Institute, and that during the day I should get what Herr Lustgarten called ‘practical experience’. I was to go to work for Sarkis Mihailovitch Kouyoumdjian.

This was the name of a well-known local mechanic whom at first I greatly despised. He was a Russianised Armenian, originally from Batoum, and a Christian. He had been a ship’s engineer. He had met a Ukrainian girl in Odessa and eventually settled in Kiev, working first for the riverboat company, later for the tram company, and finally for himself. He could deal with almost every kind of machinery, from electrical generators, steam-engines, compressors, internal combustion engines, to factory equipment owned by the many small industrial concerns which flourished in Kiev. Most of his clients were Podol Jews, with their horrible, grimy little factories. He was cheap and he was optimistic. I suppose he was what the English would call a bodger. He was not paid to service new machinery. He was paid to keep old machinery running at the lowest possible cost. He lived in his own ramshackle house a couple of streets to the east of ours, off Kirillovskaya. It was a wooden house full of bits of discarded machinery and various ‘inventions’ which he had begun but failed to complete. He never listened to my suggestions, which were even then eminently sensible. He did not really possess the imagination of a great engineer. He was the last of his family, he told me. The rest of his relatives, men, women and children, had been amongst the hundred-and-fifty thousand Armenians whom the Turks had marched into the desert to die at the beginning of the century. It is fashionable these days to treat the Nazis as the originators of modern genocide, but they could have learned a great deal from the Turks, who rid themselves of their Armenian problem with far less fuss and at far less expense. We of the Ukraine learned to fear the menace from the East long before we found ourselves at war with the West.

‘Turk’ was the strongest curse I ever heard Sarkis Mihailovitch utter, but the word sent a chill through me more than any other oath.

It did not suit me to become an apprentice to an Armenian jobbing mechanic but my mother insisted I learn the trade. Thus, in June 1913, I became Sarkis Mihailovitch Kouyoumdjian’s ‘mate’, going with him on almost every assignment, even doing small, simple tasks on my own, and gaining my first familiarity with the nuts and bolts of engineering. My mother had been right. I began to enjoy my job. It was a beautiful summer. Even the Podol ghetto was alive with greenery and blossoms.

In one respect however it was difficult to learn from my first boss. He never gave praise and he never offered blame. His small, dark face was always set in a slight smile, his black eyes bore an expression of private amusement, no matter what the situation, as if he lived permanently in the back of his head. He was neat, swift and skilful; he was economical in everything. He rarely spoke to a customer, but would listen carefully to the problem and then purposefully set to, there and then, to tackle it if he could. In a struggle with a machine he never refused a challenge and he usually emerged the victor (even if some of those victories were only temporary). No matter how hard the job or how easy, he would devote the same grave, smiling attention to it. His expression and his manner could be irritating. People thought he displayed contempt, or at least irony. Frequently he would be shouted at by irate owners telling him not to take a job if he didn’t want it. He would ignore them, set to with his spanners, screwdrivers and more specialised tools, and sooner or later they would be rewarded. Then Sarkis Mihailovitch Kouyoumdjian would wipe his hands, still smiling, indicate that I should pack the tools, work out his charges in his head, and laconically name a price. Very rarely did even the most argumentative customer quarrel over that price. Sarkis Mihailovitch knew he was cheap and, unlike any other Armenian I have known, he hated to haggle.

I came to realise that Kouyoumdjian was enormously shy. He was a kindly man. He showed considerable patience with me and he gave me an insight into the positive qualities of Armenians. Naturally, in spite of my theoretical aptitude, I made more than one practical mistake. No sardonic word ever escaped his lips. He would gravely show me the correct way of doing the thing and that would be that.

Through him I became familiar with all Kiev’s industrial districts, although Podol was chiefly where we worked. Ukraine at that time was ‘booming’. As well as being the richest-developed part of the Empire in terms of agriculture, it was also the most heavily industrialised, with coal and iron mines feeding the factories of Yuzivka, Kharkov (where the great locomotive works are based) and Katerynoslav, as well as many other towns which had grown around the new mines and engineering plants. I should make it clear that I was not alone amongst young Ukrainians in being inspired by the wonders of modern technology. Sikorski, inventor of the helicopter, was born in Kiev and conducted his early experiments a year or two before my own. I did not, like him, have the benefit of a wealthy and influential family. Thousands of us were the first generation to see and understand the Future and in the years to come were to supply the rest of Russia and the world with many of her greatest engineers. We Ukrainian Cossacks have been described somewhere as ‘Russia’s Scots’, and in this respect, as in others, the comparison is fairly made. Kiev, however, was by no means one of the most heavily industrialised cities. It was still mainly involved in trade and banking. At this time in my life I never got to see any of the larger factories. Most of my experience was confined to light-engineering works, textile plants and so on, usually consisting of no more than one or two sheds. But in no other city would I have had the opportunity of working for a man like Sarkis Mihailovitch, who specialised in no particular field. Thus I became familiar with auto-engines, steam-pumps, dynamos and mechanical looms. This broad education was to stand me in good stead in later years, though again there was to be a disadvantage, for some would think me a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none.

Working for the Armenian brought out all my imaginative and inventive gifts. In his employ I began properly to develop my own ideas, based on things I had read in Pearson’s and similar journals. It seemed to me that I could develop a one-man flying machine which dispensed with the conventional fuselage and used the human body itself in this function. The Centre of Gravity would be determined by the position of the engine, rather than the position of the pilot. While Sikorski aimed at larger and larger planes such as the Ilya Mourometz, I dreamed of a kind of ‘flying infantry’. Each man would be equipped with his own wings and engine. Wings would be fitted to his arms, a motor on a frame would be strapped to his back, to allow clearance for the propellor. Tailplane and rudder would be attached to his feet.

I described my design to Esmé, who by now was looking after her ailing father full-time, and she was greatly impressed. She wanted to know when the first men would be seen flying over the domes of St Sophia’s Cathedral. I promised her that it would be soon; that it would be me, and that she should witness my very first flight.

Having made the boast, I became determined to fulfil it. I could not bear to make a fool of myself in Esmé’s eyes. She was by now a most beautiful young woman, with long, fine golden hair and huge blue eyes. She had pale skin, and that strong, full body typical of Ukrainian women. Yet I still did not see her as anything but an old and trusted friend, though I was by no means free of sexual desire. My main excitement lay in ambling along Kreshchatik at night and ogling the expensive whores who strolled up and down the boulevards. Alternatively I could go in the afternoons to Kircheim’s Café, a famous emporium of coffee and cream-cakes, and look at the young beauties who came there for treats with their mothers. There was more than one dark-eyed schoolgirl who returned my impassioned glances, yet there was none to compare with my wonderful lost Zoyea. A yearning for her still took me to the gorges where the gypsies had once camped; but they camped there no more.

Since I first conceived the idea of a flying man, similar projects have been successful, but in those days the principles of power-weight ratio were not fully understood. Moreover the engine I was to use was not properly suited to the task. I had promised Esmé that I would make my first flight by the next Sunday. I did not tell my boss, who had laughed at me when I had proposed the invention, but the only engine available at this time had come from his workshop. It was part of a repair: a small petrol engine normally used to drive a motor-tricycle belonging to one of Podol’s largest bakery concerns. The motor was in excellent working order and had only been removed while Kouyoumdjian made some adjustments to the chain and rear wheel. A minor job. I now realise that it was completely wrong of me to borrow the engine, particularly one belonging to so important a customer, but my promise to Esmé was paramount in my mind.

When Sarkis Mihailovitch left me to lock up, as he often did, on the Saturday night, I took a small trolley and went to fetch the rest of my equipment. I had prepared the frame which would strap onto my back and give proper clearance for the air-screw. This propellor was fitted over the existing driving-cog on the motor. My greatest aesthetic thrill had come after I had finished carving it. I had built the frame of wood, covered in treated canvas, for wings and for the double tailplane section which would fit on my feet. By keeping my ankles together I believed I could perform the function of a conventional tailplane. I tested the engine and had the satisfaction of seeing the screw spin properly. It was gone midnight, so I left everything ready for the morning and returned home. My mother was in a state of great excitement. She had become convinced I had been murdered. She worried so much about me because there had, in fact, been a child murdered quite close to us. It had been a ritual murder performed by a band of fanatical Zionists and I do not believe they ever caught the Jews responsible. The body had been hidden in a cave in a gorge and its discovery, as I recall, had resulted in a particularly rigorous pogrom. I very much regret the grief I caused my poor mother with my escapades, but she never could understand that certain sacrifices are required not only of those who themselves advance the cause of science, but of those who share our jives.

Early on the Sunday morning I met Esmé and took her to the workshop. There she helped me load all my equipment onto the hand-cart and we trundled it to the Babi ravine, which, being wide, was the most suitable for my experiment. I had to reassure Esmé several times that the flight would be quite safe. There was a certain amount of danger, of course, because this would be the first test, but I expected no real problems. With her help I struggled into the frame and strapped on the wings. I stood at the top of the cliffs, on a path which led to a small ledge and a bench where courting couples would often stop. I planned to run along the path until I came to the ledge and thus give myself a good launch over the gorge (which had a small river going through it). It was a wonderful morning. Esmé wore a white dress and a red pinafore. I wore my oldest clothes. There was mist coming up from the ravine and the sun shone through it. Above us the sky was a perfect, pale blue, and in the distance the smoke from Podol’s tireless factories drifted across the glinting domes and spires of the churches. The morning was very still. As I instructed Esmé how to throw the propellor into motion, the Sunday bells of all our places of worship began to ring at once. I made my first flight to the sound of a hundred pealing tunes!

I remember the way the motor’s shriek drowned the bells. Then I was moving. I ran in long strides down the path. Esmé kept pace with me for part of the way, but fell back. Then I had reached the ledge and had spread my arms, brought up my feet - and began to fall...

The fall lasted only a few seconds. A movement of my hands and I was gaining height again. I rose higher and higher above the gorge until I could see the whole of Kiev before me, could see the Dnieper stretching back into the steppe, could see it rushing down towards the Zaporizhian rapids on its way to the ocean. I could see forests, villages and hills. And, as I floated downward again, I saw Esmé, red and white, looking at me in wonderment and admiration. It was Esmé’s face which distracted me. Somehow I lost control. The motor stopped. There was the noise of rushing air. There was the sound of a scream. Then the bells began to toll again and I was dropping helplessly towards the river at the bottom of the gorge. My thought before my body struck the water was that at least I was to die a noble death. A second Icarus!