Byzantium Endures

THREE

I AWOKE in the warmth of the sun’s rays, blinking. I listened for a moment and heard all kinds of alien sounds: the clanking of trams, the shunting ot goods-trains, horses’ hooves and cart-wheels on cobbles; shouts, laughter. And there was an astonishing smell: a mixture of the ocean and of deliciously rotting fruit and flowers, as if all the foliage of the Eastern seas had come in on the morning tide. I went slowly to my window. Many of the stately houses of the square were still shut up, for it was only a little past dawn. And Odessa had her autumn aurora. Each roof, railing, brick, tree, bush and wall gave off luminescence. The mellow colours shimmered almost imperceptibly in the city’s glowing air.

Kiev had its beauty, but it was a prosaic beauty compared to this glorious enchantment. Every outline, whether it be animal, vegetable, stone or wood, was surrounded by a faint radiance. A red and gold automobile crossed the square to stop outside a newly-opened grocery shop. It was like a car from fairyland. The men and women in it wore white suits, peacock feathers, Japanese silks, patent leather, and seemed to have come from a splendid performance of The Merry Widow.

I expected to hear music at any moment but this was the only sensation lacking. I craned over the small, wrought-iron railing and peered in what I hoped was the direction of the sea. All I saw was pavements, trees, possibly a park. I smelled coffee. I saw girls in black and white uniforms come out into the street bringing jugs to be filled from a milkman’s cart. I smelled fresh bread and identified the source, a baker’s shop at the far corner of the square. A postman went slowly along the street, delivering his letters. Women called to one another from house to house. This was how I had imagined a city like Paris, but never our own Odessa. It was possible to understand why many Russians found the town vulgar, and why so many writers and painters loved it. Pushkin had chosen to live here, for instance.

I was at once stimulated and relaxed. I was on holiday. The conception had not dawned until that moment. A holiday, for instance from school, was when one worked at home. But here, as far as I knew, I had no work to do. I was a guest. I was to be entertained. I began to feel hungry.

Wanda was knocking on my door and calling to me. I realised I was naked and felt ashamed of my body, perhaps for the only time (though I remained ashamed, all my life, of my father’s mark on my penis). Possibly I remembered my dream of Wanda. I called out to her to wait and I pulled on my trousers and shirt. I unbolted the door and she entered, laughing. ‘Modest little boy.’ She was only a year older, but all Odessans are far older, it seems, than Kievans. They give the impression of being possessed by some ancient, sardonic wickedness. Perhaps it is the admixture of blood. There are strains of every country in the world in the Odessan blood. But most typically from the Near East. Odessa itself is named after the Greek hero Odysseus and about half its population at that time was Jewish or foreign. It is probably why the pogroms were so severe there in the early years of the century. People were jealous of the power of the interlopers, though I would be the first to admit Odessa owed its atmosphere to its exotic population. By no means only Jews and criminals lived in the Moldovanka. Fiction has coloured the area, particularly in the work of Isaac Babel who lived there for no more than a week and was driven out by angry residents who resented his prying and his distortions. They say someone was murdered as a result of a lie he had written. My Uncle Semyon was a respectable merchant, for instance, trading with dozens of foreign countries through his shipping office. He undertook the import or export of goods of every sort. He had twenty or thirty clerks working full-time in his office next door and never once was there a hint of scandal about his activities. Neither, I should add, did anyone ever attempt to raid him and steal the wages-money in his safe.

They say the Russian disease is a poor sense of what is real and what is not, that we think we can talk anything into reality. This may be so. I personally can distinguish readily enough between truth and fiction.

Wanda had brought me a ‘small breakfast’, some coffee and a roll, on a tray. The luxuries were continuing. She seemed brighter this morning and her words had less sexual significance. Perhaps her voice had been tired the night before and I had mistaken weariness for mystery. I was able to greet her quite normally and accept the tray. ‘What am I supposed to do after I’ve eaten this?’

‘I’ll go and find out.’ She twisted ginger hair at her neck. ‘Madame’s in a good mood. M’sieu, too.’

I was to become used to the frequent use of French in Odessa. The city thought of itself as half-French already, though in fact the greatest number of foreigners had been German, publishing their own newspaper Odessaer-Zeitung. Many of the books I read while there were German. I also read the English Tauchnitz editions of W. Clark Russell, H. G. Wells and W. Pett Ridge.

Eventually it was my cousin Shura, not Wanda, who came for me. He looked rather more respectable this morning, in a shirt, a bow-tie, a grey three-piece suit. He carried a straw boater in his hand. He was a kind-hearted youth and had realised I would feel strange in the new city. He entered without knocking, leaning against the door-frame and winking as usual. Then he closed the door and asked if the clothes I wore (a perfectly good dark jacket and pair of knickerbockers) were what I actually preferred. I pointed out that I had little else. He said ‘something would be done’, then advised me to part my hair with an English parting, in the middle, and offered me his comb, which smelled of brilliantine. I accepted and made a poor attempt at the parting. He sat me down in front of my little dressing table and, tongue between his teeth, produced a precise line. Then he ran the comb thoughtfully through his own cropped locks and nodded his satisfaction. I put on pullover and jacket. ‘I suppose it’s fair enough,’ said Shura. ‘They expect you to look like a schoolboy.’

‘I am a schoolboy,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s why Uncle Semya sent for me. To see who he’s sending to school.’

Shura grinned cynically. ‘Of course he is, the old philanthropist.’

I became angry. ‘He is very kind. He has done a great deal for my mother and myself. He has faith in me. More real faith than my own father had!’

Shura softened. ‘You’re right. Come on, then.’

We passed a blushing Wanda on the stairs. She seemed as fascinated by Shura as I was. He pinched her cheek and whispered something in her ear. She groaned cheerfully and continued on her way.

We descended. We descended further. There were smells of food. We reached the tiled main floor of the house. Sunlight came through stained glass. It shone on hangings, on paintings, on hat-stands and mirrors. We moved towards the back of the house, past the parlour where I had met Aunt Genia, past the dining-room where I had eaten my first meal, and came to a mahogany door on which Shura, all of a sudden grave, knocked.

‘Come in.’ The voice was open, welcoming. We entered. ‘Maxim Arturovitch, your great-uncle, Semyon Josefovitch.’

I had expected a burly patriarch, a bogatyr with a long grey beard wearing a business suit. I encountered a small man with pointed features, a pointed beard, a linen jacket and trousers, a glossy collar under which a neatly-knotted old-fashioned black string-tie lay against the starched shirt-front. His hands had silver rings on them and a dab or two of ink. He seemed shy. He removed his glasses, which he flourished in his left hand as, with his right, he reached towards me through the room. He grasped my arm at the elbow, then gradually, in a series of stages, found my hand, which he pressed and shook. He was only a few inches taller than me. ‘My boy. My nephew. My niece’s only child. What a pleasure. Is your mother as proud of you as she should be? As proud as I am of her? I am your Great-Uncle Semya. Shura has told you. He has looked after you. He is a good boy. But you must teach him your learning. You are to become the wise man of the family, eh?’ He stroked his pointed beard with his spectacles, as if in delight at the idea. ‘You will go to Peter and be Jesus in the Synagogue, eh?’ Peter was what many people called St Petersburg. Great-Uncle Semya had a way of speaking which was more precise than most Odessan speech, but from time to time he would drop into an Odessan accent, as if for emphasis. ‘You will come back to us and be our voice. You have no vocation for law?’

‘I fear not, Semyon Josefovitch ... Science is - ‘

‘Quite so. A lawyer in the family is not to be. Not yet. But a scientist mixes well, of course. A professor comes into social contact with lawyers - and there you have what is almost as good as a lawyer in the family. Advocates in Odessa, little Max, are all scoundrels. It can be said, I suppose, of most professions. But once you are part of the intelligentsia, then you have access to the best scoundrels, eh? They admit you to their secrets they treat you as one of their own. You are the only intellectual we have. You are precious to us. You are to be our family’s pride. Do you like Shakespeare? Puccini? So do I. We’ll go to the opera and the theatre together.’ (He was as good as his word. I was bored, but it gave me an education in drama and music I would otherwise have lacked.)

I began to understand why Uncle Semya wished so much for me to do well at St Petersburg. All his other relatives were succeeding in various mercantile lines. I was the member of the family destined to pursue more abstract affairs.

‘Has Shura offered to show you the city?’ Uncle Semya asked. ‘He must. I would do so myself, but there is the office. Ships and tides wait for nobody. Soap must go to Sevastapol. Coffee must come from Rio. Even though the German mines threaten peaceful vessels. Not that the War is bad for business. Indeed, it is very good for business. If business can be allowed to carry on. Let Shura show you our Odessa. You will love it.’ He opened his jacket and found his wallet. He gave Shura a 10-rouble note. ‘Have a nice lunch somewhere at my expense. I shall see you this evening at dinner. Farewell. And do not overtax the brains while you are here. Save them for St Petersburg.’ He rolled the ‘r’ in each syllable with relish, as if he described some edible delicacy. And we were dismissed.

Outside my great-uncle’s study we found Aunt Genia. She had a pile of pale clothing in her arms. ‘You can’t go out in all that stuff. It’s too warm even now. Here are Vanya’s things. They’ll fit you. And he has his uniform.’ Her son was already in the army. She was a good deal younger than Uncle Semya. Wisely he had waited until his business was well-established before deciding to marry. I thought I would follow his example. My father, after all, had married young and no good had come of that.

With Vanya’s old summer clothes we climbed the stairs again. Under Shura’s eye I donned a chocolate-brown suit, a silky shirt with a soft collar, a panama hat. They seemed ineffably loud and tasteless garments to my Northern eye, but Shura sighed with pleasure. ‘Quite the dandy,’ he said. ‘Vanya used to cut a dash around here before they caught him.’

‘Caught him?’

‘For the army.’

Vanya was to be killed six months later. I was never able to thank him for his part in helping me fit into the life of the ‘Russian Riviera’

I left my knickerbockers hanging over the rail of my bed. Arm in arm with Shura I returned downstairs, sang out a farewell to Aunt Genia and Wanda, who were up to something domestic in the parlour, and sallied into the square.

From high above, the square had seemed like a fantasy land, a set for a musical comedy. Seen close-to it was even more magical. It had filled up since the early morning. Now there were stalls erected around the little central park where men in peaked caps and dark aprons strolled, chatting to one another. Fat women in red or blue headscarves piled bottles and boxes in intricate, vulnerable displays. Fruit and vegetables, some of them strange to my eye, and flowers and cloth added further colour. Large trees shaded green canvas awnings. There was a smell of horses, of sweetstuffs, of blood (as butchers spread wares on wooden slabs and waved away flies). Yet still the dominant smell was of ozone and flowers. Dogs barked at small boys with parcels who ran about apparently at random. A hurdy-gurdy man began to strap on his instrument. He was shouted at by a huge, round-faced woman in a Ukrainian blouse and went off without playing a note.

From far away I heard long moaning sounds and short hootings which could be the sirens of ships. Shura asked me if I wished to take the tram to the harbour or if I would rather walk. I told him I wanted to walk, even though I was anxious to reach the sea. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘then we’ll go through the old cemetery. It’s quickest from here.’ We turned a corner into a street. Though it was full of people complaining about the water-cart coming past and soaking their boots, it seemed almost hushed. Dazed, I turned next into a main street in time to see a squadron of cavalry, its lances decorated with little pennants, its red and blue hussars uniforms looking rather ordinary in that multi-coloured scene (I think they were part of a recruiting parade). We went through a gate into the stillness of the old cemetery: grandiose monuments of black marble, granite and limestone, huge mausoleums, ancient willows. As we got to the other side, Shura said it was possible to climb through a gap in the wall. But he did not want to spoil either his suit or mine. ‘I don’t very often come here, these days,’ he said, wishing to make it clear he had put away childish things.

Another big street, more like Kreshchatik it seemed to me. It was very wide and lined with trees (elms, I think). Luxurious shops, shaded by blue-and-white blinds; kiosks like miniature Gothic cathedrals; little wooden stands where veterans sold newspapers to fashionable ladies carrying sunshades of white brocade or Japanese silk. Horse-cabs - the open four-wheelers with smartly-uniformed drivers - izvoshchiks, we called them in which you could recline, if you wished, like an Oriental prince stood at kerbs waiting for customers to come from hotels, restaurants, shops and offices. In those days there were almost always more cabs than customers. These days there are more cabs, but almost anyone thinks they can use them. I have seen working-class women with four or five children hailing London taxis.

The streets of Odessa went on forever. By the time we caught a glimpse of the sea, between two tall buildings, I was almost exhausted. Then we climbed iron steps and stood on a railway bridge looking out towards the harbour and saw green water and all the ships, and I became incapable of speech.

Shura was certain I was disappointed. ‘Wait until you see it further up. That’s where the pleasure boats are. Look back.’

I turned to stare at the curving expanse of the great stone mole which stretched, it seemed to me, for miles out to sea. I looked beyond the mole to the horizon. It went on and on, as wide, as holy, as the steppe. The rest of the world became suddenly far away and at the same time more real to me. Beyond that horizon lay China and America and England and the ships I saw (some were warships coaling up) had been there, could take me to them. I saw little tugs chugging about the harbour, turning the green water white; the indolent smoke of the big liners; the red hulls of the tramp-steamers; all through a luminous network of cranes and derricks.

‘I’ll admit,’ said Shura, ‘that it’s probably just what I’m used to. I grew up with it. That’s why I love it.’ He began to move across the bridge. ‘We’ll go to the steps. You’ll be impressed with those. And we could take a tram down to Fountain or go to the limans. Have you heard of the limans?’ I knew of Odessa’s salty inland lagoons where the well-to-do went for their health. But I had no wish to see them. I wanted only to stand on that bridge, while trains grunted back and forth below my feet between the main railway station and the harbour station, and dream of Shanghai and San Francisco and Liverpool as I had never dreamed. I was reluctant to take even one more step forward until pulled by Shura. ‘Listen, there’s lots more. Better.’ I did not, at that moment, have the will to speak and reassure him, but I let him drag me along, down to the harbour, past sheds and warehouses and the noble funnels of the great ships, past another mole and an entirely different harbour (Odessa had many), past all the fascinating machinery of loading and unloading, of coaling and repairing, past stores which sold tackle and provisions, until later the road alongside the sea became a promenade, with trees and green-painted wrought-iron instead of cranes, and it was possible to make out another harbour, where little yachts and paddle-steamers sailed rapidly about. Shura brought me to the bottom of the famous granite staircase, scene of the distasteful ‘Odessa Steps’ episode in a Bolshevik film called Warship Potemkin.

To me it looked like the stairway to heaven. Behind us was the Nicholas Church, with its golden dome. I wanted to carry on along the harbour, but Shura insisted we cross to the right-hand side of the steps. Here a small ticket-office accepted four kopeks for us both and admitted us into a little funicular carriage. As soon as the guard thought there were enough passengers to justify the ascent, we began to move up the cliff. I watched the sea become greener and the horizon grow wider as we climbed to the top and emerged into the warmth and privilege of the Nicholas Boulevard. Here, Shura said, the fashionable people of Odessa were always to be seen during the summer. Here were restaurants and hotels looking out to sea. Immediately below was the Coaling Harbour where two frigates and a gunboat of the Imperial Fleet flew an impressive number of colours. On one side of us were neo-classical buildings and on the other were trees of the pleasure-gardens. We heard the sounds of a band. Private carriages came and went. Elegant ladies and gentlemen strolled the promenade. The noises of the harbour were muted, almost courteous.

I was very glad now that I wore Vanya’s suit, for here everything was light: white silks and ostrich feathers and pale frock-coats and cream-coloured uniforms. The steps actually did lead to heaven.

‘Now we go down again.’ Shura took my arm. Slowly we descended past souvenir-sellers, newspaper-vendors, hawkers of toys and photographs. Shura bought us ice-creams and pointed far away to the right. There was Fountain, with its summer datchas and its parks. You could look in one direction at the sea and back in the other at the steppe. But the ‘really rich pickings’ were on our left, the limans and health-resorts. ‘There are lots of silly old ladies who have nothing to do but cash cheques all day, or get someone to cash them for them. There are casinos, too. I have friends in the casinos. We’ll go there one evening.’ In the distance were more fine buildings, churches and monuments (Odessa was full of them) and more green spaces. ‘A lot of really rich people live up there. They live in impregnable fortresses. They’re only vulnerable when they go strolling on the Nickita, or go shopping in Wagner’s.’

I could not quite come to understand what Shura meant. Was he envious of the rich? Did he have revolutionary sympathies? He never displayed them openly. Perhaps it was the way all Odessans thought and spoke?

Shura led me back into the city. I had hoped to eat lunch in one of the small cafés overlooking the harbour. He told me that they were too expensive. The food was poor. ‘We’ll go to one of my regular places. You’ll meet my friends.’ This prospect alarmed me. I had never been able to mix very well with other people. But my mood was far more relaxed than usual. I walked with Shura through pink sunlight admiring all the advertisements, even those which suggested I join the army. Most of the foreign signs were in languages I could read, though some were in Greek or in Asian script which was meaningless to me, in spite of my Podol-learned smattering of Hebrew. Odessa seemed at once the oldest and most modern of cities. Like New York she combined all nations in one. The streets were crowded with soldiers and sailors from the harbour. There were French, Italians, Greeks and Japanese. There were also some Turkish sailors, mainly from merchant ships, together with Englishmen of all ranks. The Turks and Japanese stuck together in larger numbers. They were regarded as the next best thing to German belligerents in a town so closely involved with the War. We were not so far from the Galician front and since our initial successes in East Prussia we had had some setbacks.

The city was, in Shura’s words, ‘a bit too full’, but it meant good business for the natives. The black market was booming; the whores were ‘having to take on three customers at a time. They’d take on four if they had bigger belly-buttons.’ So innocent was I that I had absolutely no idea, then, what he meant.

We dashed through crowds of Frenchmen who were far more bewildered than I. Because of Shura I had begun to feel as if I had always lived in Odessa. We jumped for our lives in front of screaming two-car trams, caused Steiger horses to rear, made old ladies shout after us, and we laughed at all of them. We ogled the crowded windows of the Magasin Wagner (Odessa’s Harrods) and flirted with the flower-girls there, then we left the more fashionable streets and entered a labyrinth of smaller alleys. This was a ghetto. Tiny shops sold second-hand boots and tools; Jewish butchers and bakers advertised in Yiddish; tailors and funeral parlours and circumcision salons (as we called Jewish grog-shops) were side by side. There were washing lines and yelling children and garrulous old women and bargaining, black-clad Hasidic men, and rabbis and beggars and a richer mixture of junk, canned goods, peasant-carvings, German toys, ready-made clothing, hardware goods, poultry, live birds, fishing-gear, musical instruments, cooked food than I have seen before or since. Like the Jews themselves, the district repulsed and attracted, was frightening and romantic, comforting and disturbing, and if I had been alone I would never have dared enter it.

Into one of those dingy little Slobodka basements Shura ducked with me and through a battered door we entered the noisy, smoky gloom of a tavern. There were old travel posters decorating the walls, all of which had been scribbled on with sardonic comments. On the floor were the remains of fancy tiles. At the far end was a tiled counter with a monstrous samovar and two jugs for dispensing vodka or grenadine. Behind this sat an ancient, bearded Jew with his hand on an iron cash-box and a permanent expression of mixed ferocity and benevolence. He was dressed almost entirely in black, save for a collarless grey shirt, his waistcoat buttoned in spite of the smoke and heat. Shura greeted the Jew in tones of bantering familiarity and got no response save a slight inclination of the head. There were women and girls here, as well as youths and men, all dressed in the flashy Odessa styles, eating exactly the same dishes - a thick bortsch, lamb-knuckle (kleftikon), a shashlik in tasty, greasy sauce, with macaroni and black bread. There was also a plate of peppers, pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, known as a salad. There might have been other kinds of food sold in ‘Esau the Hairy’s’ as the place was known, but I never saw it eaten and never had the nerve to order it. A thin-faced, haughty black-eyed Jewess brought Shura and me bowls of bortsch and some bread almost as soon as we had found a place to sit. I was a little nervous; my mother had never liked me to associate with Jews, but they seemed to accept me quite readily and I was prepared to live and let live. Indeed I must say I felt almost at home amongst Odessa’s Jews who are really a different race.

Near the counter, one booted foot on a bench, an accordionist played topical songs about well-known actors and actresses, about Rasputin, about our defeats and victories in the War, about local celebrities (these were the most popular but obscure to me). I was more disturbed by the songs than the company. Some of the songs seemed dangerously radical. I whispered to Shura that the tavern was likely to be raided by the police. This made Shura laugh, ‘It’s protected by Misha,’ he told me. ‘And Misha rules Slobodka district. Nobody - the army, the police, the Tsar himself - would dare raid Esau’s. Only Misha would dare, and why should he? It’s one of his investments.’ I asked who Misha was and several of the other customers overheard me and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Ask who or what God is!’ said one. They were referring, I discovered, to a notorious local gangster, the Al Capone of Odessa, known as Misha the Jap. He was supposed to have five thousand men at his command and the authorities were inclined to parley with him rather than threaten him. Almost everyone in Odessa had a nick name. I was to find myself introduced by Shura as ‘Max the Hetman’ because of my reference on the train to my Cossack blood. ‘He’s Hetman of Kiev,’ said Shura.

Although his friends took this as a joke, they also looked at me with respect. I began to realise I had been accepted. A day before, I should have been horrified at finding myself in the company of these bohemians, but now I had learned Odessan tolerance. I determined not to judge them by their appearance, just as they did not judge me. Shura had a knack for making the most of himself and those he knew. He was at once admired and admiring of all. He was a great favourite in Esau’s with the older men and women. He had dozens of friends of his own age. He would boast of each of them: ‘This is Victor the Fiddler, he’ll be a great musician one day. This is Isaac Jacobovitch, the smoothest spieler in the market. This is Little Grania, you should see her dance. Meet Boris - he may not look much but figures are magic to him, everyone wants him to do their accounts - Lyova here is a better painter than Manet, ask him to invite you to his room - buy a picture while you can - the canvases. A new Chagall!’

Everyone was a hero or heroine in Shura’s words and, although he spoke lightly and was never taken very seriously, he could somehow dignify the meanest person and bring them to life. Before lunch was over, I myself had become the great inventor of my age, with patents pending on a dozen different machines, with ten gold medals from the Academy, with a career in Petersburg already guaranteed. I began to believe it. At least, I believed in Shura’s optimism. He was to remain an optimist all his days.

I was intoxicated on vodka and grenadine and on the company of young girls in petticoats and bright blouses, with their thick, dark hair, kindly oriental eyes, brilliant laughter and rapid, trilling, almost incomprehensible, patois. The world had ceased to consist entirely of duty and education. It could be amusing, pleasurable. I began to laugh. I tried to join in a song, my arm around a fat matron smelling of cologne and Georgian wine who cheerfully helped me with the words.

While I sang I saw someone point in our direction. A man in a pin-striped suit, with a yellow waistcoat, yellow bow-tie, yellow-and-white two-toned shoes, stood in the doorway fingering his moustache. He seemed uncertain of himself and yet supremely arrogant. He was like a king mingling with commoners whose activities were not entirely clear to him. He pushed between the tables and came over to Shura. He spoke politely in perfect Russian. I turned my head and said he must be French. He smiled faintly and said he was. We conversed for a few sentences. Then he gave his whole attention to Shura, whom he knew. ‘I’m still interested in the dental supplies. They’re hard to get in Paris now.’

‘The War’s creating all sorts of shortages, M’sieu Stavitsky.’ Shura was amused. ‘Last year you were in the export business. Now you’re in the import business. You’ll find the Dutchman easy to deal with. He has something of a habit himself and his connections are astonishing.’

‘Where shall we find him?’ Stavitsky wished to know.

‘You’d better let me arrange the meeting. He doesn’t like callers at his surgery. Got some paper?’

Stavitsky produced a silver-covered note-pad. Shura took a pencil and wrote a few words. ‘See you there at about six. I won’t let you down.’

Stavitsky squeezed Shura’s shoulder. ‘I know. I hear he’s almost one of the firm.’

I had been feeling twinges of toothache since my accident, perhaps a loose molar. When Stavitsky had left, I asked about the dentist.

Shura smiled. ‘All the family goes to him. If you’ve got toothache, he’s the one to see. He’s posh but we have mutual investments, so it’s cheaper using him. And you’re guaranteed the best job in Odessa. You can come some time when I go. Perfect excuse.’

I said if the toothache got worse I would take Shura up on his offer. My family’s connections seemed to cut across all normal social barriers. This might not appear unusual in England or America, but in Russia in 1914 there was an almost infinite number of castes. Only in bohemian or intellectual circles could there be any mixture, and even here it was often strained. That was why I think Esau’s in Slobodka so impressed me. I was never to recapture that particular experience of comradeship. Doubtless I felt it as I did because I had no knowledge of any underlying tensions in the relationships there. I was, in a word, innocent. Nonetheless I lost preconceptions and prejudices overnight. I was not to learn common-sense for a few months at least I would grow up in Odessa.

‘He’s a Dutchman,’ Shura added, ‘though I’ll swear he’s a Hun in disguise. I hope no one finds out.’

‘You mean a spy?’ I asked. I had read the newspapers.

‘That’s a thought.’ Shura grinned, it’s not exactly what I meant. Come on. We’ve time to go to Fountain. You ought to see a bit of country. And I could do with the fresh air.’

‘I’d rather stay here,’ I said.

He was pleased with this. ‘You can come back again as often as you like, now that you’re known as a friend of mine.’

As we left, everyone was singing an ironic song about a Chinaman who had fallen in love with a Russian girl and, thwarted in his passion, had burned down her entire apartment building. This had actually happened a short while ago in Sevastapol. The Chinese have always been mistrusted in Russia. The irony was, of course, that they would be seen working hand-in-glove with the Jews during the Revolution: the Jews with their brains, the Chinese with their cruelty. We Slavs can be excused for our wariness of the Oriental, whatever his guise, for he has sought to encroach on our territory for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Shura took us to the tram-stop in a quiet, wide street. Eventually we boarded a Number 16 for Little Fountain. From a seat near the front Shura pointed out various places of interest, none of which I remembered. I have a memory for tram numbers and people’s names, but I can never remember much about cathedrals or museums. We left the long, straight streets behind us and entered more open country. Beyond it was the broad emerald sea. Shura said we should not have time to stay. We took the open-sided tram for Arcadia and went straight back on it. He had to get me home for supper and had some business at six. Innocently I asked him what his main business was. I thought I must have embarrassed him, but he remained cheerful enough, though vague, ‘I fix things up for anyone. But I work mostly for the family.’

‘For Uncle Semya.’

‘That’s right. To do his buying and selling, his importing and exporting, he needs information. I’m a sort of liaison officer.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Or that house. What’s her name?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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