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.