By the time the cab turned into the long, straight avenue of Preobrazhenskaya I felt extremely lordly in my new three-piece suit, with white shirt, stiff collar and cravat, like a Count on his way to visit a Prince. My nervousness of the dentist had partly been offset by a soupçon of cocaine, taken just before we left, and partly by a sense of my own elegance. We disembarked outside an impressive building (it was in the district close to the Theatre and University) just as sunlight began to fall again upon the city. We entered a lobby and took a flight of stone, curving stairs up to a door which bore a brass plate announcing H. Cornelius, Dentist.
We were expected, but there was another visitor in the well-appointed waiting-room. She seemed very much a lady of fashion, in her mutton-chop sleeves and her hat with fruit and flowers on it, with a little veil. She smelled of expensive perfume. She was, I now realise, only about Wanda’s age. But she had a romantic, foreign air to her.
She had not, it seemed, been expected. The dentist’s receptionist was saying as much when we entered. I cannot reproduce the lady’s wonderful English so will leave that to someone else. She seemed very confident as she stood in the middle of the room, holding her salmon-pink sunshade in one hand, her matching reticule in the other. She was dressed almost entirely in pink with some white decorations and, of course, the various colours of her hat. She was a picture from one of my French or English magazines. The feathers swept round, like the train of a savage monarch, as she turned to look at us. She had blonde hair (not in those days very fashionable) and a pink and white face, with a little paint on it. She smiled down on us, although she was not particularly tall, and it might have been the Tsarina herself condescending to notice me. She was speaking English, as I say, and seemed a little put out by the stupidity of the receptionist who had addressed her in German and then in French.
‘I told yer. I’ve come ter see me cuz.’
I recognised the English words, if not exactly the sense of what she said. ‘The lady is English,’ I informed the girl who, in apron and uniform, looked like a baffled sheepdog. I removed my hat. ‘Can I be of assistance, mademoiselle?”
The English girl was delighted. She seemed to relax. ‘Could you inform this stupid cow,’ she said, ‘that I am ‘ere ter visit me Cousin Haitch - Mr Cornelius. It is Miss Honoria Cornelius, who he’ll doubtless remembah as the little girl ‘e used ter dandle on ‘is knee. I ‘ave been stranded in ongfortunate circs - circumstances - and need ter see ‘im in private.’
‘You have not come to receive his professional ministrations, my lady?’
‘Do what?’ I remember her saying. This puzzled me. She added: ‘Come again?’ I gathered she had not understood me.
‘You have nothing wrong with your teeth?’
‘Why the ‘ell should I? Every one a bloody pearl and sound as a bell. ‘Ow old d’yer fink I am?’
I spoke directly to the bobbing receptionist in slow, clear Russian. ‘This lady is related to his excellency, the dentist. Her name is Mademoiselle Cornelius. She is, I believe, his cousin.’
The receptionist was relieved. She smiled and escorted the English lady into another, even more luxurious room. With a ‘Ta very much, Ivan,’ to me, Mrs Cornelius vanished. I was to learn from her much later that the dentist was not in fact a relation at all. She had come across his name in Baedeker’s at a nearby bookshop and had decided to visit him. She had been travelling with a Persian aristocrat, a well-known playboy of those years, when they had had a difference of opinion in their hotel (the Central). He had left on an early steamer, having paid the bill only up to that morning. She was unable to speak a word of Russian but even then she was making the best of things. She had been very grateful to me, it appeared, because she had almost been at the end of her tether. This was how she recognised me when we came to meet again. She had given up hope of finding an English-speaker anywhere in Odessa and I was ‘a godsend’, even if, in her words, I ‘talked like a bleedin’ book’.
After she had gone, and Wanda and I were seated, the English lady’s perfume (crushed rose-petals) was all that remained of her. I was called into the surgery. Wanda still accompanied me. She was curious, I think, to see the inside of a dentist’s workshop. A handsome middle-aged man, murmuring in what I supposed to be Dutch, peered into my mouth, clucked his tongue, put a mask over my face and made his receptionist turn the tap on a nearby cylinder. A strange smell replaced the scent of roses. I was gassed. A peculiar humming began in my ears - zhe-boo, zhe-boo - and black and white circles became a moving spiral. I felt sick and dreamed of Zoyea and Wanda and little Esmé, the warm, comforting body of my Katya. All were dressed in the salmon-pink costume of the English girl who was cousin to Heinrich - or was it Hans? - or Hendrik? - Cornelius.
I remember leaving with an emptier jaw and a fuller, throbbing head. When I asked what had happened to Mademoiselle Cornelius Wanda giggled. ‘Her cousin seemed only too pleased to be of assistance.’ I was reassured.
With regular supplies of cocaine from Shura and from other sources, I was able to continue with my studies and with my new, adventurous life. I developed a firm, regular friendship with Katya. Eventually, I fell in love with her almost as deeply as I had with Zoyea. The holiday seemed to be without end. Uncle Semya had assured me that I was welcome to stay until my place at the Polytechnic was ‘firmly arranged’. There was no certainty when this would be. I was awake sometimes twenty hours in the twenty-four. Sometimes I did not go to bed at all. My letters to my mother were regular and optimistic. Nor was my whole life given over to adventure. Uncle Semya and I regularly visited the theatre and Opera (usually just the two of us). He proved an astonishingly tolerant host.
Aunt Genia was inclined to fret over me, feeling that, quite rightly, I was overdoing things. But at dinner Uncle Semya would laugh and say: ‘Wild oats must be sown, Genia.’ This in spite of his standing in the community (high-ranking officials would often take dinner with us and on these occasions it was usual for Wanda and myself to eat in the kitchen with the cook).
Of course life with the pleasure-loving bohemians of the Odessa taverns was not without its problems. There were fights - or threatened fights - almost every day. In the main I was able to escape trouble, either by assuming a friendly or neutral stance (something which became second nature to me) or by talking myself clear. But I was not always able to avoid the revolutionaries my mother had warned me against.
In the main any political talk would send me away at once, unless it was the simple irreverences of Odessa small-talk, but when my engineering experience and scientific skills became known I was courted by more than one socialist. There was a particular scoundrel who might have given me trouble: a morose and introverted Georgian ‘on leave’, as he put it, from Siberia. He wanted me to make him some bombs for an attack he planned on the Odessa-Tiflis mail train. I trembled with terror at the very idea of being overheard, let alone involved. If my mother had known, it would have killed her. But I could not merely walk away from him. This sinister bandit with the unlikely name of ‘So-So’ had a low, persuasive voice and smouldering eyes staring from a heavily unshaven and pockmarked face. These aspects alone were enough to make me address him with at least superficial politeness. I said I would look into the problem of producing the bombs. I planned to complain next time I saw him that it had been impossible to obtain the materials. I thought it wise to return to the tavern when I had promised, but to my huge relief he was not there. I never saw him again. Perhaps he was arrested. Perhaps he was shot by the police. It was even possible that, like the man who had double-crossed Misha the Jap over some morphine supplies, he wound up being fished from the Quarantine Harbour. There was only a certain, limited sort of honour amongst the thieves of Moldovanka. Anyone who broke his trust was submitted to sudden, swift justice of a kind which, if the Tsar’s police had been prepared to dispense it in a similar fashion, would have at once put paid to any revolution, Bolshevik or otherwise.