‘I already have a basic engine, which will need modifying, of course, and I have a good part of the metal necessary. What I list here is perhaps 25 per cent of the total,’ he went on, looking hopefully at us.
‘Is this for the Socialisation Capsule?’ asked Sonya.
‘Yes. It’s about the size of a bathtub. Rather a long one, with a lid – you lie down in it,’ replied Slavkin. ‘There is one more thing, too, that I need. Something that I know we can get hold of quite simply.’
‘What’s that – Lenin’s balls?’ Volodya said, laughing. ‘Camel, you’re quite something, you are. Even if by some miracle you get hold of this stuff, we’ll all be shot on the spot for harbouring it at home!’
‘Oh, no, that’s something I’ve taken care of,’ he said. ‘I have a licence here for my workshop from Lunacharsky. You remember he complimented me on my work at the Centre? I went to him and asked for support. Any work I do here will be listed on the jobs list of the Narkompros. He’s including it, in fact, in the anniversary celebrations for the October Revolution – as a way to allow us to requisition scarce materials. He was very accommodating.’
‘But what is the other thing you want us to pilfer for you?’ asked Fyodor.
‘Well, it’s nothing we haven’t managed to obtain before – just a little iridium.’
Iridium had an almost mystical significance for him, a fascination that had begun in childhood. The success of the Socialisation Capsule seemed to depend entirely on its properties – its extreme density, its resistance to any kind of manipulation, heat or corrosion. He would often talk of it as ‘noble’, in the alchemical sense: ‘Most true and noble metal, essence of metal, ideal element,’ he wrote. ‘With a shield of iridium, my Capsule will withstand any pressure. It will be invincible.’
Increasingly fantastic accounts of Slavkin’s childhood have appeared in the years since he became the Vanishing Futurist. It’s been claimed that he was a child prodigy who made his first inventions as a toddler; that he was the son of Bolshevik exiles in Siberia – even the son of Stalin. He never talked a great deal about it to us – just the occasional remark – but he did write his ‘Revolutionary Development’, that I suppose must now be a rather valuable document. Here, in his own words, he briefly describes his early years. Far from being acclaimed as a prodigy, he was formed by hardship, loneliness – and iridium.
In the village. Dirt, darkness, old bearded fellows, bitter women, fights breaking out on holidays. Poor, tired mother – babies hanging off her like leeches. Black-faced father, beard like a goat.
Age six I wander into the taiga for the day. Wide open skies, Siberian beauty and wildness all around. Happily eat raspberries, fall asleep by a brook. At home my father is waiting with a whip. My mother screaming at him not to kill me. I lie in bed for a week. At school my teacher – Alexei Yurievich Samarin – a political exile, intelligent fellow, teaches me to fish. I hide at his house many times. Gain the idea that education + intelligence = escape from Father.
Every Sunday to church. My family are Popovtsy, Old Believers. Endless droning choir, deathly boredom. I gaze out of window, dream of fishing. They beat me for not paying attention. Next week I fix my eyes on iconostasis – ugly, gloomy. Only one thing I like in that church – a strange cup, dark silvery metal. Priests carry it to and fro, I don’t know why. It gleams in an odd way. Cannot stop staring at it. Later am rewarded by Mother for good behaviour – a candied plum.
Week after week gaze at this cup (despite no more plums). At last can’t stop myself – I have to touch it, know how it feels. At end of service, sneak through forbidden door in iconostasis, reach up to take cup from altar . . Shrieking, hollering begins. I run for my life through village to Alexei Yurievich’s house, hide there for four days. Great scandal of village, neighbourhood, whole world, apparently. Boy profanes Holy Grail!
Alexei Yurievich and I go to my father to apologise. He slams the door in our face. ‘He’s no son of mine.’ I live with Samarins for two years until begin Gymnasium (secondary school) in Yekaterinburg.
Until I go away to school, my mother meets me secretly each week. I plan to take her away with me when I am grown up. I am thirteen when I receive a letter from my aunt: ‘Your mother’s dead…’ Something about the Lord’s Will.
In the town museum of Yekaterinburg I see the silvery metal again: ‘Iridium. The second-most-dense metal on earth, and the most resistant to corrosion, common in meteorites but very rare on our planet – because, being so heavy, it sank into the molten core of the earth during its early stages of development. Iridium can withstand temperatures of up to 2,000 ºC, is nearly unmalleable and very hard.’
I meet Socialists in Yekaterinburg, good people, like Samarins. Science and the Revolution fuse in my mind. I train myself to study eighteen hours a day and eat only once. No warmth in my life until I arrive in Moscow. The great city, traffic, shops – for some months my mouth permanently open. I discover stale rusks, half a kopeck a bag. I meet Mayakovsky, Burliuk – stop myself from pinching them to check they are not statues.
At last, Pasha Kobelev swims at me out of the crowd. ‘How about an ice-cream?’ At the ice-cream stall, advertisements – ‘Duchess papyrosy – as smooth as satin’, ‘Negro coffee – the exotic taste’ – we laugh like idiots. I never saw the need of a friend before – limited, perhaps, but efficient. I move in with the Kobelevs. Life begins.
The first anniversary of the October Revolution was to be celebrated with all the scale and pomp that the actual event had lacked. The Commissariat of Enlightenment planned a blaze of red flags, great crowds of singing schoolchildren, increased rations and free meals for the people, the hammer and sickle everywhere, and the face of Lenin against snowy roofs and buildings.
Pasha reported on the preparations to us in the evenings – the frenzy at Narkompros as entertainments were commissioned, rejected and re-commissioned by competing organising committees; and artists appeared flourishing designs for the huge sets and floats in the Constructivist style; and performers demanded props, fur coats and bottles of cognac without which their acts would ‘simply breathe their last gasp’. An astonishing amount of money had been made available – several million roubles for Moscow alone – and, what’s more, the organisers had been given the right to requisition scarce materials, as Slavkin had already discovered.
On the day itself, the IRT and the Propaganda Machine took part in the Smolensk district procession. Slavkin repositioned the gramophone to blare Stravinsky out into the street, and each of us, dressed as a capitalist, a general, an aristocrat, etc., minced up to the back of the machine. One by one, we were pushed inside by Dr Marina, dressed as Revolution with a flaming cardboard torch and a sword. Once inside the idea was that we would wriggle out of our costumes and emerge jubilant in simple workers’ clothes with cloth caps.
I have never been much of a performer, and my mood was not improved by the fact that the crowds lining the route watched stolidly, only showing excitement when an aeroplane flew overhead scattering propaganda leaflets. ‘Cigarette papers, lads!’ I heard them shouting. I had spent over four hours that morning standing in line to receive the commune’s extra two pounds of bread and fish and half-pound of butter and sugar per person, and I could feel the beginnings of a chest cold.