Dima was a straightforward little boy, happy as long as he was well exercised and well rested. Liza was more complicated, and I was glad of the opportunity, while walking, to encourage her to talk more openly. Her thoughts often shocked me.
‘I hate to eat,’ she told me one day. ‘I prefer to be hungry.’
‘But why, Liza?’
‘Look at my sister Sonya. She is fat, all she thinks about is clothes, and her marriage.’
I couldn’t help agreeing that Sonya was not the most sympathetic of characters. She was making the arrangements for her marriage to Petya Ostroumov, the son of a prosperous manufacturer from St Petersburg, at the time. The plans seemed to result in tearful scenes with her father every other day, stamped feet, and the imploring figure of Mr Kobelev outside her bedroom door, begging her to be reasonable.
‘Well, I don’t like to hear such unkind remarks – but, Liza, you don’t have to be like your sister. You can study, and work, and you certainly don’t have to marry unless you want to. Your father has often said as much.’
‘What could I do?’
‘What would you like to do?’
‘I’d like… to look after animals.’
‘You could train to be a vet.’
‘A vet! Me!’ She was delighted by the idea, and still more so when, as a result of a conversation I had with her father, she was presented with a puppy. He was named Frank, and joined us on our walks as soon as he was old enough. Liza doted on him.
The shadow of their mother’s illness fell over all her children, but Liza was the one, perhaps, who suffered most. She was four when her mother took to her room; no doubt it was hard to understand that her withdrawal was not deliberate. Dima had been too young to realise; he loved Nyanya with all his heart, and still occasionally fell asleep cushioned on her vast, wheezy bosom.
We were at the Kobelevs’ country estate, Mikhailovka, when the war began. I remember so vividly where we were sitting, looking down to the bend in the stream where the cattle were drinking. Mr Kobelev stepped out onto the veranda, rubbing his forehead.
‘Dears, it has happened. Russia has declared war on Germany.’
The prospect of war had been hanging over us, and we felt a sort of ghastly relief when it was finally announced. I thought about but dismissed the idea of going home. I was enjoying myself, and like everyone I was convinced that it would be a short war. Only a handful of governesses in Moscow left at the outset, provoking Miss Clegg’s contempt. ‘We should support our Russian allies,’ she sniffed. Later, with the sinking of HMS Hampshire in 1916, travel to Britain was considered too dangerous and I became used to the idea of staying in Russia.
The post arrived fairly regularly and I kept up with news about my brothers and my parents. James was training to be a doctor in Bristol, but Edmund had just left school. He joined up immediately. How could my parents have let him, that gentle, diffident boy? Or had they even encouraged him? He had been accepted to read Mathematics at Oxford; surely he could have been of more use in logistics, or munitions, or anywhere but on the front line, but it was quite possible that my mother wanted a soldier son to boast of… I lay awake many nights wondering whether I could have changed his mind if I had been at home.
In the box I find the letter he wrote me from his barracks in Bodmin, scribbled in his unformed, boyish hand:
Dear Gerty,
I hope you are still enjoying yourself with the Rooskis! I have joined the Duke of Cornwall Light Infantry, there are about three hundred of us here, the most decent chaps you could imagine – Cornishmen all. This evening we had a sing-song, we almost lifted the roof off the old shack! So you needn’t worry about me – we’ll flatten the Hun at a hundred paces with a din like that…
3
In the second box of papers, inside my copy of Chernychevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, I find a half-written letter home to my parents, dated December 1914, and never sent. I suspect I abandoned it. Banal and schoolgirlish as it seems now, I knew it would have shocked my parents.
Dear Pappa and Mamma,
I am glad to report that my Russian has improved somewhat and I am now more able to take part in the Kobelevs’ evening gatherings, which are very convivial. I am given charge of the Samovar, quite a complicated matter, for the Russians are even more particular about their tea-drinking than the English!
We scarcely ever number fewer than a dozen, and the conversation covers every subject imaginable. Pasha Kobelev is in his first year at Moscow University, and his student friends come to visit very frequently. One of them – Nikita Slavkin is his name – entertains us with all sorts of original suggestions – quite ‘avant-garde’! Last night he suggested that Russian children should be taught to walk on stilts, to overcome the huge distances in the countryside!!
He believes, as we all do, that this war is quite unnecessary, a piece of Imperial conceit on a vast scale. I wish I could have convinced Edmund of this. I thought he was planning to study?
Nikita Slavkin sat a little apart from Pasha’s other friends, arms wrapped around his long, knobbly legs, pale and awkward. He had very short, almost colourless hair that revealed a bumpy scalp, and slightly protuberant pale-blue eyes. He ate a great deal of sandwiches, swallowing them whole, like a snake. When the conversation turned to women’s rights Pasha drew him in.
‘Nikita here has some ideas, don’t you, Nikita? He’s an inventor, he’s inventing all sorts of contraptions that will change women’s lives – and all our lives… Come over here, tell us.’
Nikita stood – upright, he was absurdly tall and skinny – and blushed even under his hair. When he spoke, his voice was strangely deep and a little too loud; he looked embarassed by that too. ‘Just the outlines.’
But Mr Kobelev was encouraging. ‘No, tell us. It sounds fascinating.’
‘Well, one of my inventions is a lightweight chastity belt, woven out of steel thread—’
The room erupted into protest. Everyone was disgusted, either on liberal, conservative or squeamish grounds. Mr Kobelev’s aunt, Anna Vladimirovna, wanted him thrown out of the house. Pasha laughed so much he fell off the divan. Slavkin stood there, his large hands hanging by his sides, vulnerable. ‘Of course, I have not perfected the material yet…’
A neighbour of the Kobelevs, Marina Getler, who was studying medicine, looked as though she might punch him. ‘Don’t you see, modern women need freedom,’ she hissed.
His full, pale lips trembled a little. ‘I do see, yes,’ he muttered. ‘That’s my aim.’
Slavkin had just moved into the small bedroom next to mine, which Mr Kobelev had offered him in exchange for a few hours’ work a week on his catalogue. At twenty-two, the same age as me, he was four years older than Pasha and seemed a decade wiser; I had the impression that he had been born with the grave air of a professor. A scholarship student from Siberia studying physics and engineering at Moscow University, he was already known to many of the artists and poets in the avant-garde for his inventions, which he claimed would ‘drive forward the steamer of Modernity’. The poet Mayakovsky dubbed him the ‘Futechnologist’. The new, non-objective art that fascinated all of us during those years was not simply a style to Slavkin, but the key to existence in the modern world. To his mind, its geometric shapes and grids, combined with the right technology, would not only define how society would look in the future; they would also shape the thoughts and emotions of its citizens.