The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson Read Free Book Online Page A

looked at me in embarrassment, drawing back.
    I had never seen the inside of his room. The walls were covered in notes and equations, pieces of newspaper, scribbles and rather beautiful sketches. There was a series of X-rays that seemed to show a skeleton walking with a stick and sitting on a bench. Posters covered one wall. In one corner was a camera on a tripod, and in another, a heap of rubbish – quite literally, without any exaggeration, rubbish. Broken wooden crates, bits of old planking, dirty bottles, rags, stones . . .
    ‘Goodness,’ I said, ‘this is your work?’ I was conscious of a note of incredulity, and added, ’I know you are very busy, Nikita Gavrilovich, as always—’
    ‘I am.’
    ‘Perhaps one day you will explain it to me.’ I turned to leave, embarrassed.
    ‘Wait.’ He took a step towards me. ‘Why are you here? Why didn’t you go south?’
    ‘What do you mean?’ I stammered. ‘You know why. British citizens have been told to stay in Moscow—’
    ‘I don’t think you remained here just for reasons of safety,’ he said quietly.
    I was speechless. At last I said, ‘I don’t know, I felt there’d be something for me to do here—’
    ‘For the Revolution?’
    ‘Well, yes . . . For the people, for my pupils, you know . . .’
    He gazed at me, and I had an extraordinary sensation – as though it were the first time in my life that anyone had really looked at me.
    ‘You’re an unusual person,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’
    ‘No, for some reason, I’m not. I feel . . . light. I feel that I’m changing, day by day.’ I laughed. ‘I know that must sound foolish.’
    ‘Miss Gerty,’ he said, ‘you could never do a foolish thing. It makes me happy to hear you. We are in the first stage, you know, and everything is rough and crude and even cruel, but we have a chance—’
    ‘A chance to reform society, you mean?’
    ‘Oh, not just society – ourselves! Transform our own souls, even our bodies – we can be different.’ He paused and then looked at me intently. ‘I’d like to—’ he said and immediately looked away, confused.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’d like to visit you.’
    I did not look away. Afterwards, thinking about it, I was amazed that I held his gaze so coolly, although my heart was rattling in my chest. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Please do. ’
    *
    My sitting-room floor in Hackney is littered with balls of paper. If this account is to be worthwhile at all, it seems to me, it must be as honest as I can manage. A dozen times I have found myself veering off into comfortable euphemism, torn out the page from my typewriter, and started afresh. The truth, my husband used to say, however shameful, however inconvenient, is the great healer. Isn’t that time? I’d ask. Yes, but the truth is the surgeon. It sets the bones. Otherwise time will heal them crooked . . . His voice so close, in my head. I rip out yet another spoiled page. How could he leave me to tell it on my own? Out of nowhere I begin to cry, noisily, into the silence.
    After a while I quieten down. I wipe my face on my sleeve. I thread a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter and begin again. The truth is the surgeon.
    *
    Later that night, after I’d cooked for the old ladies and listened to yet more of Anna Vladmirovna’s endless supply of family stories, which could all really be boiled down to the simple maxim ‘breeding is what matters’, I lay in bed and listened to the wind – an unsettling tune with no comfort in it. Various conversations I’d had with Slavkin repeated and fragmented in my mind. ‘Revolution . . . once in a millennium . . . transform ourselves, reform ourselves, unform . . .’ Russian prefixes scuffled about drearily like the chestnut leaves on the window. I sat up in bed. There was someone at the door.
    ‘Who is it?’
    Slavkin – a tall, awkward figure silhouetted in the doorway. ‘It’s me, comrade. You weren’t sleeping, were you?’ His