Byzantium Endures

During the following spring and summer Esmé and I would go for walks together in the nearby Kirillov woods. I remember most strongly the ravines and the smell of the massed lilacs in the summer rain as we sheltered at the top of a gorge looking down on another gypsy camp. It continued to rain. Gypsy fires sent orange flame and black smoke into the semi-darkness. We became wet enough to gain courage to ask for shelter. I led Esmé down the slippery slopes, getting nearer and nearer to a colourful rabble of wretches who at first ignored us and then greeted us with greedy caution, asking if we wished to buy a toy or a lucky charm. As these grimy bargains were displayed to us on grimier hands we dumbly shook our heads and, as the rain stopped, stumbled back up to the top of the ravine. We returned the next morning, still fascinated by our discovery, until Esmé became obsessed with the idea of our abduction and fled, leaving me once again to deal with the offerings, their sly grins and their soft voices. This particular band was moved on by the police a few days later and I believe it was my mother’s complaint which was the chief cause of this official action. I was forbidden ever to visit such a camp again.

A little after this incident, both Esmé and I were enrolled in an excellent local school run by a dedicated German couple called Lustgarten. The fact that we were enrolled at the same time was, I learned from my disapproving mother, merely an unfortunate coincidence. I understood that a relative was helping pay for my studies, but I was never sure who this relative might be. Perhaps it was my Uncle Semyon - Semya, as we called him.

He was strict and very generous with his malacca, but our lantern-jawed, grey-eyed Herr Lustgarten was an enthusiastic teacher. His greatest joy came from finding pupils in whom burned a genuine relish for knowledge. A very tall man with loose limbs, he wore a formal frock-coat and high collar. His black boots were always polished to mirrors. I see him now, his arms and legs flowing like scarves in a wind, his stick waving over his head, as he demonstrated some point in algebra. I was the kind of pupil he liked best. It became evident that I had a natural capacity for languages and mathematics. I gained a working knowledge of German and French, a little Czech, which the Lustgartens spoke excellently, having spent several years in Prague, and I already had Polish from Mother. English came chiefly from Captain Brown (who continued to encourage me in all my studies). Like so many others I had only a few words of Ukrainian. My first language was Russian. The mania for nationalism had not yet taken hold of Ukraine. Someone remarked to me not long ago that, deprived of their pogroms by the Reds, Ukrainians had turned to nationalism as a poor substitute. Well, I am no Jew-lover, but I am no nationalist, either. Herr Lustgarten, in common with many Germans of his generation, was somewhat philosemitic. My mother would have been horrified if she had heard his discourses on the Russian character. I recall a favourite topic almost word for word: The Russian people,’ he would say, ‘are like the Americans. They have no sense of ethics, only of piety. Their Church, supported by the bureaucracy and the military, supplies them with a formula for living. It is why they look to novelists for ethical models; why such importance and respect is attached to the novelist. Why young men and women ape characters in Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky. These novelists are not merely writers of fiction, they are teachers, ascetics taking the place, for instance, of the Moravian Brothers in Germany and Bohemia, of Luther or John Wesley, of the Quakers. By and large Russians are a people without a moral creed, lest it be the simplest one of all: To serve God and the Tsar.’