Byzantium Endures

By the time I was thirteen-and-a-half Herr Lustgarten was beginning, he said, to despair of teaching me more. I suppose I had exhausted his learning. In the years just prior to the Great War the Kiev Technical Institute (where logically I should go to continue my studies) was a hotbed of radicalism. My mother was reluctant to send me there, in spite of my assurances that I wished only to learn. I could never have been infected by the nihilistic emotionalism of those young men who, rather than gain knowledge of the world, would change it to make it accept their ignorance. The institute’s ‘quota system’ was too liberal. There was also the question of identity papers. My dead father’s hand continued to hamper my career. I believed the application-board to be fair-minded, but Mother thought I should be prepared for certain specialised oral entrance examinations before contemplating application. This decision was reached after her final conversation with Herr Lustgarten, when possibly he warned her that the board would find me ‘too clever by half’. It is certainly no advantage to have more than an average share of brains in this world. To temporise, it was at last agreed I should ‘cram’ in the evenings, with the special object of preparing for entrance to the Institute, and that during the day I should get what Herr Lustgarten called ‘practical experience’. I was to go to work for Sarkis Mihailovitch Kouyoumdjian.

This was the name of a well-known local mechanic whom at first I greatly despised. He was a Russianised Armenian, originally from Batoum, and a Christian. He had been a ship’s engineer. He had met a Ukrainian girl in Odessa and eventually settled in Kiev, working first for the riverboat company, later for the tram company, and finally for himself. He could deal with almost every kind of machinery, from electrical generators, steam-engines, compressors, internal combustion engines, to factory equipment owned by the many small industrial concerns which flourished in Kiev. Most of his clients were Podol Jews, with their horrible, grimy little factories. He was cheap and he was optimistic. I suppose he was what the English would call a bodger. He was not paid to service new machinery. He was paid to keep old machinery running at the lowest possible cost. He lived in his own ramshackle house a couple of streets to the east of ours, off Kirillovskaya. It was a wooden house full of bits of discarded machinery and various ‘inventions’ which he had begun but failed to complete. He never listened to my suggestions, which were even then eminently sensible. He did not really possess the imagination of a great engineer. He was the last of his family, he told me. The rest of his relatives, men, women and children, had been amongst the hundred-and-fifty thousand Armenians whom the Turks had marched into the desert to die at the beginning of the century. It is fashionable these days to treat the Nazis as the originators of modern genocide, but they could have learned a great deal from the Turks, who rid themselves of their Armenian problem with far less fuss and at far less expense. We of the Ukraine learned to fear the menace from the East long before we found ourselves at war with the West.

‘Turk’ was the strongest curse I ever heard Sarkis Mihailovitch utter, but the word sent a chill through me more than any other oath.

It did not suit me to become an apprentice to an Armenian jobbing mechanic but my mother insisted I learn the trade. Thus, in June 1913, I became Sarkis Mihailovitch Kouyoumdjian’s ‘mate’, going with him on almost every assignment, even doing small, simple tasks on my own, and gaining my first familiarity with the nuts and bolts of engineering. My mother had been right. I began to enjoy my job. It was a beautiful summer. Even the Podol ghetto was alive with greenery and blossoms.