Charlotte Hobson - The Vanishing Futurist

‘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 voice gave way a little.

‘No.’

He approached my bed. I did not move; my mouth was dry. He crouched beside me, avoiding my eyes, and spoke in a ponderous monotone.

‘Comrade Freely, I have long thought you a very rational, intelligent woman. I have known your positive attitude to the Revolution and to women’s rights for some time, but when you told me your reasons for staying in Moscow, it struck me that you would see my situation clearly, without sentiment. I hope I deduced this correctly…’

He gulped audibly, and in the half-light I saw his Adam’s apple leaping up and down in his throat.

‘In order for me to work productively certain physical comforts are occasionally necessary. For some time now I have been wanting urgently to visit you with the proposal that we might… we might become intimate, so to speak. That in the light of the new world we are building, we might ourselves enjoy free, mutually satisfactory, er, beneficial…’

He hesitated.

For a moment my mind whirled. Then I noticed that he was trembling, the hand clutching his knees white-knuckled.

I reached across and touched him.

‘Oh, comrade—’

Suddenly we were together, and he was kissing my face, and pushing up my nightdress, and we were both shaking with urgency, and I was only astonished that I had never felt his hands on my waist before, or touching my breasts, and he was hurrying, hurrying, and pressed himself upon me, cried out, and a moment later fell still. I was aware of a wet patch on my thigh. The whole had taken perhaps five minutes.

My heart was galloping, I could not quite understand what we had done. After a while Nikita raised himself from me, stood up and straightened his clothes.

‘I greatly value and respect your honesty and your generosity,’ he said, serious as ever.

I sat up, flooded with shame. I covered myself with the sheet. ‘Oh… I see.’

He was avoiding my eyes again. ‘You will assist me on my great task, I hope, comrade. We will work together, shall we?’

‘Yes indeed,’ I answered.

‘Well, good night then. I’m tired,’ he said, retreating. ‘A peaceful night…’

Was that a ‘dear one’ that I heard at the end of his sentence? Perhaps it was. When he was gone I got out of bed, took off my nightdress and washed, staring at myself in the mirror. My shame evaporated and I was filled with joy. What had happened? It was very puzzling. I had only the vaguest knowledge of such matters, only my mother’s hissed and encoded warnings. For some reason, however, I was certain I would not fall pregnant or catch anything nasty. Shame? No, no, here in Soviet Russia there was no place for shame – here men and women were equal, we were honest with each other and we had no time for sentiment. And yet for some time he had been wanting urgently to visit me! I could hear my mother’s poisonous tones: ‘I’m afraid you’re not the type men like, dear.’ Every cell in my body rejoiced that night: she was wrong, wrong, wrong.

For several long days afterwards, I saw nothing of Slavkin. I began to dig the children’s vegetable plot in the courtyard, tripling its size, thinking of the winter ahead. In the afternoons I brought the old ladies outside and settled them in the shade of the lilac trees in the corner, where they watched and chatted.

‘I can’t think why we troubled to go all the way to Mikhailovka all those years,’ Anna Vladimirovna said. ‘Why, it’s just as pleasant here, without that terrible travelling!’

‘It was only an hour on the train,’ I reminded her.

‘No, no, much longer, and quite dreadful.’ In some way Anna Vladimirovna seemed invigorated by the strange new situation in the house, less tetchy, more energetic. ‘Where is the boy? Is he avoiding us?’

Oh dear God, did she somehow know how desperately I was asking the same question? My every nerve was alive to his presence in the house, and listening involuntarily to his movements in his bedroom, his arrivals and exits at strange hours, exacerbated my insomnia terribly.

As time passed it seemed to me that he had shown disrespect, if not for me then for the principle of self-transformation that he had spoken about so warmly. Taking my courage in both hands, I decided to approach him myself. In the new world men and women must be honest and direct with each other; it was no good hanging back like a blushing damsel.

I knocked on the door of his room that evening, my hands sweating uncomfortably.

‘Enter!’

‘Comrade Slavkin,’ I began, ‘I’m afraid I am disturbing you in the midst of important work, but it is essential that we discuss the matter of living space. We are here in possession of almost two hundred square metres of living space, enough by government standards to house at least another twenty-five people. Don’t you think we should report this anomaly?’

As honest as I intended to be, this was the subject that I lit upon in the awkwardness of the moment.

‘Oh, yes indeed, comrade,’ he said. ‘The fact is I have been thinking about exactly this problem…’

I could see, now, that he was blushing. Yes, blushing! A deep pink all down his neck and under his hair. He looked up at me almost beseechingly, like a boy gazing up at his teacher. A chill passed through me at that moment; if I had only heeded it, how much pain I would have saved myself. But I suppose it was already too late. I steadied myself, and spoke to him as gently as I could.

‘Please, you have no need to feel awkward with me.’

‘What? No, no—’ he stammered.

‘Really, it’s not necessary. We are adults, we are responsible for our own actions.’ I smiled, to show I meant it. ‘Now – start again. Tell me what you have been thinking.’

He gazed at me doubtfully for a moment. Then a smile began, and spread and spread. ‘Dear Miss Gerty, comrade, what a wonderful person you are! A true Revolutionary! I am convinced that if you will help me, we will succeed. Will you help me? Will you?’