Charlotte Hobson - The Vanishing Futurist

That was the night Sonya fell ill.

When I came down the next morning, only Sonya was there, lying on the divan. She did not look at me or speak in response to my greeting. Of course I assumed she was still angry with me.

‘Oh, Sonya, it’s no use being offended. I’ll explain – if this is to be the reality, we must find a way to understand each other,’ I tried to speak gently.

Sonya murmured something, I couldn’t hear what. I was suddenly so angry all over again that the blood was buzzing in my ears. ‘You, of all people, you’ve got no right to judge me! I stuck to my principles. I’m not ashamed,’ I began – then stopped. Her eyes were strangely blank, her cheeks were scarlet. ‘Sonya?’

She was shivering, though her hair was wet with sweat. She was running a high fever.

The room was cold. I banged on the door of the workshop and shouted. No answer. Where was Slavkin? Pasha and Marina had no doubt left for work early, as always. Sonya must have been taken ill after they’d gone. I brought her water, and helped her to drink, sip by sip; I wiped her face with a damp towel, and built up the fire, and all the while a single thought ran round and around my head. Today I must tell him.

‘Has Nikita been here?’ I asked her. ‘Did you talk to him?’

‘I don’t remember,’ was all she could say.

With difficulty, I removed her clothes and put them to be fumigated, dressed her as best I could in what was available. She cried; I think she was in pain. I noticed that the light was agony to her and half closed the shutters. It was this that made me fairly sure she was suffering from typhus fever. God help me, as I stood and looked down at her, moaning and shivering, I felt nothing but coldness towards her. Good old Gerty will look after the poor delicate girl, the little bird… Gerty with her English phlegm; Gerty, the soul of loyalty…

In the fading light I went out into the yard, took the axe and chopped up what remained of the joists from the barn. A son of the metalworker volunteered to fetch Pasha and Marina back from their work. I boiled water, cooked up what vegetables we had and fed Sonya broth. I was ravenous, suddenly, and aching with tiredness. I ate my portion slowly, savouring each mouthful, while at the other side of the room Sonya seemed to be slipping in and out of consciousness.

‘Nikita,’ she kept saying. ‘Where are you?’

I have since read up on typhus fever. Every detail of Moscow at that time could have been designed to breed the disease: the lice that transmit it thrived on the hordes of soldiers pouring back from the trenches, on the dirty hungry queues everywhere, in the crowded trains. Sonya could have picked up her louse in a dozen different places – at the market, or at the printer’s, when she went to collect the posters, or from any of the dirty little boys she employed to paste them up around town. Her fever was progressing fast, no doubt because she was weak and underfed. After a few days a rash would appear and the crisis would come; four out of five did not survive. Twenty years later, antibiotics would have brought the disease under control quite quickly. I did all that I could for Sonya – gave her boiled water to drink, mopped her skin to reduce the fever. Yet I’m crying now as I write this, remembering how I sat across the room from her.

‘I don’t know where Nikita is,’ I said. ‘He has more important things to see to. He has the Revolution to arrange.’

‘Why doesn’t he come to me?’ she kept whimpering.

‘Don’t ask me.’

‘Hold my hand, Gerty,’ she said once, weakly. ‘Please, don’t leave me alone.’

She couldn’t help looking beautiful even then, flushed and bright-eyed.

‘I’d better not,’ I said from the other side of the room. ‘Typhus is contagious, you know.’

At last the door opened and Pasha returned and then Marina, and the decision was made to take Sonya to the Golitsyn Hospital. There she would give Sonya an antipyretic to bring down the fever; also Marina insisted that Sonya should be nursed in the isolation ward at the hospital, rather than at Gagarinsky Lane, in a household of more than thirty adults and children who would be at risk of catching the disease.

Pasha was crying openly. ‘But, Marina, isn’t she safer here?’

‘Better there, among professionals,’ Marina repeated.

Pasha was gone for an hour or more searching for transport and it was only when he had returned with a peasant and a covered cart of some sort, and we were dressing Sonya for the journey, that Slavkin appeared. He came in, very pale, he looked… I’m not sure what that look meant, almost as if he didn’t recognise us; he seemed not to understand what was happening. He staggered a little as he entered.

‘She’s very ill, we must go immediately.’ Marina spoke gently. ‘There’s the curfew – if you’ve got anything at all to pay for medicine, we’ll take it.’

Slowly he went to his workshop and filled a box with equipment, bottles of chemicals, wire. He held it out to Pasha without a word.

‘What? Oh, to pay for medicine – yes. But you can bring it yourself. Come on, we must go now…’

Slavkin shook his head. ‘I’ll be gone before you return.’

‘Gone? Where to?’ My voice emerged squeakily, like a little girl.

He did glance at me then – he caught my eye for a moment, and afterwards it always seemed to me that there was pity in that look. ‘Tonight I must begin the experiment,’ he said.

Pasha shook him by the shoulders, ‘For God’s sake, can’t you see how ill Sonya is? What the hell are you talking about, you bastard? Why now? Where’s the timetable?’

‘I’ll stay with you,’ I tried to say to him. ‘I must talk to you—’

‘No!’ Slavkin blurted, shrinking away from me with a look of horror, and Pasha took me by the hand and led me away from him. I was crying as we went out to the cart, stumbling over the snowdrifts. As we left the yard I turned and saw him for the last time.

He started towards us, raising his hand and mouthing something, I didn’t catch what; then he changed his mind and stopped, hand still raised, a shadow against the snow as we rounded the corner.

In the early hours of the morning, I left the others gathered around Sonya’s hospital bed and set out across the dark city to Gagarinsky Lane. It was as though I were making my way through some long-abandoned ruin. The wind had dropped; it was long past curfew, the streets were deserted and thick with new snow. The bluish, luminous snowlight was my only guide. I stumbled into hidden craters in the road and heaps of rubble, terrified I would fall and hurt the baby.

The icicles strung along roofs and balconies were too menacing to use the pavements, so I kept to the middle of the road. I had never seen such icicles as that year, huge, tubular specimens like baroque organ-pipes now that no one had the job of knocking them down. Some grew to several metres, sharpened each freezing night. Stories circulated of people injured and killed by their sudden descent. As a Communist, the thought flashed through my mind, I do my best to be rational, to make sense of the world in scientific terms. Yet one person walks down the street safely, while the next is felled by an icicle: what sense can one make of that?

God forgive me, I was not planning to give Nikita the news about Sonya’s health straight away. I pushed aside the image in my mind of her thin hands plucking at the blanket as I rehearsed my first remarks: ‘Nikita – now we are alone, I have something to tell you, something that concerns us both . . .’

As I approached the house on Gagarinsky Lane my anxiety increased. The windows were unlit.